Posts by Is it me? 414 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jan 2010
The tweeter generation are generally young, and it's that generation that provides most of the impetus for revolution, as their stake in society isn't as great as older generations who have children, jobs and mortgages.
We oldies like to sit back and push the young forwards whilst taking little risk, be it the youngsters revolting or those putting them down.
"Sire the young are revolting"
"Yes, I know they always have been"
In the UK, all three would be in breach of the official secrets act, and others, so could all be put away. Though one assumes that on the girls part it was unthinking teenage rage, which will cost her fathers job and her pocket money.
A cautionary tale for all our teenage readers, if a family memeber works in any security service don't hack their PC, and definitely don't pass the details on to a friend.
The daughter is the most criminally culpable, because she deliberately and knowingly passed on secret information to a friend, potentially putting at risk the safety of others. If the result was an attack on systems from Russia, then you really are treading in espionage territory.
Not that this excuses the fathers behaviour either, which, although human, isn't right.
Not sure that it's true to say that this seems paradoxical. If you think about it, there are many things that decrease in efficiency as input goes up. If you stick too many electrons down a wire, the wire will heat up, decrease in efficiency and ultimately fail, same applies to water in a pipe or messages in an ethernet cable, although the latter does not fail quite so spectacularly.
If you can dissipate the waste or control the input, you can get maximum efficiency, better still if you can "cool" your wire then capacity and efficiency can then increase, until super conductivity.
Warning, don't try this teqnique on water pipes, as that would be akin to cooling your wire to absolute 0, in which case all bets are off, and something will break.
Note to hardened physacists - Yes I know, but I'm employing Dark technology.
I didn't use word perfect until 1996/7, and the version then was actually quite good for professional users, once you got used to it.
But the worst problem was document compatibility, exchanging documents between organisations with Microsoft, Lotus or IBM Displaywrite was a problem, but mostly on the Microsoft side. Word documents rearely loaded into the compeating products without problems, though the reverse was not the case. Word had no problem with other products.
I also noticed that, for some reason DDE calls to Word worked better from non-Microsoft products, and that DDE calls from within never quite worked as well.
Government bodies by this time were looking at choosing new packages to eliminate these issues, and tended to let the user community decide, which was usually for Word and Outlook, because they had that at home. You could always get a good package deal on a new PC with Office.
Fast forward a few years and the other vendors had more or less given-up, but Open Office was around, and again the problem was that the published MS document Standard was not the same as the output from Word. Although I think that was and still is down to cock-up not conspiracy.
All in all, Office would have won anyway, because it's a better marketed product, but we now have a situation where there is no real choice, once you take the Microsoft pill, you take it for life.
Lotus, and Novell failed to respond to Microsoft's strategy in an effective way, and thus lost. Undoubtedly some of their behaviour was anti-competative, and they should be held to account, but 17 years down the road, what real punishment can you inflict, that makes sense.
Ultimately, we put Microsoft where it is now we have to live with it.
Now what are the TPC-C costs when you take into account your transition costs between the as is and to be architectures.
How much of that 600K covers the on-going support costs, and are they cheaper than my incumbent supplier, baring in mind that Violin are a niche supplier and Cisco are not noted as being "Low Cost".
Perhaps I'll just wait a few months for mine to catch up and save all the aggrevation and cost.
Oh, audit functions will have been considered, but they will not have been implemented because they were too expensive and not business critical, or that they slowed the system down so much as to make it unusable.
I've worked on systems where the autdit functions were designed built and then not turned on. or included in the final build for performance and cost reasons. Needs too much storage; what test it, how much will that cost; and so on.
Professional phorographers copyright their images, if the NPG owned the image copyright then that copyright has been breached.
If however they had taken the images themselves, no problem, although you can't actually take photograpghs inside the NPG, or for that matter any art gallery, so far as I remember.
Not that I mind if the FBI or anyone else monitors my smart phone use, knock yourselves out guys.
It does however occur to me that if this is all done by an app on my phone, then it mus be using my data bandwidth, so am I actually paying for them to snoop?
I believe that would break a few laws, as in effect they are stealing from me. Do these apps actually use my bandwidth, or do the providers shoulder the costs?
Just wondered.
Lets compel Richard Granger to come back and sort out the mess, after all, did he not say that he would screw the IT companies into the ground and get a good deal for the tax payer.
PS. I actually think it would be great to get this system working, as I suffer for the fact that my GP and Hospital are in different, non-communicating LHAs. I get to carry the data between the two.
Sorry, but if a device has the capability to do something, then you can write software to use it. This applies to any software driven computing device.
I worked all this out two nanoseconds after I knew some phones had GPS locations in them. You can either take it as a benefit, that your phone can always be found, or not, if you don't want geolocation, buy a phone without it.
BTW Tom Tom Live can also report your location, as it has a 3G connection for live trafic updates.
You should also realise that because there are so many people out there, and so few security people to watch you, you are just noise until you do something to come to their notice, like plant a bomb, or rob a bank.
Alternately you can forbid this practice and have a tax hike to pay for all the extra officers required to keep you safe.
In reality, you actually don't want the poor driving cars, anywhere, and you don't want the rich using them much either. The problem is, that in the west a car is a status symbol, and also a symbol of personal freedom. Take away a car, and you take away freedom.
For employers, employee car ownership gives them a much larger pool of potential employees who can come to them, at their cost. Diminish car ownership, and you become reliant on public transport corridors and the local area. A lot of public and private organisations have been able to reduce their costs by centralising on cheap locations, at the expence of employees.
Take cars away from the poor, and the cheap labour pool becomes smaller, and localised, and you have to diversify your locations, increasing your costs, so it's in the interests of the rich for the poor to have cars.
It's also true that public transport is, on marginal cost, more expensive for an individual than driving.
With government and industry trying to centralise in order that they have large low carbon footprint sites, shifts the transport footprint to the employee, and forces low paid employees to travel, by car, as there is very little, if in the way of public transport from their home.
So unless Industry and Goverment start seriously thinking about the green footprint of their employees, rich or poor we all need cars. I'd prefer it that none of us need cars, but sadly increasing fuel costs will be the only way we all come of our car dependency, and not in a planned way.
Discussion takes the time and effort to come up with reasoned argument and alternative stratergies.
It's much simpler to rubbish someone elses idea as being stupid and unfair.
You may not have noticed but Politicians and PR types gave up on reasoned discussion years ago, and most executives wouldn't know a reasoned argument if it slapped them in the face.
You can copyright it. In fact professional photographers do, and rightly so. What you can't do is copyright the view, anyone is free to go and take their own photograph of Big Ben, or anything else, and do with it as they wish.
In software that should mean that you can copyright your code, so that people have to pay you if they want to use it, or if they don't they can go and write their own version from scratch. You should even be able to Patent really complex concept advances that take years to develop, and then the associated implementation. You wan't to patent that software, OK code it and prove it works, then we'll think about it.
What's really the problem is that software companies are patenting really simple concepts that any competant IT professional could think up, if needed. I've never quite worked out how they manage to get the patents, do patent offices in the US not understand coding?
In theory, you can't patent something anyone could think of, or something that's already been done.
Attacking an institution is pointless, the costs of clearing up are bourn by the shareholders which to a large degree is a large proportion of the 99% who have savings and retirement funds that rely on bank performance.
And credit unions, hmm, how ethical are they, quite a few have been run by real crimnals.
Oh, the smart thing to do, well, I would tell you, but then I'd be breaking the law, under the heading of incitement.
Personally I'd eMail the chairman of my bank and ask him to justify his actions and salary package in the light of recent events. Except that I do bank ethically, with a medium sized and successful bank that does not pay it's senior executives stupid amount of money, and is owned by its customers.
How do you detect that someone has misused an information system containing personal details.
If you date someone who has a "Security" role, you will have your background checked as soon as the relationship is declared. If your past is seriously dodgy then your partner will be asked to choose between you and their job.
For those that have access to the systems, they are going to check you first, to save problems further down the line, not least being hurt. It's natural.
So if you check out a girlfriend, or have a mate do it for you, you actually won't get caught, as how do you determine a single lookup is wrong, without having someone vet every single lookup. The people who do get caught are those who systematically abuse the system with frequent lookups, or those who are stupid enough to admit they checked out their partner, and then dump them.
To actually police these systems to the level some seem to feel appropriate would take a huge amount of effort, and you probably wouldn't have any Police officers left. You only want to catch those misusing for criminally or fincially corrpt reasons, oh and those who use it as eHarmoney for cops.
Regardless, of your belief in Global Warming, or not, however bad, do tou really want to take the risk the doomesday scenario isn't right. The further in advance you take action, the more likely yopu are to avoid disaster. Most of the things we need to do to combat climate change, are things we need to do anyway to meet the demands of a growing earth population, and a reducing supply of natural resources.
If an object is travelling away from it's origin at 2/3 light speed, and another is travelling in the opposite direction at 2/3 light speed. Would not an observer on one of those objects observe a greater than light speed event relative to their position?
As to creating energy from the magnetic field ocellation, well wouldn't that depend on how much energy was required to ocsillate the magnets compared to that produced?
The quantum tunnelling tool used by cats to move through doors has been known to science for many years.
It's called a human being, cats learnt that if they sit by a door a human will come along and open it, let them through and then close it, usually without remembering the action, thus proving that cats are capable of mind wiping humans.
More advanced cats have also developed their humans to provide a more sophisticated device that allows the cat to move through doors without human intervention, and further to do so only for themselves. This device is known to be manufactured, secretly, by Staywell, in some quantity.
Roumour has it that some smaller breads of dog have belatedly caught on.
Doesn't mean you want to hear it again.
I doubt may people like to be sworn at for doing thier jobs,regardless of the words used. We all sware given the right circumstances, but yuoof does tend to use the F and C words as ajectives to describe virtually anything, good or bad. Probably because it annoys grey haired old codgers like me, and shows them to be webbles wiv aht a cawz. The criminal element tends to do this as well, mainly because they have been caught and it makes them angry.
Use of sware words should be against the law, as a form of agression, but I doubt anyone would ever be, or ever has been, prosecuted for swaring due to accident.
Why shgould it be OK to sware at a police officer, or shop assistant, doctor, nurse, even a call centre operative, just for doing their job, no matter how irritating it is to you. It is illegal to sware at anybody, by the way, not just police officers.
Go on, ask your friends if they thinks it's Ok to sware at them.
50 Accredited Applications by March 2012.
As G Cloud does not really exist, I can't see how you will get 50 applications accredited by CESG on an infrastructure that doesn't exist, from bid to delivery in a year, let alone 4 months.
I'll buy 50 apps chosen for accreditation.
Just how much commentators know about what CESG actually does, and what it's for.
They are not spooks, they are IT security advisors and accreditors.
http://www.cesg.gov.uk/about_us/index.shtml
And like all good civil servants you can never get a stright answer out of them, and they like you to prove that something can't happen.
Will both make you test posative for opiates, there has already been a case of someone being dismissed after testing posative for opiates ingested from poppy seeds.
All poppy seeds contain opium at some level, usually not enough to refine.
Codine is a problem anyway, it does make people sleepy, often on quite low doses, Neurophen Plus can do it, and you shouldn't drive if it does.
Apparently, so my female friends tell me, some men like to post pictures of their friendly weapon, as a come on, on dating sites. Which says a lot about the sites picture vetting process.
Reputable sites have a whole load of advice on how to protect yourself from harassment, and make it clear that they do police it.
Safest thing to do is to make sure you use a disposable SIM and eMail address for first contact outside the sites themselves.
Have any of you actually listened to the BBC world service, or indeed any BBC news service.
BBC World Service, certainly the english language bits I've listened to whilst abroad use the same reports as Radio 4, and indeed some of the same news shows.
Whilst it might give a British perspective, it's hardly a mouth piece for HMG. Ifit were, it would never have become as widely respected as it is.
Oh and the BBC actually reported on the Wall Street protests some time ago, they just don't report it every day.
99% of the population live and work in perhaps 30% of the land area, the gaps in between are called the countryside, through which we travel for a variety of reasons. When we travel through it we expect to have all sorts of services available to us, collapse walking in the highlands, and we expect a helicopter to come and rescue us, crash the car on the road to Ullapool and I suspect we'd expect a mobile phone to call the police and ambulance.
Commercial organisations could spend their money providing a low return service, but I suspect the shareholders might object and suggest they invest money elsewhere. The government however has a duty to provide services to all its tax paying citizens, regardless of where they live, including shepards, who put Lamb on your table. That investment for the government might well save the state money in the long run, and enable development in remote rural areas, something that telcos aren't interested in.
Alternatively we could only supply services only to the 99% of the population who are cheap to service, but don't go on holiday to the highlands, or expect anyone to live there.
The advantage of haveing 42 different police forces using 42 different combinations of IT systems is that you have competition, and you can sustain a market for those systems. The cost of an individual system failure is low, and it can be replaced by a better one from the experiances gained by other forces, or they can take a risk and do different. Change and Innovation can be distributed, and best practice evolve at a reasonable pace.
Go to a national procurement and you'll hve your systems supplied by one of the big SIs using Microsoft, Oracle or SAP and a few niche players. System selection will be low risk, change and innovation will be centrally driven, and complex. Large COTS implementations will not be able to evolve quickly, or at all depending on the whim of the vendor. The cost of changing direction or failure will be huge.
We need national warehouse systems and coordination, but not for everything. Locally we need the flexibility to focus on areas of local import. By locally I mean not only individual forces, but also the specialised national units.
Wholly national police systems would be a victory for criminals because they will be able to evolve faster than any national system, the beuracracy needed to run national IT in government is unbelievable.
This is the usual politicians making statements that seem great to people who know nothing of the reality. Daily Mail readers.
At which point do loyal Apple, or Samsung customers think well sod this for a game of soldiers, I'm not buying any other products from them, they are blocking me buying a product I want, or even a plague upon both your houses.
PS. Please sign me up as a patent lawyer, seems to be the most lucrative field to be in now.
If it's purely party, then Conservative.com should be used, but if there is any element of government business discussed then it should be internal, and subject to GPMS marking, which, if not for public consumption would be RESTRICTED or PROTECT. Remember once you are in power, you are the government.
Disclosure of such information on an unclassified system isn't just a problem of FOIA, but also the official secrets act. If any civil servernt or government contractor was this cavilier they would be sacked.
As an IT provider to government, we always look at Open source as a method of reducing costs, but we tend to hit a number of brick walls, for serious applications.
GPMS - Government requires us to use only products certified to EAL standards, the higher the GPMS, the higher EAL needed. Getting an EAL certification costs a lot of money, and requires very tight source control, so in the main we would have to foot the bill of gettig CESG, or another certifying body to certify someone elses product, ultimately pro-bono, not going to happen. IF CESG were to go and certify Open Source products for use in government, then no problem, but they have to charge for their services at present, and Open Source vendors can't afford them.
Support - IT Suppliers have this inexorable march towards Microsoft as being cheap to support, because staff costs are low, and weverybody knows it. Wen we actually recommend a LAMP product, the support costs go up to discourage its use. (This is also true for any UNIX environment). The decision makers who made the MS march choice are pretty much still in post, only higher up the chain, so have no incentive to stand up and say they were wrong.
The customer - Particularly in the desktop environment, government departments don't want to move, 10 - 15 years ago they all moved to Office, because that's what the staff wanted, they used it at home and they still remeber that it cost a lot of money to shift from Wordstar, Display Write, Lotus and Word Perfect, which they justified as a cost saving, and a lot of those decision makers are still in place, so we have the same problem there as internally.
Enterprise Deals - Oracle, and Microsoft have Enterprise deals that make the use of their products a lot cheaper than deal by deal offerings, and will also reduce ongoing support costs, if a customer has one, then in some cases use of their products is actually free to the bid or project, you need a damn good reason not to use these deals, They cost the customer a lot up front, but long term cost reductions are bankable. OGC likes them as well.
Most of us highly paid IT consultants know the value of Open Source, as much as any other software, and make our recommendations based on what's best for the customer business, at a price they can afford and what will win us business, the two are not the same. Open source is alive and well, Apache and Linux are used a lot in appliances, and always feature in strength in depth implementations. A lot of areas where GPMS can be mitigated tend to use open source products as well, but they are usually in there as components to one of the big boys products.
For some cures can be achieved by non-medical means, it's a fact, there is probably a good scientific reason for it as well. Belief you can be cured, by whatever means can sometimes work when all else fails. It isn't, however a substitute for propper medical adivice and care, and no one should be allowed to advertise Homeopathy, Prayer or Placebos of any kind as cures for anything.
The vast majority of religious people put their faith in Medicine as well as their god, and don't think that just because someone has the title of bishop, we are more likely to believe him than our GP in medical matters, because we aren't. Where some religions proscribe certain treatments, and resort to prayer, it isn't because they think the treatment won't work, they know it likely will, and however wrong they may be, it is ultimately a choice for them, if of age.
Perhaps Google have a competition going to see how long it takes to subvert the US Patent system with ridiculous patents. And if they happen to make money.
I don't know the US patent system, but I'll be there are thousands of flowcharts out there that pre-date google's existence by at least a decade, doesn't prior art trump this?
You could shut down mobile phones altogether, emergency powers exist to do this, and it could be done for relatively small areas in London, as was done with 7/7.
However that would also prevent sophisticated Police officers using their BBM services.
Never listen to MPs when they make statements on technology, very few of them understand how it works, or who uses it.
I just have this terrible sense of foreboding that they are missing something important, you know how it is when a lot of bright people have runaway enthusiasm for a new technology and neglect the details.
Security
Capacity
Contention
And lots more. I'll stick to my little green bits of paper.
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