Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
By "it" I assume you mean "them". This crawling horror has been re-invented every few years for a couple of decades. On *each* occasion it would have been possible to chuck the old one in the bin and remodel on the basis of something that works. On *each* occasion, the politicians have given no indication that such an obvious course of action was even permitted, let alone considered. Even laboratory animals will copy a solution if they see another animal doing something that works. That's two whole generations of politicians being out-performed by guinea pigs.
Perhaps we should put the MoD in charge of child support, just to see what happens?
Quite possibly true, but the article does nothing to explain why this isn't essentially the same problem that squillions of commercial enterprises manage to solve.
You have two parties and a schedule of regular payments between them. The schedule may change from time to time. Both parties need to be able to see the state of the account and its history. Even my bank can manage this, and it managed to lose several billion the other year.
Why is it so hard? What do other countries do? If they have a better solution, why didn't we buy it off them? Why are all government IT projects so un-utterably crap?
Actually, I rather like the big dumb guy. Obviously I found him annoying the first day he arrived, but as soon as it became obvious that he was just trolling on every post it was rather fun to see how many people he could get each time.
A lot like amanfrommars, in fact. Maybe they are the same guy?
They obviously also:
5) Don't understand digital signatures.
Let's assume your crapware has just flagged a Microsoft-signed file as a virus. What now?
If you believe that the black hats have got their paws on the private keys used to sign Windows itself, you should just give up. You cannot protect a system if the bad guys wrote it.
If, on the other hand, you believe the signature is valid, that means the file is supposed to exist and its contents are exactly as Microsoft intended them to be. What do you think is going to happen when you delete it? Is it going to be a nice end-user experience? Is it going to be tomorrow's headline in the IT press?
Questions, questions...
"I see people daily who have 5+ kids just to get the government checks. Stop paying for it, and it will stop happening... at least on this side of the pond."
Stop paying for it and you will produce a generation of kids who grew up in poverty knowing that you chose to punish *them* for their *parents* over-indulgence in unprotected sex.
Yes, I know it is annoying to think that honest, decent taxpayers are paying these idiots to have sex, but once the child is born society has an innocent child that it can either chuck on the scrap-heap (as, allegedly, was the practice in late Roman times) or pick up and look after, in the hope that it might be less useless than its idiot parents. Most civilised people don't reckon the former is an option. So we have to pay. So the next question is whether you give the money to the idiot parent or whether you introduce a new rule saying "There will be no child welfare payments. Any child that you can no longer support financially will be taken into care.".
OMG. I hope the government isn't reading this...
The cement industry *on its own* is responsible for 5% of global CO2 emissions. You *can* make steel using an electric furnace, but you'll need rather a lot of windmills out the back to drive it. (It would be a lot easier if you had a nice nuclear reactor out the back instead.)
But maybe you're right. Maybe the report doesn't say anything about that.
"Let's hope scaredy-cats (like you?) don't make it such that the lessons learned cannot be implemented. Nuclear is the only sensible way forward now, unless the eco-religionists get their way."
Too late, at least in Japan. Yesterday's news brought the revelation that, having switched off 30% of their electricity generating capacity, Japan's government is now asking the people to reduce consumption by 15% in the next few months to avoid rolling blackouts.
The G8 should forget about Greece and start worrying about Japan.
It's not the usual "undocumented APIs are subject to change" story. The final reason given by MS for why we shouldn't use the APIs is:
"Finally these APIs may undermine customer confidence by accessing resources or data that Metro style apps would not normally interact with."
In other words, the current (Win8) implementation of Metro is full of security holes and we'd prefer if all the malware vendors didn't use them, thanks. Otherwise the early adopters of Metro-based devices will get shafted and our marketing department will be sad.
Doesn't *everybody* do this now? And if so, why is *anyone* paying to advertise on commercial channels these days?
Or perhaps the advertisers think they have found a self-selecting audience of stupid people who might therefore be susceptible to ads. Yes, I think I see how that might work. A bit unethical, though.
The impression given in the article was that the "separate copy" rule was a compromise hammered out to avoid further legal wrangling. The deal went something like "You agree to pay a load more money on pointless copies or else we take you back to court, for something or other.". If that's correct, then de-duping the storage would be a violation of the very essence of the agreement.
I think the point is who does the ad-skipping. Under the usual arrangement, someone providing the cable connection to your house cannot be sued for what you pull down the cable. If these people are changing the content before it reaches you, they suddenly find themselves in the position of "broadcaster" and liable for everything.
This "I'm just a carrier" exemption is the same one that protects usenet servers and ISPs from legal liability for the rantings of random idiots who use the service. I think it is a good thing and I wish we had it here (*), so I would be saddened if the behaviour of Dish Networks caused a furore that eventually led to a change in the law.
(* At least, this is my UK-based non-lawyer understanding of the situation in the US. I dare say someone will jump in and correct me if I'm wrong. AFAIK, the UK has no concept of protected status for carriers and we've had some rather daft lawsuits as a result.)
Might you also have to compensate for the refractive effects of the atmosphere? At sunrise, you'd have solar rays entering the atmosphere at grazing incidence, dipping into the lower atmosphere down to ground level and then back up again to LOHAN. Atmospheric density varies along the entire path.
It is reasonable for Iranians to use domain names under .ir for domestic traffic.
It is unreasonable for the Iranian government to crap all over their own people.
Really, these are two separate issues. If you try to conflate them you will end up suggesting that a choice of top-level domain for your email address is a major human rights issue and *that* would be stupid.
Whilst we're here, 8 million kW is a clumsy way of writing 8GW.
My guess is that whoever wrote the English-language press release doesn't actually know what a gigawatt is. That's fair enough, I suppose. I haven't a clue what it is in Chinese. If only there was a "tech news" website which aggregated all these press releases and rewrote them with the proper engineering terminology...
I *think* that's intentional, but this whole debate is now waist deep in layers of irony and I'm not sure where anyone is standing anymore. For that matter, I'm not sure anyone *is* standing anymore. Perhaps we are all just floating in someone else's "ha ha, only serious".
"this is a great opportunity to lose Win32 forever."
A great opportunity for who, exactly?
*You*, dear user, have been able to lose Win32 forever for many years now. Funnily enough, even though it costs more than the alternatives, most end-users have stuck with it. This is probably because they've spent more on apps than on the OS and half their stuff hasn't got a non-Win32 version for any amount of money.
Microsoft, too, are surely large enough to be able to lose Win32 whenever they like. In the last decade, they've reproduced most of the functionality in the .NET universe *and* started to create a third platform with this WinRT thingy. Even if they didn't have Mongolian hordes at their beck and call, most of what we think of as Win32 is a user-level environment on top of a fairly well-defined NT kernel that isn't terribly different (in terms of feature set) from the Linux kernel.
So both you and Microsoft could drop Win32 anytime you (or they) like, and that's how it has been for at least a decade. The evidence suggests that neither party sees this as a great opportunity.
"If NT 4 was still supported and on sale I doubt 1 in a million people would choose it over Windows 7 / Server 2008."
Well since we were talking about the GUI additions rather than the base OS, let's put aside the fact that NT4 probably wouldn't recognise most of the hardware that folks want to plug into it now. That done, are you quite sure about the 1 in a million figure?
Bear in mind that NT4 still can still run on modern hardware in a VM, and if you've ever tried it then your abiding memory will be that everything ran like like shit off the proverbial shovel compared to the host OS.
Bear in mind also that MS actually *ran* this experiment with XP versus 7 and had to withdraw XP from the market because it was more popular.
I don't think I'd call any (or even all) of the changes you list as having made a measurable change to my productivity. The truth, however sad for Microsoft's shell team, is that for me (and surely squillions of others) the main job of an OS is to get the fuck out of my way.
On the other hand, I do use all of XP, Vista and 7 on a daily basis and I will say that I can almost never find anything in the Control Panel these days. The individual applets haven't changed significantly, but there is (and possibly always was) just *no* rationale for where Microsoft choose to put them.
A bit of googling suggests that Apple have about 70% of the tablet market whereas Microsoft have nearer 90% of the desktop market and that's quite a bit down on their historical peak.
I'd say there were significant other players on the tablet market and Apple are under pressure if they want to retain their leadership. An awful lot of apps and content seem to be fairly platform agnostic and so the barrier to entry for a new player is also lower.
The evidence of recent new versions of Windows suggests that Microsoft have not felt under similar pressure for the last decade. The relative crapness of WINE suggests that there are still significant barriers to entry for rivals.
That's also the reason Apple get away with similar restrictions. They aren't deemed to have a monopoly of the market in question and therefore can't be forced to open it up.
The fact that Microsoft's whole Windows-8 sales pitch is about how desktops and tablets are now really just one big market should not be allowed to distract us. They aren't, so Microsoft should be allowed to cripple WoA as much as they like.
...would be a wonderful thing.
It is not uncommon for a typical web-site to contain several dozen essentially unrelated fragments of text. News sites often have over a hundred.
To be "good", a screen reader would have to do rather better than simply read all of the text in no particular order. I don't think it is reasonable to expect screen-readers to pass the Turing test in the near future, so *that* requires web-sites to prioritise their bits and pieces. However, most ad-supported websites actually want you to find it *slightly* difficult to find your way through their site.
So ... would they prioritise the ads, or the content? If they prioritise the former, they are grasping bastards and will be strung up in the court of public opinion for force-feeding ads on poor blind children. (It's bound to be the children. Someone always thinks of them.) If they prioritise the latter, they can expect a Firefox extension to arrive Real Soon Now that uses the markup to downplay (or even omit altogether) those ads for *all* users, not just blind ones.
I've seen no evidence in the last ten years that any of Microsoft's designers even know that there are classes to miss.
UI design ought to be treated as a branch of engineering, informed by psychology and experimental testing, with the objective of making the interface so easy to use that no documentation is necessary. As practised by Microsoft, however, each new product is treated as a work of art, to be crafted by a lone genius and then "explained" to the howling rabble (I mean, er, the customers) afterwards.
The last group of people who made a rash claim about FTL ended up with egg on their faces and the boss resigning. Apparently *this* information hasn't yet crossed the Atlantic.
Regarding the substance of the article, conflicts between local theories, theories with an underlying reality, quantum wavefunction collapse and relativity date back to the EPR experiment. We still don't have a satisfactory resolution. I think the current compromise is unchanged from Bohr's original position which is to deny that there is any such thing as an underlying reality.
If you are happy with that position, feel free to now get excited at the prospect of being able to transmit quantum information as fast as you like, but don't hold your breath waiting for someone to actually build experimental apparatus that can do it on a length scale large enough to permit an unambiguous demonstration.
"Some big US business to purchase a new .europe TLD and simply undercut prices and undermine the registration of .eu entirely?"
Because if they don't impose a similar restriction underneath .europe, the domain won't offer the same guarantee to end-users (ie, that the owner is completely subject to EU laws, rather than just being after a fast buck wherever theyu can get it).
The restriction is not a bug, it's a feature. If you don't want that feature, no-one is forcing you to have it.
It probably reminds you of a car, particularly if the optional extras are outrageously priced.
Or maybe it reminds you of Apple's entire product line, for which you *could* buy optional extras from third parties, but they won't quite match the base product (either in visual styling or function) so anyone who buys into the basic product tends to stick with the brand for all the add-ons.
I wouldn't, but I understand that plenty of people with large disposable incomes do. It could be that MS are now chasing that demographic, having figured that their business desktop is a monopoly and so *cannot* deliver the growth that the shareholders demand.
It could never have been $50 because that is greater than the cost to OEMs and Microsoft would therefore *irrefutably* have been selling Windows *at a loss* when they were under investigation in the US and EU for monopoly abuse.
Even given Microsoft's history of sailing close to the legal wind, that just doesn't seem likely.
Since the alleged offence is a copyright violation, the most that the IP owners can expect to recover through the courts is the money that I paid to the "vendor" of my free OS.
They haven't sold anything so they haven't made any money off the back of someone else's cleverness. Quite the reverse, in fact, since a wide deployment of *players* increases the market for content for those players, and the owners of the DVD IP presumably make money every time someone *encodes* a film and *sells* it as a DVD.
Not in the slightest. Everything to do with gTLDs is purely a stupidity tax. No, the useful services I was thinking of would be whatever they do to maintain the existing TLDs. It probably doesn't require that much money, but as long as someone else is paying I don't really care. Life is too short to worry about whether *everyone* else is getting value for money.
In the context of Intel "baking in" security, we're really only interested in stuff at or below the OS level, so I don't think dodgy apps are really relevant. (If you happen to be running Java or Flash code (dodgy GPU acceleration?) at kernel level, then you might want to reconsider your whole approach to security.)
I think the OP is correct. If you put a clean OS on the system and don't deliberately drop its trousers in the name of usability, then you don't need to give up control to Intel and their allies. It can remain *your* computer and be no less secure for that.
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