Posts by Ken Hagan

The coronaviruses are a family of viruses. A vaccine for one of them is about as useful as a vaccine for last year's flu.

Re: Why use the word racist.

Because it discriminates on the basis of skin colour?

I have no problem with the language here. I'm not abou to attribute malice to a computer but if you need a simple word to describe the problem then racist works for me.

Re: Snowflakes?

So junk the social media. You won't miss it. It's clearly full of objectionable twats. Put the phone down and get a life.

Re: Spammy, but also stupid

I got the text a day after reading about the design flaws (no exit code from a location) and the implementation bugs (no negative test results) so I was well aware of the availability of the app.

If it has only been downloaded 12 million times then it would appear that most of the population weren't impressed either.

Re: Capricious abuse of power

YouTube are protected by law from being the ones getting sued, so it's not really their platform and they shouldn't have unrestricted power over what is posted. They can have that power if they also accept the responsibility that goes with it.

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

Maybe pay a visit to Terry's Welsh Bar?

Re: The value of Windows is in the API

"The kernel underneath only matters for stuff like drivers."

That depends on your definition of kernel. If you don't provide all the IOCTL interfaces and the background services that "applications" use to make stuff happen, you don't have anything useful. It's a vast surface area and while there may be many apps that don't use any of it, and no apps that use much of it, you haven't got a replacement for the Windows kernel unless you have a replacement for all of it. At a guess, it is about 10 times larger than "the kernel". Like the myriad daemons that make a real UNIX system actually useful, most of this code runs in user-space so probably isn't being counted as "kernel". But you need it, all the same.

Of course, underneath all that there's a much smaller/narrower interface that *is* well-defined. If you emulate that, running Windows on top of Linux is easy. But that's not a wild prediction on my part, because MS have already made Windows a reasonably well-behaved virtualisation client.

Re: Working from will NOT last

Very good point about knowing your colleagues, but a mixture of WfH and Office days could offer savings in office space and win points for being more family friendly.

Re: Shared code base

Intelligence agencies almost certainly have the code already. Even MVPs were given access to a fair bit of the code in years gone by. However, I'd be surprised if much of the code is still present unchanged in Win10. There are two reasons for this.

Firstly, C++ has changed significantly over this period and MSVC has followed those changes. Also, Microsoft's own static checking tools have evolved. I doubt the XP source code would get through the build process today.

Secondly, what the code is trying to do, in terms of protocols like SSL and SMB, also changes if you give them long enough. Even if you set out to be completely backwards compatible, you are going to end up changing pretty much every line of the implementation over a two-decade period because the "same" code has to support the newer protocols and increasingly treat the older protocol as a special case rather than the main event.

There's certainly no way the message pump will have survived from Win1. That was a co-operative multi-tasking system that obsessed over swapping segments in and out of the active stack frame. The "modern" (NT and beyond) message pump divides its responsibilities between the OS/device layer and a delivery layer, where one instance of the delivery layer runs in each UI thread on the system. The latter hasn't changed much in 30 years, but it has had several accessibility and hooking mechanisms added (and removed) over that time, and it also has to co-operate with "new" environments like .NET.

So, no, the worry here for Microsoft is not that anything of value has been leaked, it is that anything at all has leaked. Presumably the XP code is guarded in much the same way that its successors is guarded, so if there is a hole in the wall ...

Re: Born on the Isle of Eire...

I don't think we have citizenship classes here. We didn't when I was at school and my kids didn't more recently.

Given how our politicians can stick an oar in some so apolitical as English and Maths, it is probably for the best that we don't have Citizenship.

Re: Isn't it odd...

You're paying for a transient pleasure, like going to the cinema or a pub or restaurant. Plenty of music isn't worth owning but is worth a few pennies for a period of time.

I prefer to own music myself, but I can understand those who prefer to rent and in doing so get access to a much broader range than I could for the same money.

Re: Automation

A machine that can generate hate-speech *might* be something that you could re-purpose as a machine to detect hate-speech generated by others. That might be quite useful in the same way that a spell-checker or a grammar-checker is.

"It looks like you are writing bile-ridden slander. Do you want some help with that?" -- Clippy, 2021

Re: Always registered.

"USB uses the same connector for everything"

Really? I can think of six without even looking in my box of cables and adaptors.

(But you are right that the connector is just *one* of the ways in which you might have the wrong kind of USB.)

"In what way is it anonymous?"

How hard is it to create an account on Facebook under a pseudonym or an email address that 99% of the population cannot trace to you? For bonus points, how hard is it to do that in such a way that the law enforcement experts of some random foreign counrty (like, say, the US) cannot trace you or touch you in court even if they could trace you?

Nitpick: Teams does run on Linux.

But yeah, not the right tool for the job.

Re: it's infamous need to be rebuilt literally every couple of months

"even though it [NT] was quite resource hungry"

I never saw a machine that would run Win9x faster than the contemporary version of NT. Architecturally, 9x was a 32-bit "kernel" that had a "DOS box for drivers" with a whacking great mutex to serialise access. It was an impressive hack, but one that had obvious costs in performance and stability.

The only reason to use 9x was that you had some DOS software that needed to bit-bang on the hardware. (That was usually an actual DOS device driver, but it could have been an application.)

It's also a process that can easily result in issues when you don't support 99% of existing extensions, no matter how slowly you execute the process.

This is like an OS changing its driver model and pushing out an auto-update when only a dozen or so common disks, rodents, keyboards and displays are supported. It beggars belief that anyone thought they would get away with this.

Re: But how long will it take to get there?

Nitpick: The current value is just over 5 years: https://www.iter.org/proj/itermilestones#177

ITER may not work, but that's the current expert prediction.

You are probably better off learning about computer security, so that you can takeover the enemy's assets mid-war. Given the "state of the art" in that, I'd have thought that the outcome of WW3 was completely up in the air. (The side that *builds* the best drones may not end up being very important.)

Re: Security Locks for the win

I think you missed the point about frequency.

"Allo, allo. Is that an aerial the size of a small town in your pocket or are you just *really* pleased to see me?"

Re: Within a busy area

I wouldn't call it "busy". Work out the volume of a sphere of that radius and consider the fraction filled by satellites and the volume of the cylinder swept out by the rock.

Even Earth appears (fortunately) to be quite hard to hit and it has measurable gravitational field. (Pedant's alert: Yes, I know that you can measure the gravitational field of a small lump of metal and have been able to since Cavendish's time, but you get my drift.)

Re: How Dare You Criticise........

Not a Graun reader, then.

Everything I've seen here, I've seen there, plus some wild speculation about what she has on the Bullingdon set from her Oxford days that keeps getting her these cushy posts.

Re: "Four words you never want to see together..."

or "son-in-law" if you want balance.

Re: So that's Cummings out of a Job then.

I think the Dublin rule applies until New Year.

Re: M:N was already there a while back

There has been a general move away from user-space threading. I think they started life in Solaris. Microsoft have deprecated their "fibers", Linux added and then removed its M:N scheduling. Apparently it is one of those superficially attractive ideas whose deficiencies only become apparent after you've invested a year or two.

This is essentially the stackless versus stackful debate for co-routines, and languages are increasingly coming down on the stackless side of the fence. As far as I can tell, the main reasons are:

If you don't know which thread a routine is going to run on, you can't safely use any OS API that depends on per-thread kernel state. If you can recode so that there are no such dependencies, you've basically done all the work needed to refactor your program as a (kernel) thread-pool feeding on a queue of work packages. If you can't recode in this way, kernel threads aren't *that* much more expensive and work as intended.

Re: Own goal?

There's no technical reason to use *any* encryption, since the update files are signed, but that's not my point. MS *could* gratuitously use a transport that they know is blocked by some users with the intention of being awkward. They might even try to justify it on privacy grounds, since the updates that you query for, request and retrieve, give away information about your system.

Why would they be awkward? Well, there is a Chinese version of pretty much every major western player in technology (search, tat bazaars, social media, ...). Sooner or later, there will be a Chinese "Windows-compatible" OS as well. (They must surely have the source code. It's just waiting for Winnie-the-Pooh to give it his sign-off.) Once that happens, there is no money for MS in China and they might as well close the door behind them.

Re: Why the problem?

I suspect this (entirely sensible) plan falls flat when confronted by a website that pulls resources, including code, from a dozen different domains because that's easier than actually taking responsibility for serving them up from your own server.

On the other hand, this might not be a bad thing. If the site was thrown together by an idiot, I probably don't want it to work as they intended and probably do want to be encouraged to find an alternative site.

Citation needed? I'd say that all the elected dictators I can think of were clearly unsuitable personality types long before they were elected. The problem is that not all the electorate agree on what "unsuitable" means.

Re: @AC - @aberglas - You had better take these seriously

Russian is a language where you can't say you are having a friend round to dinner without disclosing the sex of the friend.

With some truth, it has been said that grammar dictates what you cannot avoid saying, rather than what you can say.

This is not the answer. I doubt these accounts would exist for more than 24 hours after being flagged. Also, I doubt that many people actually care about their sources of information as long as it feeds their preferred narrative.

What Putin appears to have done is provide covert support for a position that was being openly pushed by a minority. (That, incidentally is the difference between his intervention and that of the EU and US. All three had a public position. Only Putin had an army of anonymous influecers.) That would have been almost impossible with proper fact checking, but proved fairly easy if you can get away with lying on an industrial scale.

So blame all round, really. Still, we'll learn. Experience is a hard mistress, but fools will learn from no other.

Re: Thoughts

Low voltage power distribution isn't very efficient, so possibly never. You could, however, build them into the mains socket. In fact, we appear to have a commentard further up in the forum who has exactly that on all sockets.

Re: Damn numbers and facts.

Unless you can catch it from your pets, or tomorrow's lunch.

Re: scaling

Perversely, arguing that we should avoid terms like master-slave because of the origins of the expression *is* just an etymological argument.

Does it scale? Well apparently not if the list of exceptions and their justifications are anything to go by.

Re: Liability

If so, then it would be possible for someone to maliciously hotlink to your site and then get you into trouble. That seems perverse, so I imagine that a court would let you off and instead suggest to the prosecutor that the hotlinker is the one who has violated the law by wilfully failing to maintain control over the processing of their own customers' data.

But, as you can probably tell from my "That seems perverse, so..." sentence, IANAL.

Re: Masochists...

In my case it is because I develop software and want to get screwed over before my customers do.

It's a balance, though. I could become an Inmate and get screwed earlier and harder, but I don't love my customers *that* much.

Re: In the interim, the British government has been forced to adopt human-powered contact tracing

...which is just one of the reasons why there are privacy concerns around any track and trace app that everyone is expected to install on their phone.