Posts by John H Woods

Dell online store charges 16 million dollars for new laptop with paint job

Re: Windows screen capture

Win + Shift + S for Snip and Sketch isn't it?

Election security fears doused with reality: Top officials say Nov 3 'was the most secure in American history.' The end

Re: Some thoughts on the election

Not all "_possibilities_" need to be considered by the sane. I keep seeing this ridiculous appeal to some weird definition of "open mindedness." But being open-minded just means not being closed-minded. It doesn't mean that one should consider every single thing, however unlikely, as being potentially true.

That would be insane, let alone self-contradictory (because you'd have to be open-minded to the possibility that you were insane).

UK tax dept's IT savings created 'significant risk', technical debt as it faces difficult conversation with Chancellor

Re: borrow more and repay less

There's a lot of valid reasons you might object to a more socialist government in the UK but borrowing more and repaying less doesn't seem to be one of them, if the actual Treasury figures are to be believed.

Not only can failure to invest have a hidden cost, failure to maintain is similar. No point vastly reducing your (or local authorities') road budgets and complaining about the potholes.

But, in the end, this stuff isn't about 'left' or 'right' - it's about ancient truths like 'a stitch in time' combined with the modern practice of rewarding the people who say "oh that doesn't need a stitch yet" without (and this is the crucial bit) ever holding them responsible when they are wrong.

Let’s check in with that 30,000-job $10bn Trump-Foxconn Wisconsin plant. Wow, way worse than we'd imagined

Re: one party state

Yes - this is increasingly happening in the countries without PR. It's not "we don't think they'll manage the country as well as we do" it's "they are *unfit* to run the country"

As the new "spooks=gods" bill now includes authorizing crimes up to and including murder in the interest of not just "national security" but of "economic well-being" it may not be long before there is 'legitimate' state-sponsored crime against political opponents.

Autonomy founder Mike Lynch's US extradition hearing will be in February 2021

Re: adult in the room

Not sure there was a single Reg reader who though Autonomy was worth nearly 9 gigadollars

NHS COVID-19 app's first weekend: With fundamental testing flaw ironed out, bugs remaining are relatively trivial

Re: Still confused as to how this app makes the slighest bit of difference..

You almost certainly didn't have it in December. A lot of us had something bloody terrible around then but the chances that you had Sars_Cov2 without seeding a local cluster are quite small. My cousin and partner came back from Wuhan in Jan with something really horrible and very Covid like. They were sure they'd had covid but I made the same argument --- since then they have both had antibody tests (both work in health services) and both were -ve. .

This is really a field where expert opinion beats common-sense and "ill-informed reckons" hands down.

Re: Still confused as to how this app makes the slighest bit of difference..

Well, it's not above my head but I'm not sure it's not above yours. If you really have learned some lessons from the reading material you mention, and you have a reasonable justification for your position, I'm not sure you've presented it yet.

Now that's a somewhat unexpected insider threat: Zoombombings mostly blamed on rogue participants, unique solution offered

Re: How to make the experience worse than Skype

AIUI: you create a meeting in Zoom, it gives you a meeting ID and password which manually copy into a group email and send to the invitees.

Instead of copying the creds from Zoom, why not tell Zoom the list of email addresses to which you need to send invites? Zoom then emails each person individually with a different password based on, e.g., a salted hash of their email address.

Disclaimer: Trying to do multitask with something else so this suggestion may be rubbish

Tech ambitions said to lie at heart of Britain’s bonkers crash-and-burn Brexit plan

Re: world-beating

You forgot 3P (Priti Patel Pronunciation): world-beaten

Re: GOV.UK Leads the way in high tech initiatives

Black Bloody Arrow

Re: Can anyone here suggest...

Atlee?

Re: Those who don't remember their history are condemned to repeat it.

and those who do are condemned to stand by aghast whilst they do so.

Re: totally above board.

Of course it is.

John Penrose MP, aka Mr Baroness Harding, is the UK's anti-corruption champion

Re: Universities Well it's kind of a good idea but...

Funding committee...

So, the physics dept. want $100m for this super zappotron thingy. Seems pricey. Why can't they just be like the maths dept.? They only use pencils, paper and waste-paper baskets. Or, even better, the philosophy dept? They only use pencils and paper.

See you after the commercial breakdown: Cert expiry error message more entertaining than the usual advert tripe

Re: Sigh

There's the other little matter about Sweden - not only is their death rate through the roof but it hasn't bought them anything - their economy is just as damaged as it would have been if they'd locked down.

It's almost as if economies are emerging properties of societies, not mystical deities to whom sacrifices must be made.

Trump gloats, telcos weep, and China is furious: How things stand following UK's decision to rip out Huawei

re: I for one welcome this

Me too but, like Iraq, it's for the wrong reasons.

There was a time when we could have fully justified an Iraq invasion, on humanitarian grounds, and we did nothing. And we should have been putting economic pressure on the PRC for decades, rather than turning a blind eye to, not just lack of democracy, but human rights abuses. What we did, instead, was allow them to weaponize global capitalism against us when, with a bit more international co-operation, we should have been using global capitalism to encourage China to move in the direction of becoming a modern, democratic state.

It's handbags at dawn: America to hit France with 25% tariffs on luxuries over digital tax on US tech titans

decent enough job

I'm not sure where you're sitting where it can seem that Mr Johnson is doing a decent enough job.

Cornish drinkers catch a different kind of buzz as pub installs electric fence at bar

Re: Puntastic

I love the earthy humor on the Reg

A volt from the blue: Samsung reportedly ditches wall-wart from future phones

Re: Transformer

Am I wrong about this or is it that one person that downvotes every one of my non-anonymous posts?

I thought SMPS had very small high freq transformers and were pretty efficient

Transformer

I should imagine it's a SMPS transformer working in the order of 100kHz and the power dissipation is almost insignificant when not powering a USB device.

Smile? Not bloody likely: Day 6 of wobbly services and still no hint to UK online bank's customers about what's actually wrong

Re: one egg in one basket

Not just that - I don't think anyone in my family would be able to phone me on a borrowed or new phone if they lost their phone because I'm pretty sure none of them know my phone number!

Hungry? Please enjoy this delicious NaN, courtesy of British Gas and Sainsbury's

re: 4 billion virtual serial ports

What happened to the other 864?

Fast as a motorbike, subtle as a brick: Motorola pushes out new Moto G 5G Plus mid-ranger

Coventry ...

... I must nip up the A46 and try out their network. Mind you, I get nearly 100Mbps on 4G in my village.

Baroness Dido Harding lifts the lid on the NHS's manual contact tracing performance: 'We contact them up to 10 times over a 36-hour period'

I think it was Lunn University, back in the days when it was just Lunn Poly

Analogue radio given 10-year stay of execution as the UK U-turns on DAB digital future

Re: DAB Is dead in the water

yep - in my experience 3G/4G internet radio works better in the car than DAB.

Dutch national broadcaster saw ad revenue rise when it stopped tracking users. It's meant to work like that, right?

makes sense

Targeting probably works best for campaigns, when you can benefit from repeatedly hitting the target with similar messages. Much less useful to advertise an endless succession of crimping tools to someone who has just bought a crimping tool.

Euro police forces infiltrated encrypted phone biz – and now 'criminal' EncroChat users are being rounded up

re: Except the rubbery ones.

Except Halloumi, which is both rubbery and excellent

One map to rule them all: UK's Ordnance Survey rolls out its Data Hub and the juicy API goodness that lies therein

re: proprietary product

Sure W3W is proprietary, but the general principle of being able to convert numerical grid references to words is not proprietary, whatever W3W think (and I'm no fan of their litigious approach). You don't really need maps at all for an address database, you just need a coordinate system.

OS already has a decent coordinate system, AAnnnnnn which gives you a 100x100m box. Maybe we shoud see if there is some way of adding a couple of numbers to a postcode to make it more precise?

I know the biggest outcode is IV27, over 3600km² . I don't know about the size of the incodes (although I know they only contain 70 actual letterboxes) so, if all had an official number (I suspect they don't), that number modulo 70 would tie to an actual letterbox.

Out in the country, though, it's still problematic. UK is about 250000km² so you need to address about 25 billion 10m² boxes. Maybe 8 digit case-insensitive alphanumerics (excluding 1,0,I,O) would do? If we factored enormous postcodes like IV27 we could maybe get down to Outcode + 4 alphanumerics?

Re: Could this become the official UK postcode and address database?

Have you seen What 3 Words?

'It's really hard to find maintainers...' Linus Torvalds ponders the future of Linux

re: where to begin

And that is what the greybeards need to spend their remaining working years doing - creating the in-depth documentation, examples, etc that are needed for new talent to get into this field.

One does not simply repurpose an entire internet constellation for sat-nav, but UK might have a go anyway

Re: Brexit sat-nav eh?

"Mines the one with the list of prepared jokes in the pocket."

Ah yes, I thought you must have left it in the cloakroom

Re: £92m

Following the links from the article, it seems to have originated on this .gov.uk page

EDIT: Reading that page it appears the study is of 18 months duration, so if it really cost £92m thats 200 FTEs at £150/hr

Re assume...

"the possibility that the government has considered this after consulting experts in the field and may have ideas beyond the obvious"

something something extraoardinary claims extraordinary evidence? Ok, I'm exaggerating, but I don't think it's a fundamentally safe assumption, even if it isn't that out of the ordinary.

CompSci student bitten by fox after feeding it McNuggets

Re: This is why we can't have nice things.

It's not just wild animals - it's other peoples animals. I know lots of cases of horses that have become seriously ill or even died because well-meaning people think that they might like oaty bars or grass clippings. Unfortunately, horses eat tasty things and, unlike dogs, can't vomit.

TikTok boom: Brits spent a quarter of their waking hours in lockdown online – Ofcom

Re: How do they specify time spent online?

Yep, I should imagine I'm more or less online whenever my eyes are open. E-books count, right?

The state of OpenPGP key servers: Kristian, can you renew my certificate? A month later: Kristian? Ten days later: Too late, it’s expired

Not just open source...

For instance, I love CodeSector's "Maverick" Android mapping app - but the developer appears to have gone awol. Such a shame.

Sure is wild that Apple, Google app store monopolies are way worse than what Windows got up to, sniffs Microsoft prez

Re: I clicked on 'Accept All Cookies'.

No, just cookies

hypocrisy ...

... it's so galling, it's always hard to remember that it doesn't invalidate the point. When my fat, alcoholic doctor tells me to excercise more and drink less I know on an intellectual level that it's still good advice, but my instinctive response is to dismiss it.

Health Sec Hancock says UK will use Apple-Google API for virus contact-tracing app after all (even though Apple were right rotters)

Re: distance and signal strength

"Radio waves in free space travel at the speed of light - approx 1 foot per nanosecond. To be able to tell the difference between a proximity of, say, 3m and 2m, the system would need a timing resolution of 3ns or better."

Yes - but I have a relatively inexpensive laser measure (5% the price of a new phone) that matches my tape measure to 1mm over anything from 1cm to 80m. Presumably that's done by timing? I can't see how it could be done by divergence measurement or anything else. Don't modern chips have highly accurate hardware timing? Don't you need a clock that good for meaningful GPS, anyway?

Again, genuine Qs, just interested.

distance and signal strength

Genuine Q

Why are we using signal strength to estimate the differences between devices? Do most phones not have the clock resolution to do it with timing?

The incumbent President of the United States of America ran now-banned Facebook ads loaded with Nazi references

Re: I didn't know of the triangle badges in the prison camps

Nazis hated Socialists. It's a fact.

No surprise: Britain ditches central database model for virus contact-tracing apps in favour of Apple-Google API

Re: echo chamber ...

Echo chamber (n): forum where most people disagree with your opinion.

Consensus (n): forum where most people agree with your opinion

Re:putting oneself forward as an MP

To get elected round here you have to be the Conservative Party candidate. However, if you are the Conservative Party candidate, you will be elected.

About half of our population live in seats where it doesn't matter how you vote nationally and local power is minimal. That is why voter engagement is so low.

The girl with the dragnet tattoo: How a TV news clip, Insta snaps, a glimpse of a tat and a T-shirt sold on Etsy led FBI to alleged cop car arsonist

Re: Hitler a communist, hah!

Well he killed all the communists - just saying.

Sorry: Nazis=Extreme Left isn't a valid point of view any more than World=Flat. Someone has already made the incorrect assertion that Hitler wanted state control of everything.

1) that isn't the definition of left wing - there are right authoritarian states too. (Saudi Arabia?)

2) let's have one piece of *actual* evidence that Hitler was a Leftie.

PS: there are no end of bad Leftie leaders - Stalin was a pretty good example.

No Wiggle room: Two weeks after angry bike shop customers report mystery orders on their accounts, firm confirms payment cards delinked

Re: There is no breach

"The one with the debit card is normally empty"

That's a good strategy, but you usually have a *lot* more comeback for online shopping with a credit card than with a debit card.

GitHub to replace master with main across its services

I understand the irritation...

I'm a pedant - I'm annoyed that 'begging the question' has come to mean 'raising the question' so I now have to either say petitio principii or use some cumbersome phrase. I'm annoyed that politicians have changed the meaning of 'refute' to 'deny'. I'm annoyed that 'hacking' now seems to mean just the bad sort. I'm annoyed I can't say 'niggardly' even though its etymology is innocent. I could go on but I can almost hear you begging me not to.

However, we have to wonder why some people seem to be more offended by the move from master to main than non-white people actually were about the term master (if they were). I'm sure it can only be because people some kind of implicit criticism: the way that many people in my village are more worried that they might be considered a racist than they are about saying things that might be considered racist. But absolutely no criticism is implied. BLM aren't campaigning for these changes. They aren't campaignining for statue removal. They are campaigning for equality.

Look, I'm no expert - I'm almost a stereotypical gammon - middle aged, fat, bald, married with kids, cis-hetero white male. My best friend, who is of Jamaican decent, isn't offended by anything. He's supremely easy going - if he smoked joints he would be stereotypically Jamaican. But I very clearly remember, when I was 14 and he was 15 and we were looking at family trees, and I was laughing at his very non-Jamaican surname, when I realised that's because it's the name of the plantation owner who owned his male ancestors. That was a shock that I can't get over.

Perhaps its stupid to change master to main. But perhaps it shows we are at least thinking about these things, and maybe that is the most important thing we can do.