Posts by Cucumber C Face

Samsung and Mousterian move ahead with floating datacenter for Texas

Re: Concept art

<snip>if the ship as planned looks anything like the 'concept' art</snip>

Well they managed it with the Ferrari Luce

UK border tech budget swells by £100M as Home Office targets small boat crossings

Market solution?

1. Legal route for asylum applications lodged offshore to UK.

2. Implement administrative charge / application fee slightly less than small boat traffickers charge.

I love how free market espousing governments never apply the principles where they could actually work (see also 'war on drugs'). Empire building of law enforcement instruments that can be used for oppression maybe the motive?

Whitehall rejects £1.8B digital ID price tag – but won't say what it will cost

Déjà construit

Or we could get some indication of cost from establishing and running similar systems:

Unique Taxpayer Reference

National Insurance Number

NHS Number

Passport

Driving License

[Have I missed any]

Or we could extend any one of the above and drop the others.

Microsoft Teams decouples from Office 365 suite globally

Will the real Teams please stand up

Does this mean we will no longer be 'entertained' by quasi-randomised permutations of however many Microsoft Accounts you have versus

Teams Classic (Work or school); 'New' Teams and Teams 'free' versions - each inevitably downloading a service pack when the meeting is due?

Cutting-edge microscopy reveals bottled water has 'up to 100 times' more bits of plastic than previously feared

Nanoparticles in water for the past 5 billion years

Tiny particles suspended in water are ubiquitous naturally from a wide range of sources and materials.

Acknowledgement of this places this in context. While the plastic materials may be new and perhaps different in some way, small largely inert particles in water are not an entirely novel biological threat.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5789313/

COVID-19 infection surge detected in wastewater, signals potential new wave

You only die once

Often neglected is all discussion of natural selection and epidemiology of Covid is the selection drive on the human population. There is and was a huge range of responses to infection - from totally asymptomatic through to catastrophic multiple organ failure. This diversity must be down to human biological variation.

Most people alive on Earth have now met COVID at least once. They are proven survivors!

To put it somewhat indelicately, the no 'underlying condition' fit 25 year old marathon runners who sadly went down in 2020-21 can't die a second time!

There will always be new elderly and immunocompromised people coming along, but even they have got through so far, and mostly have some immunological experience of the virus. They will likely do far better than the 'underlying condition' folk in the first wave.

Microsoft tests ‘Suggested Actions’ in Windows 11. Insiders: Can we turn it off?

Windows 2000 / Office 2003 was peak UI for me. Downhill ever since IMHO.

For a true display of wealth, dab printer ink behind your ears instead of Chanel No. 5

Conversely

We gave up on third party suppliers for our Dell Laser printers after several companies' 'long life' cartridges gave up after less than 200 sheets of sparsely printed A4. Sadly resigned to paying Dell 75% of the cost of a new printer on each set of CYM and B cartridges.

Any recommendations?

And while we are moaning about printer rip-offs

<rant>I only want to print in black/white - I even checked the box in the printer config. Why lock me out when only the f£*%ing magenta is gone! Let me guess...$$$$$</rant>

Thank you.

.

UK pins 'reckless campaign of cyber attacks' on Russian military intelligence

Collateral damage

Russia use "deliberate and blatant attempts to scare anybody who has ever P!$$£d off the Russian government...playing the game in 2018 by 1980's rules."

Right, nerve agents and strangulations are so passe. The USA and UK use drones to kill their dissident citizens as well as foreign nationals in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Not saying either side is right. Only considering that objectively the New World Order is way ahead on civilian casualties (and $ trillions flushed into arms dealers' pockets).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._drone_strikes

NAO probing Capita's sickly £700m GP support gig

Re: The Tories want to break the NHS

>if we all took more responsibility for ourselves, it would ease a huge burden on the NHS<

Most healthcare is a luxury not a money saver. If we recognised this we could have a sensible conversation about funding. Instead we remainl caught in the delusion at the outset of the NHS in 1948 - that it would get cheaper after a few years because everyone would be cured, fitter and economically productive.

Consider it was cheaper for the TaxPayer/Government when more people smoked like troopers, paid National Insurance and tobacco duty all their lives and then obligingly croaked with heart attacks or lung cancer before drawing their state pensions.

What's killing the NHS (other than rising expectations and more expensive treatment options) is people surviving longer with treatments for long term conditions - which (now) take a very long time to finish you off. I'd argue that's a great thing. However it's not saving money. It's a luxury - and we can choose how much of it we spend on it.

If great healthcare saved money you'd find some of the best healthcare systems in the poorest countries.

Consider we could cure or eliminate all cancers and heart disease - that would leave most everyone surviving to acquire senile dementias - which is the greatest social and economic health burden of all.

Activists launch legal challenge against NHS patient data-sharing deal

Illegal immigrants still pay taxes

They will be paying indirect taxation (VAT, fuel duty etc.) which is where much of the tax paid by low income people comes from anyway.

Why Agile is like flossing and regular sex

Re: Having never done Agile...

Having done been on Agile projects a few times - the answer is you mostly don't avoid "oh shit, the architecture/db/performance won't support that new feature without a major redesign".

The phrase is "technical debt" - the fastest and least elegant kludges tend to win out. In Agile's defence though at least this point is usually recognised, conceded and there can be a willingness to refactor when ones back is against the wall. Whereas with waterfall - when your information models, architecture etc. are s**t usually no one is given the opportunity to do anything about it as the PHB's 'output based specifications' are infallible.

How innocent people 'of no security interest' are mere keystrokes away in UK's spy databases

Concerns about data quality

Even advocates of "nothing to hide nothing to fear" should have this concern.

Scant consolation when the door is kicked down at 4:30 AM and a Glock is held to your kid's head - that it's because some minimum wager mistyped a postcode somewhere down the line on the way to Big Brother's data warehouse.

Tor users are actively discriminated against by website operators

Plausible deniability?

I run a website (medical educational) on which we reluctantly decided to block the entire list of Tor exit nodes. Tor publishes a list of their current exit nodes http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/ . Our site sees almost exclusively vulnerability scans, sql injection attempts, scraping, referer spam etc from >many< but not all Tor exit nodes.

The dismal status of many of these exit node IP addresses can be confirmed here http://www.projecthoneypot.org/search_ip.php

We suspect this abusive traffic is mostly not routed through the Tor network itself at all. (The bandwidth is pretty poor). Instead I guess they install and host a Tor exit node on the server, throttle it down to a trickle, and then let their bots rip [and if their ISP or LEA intervenes] they can blame all traffic emanating from their box on naughty anonymous cowards.

Want to download free AV software? Don't have a Muslim name

Great advert for Sophos anti-virus software

Brilliant work on that terrorist detection algorithm guys. Can I take it we can expect no false positives from your heuristic detection either?

Programming Office 365: Hands On with Microsoft's new APIs

Olé

Here's to another 21 years of VBA.

IPv4 addresses now EXHAUSTED in Latin America and the Caribbean

Re: A Win Win solution!

Could you rather sell whoever missed making IPv6 back compatible with IPv4 please?

A black box for your SUITCASE: Now your lost luggage can phone home – quite literally

But is it waterproof ...

.... to a depth of 5+ km?

Windows XP is finally DEAD, right? Er, not quite. Here's what to do if you're stuck with it

>none of the scary articles seem to include any risk analysis / probabilities.<

Likewise these ATM machines are (I hope) unlikely to be sat facing the interwebs unfirewalled with a luser surfing porn using IE6 on an administrator account on them. Chances are many of these machines could remain unmolested for all eternity.

Life support turned off: NHS Direct dies silent, undignified death

Re: Happy day

Save your breath Mr sad-loser. The NHS is a national religion and any service which expands the ranks of the worried well merely increases the intensity of worship.

Exposed: bizarre quantum sibling love triangle

I know I'm terminally confused....

... when I find amanfromMars easier to understand than the article he comments on.

Will small biz get a bite of mega UK.gov IT pie? Yes: if it can pass the bulls**t sniff test

Re: I get the impression Govt projects *never* plan for change

> the basic principle of taxation doesn't change <

I'm not so sure. The principles do change.

To take one possible change in the pipeline - married couples' allowances. Might the (re-)introduction of that hose your data model and code base - or could it handle that with just a soft configuration change?

(Well outside my domain - would genuinely like to know).

Switzerland to set up 'Swiss cloud' free of NSA, GCHQ snooping (it hopes)

Possibly the best country in the World

I am in favour of low taxation jurisdictions offering solutions that put pressure on high tax jurisdictions to compete. (Also applies to Switzerland - no coincidence I suggest)

Windows 8.1: A bit square, sure, but WAIT! It has a Start button

Re: lipstick on a pig

.... only you wouldn't expect to apply the pig's own bodyweight in lipstick. You might even be able to use the same tube of lipstick to more than one porker.

BBC's Clangers returns in £5m 'New Age' remake

Re: Why can't they write some new programmes?

Well the big budget revamp worked for Dr Who I'm told. (Never seen the post-hiatus Who.)

MS Word deserves DEATH says Brit SciFi author Charles Stross

Word Perfect largely has itself to blame for it's demise

While I don't dispute one could do a great job with Word Perfect back in the 1980's - IMHO it made Vi and Edlin seem like user friendly text processors by comparison.

Ease of use (by the untrained majority) was where WP 5.1 lost out to Microsoft Word V2. The much belated Windows GUI version of WP stank (yes I know about the hidden api stuff) but they never caught up.

By the time MS lost the plot with the ribbon it obviously had all been over for 15 years.

Look out, world! HP's found a use for Autonomy - rescuing Win XP bods

A bear of little brain asks...

Is difficulty 'moving data' the burning problem keeping people on XP?

So it's nothing to do with losing perfectly functional 16 bit apps; retraining lusers on crappy UI's; legacy hardware with no Vista (and later) drivers or the inability to run Office 2003 on Windoze 8 then.

I know XP arrived when PCs still (just about) came with floppy discs but.. (see icon)

Tencent offers 10TB of free cloud storage for all

File size limit

The other hidden gotcha with these services is the maximum file size - last time I tried Microsoft's Sky Drive it was 100 MB for them.

This pretty much stuffs storage of HD movies, large database backups and large encrypted containers (i.e. pretty much the only things that would potentially soak up terabytes of space) - unless you fancy splitting them before uploading.

Billionaire Google founder splits with wife, allegedly beds Google Glass staffer

Welcome To Marketing

... the Department which always has the hottest babes, the ugliest dudes and the ethics of an anthrax bacillus.

Bradley Manning is no more. 'Call me Chelsea,' she says

Whistleblower == outsider?

Perhaps your average family guy / team player / good old boy is less likely to rock the boat. Whatever else, you have to admire Bradley/Chelsea's cojones.

Paris? Blowing a different kind of whistle.

Windows NT: Remember Microsoft's almost perfect 20-year-old?

Re: A question from a young'un of 31...

>I have wondered WTF was the bloody point of Windows 95, 98 and (trigger warning) Milennium Edition?<

NT 3.5 won me over and 3.51 was a revelation. It was games which kept me (and millions of others) dual booting into DOS/95/98 well into the noughties. Doom, Duke Nukem etc. needed to hit the hardware (the ports you get now weren't available and would probably have been too CPU/RAM intensive even if they had been). Most business DOS apps could be coaxed into running on NT with various degrees of pain.

ZTE's $80 Firefox OS mobe sells out on eBay

256 MB RAM? Luxury!

Microsoft - scarcely known for their lean creations - in 1995 shipped Windows NT 3.51 which ran very well with 32 MB RAM on less beefy CPUs than smartphones have today. 256 MB was still a fair size for a desktop hard disc. Win NT 3.51 was perfectly capable of running background services and multi-tasking.

I know it's chalk and cheese but I suggest some perspective is needed.

They don't recognise us as HUMAN: Disability groups want CAPTCHAs killed

Form radio buttons - I am a spammer=default

If one is looking to reduce post spam - a radio/options array on the HTML form with 'I am a human being' not the default option foxes 99.9% of the script kiddies.

If the bot can get through that and/or there's anything more precious you're protecting - captcha's probably aren't going to buy you much more.

WikiLeaker Bradley Manning found not guilty of 'aiding the enemy'

accidental killing ... by a US helicopter gunship

There's accidents , there's reckless homicide and there's murder for 'fun'.

Clip (with crucial audio)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogFZlRiTHuw

Why aren't these guys facing a Military tribunal?

Five bods wrongly cuffed thanks to bungled comms snooping in UK

Fishing expeditions

Prevention is NOT always better than cure - but to appreciate that you have to apply more sophisticated reasoning than an amoeba.

The same dilemma exists for screening healthy people for diseases in medicine.

'Screening' starts with the default assumption that the patient has heart disease, breast cancer whatever - and you then set out to prove the negative.

There is always a false positive error rate in whatever test you apply.

Therefore one should accept

1. normal people are going to be misdiagnosed

2. if the damage (and/or number) of misdiagnoses exceeds the benefits (and/or numbers) of correct diagnoses you abandon the screening program

Harvest (say) a million internet transactions to catch the one in a million by a p@edo/terrorist/tax dodger. Say your test has the unbelievably impressive false positive rate of 0.01 percent (1:10000) and 100 percent true positive rate.

You will 'detect' one terrorist whilst falsely accusing 100 innocent people.

Not looking so good for the snoopers - even with highly optimistic assumptions of prevalence of bad guys and performance of the screening instrument.

PM writes ISPs' web filter ads for them - and it must say 'default on'

Re: Jobs bonanza!

>the job adverts for thousands upon thousands of people to check the content of billions upon billions of URIs to categorise them<

Nah... cheaper to issue a whitelist : .gov.uk .bbc.co.uk Job's done.

Apple MacBook Air 13-inch 2013: Windows struggles in Boot Camp

Re: Attention grabbing title ?!?

Running Mountain Lion and Windows 8 on Bootcamp on a Mac Book Pro (8 GB RAM / i5 2.5 GHz / 250 GB SSD). Windows 8 runs like a rocket on this admittedly silly money kit - imagine the Air in this review might be a bit underpowered.

Install (via USB NOT DVD) flawless and perfect hardware support. Do not be an berk like me and try to partition the Windows disc from inside Windows.. (I totally bricked both OS.. needed to reinstall from scratch) .. otherwise totally recommended.

I do Windows based development but need Mac for testing cross-platform stuff. I would buy a top of range Windows laptop anyway and would otherwise need a separate Mac. So stll quids in.. just.

Brit fantasy artist sues James Cameron over Avatar world

Why no stills from the movie?

I have never seen Avatar (yes - I'm the one) - whereas I am familiar with Roger Dean's work.

Everywhere these news stories are replete with pictures of Roger Dean's LP sleeve art. None of them have stills from the movie. It's almost like Cameron doesn't want his work copied.

SURPRISE! BT bags more gov broadband cash - this time in Bucks & Herts

Re: but...

Hmm... we're firmly in London's upmarket commuter belt here but with some Conservative marginals in Herts. And then of course Bucks is being skewered by HS2 - if you're having half a million squid knocked off the value of your property this might make you feel a tiny bit better.

BT were ever the wh*re to the incumbent government.

Tor users locked out of Facebook after wave of dodgy traffic

Re: Users of the Tor traffic anonymizing service are currently locked out of Facebook

Hmm.. we routinely block traffic from all Tor exit nodes on our (non-registration and wholly uncontroversial) web site.

I am sorry we have to do this.

I support and occassionally use the Tor service. However the bad traffic emanating from >a relative few< exit node IP addresses is staggering i.e. vulnerability scanning, post-spamming, scraping, high speed rule breaking bots etc. I don't think much of this traffic is actually routed via Tor - people just put a Tor exit node on their box to give them plausible deniability.

Lonely G-Cloud wanders in search of crowd o'er UK.gov vales and hills

G-Cloud - a solution in search of a problem

The problem being - how does the Government get a press release which make them look hip with the cutting edge of technology?

We must be grateful I suppose that the Coalation only p*ss*s hundreds of millions up the wall on this kind of BS rather than the billions New Labour used to,

Intel: Haswell is biggest 'generational leap' we have EVER DONE

Re: 2-in-1 WTF?

OK I think it goes like this..

The Spice Girls had a song 'Two become one'.

Ginger Spice aka Geri Halliwell - sounds like Haswell.

Microsoft touts business features of Windows 8.1

re: We want a new OS just not this one.

Actually UI wise - I want Windows 2000 / Office 2003.

My bleak tech reality: You can't trust anyone or anything, anymore

>how we got into the position whereby our leaders, or moreover, the people behind our leaders care so little about the privacy and rights upon which most of our nations were founded.<

Because the media and Lumpenprole demand the sacrifice of freedom for security from pedo-drug dealer-turrorist-tax avoiders.

Moss reanimates after 400 years in DEEP FREEZE

Glaciers flow...

.. just because the (otherwise) advancing edge is melting doesn't mean the glacier is retreating.

Internet2 superfast-boffinry network peers with Azure cloud

Through Internet2 we can support a small number of very large flows

Hmm.. does this look a little like Internet1 circa 1990?

i.e. it's high time they allocate 99.9% of the address space to US govt institutions, universities, megacorps, bagel stores, kindergartens etc. before the rest of the World gets a look in.