Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: RFC 1591

I'm not sure who your reply is aimed at -- Sullivan, who was the one trying to use the RFC as a justification, or our commentard, who merely suggested that Sullivan apply it consistently.

Re: Oh dear, the educational system appears to be in freefall

"but not if you're in the actual business of selling technology"

Ah, that's your mistake. No large retailer is in the business of selling any material object. They are in the business of selling an idea. You, the victim, aspire to being X and their job is to convince you that what's in their box will deliver X-ness.

Obviously this is easier if you know very little about X and so a large retailer is probably someone who has picked up on this and focusses their attention on that "easy" fraction of the population. (Darwin, as applied to shopping.) It follows that the retailer no longer has to know much about X either and so they probably don't. If they know about anything at all, it is how to sell ideas and aspirations. X doesn't come into it.

Re: Assume the worst

a-tomic = not-divisible (in Greek).

You will be familiar with how the same word is used with the same meaning in physics and isn't true there either.

Re: Multi-Physics

Just sounds like physics to me. At a pinch I'll let you have "physics, without the unjustifiable over-simplifications".

Re: I sure hope they don't use this for military purposes...

I think in the middle of an actual conflict 15 years hence, there would be no point in turning it back on again before you'd shot down the several dozen "interference satellites" in low orbit beaming noise on the relevant frequencies at several thousand times the GPS signal strength.

Re: One way to prevent accidents

This is an argument for programming languages to enforce a style guide and refuse to run programs that are well-formed but in poor style. (Ideally, one rule of this guide would be "Stop taking the piss and use some fucking letters you muppet!".)

Re: Beautiful

No. That's not sadistic. That's actually the way to make sure people learn. They/ll learn the lesson in their first week when there isn't much to lose anyway, and they'll never have a problem with it.

What our BOFH's assistant did here, on the other hand, serves as a testament to the general lack of homicidal tendencies amongst normal people. The BOFH sent 12 emails over a year, so is perfectly aware that people *are* storing valuable (to the company) documents locally, but apparently it was too much effort to check in this case, so the company got screwed and presumably the BOFH and PFY tried to blame the end-user.

Re: Autonomous cars will need their own dedicated space

Sounds like a railway.

Re: 'We want to break down barriers, move ideas ... across devices'

That's not even the scariest part of the quote...

'We want to break down barriers, move ideas seamlessly [...] across people [...]'

As soon as you have multiple people involved, the first question must surely be "What is your security model?" and if you don't have an answer then I have no further questions.

Re: I don't understand...

You wouldn't do it that way.

As a conceptual problem, allowing some programs to do some things and others to do others is what operating systems have been doing for longer than I've been breathing. Usually, the basis for the decision depends on some or all of "who is the user", "what has the user chosen to enable for this program", "what is this program" and "what other things is this program picking up on-the-fly". It can get quite complicated to describe, but it is not rocket science and it is not hard to come up with efficient implementations.

As an aside, the persistent failure of those who design "environments" and "virtual machines" and "sandboxes" to match the competence of those who design "operating systems" is a mystery to me. It's almost as though every time some re-invents the idea of limited access they are immediately transported back to 1959 and have to re-learn all of computer science.

Re: No matter how careful you are...

Is there a lawyer in the house?

If I changed my signature to the word "none", neatly printed, could I insist that people accept it as my signature and could I then simply deny that my signature on a document was proof of anything?

I ask, because if forging a signature really does just become a matter of cut and paste, like typing my name, then it *is* worthless as an authenticator and so there is surely some incentive for people to try to make it *obviously* worthless and for the law to accept that it is worthless.

Re: Database of photos to be hacked..Trust us...

This ^, so much.

I feel a "two types of people in this world" joke coming on, with a punchline of people who don't understand the previous comment even after it has been made and people who thought it themselves but thought it was too trivial to post.

Re: I go bang!

"Even being colourblind wouldn't be an excuse as the earth cables are stripey green/yellow wheras live and neutral are solids."

I don't keep up with fashion, but I'm pretty sure that the colours of live, neutral and earth have changed several times in the last 50 years. The "50 years" is relevant because you can't (usually) tell *when* something was wired just by looking at it. Also, if you have enough experience to do *that*, you probably also have enough experience to know that you can't trust the f@!"£$ing moron who wired it, so the colours are not something you should stake your life on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:StatCounter-browser-ww-monthly-200901-201905.png

...would suggest that IE dropped below 50% around 2010 or so. If these twats have been asleep at the wheel since then I think their paymasters (taxpayers) might reasonably ask for them to repay all the salaries they've been paid over the last decade.

Even more so in Japan, I believe, where the language apparently doesn't distinguish between blue and green (at least, in basic vocabulary) and consequently they went their own way in the early days.

Re: Is there an option?

3G you say? Do your customers know they might stop working next year?

Re: Someone hit the publish button a bit early?

"I'd like to hope it was ready before the press release went out."

Still waiting for the "Ready" release of Windows 10...

Re: Fixing the symptom…

"None of the potential filesystems involved (NTFS, HFS+, APFS, Ext4, ZFS) gives any guarantee about the order of the entries in a directory data structure. But, because most times that returned order is basically "order of creation" ..."

Microsoft's documentation for their basic directory enumeration function (FindFileNext) states that NTFS and CDFS return results in alphabetical order. In the case of NTFS, going back to NT3.1 this was a contractual guarantee (for unicode-centric values of "alphabetical"). I don't know its status now, but there is at least a generation of Windows programmers who will never have seen a directory enumeration in non-alphabetical order. (Exception: Windows Explorer deliberately re-orders files so that File10.txt sorts after File9.txt, but even in this case it is quite widely understood that Explorer had to shuffle the order to get this effect. There are probably questions on StackExchange asking for the code that does this.)

If you have never seen the OS returning the files in non-alphabetical order, it might never occur to you that it was possible on "other" systems. It is still a bug, but for someone who doesn't do portable coding for a living it is quite understandable.

In fact, I wonder if te quoted comment "because most times that returned order is basically "order of creation" ..." implies that the poster works on a system that behaves that way and is assuming that all other systems behave the same way.

Re: On the upside...

"I'd be fascinated to hear about how the annual intake [...] gets such access in a matter of days"

Having recently put a son into a rival university, I can tell you exactly how that works. Firstly, a fair proportion of that annual intake probably had unconditional offers (either the dodgy kind or the kind that result from taking a gap year) and so have been "known" to the system for about 11 months already. For those people, it is sufficient to notice that they've actually turned up and then switch on their access. For those with conditional offers, they too are probably already partly known through their UCAS application details and when the results come out in August it may be possible to get most of the access set up by some imaginative scripting. (Fixing the mistakes is what Freshers Week is for, right?) For those who only become known during Clearing, you have about a month to process them. Historically, they've been small in number.

I'm told that increasing numbers of students are deferring any kind of choice until Clearing (after their results come out) which is presumably making life hard for universities (in every respect, not just IT), which might be why "people" are finally talking about changing the system in the UK so that no-one applies before their results are known. (That is, results in August, apply in the autumn, start courses in January.) If you are reading this from outside the UK and are not familiar with our crappy system: yes, we do most of our university entrance decision-making based on the *predicted* grades given to us by school teachers. Always have done. It's part of what makes Britain Great.

Re: The phrase "User Experience" is misleading

Presumably that was when you realised that you'd captured the legal requirements exactly.

Re: Way to go El Reg

If only there was some sort of "example" domain that could be used for illustrative email addresses.

Re: Simpler

That "something stupid" is based on two historical observations. Firstly, that vulnerable people can be bullied into remembering things that aren't true. Secondly, that the level of bullying can be raised as high as is necessary to make a person vulnerable.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, but everyone remembers them.

Linus may be a better personnel manager, but he chose the GPL to release the shit he got done.

I have heard that RMS has actually written software, but I'm only really familiar with his legal work. That has certainly been a major factor in the rise of free software. Witness the projects that lawyers tried to shut down, but couldn't because it was all GPL-ed, or the projects that someone thought they'd bought, only to discover that everyone important just forked the GPL-ed source and ignored the new owner.

Re: Job seekers sit in front of a laptop or mobile phone and complete an automated video interview

This is why the rest of us have a public duty to walk away from employers who use such methods.

Re: Is this just an English thing ?

"For a mod on teh Interwebz, I guess it's especially confusing"

If I have to look at a poster's profile before it is safe to reply to their question, I'm not going to help anyone on that site. (As the fine article notes, all the real work being done on SE is unpaid.) There are other sites I where I can play. The internet is big (...really big, etc.) whereas my free time is small.

Re: District Council

There may or may not be a possibilty of fraud in rolling over budget. (Perhaps someone else can post a plausible scenario to enlighten the rest of us.) However, the problem here is that you don't appear to be allowed to roll over budget *entitlement*. That is, if you don't waste the full budget this year, you will be punished for this financial prudence by getting your budget cut next year. That is simply insane. I doubt whether *any* private citizen, *anywhere*, *ever* has ever imposed such discipline on themselves, which makes me doubt whether there possibly can be any financial justification for the idea.

If only there were laws about deliberately wasting public money, we could have all the bean counters locked up.

Re: Surprising?

"If we end up staying in the EU I know they wont like it. A "member state" (state, lol how that will change in a few decades) full of anti EU sentiment. Just what they want."

Not really. The only way we'll stay is if there is another referendum (or if the next general election is sufficiently obviously hi-jacked to that purpose) and remain gets a majority. We would then be a country that had considered the matter at great length and decided to stay and abide by the same rules as everyone else. There are other, current, EU members who cannot make that claim.

And if we don't stay, the Scots and Irish will leave "England" and rejoin the EU with a majority of the population behind the decision. I say "England" because that's what it will be and if the Welsh are unhappy about that then perhaps they should start considering their position. I'm sure there is perfectly reasonable "UK" or "Celtic Union" that could be formed.