Posts by Ken Hagan

If you want them (or anyone) to remain as employees, you ought to treat them nicely. If all of ARM's cleaning staff walked out, the management could probably find replacements and save a few pennies into the bargain. If all their chip designers walk out, they don't have a company anymore. They're fucked, with the proverbial wrought iron fence wrapped in curare tipped barbed wire.

(With due apologies to cleaning staff, but they are probably already aware of this. On the other hand, I don't think anyone believes that this is the 15% of the workforce that ARM's management have in their sights.)

Spin up a VM and see which OSes will boot in 768 MB. I suspect they all will, but you might have to allocate 2GB to actually get the shittier ones to install first.

Re: Abort Retry Fail

Well yes, I mean what a waste of characters. C++ lets you do that with "catch (...) {}".

Re: At least a small elephant in the corner of the room

"linear search"

It's the best algorithm for sufficiently short datasets. It's also a fair comparison point if you think you've got a better algorithm and want to actually do some computer science.

Re: Not yet banned

Ah! Ta for the hint. I hadn't appreciated that. Perhaps it is just as well that world+spouse ignored the politicians and spooks a few years ago and adopted https everywhere as a matter of principle. I don't suppose the politicians will be queuing up to say "sorry" and "thank you" though.

They still teach 1s and 2s complement and bit shifting in computer science at school. If you encounter someone who hasn't heard of them it just means they are self-taught.

Re: actually

Yawn. Actually adding a fifth octet would have been incompatible with every IP stack in existence and merely booted the problem a decade or so down the path without solving the routing problem. IPv6 is no more incompatible and solves these problems forever (along with several others).

It also exists and works for those of us that bother to use it.

Re: He who shouts loudest is often wrong

"I would not breed from this man."

I think that's more damning of the speaker than the cavalry officer. Just what kind of conversation provides the context for this?

Re: Did Vlad just invade Russia in the winter?

Nah. He's just got an eye for history and is trying to recreate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27

Re: the presenter squealed "Tac!" every time he clicked on something

You sold her? Crikey! Business is rough where you live.

Re: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Stop CSS? I have to disagree. I wouldn't want to go back to a web where all the presentation logic is mixed up with the contents, anymore than I'd want to use a word processor that didn't support some form of stylesheets.

But all the executable crap? Hell, yeah! Kill it with fire!

When you say a "useful user space", do you mean one that lots of users have existing software for it?

Re: Supreme Court independence

That doesn't mean China's supreme court isn't worse.

If you are sensitive not just to the browser but its version number, you are sailing waaay too close to the wind. All browsers have been good enough for normal content for years now.

Re: @DS999 - It isn't practical to roll this out to consumer versions

I use a Windows VM to run Windows software. I do my email and surfing from Linux, including downloading Windows ISOs from Microsoft for when I need to throw together a test box.

The use-case is getting my job done while staying in control of the PC.

Re: Parting Shot?

UK citizen here. I'd be fine with that, but I think the Irish would be fucking furious.

Re: extensions and version numbers

Surely every VMS user has done that, which is probably why no other OS has ever offered it. If you want version control, learn and use a version control system. They aren't *that* complicated if you restrict yourself to only one branch (ie, a strictly linear history).

I'm afraid it does, because multinational companies can be sued in the US and other patent bodies tend to respect US patents. It's a slow acting poison, but eventually the damage is done everywhere.

Re: Light and dark mode but

Windows let you choose the colour scheme until Vista. Any "mid-grey mode" you cared to invent was not only possible but immediately honoured by all Petzold-quality apps.

Because this was easy for both end users and developers, people used it and it worked, so when a partially sighted user chose a high contrast theme, it worked.

Now all the end users are stuck with whatever the devs have hard coded, and all the devs have different ideas about what dark mode even means.

It's all gone to shit and I blame the "designers" and their over-complex themes that hardly anyone knows how to change.

Probably because those two US companies might not be able to do business in China if the local authorities say no.

Re: "Microsoft Teams is running normally"

Teams updates itself on its own schedule, in my experience.

Re: What the hell ?

In some unhealthy relationships, it probably *is* the stalkers device and the stalkers tag, at least for billing purposes.

Re: Intel is trying too hard

To be fair, I think the Pentium Pro counts as a second hit. It (or at least the OOO execution it used) let x86 wipe out every RISC architecture in the PC market.

Re: plethora

Only in some regions. Elsewhere even a singular plethora (plethorum, anyone?) is clearly understood to be lots of things and therefore attracts a plural verb.

See also:

Microsoft are planning...

The red team are attacking...

But you could get away with "is" in all these cases if the context was clearly considering the group as a single-minded actor.

A two-year-old complained on the internet about being laughed at? Ummm...

Re: Bad timing?

Perhaps, though it has always seemed to me that, when it comes to the Linux kernel, the only thing Linus does reluctantly is bite his tongue. I think he quite likes the idea of Rusty modules. If someone else steps up to make it work then why not?

Re: Windows stopped being good....

Did it for years. Better than any alternative available at the time.

Re: started in Jeopardy

Finding a new pattern in a large dataset does not mean you aren't pattern-matching. It just means you had to find the pattern as well as all the matches. Since guessing patterns and then trying them out is an embarrassingly parallel problem, you'll have to forgive us if we are sometimes underwhelmed by AI.

Re: “It’s sad that games slowly rot and many disappear.”

Nice idea in general, but it probably wouldn't have helped in this case because the target audience wanted everything to stay the same. That's unlikely to be the outcome if you put the source up for tinkering by enthusiasts.

Re: Where are the regulators? Will no one stand up to Microsoft's pushy controlling tactics.

It's not an advert. It's an admission of ineptitude.

It's also a reminder that you should be trying to get as many functions as possible off Windows because you are now stuck on a soon-to-be-unsupported platform.

Yeah but this one's got a carrier group floating on top of it. Nothing is going to happen in complete secrecy.

I think encryption between two points IS the issue. For messaging, FaceBook's servers aren't any different from an email server and neither is very different from a plain old router.

If you managed to craft a law that banned messaging via a delay-tolerant server, but not encryption per se, you'd just spur the take-up of services that tunnelled through all those IPv4 NATs. (Perhaps sticking it to the spooks is the killer app for IPv6?)

I think the real intention here is to make it impossible for two private citizens to have a private conversation at a distance. One or two societies have tried that in the past. They weren't nice places to live in and usually ended badly for the bastards at the top, but not soon enough in the opinion of those who eventually overthrew them.

At least that would actually work!

Re: Etymology help?

Easily fixed in firmware though. If more than x% of the drum is about to get hammed, defer some of them to the next rotation. Oh ... what do you mean "Firmware?" ?

Re: Silence please!

Please patent this idea and NEVER LICENSE IT TO ANYONE.