Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
"I remember reading that The Sun employs English graduates as sub-editors because they are able to express ideas at the 12-year-old reading comprehension level for which it aims. You have to know a lot to write simply."
I have heard something very similar from a relative who had been employed in that (or very similar) capacity by The Sun.
The great pity is that we were all 12 once and somehow most of us appear to have lost this skill.
"Fundamentally this is a good idea as prevents shysters from shaking down a site because Bubba the Yahoo posted something nasty."
No, it's really not. It allows the site to use Bubba the Yahoo to take the legal flack whilst the site owners get to sell ad space on either side of "Bubba's" page. Everyone knows this, just as everyone also knows that if Bubba gets thrown off the site he will just re-appear under a new free email address the following week.
Society has to figure out where the line is drawn between public statements (subject to legal action) and private ones (typically not, as in the case of the average pub conversation). At the moment, social media sites put themselves forward as having the intimacy of private chats, but with the reach of public announcements. It isn't working. IBM can see that and don't want the baby thrown out with the bathwater when the blunt instruments of legislation are finally applied.
Social media's business model is "selling ad space on a conduit that people are attracted to precisely because they can post whatever they like". There are obviously legitimate uses of such a facility. Equally obviously, there are illegitimate ones. If you can't filter out the latter, then your business model is unimplementable within the law.
Sorry, but society doesn't owe you a business model. Find a new one that you can keep legal.
I note, for example, that most B2B scenarios would have fairly good authentication of who is posting and so action could be taken against those who abuse the facility and in a business setting that is probably enough of a deterrent. Amongst the general public, however, the authentication is almost nil (how easy is it to create a new and basically anonymous account?) and even if you can identify an abuser, the likelihood that either you or the platform can take action against them in any legally useful sense is almost zero. IBM's defence of B2B use-cases is therefore more than just defending their own turf -- it actually makes sense.
"Most of the micro USB connectors I have have some kind of tactile keying for orientation..."
That's nice, but I have two e-Readers with the sockets mounted opposite ways up. People keep saying that I just need to make the logo face up (or forward), but my experience over 20 years is that this rule has only been true about 50% of the time. Reversible cables/sockets is the only sensible solution.
At the time of its original announcement, MS said that Edge was *not* a re-write. It was the IE codebase with all the back-compat stuff taken out, presumably in the hope that what was left would be far simpler and cleaner and therefore easier to maintain and push forward.
If every flaw is common to both, then this might indicates that the back-compat stuff was the only bit that worked, or that the back-compat stuff is no longer being targetted by Bad People, or that MS no longer care about bugs that are in IE only.
No. We've already had that.
If you are imagining loads of non-technical end-users losing contact with the NAS boxes, then you are probably imagining Windows users, who lost SMB1 support (by default) a little while back. Any users disappointed by this announcement are Linux-heads and presumably know how to modify /etc/samba/smb.conf.
We've also already had the complaints when Microsoft stopped tolerating LAN manager passwords and people discovered that their NAS had been configured to use those and the NAS box's smb.conf was not accessible because the vendor had locked the device down.
Not this one. Your error is in the phrase "a large scale product". IBM thought the PC was a dirty little thing to get customers hooked on computers, at which point they would open their wallets to buy a proper one. (And then the PC ate their entire business for lunch, but hey ... why would anyone in the computer industry have ever heard of Moore's Law?)
"I've tried doing it with Kerbals loads of time and it's impossible."
Well, if I can be serious for a moment, I saw the film last weekend and that was one of the most memorable features of it. Every step of the voyage is taken slowly enough for you to appreciate that they did it "in one take" without the planners dropping so much as a minus sign at any point.
My particular favourite is (spoiler alert!) the bit where they have to launch back off the surface of the moon and somehow rendezvous with a command module that is hurling overhead at several thousand feet per second. (Er, yes, I'm afraid there are a lot of non-El-Reg units in this film.) If they miss then they die. No pressure...
"My driving licence, in effect, simply says that I claim to be the same person who passed a couple of driving tests over 50 years ago."
That's the most that *any* ID could ever prove. The trick is to make sure that it actually manages even that. Anything that cannot be revoked when compromised, or that can be easily faked, or that is easily left on a USB stick on the way home, doesn't even manage that.
ID is quite hard, like most of the rest of security. One of the tricks that seems to have stood the test of time is "strength in depth". Having a single ID that covers everything is the ID equivalent of relying on perimeter security. Curiously, when it comes to keeping out Johnny Foreigner, our civil servants realise that you need internal checks as well, but the idea of having separate IDs for separate roles in life doesn't seem to have occurred to them.
I'm puzzled. If it was legal for them to distribute these videos via Pirate Bay then presumably it was legal for others to download them once there. If it wasn't legal to put them there (*), surely they are opening themselves up to a much larger lawsuit from the actual copyright holders.
Also, is this not a possible defence for the downloaders? If, for example, I buy a CD on the High Street and I later find out that it is counterfeit then, yes, I have a duty to stop using the CD, seek compensation from the shop, and inform the police. However, if I do all those things then I would not expect the copyright owner to have much of a case against me. (Mens Rea and all that.)
(* I'm guessing it wasn't, since the music industry has spent about 30 years trying to enforce this very point.)
"Come Monday morning, the site is still down, the domain is still unregistered, and the client is threatening legal action if we don't do something..."
IANAL but I *think* that is basically an instruction from them for you to register the domain, which means you have their permission to domain squat.
These chips ... presumably they are mass-produced and if you know the right runes you can product a device that responds in the same way as the chip that was surgically embbeded in <insert victim here> and which is prohibitively difficult to change.
Thing about cats is ... no-one actually wants to impersonate a cat.
"This isn't murder, it's more like pest control, [...] Four more years of the Caped Cretin and we are royally screwed."
He was elected. If you murder him, those same people will elect someone else. If you want to excise your aggressive cancer, you are going to have to persuade rather-a-lot-of-millions of people that you are a smart person looking to put them right on an important point. Putting bullets into your enemy, or inviting others to do so, is not a good start to your PR campaign.
Oh ... and describing other people as "pests" is disturbingly similar to something that some other guys did sometime back when. That's not a good look either.
An interesting choice of phrase, there. "China" isn't yet the target of the ban. However, if the court decides that Trump is picking on Huawei then the likely follow-up would indeed be the extend the ban to all Chinese companies on the (not unreasonable) grounds that they are subject to Chinese law in the same way that US companies are subject to US law. We *know* that US companies can be compelled to perform actions in secret for the US government and it is inconceivable that Chinese companies cannot be leant on in similar fashion by their own government.
Basically, you can't trust *any* foreign company if you can't trust their government. You never could. The only new feature here is that the US has pumped so many dollars into China over the past couple of decades that it now finds itself dependent on Chinese companies in a way that it was never dependent on Soviet ones during the Cold War.
I think it is always "police have", since police are plural. However, in the UK you will find many who say "the police force are" but I think this is much less common in the US, where the traditional grammatical rules insist that a force is singular, no matter how many police are in it.
Yeah, then. It is the opinion of many historians who have studied the period that if Hitler had not vetoed the invasion plan in 1940 then the UK would have fallen. Had that happened, an embarrassingly large number of the population would have kowtowed and we'd quite probably have given the entire empire's resources (not yet spent, at that point) to the Nazis, at which point both Stalin and Roosevelt would have been toast.
It would be interesting to know how many of the XP or Server 2003 boxes that are exposed to the internet are actually still configured for automatic updates. I suspect that those that aren't are "managed" by the sort of person who won't be manually updating them.
"All of them, of course."
Now *that* I doubt. For example, if we refer back to Miss Widdecombe, as mentioned in a previous message, on a whole range of issues I'd be *really* surprised if she turned out to be a hypocrite, rather than just wrong. Credit where it's due ... and all that.
"Moving to the cloud has also helped Sainsbury's into the warm infinity-looped embrace of DevOps. The company has moved from five to six releases per year to multiple releases per day, said the CIO."
S'funny. We were saying just the other day how their website keeps changing from week to week now and so we can never find anything and features that used to work just don't anymore. I wonder if there is a connection...
"Personally, I imagine simply someone who enjoys engaging their brain for the pleasure of it."
Like all "competitive games", it depends on your personality type. If you are naturally competitive then people who play "just as a game" drive you nuts (and you, them) whereas if you aren't then there is nothing (*) more annoying than someone who "has to play to win, or else it's no fun".
At least in Scrabble you can tell the two types apart early on. The "players" start by setting up the board. The "winners" start by finding the nearest dictionary to use as a final arbiter.
(* Except for a wasp at a picnic, obviously. Did I even need to say that? Probably not.)
"Rees-Mogg a fellow traveller of Jeremy Corbyn?"
Well the OP actually had it the other way around, but yeah.
Everything Corbyn has done in the last six months (even down to his habit of changing his party's whipping policy on the afternoon of a vote) has had the effect of making the available deal less likely and (given the PM's "reluctance" to toy with the idea of a second referendum) thereby made it more likely that we get a hard Brexit because nothing else has been agreed in time.
"The only version of Windows that ever ran on 1GB of RAM was XP - and even then it was a lot better with 4GB."
S'funny. All my Windows VMs still have less than 2GB RAM and until Win10 they mostly managed with just the 1GB and no page file. I suppose it is possible that the Linux host underneath is just awesomely efficient at driving the hardware, but actually I suspect Windows just isn't as memory hungry as you think.
Now disc space ... that's a whole different kettle of bloated fish.
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