* Posts by Ken Hagan

8137 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Death of IE6 still greatly exaggerated, says browser hit squad

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Move along now. Nothing to see here.

"One problem: the aforementioned data, gathered by Net Applications, counts browsers running on Joe Netizen's PC. It doesn't count enterprise users."

That's open to several readings, one of which is "this data counts internet usage, not intranet usage". But it does not matter if people are still using IE6-based applications on an intranet. What matters is that they use use a different browser to surf the web.

That "different browser" can't be a later version of IE but every other browser *can* be installed side-by-side with IE6 so actually that's Microsoft's problem not the corporates'. Having installed a different browser, enforcement of its use is probably also something that a competent corporate admin can enforce and, on the Net Applications evidence, they are doing so.

So the bottom lines are:

IE6's share of the *browser* market is below 1%.

It is safe for web page authors to drop all support for IE6.

US shoots down key Rambus patent

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Prior Art

In fairness, I think we can reasonably assume that the second company only did it to take the piss.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@The BigYin

Dunno. Since I don't associate Rambus with business method or software patents, I didn't consider it relevant.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: cheaper to pay the licensing fee

"Perhaps it *should* be the case. I for one am getting mighty sick of suspect patents which should never have been granted in the first place being successfully used to create an income because it's cheaper to pay the licensing fee than to fight it in court and risk having a judge not realize how crappy the patent is."

Well if you are considering what *should* be the case, why not just say it *shouldn't* be cheaper to pay the licensing fee than fight it in court. Maybe it's the legal system that needs the attention more than the patent system. Right now, abusing the legal process seems to be fairly low risk with potentially big payouts if you get away with it. Perhaps politicians and judges should wake up to this fact, and the former empower the latter to do something about it.

The alternative, in the long term, is that society gets fed up with the fact that neither politicians nor judges seems to be serving them (society) like they are supposed to. History teaches us that *when* society finally loses patience with its politicians and judges, it ain't pretty to look at. So those two groups have (in the long term) a fairly good incentive to fix the problem before it gets out of hand.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: royalty payments

I hope not. That would create an awful precedent whereby any revenue obtained by licensing patents came with the risk that you might be asked to hand it all back at any future time.

It wouldn't be safe to spend it.

So you might as well not have it.

So the patent would be worthless.

Cabinet Office moves step closer to killing Directgov

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Thumb Up

https

Nice to see it will be that much harder for the lower phorms of life to track what I'm up to.

This may just be something they are trying out on the beta, but if the final gov.uk uses https *throughout* the site, it's setting a splendid example to others.

Serial killer PYTHONS stalk Florida's Everglades

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: the apex predator in its natural environment

In Florida, as with *any* populated area, the apex predator is the human.

Other species can pretend to be the apex predator as long as they don't start bragging about it and drawing attention to themselves. Your local conservation group can no doubt supply you with a list of species that didn't realise this until it was too late.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

How does Burmese wildlife survive?

If it encounters one of those, it doesn't. The *species* survives by breeding more than the predators can eat. If the predators get too good at catching prey, the prey population collapses and the predator populations follows a little while later. Mathematicians can have fun with this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka-Volterra_equation).

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: with WHAT?

Species-specific kill-bots, developed under a DARPA initiative? How hard can it be?

if (length>7m && scary!=false)

ok2kill = true;

Berkeley boffins crack brain wave code

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The willing part isn't necessary

We don't actually know that. At least, not yet. Obviously the next phase of the research is to pick up imagined speech. The stage after that is to see whether asking someone a question prompts them to imagine enough of the right answer to detect when the words they actually choose to utter are different.

And I wouldn't worry too much about the neuro-surgery, either. There are *other* research groups looking at harvesting useful information from the interior of the brain with non-invasive detection.

They too are claiming that it might be a big step forward for people with disabilities. They are correct in this and the research is worth doing. However, society *ought* to bear in mind that such powerful techniques *will* be mis-used. At some point in the next century, science may deliver tools that the Inquisition of old would have killed for.

Gov's 'open data' strategy: It'll cost too much and won't work

Ken Hagan Gold badge

That's a mis-leading title

Unless, of course, the government's strategy really *is* for it to cost too much and not work.

It would explain a lot, I suppose.

NHS unfurls condom app – for iPhone-toting teens

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: children of the well-to-do

Well if you can afford an iPhone, you can afford to buy your own condoms, so actually this probably isn't the target audience. My guess is that the target audience is journalists. Kent NHS wanted some free publicity for their CAPs and figured they might get a few column inches out of "There's a CAP for that!".

Students busted for hacking computers, changing grades

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: they got greedy

Indeed. It was a brilliant plan right up to the point where they told everyone in the school that they'd done it and that unless these other students gave them cash (to buy a set of answers) they'd get worse grades than their classmates.

The surprise here is that it took them so long to find a classmate who realised that the cheap way out of this dilemma was to shop the idiots. How many people paid up?

‘Quantum Trojans’ undermine security theory

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Real-world channels contain noise

"This is supposed to be impossible, since any tampering with the quantum communication channel should be revealed – for example, as (entanglement-destroying) noise on the quantum channel. However, as the authors point out, all real-world channels contain noise; to overcome this, quantum crypto schemes exchange multiple pairs over a noisy channel, and use a statistical analysis to detect interference in the channel."

Umm, doesn't this rather drive a coach and horses through the whole business. The message appears to be that to make this thing work from an engineering stand-point you have to fall back on classical methods for noise handling, at which point you've lost the advantage you were claiming for quantum undetectability.

Met Office cuts off Linux users with new weather widgets

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: There's a better solution

You want a site delivering Met Office weather forecasts that isn't tied to a particular OS because of its uses of non-standard tech? Try http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/.

You want something to embed on your desktop because you can? Congratulations. You are an insufferable geek and will just have to live with the fact that the rest of the world does not exist to pander to your taste in consumer electronics. Frankly I think it is silly that they've developed widgets for Windows, let alone any other platform. Can't they just spend the money on forecasting the weather?

Untangling the question of antimatter mass

Ken Hagan Gold badge

I think distance between "A level" and "recent popular science books" is an order of magnitude less than the distance between either and "what experts are doing right now". A couple of decades ago, I did a degree in this shit, and I was pretty confident when I graduated that I was less than half-way there. OTOH, I've a much clearer idea than most people of just how much I don't understand.

Scientists shift electron orbits for atomic storage and quantum computing

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Happy

@John Smith 19

I'll upvote you for the references (and you did say *strictly*), but I still reckon you'd be hard pushed to make the total optical assembly smaller than a wavelength. Enjoy your Tolansky.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: reverting to normal

"(i.e. stored such that they didn't 'revert back to normal after a few cycles'...)"

Hold on a minute there. This is news *precisely because* no-one has ever seen an atom that was not at its normal size. And I'm talking normal to an extraordinary degree of precision here, since we've been measuring atomic radii and firing X-rays at crystals for a century now, and a lot (most?) of physical chemistry would be very different if atoms weren't as interchangeable as lego bricks.

I'd say that's a *pretty big hint* that nature doesn't let you store "inflated" atoms without a constant pumping from an external energy supply.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
WTF?

Re: utterly astonishing

Yes, and then they had to go and spoil it with some brainless wittering about quantum computing and storage. (Instant fail --> if your technique needs a laser, then it will never be smaller than the wavelength of the light, which is substantially larger, per bit, than existing tech.)

Hey guys, you scaled an atom by about 4 orders of magnitude. You don't need to tick the "relevance" box. Just wallow in your awesomeness and be done with.

BBC's images of murdered infant did not breach privacy, copyright

Ken Hagan Gold badge

As far as I can see, that does happen occasionally but generally such images appear to be considered "too awful".

Also, the "healthy" picture is far more likely to make us think of similar people who we know, which is one of the main reasons why these things pull us up short. I don't have too many pictures of mutilated friends or relatives, but I can relate to a picture of a small child on a tricycle. I've known quite a few of those.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

A right to publicity?

I suppose you could summarise the whole argument by saying that the murdered child has a right to publicity. Society shouldn't be content to sweep such tragic cases under the carpet, and humans are visual creatures, so it makes perfect sense that news reports (which are a desirable reminder of the child's fate) should be able to use method that pull us up short for a minute. If you don't want to see, don't click on the link.

Similarly, much war reporting is just too gruesome to be aired but those sitting comfortably at home shouldn't be *completely* insulated from the rather harsher realities that exist elsewhere.

Microsoft's magic bullet for Azure: Red Hat Linux

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: tad more expensive

My thoughts exactly, but if I'm reading the linked article correctly, the figures being compared are the *hardware* costs grouped by OS, which strikes me as a perverse statistic to quote. It is certainly not possible to infer from this any measure of market share for Windows versus Linux.

Bonfire of the brands: ICANN's top-level domain selloff

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Yeah, just like you can guess the domain name from the movie's title.

Get real, anyone looking for the site of a movie will use a search engine, or read the advert.

Of course, this is a killer argument against gTLDs generally. All the really obvious domain names went about twenty years ago. Ever since then, the only reason to have a meaningful DN is so that *after* your customer has used a search engine to find the site, they will reckon that it "feels legit". Placing it underneath a reasonable root is part of that process.

In the case of films, placing it under the studio's DN makes lots of sense because *only the studio can do that*. In point of fact, creating an entirely separate DN is stupid, because even *I* can do that. It just screams "unofficial site". But studio bosses do this anyway, presumably because they've got their brains in their dicks and pharmaceutically enhanced egos to nurture.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: .movie

An even more logical place would be under the domain of the studio responsible.

Super-powered 'frankenmalware' strains detected in the wild

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: breeding?

Read your Dawkins, brainwrong. Breeding is a *random* mixture of parental genes. The result is likely to be a non-robust OS that no-one can use: Ubuntu with Unity/HUD. For what you've asked for, you need intelligent design.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Am I missing something?

Dunno, to be honest, since I don't write AV code. But I can speculate.

Heuristics are unreliable, so a system based on heuristics needs lots of ticks on its check-list before it dares to flag a program as a virus. Therefore, small changes in behaviour may well be enough to get past heuristics, unless the heuristics are cranked up to Total Paranoia mode, in which case the heuristics probably start flagging up the OS as a virus. (Guess: this is already happening and is the real reason behind the occasional tendency of some AV offerings to brick Windows systems.)

Signatures similarly can't afford to be too short, or else legitimate applications will, by chance, have the same sequence of instructions. Almost any modification, and that certainly includes patching by another virus, might be enough to invalidate signature-based checks, possibly even for both viruses.

On the other hand, this is not a new phenomenon. It has *always* been possible for one virus to infect another. Therefore, I think we already know how effective AV software will be, because it already *is* dealing with this problem.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
FAIL

"BitDefender doesn't have historical data to go on."

"All of the malware hybrids analysed by BitDefender so far have been created accidentally."

"BitDefender carried out its study after finding a sample of the Rimecud worm that was infected by the Virtob file infector."

Erm, so BitDefender have made the "discovery" that viruses infect files and the separate discovery that (on an infected machine) some of those files will be other viruses or worms. Furthermore, they apparently *haven't* made the discovery that usually this is done on purpose. (Modern malware generally combines several different strategies to maximise the chances of success. Even in the popular press, virus descriptions generally make this point.)

So in the absence of any clue, or historical data, they are announcing that the sky is falling. Sheesh! Even by the standards of AV press releases, this one is pretty lame.

HUD's up! Ubuntu creates menu-free GUI

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: look a bit harder

Try Xubuntu and wave bye-bye to all those "user experience" designers, returning to something that just works and then gets the heck out of the way so you can do your job.

Are screens different now? Are keyboards? Are mice? No, so why should Xerox's orginal concept (that has so obviously made computers accessibly to the unwashed masses) suddenly require a rethink?

Methinks Ubuntu has made the same mistake that Microsoft did. After years of bringing PC operating systems up to snuff, there's actually very little *visible* work left to do. (We can argue about kernel facilities later, but the average Joe is never going to upgrade because of a new kernel feature.) So in order to pull in the punters for the next version, they're just changing visible things for change's sake.

Of course, when Microsoft did it, they were the first. It was a daft idea and they've back-tracked (adding more menu-like features to their new ribbon). Ubuntu have Microsoft's experience to learn from and apparently just can't.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Trollface

Re: Head Up Display

For extra irony, please note that "head down" is the position that most users have when they are typing.

Icon: Because this idea is surely just the UI designers at canonical pulling our legs.

Judges probe minister's role in McKinnon extradition saga

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: someone to blame

Substitute "a high-ranking person" for "US govt" and I think we have the only explanation that makes sense.

From a pure security viewpoint, McKinnon allowed the US to learn *without penalty* that their systems were wide open. However, those lax practices were somebody's fault and presumably that person's career progression stopped at that point. To judge from the subsequent brouhaha, either that person wasn't busted down to private, or they have friends still in high places. Either way, the whole business smacks of petty revenge.

And *that* should be a concern to the *current* administration. Somebody somewhere is using the system to pursue a personal vendetta rather than whatever their job is.

Facebook to shove Timeline in EVERYONE'S face soon

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The difference is...

Theoretically nothing. For example, El Reg *could* decide tomorrow that they were going to sell all the personal info I provided when I signed up.

In practice, I haven't provided much info and most forums don't ask for much, so there is never going to be much to sell. With Facebook, however, the whole point of the site is (more or less) to centralise personal info in one spot.

Also in practice, forum managers don't but Facebook does.

How can family sysadmins make a safe internet playground for kids?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@Christian Berger

I'll take a guess that you grew up in a country that doesn't start *formal* education until 6 or 7. Most of the people here probably started formal education in the school year containing their fifth birthday, but that's just the UK for you.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Outgoing content

And another thing...

Most of the article focuses on blocking incoming nasties, but El Reg carries stories every few months about some clot who has made their own video nasty and unwisely posted it to the waiting world (either by internet or phone). Is that a sufficiently serious risk that it is worth blocking outgoing content? Or do you just grab 'em by the lugs when they're young and force them to read *every* such story on El Reg until the hard-won experience of others sinks into their heads.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

DNS

"One imagines that once the children can configure their own DNS then they're probably old enough to cope with the consequences."

Small nitpick, whilst we're collecting requirements for this project. -> Once the *oldest* child can configure their own DNS, you'd better hope that the youngest child who has access to the same device can cope with the consequences.

Russia and NASA plan to COLONISE the Moon

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Especially?

I think you mean *only* if both payload and fuel are mined (harvested, whatever) locally.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"muses that photography will always involve such chemical magic"

Really? What an odd mistake to make, considering that television was already well established by 1955.

Apple launches three-pronged education assault

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I did try

That doesn't surprise me. I've had ppsx documents that Microsoft's own converter (for Office 2003 and earlier) couldn't cope with. I imagine Open Office (or Libre Office) is "playing by the spec" and consequently covers 99% of cases fairly well, but it only takes some author set in their ways to have something that doesn't work well built into their standard templates and suddenly none of their documents are convertible.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@JDX

I'm well aware of what a textbook is. I can walk into my local bookshop and see thousands (one of the perks of Cambridge life). That's more ways of presenting the information than any normal student could possibly get through in their college years.

But I'm also aware that for every textbook, there is now a free website doing the same job. This is new in the last generation or so. For the previous 500 years, the alternative to paying for a textbook was "nothing". Now it is "several different presentations of variable quality". The facts will be the same in all. (Well, perhaps not, but that's true of textbooks too and cross-checking is far easier online.) The presentations may or may not hit the mark for you, but if not then there are others to try, all for free.

I'm not saying text-book authors shouldn't be rewarded. I'm just pointing out that they have to be a damn sight better at their jobs than they did in my day if they want to win customers. The market has changed, but the industry players don't seem to have noticed yet. Given the willful blindness of the music industry, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by this, but for Apple to have failed to notice seems extraordinary.

Maybe it's all the Web 2.0 twitter-fluff. Maybe everyone has forgotten that Web 1.0 was designed for the dissemination of information, published by the masses, for the masses, all at such low cost that there isn't room for a profit margin. (Actually, who am I kidding? Hardly anyone in the publishing industry seems to be aware of Sir Tim's original design goals. If they were, they wouldn't keep banging on about how "participation" was a "new feature of <some dross site or other>".)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: who falls for the word "free"?

Erm, politicians?

Erm, every flipping time.

Erm, even when you stand next to them and shout in their ear "IT'S NOT FREE YOU DOOFUS!!".

Ken Hagan Gold badge
WTF?

Giving it a fair shake?

"That said, any effort to lighten the backpacks of students overloaded with hefty textbooks, along with making it easier for textbooks to be updated as scientific progess and historical events warrant, should be given a fair shake."

It's a solved problem. We call it "The Internet". Perhaps you've heard of it. Apple's product managers clearly haven't. Perhaps their walled garden is so effective that they've forgotten the outside world exists.

Factual material lends itself *extremely* well to websites because it has an extremely long shelf-life and no copyright protection.

If something is true, it tends to remain true. This is provably so in mathematics and certainly true in practice in science and engineering until you are well past undergraduate level. Indeed, it would be rather scandalous if this weren't true across the board, since that would imply that we were teaching students something that won't be any use in twenty years time /even in that academic discipline/.

Similarly, if something is true, you can't copyright a statement of the fact. Others are therefore free to take "the truth" and present it in their own way on their own web-site. Experience shows that quite large numbers of people do this quite voluntarily and there are whole web-sites devoted to small articles about stuff.

And lastly, increasing numbers of lecturers put their course synopses online. These summarise exactly what students need to know for exams, which is a convenience you'll never get in a textbook. (I'm assuming that most students, for most of their courses, mostly just want to pass the exam and move on to the next stage. Is that too cynical of me?)

Hold on a sec - leap seconds granted a last-minute reprieve

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Compromise proposal

Why limit yourself to 10 years? Those arguing that the sky is about to fall in seem to be pretty confident about how many minutes we'll be out by 2100, so why not write up a schedule for the next 90 years and revise it in 2060?

This "six months notice" business arises from a desire to keep UTC and solar time within 1 second of each other. Nobody outside the clocks community gives a monkeys about that level of accuracy. Loosen that to about 10 seconds or a minute and surely it all becomes more predictable.

American search team fails to find women's G-spot

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Amused by: "The King's College study shows a lack of respect for what women say."

Sure, coz the existence of an anatomical structure is best determined by what someone says, particularly the one person on the planet who is physically incapable of looking. (Or can French women do that? I think we should be told.)

MIT boffins devise faster Fast Fourier transform

Ken Hagan Gold badge

MIT boffins devise modest tweak to FFT. Film at 11.

The point of the FFT is that it turns an O(n^2) algorithm into an O(n.log n) algorithm. For interesting problems, that's a factor of hundreds, thousands or millions. Problems that were far too large to even consider running on the largest supercomputer money would ever be able to buy during your lifetime suddenly fitted onto a machine with the computational grunt of Bjarne Stroustrup's rice cooker.

What is described here sounds like premultiplying the big-O by a slightly smaller number, at some loss in accuracy. It may prove to be useful, but it's not in the same league as the original discovery.

NT daddy turns his hand to Xbox

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: aged 51/2

Either that or he spent five seconds looking for the "no teletubbies, please" check box and then got on with plugging in his USB devices.

2K was a significantly smaller OS, which mattered when XP first came out, but eventually the world of hardware just left it behind.

Australia, US agree to space junk talks

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: reusable orbital space plane

Actually we don't. That would only deal with the bits large enough to justify a multi-million dolar flight, and *those* are not the dangerous ones because they are much the easiest to track. Also, since this stuff is a worry *because* it is dangerous, you'd have to be pretty nuts to propose using a manned craft to hoover it up.

Nuke support in UK hits record high

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Mushroom

Re: Energy security - the markets will sort it out

Heh! You know as well as I do who was right, and why.

What engineers call a backup, the market calls inefficiency.

Once again, politicians who have spent their entire careers singing the praises of free market economics demonstrate that they haven't the first idea of what it actually means.

Icon: The house of commons in 2017 when the lights start to go out.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Wow

Let's hope it was an ill-judged troll.

Somewhat ironically, boltar offered nothing scientific (like, er, evidence) in support of these claims. Perhaps she is a woman and therefore too clueless to understand.

Welcome to the latest forum features

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Yeah, I thought about doing that, but I worried about the rather long "cookie-like" nature of the URL. You've probably just spilled your bank account password to the world or something.

BTW, what's <it>psy-ab</it>?

George Lucas: 'No more Star Wars'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: something modern

With hindsight, that was either the wrong phrase or not nearly a long enough phrase.

To audiences of the time, Star Wars was mind-blowing. Not high-brow art, but quite mind-blowing in terms of sensory experience. The special effects were so pervasive that they ceased to attract the attention. There was hardly a scene in the last 15 minutes that wasn't blue-screened several layers deep. (Blue-screen meant something else then.) That was new and even without hindsight the audiences of the day knew they were looking at the first of something new rather than more of the same.

Kids today can't watch Star Wars and have that experience, because the effects (even after George has finished fiddling) aren't "vastly better than anything else they've ever seen before". (Maybe if you looked them up from birth and only let them watch Star Trek, 2001, Buck Rogers and Forbidden Planet for their first 10 years.)

*Maybe* there has been some more recent film that has had the same sensory impact, in which case there might be "something modern" you could show to your children to see the same effect. Then again, maybe not. I can't think of one.

Windows 8 hardware rules 'derail user-friendly Linux'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: what it's done for the phone market

Ooo, let's hope so. Microsoft are almost totally out of the phone market.