Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: Unexpected consequences

"The easy answer is to not use social media certain ways. "

Perhaps public officials could just accept that they need two accounts, cannot block or censor free speech on the job-related one, and therefore ought to be careful what they say (and provoke) on that account.

Then, and harking back to dozens of El Reg articles from the last 20 years, perhaps *employers* could just chill and accept that what goes on in a *private* social media account is *not* a reason to sack someone.

Re: The so-called "beast" of Revelation was an STD ...

"Read the original Koine Greek version of Revelation, and ..."

Uh, what? Hold on a damn minute! I've just had Voland's right hand telling me to learn a basketful of Slavic languages so that I could read the original interview and now you want me to learn classical Greek as well. Just *when* am I supposed to find the time for this?

Perhaps I should just take the view that any god who does not reveal themselves to me in my own language clearly isn't worthy of my support.

Re: All well and good...

"A real killer is the infernal WinSxS directory which merrily chews up many GBs of storage of duplicated files. In theory the "disk cleanup" process can tidy this, however this often doesn't clear up much beyond a few GB."

Many, if not all, of those *duplicated* files are actually hard-linked so that the duplicates are avoided. However, naive programs like Windows Explorer mis-report the storage.

I think a worse case of pointless bloat in Windows is its (default) habit of retaining the MSI for every single patch and application *ever* installed, just in case you wanted to roll back.

Re: Don't worry, it's only money

"William I conquered the whole of England"

Yes, and your logic is fine right up until the Civil War, at which point we find that King Oliver the First conquers the whole country and gives it to *his* cronies instead.

Which is again fine, up until the twentieth century where we find that would-be-King Adolf *fails* to conquer the country only because of defeat by ... well pretty much every man, woman and child in the country, at which point it presumably belongs to them "by right of conquest". Of course, like all conquerors, they've mostly (by now) passed it on to their descendants.

The other great change in the last 950 years is that we've noticed that while "right of conquest" is an excellent (because indisputable) mechanism for deciding who has power, it is a pretty crap method of deciding what to do with that power, so for the past few centuries it has been traditional to delegate that bit to our servants. However, if the servants are going to make *quite* such a pigs ear of it, perhaps that policy needs to be revisited.

Re: A "proper" OS...

"Does Windows support this?"

Yes. Use FILE_FLAG_DELETE_ON_CLOSE (writing from memory) when you create the file.

Supported since NT 3.1, probably because NT was designed to be a superset of both POSIX and VMS (and probably also OS/2 and DOS) and because Dave Cutler knew his shit.

"Why the hell is support for individual hardware a kernel thing?"

I don't think it is. I think you can happily build a Linux kernel with most of that hardware support chopped out and then load the drivers you want separately as modules, but the normal development practice is to include all those drivers in the kernel-space source tree (so that they can agree on interfaces) and so they get released together.

Re: Makeup

Thank you for this suggestion. It's the first one that provides a plausible fuel source extending from the spark to the face.

The fuel needs to be vapour, or else the claimant needs to be holding the spark right up against her face. In the latter case, she needs to have left the mask off long enough for the whole room to have become oxygen rich, in which case the whole room would have gone up like Apollo 1, which is not what has been reported.

Re: BOFH solution

"BOFH part: If you tried to enable html, or send html, or click on a link, you were sent to a "reeducation camp". In this IT Siberia, people are forced to watch presentations on email safety. Powerpoint shows designed to crush the spirit and create unthinking compliance. One viewgraph every 30s for an hour. The quiz at the end requires a perfect score. Imperfect score? Re-do the training."

If you treat users like idiots, they will act like idiots. Crush their spirit and create unthinking compliance, and they will just stop thinking. The good ones will leave. The bad ones will be left to run your civil service and keep the nation ticking over. Is that what you want?

Also, if you have the technical means to detect when people try to do bad stuff, is it not negligent of you not to simply prevent it? That one-hour punishment session sounds like a waste of taxpayers money just to satisfy some perverted BOFH-like urge. I sincerely hope that the government in question isn't mine, but based on how fscking stoopid they have been recently, I suspect I may be disappointed.

Re: It really is so much easier to nit-pick and complain

I think I had a few gripes last autumn when the changes started to roll out, but this latest set of refinements has left me, also, with little or nothing to complain about. Bastards...

Re: Ah, the carefree days of yore

"These means that well over 90% of people learn on a "stick"/manual gearbox."

Yes, but if we are all driving electric cars by 2030 then there are a lot of people learning to drive now with a manual gearbox who will never actually drive such a beast after they pass their test.

Re: What the did is grey at best

"To go with your analogy, it's more like someone tried to open your door, found it unlocked, and came into your place to leave a note for you saying that you left your door unlocked."

Or did they just post the note through your letter box, in which case I suspect you'd be laughed out of court. Tricky things, analogies. Given the cost of a single sheet of paper and a few micrograms of ink, I think one could reasonably argue that this was a reasonable way of passing an important message using the only available channel.

Re: That's nice dear ...

"But <b?everyone</b> runs Outlook."

Really? Who the fuck uses Outlook? I haven't touched it in 20 years and I can't recall seeing anyone round the office using it for a long time either. That's not to say that they are using anything better, but any talk of Outlook as some kind of default option for email sounds very odd to my ears.

Similarly, who uses Exchange, and why? It costs a packet, forces you to use Outlook, and delivers nothing that you can't get from free software. You'll be telling me next that these people use IIS to serve web pages, or something?

Re: from 1 to up to 50

You are forgetting that this law only applies to sites within the reach of UK law. 50, in the first year only, sounds over-optimistic.

Re: Just say "Yes Sir"

"If your security and work relies on your laptop not getting stolen, then you're doing it wrong."

I think the OP's point was that he doesn't do it this way. He carries around a blank laptop, for the reason he described in his own post.

Re: Brittle software?

"They can break the website, and at the same time patch Chrome so that it un-breaks it on load."

That's a pretty strong claim. If anyone has evidence that Chrome has code to un-break websites controlled by Google then I think that would be fairly clearly evidence of an attempt to leverage a monopoly in one area to create a monopoly in another, which is illegal in quite a few places (including the US).

Re: Not bad, but the last one was better

And they say that Americans don't understand irony.

Re: Ofcom Asks...

"It is more akin to an elected person having to tell you all the personal deals they have cut that benefited from them holding that position. "

I will have to go and re-read the article then. I completely missed the bit where Ofcom were telling providers that they had to provide a break-down of their own business model and reveal that X% of the contract price was paying for the phone and that therefore the on-going contract price would henceforth be reduced by X%.

It looked to me like forcing providers to spam their soon-to-leave customers with new sales opportunities rather than letting customers do their own research.

Re: There's hope for the next generation after all.

A 9-year-old using email? I don't believe it!"

If this is jake's grand-daughter, I'm prepared to assume she is a cut above average in the clue stakes.

"Unless, for example, you are a college. Teaching computer related courses. Courses like "System Administration 101""

Too true. Over in the Chemistry department, the course on Explosives is a real blast and in the Microbiology department they have an end-of-course Ebola-snorting contest. It may be possible to teach this more dangerous content merely as book-work, but why would you do that when there is a far more effective Darwinian method of spotting the failing students?

Re: @ Velv

"Among other things, the government wants a better idea of who's (legally) living in the UK and, more generally, who you all are. Just because."

They should stop throwing away the records they've got, then.

Re: Any chance

True, but it replaced a system that was for the one, so it was a considerable widening of scope in its day.

Re: Chrome

Because G paid lots of crapware devs to bundle it, and those malware pushers pre-ticked the "install Chrome" box.

Re: Linux workstation?

See Waseem's comments above. I'd be very surprised if you could boot any mainstream Linux distro on this unless you are a kernel builder who has signed a slew of NDAs. Eventually, yes, if it lasts long enough in the market, but not now and probably not in 2019 either.

Substitute "placed" for "sat" and I think you'll have no trouble parsing the expressions. They might not be how you'd choose to express the sentiments, but they aren't some 21st century abomination unto Om.

Only if they put appropriate drivers into the public domain. Otherwise you'll be using frame buffer 2d graphics and end up running your browser on one of the 4 tiny cores.

Whereas we Brits (*) are contractually obliged to slag off the home team.

(Whingeing Poms, I believe is the preferred expression.)

Re: 1970s?

Since the AD chronology was devised in 525, we either have to accept that decades, centuries and millenia begin and end at 5, 25 or 525 years past the obvious numerical boundary (*), or we have to take a deep breath and conclude that the choice of epoch is completely retrospective and, being numerate, we may as well pick the sensible one. So ... There was a year zero, just like there was a year minus one. People at the time didn't call it that, but they didn't call year one by that name either, or even year five hundred and twenty four.

(* Actually, I'm rather tempted by this. Its principal merit is that it would really annoy certain people.)

Re: Classic!

From https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Broken%20Arrow:

"When you're aiming for a clean break/no splash, and instead, whether by distraction or an imminent sneeze, your log breaks off and sends the staff crawling back inside, only to disturb you for the rest of the day and cause immense discomfort and multiple re-wipes."

Microsoft in a nutshell, then.

Re: I can hardly believe another MS issue

"MS deprecated WMP some time ago, from their perspective they can hardly be blamed for not including it in any tests."

If they are shipping it, they should test it. If they don't want to test it, they shouldn't ship it.

As others have already implied, there are better and equally free media players out there. It would not detract from the usefulness of Windows if they pulled WMP, or a number of other applets to be honest. (Like, nearly all of the Metro craplets that are still cluttering up the new Start Menu.)

Re: There is no real option to turn off Location History once it has been enabled;

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/08/google_tracks_i.html

"We only want to read it, not interfere with it."

But if privacy is the thing, then reading it is interference.

[Warning, yes I expect you realise that, but this verbal moving of the goalposts may accurately reflect the intellectual bankruptcy of the Oz Government nonetheless. ... So we need to ready to jump on it as soon as they trot it out.]

Re: Ca$h...

"The only trick I probably missed was in not getting solar panels when the cost v feed-in rebate was good."

That's probably a good thing, for your conscience. The rebate was paid by the leccy companies and almost certainly financed by raising prices for all those who didn't have a convenient roof to put some subsidised panels on. A shameful case of robbing the poor to make the quiche-eating classes feel good about themselves.

Re: Meanwhile in western France...

"You'd think it would be Vendredi Noir, mais non c'est Black Friday"

Black Friday is a disgusting Anglo-Saxon custom and merely to say the words "Vendredi Noir" would defile the language, so it remains untranslated.

Re: I knew that

"the point of the United States Army Corps of Engineers"

I always assumed that the point was "We have to have a corps of engineers anyway, because civilian engineers refuse to work in war zones, and we need to keep them trained, so they might as well practice on civilian jobs and save Uncle Sam money.".

Re: One argument in YAML's favour: a good DIFF

Doesn't JSON allow you to put a comma after the final entry in a list, precisely to avoid this problem? Quite a few languages allow this, for this reason, in at least some contexts.