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Since the NHS were admonished for not installing patches which would have prevented Wanacry in May 2017, Boeing really should have patched their systems by now.

*Ahem* http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg...

Jaroszewski is playing a dangerous game and at no less than airports! Fraud is dishonesty calculated for advantage. Authorities are never sympathetic of people showing up their shortcomings. Jaroszewski may find they throw the book at him. It took the Intel "hacker" 12 years to clear his name and he was one the "lucky" ones. http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg...

Fraud is "gaining a financial advantage by deception". "Authorities" frequently don't give a fuck.
You can return to your fantasy now...

Jaroszewski is playing a dangerous game and at no less than airports! Fraud is dishonesty calculated for advantage. Authorities are never sympathetic of people showing up their shortcomings. Jaroszewski may find they throw the book at him. It took the Intel "hacker" 12 years to clear his name and he was one the "lucky" ones. http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg...

Have a look at WSUS Offline. It does more or less what you're asking for, although you do have to run the collector and client manually every post patch Tuesday.

No, there is no more patch Tuesday. And also no, because you cannot trust Microsoft not to put spying or Windows 10 "upgrading" into a security patch.

I know that Caspar was active in the Qubes OS community and he is credited with introducing Qubes to the European Parliament before they recommended it as a mitigation against mass surveillance. He also served as a Director for the Tor Project.

Computing UK has posted an obituary here.

NHS England had a program (I believe it still has a green light) to train around 50000 healthcare workers to code their own solutions, not to send them on a new career path, but so they can set them developing software at the same time that they are performing their healthcare duties for the population - Code4Health

So how hard could it possibly be?

I don't think the licensing costs are as low as you claim they are. I have heard from several sources that due to the way the licensing was structured Nokia is paying a lot more per unit than the other Windows Phone vendors. I have also heard that they have paid back in royalties to Microsoft any cash that Microsoft has provided to them. Which is not particularly hard to believe since that article claims they are paying $250 million per quarter on licensing costs alone.

And it's terribly slow by comparison to the other options. Even according to their own research.

Google has released a research paper (PDF) that suggests C++ is the best-performing language on the market.

No, they didn't. They compared four languages (C++, Go, Java and Scala) using a single algorithm, and two implementations (initial and improved) per language. Out of those, the optimized C++ turned out to be the fastest and the least memory hungry, whereas the improved Scala version used the least source code, and the improved Go version compiled the fastest.

None of this allows generalization to "best-performing programming language on the market".

It's not for everyone, though. They write, '...it also required the most extensive tuning efforts, many of which were done at a level of sophistication that would not be available to the average programmer.'

This is a very important point. If you are Google, you probably have developers who can do this kind of tuning, and you will probably benefit from it (the developer effort is expensive, but inefficient software may well be more expensive at Google's scale).

In general, though, what you want to consider is not only the best performance that has been produced by the world on a single problem, but also the performance on different problems, the variation in performance between implementations, the average performance, and the development time.

In 2000, Erann Gatt (now Ron Garret) published a paper (PDF) that showed the results of comparing 16 implementations written by 14 programmers, in C or C++ (lumped together), Java, and Common Lisp or Scheme (lumped together). These results show that the fastest programs were written in C or C++, Lisp produced the fastest programs on average, and offered the least variation in performance. Lisp also offered the shortest development time on average.

Of course, this is old data. If anyone has performed a similar study more recently, or including different problems to be solved rather than a single one, I would be very interested.

Meanwhile, the Computer Language Benchmarks Game compares many language implementations across several different tasks, with multiple programs for each task, and shows that the results differ depending on exactly how you measure.

Apparently, if you want the fastest programs, you should go with C, C++, Ada, ATS (Fortran, Common Lisp, and Python also produced fast programs, but weren't as good on average). If you want short programs (which may be expected to correlate with short development time), you might want to go with Ruby, Python, Perl, Lua, or JavaScript. If you want short development time, but also reasonable performance, then Go, Scala, or Haskell may be good choices (or you could go the time-tested route of writing what you can in rapid development languages, and the parts that need to be fast in high-performance languages).

Well, Gartner respectfully disagree with you. They don't think it's the only reason for the 4% year on year decline, but they believe it's part of the reason.

http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2024918/pc-market-decline-2010

There is no lock in.

Sure there is. To give you only one example that was just written about it today: the airline industry.

Airline industry to invest just 1.8 per cent of revenue in 2010

Many airline systems remained locked on legacy mainframe systems and databases, with cost-saving consolidation initiatives that have been widely implemented in other industries such as virtualisation andcloud computing having made little impact so far.

1% drop? That's all?

Nope, it's not even a 1% drop. It's a 0% drop in marketshare, on Windows machines. MSIE still is getting on 100% of Windows machines sold in Europe (or elsewhere) despite the 'browser ballot' Yep ,that's 100%. Even though the antitrust complaint found that Microsoft was hurting Europe by using it monopoly on desktop OEMs and illegal tying to establish and maintain a monopoly on web browsers the remedy does not include addressing the original complaint.

The browser 'ballot' does not make any kind of remedy, not even a little, involving removal of MSIE from the desktop monopoly. MSIE is still bundled on Windows, even if you install Chromium, Firefox or one of the other extras. So, if you are a big enough asshole to still run Windows, your choices go like this

• MSIE alone
• MSIE + Chrome
• MSIE + Safari
• MSIE + Opera
• MSIE + Firefox
• ...and so on...

The illegal tying is still happening, and each and every instance of MS Windows makes the problem worse. Firefox ran a campaign a few years ago, "take back the web". To do that, MSIE has to go. To get rid of MSIE, Windows has to go. Germany, France and others have advocated dropping the problem. If every country made a push to get Windows off their networks, both public and private, billions would be save each quarter by avoiding the malware that is part and parcel of the Windows experience.

So far, MSIE still is getting on 100% despite the 'browser ballot' Yep. Even though the antitrust complaint found that Microsoft was hurting Europe by using it monopoly on desktop OEMs and illegal tying to establish and maintain a monopoly on web browsers.

The illegal tying is still happening, and each and every instance of MS Windows makes the problem worse. Firefox ran a campaign a few years ago, "take back the web". To do that, MSIE has to go. To get rid of MSIE, Windows has to go. Germany, France and others have advocated dropping the problem. If every country made a push to get Windows off their networks, both public and private, billions would be save each quarter by avoiding the malware that is part and parcel of the Windows experience.

How did Dell suddenly become the computing term trademark police? Just a few months ago, they were trying to trademark "cloud computing"!

http://www.computing.co.uk/vnunet/news/2224228/dell-cloud-claim-struck

Puh-leeze!

However, the effect is debatable, with no consensus on what it will be and whether it would be negative. If we were getting to 50% wind power then I'd want to see more research on the possible effects, but I can't see it having any noticeable impact one way or the other any time soon.

sorry to post after my own post, but I just found the source - it was £60m, not £26 - I heard 26m on a gartner call last year! here is a link to tharticle in Computing Magazine

There's a link here of open source news for UK schools. Doesn't look too bad, but you can guess nearly all of them still use Microsoft. This link refers to Becta's appearance before another EU antitrust inquiry into Microsoft's practices.

There's a link here of open source news for UK schools. Doesn't look too bad, but you can guess nearly all of them still use Microsoft. This link refers to Becta's appearance before another EU antitrust inquiry into Microsoft's practices.

Your gait can also be used to identify you. Something that could more easily be added to remote surveillance than a bloodhound :-)

Various studies recently have shown no real link between violent video games and aggression. So we have one study that shows it does and various other studies that show it does not. Which one should we believe?

Here's just a few other studies that conflict with this study:
http://www.physorg.com/news5758.html
http://www.geeknewscentral.com/archives/007883.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050815-5205.html
http://www.computing.co.uk/vnunet/news/2184836/link-video-games-violent-teens

First UK software patent - March 2008.

after the UK IPO appealed against the EU patent office and lost in the high court. Slashdot missed this one (I submitted a story but it was ignored).

Not for now.

Speaker blocks moves to put parliament on YouTube

"Footage from the chamber and committee rooms are only available subject to a licence which is issued by the speaker.

Martin will not allow material to be available on web sites such as MySociety and YouTube for fear of manipulation, according to deputy commons leader Helen Goodman.

"The licence stipulates that material must not be hosted on a searchable web site and must not be downloadable," she said."

"Press corps?... you mean any of those corporations like Sony or Disney or News Corp that pretty much control what is seen or read in the US?"

Its amazing. 100% Guaranteed, if you point out something drastic happening in the EU, people start throwing you examples about how bad things are in the US. Only, I don't live in the US, and bad things happening in the US means bad things happening in the EU can be ignored - or better yet, we can just pretend its not real.

"Propaganda?, try watching the trailers for the US and international versions of the new "Indiana Jones" trailer."

Indiana Jones is a commercial film. On a serious note, did you ever in your life contemplate and examine EU propaganda?
EU to launch 7 million euro anniversary PR campaign and use Eurovision. The Austrian press has revealed that the EU has earmarked more than 7 million euros for an ambitious PR campaign which aims to try and win back the hearts of European citizens at its 50th anniversary next year. As part of this effort the EU has launched an online competition - 'design a birthday logo for the EU' - whose motto is "Happy birthday EU", which will become the official symbol of the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. The Commission is offering 12,000 euros worth of prizes, as well as an invitation to a prize ceremony, for the winning entries, which must "reflect the EU's achievements (such as peace and prosperity) and its future". On the website EU Communications Commissioner Margot Wallstrom says, "50 years of peaceful co-operation and growing prosperity and security in Europe is really something to celebrate. It is also an excellent occasion to discuss what we expect from the EU in the future, for our children and generations to come." Click here to see the website.

The Sunday Telegraph has seen a memo by Wallstrom showing that the Commission also wants to link the Eurovision song contest to the anniversary. Viewers would be told about "the need of close co-operation in our common project", "solidarity" and "the benefits that European integration has brought to its citizens". Some of the new member states are not keen. An unnamed Czech government source said, "For most of the new members, this plan brought back memories of Communist times." (Die Presse, Sunday Telegraph, 23 July)

EU propaganda makes Bush and US efforts cited by people like you look utterly pathetic. But its clearly working, you are not aware of their activities.

"And no, regardless of what you may have read chidren do not get finger printed without permission, and no before you even bring up the topic... Socialized Medicine is not a bad thing."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/07/kiddyprinting_allowed/
http://www.statewatch.org/news/2006/jul/08fingerprinting-children.htm
http://www.eudemocrats.org/bg/23/article/21/
http://www.computing.co.uk/computeractive/news/2195260/becta-guidelines-fingerprinting
http://www.leavethemkidsalone.com/

Its not exactly secret, the funny part is your head is so far up your backside you think its not happening.

Tell me, do you think that the American bashers round these parts would take to the idea of America taking fingerprints of all children without permission of parents? Even then, that kind of Policy would be openly discussed in the US. In the EU it gets talked about in secret closed session and just implemented. The executive does not answer to the people.

As for Socialised Medicine, I live in the UK. I live in a socialised medical system, and I can tell you Michael Moore was talking such incredible disinformation about the UK NHS that its not even funny. But thats a side show when ta

The marketing crap [hp.com] says the London Stock Exchange is the world's fastest, using Microsoft software on HP hardware.

Yes, it's highly impressive. When it's working.

http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2203101/lse-technical-glitch

* * * * *

I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.
—A. Whitney Brown

I think it was a joke about the news referring to the fact that the england tax administration have lost 2 cd with millions of personal and confidential data.

http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2203890/25m-records-lost-tax-man

Splicing is not actually necessary. No cable has perfect internal reflection and so some light escapes naturally. A tap can sample this light without disrupting the cable, or being detectable. There was also a method a few years ago that involved encasing the cable in something that reduces the refractive index of the glass at the boundary and so allows the signal to be read - but this can be detected by the network operator. Newer methods are undetectable.

"You can build it, design it, and it will work great. The trouble begins when you want to add things to it, add some services and things like that. Because of the brittle nature of the platform, when you do that, other things break", Martin Taylor July 2005

"A number of studies by IDC and Gartner have proved our platform has a lower TCO than open source because there are no hidden costs."

'[Nick Barley] refuted allegations that MS security was lax, saying .. "We've spent a lot of time recently trying to educate the marketplace"', June 2004

"The study found that enterprises using Microsoft's .NET/Windows platform to build and support custom applications incur 25% to 28% less cost than those using J2EE/Linux platform during a four-year lifecycle", May 2004

I'd never heard of waste toner -- and I've never had a problem with toner running out before expected EOL on my old Epson laser -- but I Googled and found this. Looks like my next laser will be a Toshiba.

Double standard. Hardly, countries such as Mexico regularly refuse to extradite persons to the US if that persons faces the death penalty. Source 1, Source 2, Source 3. The Wikipedia article also points out that many European countries regularly refuse to extradite their own citizens. The most famous case is that of Roman Polansky, whom France refused to extradite to the US after he fled the country following a conviction on the charge of child rape.

As for you assertion that the US disproportionately denies extradition requests, I would like to see some data to back it up. The only data I could find was published by the Australian government, the country from which the accused was extradited, for the 2004-05 year. Source. According to the document, they did not have a single request denied by the U.S.

Also, just for clarification, the US did not go in and "take" him. The summary clearly points out that the US spend three years in proceedings before the order was finally given to extradite. The following article also clarifies that the accused with in Australia during the entire ordeal. Source. I hardly call that "waltzing over."

No, probably not. Microsoft's attempt at a swift flanking move on our stampede to format freedom has (temporarily) been blocked http://www.computing.co.uk/itweek/news/2173717/ope n-standards-bodies-call-halt.

"published without restrictions or royalties": OpenXML already fulfills this today

Good point. Today yes, OpenXML meets that criteria, but tomorrow may be a different story.

"fully and independently implemented by multiple software providers on multiple platforms without any intellectual property reservations for necessary technology": Once Novell did it for OpenXML, there will be three vendors (Novell, Microsoft and the open-source project doing the ODF-OpenXML converter) on multiple platforms (Windows & all platforms OpenOffice runs on). Sounds like OpenXML has this one in the pocket as well.

Novell is in Microsoft's pocket, and Microsoft is funding the ODF-OpenXML converter. Besides, you forgot to allow for the "without any intellectual property reservations for necessary technology" part, which is not guaranteed with OpenXML.

But for all skeptics, once OpenXML is an ISO standard in 6 months or so, this will be a given.

We'd better wait until then before adopting it then. Mean time, ODF does all of the above, but without any of the "gotchas".

By the way, congratulations on writing a post which very cleverly skirts all the questionable bits of Microsoft's OpenXML push without actually lying. Care to disclose who you work for?

I'm sure this has nothing to do with security and a lot more to do with making money as in this experiment : http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2165136/ airport-track-passengers

A better question is will is not if it will run XP, but will it viruses

I'm sorry, but you're just wrong. While the state of high-speed connectivity in the UK might not be ideal, we're not doing badly and the rate of broadband uptake in this country is higher than pretty much everywhere else. You might have been right a few years ago, but things are much better now.

Fingerprint payment is already in trial in the UK by the Co-op.

More info:
http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/analysis/2158 818/op-users-back-pay-touch

I agree in general. A random magazine delivered to me a month or so ago (think it may have been computing, have one issue on my desk right now, though I probably won't read it) had an article on devices like this for company use, and I thought it was a great idea. You're right that it will lose energy, though if that energy was cheaper to acquire since you got it offpeak, then there could still be some cost benefits to a company here (and you could also sell the energy to other companies, or back to the national grid according to the article, which could be BS, but an interesting idea), even if it's less environmentally friendly.

Also, yes diesel is maybe even more expensive than petrol/'gasoline', but you get more mpg out of disel engines, so it's still a benefit. If the power companies change their pricing structure, you could change the times that you store energy, unless they make the prices a flat-rate, in which case, yes it's pointless. But they wouldnt make it flat-rate until a lot of people had started using these devices, so if you bought one, and it was a few years til the energy company changes their policy, you win either way.

People are not going to go out and buy a new computer if they are unemployed and their nation's economic growth looks bleak.

It's still a big market if it doesn't grow very fast, and recent pc sales have actually been much better. Microsoft definitely doesn't want to leave.

No, thats absolutely not true. Just because a country is a democracy does not give them a right to pass any law they want to. Think Germany back in the '30s.

A socially responsible company would have left that country at some point. Microsoft should either follow EU law or leave. The US government may lean heavily on the EU to make it lessen its demands, but Microsoft is eventually going to comply, if only for symbolic reasons.

Some excerpts:

What are the main drivers pushing you towards open source?

Fundamentally, open source is about flexibility and ultimately about cost.

What applications are being taken across to open source?

At the moment the migration of applications [is] purely infrastructure, firewalls [and so on]. It's been at that low level and I think we're being appropriately cautious.

There are other ways today of moving from a legacy cost and performance structure into other available products.It's not quite step-changing but giving yourself a significant benefit that narrows the gap between that which has been available, and some of the open source opportunities. One can walk towards the edge without jumping over it.

For those that are interested in reading a bit more there are better articles out there such as this one It's a bit negative on AMD but the infor is better.

The Opteron is featured throughout the lawsuit. AMD accuses Intel of paying IBM to stop marketing servers with Opteron chips. The company also claims IBM executives said they could not support AMD without facing retribution from Intel. The lawsuit claims that Honda Motor (nyse: HMC - news - people ) specifically asked server supplier NEC (nasdaq: NIPNY - news - people ) to design an Opteron-based model, but that NEC inexplicably shelved the product, never marketing it to any other customers.

Hard to believe that one could bully a big company like IBM. Maybe monopolists like to stick together.

I would have to disagree with this; a design is complete when it meets all requirements. A design can only be shown to be complete when it passes all testing...

Minor technicality - it is possible to prove (mathematically) a design meets all (functional) requirements before the implementation (and hence testing) stages using formal methods. It's ugly and tedious, but you can do it...

My understanding was that, excepting certain infamous models (120 GXP "Death Star") made by IBM/Hitachi, all consumer-level hard drives have the same, small, failure rate.

That having been said, there are some brands I wouldn't touch with a bargepole. I wasn't surprised to learn that Fujitsu had left the HDD business after their notorious denial of problems with certain HDDs. Obviously batches of faulty HDDs will happen now and again, but to weasel out of responsibility like that doesn't exactly promote confidence in *anything* they make, does it?

Would you want to buy anything from them after that? I wouldn't.

.. that (at least in the UK) government overspends on IT is quite common, so I'm not overly surprised really.

http://www.computing.co.uk/news/1139418

Any bank that puts its ATMs on the internet has a moron in charge of IT.

Not necessarily, security is all about tradeoffs.

The best way to secure these things is to make sure that the only physical connection from the ATM is to a well secured computer under controlled by the bank.

So all ATMs would be inside bank vaults.
Fat lot of good they would do us there.

Right now most ATMs seem to rely on POTS (Plain old telephone service)for their com link, and it's not as if the telephone system has never been hacked before.

If banks are acheiving reasonable security with POTS service, whats to stop them from adding some more encryption and doing the same over IP?

Bristol City (not the football team ;) ) went wireless recently, and won an award for it.

That article also has an interview with reasons why and how they did it. It cost £3.2m which was funded by the government, local business and HP. It isn't however, just free wireless access for everyone, it is mainly for businesses and projects to make use of it - eg The first wireless application, Schminky, was launched in March 2003, at the Watershed Art Centre's caf. It allowed tourists to interact using mobile devices to play a 'Simple Simon' style game.

Other applications followed such as Savannah, a project involving the BBC's Natural History unit to help children from six Bristol schools learn about the ecology and ethology of African plains.

The strategy-based educational adventure game using wireless iPaq PDAs allowed children to become 'virtual lions', with predators and prey mapped onto the virtual landscape which overlayed school playing fields.

Further projects include the world's first global positioning system (GPS) 'radio play' recreating the 1831 riot for tourists walking around Queen Square and last November's Harbour Trials, giving tourists a multimedia tour with Bristol Ferry Boat Company.

Artciles about the Savannah project is here

Other links: here and at the BBC

Bristol City (not the football team ;) ) went wireless recently, and won an award for it.

That article also has an interview with reasons why and how they did it. It cost £3.2m which was funded by the government, local business and HP. It isn't however, just free wireless access for everyone, it is mainly for businesses and projects to make use of it - eg The first wireless application, Schminky, was launched in March 2003, at the Watershed Art Centre's caf. It allowed tourists to interact using mobile devices to play a 'Simple Simon' style game.

Other applications followed such as Savannah, a project involving the BBC's Natural History unit to help children from six Bristol schools learn about the ecology and ethology of African plains.

The strategy-based educational adventure game using wireless iPaq PDAs allowed children to become 'virtual lions', with predators and prey mapped onto the virtual landscape which overlayed school playing fields.

Further projects include the world's first global positioning system (GPS) 'radio play' recreating the 1831 riot for tourists walking around Queen Square and last November's Harbour Trials, giving tourists a multimedia tour with Bristol Ferry Boat Company.

Artciles about the Savannah project is here

Other links: here and at the BBC

Good point, Timbo, but everyone concentrates on how we get tracked on the move. Isn't the real danger the databases that all this information is feeding into. Scares me. Check out http://www.computing.co.uk/specials/1153206

the PS2 can play every PS1 game ever made.

Bzzzt, wrong.

All generalisations are wrong. You should be more careful about what you post.

show your email publicly, and I'll email you on monday. Or email me, and I'll get you some links (hmmm. will take me time), or a marketing/sales type person who'll have all the nice documentation to hand. Let me know more about what you're after.
Cheers.

some news links from google:
about the RAC

Police, Fire:
news
news
news in pdf format

Police Federation news

This is interesting for you.. the Fire Brigade Union's response to the government's desire to integrate control rooms (you don't need me to tell you any excuse will do to stop this)

http://www.fbu.org.uk/campaigns/control/controls tu ds.htm
http://www.odpm.gov.uk/stellent/groups/odp m_fire/d ocuments/page/odpm_fire_026271-11.hcsp