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User: gedhrel

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  1. Re:Not so worried about quantum on Ask Slashdot: Post-Quantum Asymmetric Key Exchange? · · Score: 1

    "What would you do..?"

    Publish it as widely as possible, publically. As a secret it's worth killing over.

  2. Re:Recognizing gender 65.9% based on one tweet on Linguists Out Men Impersonating Women On Twitter · · Score: 1

    From the article, 55% female, roughly, and it mentioned that.

  3. Re:Recognizing gender 65.9% based on one tweet on Linguists Out Men Impersonating Women On Twitter · · Score: 1

    From the article, about 55% female, and it mentioned that.

  4. Not 263 lines of code on The 8-Bit Computer That's Been Built By Hand · · Score: 1

    263 lines on the display. The article describing it gets it wrong, too, but there's an OS listing at the site.

  5. Re:Recovery Fairy Tales again on Espionage In Icelandic Parliament · · Score: 1

    It wasn't that great a challenge. The rules prohibited physical disassembly of the drive; presumably the idea was that the data should be recovered via standard commands issued to the onboard chipset?

    "Please do this impossible work for free." Yeah, right.

  6. Re:So they are smart ... on Should Dolphins Be Treated As Non-Human Persons? · · Score: 1

    If that's the yardstick for personhood, perhaps you can outline what you've invented lately.

  7. Re:fix your health not the keyboard! on Ergonomic Mechanical-Switch Keyboard? · · Score: 1

    Personally? I didn't bother. I had a private recommendation and I went directly to them. Sessions were about 35 quid a pop (perhaps 60 dollars?) which is bugger-all when compared to the benefits: I got my life back. I was out of the office, sick, effectively, and paid personally for these. Turned things around very rapidly and well worth the money.

    I appreciate I'm fortunate enough to have had the money to do this, but tech pays well on the whole and compared to the cost of _not_ doing so I'd not muck around in the future.

  8. Re:fix your health not the keyboard! on Ergonomic Mechanical-Switch Keyboard? · · Score: 1

    There are several conditions which give rise to similar sets of symptoms, and without having an expert take a look, your guess is just that.

    RSI is an over-applied term.

  9. Re:fix your health not the keyboard! on Ergonomic Mechanical-Switch Keyboard? · · Score: 1

    This is all excellent advice. Your GP and your local ergonomic advisor might be well-meaning, but they tend to target the site of the pain - which often arises as referred pain due to nerve pressure elsewhere. (There's a lot of unnecessary tendonitis surgery being performed as people mis-diagnose carpal tunnel syndrome, etc.)

    Go see a physiotherapist; ideally one who you've had recommendations of from a fellow sufferer. You sit for eight hours straight in a terrible position: your back and neck cramping up, your traps tightening defensively, and so on, and the place you're gonna feel this is not the place where the damage is occurring. A few sessions with a decent physio (and an easy exercise regime which you FOLLOW - use your workrave breaks to do these stretches) can turn this around. It's your livelihood you're talking about.

    Anecdotally: about three years ago I had terrible RSI symptoms - so much so that I actually thought my career was over. I did a whole bunch of intensive physiotherapy (after my GP helpfully and very rapidly started talking about surgery - well-meaning, but not informed) and it pretty much saved my quality of life, my ability to earn, and my mental health.

    Don't look to "cope" with this. It's typically fixable. Talk to an expert. There's a simple cost-benefit trade-off.

  10. Re:Who can be trusted? on Indian Military Organization To Develop Its Own OS · · Score: 1

    "Reflections on trusting trust", Ken Thompson, 1984.

  11. Re:right to not incriminate yourself? on British Teen Jailed Over Encryption Password · · Score: 2, Informative

    The caution now runs thus:

    “You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

    which is to say, the prosecution is permitted to sneeer and imply that you've found an alibi after the fact; the judge won't censure them for it, and will not instruct jurors to ignore those comments.

  12. Re:Only 16 weeks? on British Teen Jailed Over Encryption Password · · Score: 1

    He will get asked again when he comes out. This will rapidly turn into a fiasco.

  13. Criticism of the criticism in the article... on Security Lessons Learned From the Diaspora Launch · · Score: 1

    There's a strand of comments against that article offering the viewpoint that the author's criticism should be followed by patches, or is otherwise somehow invalidated.

    Look at Diaspora's current "contributor agreement." It shows the same approach to legalese that's been demonstrated in the codebase: ie, it's of shoddy pre-alpha quality.

    No bloody way. Fix the contributor agreement, you might see patches.

  14. Office Open XML on Microsoft's Chief Exec For Latin America Says 'Open' Means 'Incompetent' · · Score: 1

    would be a case in point.

  15. Re:Relativity Says It can be. on Geocentrists Convene To Discuss How Galileo Was Wrong · · Score: 1

    You're gonna claim that there's no such thing as centrifugal force, next.

  16. Re:Power strips (with on/off buttons) are bad on Stupid Data Center Tricks · · Score: 1

    Agh.

    We've had a number of problems caused by contractors who behave like naughty children in this fashion. So much so that our briefing to people let into the machine room (our estates people will just let contractors in and leave them unsupervised!) includes "if you accidentally hit the big red button (that has a cover over it these days because it is right where you'd expect a lightswitch to be, and we've been stung by that before) or pour your marguerita into the UPS stack, yank out a power cable because you've climbed up a rack ratehr than getting the ladder*, or ANYTHING, do not try to turn stuff back on. Let us know what happened. We are aware that accidents happen and there will be no recriminations for honesty."

    * or the guy with a hacksaw in his hand who says: "whilst I was being careful and not sawing through your fibre runs, I noticed that someone had sawn through your fibre run. Honest." It really is a bloody circus.

  17. Re:Very old news. on Google-Backed Wind-Powered Car Goes Faster Than the Wind · · Score: 1

    It is cool, but there's wiggle-room in the debate :-)

    The device extracts energy from the wind, and using only that, the vehicle *as a whole* progresses downwind faster than the windspeed.

    The cunning part is the prop; because it's rotating, the blades themselves aren't moving directly downwind (well, considered instantaneously, they're moving across it), and that's the "trick" of it. It's a very clever idea indeed.

  18. Re:NEVER talk to the police. on UK Police Promise Not To Retain DNA Data, But Do Anyway · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That is not the case. The wording of the caution is that if you do not mention anything when questioned that you later use in your defence, that may prejudice your defence.

    That is to say: a prosecuting barrister is, these days, within their rights to sneer and imply to the jury that what you've said in that regard was clearly made up after the fact.

  19. Re:Notes? on Pen Still Mightier Than the Laptop For Notetaking? · · Score: 1

    That depends on the student. Chalk and talk works well for particular learning styles. There's also plenty of evidence that transcription assists recall for lots of people. You mention "listening, thinking, and asking questions" - what you really want is for students to be in a high state of alertness rather than switched off. Different people achieve that different ways, so don't pooh-pooh the idea out-of-hand.

  20. Re:STFU on The LHC, Black Holes, and the Law · · Score: 1

    What would be the relative velocity of a cosmic-ray-generated black hole to the earth, as compared to one that may or may not come out of the LHC?

    So, the chances depend on how long such a relatively stationary (that is, oscillating in the earth, effectively) black hole would take to evaporate before it actually managed to consume much mass - which does involve it coming fairly close to matter, in itself no mean feat - but the two numbers you quote aren't enough to do that calculation, I think.

    (I'm not a crank, by the way. The LHC won't destroy the planet. But counter-arguments need to be well-thought-out and not more woolly nonsense.)

  21. Re:1996 called, on Where Are the Cheap Thin Clients? · · Score: 1

    The university in question has been hauled over the coals in the past after laptops containing confidential information were sold. It's not the only one.

    (That was about a decade ago; our DPO still has to make regular court appearances to update on the process of contacting the people affected and mitigaion of the damage.)

    Encrypted laptops, etc, are all well and good; however, there'salso a cost in convenience when someone can't get at their data because rather than slap it on some robust bit of network storage that's properly backed up, they've kept it on their desktop for the last three months and everything has gone up in smoke.

    The bonus is that the data stays on-site where it can be properly curated. And doesn't wind up on J.Random User's home laptop that then gets nicked going through customs.

  22. Re:1996 called, on Where Are the Cheap Thin Clients? · · Score: 3, Informative

    The organisation I work at (it's a university) spends about a million quid a year because people fail to turn off PCs overnight. The running costs of your cheap Dell POS are much higher; the power consumption too.

    For clerical and administrative staff, we can put 7-14 virtualised desktops onto a single box/blade - more with non-whole-stack virtualisation or terminal services. We put our heat generation in a few places, we do get better utilisation. We also export pictures of our data to users, not the data itself, which is quite a bonus.

    The downsides are what you'd expect: mostly, we have fewer spindles to deliver storage to the desktops (this is the biggest issue we face, I think); multimedia is okay-ish; for heavy computational users there aren't really gains to be had.

    It's certainly got its place. Anyone selling you a "one size fits all" for your organisation probably doesn't understand your organisation, but this isn't not a completely incredible approach.

  23. Re:Or it would go the other way on UK File-Sharing Laws Unenforceable On Mobile Networks · · Score: 1

    In this case it was Mandy. "Otherwise respectable"?!

  24. Are you sure? on Google Envisions 10 Million Servers · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure you know quite what "-" means.

  25. Re:I thought RAID was about spindle count on RAID's Days May Be Numbered · · Score: 4, Informative

    You don't rely on RAID to avoid data loss; you rely on it as a first line in providing continuity. We run backups of large systems here, but we tend to do other things too: synchronous live mirroring between sites of the critical data. And beter system design. There are some systems where, whilst we _could_ go back to tape (or VTL) at a pinch, having to do so would be a disaster in itself.

    We're designing systems that permit rapid service recovery (the most live critical data) and a second tier of online recovery to get the rest back. We just can't afford the downtime.

    Double-spindle failures on RAID systems are just one of those things that you _will_ see. Deciding whether a system deserves some other measure of redundancy is mostly an actuarial, rather than a technical, decision.