Posts by Gavin Jamie

Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

Re: Countermeasures?

I'm not an engineer but as the zap ray is likely to come from down below and navigation signals from up above does that make shielding easier, esp at high frequency?

UK officials insist 'murder prediction tool' algorithms purely abstract

You can't have it both ways

We have seen several high profile cases where there has been criticism of the failure to predict violent and possibly homicidal behavior. These assessments have been around mental health and extremism/terrorism and have shown the limits of purely human based assessment.

Automated tools may be helpful here to improve the system, although taking humans out of the loop entirely is probably not a great idea. However either we try to predict risk, or we don't, and can't be squeamish about predictions before the event, and vindictive after it.

Hello? Emergency services? I'd like to report a wrong number

222

At the end of the last millenium I worked in a large hospital on the South coast of England. The switchboard not only covered wards and departments but also large accomodation blocks for staff. Often they would be on-call and it was useful to have an internal number.

Like most hospitals the emergency number was 222. This would include cardiac arrests etc.

The number for the largest local taxi company was 222222. This could be accessed by dialing a nine first.

It frequently happened, often to visitors in an advanced state of refreshment, that someone would forget the nine and set of an alarm at switchboard.

Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

Re: Bring back 3.11

I alway wanted Manic Mynah

Airbnb sees AI as its ticket to become a sprawling Big Tech giant

Genuine people personalities

"Your plastic pal that's fun to be with"

All hail the late prophet Adams.

If anyone finds an $80M F-35 stealth fighter, please call the Pentagon

There is a presumption in the appeal that some people could have spotted an errant F-35 in their neighbourhood but not thought to mention it until asked.

US Air Force AI drone 'killed operator, attacked comms towers in simulation'

Re: What a complete shock!

Never mind AI experts, you need contract lawyers. This sort of stuff goes on all the time (albeit less lethally) with actual people and companies.

NHS Digital exposes hundreds of email addresses after BCC blunder copies in entire invite list to 'Let's talk cyber' event

Re: "deleting the original invitation"

That tends to be the most effective way to get me to read it.

UK Ministry of Defence apologises – again – after another major email blunder in Afghanistan

Smple safeguards

I am always a bit surprised that my mail client asks me if I use the word "attatched" in an email without and attatchment but does not at least put a an "are you sure" screen if I am sending to >10 people in the To: or CC: sections who will see each others emails.

Would this be a hard feature?

Tired: What3Words. Wired: A clone location-tracking service based on FOUR words – and they are all extremely rude

Plenty of rude(ish) words in the original

For the young of mind I would recommend What 3 Rude Words which seeks out plenty of rude sounding locations. https://twitter.com/what3rudewords

Microsoft demotes Calibri from default typeface gig, starts fling with five other fonts

Ascender

Seem to be taller than the capital letters in Skeena and Tenorite. Also Calibri to an extent. I would prefer that they weren't.

US Air Force inks deal with Raytheon on Windows 10 (and other) support for ARSE

Did they have to tender ARSE?

They are also contracting for Electromagnetic Lethal Battlefield Operation Weaponry although the two systems are frequently mistake for each other.

Oh good. They're looking for an NHSX CTO. Hopefully they'll see off 'snake oil' pushers, says GP

Re: "it still takes me 17 minutes to log on"

Time to log on is not generally measured as time to Windows desktop, but time to being able to start working. My morning log on is

1. Windows Log on

2. NHS smart card log on - that can be a good 90 seconds of watching a progress bar. More often use that time to go and do something else.

3. Start up the clinical application.

4. Start up the document management application (separate password logon)

Not 15 minutes for me, more like five, but I do have a reasonable bit of hardware running over a 100 meg fibre connection. More rural practices will have whatever ADSL they can get locally.

Be still, our drinking hearts: Help Reg name whisky beast conjured by Swedish distillers and AI blendbot

Cancel your units!

Azure Vitae

Bring it on, Chipzilla! Nvidia swipes back at Intel in CPU-GPU AI performance brouhaha

Cancel your units!

"The two-socket Xeon Platinum 9282 pair crunched through 10 images per second per Watt, while the V100 came in at 22 images per second per Watt, and the T4 is even more efficient at 71 images per second per Watt."

As watts are joules/sec then it would be much simpler to say that Intel runs 10 images per joule, the V100 does 22 images per joule and T4 71 images per joule.

Or even better each images takes 100mJ on Intel with Nvidia using 45mJ or even 14mJ on the T4.

Who's using 2FA? Sweet FA. Less than 10% of Gmail users enable two-factor authentication

Re: Not Surprised

Authenticator app does not rely on having signal. Does needs power and the phone and power obviously.

Google lets Android devs see nanosecond-level GNSS data

Re: Snore!

Is the 200mph still a thing? I was able to get location fixes on my Moto G while sitting at thirty something thousand feet in an A320 over the Bay of Biscay. Phone in flight mode so receive only GPS.

Only worked by the window mind you.

Close Encounters of the Kuiper Belt kind: New Horizons to come within just 3,500km of MU69

Re: It is a long way away from the sun

It is surprisingly bright. You can see for yourself if you can get away from streetlights and use https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/pluto/plutotime to work out when to pop outside.

ALIS in Blunderland: Lockheed says F-35 Block 3F software to be done by year's end

Re: ALIS, ALIS, who the F*ck is ALIS?

Its an Automatic Lock In Situation

Firing a water rocket to 1km? Piece of cake

Re: Zippy

Impressed. Do they give the pressure required?

Safari iOS crashing: Suggestions snafu KOs the Apple masses

Re: Another mark on the list

The bug in Safari was that it responded to the unavailability of an external service by crashing. Graceful behaviour would have been a blank suggestion list.

Hate your broadband ISP? Simply tell your city to build one – that'll get the telcos' attention

In Swindon

... the council have a plan to put 4G in the areas where broadband is poor. This is some rural areas and rather more places in modern housing estates that were built rather far from the nearest exchange.

According to the MP the latter areas now have companies wanting to lay fibre there, although he would suggest that this is a complete co-incidence despite BT and Virgin sitting on their hands for many years.

HAPPY 20th Birthday MICROSOFT BOB

Comic Sans

I was having a little rant about Comic Sans recently until a couple of teachers in the group said that they liked it in education because the "a" was drawn as it taught in handwriting.( i.e. an ɑ rather than an a).

Vulture 2 strapped to speeding van before delicate brain surgery

Roof rack

On Roof Gurney for At Speed Measurement

Selfies are so 2013. Get ready for DRONIES – the next hipster-cam-gasm

Manual labour

It would surely be simpler, and possibly cheaper, to employ a minion to follow you around and take your picture when requested.

I would suggest calling it a "serfie"

Amazon wants me to WEAR NAPPIES?! But I'm a 40-something MAN

Temporal error

I find google is excelling at pushing ads for things I bought yesterday, which really is not much of a trick.

Top Brit docs wade into GP data grab row, demand 'urgent' NHS England talks

Are you sure what you opted out of?

There was a mailshot about the Summary Care Record which would have taken place over the last two years or so. This came with an opt-out form and was reply paid. From what I remember it was purple. This is the record that could be accessed for your health care e.g. in an A&E department or emergency GP service at the weekends or evenings.

Care.Data is completely separate. It will not be available to people treating you. Leaflets only came out in the second half of January this year and did not feature an opt out form (there are several good suggestions for forms around here). However opting out of the SCR will not have any effect on this extraction. This needs to be done separately.

Be sure which one you have opted out of.

GPs slam NHS England for poor publicity of data grab plan

Re: What leaflet?

That was the old policy. It seems to have changed now so that it will prevent any upload, althought this is relatively recent (and seems to have been announced on Twitter)

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>@C7RKY @sam_a_voice @clarercgp Hi. The 1st type of objection in FAQ 8 stops all flows of your data to care.data http://t.co/bAvaJiaPWU</p>&mdash; Geraint Lewis (@GeraintLewis) February 12, 2014</blockquote>

<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

NHS carelessly slings out care.data plans to 26.5 million Brits

Re: GP's Opening Hours

You know more than your GP probably and there has been no extra time given by the NHS to give advice on this. If you want to opt out just email or write to them. There are a few forms knocking about (the NHS England has cleverly not produced an official form, in case people thought that they needed one).

Our local CCG produced a form. Nothing specific to Swindon in it. You can download it from http://www.whalebridge.nhs.uk/images/PCDpermission.rtf

Re: More details

This care.data extraction is nothing about your personal care. The data will never be used to treat you or call you for treatment. It is purely for management and may be given to researchers, including drug companies. Identifiable is a moot point - it will certainly be detailed enough for jigsaw identification.

There is a good, more skeptical, Q&A at http://care-data.info

Huge Antarctic iceberg: 1 Singapore? 8 Manhattans? This is CHAOS

Islands only

I would propose that only islands are used when discussing floating structures. There is a much better sense of boundaries. It has already been commented that there is little chance of seeing an iceberg and Berlin in close juxtaposition. It is easier to visualise, and indeed define islands.

Whilst Manhattan and Singapore would both meet this criteria I would hope that the Reg would recognised the fine and honourable traditional UK measurement of the Isle of Wight https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22size%20of%20the%20isle%20of%20wight%22

Is it barge? Is it a data center? Mystery FLOATING 'Google thing'

Buy and Large

(with the different spelling) was of course the worldwide (and beyond) corporation in the Disney Pixar film WallE. Would Pixar need anything this big?

Plastic ingredient FOUND ON MOON of Saturn

Finding water

It is all very well finding water on the Moon and Mars but only Titan provides somewhere to put it.

El Reg Playmonaut soars to 113,000ft

Very stable

From a position of ignorance it seems a very stable platform. Not much twisting around at altitude.

Does anyone know why the horizon seems concave rather than convex as the system bobs up and down? I assume it is optical but it seems more to do with movement than angle.

Angry Birds fire back: Vulture cousins menace UK city's mobiles

Re: Missed opportunity

I would imagine RFC1149 would suffer from considerable packet loss in the circumstances.

First C compiler pops up on Github

Stupid Question

I understand that I may be a bit thick here but it appears to be written in C.

Now I get that you can write a new C compiler these days, compile it in GCC or whatever and then get it to compile itself.

But this is the first C compiler. How did they compile it? By hand?

Londoners can bonk their way to work without Oyster cards TODAY

Re: Cost?

It might cost more. There is a daily price cap on Oyster (as you cumulative bus spend can be stored on the card). They can't do this with PayPass so if you make more than three bus jouneys a day you will pay more than you would with Oyster.

Better prices than cash though.

Google's Drive + Gmail: A 10GB Dropbox killer

Doesn't work for me

I write documents in Drive (or what was Docs before). When I have finished I email them to my editor. At the moment that involves downloading as text and then uploading to Gmail again.

This is not made any simpler by sharing. I do not want to force the recipient to log on to Docs but the sent "link" is to a live version rather than a downloadable format of my choice. In essence this is just an extension of the "share" option and is not even as good as the "email as an attatchment" option in docs (which for some reason gets caught in spam filters much more and only allows a single attatchment)

New body to supervise as your NHS file includes more and more stuff

Re: Accuracy??

As a medical student and junior doctor it was drummed into me to ask the patient and not trust the record or even other doctors. When people report having to give their details several times it is down to this training as much as anything else. I don't know if this is still the mantra.

In any case you look pretty daft if you don't ask the patient if they are allergic to penicillin before giving it. It is a trivially easy check that will one day save a patient (and rather more selfishly, my career). The same is true for checking which leg need to come off

Of course this renders the case for the SCR rather less than it would otherwise be, but I know what I would want my doctor to do.

2,500 copycat hack attempts on abortion provider site – report

Higher or lower than background?

Are these just port scans or the usual password guessing that hits any machine with an open SSH port? http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2012/01/06/brute-force-password-guessing-attempts-on-ssh/

So, what IS the worst film ever made?

Mama Mia

MrsJ got this out but even she could not stomach it. I don't mind musicals, I have even hummed along to Abba in the past but third rate singing and acting that made a chair look like John Guilgud was beyond the pale. Managed 30 mins.

LOHAN spaceplane project starting to shape up nicely

GPS at altitude

Apparently all GPS units that can work over 18km (which is pretty feasible) are classified as munitions. Have you got access to unrestricted GPS? (of course you know all of this I'm sure)

http://www.armscontrol.org/documents/mtcr (item 11)

MPs round on plans to offshore gov IT work

Officially encouraged

The NHS has an entire organisation dedicated to sending back office function abroad. These are not necessarily patient records but it is still HMG paying the unemployment benefits. As this is the DSS and not the NHS this is not deemed important.

http://www.sbs.nhs.uk/

Visa pushes NFC operator bypass on French

Multiple Cards

I have both Visa and Mastercards and choose which to use. Presumably with an SIM or phone based device I could choose one to use. With SD its could require 2 or more slots to let me do this.

Not that I am even slightly considering waving my phone around in this manner.

Ofcom pricks Shard's 'biggest erection' boast

A new unit needed

Perhaps we could measure the usable floor space divided by the land area used. Works fairly well until the development of mushroom shaped buildings. As this will measure how much a building has up top I vote this unit is named the "Paris".

Boffins develop method of driving computers insane

Call Captain Kirk

Surely you just point out a logical error or give contradictory input and the thing blows up. Or is everything I have ever learned about artificial inelligence wrong?

London Olympics ticket grab ends with website wobbles

from a lottery to a game show

The problem with this scheme is there is then an incentive to apply for everything in the firsts round and see what you get.

You can then buy what you get or wait and see if something more to your taste comes up in the subsequent rounds (when you apply for everything again). Basically it turns into a protracted version of "Deal or No Deal"

I suspect interest might wane by round seven...

French mayor busts overly busty bust

Can't find it

Found the Town Hall but can't find her jubbliness on street view.

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Neuville-en-Ferrain&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Neuville-en-Ferrain,+Nord,+Nord-Pas-de-Calais,+France&gl=uk&ll=50.750018,3.152491&spn=0.002257,0.00478&t=h&z=18&layer=c&cbll=50.749979,3.152715&panoid=8wbqslQ3dyAP1NBmhByrgw&cbp=12,157.76,,0,2.22

Early demand knocks back UK iPad 2 delivery dates

There's an app for that

iPee and iPoo.

Because it can do anything.

Cure for BALDNESS causes IMPOTENCE, says new study

No surprise

These drugs are basically testosterone inhibitors. They are therefore good at stopping things that testosterone causes such as male pattern baldness and prostate enlargement. Testosterone is also responsible for things like libido which you might want to keep.

Nice to have some figures on it though.