Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
"Sure, finding a drone in your flight path is a bother but it's really not that big a deal. "
I imagine that getting a Phantom caught up in your own rotor might be fatal and anyone flying directly underneath a Police helicopter just for shits and giggles is clearly an idiot, so the risk of such an accident might seem quite high if you were the pilot.
"And it cost nothing...Did you buy Windows 7, well ever since then its been a free give away. All the computers in the house are regularly upgraded, ..."
If you've actually bought a new computer in the last year or two then you have bought Windows 10, but you weren't paying attention and so they could charge whatever they liked as long as it was bundled with the hardware.
If you've been more careful and consistently upgraded existing machines that came with Win7 a long time ago, then you've probably broken the terms of the Win7 licence, because OEM licences are tied to whatever hardware they were bundled with.
If you bought Win7 Pro all those years ago, you're legal, but you've paid far more than it and all its successors put together are actually worth.
-- What does "in the 2019 timeframe" mean that they couldn't have said with "in 2019"?
It means the press release was shat out by a fully qualified telephone sanitisation operative. It's kinda helpful in a way. You can tell just by skimming that you needn't pay any attention to anything else the idiot says.
"the development method du jour, Agile"
Agile is not a development method. It is a method for selling training courses.
To achieve this, it needs to contain some obvious common sense, such as "try testing as soon as you have something to test, if not earlier", and some other stuff to catch your attention, such as "don't make any plans for version 2 coz you'd only need that if version 1 doesn't bomb in the marketplace". Obviously, with more than half a century of programming experience to draw on, there is very little overlap between the two categories.
"I think it's an extremely laboured reference to the Titanic."
It's an exceedingly bad one, or at least one step removed from being one.
Itanium -> Itanic is a reasonable step and Itanic is only one letter removed from Titanic.
Win10-ic, however, is not an abbreviation for Wintenium and has very few letters in common with Titanic.
Win10-ic -> Itanic works quite well, but you need to accept the latter as a real word rather than a joke in its own right.
I'm old enough to remember when major new features in Windows were so disruptive that MS had to throw them all away and start again. Even second time around, the result was Vista, so ghod alone knows how bad it was when they killed it first time.
The difference is, that first round of development is now being done "live, on customer systems", because some moron decided that this was the modern way of working.
"The fear is that drone warfare makes the idea of waging a war more palatable to the politicians and hence make armed conflicts more likely to happen."
Easily fixed. You make sure that you win the war and then prosecute the losers for crimes against humanity. Of course, you probably need some of these weapons of your own to ensure that you win and are in a position to prosecute.
Launching an autonomous drone is just a more elaborate version of launching a self-guided missile. Legal and moral responsibility for what the weapon does is assigned to whoever touched it last. I'm therefore unable to see why this will "encourage and lower the threshold for the use of lethal force".
On the otjher hand, since the enemy probably don't share our scruples, it is important for us to know the limitations and capabilities of these weapons, so developing our own is pretty much a moral obligation on our part.
Why do people find it so hard to distinguish between knowing how to do something bad and doing something bad? They won't appear to have a problem with the opposite case: knowing how to do something good and failing to do it (when appropriate) is labelled "negligence" and considered bad.
"Austerity is a political choice, the "contribution" as you put it began during the 2010 con-dem regime, and was not needed, has damaged our economy and has been jettisoned every time it was useful to the .gov to do so. Austerity and the 2008 Fiscal Crash, are not related."
I call bollocks on that one. The reason we didn't *start* paying back until 2010 was because Gordon didn't want to. He was, in fact, the first example of a politician jettisoning austerity because it was politically useful to do so. It didn't mean the money wasn't due.
On the so-called profit, I would ask what was the opportunity cost of investing umpteen squillion in a bank, only to get umpteen squillion and one back a decade later. I would also ask whether the UK banking sector has had a good decade. Yes, they've bought back their shares (at the government's chosen price) but they've clearly not invested a dime in their IT systems in the last decade and one or two of them might now fail simply because they don't appear to be able to function 24/7.
On the wider point of printing your own money, this *might* be true if we were the only country in the whole world. We aren't. The amount you can buy with a fiat currency depends just as much on how much other nations value it, unless you are 90+% self-sufficient in everything. Hardly any countries can make that claim nowadays, and the ones that can (Hello, Mr Kim) aren't worth living in.
"When we bailed out the banks to the tune of several trillion, no-body knocked on your door and asked for a contribution."
Wot? Who is this "you" you are talking about. Almost everyone I know has been labouring under an austerity regime for the past decade as a "contribution" to the bail-out repayment fund.
"A GPS signal could be spoofed or blocked for instance. When you're thinking about nuclear submarines, it usually best to consider the worst."
Actually, when you are thinking about submarines, you probably don't want to be using a GPS in your navigation system. A blocked signal is "what happens", not "the worst", because sea-water is basically impenetrable to EM waves.
And if you are thinking about ballistic missile subs, I hope you've factored into your thoughts the near-certain fact that in just a few years the enemy will be able to track those with one of their mass-produced robotic drones and so their locations while out on patrol will cease to be "totally undetectable" (as they have been for the last half-century or more) and instead be "posted on the internet, by the enemy, just because they can, for shits and giggles".
"I haven't got around to trying VirtualBox yet."
More importantly, based on your comment, you haven't got around to trying to put Linux on the host PC and Windows in the VM. Hypervisors have mechanisms these days to let you expose the UEFI magic to a VM, so the Windows licence key can be used by the virtualised system and you get to use Linux on the big screen. Also, since your monitor appears to be so big that a 1920x1080 screen is "tiny", you might be interested in virtualising a second monitor on that VM.
If there are apps on both Windows and Linux that you feel you have to use at higher resolutions, I'm a bit stuck and you are probably right. Also, if there are fancy games you need to run in the VM, that probably isn't going to work either. But for basic desktop productivity, putting the badly behaved OS in a sandbox (where it is trivial to reset or back-up) is the way to go.
In a commercial setting, where there *ought* to be someone in-house who can research and support this configuration, it is fast becoming the only responsible way to deploy Windows within an organisation. Microsoft have managed half a dozen borkages via Windows Update in as many months. Is it really sensible to run your business on an OS which can only managed "one nine" of uptime?
"In fact, can you, as an adult, explain how you recognise an everyday object such as a cup?"
I can mention the size, the impermeability, the concavity and the handle. Yes, this leaves a lot of wiggle room, but we could have a reasoned discussion about whether and why it was a good or bad explanation. Your average AI just wouldn't understand the question because it is just a machine that tends to "relax" into forms that resemble what it was designed to "know".
And yet, for every kid who has a multi-monitor desktop on a properly maintained box within a sensibly managed home LAN, you will still find another for whom the school computer is the only *working* PC they've ever handled (in contrast to the virus-ridden pox box that they have at home).
"But I've been programming for 30 yrs everything from flight control software to mentoring the web-dev team"
Depending on how well you've been mentoring that dev team, you may have the necessary skills to become a teacher. The 30 years of flight control software, however, count for very little because this is a teaching post, not a development post.
At school level, particularly at GCSE, the skills you are learning aren't really enough to do the job. That's true of all the STEM subjects and almost certainly all the others, too. Therefore, what we need to put in front of children are good teachers with sufficient specialist knowledge to know which bits are more important and which are just padding out the syllabus. (In every subject, there's always a bit of each.)
Think back to your own school days and remember the difference between the best and worst teachers. Then ask yourself, was it really just because he or she know the subject backwards? Could they not have been an equally good teacher in probably half a dozen of more subjects? Certainly my own experience answers an emphatic "Yes" to this question.
The 9-1 GCSE grade boundaries are basically percentiles. The top and bottom grades are explicitly percentiles and at least one of the intermediate boundaries is fixed by an algorithm that constrains the rest of the boundaries to be almost certainly in the same places from one year to the next unless the actually distribution of results goes waaay off a bell curve.
It is disguised, presumably because it was dreamt up by a committee with a significant minority who didn't want percentiles and so those who did simply obfuscated until everyone agreed.
Presumably someone had to clean out the CD drive. Therefore, the appropriate punishment for the child would be to have to sit quietly watching whilst the adult painstakingly cleaned the drive. Not a word needs to be spoken. By the end of the exercise the child (particularly with a 6-7yo attention span) will fully appreciate *why* this isn't something to do ever again.
See, adults can be creative, too.
Javascript runs on your machine, but it is easy to deny access to the precise timing features that would be necessary for this attack.
Actually, it would probably be possible for OSes and VM providers to ensure that only threads in the same security context were ever scheduled on both halves of a hyper-threaded CPU. That would probably kill off a whole category of timing attacks.
Edit: Lorribot, below, states that "Bear in mind that VMware prevents VMs from sharing a core so this would not work on that platform, I suspect other Hypervisors do much the same." so apparently this mitigation has already been partly done.
"In both countries religion is still touted as a major cultural force - especially by politicians."
Not in my experience. The only part of the UK where politicians can safely espouse particular religious beliefs is Arlene's bit. Trying to defend a policy on religious grounds anywhere else in the UK results in a torrent of derisive abuse about "your sky fairy" followed by losing the argument.
"It seems like Stephen Hawking is the current favourite, but Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing are doing strongly too."
Interesting. I'd wager that all three would be unknown to the general public had it not been for disability, sex and sexuality. They are known for being "scientists, despite the obstacles that history placed in their path", rather than "scientists". Apparently the science is never enough of a story in itself.
Conversely, artists seem to get a free pass for their personal lives as long as the art is good enough. Strange.
I won't hold my breath, then. I have a laptop at the moment that refuses to boot because (as I've discovered from looking at the journal offline) pulseaudio is in an infinite loop waiting for the successful detection of some hardware that, presumably, I don't have.
I imagine I can fix it by hacking the file-system (offline) so that fuckingpulse is no longer part of the boot configuration, but I shouldn't have to. A decent init system would be able to kick of everything else in parallel and if one particular service doesn't come up properly then it just logs the error. I *thought* that was one of the claimed advantages of systemd, but apparently that's just a load of horseshit.
"I've tried emailing site owners with a link to the RFC that defines valid characters for email addresses"
To be honest it might be more productive to search Stack Overflow for "email address validation" and reply with corrections to the (presumably several hundred) crap answers that don't permit a plus sign, coz that's where all those crap websites got their code from.
Even more productive still would be to post an answer saying "Please don't even try to validate an email address. You *will* get it wrong.", because not allowing plus signs is just one of the common mistakes. (Ask anyone with an apostrophe in their name, for example.)
"You can't use necessity as a defence for murder so you can't choose to kill one person over another even if your own life is at stake."
You sure about that? I seem to recall various cases of killing in self-defence being basically let off. In fact, no need to google for it -- there'll be another one along in a few months, I expect.
"The problem, generically, with software is that people want something that is as complex as a 787 but for £4.50."
That may be the problem generically, but it isn't the problem in this case. Windows costs an order of magnitude more than this. At the bottom end of the market (cheap laptops) it is an appreciable fraction of the cost of the system.
"MS is happy to keep letting Windows flail about. It's all about the cloud now."
Why would anyone use an MS cloud product if they weren't beholden to Windows on their desktops? There are other cloud vendors, maybe better, maybe worse, but certainly *interchangeable* and (in the event of a sufficiently serious screw-up by one of them) *replaceable*. If this really is Microsoft's long-term strategy, then it is corporate suicide and I can only hope that billg finishes spending his cash on good causes before his shareholdings become worthless.
I think that is because they've switched off SMBv1. Those other systems you mention will still support v1 even if they are willing and able to run later versions, but MS (wisely, from a security point of view) have recently chosen to disable it. This change then collides with a decision (starting in Win7) to move away from NetBIOS-like browsing towards Function Discovery. FD doesn't seem to play nicely with non-Windows systems, so the disappearance of SMBv1 has broken the network neighbourhood for several zillion users.
" I knew that this would be the case, which is why I hit "shutdown". But Microsoft knew better and after a couple of swaps forth and back I finally figured out I had to hit a greyed out option somewhere deep in the energy settings..."
Just as a heads-up, you probably want to check that setting from time to time. The last couple of six-monthlies have reset the switch on my systems.
Neither is China -- it's a tyranny (in the Roman sense of the word) with an all-powerful king at the top barking out orders for courtiers to put into practice. A bit like Soviet Russia, in fact, or Nazi Germany.
If you look at what these regimes *did* rather than the bullshit they *said* about it, then there never were any communist regimes. But tyrannical bastard control freaks who want their jackboot on everyone's neck? Yeah, history has *lots* of those and technology is making it easier and easier for people like Mr Hastie to set up the necessary infrastructure and institutions, whether they are smart enough to appreciate the consequences or not.
The Americans in the 1780s had the right idea. You need to assume the worst and then explicitly design in mechanisms to prevent it. Then, for the rest of Time, the people who administer the system need to take the attitude that they *might* be evil.
Even if successful, this will only stop Amazon from winning the contract to supply eager buyers with this kit. Worse, in a few years time this product will probably be something that a graduate student could throw together with standard libraries, commodity hardware and a big enough budget.
The way to prevent everyone from being spied upon is to persuade your government not to do it. They, and only they, have the power to actually make that (not) happen.
You can try to protect people in other jurisdictions by banning the creation of such kit, but other countries have clever people too so this is basically just stalling for time. In the long term, you need to either invade those countries and overthrow that government (a strategy which doesn't have a great track record in recent years but has worked in the past) or hope that the people there rise up and do the job for you (which has a slightly better track record, but you may have to wait a bit).
"A lot of decent people left Nazi Germany before WW2. That improved things, didn't it?"
Given the contributions that a few of them made to the Allied war effort, I rather suspect it did make a difference. On the other hand, I'm not sure that all *that* many (in percentage terms) actually left.
I'm guessing (so hopefully someone who knows will chip in) but as I understand it, a solid core would be slowly (as in, a billion years or so) crystalising out of the melt (the outer core) and so it is to be expected that it will show some selectivity in what atoms it permits in the emerging crystal structure.
Alternatively, perhaps it is a mixture but it is so predominantly iron and nickel that geologists don't sweat the details. Hmm ... now I'm curious, too. (Trundles off to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_core...)
"Based on the relative prevalence of various chemical elements in the Solar System, the theory of planetary formation, and constraints imposed or implied by the chemistry of the rest of the Earth's volume, the inner core is believed to consist primarily of a nickel-iron alloy. Pure iron was found to be denser than the core by approximately 3%, implying the presence of light elements in the core (e.g. silicon, oxygen, sulfur) in addition to the probable presence of nickel.[11]
Further, if the primordial and mostly fluid (still forming) earth contained any significant mass(es) of elements denser than iron and nickel, namely the white (appearance) precious metals (and a few others) except silver, specifically the siderophile elements, then these would necessarily have differentiated to the very center of the core into concentric nested spheres by planetary differentiation, with the most dense (and stable, i.e. platinum, iridium, and osmium, (etc.) in order of density) of these forming the innermost spheroid(s).[12] While unstable elements of such trans-iron/nickel density would have mostly decayed to iron/nickel/lead by the time the earth formed a discrete core.
See also: Densities of the elements (data page)
It then necessarily follows that all, or almost all, of these denser elements we have mined (or are even able to) at the surface (or near surface, or even at all "above" the core) have been delivered later as part of impact objects/masses.[13] "
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