* Posts by Ken Hagan

8137 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Kaspersky Password Manager's random password generator was about as random as your wall clock

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Like that?

In the context of the article, the real weakness of that code is that it could only ever return about 4 billion possible answers, which is only an order of magnitude larger than something that the article claimed could be brute-forced in a few minutes.

Microsoft defends intrusive dialog in Visual Studio Code that asks if you really trust the code you've been working on

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Pointless

The real problem here is that this question is pointless. It has no useful answer.

If the user trusts the code, it doesn't mean it is trustworthy. (Even well-intentioned code might have bugs.) It just means the user doesn't want to be pestered by an algorithm that is (inevitably) too dumb to answer the question by itself.

If the user doesn't trust the code, they presumably still want to read it, so they will click on the annoying popup to make it go away.

Either way, the user has been annoyed and Microsoft have learned nothing that they can act on. (I *assume* that MS don't do dangerous things on random pieces of code just because the end-user happens to be reading it. That would be like ActiveX on steroids.) On the other hand, the end-user has learned that they are using an IDE created by people who think this a security feature. Oh dear.

SQL Server beta for Windows Server Containers terminated 'with immediate effect'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Beta software

If only Google would delete all their beta software. That would be fun to watch, from a few million miles away.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Tried the corrections link

Calls to “Linus OS” ??

Possibly missing an apostrophe after Linus.

Possibly a tad disrespectful of the other zillion developers involved.

Probably missing an X though.

Not for children: Audacity fans drop the f-bomb after privacy agreement changes

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Re: suggestion

TRademarkable Audio Manipulation Program?

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Trollface

Excellent trolling, there!

Oh dear, Universal Windows Platform: Microsoft says 'no plans to release WinUI 3 for UWP in a stable way'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Did anyone ever do otherwise? ;)

Dear Microsoft,

There is no business case for third-party developers to re-write their UI to offer no *functional* improvements to their end-users, but to restrict (however slightly) the range of Windows versions that it runs on.

There is arguably a negative business case if they are unable to re-write all of their software at once, because customers *will* notice that the look and feel of the app is inconsistent (like your Control Panel / Settings farce that has been running for a decade now). On the other hand, they probably won't care, because 99% of their customers don't give a shit about look and feel as long as it presents a UI in a coherent way (unlike your Control Panel / Settings farce).

This does not strike me as a difficult concept to grasp. I am therefore somewhat bewildered that you have tried to do exactly this at least half a dozen times over the last 25 years, each time chipping away at usability with "features" like hiding keyboard shortcuts, hiding system menus, hiding window borders, hiding entire, yet new, features like the "charm" thingy, etc.

Microsoft wasn't joking about the Dev Channel not enforcing hardware checks: Windows 11 pops up on Pi, mobile phone

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: You're nuts

It runs just fine in a VM that has only 2GB allocated to it. That's not a completely fair comparison because the VM host is presumably using more memory to cache files, etc. Nevertheless, the idea that Win10 needs loads of RAM is simply untrue. It will use it if it has it.

Openreach to UK businesses: Switch is about to hit the fan. Prepare for withdrawal of the copper-based phone network now or risk disruption

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I don't understand

To judge from Mishak's reply, several posts above this one, that is no longer a legal requirement.

What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Almost Yawned

If everyone did that, could people point their phones at the MS store and dispense with Play altogether?

Happy with your existing Windows 10 setup? Good, because Windows 11 could turn its nose up at your CPU

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Annoying, but understandable. Haswell (4th-gen) introduced AVX2 and a VEX coding scheme that was useful enough and orthogonal enough that compilers can actually target it. I expect MS want to use that in Win11.

And yes they could make two builds of /everything/, but then you have to test the "old" build, on a range of representative old hardware, purely for the benefit of processors that (by 2025) are 10 years older than the OS.

Windows 10 required SSE2, which came in about 10-12 years before Win10, and not many people complained about that. A change of compiler switches would have "fixed" the problem, but made the OS run slower for everyone else. When is an OS vendor allowed to finally start depending on last decade's technology?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Windows 11 also requires the presence of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) – version 2.0

I expect there is a big difference between what your PC Health Check says and what Windows 11 will say when it finally turns up.

Just as... there is a big difference between what the article says (5th gen) and what the linked MS article says. I'm running the latest Win10 on a Sandy Bridge era Xeon, so old that it almost pre-dates Intel's current nth-gen labelling scheme, but it is OK as far as Microsoft's list goes.

BMA warns NHS Digital's own confidentiality guardian could halt English GP data grab unless communication with public improves

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Re: Effective use of data...not

"Dido In Disaster Out"

Marvellous!

‘What are the odds someone will find and exploit this?’ Nice one — you just released an insecure app

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Shift left? shift right?

Fun fact: Waterfall was "invented" by an academic paper that needed a term for the worst possible methodology. Naturally no such term existed because all methodologies that had actually been proposed, described or actually used had at least some redeeming features.

It was a straw man on day one, has never been a thing, but is still The Reference against which everything is measured. This is probably because even snake oil looks good next to it.

Campaigners warn of an 'algorithm-driven censorship' future if UK Online Safety Bill gets through Parliament

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Look at last time.

It is very easy to ban VPNs if you don't mind stopping everyone from working from home. In the current situation, that might be something you minded, particularly if you had just spaffed a squillion pounds on Dido and her cronies and sent several sectors of the economy off a (white) cliff.

Now that China has all but banned cryptocurrencies, GPU prices are falling like Bitcoin

Ken Hagan Gold badge

The OP didn't say the price had gone down 90%. They merely observed that it hadn't risen when the supply fell by 90%.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Phew that was close!

I think you'll find that the Euro is backed by quite a number of armies, including one with nukes. It's not like those countries have an alternative currency they can switch to quickly if the Euro discovers a Total Inability To Support Usual Payments.

India tells Twitter to obey its laws — or make wielding them easier

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: They Can Always Block It

But what if they block Twitter (and Facebook) and the sky *doesn't* fall in? One billion people managing without social media might set a terrible example to the rest of the world.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Democracy ??

"No party elected in the UK has ever had a majority of 50%+ of the electorate."

Pretty sure that was commonplace up until 1930 or so. Never since, though, so your basic point stands.

Mayflower, the AI ship sent to sail from the UK to the US with no humans, made it three days before breaking down

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My first thought: How does the door entry system work? Do all the meeting attendees have to smile or can we manage with just one and everyone else can taildate them?

(That's such a good typo I think I will leave it in. Truly brought an entry requirement to my face.)

What Microsoft's Windows 11 will probably look like

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: But is it better than Window 7?

Not that you as an end-user can do anything about it, but fibers were only added to NT to make it easy to port from other OSes that had tried them and not yet found them to be more trouble than they were worth. The advice to Windows programmers has always been "don't use them in new software".

That was over 20 years ago. Very sad to hear they are actually used by any software still on sale.

Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10

Ken Hagan Gold badge

I took it to mean "I'm so full of verbal diarrhea that I can't say "running" anymore.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: MS will probably nuke any x86 code too

I think you are massively underestimating how much 32-bit code there is. It took them about 10-15 years to kill Win16 and it had significant functional limitations compared to Win32. Win32 code has no such limits compared to Win64, unless your problem has datasets bigger than 2GB. Unsurprisingly then, there are still plenty of expensive speciality apps that are sold as 32-bit software. It ain't broke, so why fix it?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Too much to hope...

It is certainly good for devs and support that there is little excuse to be running an old version. It is less good that the newer versions may be less good.

We've found another reason not to use Microsoft's Paint 3D – researchers

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Re: Mat Powell is wrong

Methinks Mat Powell is trying to spread FUD. Do MS have an alternative file format they are trying to push? Is this a (laughable) attempt to badge STL as proprietary, in contrast to their own one, which of course isn't proprietary because it is the Microsoft Industry Standard (tm).

Pakistan's Punjab province tells citizens to get jabbed or have their SIM card blocked

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: A better incentive

It's not just vaccines. Mental health issues have a cost to wider society, so where's the harm in gently "nudging" people towards taking mind-altering drugs?

And whose society are we protecting here? There are 225 million people in Pakistan. Millions of them have "been told" that the vaccine causes infertility or even death within a couple of years. Now "the government" is telling them that the screws are turning and they'll have to have the vaccine eventually. The vaccines were all developed abroad. Last time this happened, it "turned out" that a foreign government wanted their DNA.

If you were to call for a vote in the UK, you'd have a huge majority in favouring of taking the vaccine. Evidence out this week suggests that even the "vaccine hesitancy" of some has not actually materialised as "vaccine refusal". We didn't force the issue and people were persuaded by the experiences of friends and family. However, if you were to call for a vote in some parts of Pakistan, you'd just lose the vote. What's your authority for imposing sanctions on a regional majority population that numbers in the millions?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: F... an

I believe so, which would suggest that earlier attempts to get people to accept vaccination did not use effective strategies. As the article relates, at least some of those attempts did not treat the local population with respect and left people feeling pretty pissed off about it.

So we created a reservoir for polio to reside in and perhaps mutate one day, and we might now be creating a similar reservoir for covid. Great work, guys!

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: A better incentive

When you have this many skeptics, there is considerable social pressure involved, so I don't think you can just rely on people being amenable to having their minds changed and getting vaccinated. (Their kids don't even get asked, for one thing, so a "Darwinian fallback position" is not really acceptable.)

You have to go in an actively persuade people that their doubts are mis-placed. You have to win the argument. (And as I've argued above, I don't think that coercion is a winning argument.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Hmm, awkward

Well throwing someone in jail wouldn't be *forcing* them, but I doubt people would see it that way. Vaccination is a medical intervention and there is much to be said for the principle that the state should keep out of people's bodies. If your society is so broken that rational argument isn't sufficient to ensure that most people take up vaccination voluntarily, then you aren't going to fix it by saying to all of these people "You really ought to let us inject you with something that we know is biologically active.".

Looking at it from another perspective, if you were already sufficiently skeptical of the vaccine that you were refusing it, would government bullying make you more likely to acquiesce? I suspect not. Instead, this policy will entrench the belief that the vaccine is to be resisted. Whilst I accept that society can force an issue of public good over personal freedom, I don't believe this will have the effect that it is hoped to have.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Hmm, awkward

People should get vaccinated, but governments shouldn't force them. On this occasion, I therefore find myself on the side of the religious nutjobs who are endangering not only themselves but also their friends and families.

Samsung brags that its latest imaging sensor has the ittiest-bittiest cam pixels in the world

Ken Hagan Gold badge

640 nanometres

That's yellow, isn't it? Does this sensor have trouble imaging red things, or is it all easily patched up in software?

Apple, it's OK. Seriously. You don't need to blind your iOS 15 engineers to prevent leaks

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Ah but ... If you worked at Apple, you wouldn't know they worked that way, so you wouldn't quit.

Whatever you've been doing during lockdown, you better stop it right now

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Podcasts?

Never heard a podcast that wouldn't be improved by offering a transcription, which would take only half as long to read even if you didn't skim the boring bits.

It is with a heavy heart that we must tell you America's richest continue to pay not quite as much tax as you do

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Death to the rich!

Such wealth is not useful if you can't get it out of the Cayman Islands. All tax havens require the tacit acceptance by the countries that make the Nice Things that rich folks want to buy, like yachts and multinational companies.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Not if you are taxed on it. The stupid house prices in the UK are another thing that might be fixed by tax reform. (I say stupid on behalf of the generation belowme who have bugger all chance of ever affording such prices unless they "inherit" a windfall from someone.)

Just when everyone thought things might be looking up, Dido Harding admits interest in top job at NHS England

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Headmaster

Re: No! Just no!

"...the biggest learning..."

In particular, Dido, that didn't need to be said. Ever.

Oracle hits UK reseller with lawsuit for allegedly reselling grey market Sun hardware

Ken Hagan Gold badge

substantial damages?

Wouldn't that require Oracle to prove in court that they are substantially gouging their European customers?

Is that something they want to do? Is Ms Streisand now in charge of Oracle?

Microsoft Irish subsidiary makes $314.73bn profit

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Re: There is another way

Or you could introduce a Universal Basic Income and solve the problem that way.

Wyoming powers ahead with Bill Gates-backed sodium-cooled nuclear generation plant

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Re: Thankfully, the world is simple

As several people have already mentioned, fast reactors can actually turn your long-lived waste into short-lived waste.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Wyoming

More so than DC, despite the lower population.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Proper Generation IV reactor design

A bloody big battery is probably the fastest thing. Short-lived, but long enough for your other tech to get going. We have a mixture of technologies, so why not use several?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Fusion has been 15-20 years away

His successors are planning to turn ITER on in just over four years. It may not work and it may not itself be commercially viable, but that "always 25 years" slogan is wearing pretty thin.

It turns out that all fusion needs is a fraction of the cash regularly spaffed in the direction of other technologies, whether those be subsidies to get renewables up and running or a tacit agreement to externalise the environmental costs of non-renewables.

Android banking malware sharply increased in the first chunk of 2021, reckons ESET

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Phone Banking

Compared to Android, the patching regime on a desktop (of any flavour) is far superior. The multi-user security model probably helps, too, if you are willing to use it.

UK's BT starts trials of new hollow-core optical fibre networks

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Scattering

Ah yes, the high-speed traders. Probably the only people who care and equally probably able to afford it on the back of their ill-gotten gains.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

For a sufficiently thin fibre (comparable to the wavelength of the light) I think it does travel through in a straight line. You have to start thinking about waveguides and solving Maxwell's equations for the whole interior volume of the fibre.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Scattering

A fair question, but I'm guessing that the answer is ...

Because the refractive index of air is one point oh fuck all, so you are already enjoying 99% of the possible benefits and getting a long-lived vacuum seal on a thin tube several million times longer than it is wide is Quite Hard.

Also, if memory serves, there is something called Knudsen flow which in this case means that evacuating the tube would be quite hard too. But my memory is definitely flaky on this point so I expect that someone who can be bothered to google will shortly be putting me right.

Firefox 89: Can this redesign stem browser's decline?

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Re: Stats

It's almost as if the low score on market share proves that it is the browser of choice for those who don't want to be tracked.

Whoop! Robot/human high-fives all round! Oh, my fingers have disintegrated

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Sheds and over light covers

Is it fraud if it is obvious?

At least, it is obvious to me. Then again, I'm not buying ads on Amazon.

Microsoft releases command-line package manager for Windows (there are snags)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Restarts

This is precisely the issue and it is (slightly) worse than suggested. Because of this historicalbehaviour, there are apps that rely on this locking. They "know" that if they are running then theycan'thavetheir dependencies upgraded under their feet, so things like config data formats and protocols are stable.

I doubt whether anyone knows how widespread this actually is, but MS have considered changing it in the past andbacked away. I think oldnewthing had an article on it a few years back. Don't expect it ever to change.

US Patent Office to take only DOCX in future – or PDFs if you pay extra

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: You want interoperability?

With ASCII art? And formulae written out in TeX source code? No thanks. There's a reason that normal people use rich text formats. Plain text is inadequate for most forms of technical communication even before you insist on a layer of legalese.