Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike

Re: Same stunt they pull in any academic setup

That type of stuff you find only in the kingdoms of the world

France is a republic, but has a well-developed honours system. The lowest rank in the Légion d'honneur is "Chevalier", which is "knight".

am I wrong to assume they actually have to pay a bit for the privilege?.

Yes.

Some people do get recognised because they've spent lots of their money on stuff, like Bill Gates and his Foundation, but other honours go to people like librarians and dinner ladies for their service to their communities.

Re: Honorary knighthoods

when the honors system is changed so that an honorary honor can be bestowed, it call into question the basic reasoning behind the whole thing.

Why so? It's a recognition that the person honoured has done something worthwhile for the country or its people, whatever that person's nationality. The "honorary honour" is just a way of allowing that to happen for non-commonwealth citizens. It has restrictions, like the inability to use a title, but the recognition is just as valid and as valuable.

where a bunch of pompous, self-important and essentially self-apppointed people deem themselves (and those they decide to bestow honors on) to be of more value as human beings than all the other human beings?

Most honour awards start by recommendations from ordinary people who work with the person concerned. They write to an awards committee to propose that someone be recognised. Obviously there needs to be some sort of selection process, and the people on those committees are usually senior people from the committee's fields of expertise, like health, arts, education, business.

Might also begin to explain why food banks and other signs of poverty are so common in UK

France and Germany have 3-5x as many people using food banks as the UK.

and the NHS is struggling, even while it is deemed appropriate to spend vast amounts of cash on aircraft carriers and aircraft to go on those aircraft carriers

By their very nature health services will always struggle, no matter how much money is given to them they can always spend more. The UK is no worse than other European countries in that matter. As for aircraft carriers, it's a pity that we need them, but defence is fundamentally no different to healthcare, it's a necessary part of any government spending in a free country.

Give my regards to Reigate: Print biz Canon to up sticks in the sticks

Lies, damned lies, and...

Where the remain vote beat the leave vote?

Hmm. Take the 35% of people who voted for "hard Brexit" parties, compare it with the 40% who voted for any sort of Remain party, and by ignoring the other 25% it concludes that remain votes exceeded leave ones? Interesting approach, but I feel it lacks a certain mathematical rigour.

Ever since the election journalists from all the papers have been trying to map the figures to align with their preferred leave/remain outcome, and they've all succeeded! If nothing else that just shows that the figures are still much as they were three years ago, with no major shift either way.

It also perhaps shows that the Leave voters have a more concrete idea of what they want, since the single-issue hard Leave party (Brexit) got 31% of the votes and 40% of the seats, while the single-issue Remain party (ChangeUK) got 3.3% of the votes, and no seats.

Ask the people again, and properly this time with an understanding of what Brexit actually is.

You expect to get a different answer to the one they gave in the EU elections last month?

Bear insistent on playing tonsil tennis with you? Just bite its tongue off

Reminds me of Billy Connolly's "Ivan the Terrible"

“It’s amazing the surge of strength you get when you bite your own willy.”

Idle Computer Science skills are the Devil's playthings

Re: Hire immediately

We had students like Charlie. The ones who phoned the computer centre and owned up were thanked, told not to do it again, and the underlying bug was fixed. The ones who ran away leaving someone else to clean up the mess were hunted down and had a very painful interview with the CC director. They also usually got a ban for some weeks or months.

There's a reason why my cat doesn't need two-factor authentication

Re: Schengen sucks and everyone is looking the other way

and this differs from external borders, how?

It's the "weakest link" problem, it requires all Schengen members to trust the border controls for all externally-facing members. Needless to say, they don't, but dislike saying so quite so bluntly. Instead they come up with various reasons why they, exceptionally, have to maintain their own checks.

Re: A pretty simple concept really:

Years ago I was at a meeting in a BT building in central London. All entry was via card-operated turnstiles minded by security staff, barely enough room to squeeze through with a briefcase. Visitors were signed-in to get temporary cards.

Fire alarm went off (somebody burnt the toast in the kitchen, yes really) and we all evacuated into the street. When the alarm was over 15 minutes later we all re-entered via the firedoors helpfully held open for us. No checks, we could have been accompanied by any passer-by who joined the crowd, carrying anything.

The best and worst of GitHub: Repos wiped without notice, quickly restored – but why?

Human oversight costs money. If you want it, be prepared to pay for it. "Free" services will rarely be able to offer more than a primitive rule-based oversight, dressed up as "AI".

'Happy to throw Leo under the bus', Meg Whitman told HP after Autonomy buyout

Re: Country and Western

I prefer Scrumpy and Western myself.

Or Weston's Scrumpy. Not a bad restaurant either.

HPC processor project tosses architectural designs on desk of the European Commission

Re: Just what we need

over the period 2014-2016 UK researchers and Innovators received 15.2% of the Horizon 2020 funding, for a total of just under €3.8bn funding.

That's nice, €1.3bn/year. Over the same 3-year period we send around £13bn gross (after the rebate) to the EU each year, of course (Germany sends €20bn/year). They're paying us with our own money, and making it seem like we're getting something, which is pretty smart.

Amazon Alexa: 'Pre-wakeword' patent application suggests plans to process more of your speech

Re: Already does this

Most of which consisted of just wind as I was out walking the dog...

It didn't offer advice on dietary supplements?

Long-distance dildo devotee deploys ding-dong over data deceit

Re: Advancements in AI

Penetration testing?

Oracle AI's Eurovision horror show: How bad can it be? Yep. Badder

110v or 230v?

Tesla driver killed after smashing into truck had just enabled Autopilot – US crash watchdog

Re: What's the point?

Crashed? Alright - let's see just how naughty a boy/girl you were, and how hard we need to throw the book at you.

Bit late by then. How's the resurrection technology for your victims coming along?

Re: What's the point?

The newer models also steer back into the correct lane if they detect that you're steering out - I tried something similair in a different hire car and it worked very nicely, gently decisive without being too sudden or intrusive.

I've driven a car with that. It was intensely annoying, especially on twisty country lanes where it's often impossible to keep a large car fully within the lane all the time without scraping along the hedge.

I think that's it's these sort of driver-assist technologies that are the best life-savers right now. Driver still has full attention, car helps out to improve/focus that attention.

On the contrary, if you're drifting out of a lane to the point where a gadget has to tell you about it then you very clearly are not paying full attention.

keep your effing hands on the effing wheel and pay attention to the bloody road

Applies to all drivers, not just Tesla, and the best way to ensure it is to stop fllling cars with stupid gadgets that encourage drivers to pay less attention. When you're the driver you should be driving, with 100% of your attention on that single task. In which case there is zero need for "driver aids".

Wine? No, posh noshery in high spirits despite giving away £4,500 bottle of Bordeaux

Re: No point "wining" about the mistake...

If you can't tell the difference between 2 buck chuck and any Bordeaux, stick to beer.

Banhammer Republic: Trump declares national emergency, starts ball rolling to boot Huawei out of ALL US networks

Re: Huawei + China Vs Cisco Systems + United States of America

At what point do developed nations stop the bleeding of jobs?

At the point where their citizens agree to pay 3x the price for stuff made "at home", or when the staff in those home industries agree to a 60% salary cut to compete with the developing economies.

Japan's mission to mine Mars' moon is cleared – now they've filled out the right paperwork on alien world contamination

Re: "from well underneath the moon's surface"

Where there's a well there must be water!

Or oil & gas.

Japan on track to start testing Alfa-X, fastest train in the world with top speed of 400kph

Not nostalgia

a nostalgic reverence for the past. I don't think their is any country in the world which seems to hold such a love of steam trains

As someone who enjoys watching steam trains, I don't think its a nostalgia issue, but an engineering one. I do remember travelling on steam-hauled passenger trains, even as a small boy I could see that they were noisy and dirty.

The thing about a modern high speed locomotive like a TGV is that it's impressive but boring, all the "works"are hidden inside & just hum away to themselves. A steam loco is 'real' engineering, you can see all the bits working together. I'd sooner watch a new steam loco like Tornado than a TGV, not because it's an old design but because there's something to see. I'm an engineer, I like watching the mechanical bits :)

Re: Well....

Woah: "mountain spine" feels like an exaduration (unless you are Dutch!)... The highest point in England is Scafell Pike (978 metres : 3208 ft.).

The Pennines are still tricky for trains, which struggle with more than a 4% grade, Have you seen how hard something like Tornado has to work to climb Shap Fell on the west coast mainline? Even a modern electric HST has relatively low limits compared to road vehicles.

Surely there are multiple examples of similar hilly terrain that fast trains already go through (Japanese? Chinese?)

3.85% grade for the Japanese bullet train, according to wikipedia. The Paris-Lyon TGV track reaches 3.5%. Long sweeping curves can make it easier, but then you're back with the problem of finding and buying lots of land. Going through is possible, of course, the Swiss are experienced there, but it's far from cheap even for short tunnels.

Re: Well....

Poorly designed tracks, without the experience of 100 years of engineering means that the trains have to travel slowly because corners.

They were OK for the trains at the time. Today's problem is that Britain is a long, thin, country that is very densely populated in just the places where high-speed trains would be useful, and with a central mountain spine in the way. That makes it difficult, politically and financially, to buy the land to straighten out the tracks.

France, for example, is the opposite. twice the area of the UK, with a big empty space in the middle where the tracks needed to be laid.

Eurostar is a prime example of the different situations. The area between Paris and Calais is old coal-mining land, with high unemployment and low incomes. People there were trying to force the train to go past their towns, to bring jobs in. Across the channel you hit Kent, the "Garden of England", land of orchards, mansions and Mercedes. Those folks were spending their money to keep the nasty, noisy train away.

Re: Well....

Absolutely pathetic tilting ..... apparently

Lots of money down the shitter. Obviously the people pioneering HS2 have very short memories

You've got most of that completely backwards.

The titl worked extremely well, so well that people were slightly seasick because they felt no cornering force when their eyes told them the train was tilting. They had to reduce the tilt to make the cornering felt.

APT failed because of politics in nationalised British Rail, with conservative teams claiming it was too advanced and couldn't be done, even though it was actually working. When politics finally killed it the patents were sold to the Italians, who used them in the Pendolino trains that we eventually bought. Buying our own technology back due to political stupidity.

As for HS2, its a victim of exactly the same politically-motivated backstabbing.

Essex named sexiest British accent followed closely by, um, Glaswegian

Re: Same for NI

That's a really old clip you know (1950's?)

1970s, IIRC. I remember the original interview, although I date from the (late) 50s!

Same for NI

N. Ireland has dozens, from the fairly posh Co. Down one from out Hillsborough way to the harsh E. Belfast inner-city variety. Not to mention the Ballymena one made famous by a certain late politico, or the incomprehensible Strabane one.

Then again I knew someone with an inner-city Belfast accent which really grated on me, yet her Canadian husband loved her "gorgeous Irish accent". No way could you place a generic Norn Iron accent in a general list of favourites.

AI has automated everything including this headline curly bracket semicolon

Re: Politics IRL

One of the US papers did that in the 40s, ran the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman", the actual result was the reverse.

US minister invokes Maggie Thatcher, says she would have halted Huawei 5G rollout

Re: Bit of a blunt argument Sir!

The current lot have turned their back on Thatcher's proudest achievement, the Single Market.

I think she'd have been very happy if it had stayed as a free single market.

The current centrally-controlled and regulated protectionist apology for a "market" would not have been to her taste.

If the thing you were doing earlier is 'drop table' commands, ctrl-c, ctrl-v is not your friend

As a guess, non-echo password input is often done as non-buffered I/O, and the paste "types" the characters too fast for the unbuffered input to keep up. Used to be a problem on physical terminals without typeahead, it's rare to see it on a software terminal nowadays.

Tractors, not phones, will (maybe) get America a right-to-repair law at this rate: Bernie slams 'truly insane' situation

Re: Clarity needed here

computers only sold to dealers to get the car electronics to accept these new parts.

You can buy adequate substute computers on eBay, or find a moonlighting mechanic to make the change for you. Like DRM, it just makes life difficult for the honest person but has zero effect on the criminals.

Firefox armagg-add-on: Lapsed security cert kills all browser extensions, from website password managers to ad blockers

Re: Hmm... nothing here

They pushed out a temporary fix via their "Studies" feature.

Which itself raises the interesting question of whether Mozilla can choose to run arbitrary code on my browser without asking first?

Re: Out of curiosity ...

I go to a website for the content I want to see, but not necessarily for all the content it wants to foist on me.

Personality quiz for all you IT bods: Are you a chameleon or an outlaw? A diplomat or a high flier? Vote right here

I don't think Diplomats are renowned for their rants about stupid users.

Oh, they are. Especially when they forget to check that their microphones are off.

Remember “diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' until you can find a rock!” (Will Rogers)

UK is 'not a surveillance state' insists minister defending police face recog tech

Re: Yes it effing is!

You can only stand if you have the money to be able to.

If you think you have a platform that people will support, raising a few thousand from potential voters shouldn't be difficult. If you can't raise it, you're clearly running on a platform people aren't interested in.

Sure, you can pay it all yourself if you're just running for your own amusement or vanity, but that's not what elections are there to encourage.

Then see what happens to footfall.

Probably nothing much. Most ordinary folks don't care, any more than they care about letting Facebook sell their personal details.

Re: Yes it effing is!

Hard to have any say in politics when there's no option but to choose the colour of tie the shit in power wears.

You could always stand for election yourself. No tie required.

May Day! PM sacks UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson for Huawei 5G green-light 'leak'

Re: ByElection

As Brexit has proved, in this country, we are fucking stupid.

Defining someone as stupid simply because they disagree with your view? Not the most logical of arguments

We have a reading age of less than nine according to OECD https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/Country%20note%20-%20United%20Kingdom.pdf

I'm curious how you get "reading age of less than nine" from that PDF. It seems to show that the UK is pretty much in the middle when it comes to literacy & numeracy in the EU, better than some like France, and non-EU places like the US, but worse than S. Korea or the Scandinavians, which won't come as a surprise to anyone. Disappointing to see the poor numeracy levels in may places, but it seems unfashionable these days to teach mental arithmetic in schools "why bother, everyone has a calculator" is the prevailing attitude.

Our education system literally is going backwards https://literacytrust.org.uk/information/what-is-literacy/

Yes, Tony Blair's policies have a lot to answer for. Not that his kids will suffer, of course, since he sent them to a private school.

NASA fingers the cause of two bungled satellite launches, $700m in losses, years of science crashing and burning...

Especially when "NASA", in this case, means "taxpayers".

What a meth: Elderly Melbourne couple sign for 20kg shipment of drugs, say cops

Re: Insurance value 5k max

I wouldn't bet on it:

Drug dealer arrested after calling police to report stolen cocaine

after all, if they were smarter they might not have to turn to crime...

Oh dear. Secret Huawei enterprise router snoop 'backdoor' was Telnet service, sighs Vodafone

Re: Sniffable

Have you ever seen that used in real life?

Nope.

A quick Google search suggests its only supported out of the box between Windows OS's which must make it close to non-existent given how common managing Windows boxen with telnet is.

My current Debian Linux box supports it, at least according to the telnet manpage.

Agreed, though, it's unlikely to be in widespread use, especially since it uses preshared keys rather than any public key approach.

Re: Sniffable

At least Telnet is plain text and unencrypted.

Not necessarily, see RFC2946.

FYI: Someone left 24GB of personal info on 80m US households exposed to the public internet

It's a question of priorities

Who do you think manages the cloud if it's not IT folk?

In-house IT folk have the security of your organization to maintain.

Cloud IT folk have the the security of their cloud service to maintain.

Not the same priorities at all.

And in current affairs... Apple recalls three-prong AC adapters after some shocking behavior

Re: And it has happened even before 2016...

adaptors have to conform to the relevant standards for electrical accessories plugged into the household mains - basically BS1363

There's a big difference between conforming to BS1363, with a kitemark to prove it, and just "built to BS1363" which I've seen on many cheap plugs and is, of course, meaningless. I wonder if there's a kitemark on the Apple adapters?

Northern Virginia cements spot as bit barn capital of the world with jigawatt capacity

Re: where are the windmills

Virginia as a whole gets 40% of its power from four aging nuclear plants.

What sort of backup supply is there for this 1GW of datacentres handling 70% of the worlds internet traffic, then?

Clouds seem useful, but they do tend to blow away in a good puff of wind.

Thank you, your DNA data will help secure your… oh dear, we've lost that too

Night porters

The real advantage of the old-fashioned night porter was that, after letting you & your colleagues in and turning on the lights in the lounge, he would bring you drinks & coffees from the long-closed bar. If you tipped him enough he'd even sometimes forget to add them to anyone's bill.

Is that a stiffy disk in your drive... or something else entirely?

You have to hand it to her, a second mistake like that certainly ticks the boxes, assuming it wasn't just a wind-up.

No stormy weather on Microsoft's horizon – as quarterly commercial cloud cash balloons 41%

picking the right secular trends

I always thought cloud was more of a religious thing.

FYI: Get ready for face scans on leaving the US because 1.2% of visitors overstayed their visas

Re: Blame Canada

it seems to be depressing that the anti-Brexit argument basically amounts to giving PIRA a veto over any democractic decision

Yes, not doing something just in case it might result in violence from paramilitaries is a classic example of "giving in to terrorists", which people in NI have spent 30+ years refusing to do. Varadkar should be ashamed of himself for those comments.

let's hope UKIP don't decide to sert up a paramilitary wing.

Unlikely, one advantage of the single-issue parties like UKIP is that the UK has had an anti-EU option that doesn't involve far right/left violent extremism. It's been spared the move to the extremes that other EU countries are suffering. I wouldn't be so sanguine about the likes of BNP or Britain First, though.

Re: Blame Canada

Can't you just walk across the border?

With a US or Canadian passport, yes. The only person I know who tried it (in a car, travelling with an American friend) saw her friend waved through, but she had to spend an hour in Canadian immigration waiting to be interviewed, and then thoroughly questioned as to the reason for her trip. The fact that it all happened directly under a large photograph of the Queen was even more irritating!

Tesla touts totally safe, not at all worrying self-driving cars – this time using custom chips

Re: If, if, and more if's....

Long haul trucking is one. Get on the expressway. Stay in your lane. Don't run into things. Don't pass anything that isn't stationary or moving VERY slowly.

Sounds like a train, which would be a much better way to move containerized goods long haul, with the trucks reserved just for the endpoint collection/distribution.

Unfortunately the problem there isn't technical, it's truck drivers & their unions.

Bloke faces up to 20 years in the clink after gun held to dot-com owner's head in robbery

Re: God what a twat

He deserves to get locked up for being called "Rossi Lorathio Adams II" anyway.

Presumably that one is down to his parents.