I see here the modern replacement for the traditional "Mandy - Slow and Easy - 01-423-9999" tartcards which were a standard adornment to 1980s phone-boxes.
Forget all this idiot-proofing; I just wish manufacturers would come out with a mechanism that will automagically hitch up a trailer and sort out the electrics/snatch-cable in the dark/rain/mud without me needing to get out of the car several times in the process.
"an infra-red night-vision windscreen would be kinda neat too).
Tanuki Towers has sufficient thermal-mass to make such things irrelevant: if I turn the heating off altogether I lose about 0.5 Centigrade per hour; running flat-out the oil-furnace and both woodburners can push the temperature up by about 1.5 Centigrade/hour, making "turning the heating off overnight" a complete waste of effort.
#1 consideration for me in any deployment is "what regulatory regime will my data be held under" ?
When you have to be able to satisfy FoIA, RIPA, SOX etc, entrusting your data to a third-party in a different jurisdiction is a spectacular business-risk. Any IT savings on hosting-fees are likely to be wiped out the first time you have to fly the corporate legal-team across the Atlantic . . .
I still use a Datong RF speech-processor - nothing finer [it generates SSB at 60KHz, clips it, then down-converts it again to audio - so leaving all the nasty clipping-induced harmonics behind].
Shame about the block on sheep-shearers: I guess this means no more tranches of tanned and muscled Aussies and Kiwis visiting the UK in summer to drink the place dry.
It's a bird, innit? It's a bloody sea bird . .. Albatross!
If you mention the 1980s Nimrod AEW3 I may have to bore you to suicidally-high levels of ennui with tales of semaphore-programming on the dreaded GEC 40xx series computers.
History has repeatedly shown that one of the quickest and most-effective ways to accelerate the adoption of a technology is for it to provide quick and easy access to a diverse range of quality porn.
Unless "YouView" addresses this sector, it's doomed to failure.
[I'm sticking with my Bloomberg subscription - my porn begins with $$$$$]
The whole principle of 'geographic' numbers is today dead as a do-do, and should be abandoned: it's completely meaningless in these days of mobiles and IP telephony: long gone are the days when you could reliably omit the area-code if you were calling someone who lives down the street.
"Network numbering" for mobiles has also gone by the wayside through number-portability, so "free calls/texts from your mobile to other people on the XYZ network" is equally meaningless.
The only real differentiation that anyone cares about now is having some indication of likely call-cost easily derivable from the number. And that's not exactly easy to work out unless you know your service-provider's interconnect-charge policy as well as the number you are calling.
So, honestly, the entire thing's a mess - but outside the premium-rate stuff, does anyone really worry about the per-minute costs of a call? Compared to the days of the old nationalised Post Office Telephones, phone-calls today cost peanuts.
(Yes I can rememebr the old Buzby-thing about "it's cheaper to call after six or at weekends", to which some wag invariably added "or from the office...")
I wish I'd taken pics of the failed H-P LaserJet-II I once had to strip.
It lived somewhere damp. And was regularly used to print envelopes. Seems it had become home to a family of snails, who had developed an envelope-glue-eating habit as well as dying in interesting ways in the mechanism.
Sony still do some decent MW/LW/FM portable-radios; the one I've got in my bathroom [a 10-year-old 'ICF-M770L' ] gives about a year of shave-time and bath-time listening from four AA Duracells Not sure if this one's still available new in the UK though.
Alternatively, there's a company called "Eton" that peddles Chinese-made digitally-synthesized MW/LW/FM/short-wave radios that seem to have a good reputation.
[I'm not taking my mains-powered 1944-vintage RCA AR88-D communications-receiver into the bathroom].
The problem for small-business comes when the rules for big-business get applied.
Responding to a tender document, even a one-man business is these days invariably asked to confirm that they have in place a range of auditable environmental/anti-discrimination/fair-trade/fair-pay policies, questions on whether you offer flexible-working/workplace-nursery/stakeholder-pensions to your 'employees' etc. If you don't, you don't get the tick-in-the-box on the assessment - so you don't get the contract.
Then there's all the EU-mandated stuff like WEEE directives - all this adds small but cumulative amounts of friction and drag to the whole process-of-commerce.
Public-sector organisations are the worst for this sort of legislational turd-gilding. Charities and other 'third sector' bodies are close behind. Some private businesses are standing fast against this regulatory touchy-feely stuff, but their numbers are falling.
What's needed is for small-businesses to be granted an exemption from all this legislation that's only really applicable to big corporates.
Most coding is - to be honest - the blue-collar work of the 21st century; it can be easily taught to a 'good enough' standard and then carried out by the Indians/Chinese.
Always assuming 'what to code' has been adequately specified !
The sorts of things I look for in a compsci graduate are more business-skills based as well as the techie stuff. Sure, you might need someone who knows about real-time programming and interfacing to the real-world, but you also need people with decent skills in business/systems-analysis, project-management, risk-management. That's actually far more important a skill-set than just 'what language you code in'.
So, Apple have finally developed a hypocorism- euphemism- and innuendo-filter as well as working out how to reliably detect naughty fleshtones in attached images?
It's alleged that what killed-off Betamax was that the VHS-people allowed their tech to be used for pr0n but the Betamaxists didn't. Part of me would like FruitCo to suffer the same fate. Perhaps Microsoft/Android/Windows7Phone should specifically offer apps like "Pr0nfinder Professional", "RateMyTodger" and "Nipple-Vu",
The Intertubes are made of Badgers' Paws and String
One of my clients has a container-load of old Toshiba Tecras from the late part of the last decade. Can I cash the lot in against a Lenovo Thinkpad and a cute apartment in the Bahamas?
Most of my music=listening is done while driving. Streaming doesn't work well here [dammit, FM radio doesn't work well here either much of the time: often I can only get a hissy rendition of Radio-4 or someone speaking Welsh/Irish!]
Brute force techniques generally crack any password: you simply find someone that knows the password and apply brute-force to them until they tell you what it is.
And when the men are no longer being sprayed with this and the effects wear off - presumably they become profoundly bitchy, irritable, suffer with hot flushes/stomach-cramps and are entirely unable to park a car properly for the next week?
The big problem with any of these plans is cooling the process. Oil-refineries, petrochemical plants, power-stations are sited on coasts/rivers for a reason - they all need a reliable supply of vast quantities of cooling-water.
OK, a shipborne process has the entire sea as a potential heatsink - but cooling-water by the millions-of-litres-per-day isn't exactly easy to source in Afghanistan.
Nokia were at one time promoting phones with their "comeswithusic" pre-load service. I guess they've decided to extend the scope of the offering to also embrace adult content ?
The future is 'TV' stripped of ads, BitTorrent or other P2P as the transport mechanism, and with subtitles provided by one of a hundred fansubbing groups.
I'm in the UK. Here we have the BBC "TV-licence" tax on anyone who receives broadcast- or cable-TV. I'm happy to get my 'TV' a day or so behind via the 'net - and so not have broadcast receiving gear.
Truth is, too, that none of the Japanese anime series I really want are ever going to see broadcast in the UK. So here's to the hordes of fansubbers - and up yours BBC/Google!
How long before Saint Jobs comes out and announces "Any Military usage of the iPhone is contrary to Apple's Ethical Statement " - and promptly revokes permission-to-run for all 'military' apps that have been sold via the App Store?
If the assorted musos think there's a need for a national radio-station to showcase their new talent, let the record-companies fund it out of their A&R budget rather than expecting to get a free ride courtesy of the licencce-fee-payer.
Coat? Mine's the one with the DAB-radio-that-doesn't-receive-anything-here in the pocket.
OK, after they sort out that particular Catholic-reliquary scam, I can offer - to the enduring realm of Shakespearian actors - the skull of Yorick *as a boy*.
[Anyone seeking to buy the 21st-century equivalent of 'papal indulgences' - better known as carbon-offsets' - at a discount should queue to my rear]
Genetically engineer a 'functional food' hybrid between the tobacco- and coffee-plants. Then you can get both your nicotine and caffeine-fixes combined into one easy-to-swallow shot.
I propose to market this under the name Caffotine(tm).
Fuelled by this stuff, programmer-productivity would soar world-wide! Though you'd probably still need a team of non-Caffotine-enhanced debuggers . . .
From my PoV the only real benefit of BBC etc migrating over to DAB is that it'll free up a good slice of the FM spectrum for re-use by undocumented broadcasters.
OK, Google: put forward your idea as a RFC. Then we can all choose to giggle, and ignore it.
Until then I'm happy to continue running my nine intercontinentally-dispersed authoritative DNS-servers for clients and Gurgle can remain blissfully-unaware of their locations.
[despite my efforts the Southern Hemisphere remains somewhat DNS-impoverished: ah, how I long for cost-effective 100Mbit/sec providers to the Falklands and Antarctica]
And - as far as the Bible is concerned - let's face it; the book's chock-full of smiting and begetting. Then we move on to the pornfest known as the "Song of Solomon" - that can easily be repurposed into a Flash-animated-shagathon.
So priests are being encouraged to implement push- and multicast -proselytising modes? I wonder how many Megabits-per-second a streamed prayer requires?
[ Must admit, whenever I've tried to open a connection for prayer or worship I've never managed to get past the first SYN ]
Register
191 posts • joined Friday 8th September 2006 11:04 GMT
Page:
Vorsprung Durch...
"Vorsprung Durch Technik" as they say in Germany (just before doing a spectacular flip into the path of an oncoming truck)
Validation
I am reminded of a RIPA-related conversation between myself and an unnamed Home Office type some years ago:
Me: To release protocol- or content-data I will of course need to be formally served with a warrant or summons.
Them: That's how it will happen.
Me: How will I know that the request is valid?
Them: It will have the signature of a senior Judge, or the Home Secretary, on it.
Me: OK, please provide me with copies of the signatures of all senior Judges and the Home Secretary, to be held on-file for validation purposes.
Them: <<silent, vacant expression of having unexpectedly been hit round the head with a dead fish>>
I'm still waiting.
Re: So do people actually scan these things?
I see here the modern replacement for the traditional "Mandy - Slow and Easy - 01-423-9999" tartcards which were a standard adornment to 1980s phone-boxes.
Call rejected - you are too stupid.
I've for a long time wanted a phone that has caller-IQ as well as caller-ID.
Idiot-proofing only results in smarter idiots.
Forget all this idiot-proofing; I just wish manufacturers would come out with a mechanism that will automagically hitch up a trailer and sort out the electrics/snatch-cable in the dark/rain/mud without me needing to get out of the car several times in the process.
"an infra-red night-vision windscreen would be kinda neat too).
Thermal Mass
Tanuki Towers has sufficient thermal-mass to make such things irrelevant: if I turn the heating off altogether I lose about 0.5 Centigrade per hour; running flat-out the oil-furnace and both woodburners can push the temperature up by about 1.5 Centigrade/hour, making "turning the heating off overnight" a complete waste of effort.
Thermostatic radiator-valves are wonderful.
Businesses come, businesses go. It's all part of what Joseph Schumpeter describes as 'Creative Destruction'.
Live with it.
Seminal.
http://www.canismajor.demon.co.uk/spool/livejournal/bstj2.jpg
I never met you but you touched my soul....
There's one less record in /etc/passwd tonight.
[And Steve Jobs no longer has a giant's shoulders to stand on]
IT is cheap. Lawyers aren't.
#1 consideration for me in any deployment is "what regulatory regime will my data be held under" ?
When you have to be able to satisfy FoIA, RIPA, SOX etc, entrusting your data to a third-party in a different jurisdiction is a spectacular business-risk. Any IT savings on hosting-fees are likely to be wiped out the first time you have to fly the corporate legal-team across the Atlantic . . .
Datong
I still use a Datong RF speech-processor - nothing finer [it generates SSB at 60KHz, clips it, then down-converts it again to audio - so leaving all the nasty clipping-induced harmonics behind].
Sheep-sh***ers
Shame about the block on sheep-shearers: I guess this means no more tranches of tanned and muscled Aussies and Kiwis visiting the UK in summer to drink the place dry.
It's a bird, innit? It's a bloody sea bird . .. Albatross!
If you mention the 1980s Nimrod AEW3 I may have to bore you to suicidally-high levels of ennui with tales of semaphore-programming on the dreaded GEC 40xx series computers.
Does it do Porn?
History has repeatedly shown that one of the quickest and most-effective ways to accelerate the adoption of a technology is for it to provide quick and easy access to a diverse range of quality porn.
Unless "YouView" addresses this sector, it's doomed to failure.
[I'm sticking with my Bloomberg subscription - my porn begins with $$$$$]
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
When Cisco introduce power-over-fibre, have them call me.
Not all glasses are concave:
ACME [otherwise known as our good friend Cliff Stoll] produces topologically non-concave drinking vessels:
http://www.kleinbottle.com/drinking_mug_klein_bottle.htm
Badgers.
You're excluding the 1,472,338 users who are actually Badgers.
Geographic numbers are a daft idea.
The whole principle of 'geographic' numbers is today dead as a do-do, and should be abandoned: it's completely meaningless in these days of mobiles and IP telephony: long gone are the days when you could reliably omit the area-code if you were calling someone who lives down the street.
"Network numbering" for mobiles has also gone by the wayside through number-portability, so "free calls/texts from your mobile to other people on the XYZ network" is equally meaningless.
The only real differentiation that anyone cares about now is having some indication of likely call-cost easily derivable from the number. And that's not exactly easy to work out unless you know your service-provider's interconnect-charge policy as well as the number you are calling.
So, honestly, the entire thing's a mess - but outside the premium-rate stuff, does anyone really worry about the per-minute costs of a call? Compared to the days of the old nationalised Post Office Telephones, phone-calls today cost peanuts.
(Yes I can rememebr the old Buzby-thing about "it's cheaper to call after six or at weekends", to which some wag invariably added "or from the office...")
Not bugs but...
I wish I'd taken pics of the failed H-P LaserJet-II I once had to strip.
It lived somewhere damp. And was regularly used to print envelopes. Seems it had become home to a family of snails, who had developed an envelope-glue-eating habit as well as dying in interesting ways in the mechanism.
Sony, or Eton...
Sony still do some decent MW/LW/FM portable-radios; the one I've got in my bathroom [a 10-year-old 'ICF-M770L' ] gives about a year of shave-time and bath-time listening from four AA Duracells Not sure if this one's still available new in the UK though.
Alternatively, there's a company called "Eton" that peddles Chinese-made digitally-synthesized MW/LW/FM/short-wave radios that seem to have a good reputation.
[I'm not taking my mains-powered 1944-vintage RCA AR88-D communications-receiver into the bathroom].
2 for the price of one?
What we all want to know is - would they be classified as meat or dairy?
Red Tape and turd-gilding.
The problem for small-business comes when the rules for big-business get applied.
Responding to a tender document, even a one-man business is these days invariably asked to confirm that they have in place a range of auditable environmental/anti-discrimination/fair-trade/fair-pay policies, questions on whether you offer flexible-working/workplace-nursery/stakeholder-pensions to your 'employees' etc. If you don't, you don't get the tick-in-the-box on the assessment - so you don't get the contract.
Then there's all the EU-mandated stuff like WEEE directives - all this adds small but cumulative amounts of friction and drag to the whole process-of-commerce.
Public-sector organisations are the worst for this sort of legislational turd-gilding. Charities and other 'third sector' bodies are close behind. Some private businesses are standing fast against this regulatory touchy-feely stuff, but their numbers are falling.
What's needed is for small-businesses to be granted an exemption from all this legislation that's only really applicable to big corporates.
Coding is a small part of it.
Most coding is - to be honest - the blue-collar work of the 21st century; it can be easily taught to a 'good enough' standard and then carried out by the Indians/Chinese.
Always assuming 'what to code' has been adequately specified !
The sorts of things I look for in a compsci graduate are more business-skills based as well as the techie stuff. Sure, you might need someone who knows about real-time programming and interfacing to the real-world, but you also need people with decent skills in business/systems-analysis, project-management, risk-management. That's actually far more important a skill-set than just 'what language you code in'.
Always look on the bright side.
This surely means it's time for redundant public-sector workers to retrain as insolvency-practicioners and then to get lucrative jobs with PwC?
[Or, if you've only got a room-temperature IQ, retrain as a bailiff]
Let me lift your flap and insert my tab.
So, Apple have finally developed a hypocorism- euphemism- and innuendo-filter as well as working out how to reliably detect naughty fleshtones in attached images?
It's alleged that what killed-off Betamax was that the VHS-people allowed their tech to be used for pr0n but the Betamaxists didn't. Part of me would like FruitCo to suffer the same fate. Perhaps Microsoft/Android/Windows7Phone should specifically offer apps like "Pr0nfinder Professional", "RateMyTodger" and "Nipple-Vu",
Mass messaging?
Banning Mass-messaging is really going to annoy the Catholics.
[Do they have Catholics in India?]
The Intertubes are made of Badgers' Paws and String
One of my clients has a container-load of old Toshiba Tecras from the late part of the last decade. Can I cash the lot in against a Lenovo Thinkpad and a cute apartment in the Bahamas?
Dr Freud? Dr Freud, you're needed...
Why did I read "ring probe" and get a wholly-unnecessary vision of where the Yard had been investigating?
Hissing Sid!
Sounds like it's time to call in Captain Beaky and his Band !
The bravest animals in the land are Captain Beaky and his band
That's Timid Toad, Reckless Rat, Artful Owl and Batty Bat
They march through the woodlands singing songs
that tell how they have righted wrongs.
Coat? Mine's the one with the snakebite-proof gloves in the pocket.
Can't hear you - I'm in the car.
Most of my music=listening is done while driving. Streaming doesn't work well here [dammit, FM radio doesn't work well here either much of the time: often I can only get a hissy rendition of Radio-4 or someone speaking Welsh/Irish!]
Electrodes and conductive gel.
Brute force techniques generally crack any password: you simply find someone that knows the password and apply brute-force to them until they tell you what it is.
Blow "View Haloo!" and let the chase begin!
But do any of these 'apps' manage to get anywhere near the 126dB sound-pressure-level of a genuine Vuvu?
If not, I want my money back.
Coat? Mine's the one with the hunting-horn in the inside pocket.
Who can forget..
mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko
PMT?
And when the men are no longer being sprayed with this and the effects wear off - presumably they become profoundly bitchy, irritable, suffer with hot flushes/stomach-cramps and are entirely unable to park a car properly for the next week?
WTF?
A truly silly amount of money for a *MONO* radio that looks like something your parents/grandparents had?
Pull the other one: it's got stereo!
Keepin' it cool?
The big problem with any of these plans is cooling the process. Oil-refineries, petrochemical plants, power-stations are sited on coasts/rivers for a reason - they all need a reliable supply of vast quantities of cooling-water.
OK, a shipborne process has the entire sea as a potential heatsink - but cooling-water by the millions-of-litres-per-day isn't exactly easy to source in Afghanistan.
Comeswithporn
Nokia were at one time promoting phones with their "comeswithusic" pre-load service. I guess they've decided to extend the scope of the offering to also embrace adult content ?
How quaint.
This is utterly last-millennium thinking.
The future is 'TV' stripped of ads, BitTorrent or other P2P as the transport mechanism, and with subtitles provided by one of a hundred fansubbing groups.
I'm in the UK. Here we have the BBC "TV-licence" tax on anyone who receives broadcast- or cable-TV. I'm happy to get my 'TV' a day or so behind via the 'net - and so not have broadcast receiving gear.
Truth is, too, that none of the Japanese anime series I really want are ever going to see broadcast in the UK. So here's to the hordes of fansubbers - and up yours BBC/Google!
Er, yeah.
How long before Saint Jobs comes out and announces "Any Military usage of the iPhone is contrary to Apple's Ethical Statement " - and promptly revokes permission-to-run for all 'military' apps that have been sold via the App Store?
Let's see the colour of your money.
If the assorted musos think there's a need for a national radio-station to showcase their new talent, let the record-companies fund it out of their A&R budget rather than expecting to get a free ride courtesy of the licencce-fee-payer.
Coat? Mine's the one with the DAB-radio-that-doesn't-receive-anything-here in the pocket.
Alas, poor Yorick.
OK, after they sort out that particular Catholic-reliquary scam, I can offer - to the enduring realm of Shakespearian actors - the skull of Yorick *as a boy*.
[Anyone seeking to buy the 21st-century equivalent of 'papal indulgences' - better known as carbon-offsets' - at a discount should queue to my rear]
The obvious answer is...
Genetically engineer a 'functional food' hybrid between the tobacco- and coffee-plants. Then you can get both your nicotine and caffeine-fixes combined into one easy-to-swallow shot.
I propose to market this under the name Caffotine(tm).
Fuelled by this stuff, programmer-productivity would soar world-wide! Though you'd probably still need a team of non-Caffotine-enhanced debuggers . . .
Thumpin' Choonz FM.
From my PoV the only real benefit of BBC etc migrating over to DAB is that it'll free up a good slice of the FM spectrum for re-use by undocumented broadcasters.
Dear Gurgle. Please submit a RFC.
OK, Google: put forward your idea as a RFC. Then we can all choose to giggle, and ignore it.
Until then I'm happy to continue running my nine intercontinentally-dispersed authoritative DNS-servers for clients and Gurgle can remain blissfully-unaware of their locations.
[despite my efforts the Southern Hemisphere remains somewhat DNS-impoverished: ah, how I long for cost-effective 100Mbit/sec providers to the Falklands and Antarctica]
Must be the Tesco 'Value' Viagra!
Presumably they were aiming for the "oldest person to be listed on the sex offenders database" award?
Smiting and Begetting
And - as far as the Bible is concerned - let's face it; the book's chock-full of smiting and begetting. Then we move on to the pornfest known as the "Song of Solomon" - that can easily be repurposed into a Flash-animated-shagathon.
Original SYN ?
So priests are being encouraged to implement push- and multicast -proselytising modes? I wonder how many Megabits-per-second a streamed prayer requires?
[ Must admit, whenever I've tried to open a connection for prayer or worship I've never managed to get past the first SYN ]
Indulgence...
This reminds me of the medieval Catholic church's sale of 'indulgences' - which were essentially permits-to-sin.
Not only did they invent the sins, they sold the penance. A nuce little earner.
Get Stuffed, tv-licensing
And for their next trick they'll be demanding all those who can *potentially* access such crap to pay the licence-fee.
Locked!
This 'thing' doesn't sound like an airship.
It sounds much more like what my RADAR-friends call a 'return'. And that means you remain a target until you're confirmed friendly.
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