Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
I can't judge the tone of this article. Given the amounts of money regularly pissed up against the wall by governments for all sorts of crap ideas, I'd say that £150m to have *some* sort of wireless coverage for *all* points of the UK would be a bargain.
That said, what's on offer here is only 99% and I suspect that each additional "9" you want to put on that figure will cost another £150m (at least).
Exactly. What are we calling Java here? Is it the JVM?
If you have a Java compiler that produces native code, I imagine you could get within a factor of two or three of C++, just as you can with most other languages. If instead you are targeting the JVM, then you obviously aren't concerned with performance, so neither you nor I care how close you get.
That's fine. For many applications, performance isn't important. However, when it is, you don't target some intermediate ISA, whether that be the JVM, the CLR, or OS/400. There's a reason why all the key server applications for both Linux and Windows, as well as the kernels, are still compiled as native code and it isn't the need to hit hardware because 90% of even kernel mode code doesn't actually get to touch hardware these days.
I did. I noted that user-level apps can't cause blue screens. I deduced that the man in charge of Adobe's quality control EITHER is unaware of this OR treats his customers with such contempt that he expects us to be unaware of this.
Either way, I came away with an even lower opinion of Adobe's products.
Technically, I think that's all there is here, and so in that sense this is "just" a separation of UI from actual work, which is a technique that has been around (and good practice) for decades. So I doubt the technical people at MS will be claiming a breakthrough here. (Their marketing department will, of course, claim/troll that they've revolutionised programming and made everything multicore friendly at the flick of a compiler switch.)
The only new bit is the level of bullying that is being built into the language in order to persuade programmers to actually write apps this way.
It's better than that. On the assumption that no private citizen was *ever* going to build a warship of any kind, the law being broken could *only* ever have applied to the government, which was always at liberty to change it if it wanted.
So it was an utterly pointless act to introduce the law in the first place.
AND
When they did finally change their minds, they chose to break the law rather than repeal it.
I looked into this recently with a view to buying a DX. Amazon will happily sell this US-only model to foreign users and there's a section of their website dedicated to making it easy for you to do this.
However, they note that because the DX is attached to a US cell network, when you download a book in the UK you may be subject to a charge. My conclusion was that if you buy/import one of their US-only products, then everything you do on it will be hit by roaming charges. That's a breath-takingly bad deal and I'm staggered that they have the cheek to encourage such purchases through their website.
"It is sometimes fun to ask Kindle 1.0 users why they think their electronic book has a keyboard."
Really? I use mine to organise my books in collections with names that make sense to me. I use it when the experimental browser wants a URL. I use it when I'm typing in an access code to a Wifi network. The list goes on.
I hardly ever use it, but the device would be unusable without one.
If you think it is idiotic to expect people to follow instructions, then good luck job-hunting. It's not hard. You are at a university. You are asked a question. You don't answer a different question.
The only thing proved here is how tolerant some academics are when presented with yet another cretinous self-obsessed student who is so full of his own "entitlement" that he thinks he can redefine the course requirements to suit himself.
Too true, but let me be stupid for a while.
The Android fans are always claiming how "open" and "free" it is, so presumably there are neither technical nor legal barriers to someone (Apple or Microsoft) adding an Android layer to their next OS. It's been done many times before on bigger computers and the next generation of devices will be vastly more powerful than the previous version that all this legacy software was written for.
Obviously this doesn't work the other way, since both MS and Apple are "closed" and you'd have to reverse engineer their stuff in a foreign clean-room and only sell mail-order from a Pacific island in brown envelopes to bypass customs, but that's because MS and Apple are evil. Google aren't evil. They said so. Android is open. They said so.
"Java has its own security sandbox"
Evidently not a good enough sandbox, since it was the attackers' chosen vehicle for getting around the SOP.
It's a shame really. The original design objective of the JVM (not the language) was to produce something that could be proven secure, at least in the same sense that a proper OS is secure against privilege escalation attacks from user-level programs. The whole project, then, *should* have been a case of re-inventing the wheel. I suspect, however, that once client-side Java failed in the marketplace, the security people lost influence to those trying to re-invent Java as a server-side language.
We may be about to find out. It's all very well explaining that the world's favourite web servers and browsers are stuck on 1.0, but if 1.0 isn't secure then I'm afraid the general public's response is (eventually) going to be "then get a real server/browser".
In this context, a real web server would appear to be IIS and real browsers would appear to be IE and Opera.
How does this help? For an end-user whose bank doesn't use RC4, all your advice will do is force that end-user to switch browser to one that cares less about security.
The problem lies at the server end, but in the meantime we are discussing mitigation that can be applied at the client end. Having said that, disabling Java (until such time as Oracle pull their fingers out) probably leads to the same "browser switch" problem as disabling weak protocols.
I don't think it would be wise to do anything except warn. Specifically, *all* browsers should issue a big fat "This isn't secure." warning against TLS 1.0. Such a statement is factually accurate (so legally safe) and allows end-users to carry on if they are comfortable with the risks.
How hard can it be for web server admins to switch over to TLS 1.1?
It makes perfect sense once you realise that the Kindle is (or was) an e-Reader, not a PMP.
It marked itself out as best in class by a considerable margin largely because its screen was far more readable than some backlit LCD crud. This "fire" takes the brand and applies it to exactly what it wasn't.
I see the "fire" uses crappy old conventional screen technology rather than lovely e-Ink. It's not really a Kindle then. Seems odd that Amazon want to dilute the brand having been so successful in building it up.
I also see that a 9.7" model still isn't available anywhere except the US. A pity, since there's a place for larger paper books so it seems perfectly reasonable that there might be a place for larger readers as well. (You can export the now-rather-old-model DX but you are charged every time you download a book, so I doubt anyone actually does.)
And yes, to the best of my knowledge a US dollar has *never* exchanged for less than a pound sterling, so at no point in the whole history of the world has $79=£89.
I'll let you have exhibit 1, but the other 2 are rubbish.
Yes, "Dave Cutler" was imported and the OS he created looked a lot like VMS, but if DEC had believed it was "imported" as-is, then they'd have sued Microsoft out of existence. Hiring people from other companies doesn't count as "importing" their previous work.
Similarly, OLE was an in-house effort as early as OLE 1 (being based on something produced by the Office team).
On the other hand, I don't suppose the general public ever thought that either were "exciting".
Back on the first hand, if you want proof that *some* people inside Microsoft still know how to program, consider this: closed (or lost) source crapware from many moons ago that had no right to ever have run in the first place *still* works in the current version of Windows. That's an exceedingly *un-exciting* feature of Windows that has ensured the upgrade fees continue to roll in year after year after year. Windows may *be* crap, but what matters for the vast majority of customers is whether it runs *their* crap.
"99.8 per cent of all virus/malware infections caused by commercial exploit kits are a direct result of the lack of updating five specific software packages"
Umm, yes, that quote does appear in the linked article. However, it is unsupported by the evidence in their pie charts...
37% Java
32% Acrobat
16% Flash
10% IE
3% HCP (Windows Help)
2% Quicktime
The first five add up to only 98%, not 99.8% and presumably the collection of six has been normalised to 100%, since other vectors exist, so I think either the "5" or the "99.8" must be wrong. Be that as it may...
...Am I alone in being depressed that the original purpose of #1 was to be a sandbox and the original purpose of the next 5 was (or certainly ought to have been) the presentation of dumb content?
This is actually the wrong way round. Because you've no existing Spotify login, there's nothing to stop you creating a fictitious persona on FB. The only people who are screwed over by this are those who have already got a spotify login (quite possibly with accurate identifying information) that has now been assimilated by FaceBorg.
...or Doctor or Professor or any other gender neutral title you care to imagine.
This was true even in the 20th Century, so presumably there are no systems out there that try to infer male/female distinctions from a title.
But, yes, sadly there's always someone who insists on over-validating things that ought to be free-form text.
Correction: it has to *try*.
The UK remains a sovereign state. If a UK court seized the server, the US company wouldn't be able to comply with such requests, like it or not. Such carelessness (losing the server) might put the US company on the wrong side of US law, but that's not the UK's problem.
Seen in that light, the Lib Dems are merely pointing out that such hypotheticals are worth thinking through before we put *our* servers in somebody else's jurisdiction. (Well, "Duh!", but I suppose these are politicians so we have to let them go at their own pace.)
Fortunately, we have laws against such recklessness. Unfortunately, UK.gov never seems to believe that its own laws apply to it. Therefore, whilst UK private companies are probably being diligent about their cloud use, UK.gov is probably already spraying confidential data around the globe to an extent that makes the Freedom of Information Act redundant.
"If I buy a Microsoft branded tablet, or one "designed for Windows 8", why should I even expect to be able to run any another OS?"
Because it's your tablet.
Obviously the vendor doesn't have to make it easy, but we're not talking about that here. We're talking about the vendor taking additional steps in order to make it difficult.
Indeed he should, and I have myself, but the vast majority have gone for .co.uk so I think it is a more realistic "first choice" example. Either way, however, the fact remains that there are 60 million of us in the UK and there just aren't anywhere close to 24 million "obvious" personal domain names.
So I don't believe this 40% figure. I might be willing to believe 4%, but even that sounds rather high. Hence my assertion that most of the survey respondents have downgraded their expectations and simply aren't asking for their first (or possibly even their fifth) choice domain name.
What exactly is the first choice of someone called John Smith who wants a personal website? It presumably isn't http://www.john-smith.co.uk/ because that seems to have a domain squatter on it. I imagine that this is so obvious to most people that their first actual choice is deliberately *not* their first choice.
Any meaningful use of the word "colony" implies self-sufficiency. That's not going to happen in 20 years. If we turned all our swords into ploughshares and spent the savings on colonising space, it might happen in 50. But we won't, so it won't.
What you're imagining is something like the ISS, which is about as self-sufficient as leaving someone in a boat in the open ocean. Limited supplies inside and only death awaits outside.
"LEO is rife to be commercialized"
Umm, no-one has changed the technology of getting into LEO (or any other orbit, for that matter) for about 50 years, so the economics remain much as they ever were. The only significant changes are that satellites now don't need to weigh as much to do their job and robots are good enough that you don't need to send people. I see nothing to suggest that we are on the brink of some new phase in the exploitation of LEO.
"But several 100 thousands want to *go* there. Which under SLS will *never* happen in their lifetimes."
As long as you are using chemical rockets as your launch system, there's no way "several 100 thousands" are going to get into space. (Probably more like several hundred.)
The only thing that will change that is some breakthrough in the technology of getting folks up there, which is largely an exercise in giving several hundred megajoules of energy per kilogram to your payload, remotely, without destroying it in the process. It will probably need the help of some physics that we simply don't know yet. Perhaps we should be diverting NASA's manned space budget to Fermilab.
First off, your 700+700 actually works out at marginally less than 1400, but the margin is too small for anyone to notice.
Secondly, your stationary observer standing behind the spaceship sees the radio wave move at exactly x and the radio operator on the spaceship does too, despite the two observers *agreeing* that they are moving relative to each other.
Now, if you want to turn round and say "This cannot be. I cannot imagine definitions of space and time where this is even possible. It must be untrue." then well done. You've arrived at roughly where Einstein started off. His conclusion was that in order to preserve the constancy of c, he would have to change his definition of space and time.
To be honest, if trying to imagine space-time doesn't do your head in, you haven't understood it. I find quantum theory *much* more acceptable.
"So much for predictions that we will understand all of physics in a decade or so!"
It is sadly true that various fairly eminent souls have made several such rash claims over the past hundred years, but I don't think it has *ever* been the consensus view of physicists.
And as I noted in a reply to an earlier post, Einstein held precisely the opposite view (i.e., that we'd never finish) except for the special case of classical thermodynamics, which in many ways is a set of theorems about inference from limited information rather than an actual physical theory.
You're in luck. Einstein addressed this very question and gave a clear answer. (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Albert_Einstein#Thermodynamics_.22will_never_be_overthrown.22)
Notice the particular mention of the "framework of applicability of its concepts". Presumably, then, he expected even Special Relativity to be overthrown even within the sphere for which it was developed (classical electromagnetism on a macroscopic scale).
In fact, he would probably be disappointed that it hasn't happened yet. With physics now funded on an international scale with thousands of active researchers, it is rather disappointing that the Standard Model developed in the late 1960s is still our best effort 40 years on.
For that matter, how did they measure the distance? At light-speed, 60 nanoseconds is less than 20 metres. That's 20 metres along a path of 730000 metres through solid rock dipping through Earth's gravitational well and back up again.
I dare say they've thought about all of this (coz it's their job and it only took me ten seconds over breakfast to come up with that) but even forewarned of all the complications, this is a *really* challenging experiment.
Oh, and as others have pointed out, *all* the neutrinos seem to be travelling at the same "only ever so slightly faster than light" velocity. If they aren't limited by c, they sure seem to be limited by something awfully close to it. This is too much of a co-incidence. As the experimenters themselves say, the result is crazy.
The point, which El Reg seems to have picked up on but the mainstream media have missed entirely, is that the scientific interest here is not "Is this true?" because not even the experimenters believe that it is. The point is "Why can't we figure out where we've gone wrong?". This is fun stuff for physics geeks, but not (ultimately) interesting for anyone else.
"And don't tell me he misspoke. He has been a politician most of his adult life, Words are his craft and trade."
It's debatable whether most politicians are good with words. Most modern politicians are quite good at the media sound-bite or the quick put-down. (That is, in fact, probably the only skill they need and therefore the only thing our leaders are selected for. A crap system for electing governors, but probably still better than the alternatives.) Lawyers are similar, although they play the same game in the language of the court rather than the street.
Using words precisely to convey an exact shade of meaning whilst excluding all the plausible alternatives is a skill you are more likely to need in technical writing, and so you find that skill in scientists, engineers, mathematicians and programmers, but not politicians or lawyers.
So Cosma2k is Russian. Has he broken any Russian laws?
The official Russian position in the Litvinenko case is that their constitution prohibits extradition. It follows that there is no prospect whatsoever of prosecuting this guy except in a Russian court for crimes under Russian law. Unless MS can find victims who are both in Russia and willing to stand up in court against someone who is presumably a bit of a player in the local crime world, the whole exercise is just willy-waving.
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