Posts by Chris Miller

BBC-featured call centre slapped with hefty fine for unwanted calls

Re: 'The bigger problem is that there is a cold calling industry'

"You're travelling overseas" - and then, just to add injury to insult, you (or your company) gets billed for the non-UK segment of the call.

Fifty, fired and fretful: Three chaps stare down CAREER MORTALITY

@David

99% of the time your description of VC is spot on. The other 1% you get Amazon/Google/Apple/Microsoft/...

Re: "get serious about retirement savings plans"

Sorry, but them's the rates (aged 60, as you say). You may be underestimating the effect of (say) 3% inflation, which is a doubling every 24 years. Putting it into shares may give you some capital growth (although that hasn't worked very well over the last couple of decades), but fixed interest is (of course) effectively non-existent at present. If interest rates go up, annuity rates will improve (and they get better as you age), but such a change would probably reflect an increase in inflation.

"get serious about retirement savings plans"

In his 50s, he's leaving it late. If you haven't got a defined benefit pension, current annuity rates (50% survivor, RPI linked) are about 40:1. So a million quid pot will get you a pension of £25k - hardly the lap of luxury. And the brain-dead LibDems think there should be a wealth tax on assets over a million ...

Samsung plans LTE Advanced version of Galaxy S4

Re: One question... Why?

Apparently, you can download torrents of every Star Trek episode ever made overnight. Of course, this may make a bit of a dent in your 'fair usage' allowance.

New material enables 1,000-meter super-skyscrapers

Re: Never mind going up

In the 80s, I was doing some work in the 30-storey Torre Europa* in Madrid. The fire escape method was a flexible tube that you used to drop to the floor below (where there was a similar tube and so on). I imagine (I only saw the pictogram instructions, I never had to use it, thankfully!) that friction slowed you down enough to prevent injury on a 3m drop.

* The office had a fine view of the neighbouring Bernabéu, which was entertaining when floodlit evening fixtures were being played.

Julian Assange: Google's just an arm of US government

the pale blond hacker skiddy

FTFY

CRINGE! Home Office wants to know whether your boss BEATS YOU

As Dean Acheson wisely observed: "A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer." The same goes double for RFIs.

Desperate Venezuelans wiped clean of bog roll

Who is in charge of the supply of bread to the population of London?

Question asked of the economist Paul Seabright by a visiting Russian official shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union - quoted in his "The Company of Strangers".

BBC lied to Parliament about doomed £100m IT monster, thunder MPs

Re: I've seen this sort of thing before...

THE PLAN.

In the beginning was the plan.

And then came the assumptions.

And the assumptions were without form.

And the plan was without substance.

And darkness was upon the face of the Workers.

And they spoke amongst themselves, saying, ‘It is a crock of dung and it stinketh.’

And the Workers went unto their Supervisors and said, ‘It is a pail of manure, and none may abide the odour thereof.’

And the Supervisors went unto their Managers, saying ‘It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that none can abide by it.’

And the Managers went unto their Directors, saying ‘It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength.’

And the Directors spoke amongst themselves, saying to one another, ‘It contains that which aids growth and it is very powerful.’

And thus the Directors went unto their Chief Executive, saying unto him, ‘This plan will actively promote the growth and vigour of the company with powerful effects.’

And the Chief Executive looked upon the plan, and thought that it was good.

And the plan became Policy.

Tech giants' offshore cash-stashing is only ever a delaying tactic

Re: "Companies don't pay taxes, people do"

"Dividends on the other hand are typically taxed at around 15%". That's because dividends are paid out of company profits and have already been taxed once, at a rate not far from basic rate income tax. Hence dividends (in the UK) are only subject to higher rate income tax. By all means tax dividends at the same rate as other income, but you'd (logically, if logic has any place in taxation :) have to allow them as a corporate expense, just like salaries.

Singing astronaut Chris Hadfield resigns from Canadian Space Agency

Re: he still needs to rehabilitate

Surely Benson, AZ?

NSA PRISM-gate: Relax, GCHQ spooks 'keep us safe', says Cameron

True, but I've always told people not to put anything in an email that they wouldn't feel comfortable writing on a postcard.

I wonder how many terrorist plots have been genuinely uncovered in this way (as opposed to monitoring existing 'people of interest'). It would take a really dim terrorist (of which, admittedly, there appears to be no great shortage) to send "I've got all the Semtex we need for the bomb" in an email. Surely you'd arrange for an apparently innocuous code: "All the guests have been invited to the wedding", or some such.

BBC's Digital Moneypit Initiative known to be 'pile of dung' for years

Re: An Important Consideration

The first thing that newly TUPEd staff receive is a training course subtitled 'how to say NO to your former colleagues':

"Is it in the contract?"

"Do you have a costed change request for that?"

The first question a PwC (or any other 'management') consultant asked to carry out such a review will ask is: "What would you like the answer to be?"

Review: Acer Aspire P3 Windows 8 slate

FWIW, I've had several Acer laptops and have had no problems with the build quality. The materials tend toward the plastic end of the spectrum, but they've survived pretty rough handling.

So, who ought to be the next Doctor Who? It's up to YOU...

It's already decided

Sandi Toksvig. Because her BBC contract apparently requires her to be in absolutely everything.

PS Judging by the number for votes for Mr Cumberbatch vs Mr Holder, I can only assume some people are taking this poll seriously.

Al Gore: Stop using the atmosphere as 'an open sewer

Come on guys, give Al and Eric a break

Private jets don't just buy themselves, you know.

BT links with Huawei raise national security concerns, say MPs

Re: Good for them

I wouldn't put it quite so strongly as 'nonsense', but I've carried out security risk assessments for clients with Huawei kit, and my conclusions were that there are real threats, such as:

(a) a magic 'off' button - Huawei could configure their systems to shut down on receipt of a specially formed packet (a 21st century 'ping of death') to facilitate DoS attacks;

(b) back doors that could allow an attacker to gain sysadmin access (which also exist, by accident if not design, in many other systems);

(c) analysis of traffic and reporting back to some central point (I think this sort of capability is rather beyond the fairly basic low-level kit that constitutes most of their current installed base, but that will no doubt change in the future as Huawei move up the food chain).

But none of these seem to be very plausible because:

(1) most Huawei kit is installed in China, so they would be just as vulnerable to these attacks;

(2) most such kit is not directly exposed to the Internet. There are firewalls and IDS/IPS systems in the way (hopefully not all Huawei ones!) that would make inbound and outbound access very difficult, if not impossible.

I don't claim to have conducted any exhaustive analysis of the hardware, and I'd welcome comments or corrections. But it doesn't seem to me that any threat is currently very great.

Network Rail axes hundreds of tech suppliers

Accenture, BAE Systems Detica, Cognizant, CSC and TCS

Nope, can't think of a single reason why this won't be a huge success (actually, I can think of 5 reasons).

Boffins develop 'practically free' sulphur-powered batteries

You spell it sulphur, I spell it ...

I expect it was to explain why Richard was using the deprecated spelling, which was changed to sulfur in the 90s with agreement from IUPAC and RSC (in return USizens have to spell aluminium correctly). I don't know what happened to it, though.

Tech aristocracy joins conflab with Secret Rulers of the World

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - "Wealth of Nations" Adam Smith (1723–1790)

PS Anyone want to play spot the 12-foot, blood-drinking, shape-shifting lizard? My money's on Mandy.

PPS Their opening session is on <drum roll> Ethics. ROFLMAO

Steelie Neelie wants roaming charges gone by Easter 2014

If you're going to do this, why not abolish international call charges for landlines too? I think roaming charges should be both clear and reasonable (which is not always the case, at present), but no doubt the mobile operators need to get their profits from somewhere, and what they can't recover from roaming charges will have to be recouped by increases in their standard rates. If your job/lifestyle requires/permits you to 'enjoy' foreign travel, is it right that those who can't afford it should subsidise your phone costs while you're abroad?

Kinky? You're mentally healthier than 'vanilla' bonkers

@ribosome

He was probably quoting my hero, Ernest Rutherford (see above), who also said:

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

Re: WTF?

It means: "we'd like this to sound a lot more scientific than it really is".

The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't. - Ernest Rutherford (Baron Rutherford of Nelson) 1871-1937

Elon Musk pledges transcontinental car juicers by end of year

Sorry, I picked the wrong number from the HS2 site, which includes both phase 1 and phase 2. The correct cost for phase 1 alone is 'only' $25 billion* - sounds like a bargain now, doesn't it? In reality, whether it's clinically insane by a factor of 10x or 20x doesn't actually matter - it's still utterly bonkers. To save us from further irrelevant quibbling, the HS2 site claims the length of phase 1 to be 140 miles, I guess they're including the spur to Lichfield.

* "We estimate the first phase of HS2 will cost around £16.3bn to construct (in 2011 prices)." At the current rate of £1 = $1.52, that's $24.8 billion. These are HS2's own numbers from their web site, linked above - but the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority says they're crap and has categorised it amongst those government projects that are 'failing' (although for some completely inexplicable reason they're refusing to publish their report).

"California is currently planning the slowest and highest-cost high-speed rail link in existence". I assume you're talking about XpressWest: $5 billion for 186 miles of 150 mph track. But Britain has a plan (that looks like going ahead for reasons that no sane person can fathom) for HS2, phase 1 of which (London - Birmingham) is estimated* to cost $50 billion for 100 miles of 225 mph track. When it comes to pissing away public money, you're mere amateurs.

* This is a government project, so you can probably double that to get the real cost.

Drupal hacked, resets passwords after millions of accounts exposed

@Ben

You're right in principle, but in practice it means the difference between a hacker simply copying one or two passwd files (ideally that shouldn't be easy, but that seems to be what has happened here, and occurs all too often), and their having to gain complete ownership of your web server, identifying the code containing your 'personal' salt-generation software and then disassembling it (the source code is held on a USB stick in a safe). I wouldn't propose this mechanism for the protection of military grade secrets, but I think for a list of passwords to a standard web site it's more than good enough.

Of course, most people will just use standard off-the-shelf code for their password algorithm, in which case a smart attacker should be able to ascertain which one and then, as you rightly say, all bets are off unless you can train your users to adopt 'strong' passwords (good luck with that!)

@Phil

It sounds like you're thinking of the standard Unix password scheme (apologies if I've got that wrong). But for a web password, you're free to use your own methods, which could easily include a salt that is generated rather than stored by a separate hashing process from unchanging user data (perhaps the user name or a timestamp of when the user was created).

Re: Doesn't matter

Which is why you must salt them in addition to using a hash function (preferably a better one than MD5).

EMC inks deal to take Brit F1 racer Lotus to the clouds

"we'd love to see the front wheels too"

I expect they're Most Secret - perhaps it will have four.

Oi, butterfingers! Drop your mobe in a pint? Hope it's not an iPhone

Agreed

Anyway, why would I want to protect my Greek?

Hot new battery technologies need a cooling off period

@ Terry Barnes et al

Batteries are not at all like calor gas. Gas is gas, petrol is petrol, but a new battery may perform very differently from an old one (even if they are nominally equivalent). Batteries deteriorate over time and with each cycle, in reality it's unlikely they will last usefully longer than 5 years, but I suppose the technology will improve. But you claim that people will be happy to exchange 'their' brand new one (irrespective of who may 'own' it), for one that may be on its last legs and won't hold enough charge to get you home? I think a reality check may be in order.

I'm sure if petrol were a new discovery, green zealots would be campaigning against the 'dangers' of filling stations in much the way they do with nuclear power. When was the last time you saw a filling station explode (Terminator doesn't count), or even a significant spillage? It's true that it's possible to get a few splashes of petrol if you're a bit careless while refilling, which might result in a dry-cleaning bill. But a 'splash' from a few hundred kW recharging device could ruin your whole day.

Gosh this 'green' technology is more complicated than it appears.

Battery swapping also has problems

1. Getting on for half the value of an electric vehicle is in the battery. If you've just spent £50k on a new electric Beemer, how happy will you be to have half its worth (and possibly performance) swapped out for a 10-year-old Toyota when you first 'refuel'?

2. The energy supply problem remains. Count how many cars fill up in an hour at a typical filling station. Multiply that by 30kWh per battery and you've got an approximation of the power demand. It's not trivial, I reckon about 10MW for a fairly busy establishment. If you recharge on site you're going to need a hefty power supply. If they're taken away to a central recharging station and replaced by fully charged ones (analogous to the present petrol/gas tanker) that's a major logistical challenge - batteries are heavy. A 30,000 litre tanker carries 300,000kWh of energy. 10,000 batteries will need a lot of 'tankers'.

Is there an electrochemist in the house?

The claimed energy density "2600 watt hours per litre" is about 3.6x that for the best Li-ion batteries (2600 kJ/L). Is this chemically plausible, or has a mistake in unit translation occurred (probably by a journalist)?

[Paris, because she knows almost as much about electrochemistry as I do.]

Stand by for PURPLE KETCHUP as boffins breed SUPER TOMATOES

If they could produce a supermarket tomato that actually tastes of something (my preference would be for 'tomato'), that would be a real breakthrough.

BBC suspends CTO after £100m is wasted on doomed IT system

@keithpeter

The BBC has 23,000 staff (and no doubt many more contractors) so simply keeping the joint running in terms of desktops, laptops, fondleslabs and associated networking and server hardware and software probably takes up £200 million a year. Add to that a very substantial web presence (BBC comes just below Apple and above Adobe on website hit lists) and I seriously doubt that there's more than £50 million which could be called 'discretionary spending', probably a lot less. A huge chunk of that has just been pissed away.

Doesn't matter whether it's public or private

No 5-year technology project can possibly 'succeed'. Even if you implement it to perfection, in 5 years:

1. The technology will have changed.

2. The people (especially the sponsors at the top) will have changed.

3. The business will have changed (though I hesitate to call the BBC a business, it still changes radically over a 5 year period).

So my rule is - no projects will be undertaken that can't be completed and delivering benefits in 6 months. Inevitably the cry goes up: "Oh, but my vital megaproject can't possibly be implemented in less than 5 years." To which the answer is: break it up into 10 subprojects each with deliverable benefits, or it ain't happening on my watch.

Make no mistake

Deputy heads will roll.

'Catastrophic failure' of 3D-printed gun in Oz Police test

130,000 is clearly a nonsense number, as a quick arithmetical check will show. Population of the UK: ~70,000,000; UK life expectancy: a bit over 80; so we would expect* no more than a million deaths a year from all causes in the UK. 130,000 implies that 1 in 8 deaths are caused by knives, which is clearly ridiculous. It sound like a huge overstatement even of the global deaths from knives, being about 0.1% of the gross global mortality.

* Assuming some reasonable age distribution. It's possible to construct extreme examples for which the approximation fails (such as a drastic war that has wiped out half the males between 20-40, or a massive baby boom), but they don't represent the modern UK.

Daft tweet by Speaker Bercow's loquacious wife DID libel lord

Sally Bercow = Yo Screwball

That is all.

Paul Allen buys lovingly restored vintage V-2 Nazi ballistic missile

If he also buys an island with an extinct volcano, I'd be very worried.

US power grid the target of 'numerous and daily' cyber-attacks

Re: Working OK?

I imagine that by 'attacks' they mean probes to find out if some well-known TCP port has been left open by mistake, rather than APTs.

COLD FUSION is BACK with 'anomalous heat' claim

Re: @Chris Miller

Apologies HFG, I didn't intend to insult arXiv which is a fantastic resource, with many great papers. But the fact remains that you can get a paper on there with no peer review process, which is what has been done in this case. When it gets published in Nature or PTRS, I'll give it another look.

"I wouldn't accept it for publication"

No-one would. That's why it's on arXiv.

O2 brushed off outsourcing 'rumour' - but it's happening ... to THOUSANDS

Re: eh?

Actually, the 'solution du jour' for consultants is now 'insourcing'. In many cases exactly the same firms that dropped in 5/10 years ago and told management to outsource everything, are now returning, sucking their teeth, saying 'who sold you this, then?' and charging millions (again) to bring it all back. It would be funny if it weren't so bloody serious.

BT Tower is just a relic? Wrong: It relays 18,000hrs of telly daily

Re: London - same old, same old: Paris the historic past preserved

And Guy de Maupassant supposedly ate lunch in the Eiffel tower's restaurant every day, because it was the only place in Paris from which the Eiffel tower wasn't visible.

Re: £50

I think Joe used the same BoE site; £1 in 1965 equates to £16.39 in 2012 money, so four bob (20p) equals £3.28. My first legal pint (c. 1970) cost 1/11 so I could have got two pints for the cost of the trip up the Tower, whereas £3.28 will barely buy you a pint in London today.

WTF is... LTE Advanced?

Exactly

I'd love the ability to achieve a (say) 1Mb data rate the full length of the M11 or the rail links to London (or the west/east-coast mainlines, for that matter), rather than planning for pointlessly* high data rates that can both flatten a battery and exhaust your annual data allocation in a few minutes.

* For truly mobile applications - no doubt there are some areas where fixed lines aren't practical and a high-speed over-the-air link is truly useful.

So you want to be a contractor? Well, here's how it works

Re: No you fucking don't.

Ah, Dominic, I see you've had your coffee now :)