Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
@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...
"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".
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.".)
"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.
"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.
"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".
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.
"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.
"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.
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?
"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.
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.
"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.
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.
"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.)
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.)
"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.)
"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.
"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.
"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.
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.
"It is geographically, and soon to be politically, an island."
Actually, it's more than one island, but you'd need to take your blinkers off to notice that. Worse still, not all the islands are exclusively the UK, but again, don't let this geographical pedantry disturb you.
"I have went"
If the pedants will look away long enough for me to say "It's not very irregular.", then I will. (If they won't, then would the rest of you be so good as to skip the rest of this post. Otherwise we'll get logical paradoxes.)
I think "went" is to "wend" what "spent" is to "spend" and so "I have went" is about as irregular as "I have spent" and therefore rather more regular than "I have gone". It should, of course, be "I have goed" but I imagine it is too late to insist on that now.
Quite how the verbs to go and to wend (as in, "wend their merry way back from the pub") ever became entangled remains as mysterious as ever, of course, but most western European languages seem to have one or two stupendously irregular verbs with different persons and tenses taken from different root verbs in older languages. I think it is some kind of competition.
"Android already has a huge and impressive app catalogue"
Really? Where?
Android hardware is predominantly poxy little screens and no keyboard. Unsurprisingly then, whatever is in the Play store is the kind of app that is usable on that kind of device. In addition there are painfully restricted "reader" versions of a handful of desktop apps. But there's next to nothing of the kind of software that normal people run on normal desktops for reasons that are both perfectly clear and very unlikely to change in the near future.
Of course, if someone could add a way to run Linux apps on Android, it would be a different story. :)
systemd with faint praise
So today's news is that MS are interested in a device that sits alongside the CPU and offers potentially huge speed-ups for certain classes of compute-intensive problem. That was, of course, also the news about 20 years ago. What eventually panned out was that MS (and others) abstracted the interface to such devices, so that programmers could use the feature without (mostly) caring about which vendor was providing the gizmo. I expect this will go the same way. AMD are doing the same sort of thing, aren't they? Next month's news will therefore be that Intel no longer have the market to themselves and MS (and others) don't care one way or the other because their APIs work on both.
So, yeah, nice to see the technology roll out, however slowly. Not a reason to rush out and buy more Intel shares, though.
In fairness, the scheme offers nothing new in functional terms, because the CPU has no notion of thread as distinct from process, so the existing page protection mechanisms could always have been used to do this. What's new is that Intel reckoned that resurrecting a much more primitive scheme (costing only one register per thread) was worth it at this point in time.
No doubt the cycles of reincarnation will continue and this will soon be "legacy cruft, used by only one or two programs ever, but still needing to be implemented by every processor they ship, now and forever". Then, in about 20 years time, Intel will finally drop support for it and everyone will be aghast, ranting about the back-compat implications.
For a very rough estimate, Amazon will sell you a "1.5-3 TB" tape for about 20 quid which means that the price per TB is about half that of spinning rust from the same emporium.
(Obviously that's not the tape product being discussed here, but hopefully the unfairness of my comparison will provoke someone who actually knows about the subject.)
"Android versions prior to Nougat also run older versions of the Linux kernel."
It's worse than that. If you (*) upgrade an older version to Nougat, you are probably still running the older kernel. In fact, you are probably stuck with whatever kernel version was current when the original device manufacturer first released the device.
(* Yes, I mean you, with something like CyanogenLineage. Obviously the OEM has other options. However, I don't know if they actually take advantage of them. Anyone out there with a phone running the vendor's stock image that has been upgraded? Was the kernel upgraded at the same time?)
I'm assuming you aren't actually going to try this but...
There's no shortage of smart-enough people in poor-enough countries, so it would probably work. It is also in line with the bizarre-but-conventional wisdom that you can manage something that you have no experience of because management is a skill in its own right.
All you need now is to find some pissed-off-enough shareholders to volunteer to be your first customers.
" Those local admin rights sound like trouble, but "Windows has an option to store encrypted passwords" WTF? You have to ask it to? "
I don't know what that's all about. Windows (NT flavour, obviously, since DOS doesn't count) has always stored passwords just as securely as any other mainstream OS. Best practice in this area was established about half a century ago and isn't actually difficult.
Of course, there's nothing stopping some clueless twat of a programmer from storing a password in plaintext in an INI file on a network share open to the universe, but you could do that on any OS.
"I'm not blaming devs, they're often under pressure to deliver but we all share the blame on this sort of bad practice."
I've been developing for NT since version 3.1 and I can place hand on heart and swear that I have never shipped a product that required admin except for configuration that actually does require admin. I won't swear that the configuration was always confined to a separate process, but I will swear that it had a graceful fallback when run as a normal user.
I most definitely do blame the devs. A gratuitous requirement for admin rights is sufficient grounds for sending the product back and asking for a refund, if for no other reason than it indicates that the developers haven't a fucking clue and ghod alone knows what else is broken under the hood.
(So actually, yeah, like the other guy I blame the devs first but then also the procurement people who tolerate this shit.)
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