Posts by LOW

GCHQ's exploding doughnut threatens to ooze into innocent field

@x7

Methinks you might be onto something there. Lyneham that's the one just south of Junction 16 on the M4 right? There's one north of that where they hold the airshows (Fairfield or something?) and every time I was on an Orange call it dropped at a point just before junction 16 on the M4.

Since I had a GIS specialist in the house, I asked him to give me a line between the two airbases. That line crossed the M4 at the point where my signal ALWAYS dropped.

That was in 2000.

Given the publications out there, the laws in place and the treaties agreed, we need to get these guys to move their envelope of secrecy well, well back from where it is.

They won't do that, of course, because then they'll have to justify their drain on the tax payer.

What a sad state of affairs.

How long are we going to let this go on for?

Given the prevailing view here...

...of the usual government incompetence and lack of foresight, rubbed over by a poorly thought out and expensive solution, there's only one thing left to suggest:

It's a doughnut right?

Dunk it.

French hacks go after new surveillance law … with the help of the ECHR

@dogged

Are you stalking me or do you just have so much time on your hands that you're following me around El Reg?

Are you sitting in Cheltenham and getting paid to do that?

You commented on my comment on the One Windows for All article, slagging me off (i.e. attacking the person, not the detail) and here, you've done it again.

Let me put you in the picture. I think that if there is one development platform and system for all devices, that's just simply brilliant. But look at the clusterfuck Java was. Now add to the inevitable Java scenario Win 10's "telemetry". How the hell is anyone supposed to conduct business on a Win10 system - even with an enterprise license?

Answer me that.

Now as for this one, I happen to value a lot of the points that amanfrommars makes. He has insight and a good grasp of what's going on in many cases and delivers it with humour and irony (which just adds to it, in my world).

So how about you read the bloody book that I linked to in my previous comment in this thread and then look around you.

Go on, I dare you to tell me that what's in that book is not being executed before your very eyes.

Then check out the UN's Agenda 2030. Then you can justifiably comment on my comment.

In the meantime, have a coffee on me, to perk your brain up and look up "Ad Hominem" attack, so that you don't do it again and make yourself entirely unpopular.

Let's be civilised and keep to the meat of the subject and not slag each other off like children eh?

It's all Part of the Plan for WORLD DOMINATION

Oh why don't we have a white cat icon?

Haven't you read the manual, written in 1934?

Vis:

"A complete digital scan of the Technocracy Study Course. This copy by TNAT The North American Technate. Google Technocracy technate for more associated information.

This is the 1945 edition. The last two chapters of this book contain the Technate design for North America.. the complete appendix.. after the design chapters.. are presented also.

The Technocracy Study Course introduces basic concepts of science, then relates those concepts to the idea of a scientific social design, secular and humanitarian, creative and life enhancing when the Price System abstract value system is not used, but energy accounting is.

The design based on the metrics of energy.. is the viable alternative to the present system referred to as a Price System. The Technate design precludes special interest groups. It is not a political system.

Investigate Technate design for an actual alternative system based on sustainable abundance "

Here https://archive.org/details/TechnocracyStudyCourseUnabridged

Now do you get the cough "Telemetry" cough in Windows 10? They need to know everything in order for their cunning plan to work.

Win 10 tells me that they don't feel that they know enough yet.

Let's not feed the beast eh?

'One Windows' crunch time: Microsoft tempts with glittery new devices

Microsoft Shot Itself in the Head with Win10

In a post-Snowden world, why would any developer contribute the spyware used by the alphabet soup agencies?

If Micro$haft had gone the other way, on the other hand...

Nuff said?

All in all, it's just another hit in the stalls: Roger Waters The Wall

The Wall Changed My Life

Gerald Scarfe, who did the animation for the film, complained in an interview that so many people had said this to him and was frustrated because he didn't know why - he appears to have thought that he was doing something so outrageous e.g. depicting school so graphically as a mincing machine to homogenise everyone, that his sets would never be created and he was surprised when they were.

I can tell him why - it legitimised the notion that the mainstream education system was just BS indoctrination to get you to want to be cannon fodder for the state and the corporations.

I've been on both sides of that coin and went from the worst comprehensive school in my borough to an elite boarding school that was, for my time there, more expensive than Eton or the other one.

It was there, The Wall was given to me and I never looked back. It gave me the discrimination to do my own research and to be able to go up against so called "experts" in their fields with facts, numbers and real world solutions - and win. I'd always had a problem with "authority" and, with The Wall, authority had now completely evaporated, unless it stood on its merits.

I built a 20 year career (give or take) in the City of London with that notion.

As for the music, The Wall is bluesey rock to me and Floyd went from catering to an acid loving audience (e.g. the excellent Set the Controls to the Heart of the Sun) to, say, the incredibly powerful Comfortably Numb, which is a dope smoker's track. I think that Echos is a very clever in-betweeny track, that heralds the transition.

Then, after the complete despair in The Final Cut - documenting the whole Thatcher, Falklands event, with the pessimistic ending of nuclear annihilation whilst slavishly working to make a profit for your employer (Not Now John), Waters made a few false starts when he was broken out of Floyd. Radio Kaos springs to mind. Ugh.

Then he created the Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking - a much undervalued album in my opinion. David Sandborn on saxophone and Eric Clapton on lead guitar. It's the only album that I've ever come across to depict what we would now call a "road movie". The insight, perception and musical talent that you're exposed to with this one is, for me, the pinnacle of Waters' art when looked at from the perspective of a whole album - as opposed to a bunch of songs slung together.

And that's the nub of it for me. This is art. I lived with someone who went through a ceramics degree at Camberwell (the top place to do this in the world at the time) and, as a business analyst, she asked me to define "Art" to her. I shadowed her studies and came up with this:

Art is something where the viewer perceives things in the work that the originator has never even thought of.

In my view, Scarfe had a blind spot - he never saw how original and game changing his stuff was.

I know nothing about this latest work but given Waters' track record, I would imagine that it's now very, very well done, extremely polished and well worth a look.

The question, for me is: "Why would he bother?"

Perhaps because he feels it's message is still relevant and needs to be shoved in our faces.

Given his later stuff e.g. Perfect Sense, he's arguably right.

I think Roger deserves a beer just for getting to the age that he is and for giving so many people so much pleasure and a vehicle for some heavy duty reflection on what's going on in their lives and their world.

Personally, I take my hat off to the man.

Windows 10 marks the end of 'pay once, use forever' software

Re: Ad Supported Solitaire

Don't you get it? Didn't you read my post (the one before yours)? It's NOT about advertising, it's about profiling who you are and whether you're going to fit in to the society that the powers that shouldn't be have envisaged for themselves. Do a search on "Georgia Guidestones"

Click the links I gave you. Investigate for yourself.

Wake up.

If nothing else, the military angle to this, that I outlined above, should be of serious concern to every network and server admin on the planet. On Win10, even their users' hard drives are available for inspection - by ANYONE, according to the End User License Agreement.

This is insane and we all need to stop it now.

It's bad enough that all their users corporate data and negotiations are going out over email in plain text but Jade Helm really takes the biscuit.

Monetizing advertisements (and there's us with our ad blockers) is blatantly a Trojan horse.

Go on, have a look at how Jade Helm works - but only if you want to take the red pill.

I think that everyone, here, has missed the point entirely.

Ever heard of Jade Helm? No? It's a military exercise, going in 11 states of the USSA right now and it has a lot of Merkins jumping up and down like cats on a hot tin roof.

Why? This thing is Win10 on steroids - it has this as its heart http://www.dwavesys.com/d-wave-two-system , apparently. The top brass presented the whole thing to Merkins as a training exercise for 1,300 special forces personnel. However, given the video coverage of the thousands of bits of serious hardware (like Abrams tanks and Howitzers) rolling into these states on trains, what? Are these guys being given hundreds of bits of kit each? Of course not - hence cats on hot tin roofs.

Anyway, back to the IT, or should I say, AI. Jade is part of a suite of kit that takes input from social media, telephone and anything else that it can get hold of, so that it can make a decision.

The request for that decision comes from a military commander, who feeds their objective into an ERP system. This then, apparently talks to the Jade 2 system, which then - being a quantum computer - considers all the possibilities at once and then feeds the battle plan back to the ERP system. The ERP system then schedules the whole lot and you can have it all at eight bells.

The powers that shouldn't be, as Dick Cheney said, need "total information awareness". Who you are, what you're doing, who you're talking to and what you're thinking and they need it in real time.

Don't worry, though, this thing doesn't "predict" pre-crime, it just "anticipates" it.

The dominant knowledge domain, here is called GEOINT - geographic intelligence, you know, the stuff handled by what we call GIS.

Now, if you think this stuff is just a Merkin deal, bear in mind that Putin (ex-KGB) is the head of Russia's geographical society.

Last word: They have plugged this thing into armed drones and I saw a US General admit that, at first the system will make mistakes but he said that it does learn very quickly.

More here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqGEz9IqOrE

The solution, it seems, to the New World Order (their term, not mine) is to get the hell offline.

mmm.

Microsoft to Windows 10 consumers: You'll get updates LIKE IT or NOT

NO. You've all missed the bloody point

When the Romans arrived in Blighty, it was "Veni, Vidi, Vici" - I came, I saw, I conquered.

Then Micro$haft came along and then it became "Embrace, Extend, Exterminate".

Today, in the 21st century, we've moved on. It's all about captive audiences now and so they can be much more efficient: Vici, Veni - all over their share price, stock options of senior management and profit related pay bonuses of senior employees. If you get my splurge.

Where are you in that? Nowhere, unless you've paid them to be your hireling. In which case, they'll do your bidding. Ah, that'll be Enterprise then.

So let's all "learn to expect more"* eh?

*a trademark of the Serious Cybernetiks Corporation that's drawn from the infinite pot of "artfully ambiguous phrasing" in Neuro-linguistic Programming - a technique of psychological warfare.

I'm sure that the Romans had a concept of backdooring your system - but back then, you knew about it immediately.

Disclaimer: I've been on Windows since 3.1, can't use Crapple stuff for toffee and have not really got a handle on Linux.

Now might be the time to venture further afield.

UK defamation law reforms take effect from start of 2014

Re: A defamatory statement ..

Aah, now there's the rub "caused or is likely to cause serious harm" to individuals' or businesses' reputation"

I think that most of us, readers (and probably most readers of most web content in general) agree that politicians are lying thieving, very dangerous wankers.

Having spent some considerable time hanging around with these (in my opinion) proto-humans, it seems to me that only people who think that politicians, and big industrialists, like the Rockerfellas, Greenbergs, etc have a good reputation are other politicians, big industrialists, lobbyists, hangers on and HR twats, who still think that a pyramid is the way to govern an agile organisation.

In my opinion, the "reputation" of politicians has been irrevocably damaged by their actions over the last four decades that I've spent on this planet, to the point where no further damage can be done. To say that Cameron is a self serving little cunt and Blair a terrorist, is, in my opinion a gross understatement. Likewise, Monsanto - bio-terrorism from farm to fork, in my (very informed) opinion is also an understatement.

So who decides that someone ( or the mythical corporate "person") has a good reputation to defend in the first place? Does the court put it out for a (inter)national vote or is just membership of the Old World Order or big business qualification enough?

Any ideas?

Think your IT department's parochial? Try selling to SMEs

Having been on both sides of both fences...

...my experience is that the SME's think that good enough is good enough and the big corporates want the best of the best, so that they can be the best.

I once specced up a system for one of the largest firms of its type in the world and it was a paper- based system. They were horrified and wanted a computer system. When I produced the justification for the design, they instituted the paper system the next day and, as far as I know, they are still using it - I demonstrated "necessary and sufficient" to them.

When running a SME, I specced up Sage Line 50 (back in the day) for the accounts and it had errors in it (the VAT calculation was erroneous if you put the figures in one way and correct if I used another part of the system). It became so frustrating that I ended up using Excel for all of it (an old banker's trick), which worked very well. Egg on my face there for an over engineered solution spec.

As a corporate buyer, I became wise to IT salespeople and used to send them out for coffee, whilst I talked to the techie. That saved an awful lot of money because salespeople are basically bullshitters (my non-techie division director nearly fell off his chair when a salesman for a big data processor talked about "massaging the data" in one meeting, for example) and it's easy to tell if a techie knows their stuff - which they generally did. However, the general view, in my experience, is that corporates throw money at things to maintain (or gain) a "competitive advantage". Actually, I wanted that particular product precisely because I could massage the data but that was too much information for my boss. Nevertheless I got it in on a practical basis that ensured his arse was covered and massage was not mentioned in my guff.

Running a SME, I wouldn't buy anything unless I had to or I could realise an immediate uplift in the bottom line.

Early on in my business career, I came across a phrase that seems to portray the difference in thinking between a SME and a large corporate with great accuracy: "The fox runs for his life, the hound runs for his lunch".

I see the same phenomenon with fish tanks - a big fish tank is less susceptible to fluctuations in composition than a small one. I think that this is the fundamental difference between the two extremes. Microsoft is reputed to have enough money in the bank to pay everything for six months if it didn't bring in any money at all. What SME has that amount of "give" in their business model?

Another factor that springs to mind is that SME owners generally have an intuitive feel for the state of their businesses at any given time, whereas corporate types have to look it up on a system somewhere. That's a big difference in awareness.

Then, there's sales and marketing. The perception of sales and marketing at the corporate level is nowhere near the perception of sales and marketing at the SME level. SME's just don't seem to understand a sales led organisation, they only seem to understand a demand led organisation. This is simply because SME's don't have the marketing budget of the corporates.

Finally, there's debt led expansion. Since the '90s business schools have taught that debt led expansion is another way to achieve a competitive advantage. For a SME, debt is the devil incarnate and it really does keep small business owners up at night.

I can't really fault either mentality as an approach to succeeding in capitalism, I think that, if we are to have a world that is an ecosystem of big corporates and SME's then we need to understand and see the value n both perspectives. Ugh, I'm sounding like a Rand Corporation think tank. Time to go.

In conclusion, there is an obvious discontinuity between the thinking of the small business owner who earns money to put a roof over their head and food on the table and the corporate type who has a salary coming in every month.

The fox runs for his life, the hound runs for his lunch

Autonomy to HP: bollocks

In the beginning....

...were a couple of fresh faced Cambridge graduates sitting in my office with a genuinely innovative and potentially very useful product. Their kit promised to be XML before XML was even a standard..

I was working in a major international law firm with 4.5 million documents that were growing like billio (unsure of sp, there and can't be bothered to look it up before you commentards go at my spelling) and we needed a way to find how we'd constructed documents in previous deals n order to cut down our overheads in the future.

I spent a long time with these guys, and they gave me a fabulous piece of search kit to play with for free. As it turned out, their stuff was rubbish for legal documents and we came to the conclusion that no amount of training (if you're not familiar with training software, think about training OCRs - it was basically the same scenario) would solve the problem.

As it turned out, we came to the conclusion that Goldfarb and Prescod had got it right with SGML (which was created to handle IBM's legal documents, globally - for the non-initiated among you, XML is a direct sub-set of SGML and it handles legal documents rather well and, unlike SGML doesn't require a couple of years to learn) and, really, no amount of training would solve our problems. We really tried.

To give you a specific idea of what the problems were, the word "service" is used in many different contexts in the legal world and none of us found a way of training an artificial intelligence machine to deal with that in a humane way - we just got junk in the search results. So, back to what's now called XPath and XPointer, I believe. It's been a while and this was "back in the day".

However, using the same kit to search the internet pissed all over everything available (and it would put Google to shame today, IMHO). Fabulous stuff.

After I'd done the research for them, they disappeared from the market and you couldn't buy their product unless you were a Rothschild funded government. Having spent over a year using Autonomy's kit on a daily basis, I was gutted when they pulled it from civilian life but did understand why it wasn't available to me any more.

In my experience HP make great hardware but don't ask them to give you software - their software just ain't as good as the sauce we all know and love.

HP really missed a trick there and more fool them. Autonomy came up with a brilliant game changer for searching in-homogenous data sets i.e. the internet and they are still a legend in my mind. Oh how I wish for a web search engine like that again.

As for Google, bah, yank spyware pish full of advertising crap that I don't want to see. So I never use their engine that was designed to wow noobs and, as far as I'm concerned Google is still not mature enough for a serious researcher who needs to find facts now, for a business case. So in my mind, Google is 20 years behind the times. Twats.

Oh remind me, what's Google's revenue model again? Oh yeah, the emperor's new clothes.