How does it compare with Tesseract ( https://github.com/tesseract-ocr ) or GOCR ( http://jocr.sourceforge.net/ )?
Apart, of course, from having to send all your stuff to somebody else's computer?
32773 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Are GCHQ that dense? Yes, yes they are."
No they're not. They just hope they can get away with it anyway.
They'll brain-wash the Home Sec to let them do it. And heaven help us if the current Home Sec. in the HO gets into No 10. The current Home Sec in 10 has been bad enough but the current Home Sec. in the HO actually wrote an article in the times describing himself going through the process without even being aware of what he was actually describing.
"The ad agency even bragged about it."
If you pull a stunt like that the only way to get away with it is to keep quiet. An ad agency is about the least likely body to achieve that. Good to see they receive sufficient opprobrium to spill over onto their client. I wonder if their other clients will notice. Who was it again? Leo Burnett Tailor Made.
I wonder if Leo Burnett Tailor Made will get themselves onto first page on Google with this report.
"if a set of data wasn’t believed to be useful, there wouldn’t be a market to buy it"
FTFY
Remember what I keep telling you, the only thing the advertising industry sells is advertising and this sort of thing is one of their products. It doesn't actually have to be useful, they only have to get clients to believe it is, probably by telling them that all their competitors are already buying it.
This seems to be typical of managerial thinking in general. I've never quite worked it out.
Do we put it down to them being so stupid they actually think it? Or do they know it's wrong but they're so stupid as to think it's credible? Or do they just not care? With a few other gradations in between.
I wonder how long it will take for currently US tech businesses to come to the same conclusion and shift their HQs. Just use a US franchisee to conduct any sales there. ROTW is a big place compared to the US so cutting yourself off from it isn't going to be a good idea.
It's largely a list of the things I don't want in an OS and the good things in the list I already have. I wouldn't, of course, have them if I were running Windows.
One thing I think would be a good idea would be separation of applications and user data. Have a separate, versioning storage engine, either running in a separate container or possibly even on a different processor providing storage as a service, preferably with some sort of authentication to authenticate the application as well as the user ID.
Noting his previous logistics background before joining Amazon (i.e. none) it explains a lot. Such as the customer being the only one to notice that a product had gone into a distribution point and never officially left let alone not having left on schedule. Or their system going into confusion if an order didn't get delivered to a locker, treating it as a return and sending a courier to pick up up the non-received item from the customer who hadn't received it without having any notion that sending out a replacement PDQ would be a good idea. Or including a locker over 200 miles away in the nearby location list.
Let's hope they appoint someone who'll take a look at the whole sorry mess.
A long time ago I worked for a branch of a business that printed out its own invoices & things. Then there was an instruction from on high that all this sort of thing must be printed by some behemoth printer in a corporate data centre with which we otherwise had nothing to do. The corporate data centre had its own ideas about what the data it was to receive looked like irrespective of whether it fitted out requirements.
Somewhat less long ago I worked for a business that received and transmitted data via EDI irrespective of whether what was needed was a good fit with EDI message formats. If there were good tools for parsing EDI messages I never found them.
A little later I worked on a couple of projects which used XML. XML came with all the tools to transform one schema into another or even into non-XML formats. We could have our own private schema and not duly worry about what the customers' schemata were, all we had to do was knock up new style-sheets to transform them into what we wanted. By comparison with what had gone before it was like having a big light switched on. So no, I won't support your comments about XML.
The saddest thing of all about this is that they don't expect clients to notice that there's something hopelessly wrong about it. They must assume that client managements are looking at this, nodding sagely and saying "Good Idea". Given that those managements have already decided that outsourcing critical* components of their operations was a Good Idea the assumptions may well be right.
*whether they realised it or not
"Once out in the wide world, secure key transmission becomes impractical."
If you agree on some sort of hashing algorithm then you can let some third party generate your one-time pad.
If Alice and Bob want to communicate they each sign up to el Reg and let each other know the handle they use. When Alice wants a OTP to communicate with Bob she selects an article and posts a comment. They both apply the hash to the article to generate the OTP. As a variant, in order to reply Bob selects a comment to hash and posts a reply of which the selected comment is a grand-parent. Or to really hide the OTP in plain sight they just use an amanfrommars comment as it stands.
The generation and distribution of the OTP is looked after by el Reg (other discussion fora are available). The shared secret is simply the means of identifying it to each other. There has to be a meeting to share the secret but once that's done there is a ready supply of OTPs with no risk of interception.
"There is PGP and decent one time pads are REALLY easy and unbreakable, the issue with them is purely key distribution."
It certainly is for one-time pads. One reason for suggesting encryption be built into SMTP rather than being on top is that there is already a framework in place - the mail servers.
CO2 tends to get removed from the atmosphere in 40-50 years which is used to justify burning forests as "renewable energy"
Wood burning is essentially a closed cycle - the wood that's burned has been a standing crop that has been building up for a few decades. The C in the CO2 it releases into the air is the C that it removed from the air when it was growing so there's an equilibrium.
Burning fossil fuels releases as CO2 carbon that was fixed many millions of years ago and that amount of C will hang around until it finds its way to another long term sink.
"Sounds like a quite a few people went to schools where the staff had no idea how to store the daily milk delivery."
Milk delivered from the farm was unpasteurised and fresh. Milk delivered to the school had a cooked taste; whether that was simply age or over-zealous pasteurisation I'm not sure but living in the country one knew the difference.