Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: skewed sample

Yup, and 80% of that job-seeking sample would recommend that their rivals (for the few jobs available) should focus on dead-end languages. Astonishing.

Re: Fusion is one exception

A decent route into space is another.

Artificial intelligence.

Cure for cancer.

Civilised international relations. (Does that fall foul of (a)?)

You quibble with "working on", but just because they were barking up the wrong tree shouldn't disqualify their efforts, otherwise you have a tautology. I think "precious few" is overdoing it.

Re: "Self-referential" curiosity

I doubt it. USB isn't a peer-to-peer link. It's very much host and slaves, and the connector on this device looks like the slave end, so it won't be able to see the other slaves.

Re: maybe....

"i thought in this day and age of super GPU brute force etc that the gov can crack encryption?"

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_attack.

In summary, for any sensible encryption algorithm you can kick brute force attacks so far into the long grass that no-one will ever be able to brute-force them with existing computer technology, regardless of their budget.

The NSA *may* be able to decrypt this hard drive if they have access to working quantum computers or if they are aware of a systemic weakness in the algorithm. The former would put them several decades ahead of the "open" scientific community in a field closely intertwined with fundamental physics, which seems unlikely. The latter is possible, but if it is true then I wouldn't expect them to decrypt this guy's drive. That would effectively reveal to every foreign government that the US can read all their secrets and I'm sure the NSA wouldn't want foreign governments to know that.

Re: the highest tech facility on the planet

You can argue that, but I suspect that there are three-letter organisations that have rather more. One of them not only uses Linux but is actually responsible for writing some of it. But that merely adds weight to your argument, so I'll stop nit-picking, lest the OP get the wrong idea.

Re: Re: THE WEB AS WE KNOW IT WILL DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIE

A standard DRM means that no-one can claim to be a complaint browser unless they've paid the licence fee and joined whatever consortium owns the decryption keys. Historically, that has proven to be quite a barrier to deployment. Look at JPEG 2000, for example. Dead in the water for a decade, and not because the world didn't need a revised JPEG standard.

Or is this some new kind of "open source DRM", where anyone can decrypt the content? That would be nice.

Or perhaps you are happy to have it "in" the standard, but undocumented and optional? That's the current position.

There is a place for DRM, but slap bang in the middle of a class of applications, 90% of which would be harmed by it, is not the place.

Re: Fantastic thesis!

I quite agree, but the PhD viva did flag up one correction. The list of tags at the end of the article is missing "Surveys". Actually, quite a number of El Reg articles are missing this tag. Perhaps someone would like to add it.

(Note: That's shorter than the full tag-name which is "Ursine defacation habits, Papal religious beliefs and Holmesian constipation", but I don't think anyone will be confused by the abbreviation. We all know what to expect from a survey.)

Re: Asylum taken over by the inmates

"And what moron decided that IE and Windows had to ape FF, Apple and Adobe and create accurately scaled print-ready fuzzy text (causing variable density) instead of (tradional Microsoft) readable pixel aligned text?"

Probably someone whose day job consists of preparing content that ought to have the same page layout on screen as it does when printed. For such people, proper WYSIWYG has been a long time coming to Windows. Such people probably also have the retinal 40-inch monitors that seem to be standard issue amongst Microsoft's UI designers.

By contrast, I'm guessing that your day job consists of preparing source code that is rarely (and in most cases never) printed and you are working with a somewhat smaller monitor and would like to see as many perfectly-pixel-aligned lines of text as possible per square-inch of screen estate.

An irony here is that the Metro-encumbered devices that VS2011 is aimed at will hardly ever print anything either, and they all have poxy little screens with exactly your requirement for clear pixel-aligned text rather than "something absolutely fabulous, darling". Perhaps Microsoft's UI team should get off their fat arses and (a) walk over to the offices of almost anyone else in the company who actually uses VS for a living, and (b) take their Metro-encumbered tat with them and try reading some actual content whilst they are en route. With any luck, they will (c) get run over by a bus.

Re: the energy company method

I don't think that method is unique to energy companies. I think it is pretty much standard practice in all industries, for reasons I've never been able to fathom.

However, it is likely to be masked by another irrational effect -- the tendency for everything to be priced at "round" numbers. So if the unit cost rises from £100 to £103, there will be agonising meetings to decide whether to bravely absorb the cost increases to protect our valued customers (retail at £149.99) or whether to regret that these increases will have to be passed on given the pressures of the global economy (retail at £159.99).

Re: Aliases

I wondered about that. If I register under one and not the other, do I have a good case against some domain squatter who registers under the other? If not, I may feel obliged to register both even though I don't intend to use one.

Re: Re: Re: Fascinating

"At best it sounds pretentious or implies a self perceived superiority and attempted theatrical authority."

Guilty as charged. I was responding to claims about the unusability of Office that I found not only untrue in my own experience, but also utterly unsupportable *even in principle*. I have nothing but contempt for the original author (Hi, I spit on your grave, btw.) and do indeed perceive myself to be superior and perfectly entitled to claim the authority vested by natural law in all those who have a clue.

Re: Re: Is there no end to their perfidy?

Yeah, trying so hard, and yet his predecessor managed so much more on that front.

Re: the long and short of this story

Not by my reading it isn't. The reduction occurs because roughly 10% of people do both of (i) use their DoB as their PIN and (ii) carry this DoB elsewhere in their wallet. Therefore, a strategy of "use the DoB in the wallet" will succeed in 100% of those cases. Less amazing, and possibly not completely true, but (sadly) probably not completely false either.

Re: Slightly off-topic (winelib)

WineLib? Yup. Been following Wine for about a decade, and in particular I have followed its extensive database of popular apps that don't work particularly well. I really wish it were different, but I don't think I could recommend Wine-on-Linux to a non-geek.

Despite no personal experience in trying to make it work, I suspect that winelib is similarly close-but-no-cigars-yet, so I'm reluctant to recommend it to my employer.

This is not intended as a criticism of those who have worked on Wine, but I think we have to moderate our expectations when we set out to faithfully reproduce behaviour that isn't properly documented. A priori, there was no reason to suppose that Wine (and winelib, for the same reason) was even possible, let alone likely to be affordable or imminently available.

Re: Consultants

Based in the decisions they've been making recently, are you sure this hasn't already happened? Say, sometime in the 1960s, perhaps?

Re: @secret goldfish -- Re: Re: Re: Do writers dream of electric royalties?

"Spot on, but being organisations they BUY effective lobbying which we citizens can't. Methinks, we citizens need an organisation that does the same/maintain balance."

That might work, but a cheaper solution would be to level downwards rather than upwards. Stop the corporations from spending money that way rather than struggle to find a mechanism for poor people to keep up.

I'm sure that once upon a time "lobbying" was called "bribery" and consequently not something that either the corporation or the politician would have wanted to be associated with. Somewhere along the line it seems to have been given a PR job to make it acceptable. That's the real bug with an obvious fix. All else is just symptoms and band-aids. (That rather weak analogy is supposed to be an IT angle, by the way. Apologies if it isn't working for you.)

Re: still looks breathtakingly awful

Actually, it's getting worse. I think the original logo was just one colour, but people have now started shading the areas differently and this merely strengthens the perception. Check out the logo as used on http://www2.sainsburys.co.uk/activekids/.

I thought there was a law against the depiction of minors performing sex acts?

Re: How to make it all green

Nurse, we have two sense-of-humour bypasses on the comments page. Get an ECT team over here at once!

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: tarded.

"Hey, reg, is there an easy way to get to the "view my posts" page without having to find an article with comments, view the comments, login, view my posts?"

You can use the "Forums" link at the top of each page. That cuts out part of the process.

Re: OS or App?

If the API call results in an elevation of privileges, it is the OS's fault, fair and square, but the implications of the article are that 90% of attacks are not of this nature.

If it merely uses the current user's privileges to perform a malicious action, it is the App's fault. You can do quite a lot of damage without elevated privileges. All phishing attacks, for example, fall into this category and "emptying my bank account" is quite a lot of damage. Depending on network security, you might also be able to transmit company secrets to an IP address in Shanghai. (See the Nortel story.)

Re: more severe

History has quite a number of regimes where a conviction resulted in some gruesome fate befalling family and friends (followed by your own demise, natch). I rather suspect that several still exist, though these days it tends not to be written explicitly in the statute books. It's just "understood".