Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: "their freedom to wear whatever they want"

Well they shouldn't give it a name that sounds like it was lifted from the pages of Jane Austen, then. Bloody fashionistas...

Re: Real World Example

"You can get away with this if you are young, thin and female, "

I'm guessing you are a lesbian, then? I'm surprised though, coz I'd expect you to be a bit more PC than that.

Re: Words of Satan

You can turn that on its head. If you are just a nasty piece of work, become a security pro and no-one will ever know.

Re: Competitive market?!

If only the overseeing government had strong antitrust laws and enough backbone to enforce them.

"The world needs a cutdown version of Windows that has all the fripperies removed, also all the legacy 8, 16 and 32 bit code it is what Windows 10 should have been."

Not clear whether you are sugggesting that the legacy code should or should not be removed, but it is the only reason why most people run Windows. I can't think of a single Win10 feature that nearly all users could not live without.

What the world needs is an easy way to run Win7 (for the apps) in a VM on top of Linux (for the modern hardware support, email client, browsing, and increasingly large numbers of general purpose apps). The technology exists, we need an easy way for non-IT types to get it up and running, bearing in mind that most home users and small businesses have no IT support at all.

Re: An awful lot of software still depends on drive letters?

"it is 2019 and an awful lot of software still depends on drive letters."

The side-swipe about drive letters looks like an irrelevance. Nearly all software will complain if files are moved to a different path while the software isn't looking, even on Linux or Macs.

You stuck flags in daisies? I'm not surprised your mum was embarrassed.

Re: Defense against the Darknet

"No, the people who flooded the Internet and TV with content win."

That'll be the Indians then. If not already, then soon. It should also be noted that the English-as-a-Second-Language crowd in Europe speak yet another dialect that isn't quite anybody's. There are a lot of them, too, and they have more money than you do. Get used to it Americans, your time at the top is limited and then you're following us down. Try to be more graceful about it than we were.

Re: Diversity

In the context of an article on facial recognition software, I would have thought that "different coloured Americans" was indeed sufficient. In the wider context of AI, your point stands though.

Re: On a side note

And conversely, I can remember the practice of trying to read a floppy on a different machine immediately after you wrote it, because we all knew that 1 time in 10 it wouldn't actually be readable.

Re: Why it's important to specify units.

Be grateful that no-one uses kelvins for everyday purposes.

JS is roughly Lisp in C-like syntax. I'm not *that* familiar with VBA but I don't think it has any of the classic Lisp-y features like lambdas, closures, higher order functions and lists.

Re: Ah c'mon

A four-year-old watches you *far* more than you realise. (This becomes fairly obvious a few years later when they start using it against youj.)

Re: All fun and games

It is poor banknote design to have them all the same size. It makes this sort of error mechanically undetectable. That might not have been an issue until people started using machines to handle banknotes, but it seems odd that no-one has fixed the problem since then.

Re: We'll see more of this

"after three years of non-stop negotiations"

Really? Have they started? Last I looked, Mrs May was still making up shit as she goes along, completely oblivious to what the other side has said about what they were prepared to entertain.

But to your main point, yes, since the UK has clearly gone completely round the bend, all businesses that *can* get out probably have a duty to shareholders to actually do so.

Re: It's hard to think of anything more boneheadedly stupid...

Testing helmets the same way is also "more boneheadedly stupid", both literally and metaphorically, and it took me about 5 seconds to come up with it. Come on, Gareth, raise your game!

Re: IBM

If not intimidation, then certainly it is a purely procedural move intended to deny the victim access to justice. It's an abuse of the legal system and IBM should be declared vexatious litigants as a result.

Re: Rosyth?

Park 'em alongside the terrace at Westminster.

Re: The only thing Marx killed was time[0].

"Oh well, there goes the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita and just about everybody's scriptural texts. Because any ideas can be and are twisted by evil men."

Well yes, which is why *all* philosophies need to be scrutinised with a critical eye, even the one that is (or was in the past) the mainstream view in your society.

Re: Well that problem has been solved decades ago...

Users already have to "install" apps, for some definition of "install", and some installers already take a very long time for no obvious reason, so users are already used to running an installer and going to make a cup of tea. (Well, this one is, at any rate. YMMV.)

Re: Won't work.

I tend to agree, but with the rather significant caveat that "Now is not yet the time.".

Re: Not Just Server Rooms

"and that new contractor was off the platform on the first helicopter available"

They waited for a helicopter? Quite generous, in the circumstances.

Re: no such thing as "unsolvable"

"Turning three mutually intermeshed gears."

Well, yes, but the OP allows you to ask a few questions and you might find out that actually those gears don't need to turn if you can rotate the entire assembly instead.

Re: Meanwhile in Bristol ....

"given the kids cardboard boxes"

There is *nothing* as much fun as a cardboard box you can fit into.

Re: As a Canadian

"It's not really made much of a difference other than the decriminalization of a large section of the population."

If de-regulation has been accompanied by no discernable downside, then that in itself *ought* to be welcomed by the hard right, since they are always banging on about red tape and interference by government in people's private lives.

Re: Not seeing the mass-market appeal

I am inclined to agree, but I think that AR goggles could be considerably easier and more useful. For a trivial example, we all remember the Pokemon Go craze of a few years back. That was just AR on s 2D device and it clearly captured the imagination of ordinary punters. I'm sure there are loads of useful applications of AR outside gaming, too.

Re: Best virtualisation options?

VirtualBox gives its guests not much more 3D than is necessary to run the Windows shell. (I don't think any shaders from the guest machines get to run on the GPU.) I doubt you could run any games on it. I think VMWare's workstation offering (that you pay for) does slightly better. Neither gives you access to stuff like Intel's QuickSync offering (hardware H264 + H265).

On the other hand, if you don't need to run games, you can certainly get by. Software decoding is enough on a modern machine to let you watch all the videos on the internet and Windows (any version) is more stable in a VM, perhaps because the virtualised hardware platform is more stable. I've been running Windows in a VM full-time for several years. It works for me.

Re: A smartphone based desktop does make perfect sense in the age of the cloud

"If in a few years the majority of office workers use cloudy documents instead of those on the C-drive, the smart phone just needs to be able to run a web browser fast enough."

No. It also needs to run a mobile signal fast enough. The path to my local drive is about 3 orders of magnitude wider than my internet connection and we have all put SSDs into our machines in recent years precisely because that width is important.

.int

.arpa

Re: Perhaps they have moved on

"To get a clean from start you would have to wire up the processor from transistors, design and build your chip fabricators, code your compilers and bootstrap yourself into the modern age."

Not true, if you use multiple sources for the entities at each level and compare their results.

At least, assuming that the same enemy hasn't nobbled *every* supplier at a given level. Choose your suppliers carefully, though, and the probability of that must surely sink to a level that anyone can live with.

"They threw the relevant data away. How does a new system deal with that?"

Easy. Anyone who can (on the basis of age) plausibly claim to have arrived at that time and who has (on the basis that they are still here) managed to avoid deportation for the umpteen decades during which the government *had* the records, must be presumed to be legally in the UK.

Interesting, but it is still a VM. Just because your language has something that it calls a pointer doesn't mean you have to implement it in a way that corresponds to actual virtual addresses.

Re: Unpopular solution ...

"So you want to give the social media companies an official mandate for universal censorship of anything they want to declare suspect?"

"the big social media websites" != "universal". For some of us, it's not even close.

Also, government *already has* this power (by passing laws) and we seem to manage. The problem, in fact, is that social media companies appear to have found a way around that and are busy monetising something that society as a whole has decided is unacceptable.