Posts by Mage 9273 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007
I thought Adam's blog was daft. Everyone knows that Facebook & Twitter have to be PAID to deliver all your posts to all your followers.
Neither are public service broadcasters but advert funded exploitive parasites, except twitter isn't so good at it so is losing money.
The USA approach (not dissimilar to Russian, Chinese and French) is to claim only their own laws apply, and not only to their own troops, but indeed to anyone else. Also they will define who is a combatant or civilian, not the Red Cross/Red Crescent etc.
I'm puzzled why if "Brexit" is about being in control of British sovereignty that they would ask anyone, or indeed why there are not plans to leave NATO and UN as well as EU (Swiss only recently joined*)
[*3 Mar 2002 ... Switzerland abandoned centuries of political isolationism yesterday by voting to join the United Nations in a cliffhanger referendum which had ... The Guardian. See also Wikipedia]
The problem is that all services the public needs would collapse. Due to the fact it would take years to process each months taxation.
The tax revenue pays for lots of stuff people need. The MPs and Civil servants only actually spend a small percentage of what is raised on themselves.
Similarly if it was used for DRM, no-one would buy streaming services, downloads, subscriptions or physical media after a few days as it would seize up.
The sub 1GHz, especially 800MHz and lower is cells that are too big for high capacity, high speed data. Only a cheap way to extend voice coverage at expense of capacity.
Above 2GHz, toward 3.5GHz radio spectrum becomes progressively more Line Of Sight. So 3.5GHz is only much good for roof top aerials or femto cells.
Above the 4.5GHz / 6GHz you are looking at only open plan offices pico-cells or air-point per room WiFi.
I've used 10GHz band terrestrial Fixed Wireless Broadband and both Ku Band (11GHz to 12GHz approx) and Ka Band (19GHz to 21GHz) gear, not just as a user, but both as RF Equipment design engineer and also evaluation of systems.
28GHz etc is fantasy outside of a room or open plan.
Very much in the media, stuff by Regulators etc is nonsense.
Mobile is viable between 900MHz and 2600MHz bands. The 2300MHz is the only useful new band in Europe.
Most of the existing 900, 1800 and 2100 spectrum is massively underutilised:
1) Cells too big
2) Split between multiple operators. Using one shared Infrastructure, or even "roaming" where an operator actually HAS coverage, would almost double capacity!
Regulators need to be forbidden to auction as this encourages weak licence conditions to make auction price go higher. Auctions are the enemy of efficient spectrum use.
Conventional badly applied theories of Competition benefiting Consumer damage Mobile performance and competition as it's NOT like making baked beans. Spectrum is too finite. They need to be only competing for customers by offering shorter contracts, better deals from the same wholesale properly regulated spectrum.
Subsidy of handsets by subscription is hidden hire purchase.
Also hidden is the overcharging on voice and text, subsidising data.
The regulators have totally messed up.
The FCC is messing it up for the rest of the world too, as does greed of royalty earners like Qualcomm wanting to sell new model chips for new bands. The proposal to have LTE on WiFi bands is driven by chip vendor greed and to an extent Mobile Operators (Femto cells without an expensive licence or bothering to co-ordinate channels).
700MHz and 600MHz are madness as the cell size can't be controlled and even larger than 800MHz which is poor for cell size.
You can't beat the laws of physics.
It was though an experimental landing mechanism. The main mission is actually the satellite, the lander was only supposed to operate for a short period and establish if the landing tech actually works. Still, I agree it's a shame.
I hope they got some useful telemetry to unravel where it went wrong.
"I've said this before I am yet to see an individual with a certification from the likes of Microsoft or Citrix that can demonstrate a superior level of knowledge to an individual that's actually worked with the technology."
Actually sometimes the MCPs, MCSEs are worse, because you have to put MS Marketing Dept answers to pass, which not only conflict with real world common sense, but sometimes with MSDN/TechNet articles.
Very many of the "Official" MS exam ways of doing stuff are nuts.
IMO the MS exams (having passed four with high scores) are only of value to companies selling ONLY MS products picking MS friendly Sales people.
Some of the Cisco ones are a bit more useful.
" Until and unless they can make the exams real world examples where the solutions don't revolved around using only vendor technology and / or the way the vendor want you to do it in a lab environment, they're just noise."
Can't upvote that sentiment enough!
Yes, it's actually garbage.
1) The real score on real world stuff will be lower.
2) Any competent Audio typist (that works with the same person) can beat a transcriber (remove source errors).
3) Perhaps they are comparing a real time stenographer? Even so it's a poor score.
Natural language parsing is the limit, it's simply nowhere near good enough to sport decent text to speech.
Dictation transcription (aka Audio typists), transscription not in real time of unknown source, speech/Film/TV/News subtitles in real time, and live stenography / shorthand with later transscription are all different activities. All rely on UNDERSTANDING the meaning as well as basic parsing.
This is shameless marketing.
IoT is mostly sold by accident? You buy the expensive coffee maker and it happens to have it?
Yes SOME people deliberately go out and buy Nest or an IoT door etc, rather than reliable traditional products from established suppliers that won't be closed by Google tomorrow or ditched by Amazon or Apple for something with more profit.
Amazon Echo and Google Home are madness anyway. Ask Harry Harrison's teddy.
Apple Homekit isn't as show-offable as their iPhone and iPad. I'm sure Apple can't understand why the apple TV (stupid name for something that's an over priced locked to iTunes streaming box with no screen) isn't the money spinner that iPod + iTunes was. I wonder do Apple actually understand why the iPod and then then the iPhone were so successful? It wasn't the price, security or technology.
iPod: The iTunes compelling content deal with Record Labels of selling tracks instead of full albums.
iPhone: The compelling Carrier deals with unlimited or massive caps, when all other smart phone users were paying a fortune per megabyte! Or even per second connect time!
It was never purely the technology or even the box, despite what Apple or Apple fans like to think.
There is simply no compelling reason to have an Apple TV vs a Roku, Chromecast, Amazon FireTV, PS4, Xbox or Sky Box.
There is no compelling reason to have an Apple Watch, unless you already have an iPhone and you want to look like you have a high disposable income (it's a product that should and does sell less than $60)
Why would anyone especially buy Apple Homekit compared to any other IoT, given that IoT is a minority sport in the first place? Hardly anyone will know you have it and it's not even shiny in an an Apple Store. It's laudable the commitment to security in it. I wish all IoT had it but elsewhere I point out that security is never coming to IoT.
The RFIDs are read at close range (i.e. dairy) or some herding activity.
Then a Mobile phone data connection is used.
Satellite provides the back-haul for the conventional mobile basestation. Inmarsat is competing with OB2 / Astra / Eutelsat and others. This is NOT the expensive direct to customer satellite Terminal market. The clue is Vodafone.
How many of those cars are made in UK?
How many TVs are made in Europe now.
Large scale automation was common in the 1930s, though it started in the late 18th century.
There is eventually saturation and eventually a situation where very few people are employed. They are developing the technology to restock shelves and already have self service checkouts in some shops.
There will be no overnight change. However there are no "jobs for life" any more, except maybe in some Civil Services. We are a long way from having to make this decision, it could be another 150 years. It seems likely though there will be a slowly increasing number of people that never get jobs.
It's really a lie about retirement age being raised. It's the age to start getting a government pension that is being raised. If you are over 49, then you are more likely to be made redundant and if over 59 unlikely to to find a job if you are unemployed. Businesses have not raised retirement age, quite the reverse. It's obvious without an age, the approximate age of the person on a CV.
It's a dishonestly written article, typical of the propaganda from "The Conversation"
"So what happens if there's a loose car on the tracks? Or a large tree? Or a cow (remember why old trains had "cow catchers")?"
Indeed. It's not so simple. So why are people working on much harder car issue than on trains? Solve one problem at a time. Autonomous car needs many different issues solved.
Buses, trucks and cars should be last on the list after Trams.
It's not just because of Unions that trains have drivers, and surely that doesn't even need so called "AI" or GPS (apparently GPS isn't good enough for autonomous cars, not just accuracy, but signal loss). So let's do trains first. Signals can tell the train where it is. It doesn't need to steer. Only follow signals and stop if there is something unexpected on the track, which should be very much easier than cars avoiding unexpected things on roads (bins blowing in wind, missing manhole covers, never mind trucks, children or cyclists.)
It can't.
The other issues are:
1) The user is unlikely to ever know it's compromised.
2) Most devices can't be updated.
3) Even if updates exist, users are unlikely to know they exist.
4) Even if it can be, and the user knows, most users won't bother.
5) There will be another bug, or patch ineffective and the maker will be gone, or closed by Google or lose interest as they are supporting the new shiny thing, or developer is gone (outsourced?) and no-one can patch it.
Forced automatic updates are actually a security risk and not a solution.
Ultimately the palliatives used by phones, tablets, PCs etc only partially solve the problem even for those. The IoT issue may not have a solution other than uPNP illegal on firewalls and no INWARD control at all on domestic IoT.
We don't even have a complete solution for ordinary Internet stuff. The issues go to the heart of adding security as an afterthought to most internet protocols. Why didn't email have signing, whitelisting, etc from day one?
Why are web browsers still not properly sandboxed?
Why did anyone ever think Active X or Java (not Javascript) was a good idea in a browser?
Why aren't 3rd party cookies illegal, or 3 party iFrames blocked? Why are all defaults on all browsers and email clients at nearly the worst for security & privacy.
So how can we expect anyone to get IoT security right?
So called "Agile" software development makes it all worse.
Ha ha!
I'd trust them less than Clinton, Blair, Bush, Trump, Putin etc.
Though I think their agenda is making money. At some stage though all large corporations become more interested in Empire Building and Ego than purely profit motive. That's a worrying thought.
Perhaps if people stopped using Facebook, or at least stopped promoting it or blocked all the ads it might eventually close too. Then we would only have the problem of how to regulate Google.
Amazon, Apple, MS, AirBNB, Uber etc are all adequately covered by pre-internet laws, if they were enforced.
Why do Police, Broadcasters, Local Councils, Big companies all promote Twitter & Facebook on the their websites (driving away traffic)? It's not the golden pages / yellow pages.
They moderate, thus are not common carriers, yet don't do it properly, also are they even in reality legal in EU and other places with EU style legal systems?
You and I must be ancient, Hans 1.
I remember installing CAPI drivers and configuring them in 1990s, and again oddly in 2006 for early 4G gear (dial-up connection + Native networking, so they used CAPI driver architecture. All mobile is a little bit like ISDN, it's sort of dialup rather than always on)
48V is very standardised from probably before WWI and often Exchanges, Industrial controllers, comms gear on masts, etc. Standard PSUs. Probably used in other things too as it's a sort of maximum voltage allowed to be regarded as "low voltage". 12V is too much current. Mostly 12V is domestic and cars and 24V only trucks and some larger SUV type things or mobile/vehicle Military.
The iPhone type capacitive only screen can't do precision, with ANY after market stylus. The phone has to be designed for a stylus of some kind. Most phones since after Nokia 5800 are not
Precision needs an added resistive screen or a wacom type combo of base + energised stylus.
Yes!
"The really big deal about the first iPhone was that Saint Jobs had the arrogance and market power to mandate that at least one cellular carrier in each market was signed up to providing an affordable data package. The ability to do internet-related stuff on your phone without needing to take a second mortgage to pay for the data was what transformed the market, not the perfection (or otherwise) of any particular manufacturer's devices."
I can't upvote this enough! I had three perfectly usable smart phones before iPhone existed, only possible because my employer was paying. All had real email, real browser (well, more real than iE6) and two had real fax TX and RX! Copy & Paste and Apps.
The company I was working for even had a working 4G VOIP only "phone" with SD slot, USB host and client, touch screen, real Debian as OS and desktop Firefox browser the same time as 1st iPhone released. The HW was all out of a catalogue!
Magical iPhone marketing and carrier deals. Not remotely responsible for miniaturised cameras, LCDs, GPUs, motion sensors etc. Apple didn't develop ANY HW for first iPhone. All bought in.
Next people will claim they invented MP3 players (they were years late, but iTunes make it a success, deals with record lables, not the HW or SW)/
True, though actually it's an erroneous credit.
Though Nokia had the Communicator 9110 in 1998 and the 9000 in 1996.
I'm not sure Nokia made the first smartphone, though it was certainly the first successful on in business.
"The product line was continued in 2000 by the introduction of Nokia 9210 Communicator which introduced a wide TFT colour internal screen, 32-bit ARM9-based RISC CPU at 52 MHz, 16 MB of internal memory, enhanced web abilities and most importantly saw the operating system change to the Symbian operating system. The 9210i launched in 2002 increased the internal memory to 40 MB, video streaming and flash 5 support for the web browser."
I had a 9210i and contract that allowed two GSM channels, thus 28.8k. Lots of home users only had that speed then. It marked the switch to a version of Symbian and ARM. Earlier versions were x86!
A touch screen was envisiaged in 2002, but the development of the GUI families on Symbian used in Communicator was killed off around then in favour of inferior S60 GUI on Symbian. Nokia Politics.
The BlackBerry 850 in 1999 was maybe third pager product and included email. I'd not regard it as a smartphone. Did BlackBerry have a real Smartphone in Nokia 9000 sense before 2003?
Smartphones have as much to do with VR as your TV. It has a screen and maybe an ARM CPU too.
They've existed since 1998.
The form factor isn't an Apple design. It's what you get when you simply slap a touch screen on a rounded rectangle, the most efficient shape to fit maximum electronics in a hand held device.
No, they did not point a camera at a London underground map or give the computer access to the Internet and said "Learn about the topology, routes and distances of the London Underground". Humans laboriously entered the information into a database for a program created for this domain of problem, by humans.
The system has an impressive sounding name and description. This is marketing, though of what exactly I'm not sure.
"Although Mrs has promised that there will be no border controls between North and South."
Except that's not up to Ireland, NI or UK, but up to the EU decide.
***
If there is no Right of Residence of EU Citizens and Freedom of movement to UK, then there will be a hard border for first time ever NI <-> Ireland. May's promise is hot air.
Also even during Dev's so called Economic War against the EU, there was always a Common Travel Area. That may end for first time ever. There will be the cost of a border fence. Even before 1973 and during troubles there has never been a physical border.
UK wants the NI-UK to Ireland border to be the Irish ports and airports, like 13th Century to 1922! Neither EU nor Ireland will agree to that.
In the long term Ireland may benefit if International and other EU suppliers ship direct to Ireland rather than is so often the case via a UK middle man. Books, Magazines, Music, DVDs, Games etc very much treat Ireland as a UK region. DVDs etc often have an extra added Irish classification sticker, though some are printed, but alongside the UK one!
Very many "Irish" papers are thinly disguised UK ones.
BBC & ITV are the next popular TV stations and available to near 100% FTA and over 82% get them in a PayTV package. PayTV historically high as UK TV wasn't always FTA on Satellite, though Dublin, East, South East and Border got Terrestrial TV from UK since 1950s, Irish TV only started hours before 1962.
This is biggest change since Irish break with Sterling in 1979 (In reality Ireland only had its own currency 1979 to 1999)
Ireland has suffered because UK left ERM and didn't join Euro. Brexit will not be as simple as Ni Unionists or Brexiteers claim. EU totally decides what it is, with any one of the 27 having a veto!
The Referendum had lies on both sides.
It's FAR worse for Gibraltar who face the border with Spain being closed and withdrawal of 14,000 Spanish workers and loss of Spanish trade. It's only because UK and Spain are both in EU that the Spanish - Gib border is cordial!
Some sort of compiler like tool to check the source. Problematic as ONE text file might have
HTML (rendered on client)
Javscript (executed on client)
Then executed server side never seen by Client
Actual SQL (evil!)
Santitsing function calls in language of the day calling SQL stored procedures.
Coldfusion (perhaps dynamically generating javascript and HTML)
php
maybe even Java too
Oh how I hate web development compared to a program / app entirely in C#, VB6, C, C++, Modula-2, JAL or Java (Embedded system from scratch so much nicer than Windows /Linux and console or serivices with no GUI nicer still, though actually VB6 + OBDC at the end was a nice RAD test environment for XP).
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