* Posts by Nick Kew

2841 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2007

US lawmakers to de-silence electric cars

Nick Kew

noise? what noise?

How is this noise - or any other such as the bell or horn - going to alert the deaf person?

Anyone in charge of a vehicle - from cyclist to juggernaut - has a duty of care to more vulnerable people, including all pedestrians. You don't generally know if a person is blind and/or deaf. Or might suffer some other condition such as a faint or an epileptic fit in front of you.

Terry Pratchett cuts ribbon on Treacle Mine Road

Nick Kew
Gates Horns

Coincidence, or ....

The ex-mayor is caller Winder! Well, that's a stronger Ankh-Morpork connection than a few street names! Either he's got a bloody good sense of humour or he's not read the books!

Someone should check whether these roads have the right cobblestones.

The good book: How to bet better online

Nick Kew
Stop

One up, two down

Online betting is a mugs game. You have two chances to lose, but one to win.

Place your bet and lose - you lose.

Place your bet and win - you still bear the risk of counterparty default. And that's not idle theory: financial institutions are going bust at sufficient rate to make that a real risk. Who's to say the company you betted with won't be next?

World's 'smallest, lightest' laptop launches

Nick Kew

Why?

Um, still looks heavier and much more unwieldy than the Nokia N810 tablet thingey (could you use it while standing up, for instance?). Any advantages to shrinking the laptop form so far out of its traditional size?

Sun downgraded to Goldman Sachs sell list

Nick Kew
Go

Buy!

Interesting order here: GS recommends selling *after* a big fall and before [insert prediction here].

Sounds to me like as good a buy signal as one could wish for.

Junk science and booze tax - a study in spin

Nick Kew

yeah, right

That'll be why Scandinavian countries with hugely expensive booze have so much less^H^Hmore of an alcohol problem than, say, Italy?

Berlusconi plans to use G8 presidency to 'regulate the internet'

Nick Kew
Black Helicopters

Move along, nothing to see.

I doubt we (non-Italians) have much to fear from Berlusconi. Lots of bluster, but who the **** takes him seriously?

What's much more worrying is already happening. Regulation to "protect" us and/or the children. ISPs to spy on us. RIP act. That spam email had a picture of a child attached - you're nicked. And don't even think of letting your teenager research chemistry homework online, especially if you're of middle-eastern appearance.

Apricot Picobook Pro netbook

Nick Kew

Hardware choices

Do you folks (hardware reviewers/pundits) regard devices like the Nokia N810 in the same class as these devices?

It's a great deal lighter (which to me seems like a huge advantage in the market for smaller-than-a-macbook devices), and I expect an important reason is that the ARM processor means it can get away with a much smaller battery. I'd love to see some comparative reviews of devices in this class, to see whether I'm losing anything that matters by choosing an ARM-based device, or whether it's a no-brainer.

NetApp ready to rumble in Sun IP case

Nick Kew
Stop

Blackberry

Groklaw has a different take on this. She points to the blackberry case, where RIM were taken by IP pirates and forced to pay a huge ransom before the patents were invalidated.

Investment firm looks for Sun's true value

Nick Kew

IBM precedent

Sun has historically relied too much on banking clients, who are currently spending rather less than of old.

Some of the newer areas of business are generating healthy profits. Perhaps not unlike where IBM was a few years back.

At today's prices ... gotta add Sun stock to the pension fund between now and end-of-year.

Intel badmouths Jesus Phone

Nick Kew

Heh heh!

Intel is not a serious contender for the mobile phone: the power consumption gives you an unacceptable choice of useless battery life or great big heavy battery. So why the sour grapes? Is it that ARM are positioned to advance into what Intel regards as its turf? Maybe an ARM-powered Eee-sized Macbook or something?

Time to increase my holding in ARM shares!

Netbooks take ten per cent of Euro PC market

Nick Kew

Running on battery

Any of them optimised for low power consumption? I'm thinking of things like ARM rather than Intel processor.

Sun, Novell, and Cray - Time to go private?

Nick Kew

@David Haig

Can't imagine the competition authorities liking the idea of IBM+Sun much. Add topend hardware and opensource software, and it'd make a complete monopoly.

Apple ARMs up iPhone

Nick Kew
Coat

@Mike Moyle

Like a Nokia 810, you mean?

Wonder if that's why ARM stock is up this week, when so much else is in the red?

/me feels smug, having bought at 90p just two months ago - on long-term expectations about a processor family with such low power consumption.

Freelancers might be taxed as employees after High Court ruling

Nick Kew
Thumb Up

Good news for the genuine freelancer?

I can just hear the howls of protest from the same brigade who cried Wolf at IR35!

But having spent 10 years as a genuine one-man-band (never an "employee-equivalent" role, and at other times worked as a wage-slave employee, I have no sympathy. The tax benefits of self-employment are (rightly) intended to help people deal with uncertain and intermittent income.

When pseudo-employees abuse the system, it damages it for everyone else. Concrete evidence for that is the rise of taxation on small business even as bigger business got a reduction in their corporation tax: the government is targeting abusers and hitting the legitimate along with them.

Taiwanese firm to sue over armed raid at IFA

Nick Kew
Black Helicopters

So where's safe?

This appears to show serious insanity in Germany.

But an unpleasant incident at a trade show is put into perspective when you compare what happened to Dmitry Sklyarov! Or when you consider the pirates who successfully extorted a large fortune out of RIM with a blackmailing injunction against selling any blackberries in what was naturally their biggest market!

So where is safe to do business in the West? Norway has a somewhat confidence-inspiring track record, and the Netherlands still seems to understand the concept of Free Speech. Anywhere else?

Government told: Release secret Iraq documents

Nick Kew
Pirate

Competition: fill in the redacted bits

Will El Reg bring us this event? And perhaps an associated wiki?

Vodafone says termination rate clampdown would hit the poor

Nick Kew
Stop

We already pay to receive calls

I think El Reg is inadvertently scaremongering in this article, by leading readers to suppose we'll be expected to pay to receive calls including spam, wrong numbers, etc. If that happens it'll be by choice or when we're scammed. At least, I assume so ...

I for one have paid a lot for incoming calls over the years, without the option. That's because, as a one-man business (from 1998 to earlier this year) I had to ensure my landline would divert to the mobile and I wouldn't miss vital business calls. So the landline was being charged full call-to-mobile charges, and that's a sector where they seem to operate a cartel (no bloody competition).

Just to complete the scam, there was an idiot Estate Agent[1] who kept giving my (landline) numbers to his customers, so I'd get their calls at my expense. Being a public-facing business, they had about 100 incoming calls diverted to me for every business call I got.

[1] The callers always asked for "Ben". There were several other staff at the same agent, but never a call for anyone else. So I have to infer that it was Ben who couldn't give his own phone number, rather than lots and lots of customers getting it wrong.

Microsoft 'proves' six degrees of separation theory

Nick Kew
Stop

They've posted evidence for the opposite.

So they've come up with a little over six ..

... from a sample that is self-selecting and oriented to their particular service.

You or I (any El Reg reader) is no doubt just one person away from at least one MSN user. Not so most of Africa, and even pockets within the developed world.

The 'net is all about connectivity. It would be surprising if 'net users didn't have *significantly lower* degrees of separation than non-net-users, particularly where large communities are not connected. A self-selecting bunch like MSNers just amplify that effect.

The Guardian's excellent Web 2.0 blog-up

Nick Kew
Coat

Web 2.0

So it told me my carbon footprint is 0.0, 100% below the national average.

Well I know it's low, but that calculation looks like an artifact of "web 2.0". Adds breakage to what we had before the luvvies discovered it.

Mine's the shabby one that fits a chap with 20 years less paunch.

Researcher's hypothesis may expose uber-secret DNS flaw

Nick Kew
Stop

Deja Vu

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/res-disaster.html

Once you've read it, look at the page's Last-Modified date. November 2002.

Shocker DNS spoofing vuln discovered three years ago by a student

Nick Kew
Stop

Don't you read El Reg?

It seems I wasn't the only one to point out, in a comment on your earlier story, that DJB warned very clearly of this in 2001.

Vendors form alliance to fix DNS poisoning flaw

Nick Kew
Boffin

DJB pointed this out in 2001

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/forgery-cost.txt

... and there's ample evidence of his having repeatedly pointed it out.

My take on this: http://bahumbug.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/sensationalist-humbug/

Congress still afraid to define 'internet gambling'

Nick Kew
Stop

We all know the real definition ...

... if foreigners are in charge, it's illegal.

Oh, and to the rant above: the present Commission is what we have *without* the Lisbon agreement. Guess that must be what you want? Me, I'd prefer to see the commission replaced by an executive appointed by and accountable to the democratically elected parliament (whose track record compares rather favourably to other parliaments).

Cap, trade, subsidise - Obama's energy plan goes off piste

Nick Kew
Alert

How is this a surprise?

We (or our rulers) have spent years spouting hot air and doing nothing, while pursuing resolutely counterproductive policies[1]. And our meeja bleat about "the poor" when anyone talks about "green taxes", conveniently ignoring the fact that the poor suffer not from high fuel prices, but from living in a society that marginalises non-drivers. Etcetera.

But americans - of all political persuasions - have a much better record than us of appreciating that social tinkering can't fix problems like this. That leaves two options: hide in your bunker (Dubya), or do something meaningful with market forces. I expect either side would rightly laugh at the kind of tokenism we have here in .uk[2] masquerading as anything more than rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.

What's needed is the political courage to follow through. If John Major's fuel price escalator hadn't been dropped by his idiot successor, we'd be better placed to face current and future cold turkey as oil supplies tighten.

[1] Winter fuel allowance forsooth! If there is a budget to keep old people warm, then spend it on improving thermal efficiency of their homes! And get a bloomin' fleece or pullover. Etcetera, etcetera.

[2] Don't leave appliances on standby, drop tax on smaller cars, please don't use plastic carrier bags, etcetera, at the same time as refusing to mandate universal broadband, closing local facilities while subsidising car parking, working to ghettoise cyclists onto substandard psychlepaths, hugely expanding aviation, etcetera.

Web infection attacks more than 100,000 pages

Nick Kew

@anonymous {hero|coward}

Some of us have SQL injection in hand. See

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.3/mod/mod_dbd.html#security

Welsh couple cop Mosquito flak

Nick Kew
Flame

Antisocial Behaviour

Some kind of action on noise nuisance is long overdue:

- Builders or other workmen who play the BBC's monument to mindlessness (aka Radio 2) or similar.

- Defective car or house alarms that go off again and again and again.

- Pubs/etc that regularly play electronically-amplified noise without proper soundproofing.

- And now, it seems, this "mosquito".

These things can blight a significant area, and the whole lives of people affected. Isn't it time we introduced some remedy? How about a legal order covering Antisocial Behaviour, and requiring a perpetrator to stop?

Oh wait ... what we need is someone to take this seriously.

Giant solar plants in Negev could power Israel's future

Nick Kew
Boffin

Can biology do a better job?

Alternative proposal: pump huge volumes of seawater into the desert and grow algal blooms. Big carbon-sink cum non-destructive biomass source.

Pub-bore thinking at http://bahumbug.wordpress.com/2008/01/13/blooming-in-the-desert/

Sun's war against clarity and business continues

Nick Kew
Alert

The price of free speech.

Interesting problem for Sun, given how big they are on giving employees freedom over what they blog about. If management have Words with this blogger, they risk unkind fingers pointing at their stated policy and values.

A company with a conventional "everything must be approved by PR" policy doesn't have that problem.

Nato secrets USB stick lost in Swedish library

Nick Kew
Black Helicopters

@ken hagan ...

How to hand it in?

Make your own copy of it, then post it anonymously to [journalist|embassy] of your choice.

BBC iPlayer launches, but with limited viewer reach

Nick Kew

One Viewer to rule them all

Did the BBC design and ship One True Wireless? Or the One True Television set? Nope, they left it to the marketplace, and we've all benefited from competition, choice and innovation.

Did the BBC design and ship the One True iPlayer? Erm ....

Rant: http://bahumbug.wordpress.com/2007/07/13/confusing-the-issues/

Stripogram councillor rocks Devon Lib Dems

Nick Kew

Comment from a local ...

[Not really local, but from within the same parliamentary constituency, so more-or-less local in political terms]

The libdems aren't taking us seriously. Our old libdem MP retired in 2005 and they gave us some candidate with no local credentials, so the (local) Tory won it.

The Mayor of Bideford (and thus presumably overlord of this unruly rabble) was our Green party candidate, and seemed quite impressive for a politician.

Computer virus turns 25

Nick Kew

IBM Gremlin

To Anonymous Coward. I don't like turning this into a discussion, but the IBM Gremlin in question was of course a *mainframe* thing.

I've no idea what the 1997 "gremlin" was, but it wouldn't surprise me at all to hear the word had been re-used, perhaps many times.

Nick Kew

It's older than that

The (harmless) "IBM Gremlin" was old news in my undergraduate days. And I left Cambridge in 1983.

(Un)lucky UCLA student cops Paris's old mobile number

Nick Kew

I can top that ...

Having, in a previous job, been given a phone extension that had previously been a fax number:-(

Mine was bad enough, but at least it wasn't a heavily-used fax number. My colleague just up the corridor at the same time got the main public fax number for the entire research institute of about 300 people!

MPack malware exposes cheapskate web hosts

Nick Kew

Not true

"Poor configuration of Apache servers allowed ..."

True up to a point, but the real culprit is PHP. Together with failure to take advantage of a number of protections.

"Check if your hosting company uses chroot and/or suExec because that is the only way to make sure that your own web site will not be compromised by other users sharing the same physical server."

That's not true at all. chroot is not relevant to this issue. suexec is one of a number of options that is relevant, but very few PHP hosts use it (a few more are prepared to use FastCGI, which serves a similar purpose). There are also quite a few assumptions underlying the claim.

And to Steven Hewittt - have you seen any of the press PHP has got from within "the OSS crew"? It's been known for years to be a security minefield. You'll find me on record comparing it to Microsoft, as both have put "attractive to dumb users" ahead of security. Google Stefan Esser for comment from the heart of "PHP security".

UK.biz: recruiting talent the number one IT problem

Nick Kew

A Recruiter calls ...

[Ring Ring]

"Hello, [me] speaking"

"Hello, this is J. Random Recruiter. Is this a good time?"

"Yeah, fine. What can I do you for?"

"We've got a city financial company needs your skills, in particular [foo]"

"Indeed?"

"Would you be available to work in The City"?

"I work for clients around the world. The City is fine. Just so long as they don't expect my bum physically in their seat on a regular basis. Happy to travel to London occasionally - say, up to once a month."

"They'll pay £150K for this. And that's a permie salary"

"Great. And that'll be based on working primarily from home?"

"No, clients won't generally do that. But you don't have to live in London, you can commute in from the country".

"It's a minimum of five hours from here to Paddington, one way. About monthly is OK; anything much more frequent isn't. That's why I work from home, for clients around the world".

"You find clients who are happy with that?"

"Most of my income comes from America, which means it's losing its value. I'd welcome work coming from London."

"And you wouldn't consider moving"?

"Yes, but not to anywhere in SouthEast England."

"They might be flexible on the pay".

"The money is fine, thank you. Southeast England isn't. That's what I've escaped from, and I'm not about to go back".

"Oh. So you wouldn't be interested?"

"As I said, I'm happy to go up there from time to time."

... and it draws to a close. We haven't even discussed the work itself, beyond the recruiter having taken an interest in my CV. He can use our telecoms infrastructure to do his job (contact prospective recruits) remotely, but won't countenance the recruits themselves doing likewise.

Not all of them say £150k (the last one I recollect did). But the shape of the conversation is remarkably predictable. I expect hacks prepared to work in central London are in a lot of demand and commanding that kind of pay because of it, while those of us who won't do it will find my tale very familiar.

Open source 'leaving Asia behind'

Nick Kew

This argument is oddly familiar

This argument is oddly familiar, because it cropped up recently amongst members of a major open-source organisation in the context of ... why we have so few women. The argument was that a robustly critical culture seems hostile to women, and they can't take the heat, so we should change it.

This particular organisation does have a significant Asian presence (though still way behind Europe and North America). I believe that is determined more by language than anything else - our European presence is concentrated in those countries where English is spoken either natively or as a fairly-universal second language.

How to counter premature optimisation

Nick Kew

Don't confuse non-optimisation with non-design ...

In about 1988, I was involved in developing an embedded system, with a hard limit of 128K EPROM for a complex system. So code optimisation wasn't optional.

But at the same time, I was able to improve a key mathematical algorithm used. That brought the system startup time from 45 minutes (power-up to fully functional) down to about 90 seconds. It took more code, so it required optimisation too.

Now while that's very clearly not the kind of optimisation the article tells us to dispense with. But there's also a big grey area between the two. So I'll continue to say rude things about the great big messes I see. They may be technically mere optimisation, yet still have an order of magnitude or more effect on performance. Not to mention (sometimes) security.

Silicon offsetting - the new green saviour?

Nick Kew

Alice in Business

You seem to have overlooked the reference to a related article:

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/01/09/alice_business/

Alice in Business

Nick Kew

Feedback summary

In addition to the comments here, I've had some interesting feedback in email. I've posted a reply to them on my blog, at http://bahumbug.wordpress.com/2007/01/16/feedback-on-alice/