Posts by alain williams

British boffins perfect process to make any item '100% waterproof'

Great news for small boys

wanting to avoid bathtime

Fart-lighting youth in petrol can mishap

Attempt to be Paris' best friend ?

I read that Paris Hilton is coming to the UK to find a new best friend ""I need a best friend who is hot,"" -- maybe the lad though that this would improve his chances by making him a really hot ass!

Rude Tintin pulls out

@"Racism-Free"?

I recently found a Rupert the Bear annual that I had when I was a kid (40+ years ago). If it were to be published today it would be deemed highly racist. Like the early Tintins it reflected attitudes of the times.

Malicious gossip could cost you your job

It is all about avoiding responsibility

The primary concern of the civil servants who run this sort of thing is that no blame attaches to themselves. Thus it is simplest for them to take a starkly black & white approach to things and avoid all value judgement. This results in exremes and innocent people being hurt -- just to ensure that blame doesn't come their way.

A related theme is the health and safety brigade; a friend of mine who is a primary school teacher needed to fill in a long risk assessment form just to take her pupils round a local church -- a complete waste of time, but the petty officials who insisted on it could then say that due dilligence had been done - ie ''if anything happens then it is not our fault''.

Home Office to order fingerprinting of air passengers

What was that threat again ?

How many times has this ''loophole'' been exploited ? The response to a threat need to be commensurate with the actual risk. This is just an excuse to fingerprint lots of people.

Anyone want to run a book on how long before this data ends up being shared with the cops -- all in the name of stopping terrorists and paedophiles of course!

Relay server attack tactic dupes auto-reporting

@Antidisestablishmentarianist

""After all, all those forums posts claiming 'It wouldn't have happened if you'd used Linux (snigger)' can't be wrong can they?""

Of course it is possible, guess a username/password and you can get in. Just as if you leave your front door key under the mat it does not matter how good a lock you have.

You misunderstand why Linux is more secure than M$ systems, but that does not mean that it is absolutely secure.

Has ISO already rejected anti-OOXML appeals?

@Bruce

''Several companies have implimented previous versions of OpenXML.'', how did they do that, how can we verify that if we don't have a standard that we can check it against ? OOXML is not complete, so it can't be done.

''And ODF 1.0 is hopelessly flawed. Maybe someday they will fix.'' I have to ask Bruce who's shilling you are taking -- you seem to regurgitating the cr*p that comes out of the M$ publicity engine.

@Dale -- Don't implement

The point is that having it as an ISO standard will allow MS to confuse the pointy haired types that don't understand the issues. The result will be that in a few years time today's documents will not be readable -- MS Word 2028 will not read the formats being generated by MS Word today, or OOXML. This will be a disaster for those organisations that need to keep documents for many years (eg: mortgages, land deeds, ...).

This has been recognised by some countries and organisations - they have adopted ODF because we will still be able to read it in hundreds of years time. The pointy haired types will believe that the same will be true of OOXML, they will believe that .docx is a sort of OOXML and also OK. They will be wrong. Our children will suffer for the blindness of the ISO JTC1.

Today should be a day of international mourning.

NXP sues to silence Oyster researchers

The cat is out of the bag anyway

Security through obscurity does not work. If this report is NOT published NXP will try to pretend that the problem has gone away. If it IS publishe then they will have to fix the problems.

Court slaps UK BitTorrenters with landmark damages award

Loss of £8.99 ???

Well no.

Take off VAT: £7.65

Take off 100% mark up by the retailer: £3.82

Take off production costs of CD, box, ..., say £2.00: £1.82

There are probably other unit costs that I have not thought about.

Multiply that by how many times uploaded (100): £182.00. Hmmmm

Microsoft should buy Rackable instead of building custom computers

What is important in a data center ?

''Microsoft is talking about getting 1,200 watts per square foot out of its new data centers.''

Errrm: no, that is the wrong metric. They should be talking transactions/web_pages per second - or something like that. The reason that MS thinks in terms of watts/square foot is because it is wedded to one architecture (software & hardware) that makes this a reasonable measure of performance.

I am wondering when Google will start using different architectures - being Linux based they could build machines based on the IBM P6 or Sun sparc chip (or whatever) without too much difficulty. MS is stuck with Intel compatible chips.

Asus Eee Box to debut in UK... minus Linux

Spec of Linux version

I would prefer the Linux version to be cheaper rather than have more hardware ... it has got 1GB RAM & a fast enough processor ... what do I want lots of disk for ? I keep all my files on a server, I just want a local disk for the OS -- so get rid of the hard drive and put the solid state drives from the laptop version in to it.

All this makes it eat less electricity -- one advantage is no fan which means quieter and more reliable.

UK Unix group vows to appeal OOXML ruling

Re PayPal only ?

Also accept cheques by post, or contact us for other ways: http://www.ukuug.org/ooxml/fund/

EC's 'Steelie' Neelie snubs Microsoft Office

It pays M$ to delay

the longer that it can prevent widespread adoption of ODF (a file format where users can really choose from competing word processors) the longer it can continue to milk businesses and individuals world wide. MS is desperate to prolong its desktop monopoly - MS does not want to compete on a level playing field.

Remember: this affects everyone, it is not some abstract action - the EU is acting to protect the best interests of EU citizens.

Microprocessors are the new cigarettes

Plonkers

The trouble is that investors listen to these plonkers; they might be beguiled to approve a motion at the next AGM that research be cut. Yes: that would improve the cash available for dividends and so jack up the share price, but then the companies would nose dive in a few years time.

Actually: I am wrong about them being plonkers, they know exactly what they are doing. They will make lots of short term loot, then dump the stock and go and find someone else to suck the blood out of. Parasites, vampires or pirates would be better descriptions.

New banking code cracks down on out-of-date software

I don't bother with a virus scanner

on my PC since I run Linux ... so will they blame me if something goes wrong ?

Geert Wilders faces legal threats over footage copyright

Inflamitory

There are people on both sides of this who are stirring the pot. I do not think that most muslims are seeking Jihad, however some are. I don't know enough about it. It is an error to put all muslims into one group, there are many different sects with different views, some benign, some not so.

Cuba, India vote no on OOXML

@We have the standard

MS is terrified of having to compete on the basis of ''best product''. A customer lock-in is the central part of its strategy.

ICO queries Heathrow T5's huge fingerprint scam scan

Festure creap

How long before MI5 demands a copy of the fingerprint data - just as they are now demanding a copy of travel logging data collected by London's Oyster cards.

George Orwell was wrong - he put the date of his novel 25 years too early.

Children should get keys to their data when they come of age

What about adults

In theory adults have been asked if they consent - all too often they have not, or the consent tick box hidden away.

Microsoft offers free Office storage to web plebs

And give your docs to the world

Given the M$ tradition of great security, we can expect to find people downloading other people's private stuff.

How long do you think before a twit in a govt dept decides to put a few thousand people's social security & ... details up there ?

Wikileaks judge gets Pirate Bay treatment

Thanks for alterting me to the existance of wikileaks

I have now added it to my list of favourite web sites and added wikileaks.org to my /etc/hosts, with the comment ''Up yours Judge White'' -- well that bit makes me feel better :-)

Murdoch could save Yahoo! from Microsoft!

Lesser of 2 evils

Although I dislike Murdoch, I dislike him less than I do Microsoft. Also Murdoch does not have quite the 'net presence that MS does and so competition is kept a bit more alive.

EU investigates Microsoft's OOXML campaign

Yet more delay

This will provide M$ with more excuses to sit on its hands and not release the specifications that it has been ordered to ... mean while stopping effective competition by use of obscure file formats.

BTW: can we have a chair throwing button ?

Faster broadband through bonding

Let's do it properly!

What I find amazing is that new housing estates are being built with the same crappy comms infrastructure that we have elsewhere. How difficult/expensive would it be to run fibre into every new house an connect to a decent switch on the street corner ? It is hardly as if new houses were being sold for the lowest possible prices.

When, in this country, will a bit of forwards thinking become visible ?

US spooks won't get UK census access

Safe Harbour ?

Lockheed might sign all sorts of contracts with the UK govt, but once the data is in the USA and a spook comes visiting - how long do you think before the CIA has a copy of the entire database ?

Look at what the banking people at SWIFT did ?

In truth, I suspect that the CIA will get a copy of the census no matter who does it. The only way out is to not complete a census form - be on holiday that week.

ISPs nominate UK record industry as top internet villain

Extending copyright term ?

It is already far too long. It should be required that the companies lodge a DRM free version with the UK copyright libraries for free use/distribution once the copyright term has expired.

Polish teen derails tram after hacking train network

Give him a job!

OK: he might be a bit young - but he sounds like someone with a brain that works.

Asus to show second-gen Eee PC next week

So when can I buy one ?

It is being shown next week, how does that translate to on the shelves in the UK ?

Linux desktops grow and grow and grow

Where to go to complete the survey

If you want to participate in the survey, go here:

https://www.linux-foundation.org/en/2007ClientSurvey

Small print is ignored and needs a rethink, govt study says

Need standard contracts

Many of the things for which these ''agreements'' are made a condition of use can fall into broad categories. There is no reason why UK Citizens' Advice (or similar) could not draw up some clearly worded and fair (on supplier and purchaser) contracts. The variable bits could be in a schedule at the end eg: length of contract, geographic area of support, ... A vendor insisting on something different would need to justify why it neeed something different.

While we are at it: let's have standard contracts with the banks. Every month or two I get a letter of variation of terms. Why is this needed, it always seems the bank putting in some extra clauses to protect itself.

There are several things that I have not bought or signed up to because I did not like the agreement: Skype and E-Bay being 2 of them.

123-Reg takes weekend off

Resilience - what is that ?

The question that MUST be aske of 123-reg is:

*why* did an outage at one site cause their DNS service to fail?

A central philosophy of DNS is that you have multiple NS machines and anyone with an ounce of itelligence puts these machine at different locations. It appears that a single failure caused this outage; if this is true then one can only classify 123-reg as a mickey mouse organisation that doesn't deliver what they should.

Microsoft stuffs Sage with free accounts software

Just free to gain market share ...

once M$ have killed Sage their product will no longer be free. Remember that the early versions of MS Office were free (or almost so), now it costs a lot.

Anyway: who would trust M$ enough to not send bits of accounting information home ?

Court date for challenge to 'new' patent rules

@Keith T

"That makes no sense, except to software freeloaders -- people who expect programmers to work for free."

You are confusing copyright and patents.

Copyright let you stop people taking your program and distributing/using it in a way that you don't want - often that means that you want to be paid for every copy. Nothing in copyright stops someone else writing a program that does the same thing as your program and selling/giving it to others... as long as they did not use any of your code in their program. You yourself probably benefited from other programmers' ideas when you wrote your program - that is part of the reason why software is advancing at the rate that it is: programmers stand on the shoulders of those who went before.

A patent is about an idea. If you were able to patent something you could stop someone from producing something that did the same as your idea/program.

Patents might be needed in the software world if there was a paucity of new software ideas, people not being willing to invest the time because they were not getting any reward. This is patently (ahem) not the case, programmers have shown themselves to be very inventive at producing new ideas.

In fact s/ware patents would be a bad idea since it would slow the rate of innovation.

Topless Liverpudlians confined to tropical fish stores

George Orwell

Did he get arrested when visiting France after writing Animal Farm ?

Man wrongly detained for 50 days has ISP to thank

Re: Actually, we need more of this.

Good point Steven, and if those wrong addresses just happened to be those of an MP, high court judge or member of MI5/...

Schoolkid chipping trial 'a success'

Just the thing for finding kids ...

Paedophiles will love this. Nice little tracker for finding kids!

Red Arrows Olympic 'ban' causes online furore

Olympics themselves should be banned

It has little to do about sport, more about political vanities and the inner circles filling their pockets, see what The Sunday Times wrote yesterday:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/london_2012/article2654494.ece

The cost has already trebled to 9 billion - how much more will this pointless exercise rob from us ?

UK police can now force you to reveal decryption keys

Secrecy makes it ripe for fraudulent use

Because no one knows that it has happened to anyone else, there can be no oversight. All that we now need is a bent copper to go round collecting private commercial date (or other encrypted stuff of value) and start selling it. The copper never gets caught because the victims are not allowed to talk to other and so deduce that they are being scammed/robbed.

Also: if you are a terrorist (one of the supposed bogey men that justifies this) then you will go down for 20 years, in innocent man will go down for 5 for refusing to disclose keys. What would you do if you were a terrorist and were asked for keys - want a 5 or 20 year spell of eating porridge ?

The is completely stupid - it puts us good buys at risk and does little to deter the bad buys.

Microsoft: no plan to appeal EC verdict for now

Re: I still don't get it.

"Where is the case ?"

The real point is about secret protocols and file formats. The EU, rightly, realises that competition is good for consumers. Because machines that run M$ s/ware are pervasive the protocols that they use have to be supported by anything trying to compete. M$ keeps those protocols secret, in fact it deliberately obscures them to make it difficult to reverse engineer. This makes it difficult for non M$ systems to interoperate 100% with M$ systems and thus compete fully.

Note that it is NOT the M$ code that is wanted, but the specifications to the file formats and protocols.

Note also that many of the non-M$ protocols in use are published standards and so anyone can implement them - and M$ rightly takes advantage of this; but then refuses to give to others what it has taken from others.

M$ is rather like the little boy in the play gound who accepts sweets from the other kids but refuses to open his own paper bag.

Microsoft sets spinners on court verdict

But will M$ obey now ?

The amount of the fine is small compared to the extra profits that it has made but preventing competition. The sensible thing for M$ to do is to continue to delay and then fail to document their stuff properly (whoops - there seem to be typeos, we will fix them in the next release). Once a monopolist, they will always have that mentality.

Next generation BBC iPlayer gets MS man on board

What are the terms of the appointment ?

Is he there for a fixed term ? Going back to M$ in a few years ? Is M$ subsidising his salary, or paying for an assistant, ... ?

I can't believe that the BBC did this ? It is like putting the fox in charge of the chicken food - not in charge of the entire operation but definitely with a huge conflict of interest.

No data protection exemption for YouTube baby battle video

Too much is done in secret

I do not know the rights/wrongs of this case, but I do have a lot of experience of the abuses of family law in this country. One of the biggest problems is that it is all done in secret to "protect the child" - in fact the effect is quite the opposite.

Courts reguarly abuse kids and parents, the parents can do little about a system that is more interested in protecting its own backside and following precedent. Because it is in secret the Social services, cafcass & judges come out with outrageous decision and destroy families. The lack of indendent over sight (eg press) means that they can do what they want.

Remember: the UK's worst child abusers are family court judges.

Websites could be required to retain visitor info

Take this to its logical end

So ISPs (and company IT depts, ...) need to keep a copy of everything that goes through -- just in case. Presumably the same logic will also apply to:

* post office - record which post box a letter was collected from, where it is going to, dates, etc

* shop - what/when you bought, what notes/coins you used

* shop, etc, anti theft video now to be kept for 2 years

* taxi company: where from, to, name of booking over phone + phone number

What about consumer goods: should my DAB radio store details of what I have been listening to ?

The level of spying on citizens is becoming intolerable.

Police want DNA collection superpowers

Accountability, checks and balances ?

I see the police being given all sorts of new powers (usually on the pretext of hunting the current bogey men: paedophiles and terrorists); no where do I see that police procedures are tightened up: to stop the wrong people looking at the files; independent oversight of their activities; proper reporting of real facts.

Also: if they want to catch some criminals they could start with those social parasites who inhabit the legal system. Solicitors, barristers and judges who are only interested in trousering your money. The most child abuse today is done by judges who break up families and distort the truth to stop loving dads from knowing their kids.

Tesco beefs up under 20 quid software offering

Why pay for these things ?

Why would you want to pay for these things ? Even if you are stuck with a Microsoft Windows system you can still download OpenOffice and the Gimp for free. Anti virus, try ClamAV.

I suppose you get a nice cardboard box and manual ... but is it worth it ?

Olympic planners left IT out of the budget

Cap the cost

If the building of a hospital can be capped, then the cost of the Olympics should be capped. They got it wrong once, came back and said that they had done their sums and it would cost £9,000,000,000 - they should not get a penny more.

The olymics last 15-18 days, that works out at £500,000,000 per day.

UK Gov boots intelligent design back into 'religious' margins

Just because it could be true does not mean that it is true

"We assume intelligent design is false, a higher power cannot exist? Why not? Couldn’t a higher intelligence have sculpted the “big bang”, evolution, etc. etc. well...yes."

That is quite possible. It is also possible that Ming the Mercyless is poised to invade earth and that our new prime minister will save us in a Flash. Possible but unlikely. We can go around the world and consider all of the creation myths, but which one do we choose ? Use your eyes and ears: what evidence do we have ? We will be left with a large number for which we have no evidence to disprove, so what do we do? Use that tool of rationalism: Occam's Rasor: classify the complicated as unlikely and choose the simplest explantions as most likely.

Invoking a 'higher power' is always more complicated since it means that we need to explain the existance/origin of that higher power.

"Thus I believe in a higher power and in teaching *all* possibilities of our existence in schools."

Wow: there are a lot of creation myths out there - that would take a lot of time. However: you are right in that there is little rational basis in choosing the Jewish/Christian/Muslim myths over all of the rest down to, and including, the rantings of Ron Hubbard's scientology: none have any refutable, repeatable evidence or make predictions that are, realistically, repeatably testable.

Say goodbye to Office 2003, Microsoft tells PC builders

Re: New Versions of Office

The one comment that is wildly enthusiastic about the new Office is posted annonymously -- why ? A MS employee perhaps ?

US and allies lay global foundation for biometric border checks

What about asking parliament first ?

It is significant that this announcement is made in Washington - not Parliament where it should have been made.

John Reid presumably picked his script up from the US state department on the way to the meeting with the press. This government has got it's head so firmly stuck up Bush's ass that they don't know what to do unless he tells them so.

The great (self inflicted - and perhaps internal jobs) excuse of 9/11has given the government's the means to terrorise their citizens with puffed up terrorist bogey men. The real people that we need to be afraid of are the potiticians.