Posts by JimC

Wikipedia sockpuppetry probe puts a sock in hundreds of accounts

Re: Encyclopaedia Britannica/marketeers

Advertisers of any description if you ask me. Putting ourselves in the hands of a profession that is basically about a sort of sanitised deceit was not a smart move.

Windows 8.1: Read this BEFORE updating - especially you, IT admins

Exactly...

Due to my amazing trust in MS I didn't want to go near the store thing, but that way we are forced into it..

Here comes Windows 8.1! Microsoft grits teeth, pushes upgrade to world

Its the UI changes that kill it for me...

Really need to upgrade my 80ish mother's PC, but no way will she be able to learn a new user interfacr

So right now it looks like the best option might be to keep the old box until it dies and get her an android tablet for web browsing.

Boffins find MEXICAN WAVE pattern in random climate wobbles

Re: Yay!

Personally, as someone very unconvinced bythe IPCC and their AGW posturing, I'd say the opposite. Over time catastrophic natural climate change is inevitable. Happened before, will happen again. But if you've spent all your resources on useless damn windfarms, what are you going to do about it?

Control panel backdoor found in D-Link home routers

It would be nice to think

That the default config disables management access via the WAN port anyway, but I suppose that's too much to hope for.

Wikipedia Foundation exec: Yes, we've been wasting your money

What, pay the creators?

They'll get in trouble with their sponsors if they move away from the principle that content should be provided by the naive exploited who should just be grateful to see their text visible in public...

Web Daddy Berners-Lee DRMs HTML5 into 2016

Quite

Don't they know that big advertising are the only people allowed to make any money, not the people who actually do stuff...

THE TRUTH about beaver arse milk in your cakes: There's nothing vanilla about vanilla

s for that musk stuff

Or the civet cat glands...

NASA: Humanity has finally reached into INTERSTELLAR SPACE

Boys are back...

According to one report I saw they got one of the old team, in his 70s, back in from retirement to help reconfigure an on board tape system to get the extra data. Here's to the team!

Former staffers of titsup Brit IT giant 2e2 haul administrator to court over pay

Re: and FTI Consulting

> Would you undertake thousands of pounds worth or work

Maybe if payment was not "guaranteed first snout in the trough" then the administration could be achieved for many fewer thousands of pounds 'worth' of work...

and FTI Consulting

Will end up with the Lions share of the money...

(other insolvency practitioners are available and behave in exactly the same way)

Don't tell the D-G! BBC-funded study says Beeb is 'too right wing'

Presumably

For balance one needs two studies. This one, clearly demonstrates that the far left considers there's editorial bias in the BBC in one direction, whereas the previous one demonstrated that the far right considered the BBC biased in the other direction. Therefore they've demonstrated that the BBC is providing thoroughly balanced coverage , and all is well in Nephelococcygia.

Put down the (cod)piece and step away: Artist cuffed after sculpture cockup

Re: A total over reaction

Well it could be an over-reaction - or or it could be that he's not telling us the whole story as we only have his side of it. I'm not saying that the photos are, shall we say, also an artistic work, but it occurs to me the possibility exists.

Ministry of Sound sues Spotify over user playlists

order of songs ... seems a little daft.

> order of songs they are claiming copyright on. Which seems a little daft.

Why? A book is just a long collection of pre-existing words in a different order. Although I suppose we can expect that any time now the EFF will deliver an amicus curiae brief suggesting that copyright on books is invalid because all the words have been used before, just in a different order and that constitues prior art...

Scots council cops £100K fine for spaffing vulnerable kids' data ONLINE

Social Workers not very good at IT Security

Pope not protestant

Bears fail to use public conveniences

Politicians fail to own up to relationships with certain young women

MIDI daddy Dave Smith: '30 years of version 1.0 shows we got it right'

eh, what...

Midi will drive a modular setup as well as anything else... Note ons are note ons. Or are you thinking you want some kind of protocol for interfacing multi manufacturers module components? Get real man! Bandwidth alone threw it right out of the window back then, never mind analogue vs digital...

The only thing that maybe might have been better was another byte on the program change, which would have helped the GM limitation

Guardian teams up with New York Times for future Snowden GCHQ coverage

Re: "Prior restraint"

> Bush administration/ Obama administration

Which consist, of course, of 90% plus of the same people in the same jobs...

Re: damage limitation - Syrian chemical weapons.

I also wonder how easy it is to distinguish a chemical weapons attack from a conventional shell or two landing in a storage warehouse or factory, or even a straightforward industrial accident?!

Imagine if Bhopal had happened on the middle of some sort of military incident..

'Silent' staff stood by as £100m BBC IT project tanked – DG

Re: Management don't want to know ..

Or you get labelled as not having a "can do" attitude. I have yet to understand what the difference between having a can do attitude and being a mindless yes man is...

I got the coat last month...

Workers at world's largest – and most remote – telescope go on strike

If you think through

You'd realise what a nightmare that would be. Everyone resigns: the whole enterprise collapses. Industrial action is a LESS extreme way of resolving disputes like this.

No signal in Seascale? Countryside Alliance wants to hook you up

Re: I await the pitch(fork)ed battle...

More a suburban phenomenon I believe. It amazes me they fail to see that of they don't want phone masts near little George's school all they have to do is throw out all their phones and take 'em off their brats too...

Mystery of Guardian mobos and graphics cards which 'held Snowden files'

Option 4

The spooks were actually there doing something completely different. While the Guardianistas were smugly laughing at the stupid GCHQ people, said folk were ... bzzz, crackle

.. No carrier....!

Brazilians tear strip off NSA in wake of Snowden, mull anti-US-spook law

I can see.this getting popular..

Want to do business in our country?

You have to do the data processing here for National security reasons.

Processing data in our country?

You must pay full national taxes on all your sales then. Try claiming you have no local presence now!

.

Legal bible Groklaw pulls plug in wake of Lavabit shutdown, NSA firestorm

Re: More to it than what was stated?

Rather my feeling. I also think they lost their way a whole back, what with all the Google worship too. That created a credibility problem for me.

US court rules IP address cloaks may break law

Hang on...

What we have here is effectively a deliberate attempt at deception, verging on fraudulent. It's less than astonishing that its got itself labelled as illegal. Sky does not appear to be falling here...

Curiosity looks up, spies Martian double-mooning

So, what do we call this...

Not a lunar eclipse, that involves shadows. I suppose it isn't really an eclipse at all: a conjunction maybe?

Study finds online commentards easily duped, manipulated

To me a more serious issue is

I like to pride myself on individual thought, and not caring what the mass thinks, and yet I find myself tempted to tailor oposts to what I think will get upvotes and avoid downvotes, even though I like to think that a reasonable number of downvotes is a good thing.

It feels to me like a variation of the peer pressure principle: one is motivated to post what one thinks the masses want to hear, and not necessarilly what one believes to be correct. I'm not at all sure that its a healthy trend for society if we all start to try and talk and think exactly the same things. Apart from anything else I thought I'd grown out of that a bit wheen teenage years departed!

Climate change even worse than you thought: It causes war and murder

Why using anthropogenic is bad...

The reason why lumping anthropogenic in there is bad is because sooner or later major climate change is a dead certainty: its been happening for all of known history and before. And when it does happen history tells us there are major population migrations, famines, wars, all the rest of it, disruption probably beyond our capability to manage.

But by bunging the anthropogenic label in there its saying, there, there, no need to worry, we'll build a few more windmills and everything will be OK. But it won't be. Because even if there is an anthropogenic component the climate will change anyway and we won't be ready for it, so we'll still get the migrations, famines and wars...

Apple's shock treatment: An authentic charger-spotting guide

Re: Electrocution = DEATH

cue obligatory pTerry reference to dead meat being hung...

Re: Intentionally or unintentionally buying fakes?

Oh, they've always been duped into buying a fake when they thought they were buying the real thing in good faith - according to their interviews in the rags... Oh, and they paid full whack for it as well...

London Mayor shows off GIANT BLUE COCK in busy square

they've had one down the road

in Dorking for years - and their's gets assaulted by guerilla knitters...

How do you drive a supercomputer round a Formula 1 track?

> carbon fibre isn’t heated up, bent into shape then left to cool.

> Similarly, the carbon fibre isn’t heated up, bent into shape then left to cool. It’s “cured”.

In that particular case that's not what is going on...

The raw material starts as a "cloth" of carbon fibres, sometimes woven, sometimes not. Very basically this is soaked in epoxy resin and formed into shape, then left for the epoxy to go hard or cure - a chemical reaction between two different chemicals.

What you were looking at is more sophisticated than that in that I'm quite sure they'll largely be using "pre-pregs", where the cloth is delivered to the factory in a refrigerator, already soaked (pre-impregnated) in exactly the right amount of resin, and using a resin mix that doesn't significantly cure until it is cooked at high temperatures. Incidentally its also compressed onto the moulds while the glue is going off, conventionally by air pressure (using vacuum pumps), but at this level I wouldn't be surprised if they go even more trick than that.

At the basic level this carbon fibre stuff can be very garden shed - as the main who came across me repairing a bit of my racing boat in the street outside my house (working out of the back of my van) last week would testify - but there are levels and levels as you go onwards and upwards...

Sysadmins: Everything they told you about backup WAS A LIE

Re: Point 3 is wrong

It must be twenty years since I restored an OS. When it comes to metal then you need an OS to be able to restore anything, so why restore the OS on top of a working OS. Disk images for virtuals are another kettle of fish I guess.

UK sitting on top of at least 50 years of shale gas – report

Re: Down the tubes we go (again)

I thought we mostly spent it on Social Security rather than the military...

But your basic premise, that a short term bonus will be squandered rather than invested seems right on the mark to me...

ICANN puts Whois on end-of-life list

A major monopoly??

Hard to be a major monopoly when every amateur in the world has a digital camera...

Perhaps they're just the only agency left standing, in which case maybe their approach to freeloading thieving bastards is justified...

German Kim Jong-un lookalike spaffed official Nork pics over Instagram

Re: "I was a big big fan of the DPRK ..."

Although one thing the net has demonstrated to my satisfaction is that there is no viewpoint or opinion, no matter how bizarre or irrational, that there does not exist a person or even persons ou there who appear too sincerely hold it. The quote about the universe being a stranger place than you *can* imagine certainly applies to people...

Anons: We milked Norks dry of missile secrets, now we'll spaff it online

Re: Double standards in 3, 2, 1?

My dear chap, should the skiddies have actually managed to obtain genuine NK documents, what on earth makes you think that the US Government agencies would not have obtained them long before?

Indeed one might suspect that the kiddies might have found it easier to source NK documents from US sources rather than NK ones...

Ecuador: All right, Julian, you CAN stay on our sofa - it's your human right

> but doubtful that he would that irresponsible.

irony tags.. there must be some irony tags on this. Mustn't there?

Linus Torvalds threatens verbal assault on developers' pets

Re: Stop the presses!

Now look, its a law of the Medes and Persians that anything involving the alleged decease of hamsters is funny and newsworthy. Its otherwise known as the Starr principle.

Windows NT grandaddy OpenVMS taken out back, single gunshot heard

Yeah its funny how many facilities we had on the Vax at college

would be very welcome right here and right now... Still, I suppose over the years I've earned a fair few quids for coping with DOS/NTs inadequacies and Netware's eccentricities so I shouldn't complain...

Wikimedia edges closer to banishing Wikitext

Re: lowering the bar

[studies various wikipedia pages]

The evidence would suggest that's not the case. It appears to be more than accessible for editing by stupid people.

Amazon faces its third strike in Germany

Re: studentofman

So, from your post you have read much... would it be unfair to assume that you have no actual real world experience of working in large organisations? When I was young and naive and had only worked for small companies I thought much like you.

When I came to work for a large company where the management are almost entirely divorced from the workers on the floor I came to hold an entirely different opinion. The union system, working well, is vital to give the employees some weight. When I worked for a small company I could say "Treat me better or I'm off". In many large companies if one person says "treat me better or I'm off" the people who actually make the decisions won't even hear the complaint.

Sure the power of the union can become too great, just like the power of the management or the power of the shareholders or even the power of the customers. For an enterprise to work in the long term the desires and needs of employees, executives shareholders/owners and customers must all be balanced. At the moment in the UK I see the executives having too much power, and more strength is required for both shareholders/owners and employees.

How Microsoft shattered Gnome's unity with Windows 95

Have we forgotten IBM's CUA?

I remember that CUA documentation being a vital tool for a while. I still don't really get on with the damn silly ribbon stuff. 'Spose I'm going to have to stop using the old stuff that works, but I don't relish having to teach my 80ish mother a new interface.

Think your IT department's parochial? Try selling to SMEs

Re: What's good for the SME might not be good for the sales rep

Sounds exactly right to me... Been there and seen it!

Fear the Embarrassing Bodies webcam

Re: not a freakshow

mate, a freakshow is *exactly* what it is. And to my mind its also a damn disgrace on our society, firstly that people are willing to broadcast the freakshow, and secondly that people watch it.

Windows 8.1 Start button SPOTTED in the wild

Re: for your granny

But my mother knows how to use the pop-up menus. She really doesn't want to have to learn a completely different means of operating the damn system, she just wants it to work the same way it always did, but carrying on with the old kt is starting to get completely unsustainable.

UN to call for 'pre-emptive' ban on soulless robot bomber assassins

Re: hard decisions/legitimate targets

Nothing new about that either. I understood from my father that even in 1951 it was impossible to distinguish an oxcart containing ammunition from an oxcart containing the rice crop when you were a few hundred feet up in a Fairey Firefly with people shooting at you. An automated system might even be better at getting the identification right than the mk1 eyeball.

Hammond pleads guilty to Stratfor hack: 'It's a relief'

Re: a potential nightmare of continuous subsequent trials

Yeah, the police are *******s like that. If you've committed lots of crimes they'll keep after you until they get you convicted.

Boffins' brilliant plan: CONCRETE COMPUTERS

> You may disagree, but then you aren't writing this.

That's telling 'em:-))

Reports: New Xbox could DOOM second-hand games market

Re: @M Gale

Oh come on. There are all sorts of situations where you shell out a sum of money but don't get to legally own whatever it is. If you don't want to buy stuff like that don't, but don't pretend its somehow unique to DRM software.