Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: Question

I think Sunak is keeping Penny out of the way to protect his own position. Schapps presumably isn't a threat.

Re: It's a competitor/successor to the JVM.

"They've also learnt from thirty years experience of the JVM. In particular, it's a simpler lower-level, thing, where language features aren't tied into the VM."

Now *that* remains to be seen. One big reason that the JVM directly encodes certain language features is to make it easier to sandbox. Java fell out of favour in the browser because it still wasn't (apparently) possible to sandbox reliably. Can WASM be sandboxed? We'll see. And if it can't then it's just another ActiveX.

Re: Do you know any storage jokes?

Kyiv to Sevastopol.

I think it is a bit of a stretch to assume that the recent research that has made electric cars viable could equally have been done 100 years earlier if we'd been bothered.

Re: It's a bloody word in our bloody language!

To be honest, there shpuld be a presumption in law that a holder of intellectual property has only one umbrella domain and all their stuff lives underneath.

Then, any appearance of their trademarks and shit in a different domain is clearly not a violation. It can't be passing off because it can't be official because it isn't in the right place.

As beneficial side-effects, there would be much less pressure for new TLDs and end-users would have an easier time figuring out whether a site like (say) windowscentral.com was a source of official Microsoft advice and tools, or not.

Re: re: How this is not monopolist behaviour?

The suggestion is that MS *have* a (near) monopoly on "office software" which they are leveraging to try to increase their share in the cloud provider market. If so, that would be illegal. It is (with different products) something they have been penalised for in the past.

Re: More performative bullshit

Until about 40 years ago, that was the consensus view among US politicians and judges. The current gun frenzy has no historical precedent and therefore cannot claim any moral or legal backing from the 2nd amendment.

Much the same could also be said about the assumption that the US /ought/ to be a Christian country.

"and not lose your data"

Surely that's what backups are for? (At least for the parts of your data that aren't linked to a git repository somewhere, or stored elsewhere on your LAN.)

A single partition means you don't guess wrongly how much you need on each volume. For a novice, that seems to me like a big advantage.

Someone who respects the technical prowess of Russian scientists and engineers, who distinguishes that from the organisational dysfunction of the political and military establishment, and who already has exploitable intelligence assets there and so might as well use them.

Re: Design for failure

I wonder how many customers have a plan B for when Microsoft 365 goes belly-up (if only for a week or so).

Given that they apparently lost a fairly significant signing key a few weeks ago, and given that several significant nation state actors currently feel themselves to be at war with the US, this possibility *ought* to be on everyone's radar, but I fear that most MS customers probably couldn't make a backup of their own even if they wanted to.

Re: Given its operational ceiling of 6000 meters

I doubt whether the operational ceiling is something they've designed for. It's more likely to be a side-effect of building a quadcopter that can cope with 12 m/s headwinds and 40 kg payloads.

"In a post on data security and Python in Excel, Redmond lists the following plus points.

Excel's Python code runs on hypervisor isolated containers built on Azure Container Instances.

The container has Python and a curated set of secured libraries provided by Anaconda.

The Python code does not have access to the user's computer, devices, account, the network, any user token, or workbook properties, including formulas, charts, PivotTables, macros, and Visual Basic code."

I've had emails where the inadvertently quoted correspondence included a remark (between two other parties) to the effect that I had somehow become aware of some secret information, which was embarrassing for them.

The source of the leak was an equally unwisely quoted email between the same two people, earlier in the thread.

Is there an email client out there that is *so* broken that it automatically quotes all previous correspondence to everyone else *but also* automatically hides such quotes from its own end-user? I ask because that might explain how my correspondents were quite so clueless, without requiring them to be complete idiots.

Re: Students?

It is up for review every ten years and factions within the present government are certainly against it, but the present government is unlikely to be around in 2027.

Re: Last rites ... hope not

The visibility of social media makes it more like a billboard than a telephone. But yes, society knows how to regulate communications and the internet changes nothing. The idea that we need new laws is just politicians trying to look useful.

Re: Being based off ...

"This site is longer uses ..."

I don't recognise your post as English, either. I know what you meant, though, and perhaps that ought to be enough.

"when will they learn to get a life"

...asks the internet troll.

Re: India shows no signs of stopping, or slowing, its digital diplomacy effort

"Hey, if it's good, why not ?"

Careful now! That's the kind of co-operative logic that gave us the Linux cancer. If it isn't nipped in the bud, we might one day have governments all running their public services with flexible, well supported, inter-operable, trusted packages.

Given that all governments have quite a lot of admin functions in common, it is shocking that they all seem to have the not-invented-here attitude. One could understand it if they were preferring to spaff money at their own industries, but most of them aren't even doing that.

The insanity is even more obvious at local government levels, where the services to be provided and the legal constraints are actually identical.

Re: Let them be misleading

"It's public knowledge that 6G doesn't exist yet"

I don't think Joe Public knows that. Nor am I confident that Joe Public is clear on the difference between their xDSL to the property and the "fastest" WiFi that is used for the final hop to their shiny. Furthermore, I think that's why 6G chose that company name.

Re: "radically alter the workflow of medical professionals, without their input"

"Because the wards were very busy, the new IT teams had more time with the back office team."

I think you've hit an important nail squarely on the head.

The people that programmers can most easily speak to and spend time with are (approximately in order): each other, their friends in IT admin, their own company's sales force, the customer's management, light users of the eventual system (your back-office team) and lastly the heavy users of the eventual system.

My guess is that unless you make a conscious effort to address this bias, you'll end up with a system that reflects it.

Re: I feel sorry for the engineers.

Well if their claims are true then, by speaking out, they've demonstrated that they are the best engineers in the company. Musk wouldn't want me as the judge in the ensuing case for unfair dismissal.

Re: The real problem?

For the example in the fine article, I'd expect every official MS package to be signed by MS and anyone grabbing it to have some way of validating that the package is indeed signed and, moreover, signed by the expected author.

If your platform doesn't offer that, it is just ActiveX by another name and you have learned nothing in the last 25 years.

Re: 30 hours?!

Perhaps the other 29 .5 hours are translating it from the legalese into something a normal user might be able to understand.

I can see the point in commercial contracts being written and read by corporate lawyers, but if your product is aimed at ordinary people, it should not take even 30 minutes to read the terms and conditions. (And yes, this applies to financial insitutions, too. Particularly ones who issue "revised terms and conditions" every few months with a helpful guide to the major changes and (by implication) no guide at all to the minor changes that they don't want to tell you about.)

I would infer that they have the outward appearance of an English-speaker, but no underlying understanding of the language, and so prone to verbal "hallucinations".

So something else gets cut.

You have a choice between 90% of the intended functions or 0%. Be quick. That choice may be short-lived.

The article also says...

"which suggests the odds of this disparity being due to chance is just 0.0529 and is thus likely to have been deliberate."

...which to me reads as not even significant at the 5% level and therefore not likely to be deliberate.

Re: Just one question

An ordinary rifle would be fine. Recoil is proportional to the impulse of the shot, which means that mass and velocity matter but "little g" does not.

Re: And then what?

But, but ... it's a really good bit of PR for a machine whose sole reason to exist is "making better hydrogen bombs".

Re: It could be useful anyway.

Unlikely to be non-toxic, since it is full of lead.

Re: Colleagues are distracting

"not sure if I'm allowed the ear defenders, we've been told we can't use noise cancelling headphones, which seems to be due to worries about hearing alarms)."

Bizarrre! Where I work we test the alarms each week and the main worry is the risk of hearing damage if you *aren't* wearing some sort of protection.

Well you're just a bunch of numbers at any rate.

Re: is Ai really Ai

I don't think anyone is pretending otherwise.

The two *interesting* questions are 1) "Are we any different, or just bigger?" and 2) "Would a sufficiently large AI have an internal monologue that is similar to our sense of consciousness?".

"Before that point the human part is designing an instruction set architecture and putting the specification into the machines."

Sounds like ARM might need people for that then. Co-incidentally, it sounds like those are the skills they are trying to foster in the wider education system.

Re: I was going to say this is ridiculous but...

Several posters above make good points about humidity and the passage of years, but if they used a solvent that isn't a normal part of the atmosphere then the idea might have legs.

Re: The Good Old Days of Opera

I think the fact that *Microsoft* gave up trying to maintain a non-Chromium browser engine tells you how much leverage Google have in this area.

Re: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

"Absence of proof is not proof of absence."

Works better, but still lacks the rhetorical polish that you get with words ending in -ence. Perhaps other languages can express it more pithily.