* Posts by Kevin Johnston

1537 publicly visible posts • joined 6 May 2007

Cryptome escapes Thales' attack dogs in bank security row

Kevin Johnston

or just possibly...

they don't want the old 'obsolete' information out there for people to realise that it used to be about security but it is now about cost reduction

US taxman joins UK politicoes on hunt for Amazon cash

Kevin Johnston

Financial merry-go-rounds

It's good to see that the investigations into the antics of Enron et al have produced a system where finances are much better regulated and all dealings are transparent and above reproach.

NOT

Look out, fanbois: One in two nicked mobes is an iPhone - cops

Kevin Johnston

I wonder

are these figures possibly being massaged by people who want an iPhone but can't afford a new one so when the chance arises it is 'of course it was an iPhone6 officer, would I fib to you?'

BT's 'six-month free broadband' offer is a big fat FIB - ads watchdog

Kevin Johnston

Re: Does the ASA have any other punishments?

Sadly not. I have always believed that the ASA should have (and exercise) the ability to block ALL adverts after such a failure for a period equal to the original failing campaign.

Then again they upheld complaints about Virgin saying that with their fibre 'you could say goodbye to buffering'. This was a correct use of English and made no absolute statements unlike the ignored re-defining of 'Unlimited' so loved by BT et al.

Not that much hope then.

NRA: Video games kill people, not guns. And here's our video game

Kevin Johnston

Curious morals

I will never understand the various stances taken by groups in the US where violence of almost any form is considered legitimate media and has elevated ambulance chasing to an art-form but where normal human interaction which might result in 'naughty areas' of flesh being visible is abhorent.

If you make violence appear to be commonplace in society then the social mores which should deter it are irrevocably broken.

Amazon rainforest starts making phone calls

Kevin Johnston

Re: @JaitcH

Darn it...beaten to the punch by mere seconds

Kevin Johnston

I am not a lumberjack but.....

I was under the impression that all the branches got removed before the trunk was cut into manageable sized chunks and loaded onto a lorry. If they hide these amongst the branches they will be left on the forest floor surely?

Inside the new climate row as Mystic Met Office goes cool on warming

Kevin Johnston

Re: The difference between being true and being truthful

Colour me a Pedant, but surely the new Century started on 1st Jan 2001.

Try as I might I can find no record of a Year 0AD suggesting that as with most people you are confusing the change in major digit(s) with a number of years passed since a marker.

And yes, I am ignoring the Gregorian/Julian calendar changeover which caused no end of confusion with the populace.

Kevin Johnston

Re: Not the Met Office's fault.

A lot of the evidence is from the work done by the Environment Agency when they changed their river management from County based to catchment based. They were able to track a lot of problems to their source and in a large number of cases, farmers (and other landowners) had 'improved the drainage' of their land to get water off it more quickly. This can come in a variety of methods such as substantial ditches around fields to direct the water or adding channels of buried gravel where land is not ploughed.

Surface water can drain to the edge of a field faster than it can soak into the soil in most instances and so by adding a good sized ditch you clear the water faster than just letting it soak away.

You seem to have missed the bit where I mentioned Sussex, this was rather relevant as whilst you are generally correct in your comments about upland farming my comment was about the impact that changes to land management can have when a large volume of water enters the river system more rapidly than the system can cope with.

I may not live up a mountain but I believe that doesn't preclude being in a rural environment.

Kevin Johnston

Re: Not the Met Office's fault.

I'm afraid I have to disappoint you here. Back in one of the early recent major floods (2002/3?) there was a guy interviewed on the TV News for Sussex who made an a statement of blinding obviousness but, due to his alliegances, it was completely ignored.

He said that the bulk of early stage flooding was due to changing from 'soakaway' to 'run-off' on uphill land. It made the land accessible much faster for the farmer who didn't have to suffer from tractors bogged down etc but it collapsed the timescale for rainfall to enter the river systems to a matter of hours.

I know that with the current situation with the water table at maximum this would make little difference but it would curtail a lot of these flash floods where the water hits the ground and then within minutes has been guided into a river. This is also a contributing factor to the droughts which got no better despite some rain.

Oh yes, the alliegances which caused the problem? He was from 'Friends of the Earth' so of course had to be spouting rubbish.

Cisco sued by East Carolina University

Kevin Johnston

Re: Try a quick Google

Ah yes, but how many of those places are likely to have a bucket of spare cash to replace some funding that has gone AWOL?

Apple rubbishes rumours of iPhone for the masses

Kevin Johnston

Re: Snigger..

But wasn't that Naomi Campbell's favoured technique?

Fatty French Kilogram needs a new-year diet, say Brit boffins

Kevin Johnston

Beats me

Just how do you convert a physical entity to a mathematical scribble?

This sounds like those definitions of the value of money where 'it means whatever we agree it means regardless of whether it makes sense or not'. As Mike Scott says above, the definition is the definition. Where the problems arise is in producing a physical representation of that definition. If you cannot achieve it then which is at fault, your definition or your real world?

Devs: 'Pirates are flogging OUR stuff on BlackBerry's App World'

Kevin Johnston

Emulator?

Silly me, I thought they had released an Android emulator....they certainly were announcing one...

Bite us, Apple: Samsung hauled in $8.3bn in Q4

Kevin Johnston

Re: Is it time for Apple...

Sadly you are mistaken....an iPad does not have a light come on whenever you open it

Do Not Call Register operator breaches Register

Kevin Johnston

Tele-whatsits

I used to have great fun baiting these callers (much to the annoyance of my wife who always just put the phone down) but now the baton has been passed to my son. He spent a few months earning pocket money doing tele-sales* and now critiques their script for them....

*Yes I know, but who hasn't done a short-term job they would rather not talk about

Major new science: Women more nude, more often online

Kevin Johnston

Goodness gracious

What a startling piece of research. I would never have guessed that female figures from a fantasy setting have less coverings than male figures from a fantasy setting unless they had told me.

Or, of course, unless I was someone who ventured into bookshops and comic shops where EVERY female figure in a fantasy setting wears the tanned hides of five mice while the hero is either armoured head to toe or has the whole 'loincloth and a big chopper' thing going on.

I really must consider going into research to get paid to state the bleedin' obvious.

Trust the cloud with my PRECIOUS? You gotta be joking

Kevin Johnston

Ah, the cloud

People I speak to always look pityingly at me when the conversation heads this direction. They know what I am going to say and almost universally manage to imply I am a little soft in the head without ever giving offence.

Option 1 - private data centre....you know what it is, where it is and what is going on....OK, you do have to look after it but if you love your data then is that such a hardship?

Option 2 - contracted data centre....you know what it is and where it is and you have a piece of paper saying they will love your data in just the way you do....it does sometimes take a little longer for things to happen but these guys are professionals right?

Option 3 - the cloud....you know who sells access to it, and quite possibly you can track down the owner of the data centre, always assuming you knew which one your data was in when you did the search. You have a piece of paper which says they would love to have your data and they will take care of each and every byte. Of course this may not 'quite' meet those pernickity regulators requirements as you can't quite be sure who is looking at it or playing with it but it's close enough surely?

Once that data is outside your firewall then control is down to the weakest link, and that won't be you.

Google can't use finger-fumble patent to poke Apple - Trade panel

Kevin Johnston

Self-evident wisdom

The title itself gives away the plot....The US International Trade Commission.....

Rather like the Baseball World Series which, last time I looked had one non-US team and none from outside the North American continent

Quadriplegic woman demos advanced mind-control of robot arm

Kevin Johnston

Re: Exellent

There is always Claire Lomas who this year completed the London marathon course this year wearing a robotic suit. She was paralysed as the result of a horse riding accident but managed to walk about a mile each day to get round the course thanks to the suit. It uses 'muscle twitch' sensors rather than an implant but it is a good indicator that things are coming together.

Chinese spacecraft JUUUUST avoids smashing into Toutatis

Kevin Johnston

Mmmmm Chinese fly-by's

problem is that half an hour later you want another one

Copyright trolls, biz scum, freetards - it's NOT black and white

Kevin Johnston

Re: Yes - but . . .

I had just started writing a reply to suggest the use of the Small Claims Court in the UK and couldn't remember the maximum you could claim. Went searching to see only to find that someone with some authority has already thought of this and we now have a Patents County Court which will hear claims for infringement of all forms of Intellectual Property with a value below £5,000.

This was reported in Out-Law and TechDirt so may even have made in into El Reg.

There is hope........not much, but some

iPad mini to outsell iPad, get Retina Display? iPad to slenderize?

Kevin Johnston

Shurely Shome mishtake

Are those extra displays not for the forthcoming iPhone5XXL with the extra large screen?

Dutch script kiddie pwns 20,000 Twitter profiles

Kevin Johnston

Re: ...verbose, complicated terms and conditions...

Too too true...the number of times I have tried to download a simple app only to have it ask me for permission to go into just about every part of the system for some undisclosed irrelevant reason. Strangely enough when I tell it to swivel the app won't run.....meh, plenty more fish in the sea*

* for younger viewers, it was once thought that there was an endless supply of fish. It now turns out that you need to leave some to let them make more fish.

Apple confirms Amazon ebooks bendover, EU watchdog drops bone

Kevin Johnston

Critics of the deal....

My criticism would be that Apple and it's co-defendants have been given a green light to take control of the e-book market in, at most, 5 years time.

Regardless of who which flavour of deal favours, the one thing which the Amazon version has which the Apple version does not is the possibility of competition. The 'most favoured nation' clause in the Apple deal means that not matter what, no-one can have a better deal than Apple. Why this was allowed to stand is very hard to understand, such a controlling position should not be permitted to be open-ended.

Linux kernel dumps 386 chip support

Kevin Johnston

Re: 8080, bloody Hell!

Pah.....at least with a proper 8" floppy you could just use a hole-punch (very carefully) to double your capacity

Review: Apple Mac Mini 2012

Kevin Johnston

Wow......it isn't £1=$1......still pretty damn close though. I can accept that there is a cost in shipping the things across the puddle but there is no way it is $200 per unit which the UK price suggests at today's exchange rate.

Report: Apple, Google, Microsoft join forces to buy Kodak patents

Kevin Johnston

Tiered

Good idea but rather than breaking out by patent type, go by date of application. For the first five years the person/company applying for the patent is in total control but it is then handed over to a central body who determine the licence fee for the next five years at which point it becomes public domain. By having a single body set the licence fee you prevent a further tranche of problems.

The difficulty with breaking out by patent type is that the arguments would simply change to which type of patent it is.

Adobe demands 7,000 years a day from humankind

Kevin Johnston

Once upon a time

I think it was Norton who had the only sensible T&Cs I recall....please treat this software like a book, you can install it anywhere but you should only use one copy at a time.

As the article implies, the more you tie these things up in legalese then the less likely people are to even bother reading it to say nothing of complying with any conditions. All these complex regulations/agreements achieve is to create loopholes for people who like loopholes to slide through and 'normal' people to get snagged in.

Xboxes stay on sale but may cost Microsoft money in Google case

Kevin Johnston

Curious argument

Not sure how para-phrased this report is but it implies that Microsoft's argument has little to do with validity and more to do with how well they bullied smaller companies as in 'other people have paid up so you should too'.

If this really is their case then I really really hope that the judge deals with it appropriately ie a swift kick up the backside and a bit bite out of their wallet

Sex offender wins case against Facebook vigilantism

Kevin Johnston

Re: Blight?

Whilst I agree that this is a very emotive issue, the whole point is that these people have gone through a trial and have been sentenced in accordance with the law of the land.

You may not like that law or the sentence it produced but unsurprisingly, breaking other laws to have a go at the people who were convicted does NOT fix the problem. The only way to change it is to get enough like minded people to lobby to have the law changed (and not Daliy Mail style lobbying either).

Laws can be changed if a sufficiently large portion of the population push for it but be careful, once you open the box and allow emotion to dictate policy you are leaving yourself open to control by the least stable elements.

Dell launches Sputnik Linux Ultrabook

Kevin Johnston

Re: They are giving the middle finger to microsoft at last!

Except that as the article mentions, this is priced higher than the same spec Windows box....

How do they justify charging more for removing a paid-for OS and installing a free one instead? Looks more like their previous Linux offerings where it was a twisty maze of passages all the same to find the one product with Linux and then you paid a premium for the privilige.

I got the feeling last time this was more to 'prove' a lack of demand than anything else, nothing seems to have changed.

Beware the malware-tipped SPEAR TRAP in your inbox

Kevin Johnston

simple yet effective

I have always tried to use disposable addresses where I have concerns about the person/company I am talking to and as I have my own mail server it makes this a lot simpler. It never ceases to amaze me how often you can track a unique address through a number of apparently disconnected companies and ending up in a spam source.

Google 'wants to dodge consent decree' in any FTC antitrust deal

Kevin Johnston

SEP?

Had a moment when reading the last sentence and thought it referred to the SEP field from HHGTTG. Scarey thing was it sort of fitted.

Google parks panzers on Germany's lawn over 'link tax' plan

Kevin Johnston
Flame

I guess it must just be me then

I have a couple of media sites which I go directly to so that I get the slant I like on my news. Tried a different one and their version of shrill ranting just left me flat.

The last thing I want is someone assuming they know better than me throwing their preferred stories/slant in my face every time I go onto the web, That is what El Reg is for.......

I understand a post like this should be concluded....Flame On.....

Second PAC-MAN orbiting SATURN: Local absence of dots explained

Kevin Johnston

Re: Can I be the first to say

Yes....yes you may

IBM insider: How I caught my wife while bug-hunting on OS/2

Kevin Johnston

Don't forget

It was Year 2000 compliant from the very start

Mint Linux gifts Unity haters with 'Nadia' ... plus her Mate

Kevin Johnston

Have to agree

Been using Linux on and off for quite a while now (I just wish certain large corporations would release Linux releases of ALL their software, not just bits of it) and I have gravitated towards Mint as a clean, consistent and easy to install/use distro.

Clement and his team seem to be VERY prompt in responding to comments both positive and negative which is very much in the tradition of the linux concept.

I just hope with people like Valve finally looking at major game titles on Linux we may actually get a real choice in desktop OS for both work and home.

Outrage over AT&T iPad data slurp hacker conviction

Kevin Johnston

Re: He did however pretend to be other than who he was

I think a more reasonable analogy would be 'tailgating' at businesses. There should be some form of security check to stop unauthorised people coming in but if you can tailgate someone without some other process spotting you (an observant doorman for instance) then you are in without being required to ID yourself.

The whole white/grey/black-hat thing is an ever shifting swamp but the one thing that is clear is that some form of independent security checking should be expected for Corporations as otherwise only areas they want tested will get any effort. As to where the line between legal/illegal is well you roll the dice and hope that it comes up your way as there will always be people willing to swear white is black if it distracts the viewer from their own problems.

First FIRE TORNADO documented in Australia

Kevin Johnston

Anyone else..

remember when places like Australia and California amongst others used to have regular burn-backs? I recall it was to reduce the chance they would fires of this magnitude simply because there wasn't the buildup of readily combustible brush etc over such large areas. Did they stop 'to preserve the environment' or because there was no proof it was working?

Thank BRIT eggheads for new iMac's sexy seamless knife-edge

Kevin Johnston

Re: sealed forever

Oooh, so close to a thumbs up but where was 'proper job' or more phonetically 'arhh prahper jahb'

New flexible lens works like the one in your eye - and could replace it

Kevin Johnston

Re: Asimov - Marooned off Vesta!

Close....that was an anoptikon (need to put the indefinite article in or you get the confusion that was important to the plot line)....used changeable 'fields' to focus light and the fountain pen sized version that they had kept as a souvenir would do telescope to microscope (ish).

Kevin Johnston

Scarey yet indicative of my predictive powers

We were having our usual lunchtime 'brainstorm' on Monday and contact lenses got mentioned. I boldly stated that a proper lens would need 'autofocus' capability but we were never really likely to see that....

48 hours!!!!!! you could at least have given it a week so that everyone forgot the conversation but no...

Microsoft v Google judge could shape the world in new patent punchup

Kevin Johnston

Re: Shurely Shome mishtake

I think you are using a poor comparison here. This is a product which Microsoft apparently want a license fee of $10 per item for use of their patent(s) and taking an 'unlocked' street value of around $500 this is 2%. Google are looking for 2.25% for a license for their patent(s) but MS only want to pay around 0.002%.

To use your example it would be like MS asking $8million per 747 because the on-board computers use FAT or similar.

Only offering one-thousandth of the requested license fee as a 'bargaining position' is only one step removed from just saying Get Stuffed

Kevin Johnston

Shurely Shome mishtake

If I have read the figures here correctly then MS offered just over a million but claim that 2.25% would cost them billions????

So that would make their offer in the region of 0.0025%

And they are surprised that Google said 'see you in court?'

Judge: Your boss has no right to your emails held by a third party

Kevin Johnston

Is it just me?

I thought EVERY company put into employment contracts that all email/documents/inventions etc etc etc belonged to the company and most include that email is not for personal use. Not sure how you get from there to not being allowed to access staff emails if they were sent to a company email account since the fact that they were sent to a company email account would surely put them on the 'company ownership' side of the equation.

I know there was a European Privacy thing a while back which said that a company could not read personal emails sent to your company email account and would have thought this strengthened the aspect that the mail account belongs to the company. From the sounds of it, these emails contain information relating to the financial status of the company and so surely HMRC would insist that the company could produce them.

I'm confused

BOFH: Can't you just ... NO, I JUST CAN'T

Kevin Johnston

Re: F***ing brilliant

For quicklime just watch old episodes of Time Team where they show you all sorts of useful stuff like baking limestone to make quicklime, stratification of soil layers to generate an appropriate age of your artifact (a skull for instance) and all sorts of other trivia

Firm-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's tax dodge profit shift? Totally legit

Kevin Johnston

Options

There is one thing which could be done which would limit profit shuffling. Any 'license fees' or other such administrative figure transferred to a parent company or similar after the first year are declared to be 100% profit in the first country it lands in and tax must be paid at that point.

This probably will not stop the game but it should get the Corporate pucker factor fluctuating.

Next step would be to encourage the tax havens to play yo-yo rates so 'they who must not be named' can't work out from one payday to the next where best to hide the money.

Microsoft's 32GB Surface RT has 16GB of free storage

Kevin Johnston
Happy

Re: Meaningless

If it helps, 90 degress are 100 gradians

Fondle fever: Growing tablet market no longer just an iPad market

Kevin Johnston

Well, well

Q4 results will be VERY interesting since last year saw a dip in the Apple share Q3 to Q4. If that repeats this year then it will be hard to deny that the mystique has faded.