* Posts by Ken Hagan

8135 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Deep inside ARM's new Intel killer

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Atom

A fair point. To be honest, I think the Atom was "for" filling a whole in someone's product matrix whilst the company decided whether they were serious about the low power market. It's still not clear to me that Intel *are* serious. Remember, they made ARMs for a while and then sold the business on.

Maybe they want to treat ARM like AMD -- someone to point the regulators at every now and then, whilst they (Intel) carry on coining it in the server market. Perhaps that will change if (or when) ARM deliver a chip that looks good in a blade. Then again, they've had a decade to do that (ever since Linux took root in server farms) and don't seem to have got around to it.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: OS support

The impression I got from the article was that it would be little more than a context switch. You need to save the on-CPU state and then send a message to "something" to shut down the current processor and fire up the other, whereupon the saved context is re-loaded and continues execution. I'd have thought the OS support would be trivial.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Did you look at the performance graphs of the two ARM cores?

If you design a chip to have a high maximum performance, its lowest power state is still going to look rather greedy compared to a rival chip that cannot compete on performance. That's a basic rule and applies even to different breeds of ARM chip.

If Intel want to compete at the ultra-low power end of the market, they will be able to do the same things as ARM. Conversely, if ARM ever want to compete with Intel's offerings for server blades, they'll find that their performance per watt starts to fade.

The laws of physics are the same for both companies.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: a goodly amount

"Underneath, there is a pretty decent RISC core just waiting to be used. It would get the transistor count down by a goodly amount."

No recent Intel chip has devoted more than a few percent of its die area to instruction decode. That's not a goodly amount. That's an afterthought. ISA ceased to matter at the desktop/server end of the market over a decade ago. (Ironically, it probably started to fade at the same time as Intel were pushing a new ISA -- ia64.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Pirate

Ahh, takes me back...

ARM seem to be doing what AMD did in the late 90s: giving Intel a serious kick up the backside. Last time round, AMD killed ia64 and probably hastened the demise of the Pentium 4. Intel were saved only because they had apparently unlimited fab capacity and several skunkworks teams hidden in the basement. They still have the fab capacity, but do they still have the heretics?

World's stealthiest rootkit gets a makeover

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: booting from a live CD

Actually, building a PC that boots from a replaceable (unlike flashable BIOS) but read-only (unlike flashable BIOS) medium really *ought* to have been the norm for the last couple of decades. Instead, we've had moronic attempts to move the goalposts with OS vendors and chip manufacturers vying to introduce new levels of even more trusted hypervisors that only people with deep pockets can get their code signed for.

A CD-ROM is a rather clunky way of doing it, but it works.

Are IP addresses personal data?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: proxies

Ah, but they're on to that one. Routing through a proxy will count as "anonymous posting" and it will only take one complaint to have you chucked off the internet ... [deep voice] FOREVER!

Ken Hagan Gold badge

It depends on the meaning of "identify"

"Tracking the IP address does not necessarily identify the individual. Is the partner or the account owner visiting the Next store's womens clothing site? The marketer does not know and does not need to know they are only looking to see if a user of that IP address falls in to a possible class of customer"

I think this is wrong. Tracking the IP address allow the marketer to correlate several independent sources of information, so the individual is identified as the same one who also did such-and-such. It is true that the marketer doesn't know the individual on a personal level but they've been identified to the extent that the marketer cares about just as surely as they would have been if they'd been tagged by postal address.

The law presumably has no hesitation in declaring "tagging by postal address" to be a means of personal identification, so it shouldn't hesitate in a functionally similar case.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: shirley

In practice, unless you use dial-up, the IP address assigned to you will remain yours for at least as long as your broadband router stays up. Even for the average Joe, that could be months. If you have your router on a UPS, you might be stuck with the same address for years.

If you rent where you live, you might be changing real address every six months, but no-one would argue that your postal address isn't personal data.

Of course, addresses need to be *public* in order to be useful, but they are still personal.

Conversely, what I do in the toilet is *private*, but I do it the same way as everyone else, so it is hardly personal.

Libel reform vows to slay anonymous trolls

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Then you can stand up in court and use "It is true." as your defence. The law isn't *that* stupid. (Judges, maybe...)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: factual and in the public domain

I'd hope that it was removed. Anything else would seem to require *somebody* applying a level of judgement that makes the whole process subjective, which is not a good thing in legal matters.

If you have a problem with that, perhaps you should consider posting under a traceable name and turning up in court to say "It is true and in the public domain." (and then claim lots of costs from the idiot who sued).

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: using a pseudonym

I would *hope* that the acid test, for legal purposes, would be whether the site managers could direct the complainer's lawyers to you. That is, as long as the "single-use" name is traceable to you by a legally empowered entity, it is not anonymous in the eyes of the law.

Anything else would appear to be an abuse of the meaning of the word "anonymous".

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"So if I object to any article in any newspaper or on any television channel they are legally obliged to publish my objection with equal prominence? Sounds good."

I believe that this *was* one of the proposals considered. I don't know what the outcome was. But yes, applying the law equally to on- and off- line publishers would seem (on the face of it) to be a good thing.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

People who own servers that are within UK jurisdiction will be liable under UK law for the statements those servers publish to UK clients, unless the remarks are published in the name of someone else who is liable under UK law.

The principle is "if you aren't willing to put your name to it, don't bother saying it".

If you *are* willing to take legal responsibility, but don't want non-legal entities (such as nosey employers) to associate the remark with you, create a second account. In the UK it is perfectly legal to have multiple identities as long as the intention is not fraudulent.

That leaves sites with the problem of determining which of their users are subject to UK law and therefore *able* to assume legal liability for their remarks. Assuming that this problem can be solved...

It all seems reasonable to me, and the likely consequences are an *increase* in free speech because sites (like this one) will be less censorious of comments. (I'm sure El Reg moderates primarily because it is afraid of the legal consequences of negligence rather than a desire to inspect every half-baked utterance that is submitted to the site.)

FSF takes Win 8 Secure Boot fight to OEMs

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: what the advert tells them to

Intel would dearly love that to be true, but AMD still sell everything they can make.

It's not even about trusting anyone in PC world. That uncertified PC will be powered up and running Windows for the average Joe to see with his own eyes.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"a Windows 8 certification requirement"

"Microsoft said support for UEFI Secure Boot is a Windows 8 certification requirement."

Does the average Joe check for the Windows Logo? Or does he just buy a PC with Windows on it?

And if a major OEM decides not to bother getting their hardware certified, Microsoft are going to do what, exactly? Windows 8 will obviously work on non-certified hardware, since otherwise MS just killed the whole of their own upgrade market. Therefore, MS can't withhold Windows from such hardware, or make their OEM pricing dependent on it, unless they want to end up in court again.

We had all this with Vista's protected video path. MS stuck to their guns right up to the final release and the rest of the world just yawned.

OPERA review serves up a feast for physics geeks

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"This is by my admittedly-poor understanding of quantum mechanics :)"

Don't worry. If you are seriously considering particles changing from normal to tachyon and back then you've gone well beyond anyone else's understanding of quantum mechanics, too.

Doesn't mean it isn't true. Just means we've no theory with which to investigate the possibility further.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Richard, since this paper has been published you have been beside yourself with alarm and distress that relativity is being questioned, or not as useful as we thought:"

That's not the impression I've been getting. Perhaps the difference is that I know just how much is riding on this. Special Relativity is a purely logical conclusion forced on you if you accept the laws of electromagnetism discovered by Maxwell in the 1860s. Einstein's contribution was "merely" to point this out. (It is a measure of how painful the mixing of space and time is for most people that his contribution is reckoned by most people to be a separate discovery, and a *physics* discovery, and one worthy of a part-share of a Nobel prize.)

Prior to fixing the laws of electromagnetism, the only fundamental laws known were those of mechanics. Since settling on Maxwell's laws, the only new field to be opened up which *doesn't* depend on EM, is thermodynamics. (This goes much wider than physics. Modern chemistry is now theoretically grounded in quantum theory, as it relates to the behaviour of electrons and atoms. Large parts of biology are now explained with chemistry, to the extent that a chemistry A-level is more important than a biology one if you want to take the latter subject at university level.)

If Maxwell is wrong, the experimental measurements don't go away. You are left with a metric fuckton of results that we depend on in everyday life for which you need to explain why they are still true even though Maxwell is wrong.

You need a bloody sight more than 5 sigma on *one* experiment to persuade the community that they've been talking bollocks for the last 150 years and should start again.

Ballmer disses Android as cheap and complex

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"What will it take for the Board to get rid of this guy?"

My guess is that he's safe as long as Bill Gates doesn't turn on him.

My second guess is that Bill Gates doesn't care enough about the company anymore to bother doing that.

On the other hand, he may be gone by 2018. (http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems/208402027)

Oracle updates Java to stop SSL-chewing BEAST

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Great idea in theory, unworkable in practice for many businesses due to cost."

Yeah. I expect that's why my bank is using TLS 1.0.

In the short term, *some* businesses might hold back due to cost, but Apache will get there eventually and if MS want to turn basic security into a cash cow then I'm sure their customers will tell them where to stick their upgrade fee. In the absence of end-user awareness, however, I don't see any pressure on web server software vendors.

It doesn't need to claim the sky is falling. As far as I'm aware, if you have no other tabs or browser instances open, and the site itself is clean (which a bank ought to be) then there's no vulnerability. The warning message could therefore suggest this to the end-user as "best practice until we get a proper fix".

ITU heralds ultra-high def TV progress

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Foresight failure

So we're onto our third or fourth standard for digital TV and we still aren't at a point where the basic parameters are carried in the signal. WTF is that all about? If I want to send a still image, I don't need a revision of JPEG for each colour depth and spatial resolution I'm interested in. I can understand that it might be beyond the decoding abilities of hardware to decode arbitrary resolutions at arbitrary frame-rates, but selective dropping of excessive data is another problem that the software world solved yonks ago. Why does UHDTV need a new standard?

'Mental act' computerisations no longer automatically unpatentable

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Not surprising

The IPO would be rather silly not to change if the courts say they are currently doing it wrong. However, in a sane world, this would be an Emperor's New Clothes moment, when everyone suddenly realises that the floodgates are open and we need to change (or clarify, **) the law. Sadly, I suspect we live in a daft world and will now all drown in a flood of bogus patent claims.

(** The fact remains that "using a computer to do a complex calculation" is not non-obvious and there is more than half a century of prior art for using computers to make previously infeasible approaches suddenly feasible.)

Robot resolves Rubik's Cube in record time

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Can we have a Playmobil reconstruction?

The post is required, and must contain letters.

US military debated hacking Libyan air defenses

Ken Hagan Gold badge

You say Qaddafi, I say Gaddafi

Both are in common use. I think it depends on how you choose to transcribe from Arabic. That, in turn, probably depends on your Arabic accent.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Alternatively

It is easier to say "We could, but we decided not to." than to actually do it.

Win 8 haters are just scared of change, say MS bosses

Ken Hagan Gold badge

A lot can happen in two and a half years. One thing that might happen is that someone throws together a canned "Linux desktop with XP in a (seamless) VM". Everyone gets to run their Windows-only apps inside a firewalled VM and perform their internet-facing activities in an OS that is considerably less vulnerable to attack than any version of Windows yet produced.

That's probably *already* a more flexible and secure option for people with professional IT staff to help set it up. As long as MS continue to puke up bloated eye candy instead of lean OSes, the incentive will be there for someone to put the pieces together.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: we did have a choice

"So for those of us who wanted to remain on, say, Windows XP, there came a time when you could no longer buy a new computer with Windows XP."

So we bought a shiny new box, put a hypervisor on it, and re-installed our old XP in a VM. We get the benefits of the new hardware and XP thinks it is running on a 10-year old machine. (Well, we're not quite there yet, but for a lot of applications we're quite close. The main fly in the ointment is that "the old XP" is often an OEM licence tied to an old box.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

It also looks like the sort of screen that in all recent versions of Windows would have provoked the wrath of the Desktop Clean-up Wizard. They can't have it both ways. Either every previous UI from MS was rubbish, or this one is. (Yes, that's probably an inclusive OR.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: sinister plot

No way. Those who aren't already on Win7 are the ones who stuck with XP. They aren't gonna jump for this.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Program Manager

Co-incidentally, PM was designed to be usable on sub-VGA resolution displays on 12" monitors. Perhaps this is what passes for "targetting devices" over at Microsoft.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: new stupid hoops

I think the assumption is that the limiting factor on your productivity is the clunky old computer running what, at the time, was described as the best UI ever. Therefore, you will rejoice at the opportunity to learn a whole new way of getting your work done.

For the 99% of the population who use a computer because they have to, rather than because they have no friends, this assumption is completely bogus. However, it does seem to be the driving force behind every UI revamp we've seen since the 1980s. (I'll classify Win95 as merely a case of MS catching up with the rest of the industry. Everyone else had arrived at a document-based desktop metaphor before then.)

Toyota Yaris 2011

Ken Hagan Gold badge
WTF?

WTF is a "City car"?

The 1950s called. They want their quaint road system back. All the cities that I'm familiar with have motorways and dual carriageways for anyone who wants to go further than round the block. (And without getting too dark a shade of green, perhaps even a city car isn't the appropriate vehicle for that journey.)

In the meantime, any car that needs special pleading to explain its motorway performance is unfit for the consumer market.

Punters to favour Smart TV over 3D TV

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Oh dear, another survey.

"Telly buyers are keener on Smart TV tech than they are on 3D, but both features are going to be taken up more enthusiastically than televisions in general over the next three years."

Translation: the market for TV in general is saturated, that for 3D TV isn't quite yet, and that for the next big marketing push hasn't even got off the ground yet.

If I buy a TV in three years time and it happens to have features that I will never use, do I count as "keen" on that feature?

If I can't even be arsed to reply to the survey, does someone else who can be bothered to reply get to say what my opinions are?

Energy minister gives grudging nuke endorsement

Ken Hagan Gold badge

It's not a contradiction. Nuclear is the cheapest low-carbon option, but if you force it to compete with high-carbon options that have externalised their environmental costs, it loses.

Actually I urge everyone to follow the link to the speech. It's not half as wild as the article suggests and (allowing for the fact that the Huhne seems to find it emotionally difficult to turn his back on an anti-nuclear childhood) reasonably sane. He *is* calling for a new generation of nuclear stations. He just doesn't want to write a blank cheque. Since I'd be underwriting that cheque, I'm inclined to agree with him.

Most of the swipes he takes at the UK's past exploits in the nuclear field are painfully true. The civil program was always hobbled by the priorities and the secrecy of the military one, and building the Magnox reactors to 11 different designs was quite astronomically stupid. If we are to avoid similar stupidity in the new nuclear program, we need to be able to admit that.

Busting net neutrality may amount to spying, says EU

Ken Hagan Gold badge

I don't know if you read the article correctly, but you seem to be confused about networking. Your IP address is not private information, so the ISP can tell the MPAA who you are.

Your address is public. If people don't know it or it isn't on the envelope, you won't get any letters. Your IP address is the same.

The contents of your letters are private. The postman doesn't need to rip open the envelopes in order to deliver them to the right house. The contents of your network packets is the same.

The fact that you are receiving a lot of medium sized parcels in brown envelopes may also private, although the postman doesn't have to open the packets to know. You will certainly find people willing to argue that it shouldn't be wrong for the postman to *notice* such things and organise their rounds to make it easier to accomodate your traffic. It might only become wrong if the postman goes on to publicise the fact that you are getting all this stuff.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Perhaps I've mis-understood or mis-represented myself.

I wasn't thinking about (and I'm not concerned about) anything that involves inspecting or re-writing the packet header. I don't think there is anything private there and my understanding of the specs is that the header is, by design, the bit that intermediate parties are expected to read and modify as part of the delivery process. The packet body, however, is the opposite in just about every way. Nothing beyond "blind copying" should be necessary and therefore anything beyond "blind copying" is evil.

For an ISP to use source or destination addresses, or IP protocol numbers, or TCP/UDP port numbers, as part of its traffic shaping strategy is probably both defensible and open to challenge.

Gratuitously dropping TCP packets, for example, *will* just result in requests for re-transmission, whereas dropped UDP packets are generally just lost. It seems reasonable for an ISP to consider that when deciding what to drop. Similarly, if the port number suggests a higher level protocol that can wait (like FTP) it would be fair to let that packet wait.

Conversely, filtering on the IP address to favour your own services would be like an OS vendor favouring the products from their own applications division. In this case, the ISP would be leveraging their monopoly position in "shunting data around" (at least, it's a monopoly with regard to this particular customer) to extend that dominance into a new market, such as "IP telephony".

Ken Hagan Gold badge

/may/ amount to spying?

"Net neutrality is the principle that an ISP will deliver all content requested by a customer equally, not allowing content producers which pay it to have preferential access to its subscribers."

Given that definition of NN, it can be implemented simply by preferring traffic from certain server IP addresses. No packet inspection is required, so any inspection that occurs goes way beyond any technical need and is a clear privacy violation. What am I missing?

German states defend use of 'Federal Trojan'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Net security firm F-Secure hasn't seen the Trojan in the wild"

It doesn't really answer your question, but it suggests that such evidence is very thin on the ground.

High Court: Computer simulations can get patent protection

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"I can only hope the IPO have the balls to reject it again, for an inarguable reason this time."

You're in luck. The judge pretty much told them how to do it...

"For the purposes of this appeal I can assume that the invention is new and not

obvious since those points are not before me."

Since numerical simulations as a design method pre-dates computing and are also one of the earliest uses to which computers were put, I'd say that's clear prior art and obviousness.

I expect there is prior art in the drilling industry itself, that no-one bothered to publish because it was too obvious. This is the real damage done by such decisions. Everyone who previously refused to abuse the system starts losing out and eventually you have to be an arsehole in order to survive.

Sony network ransacked in huge brute-force attack

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "Simple .. it's the most hateful and hated company ever."

That would, of course, be a matter of opinion. For what it's worth, I say Sony were better than this lot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: End of story

Not quite. If your account was attacked, it probably means that an account you have with some unrelated organisation has been compromised.

If those who had been attacked compared notes regarding who they have accounts with, it would probably be obvious where the breach had occured. Pooling information in this way might itself constitute poor security, though.

Smut oglers told to opt in to keep web filth flowing

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Coat

Re: wars because of porn

They wouldn't be wars. A war is between two societies with differing views. If you want porn casualties, what you should be looking for is conflict within a society between men and women. You'll have no trouble finding evidence for that. Whether porn causes such conflicts is another question, just as it is debatable whether religion causes wars. As ever, correlation is not causation.

I'll now get my flame-proof coat before I'm accused of having argued any particular point of view.

Would you let your car insurer snoop on you for a better deal?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"By hamstringing young drivers they never really learn how to control a car, how to get out of a bit of a slide and are never going to learn how to manage screw-ups by themselves and others."

If the device really does result in drivers never needing to go a bit too quick, corner too fast or brake too sharply, then it is the greatest single contribution to road safety ever.

And last time I was in a live-endangering situation on the roads, there wasn't time to teach the other driver my skills, so it really wouldn't have made any difference whether I had them or not.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

I'll take that bet

Because I don't think you can "do 40mph everywhere" without the occasional piece of hard braking as your uniform daydream meets up with the reality that not everyone else is doing 40mph everywhere.

German hackers snare wiretap Trojan, accuse gov of writing it...

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Presumably illegal outside Germany

So either they've got rather better geolocation than anyone else on the planet or they've inadvertently trampled on the criminal law of their neighbours. Where's that popcorn...?

IE security hole sewn up for Patch Tuesday

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Even governments have condemned it FFS. And as others have noted - you actually have no choice to remove it either."

Do keep up. Even Microsoft have condemned IE6 and would very much like you to to remove it. In fact, it takes conscious effort to *stop* Windows Update from removing it.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@Nigey

MS are patching IE 6, 7 and 8 on XP, 7, 8 and 9 on Vista, and 8 and 9 on Win7. The only lock-out is that you can't use 9 on XP, so that's several more patches than would be necessary if what you say were true.

Given that MS themselves have a "death to IE6" campaign, I think it is actually rather surprising that they are still patching it.

London 2012 Olympics: 17000 athletes, 11000 computers

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"I installed Windows 7 on the same hardware as Vista and found it to be MUCH slower. "

I don't doubt your experience, since I wasn't there, but I think you are the *only* person in the world with that experience.

This Dianamania is a slur on Jobs

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: ability to be a nutter

There's a saying: "Reasonable people adapt themselves to fit the world. Unreasonable people adapt the world to fit them. Therefore all progress comes from unreasonable people."

I think both Jobs and RMS have been more than a bit unreasonable in their time.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

You forgot to allow for the fact that almost any comment on this forum can be downvoted entirely at random.