* Posts by Ken Hagan

8137 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Place your bets: How long will 1TFLOPS HPE box last in space without proper rad hardening

Ken Hagan Gold badge

It is also possible to irradiate things down here on Earth, and I'm sure they've done that too. This exercise sounds more like the "all up" test that proves something you are already pretty damn sure of.

Firmware update blunder bricks hundreds of home 'smart' locks

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Google is your friend. There have certainly been cases of hackable medical implants and I'd be surprised if no-one has yet added telemetry.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Given the price tag, definitely.

Revealed: The naughty tricks used by web ads to bypass blockers

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: if people block them...

So the correct response to an ad that gets past the filter is to talk to whoever is being advertised and say:

Your ad-pusher has ripped you off. You've paid them to foist an ad on someone who went to great lengths to avoid the ad and who now feels hacked. Your company and it's products are now on my blacklist and you paid for this to happen. Of you had chosen a better ad-pusher, you'd have paid fewer fees for page impressions AND those ads would been served to someone who might buy from you. Your loss. Love, me.

UK.gov cloud fave Amazon comes under fire for tax bill

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: We apparently went from two A4 binders of tax law in 1997 to seventeen by 2005

Oddly enough, one of the concrete proposals that she makes at the end of her book is to repeal nearly all of these tweaks.

She also notes that every chancellor stands up once or twice a year with the specific task of "being seen to be doing something" and nearly always isn't actually able to do much. Therefore they do something visible. Therefore we end up with a tax system containing thousands of (overlapping) special cases. This makes life easy for the dodgers and hard for HMRC.

Therefore, as noted above, she suggests that we should repeal nearly all tax breaks.

(Related: I have a book on software testing by a chap named Beizer who uses the US tax code as his "sufficiently complex to be realistic and yet sufficiently widely known to make the book readable" source of examples. Along the way, using the methods in his book, he finds several contradictions in the code. Not being a lawyer, he cannot say what happens if you are found to have breached one of those bots of the code.)

What's your point, caller? Oracle fiddles with major database release cycle numbers

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I for one...

18 is 50% better than 12

Horsemen of the disk-drive apocalypse will ride upon 256TB SSDs

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Fortunately

No skill required. In fact, surface tension will keep an SD card floating unless you actively submerge it. (Then the density comes into play and I rather suspect that they are less dense than water.)

Mediocre Britain: UK broadband ranked 31st in world for speed

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"to install it to the "neighborhood" cluster of three houses on our side of the road"

I may be inferring too much here, but are there houses on the other side of the road that would have to pay their own three grand to install a second link? If so, just how wide is that road?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: All I wanna know is...

"I don't want all the other call packages that you have to have currently."

They may call them "call packages" but they don't really cost the phone company anything. They only have one product and it costs them the same almost regardless of what you do with it (*), but they make more money by slicing and dicing it in these strange ways. The same is probably true for mobile providers.

(* One might guess that sheer volume of usage was an additional cost, but the near-universal offering of "unlimited" packages suggests that this isn't the case. I suspect that the reason is that the provider can just throttle your pipe if your usage starts to inconvenience them.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: All I wanna know is...

You can drop it now, by not using the phone.

No, it won't save you any money, but not having to support voice calls won't save the telephone company any money either, so I fail to understand why they should be offering it as a (cheaper) product.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

They do, but might broadband be part of the answer? Unpleasant regimes all over the world reckon that the internet is something that, to coin a phrase, you wouldn't want "your wife or your servants" to read.

Your top five dreadful people the Google manifesto has pulled out of the woodwork

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Wrong think black list

"If I was to say that on average women live longer than men would I be wrong?"

It depends on whether you think that's a good thing. On the other hand, if you were to say that, on average, women have to put up with men longer than men have to put up with women, then you probably offend either way.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Happy

Re: This Article

"(I won't comment on your grammar, as that will guarantee that I make a grammatical error)"

Do punctuation errors count?

Samsung drops 128TB SSD and kinetic-type flash drive bombshells

Ken Hagan Gold badge

128TB ?

That should be an interesting price tag.

The linked article seems to suggest that this is an actual intended product that might appear in the next 12 months, in which case either the price will be eye-watering or the price per GB will wipe spinning rust off the map overnight, or perhaps some combination of both.

70% of Windows 10 users are totally happy with our big telemetry slurp, beams Microsoft

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Interpretation

"I'm happy with 'turn almost all of it off, if anything really needs access it will ask'."

Then you have presumably discovered that, in practice, most software does not ask but instead just fails quietly and it is up to you to figure out why. You sound like the sort of person who is willing to do this.

Your mates sound like the sort of people who aren't. They've discovered that switching things off screws up and wrecks things, so they don't.

A 70:30 split between these two populations sounds surprisingly heavily weighted on the "clued up" side.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Still not going there

"Win 10 is currently what I have to use at work ..."

Me too. Speaking as a developer, there are an infinite number of non-default configurations that we can't test against but there is one default configuration that we can test against and if we don't then we look a bit foolish if that's a configuration that doesn't work. So all my test systems stick largely to the defaults. They also have no personal data on them, (and no source code, as it happens) so if MS want to slurp then there is nothing for them to find except for usage patterns that will skew their stats towards "None of your newly-introduced features are getting *any* usage whatsoever.".

So I am "several" of the 70%, despite switching the telemetry off on the systems I actually care about.

Google diversity memo: Web giant repudiates staffer's screed for 'incorrect assumptions about gender'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Talking about role models

There is a serious shortage of role models, good or otherwise, and the already short list is then skewed towards those who are capable of rising to the top at the expense of male opponents. So even if there were none (which depends on your politics) I wouldn't say that the absence proves anything.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Reality

"This is amazingly apparent in schools. Boys have a tendency to fight and normally punch each other a few times and next day are best mates again. Girls tend to be far more psychological in their fighting, with cliques etc. that go on for years."

That's true enough for kids, but my impression is that actually both sexes spend the next decade becoming more like each other again. At least part of the problem, then, is that important (ie, door-closing) life choices are being made at an age when the children are at the "most divergent" (or most stereotypical, if you prefer) part of their development. Not sure what the answer is...

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: @Ken: There is evidence

Ooh. Thanks for that. I honestly didn't think to look, but now that I google for "adolescence impaired judgement" I find that the academic community has explored this a fair bit over the years. For example, the pruning seems to be what's mentioned in http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr07/teenage.aspx. I'm not sure they use the phrase "bad to crap" but that's pretty much how I'd describe the process. (I don't consider myself to have been particularly wayward but I know, because I still feel guilty about some of it, that I did stuff that I simply could not do now.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The token conservative spoke out!

@Tom Paine, re: your scarequotes...

Christian isn't a well-defined term. (The Creed is a bit vague on many issues of contemporary importance.) It would be unkind to say that some people self-identify as Christian because no real Christian will do it for them, but...

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Old Fashioned values

"What ever happened to employing the best person for the job?"

Define "best" and then we can talk.

Yes, I know, for a technical position our notion of best really ought to be dominated by the ability to perform the principal tasks. However, if your company has more than one employee then being able to work in a team to create something greater than the sum of its parts is also important. We've all known (and read on this site about) co-workers whose social skills or personal habits outweighed their technical abilities and so they just weren't the best person for the job. (For example, being the personification of social poison appears to be a requirement for "The Apprentice" and I'm frankly astonished that Milord Sugar doesn't just fire the whole bloody lot of them at the end of the first show.) For most candidates, with average social skills, this isn't an issue, but it provides wiggle-room for Prejudice to sneak in and decide that so-and-so "is great but lacks synergy".

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it

I don't think it is anachronistic to also point out that this ideal was given an enforceable expression in the US Constitution.

(I once told a yank that this document and the Declaration of Independence "would make a really good basis for running a country". His reply was something like "So you don't think we've managed that?" to which I replied "Well, you've made a good start but it needs ongoing maintenance.".)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"data on what careers all-girls school pupils end up in"

I think such data exists (at least for the UK, where there still are a number of single-sex schools) and the results suggest that girls are more likely to pursue STEM subjects at school (and, I imagine, careers later) if there aren't any boys in the class.

I suspect that boys in the class are far more influential than the teachers or other adult role models, simply because of the amount of exposure time to those influences. I am fairly confident that the effects are fairly small in the first few years of schooling but start having an effect pre-teen, when kids start thinking about each other's feelings a bit more, and since this seems to happen for girls a bit earlier than for boys, we probably have a situation where boys are having a negative influence and aren't capable of being aware of it. (You'd certainly be wasting your time explaining it to them, even if you thought they would listen to you.)

Later on, of course, the hormones kick in and both boys and girls pretty much lose their heads in an attempt to conform to each other's prejudices. (This appears to be a near-universal phenomenon. Even quite "sensible" and "nice" boys and girls will confess to all sorts of internal struggles and external mis-behaviour if you can persuade them to open up in later life.) You probably could sit everyone down at this point and try to explain to them what is happening to their heads, but Nature has a several-hundred-million year head start in brewing those hormones, so you are on a hiding to nothing. It appears to take several years before rational thought regains control. By then, everyone in in their twenties and career paths are largely settled.

I find this a rather gloomy theory because (i) it appears to rule out any effective intervention, and (ii) many people in later life *do* wish that they'd chosen differently in their teenage years.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Hmmm, let's talk about primary school teachers, 4:1 female to male ratio. Is this because of differences in distribution of traits?"

It probably is, but the "traits" in question are not those of the teachers, but of the rest of society.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Dare I say

"That's why recruiters get unconscious bias training, and receive special instructions to check more carefully CVs sent by women and minorities."

Do they? How stupid. I thought the standard practice was to separate the personal data from the professional data and hide the former from those who evaluate the latter. You pick the best candidates and find out later who they actually are.

Tech giants warp eco standards to greenwash electronics, rake in cash

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"The report suggests the standards process demands a lot of time, which discourages participation from non-industry stakeholders in academia and in advocacy organizations."

I think you'll find that the process demands a lot of time in order to discourage participation by non-industry stakeholders. In fact, the process can probably be prolonged until all the non-industry participants have lost the will to live and then the industry gets to write whatever they want and they can even boast afterwards about the range of people who contributed "at various stages".

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: TL;DR

Fair summary. For those who want more detail but still can't be bothered to read the entire article...

"its product verification committee had determined that products were upgradeable if they had an externally accessible port "

...tells you everything you need to know about the mental prowess of the oxygen thieves who designed the scheme.

Foot-long £1 sausage roll arrives

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Surely it's an insult to the animal to kill it just for a few pork joins and some bacon and then discard the rest of the animal?"

It might be, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't mean I personally have to actually eat all of it. There are other ways of using a dead animal. Oh, and I dare say that any veggies reading this will point out that it was an insult to the animal to even bring it into this world just to fatten it up and kill it, no matter how much of it you used afterwards.

Horses for courses I suppose.

Dems fightin' words! FCC's net neutrality murder plot torn apart

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Not for profit

"Name one where private, profit-driven enterprise can't do any better."

Umm, telecoms? You yanks do appear to have the worst ISPs in the developed world, to judge from the complaints and the region-wide monopolies that underlie those complaints. Everyone else seems to have regulated their way to some kind of competitive market.

Big question of the day: Is it time to lock down .localhost?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Is localhost even needed?

"If someone could please shoot the guy ..."

Er, gosh. A really special talent there.

Core-blimey! Intel's Core i9 18-core monster – the numbers

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Nice L3 cache you've got there

You could run WinNT quite nicely on that, although you'd need to tweak a BIOS setting to disable hyperthreading or else the number of cores on the top-end part would be too large.

I don't know if you could run Win95 on it. Do these things still have a mode where they can run 16-bit instructions?

Re-identifying folks from anonymised data will be a crime in the UK

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Even the most eye-watering fines found only rebound on a CEO by their being sacked."

Define "eye-watering". I bet if I cost my company a "ten years' profit" fine, not only would I be sacked but also I wouldn't get the golden parachute and nor would I be offered the chance to walk straight into another job.

Gov workers told their social posts are more believable than politicians' statements

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Honesty is the best policy

They work for us, not the minister. (The minister also works for us. The word means "underling", "minion" or "servant".) If they criticise the government in posts made as part of their day job, that's unprofessional. If at least some of them don't criticise the government when they get home, that's scary. I will assume they've been shat upon at work from such a great height that they are no longer capable of acting in society's best interests. Time for the offending "minister" to be sacked for workplace bullying.

Edit: Also ... informed criticism is an essential part of checking that a policy is working as intended. It is precisely because these people know more than we do that they have a public duty to use that knowledge to criticise where a reasonable person might feel there is an alternative viewpoint. Obviously there are issues of privacy but "This will make the minister look bad." is not a privacy issue.

Four techies flummoxed for hours by flickering 'E' on monitor

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"it served as a useful lesson for the rest of my life concerning electrical equipment and interference"

I presume you realise that 99% of teenagers would not have learned anything of the sort from the experience you describe. (They'd probably have learned that the world hates them and "this shitty shit is shit".) Kudos to your 15yo self.

CMD.EXE gets first makeover in 20 years in new Windows 10 build

Ken Hagan Gold badge

I think this article is about a different set of colours. (Otherwise Microsoft, who presumable are perfectly aware of the feature you refer to, wouldn't be making an announcement about it.) I think this article is talking about the colours used by arbitrary console programs (is this the old VGA palette?) rather than the ones used by CMD.EXE.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Oh great, some of the text are just near impossible to see on some backgrounds now

"Did the Insider chumps who 'do testing' and 'give feedback' to Microsoft ever consider the possibility that some of us might be colour blind?"

I do not believe that MS act on feedback from Insiders so I don't think it is fair to blame them.

Actually, I'm not sure what motivates most of what MS do these days. If they really wanted to improve the appearance of Windows on modern monitors, perhaps they could finish implementing High DPI support in all the applets that ship with a vanilla installation. (Until fairly recently, nearly all the MMC snap-ins for the "old" Control Panel were blurry shit at >125% mag. They've address the most commonly used ones in recent builds but not all. Given how easy it is to add the relevant manifest entry, and given how that's all you need to do if you learned your Windows programming from Mr Petzold, this is frankly embarrassing.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: What's the point?

"As far as I'm aware anything that works in a command prompt work in Powershell?"

I don't think PUSHD works in PowerShell and I suspect there is other stuff, too, because if it were true that PowerShell was completely compatible then CMD.EXE could have been retired a decade ago and it clearly wasn't.

For the curious, I'm sure Mr Chen's blog has several articles that tell us why CMD lived on after PS appeared. Here's one ... https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060427-21/?p=31383 ... which isn't actually CMD- or PowerShell-specific.

Forget Iran and North Korea. Now there's another uranium source

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Someone hasn't been reading

It's mid-afternoon here, so here's the link.

If I may venture an opinion, the further you go in physics the more you start to think that pretty much every "force" is a fictitious one, introduced to explain why particles following "straight line" paths in a coordinate system that respects extremal-action appear to be following curved paths in the 3D sub-space that we are blinkered enough to consider more fundamental.

Certainly once you've seen magnetism emerge as an illusion of moving frames of reference and gravity emerge as an illusion of curved space-time, the legitimacy of a centrifugal force that emerges in a rotating frame seems fair.

Cancel your summer trip to nearby Proxima b. No chance of life, room service, say boffins

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: In other words...

If a decent magnetic field is required then the next question is "To what extent does Earth owe its magnetic field to the large amounts of iron in its core that it pinched from Theia?". The old Drake equation might give a rather different answer if you had to insert a "has a collision with another planet early in its life" factor to the right-hand side.

Did eye just do that? Microsoft brings gaze tracking to Windows 10

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: As always, it's a balance between benefit and risk

Can't believe you got downvotes for pointing out that assistive tech has benefits. It would seem that some people just hear about a new feature in Windows and can't help hating.

To the down-voters: just because a particular technology can be abused, and just because this particular company's recent track record suggests that it *will* be abused, doesn't mean the technology is bad. Maybe one of your nice Linux devs will think it is a good idea and port it (without the spying aspect) to Linux, and then we'll have better PCs.

How can you kill that which will not die? Windows XP is back (sorta... OK, not really)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

How big is this survey?

"Windows 98 and Windows 2000 remained the same at .01 per cent."

Is that one over-zealous web developer who fires up two really old VMs once a month just to tick a "compatibililty" box on a contract?

Linus Torvalds pens vintage 'f*cking' rant at kernel dev's 'utter BS'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Counter argument

I don't think this is a kernel (fork or otherwise).

It almost certainly is without rants, however, since MS have to pay lip service to the norms of US employment. On the other hand, they probably sack the lowest performing 5% of their team every so often, which I'd argue was an even worse way to treat your devs.

NAND that's that... Flash chip industry worth twice disk drive biz

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Wake me when the price of 1 TB of SSD gets to within shouting distance of 2x that of 1 TB of spinning rust. It will happen, just not soon."

I doubt whether there is any serious disagreement between you and the article's author. It all depends on what you mean by "soon". If I am an end-user, then "soon" might be a few months. If I am an investor, "soon" might be a few years.

If I am me, and talking purely about my personal purchases, then I may already have bought my last platter of spinning rust.

Petition calls for Adobe Flash to survive as open source zombie

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Destroy the culture too

Wouldn't it be funny if Adobe *did* publish the code, thereby turning this into an open standard, and FOSS people then produced a Flash plug-in that ran on all platforms and didn't have a million holes?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

There already *are* open source alternatives to Flash that can play older games and a VM ( as suggested above) is a viable solution for the remainder. I think this new proposal would simply keep Adobe's implementation, bugs and all, limping on indefinitely. (The sociopaths who currently refuse to remove the Flash crap on their websites would jump at the chance to keep it alive forever.)

BBC’s Micro:bit turns out to be an excellent drone hijacking tool

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: @Steve Evans

"Having said that you can program the micro:bit to write rude words in the air as you spin it round on a piece of string."

What a lovely idea. The possibility of taking someone's eye out with a well-chosen expletive means it might make a nice Code Club exercise. (Always assuming that it isn't already.)

Sysadmin jeered in staff cafeteria as he climbed ladder to fix PC

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Windows for Worgroups 4 A

"Windows 95 did NOT "sit atop DOS"."

It may not have been compatible with previous versions of DOS, particularly if you were hoping to use a device driver written for the older system, but it was definitely DOS. Anyone with a clue ran the early versions of NT instead, which needed less hardware, were far more robust and actually had all the features that Microsoft's marketing team were claiming for 95.

'SambaCry' malware scum return with a Windows encore

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: SMB != Samba

"WannaCry used flaws in the Windows implementation of SMBv1, SambaCry used flaws in the Samba implementation."

Precisely. Thank you. And since both implementations have now been patched, the only remaining problem is those systems that cannot be patched because the vendor is a fucking sociopath.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Autoupdate?

"Yeah, I'm cool about having a back door in my router ..."

Well switch it off, then. I wasn't suggesting the MS insanity of not letting you do that.

My point is that the current situation makes it impossible for anyone to switch it on because the vendor has no update and if we fixed *that* problem then we'd still have the problem that Joe User couldn't switch it on. So it has to be on by default and only those with basic IT skilz (like you) will be able to switch it off but that's still one hell of a lot safer (in terms of herd immunity) than the present clusterfuck.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Unhappy

So the only people vulnerable to this are folks running cheap NAS or ADSL boxes that have Linux firmware but for which the vendor never bothers to issue patches.

So that would be just about everyone then. :(

The general public really needs to learn the difference between free as in beer and free as in speech. Perhaps we need to maintain a list of vendors (of the above items) who have a track record of providing patches for their products (through auto-update, coz otherwise it won't happen on Joe User's box) for a period of at least five years (for want of a "lifetime" estimate). I'm guessing it won't be a long list at first, but in the long term it needs to include everyone.