Posts by Dr Paul Taylor 421 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2009
In the 1970s APIs were called modular programming. It was the essence of Unix.
Problem is, the teenagers who implement a lot of the gizmos on the Web care more about making their sites look pretty than providing information to others.
Besides this, there is a widespread attitude that "no robots must be allowed in", ie under no circumstances should other sites be allowed to build on "my" information.
For example, when Jamie Jones and I were implementing istopbrexit.info, I thought "we've got the user's postcode and that of this meeting, let's tell them how to get there". A site called traveline.info seemed to be providing passable public transport information, but I couldn't see how to feed postcodes to its interface.
When I enquired, they told me I had to pay £500 for a license. This is a pretty stupid attitude, because if they provided a simple API, more people would find out about their site (and see their ads).
As for Google maps, it's only for Californians who never get out of their cars. It lacks any detail for pedestrians. streetmap.co.uk is far superior in Britain and increasingly openstreetmap.org across the globe.
(We took istopbrexit.info down when the disaster happened, but also because the major anti-brexit organisations were determined to compete with me instead of cooperating, and for personal reasons. Unfortunately, the domain name was taken over by a porn site.)
So where is the "finishing line" to which you want the Ukrainians to fight? Moscow? Vladivostok?
Napoleon and Hitler tried to invade Russia. Their best generals fought back - Generals Janvier and Février - who didn't even have nukes.
Besides, Putin is a street thug, who relates that he learned his most important lesson from a rat that he cornered when he was a kid. Inexplicably, I got downvoted for pointing that out before.
Слава України! nevertheless.
In previous wars it was necessary to dig tunnels into the enemy territory or fly over dropping (bombs and) leaflets. Both of these were highly dangerous operations.
For the first time in history we have a dense pre-installed network of cables (etc), through which the message could be delivered to the Russian people, about what is being done in their name to their Slav brothers and sisters and why the outside world its wrecking their economy.
All we need to do is to hijack some of the HTTP/port 80 outgoing connections from Russia. Maybe some clever Ukrainian geeks are already doing this.
Why do you want to do something so stupid as to destroy this system?
I have found myself in this discussion many times before and it often descends into a shouting match.
To be objective about what the gender issues are in computer science we need to have some idea of what happens in the occupations that women choose instead of IT.
What about mid-wives? How many of them are men? Do they have soul-searching debates or shouting matches about how to encourage more boys to consider midwifery as a profession?
According the one conversation that I have ever had with a mid-wife, the ratio is 100:1.
(As a gay man, I have not had occasion to use their services.)
We have random companies imposing random sanctions (IT and otherwise) on random other companies with supposed links to Russia.
Nobody seems to be giving any thought to whether these sanctions have any effect, or whether there might be some other course of action that would be more effective.
This really just amounts to blowing raspberries (not even Pis) at Putin.
Supposedly we are fighting an economic war, because it's far too risky to fight a shooting war.
But we have no economic generals capable of planning that war.
In past wars, getting your message to the population of the enemy country required flying over them and dropping leaflets.
The Internet and Web make this far easier. Just hijack (some) port 80 connections out of Russia and make people watch videos of the effects of bombing Ukraine and what captured conscripts think, before redirecting to the intended site.
But also bear in mind that all this will force dictators to be more IT-self-sufficient, so the effectiveness of such measures will be reduced next time round.
Taiwan, for example. China is taking notes.
I'd be more convinced if the "soundbites" were on topics about which the experimental subjects didn't already have opinions.
Cf BBC Radio 4's Unbelievable Truth panel game.
Exactly, and it's frankly irresponsible of El Reg and the authors of this work to present this in this fashion, because when The Great Unwashed get hold of the story they will not apply the reasoning that Commentards can.
Its difficult enough already to get IT-illiterate bureaucrats to accept information from plain HTML webpages used in the way that Tim Berners-Lee intended; they demand it "as an email attachment", which is of course less secure.
I don't know anything about Stuxnet, but presumably it was programmed to recognise the characteristics ("hostname") of the Iranian equipment. The malware was in the code that did that recognition (and of course the security holes in the equipment), not in the "hostname" itself.
OK Bobby Tables shouldn't have had punctuation in his name, but we have no idea what stray "punctuation" there might be in DNA.
It does make me wonder, though, whether we might have a sample of Putin's DNA and could manufacture a drug (using the technology that gave us Covid vaccines) that would target him specifically.
I "went" to an online seminar on 24 Jan and Zoom worked fine. When I "went" to another one on 31 Jan there was no audio. Now it denies that I have either a mic or a speaker.
Apparently the Ubuntu "Snap" for zoom-client was automatically updated and there is no previous version available to which ti revert.
Does nobody test these things?
In the past this happened with maths rather than programming. Some very smart kid (usually boys but there's at least one famous girl) would do their A-levels at age 10, compete in the International Mathematical Olympiad and want to go to university at age 12.
They they would burn out.
One such student whom I knew was told to wait a year before starting university at 15, and then skipped the first year. He started a PhD but never finished it. He became a programmer and died of liver cancer at the age of 41.
There are other things to learn when you're 12 besides maths or programming.
That would only be possible if there were a Euromicrosoft and a Eurogoogle and a Eurofacebook and all the rest. But Europe has failed to create those things and so surrendered long ago. (As for the little island floating adrift in the Atlantic, it only knows how to lick American boots anyway.)
Cambridge University bought an IBM 360 in the 1970s. Since JCL is not fit for humans, they wrote an operating system called Phoenix, a scheduler called Eagle, a scripting language called Wren and lots of other bird-themed programs. Meanwhile, the top American universities were developing Unix and the FOSS world. I saw Knuth's TeXbook in a bookshop and asked, why can't we have clever software? Of course Phoenix was abandoned in the end. Such a tragedy that all of this intellectual effort went down the drain!
(Separate story) A friend of mine who had been to school in Moscow had an IBM360 manual in Russian, because the Soviet's had "emulated" it.
My website and email are hosted by a small company (with which I have excellent first-name relations) who are in turn hosted by Linode. During 2020 my emails to Gmail and other Google-managed addresses was going astray, with no error reports or accessible blacklist. My hosting company gave me advice but couldn't fix it, so I re-routed my outgoing email. I don't know whether Google has yet un-blacklisted this IP address.
Just as the width of our railway lines (and probably everyone else's) is derived from that of Roman carts (go to Pompeii to see the original ruts), so our tax year starts with the old Roman year on 26 March (Julian calendar). To make sure no-one lost out on rent, interest, etc, this became 6 April when adopted the Gregorean calendar, about 170 years after the southern half of Europe.
I used to have a phone number beginning 555 (Stratford, London E15). Americans wouldn't believe it was genuine. (Because they reserve 555 for helplines and TV shows.)
For a while I was getting "adult" calls, though most of them cut off when they heard a male voice. Eventually I persuaded one to explain where he'd got my number. It was in the Daily Star "newspaper", listed as "Mature Edin". So the callers were so dim that they were calling the wrong city. I did manage to get is stopped, but I forget how.
Until not so long ago, Turing was barely known to the population at large. That he has achieved seriously belated posthumous fame is a tribute to the massive amount of work done by Andrew Hodges and the late Barry Cooper. I don't know who led the campaign to get him on the fifty pound note. That the miserable brexiters abuse his legacy does not detract from it.
Ten years ago my father was in hospital with his terminal illness and my mother was in a care home with advanced Alzheimers.
One day I was on a bus that could have taken me to the hospital when I got a call with number withheld. I didn't take it because someone else was harrassing me and also withholding their number.
I subsequently worked out that it was the hospital telling me that my father was in danger for his life, although in fact he survived that particular incident.
So I very nearly missed seeing my father for the last time because of this stupid and unprofessional NHS policy.
Phyllis Pearsall compiled the original London A-Z maps (in part) by trudging the streets and copying down their names. Was this breach of the copyright of whoever made the street name signs? Probably not. If someone else reproduces her index, is that breach of copyright? Yes. The difference is the "added value" of her legwork.
Cecil Sharp collected folk songs from the west of England and published them. Was that breach of copyright? I think there was a case against him. Did he do a cultural service? Yes, because otherwise those songs would have been lost.
So, if this law firm were about to be flooded or burned down, would they deal with the problem by getting a court order against the water or fire?
On the other hand it is interesting legally if it sets a precedent that "papers" can be served by email.
In other news, apparently handing them to PC Plod guarding the respondent's home is not good enough.
I've seen this cycle too. I've even had cards posted through the door saying they came but I wasn't in -- even when I was in!
I don't tell them I don't have a TV, because it wouldn't save me any hassle. On the other hand, it would give them a name for a computer to generate a summons to a magistrate's court that couldn't attend because of covid.
Best just to ignore the threats.
No, Russell's Teapot orbits between Earth and Mars. This is Vulcan. which is actually more important in the history of science.
All these comments are based on recognising faces as humans do. But we are talking about an algorithm, which inputs some bits and outputs some bits. If the input bits really do encode a face, the algorithm might recognise it. But it's still just looking at patterns of bits, in a fundamentally undocumented way. Maybe it could be triggered by a "master" pattern that would not be recognised by a human as a face.
I agree with most of the sentiments of this project, but surely going back to sanitised HTML would be better.
I am finding it increasingly difficult to read small text, so a basic thing I do with web pages is to enlarge them. In basic HTML, the text gets re-wrapped. "Clever" web pages often have fixed line lengths, making this impossible. (I do also resize PDFs.)
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