* Posts by Ken Hagan

8137 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Top CompSci boffins name the architectures we'll need in 2030

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Yawn

I could have written that list 20 years ago. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure I *read* that list 20 years ago. Curiously enough, mere demand does not conjure supply out of a unicorn's butt, so we're still waiting for them. Yes, they'd be nice, but unless you have some evidence that these old problems are newly solvable, there's no news here.

A single typo may have tipped US election Trump's way

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Their election chances were damaged because the truth got revealed...

"They also hacked the RNC, but didn't release those emails."

That's probably because the RNC emails didn't contain any background material about Trump. Certainly the appearance from the East side of the pond is that the Republicans were as surprised as the rest of us with his performance in the primaries and responded simply by not bothering to field a candidate this time around. We've ended up with an Independent winning. Is that the first time this has happened?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: A single typo may have tipped US election Trump's way

"The Palmer Report has a lot of eyebrow–raising information up, if you care to look."

Just had a look and, yes, *that's* the sort of thing that, if proven, would justify all the talk about rigging the election. That's where people should focus their attention. The wikileaks stuff just looked like mud being flung in a dirty campaign and I find it really hard to believe that it swayed enough people to make a difference.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: A single typo may have tipped US election Trump's way

Was anyone actually swayed by whatever revelations followed these hacks? Hasn't it been fairly obvious for about a year what sort of people the two candidates were?

Come back if you find evidence that someone actually fiddled with the voting machines. Until then, shut up because nothing else that people are talking about counts as "hacking likely to affect the vote".

Blue sky basic income thinking is b****cks

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"GREETINGS, MEAT SACK..."

Sorry, I don't speak COBOL. Do you have a colleague written in a proper language?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Mixed feelings

"What about the sort of smart clothing one might require for a job interview?"

If the interviewer is such a shallow-minded twat that they insist on smart clothes then they can bloody well pay for them. I don't see why the welfare system should foot the bill for the prejudices of a by-gone age.

'Emoji translator' sought by translations firm

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Flame

Re: What a load of bollocks...

Perhaps the truth is that a picture *costs* a thousand words.

The time spent typing in two random emoji could be better spent just writing the flipping words. The time spent playing silly mind-games trying to decipher them could be better spent having sex (or whatever it was that the text interrupted). The time wasted because the meaning got garbled in transit is lost forever. The fact that professional translators think you need special skills to figure out what they mean is a really big clue that these hinder communication, not help.

Use words, you numpty, and whilst we are at it can you shit on that horrible ribbon and bring back a menu with (you've guessed it) some fucking words on it.

Europe to launch legal action against countries over diesel emissions cheating

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Oh, here we go again!

"as Britain has been fined numerous times, it seems it will do nothing but take money from the population"

If the people are stupid enough to keep electing a government that ignores the law, then I'd argue that the people deserve to be punished. You do have a choice in the polling booth, you know. You don't *have* to vote for the blithering idiots whose mere touch turns everything to shit.

Is your Windows 10, 8 PC falling off the 'net? Microsoft doesn't care

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Don't think Microsoft has the monopoly on dodgy DHCP clients

"To the people giving me thumbs down, go and run a packet trace, this is exactly what an Apple client does."

And did anyone so much as suggest that it isn't? No. Your downvotes are for two quite different reasons. Firstly, you said something that makes a particular OS look inept. Expect downvotes from fanboys. Secondly, you said something a while back on an unrelated topic that put someone's nose out of joint. Expect downvotes on everything you post until they forget who you are or they find someone new to pester or (but it won't happen) they get a life.

And to all those people in these two categories: May you choke to death on mince pies this Christmas.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: See no evil, hear no evil.

That was pretty much my first thought, too. Given reasonable rates of updating, by the end of the year there won't be any machines running Windows on the internet. Are we *sure* it is a *Microsoft* patch that is causing this problem?

HBO slaps takedown demand on 13-year-old girl's painting because it used 'Winter is coming'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Arseholes

"I realise you can't beat the the novel format after all."

I think the real truth is that you can't beat the *original* format. Each format has strengths and weaknesses and a competent author will play to the former, making it very hard to produce an equally good "translation" into a different format.

As a result, producers who buy the rights to a book might be better advised to buy the rights to the characters (or universe) depicted therein and then commission someone to write a different story. (This needn't be the original author and unless that author has some experience in the other medium perhaps it shouldn't be.)

I think I read somewhere that JKR made a lot of friends when she first met the producers of the first film and suggested that quite a few things would have to change to make the books filmable. Cue huge sighs of relief from the screenwriting team.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"In this case, it looks like the publishers have dibs on clothing bearing the phrase, and the website allows you to print it on T-shirts. Hence, infringement."

Perhaps the girl should use Google Translate to create a non-English version of the text and upload that instead. I hear that translating random phrases into Arabic is a popular meme right now.

Sysadmin told to spend 20+ hours changing user names, for no reason

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: funny thing about these requests

"All clashes of initials should be referred to 2IC for prompt resolution"

Well if HR are doing their job properly, they won't be taking on anyone whose initials clash with an existing employee.

What can we use to hit Intel between the eyes, thinks Qualcomm – a 10nm ARM server chip

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: People don't buy x86 because of Performance or anything

I don't care *why* is it that way for x86 now. I am merely pointing out that it *is* and that those equivalent standards for ARM are only "being quietly worked on" and not "working". As and when the ARM folks get their shit together I look forward to the "harder times ahead" for the x86.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: People don't buy x86 because of Performance or anything

"Everything Linux works on Arm. [...] The platform is definitely there. And tested and running for years thanks to Android and rpi and domestic routers and switches."

If you say so, but this guy reckons that's a huge steaming pile of crap: -> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/10/linus_torvalds_says_arm_just_doesnt_look_like_beating_intel/

I have to say that my own experience of running Linux is more in line with his. I have several ARM-based machines and my options for putting the latest Linus kernel in each of them are (i) ha ha ha ha, (ii) learn about this particular machine's boot-loader, grab the vendor's kernel from a git repository, figure out what kernel options are required, try some builds and debug the results.

On x86, the proces is download an ISO, burn the CD (or write the stick) and boot. Job done.

90 per cent of the UK's NHS is STILL relying on Windows XP

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Amortisation, anyone?

Anytime you buy some equipment, you should ask yourself when it will become worthless (at least for accounting purposes). To a first approximation, that happens with the expiry of either the hardware, the software or the vendor. It sounds like the hardware is still going strong in these cases (or is readily replaceable in the case of desktop PC systems) and so your main worries are software and vendor.

Someone selling you kit and agreeing to share the design and all source code, with an agreement that says you can use that information either if the vendor disappears or if you think the vendor's support offering is too pricey, will immediately have an expected lifetime of N-times longer than the schmuck who sells a closed system. That makes it N-times cheaper than the (closed) competition.

If your bean counters are doing their job properly, that should mean that an organisation the size of the NHS basically need never get into this sort of situation again. Indeed, any use of a closed system should immediately raise suspicions of corruption and back-haners, since it is so vanishingly unlikely that the deal is being costed fairly.

Afterthought: A private sector organisation has to consider a fourth possibility, the expiry of itself. That might present a compelling argument for something that is cheaper this year and we'll worry about the costs next year. Countries tend not to go bankrupt, even when they run out of money, so they probably *shouldn't* be worrying about that fourth possibility.

Are you listening, Mr Trump? World's largest tech distie is now owned by the Chinese

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Trollface

Re: I'm sure...

Nice troll.

Er, it was, wasn't it?

[re-reads]

Oh.

Take that, creationists: Boffins witness birth of new species in the lab

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Meh...

That was indeed in the fine article, but only as part of the career background of one of the teachers of the person doing the experiment in the article. The experiment that was the subject of the article was a demonstration of changes in viral DNA. The bacteria remained unchanged at the end of paragraph 3.

It's this kind of lazy shifting from one thing to another that I was crtiticising in my comment, because it makes it easier for the nut-jobs to make it look like scientists are shifty and slack with standards of evidence.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Meh...

I thought viruses officially weren't alive, so I find this an unconvincing demonstration that living things can speciate.

Worse, it probably hurts your case. If you subsequently show that the bacteria evolve into resistant and distinct sub-groups then you might have a story worth telling. Sadly, however, no-one will be listening because you made a similar claim in the past and were discredited.

The UK's Investigatory Powers Act allows the State to tell lies in court

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"If the dealers are stopped with drugs on them then [...] I wish there was a law that the cops could just shoot them on the spot [...]"

Nice idea, until the day that the cop makes a mis-identification of what the "dealer" (which might be you or friend or relative) is carrying. Unless you have some amzing scheme to turn all cops into infallible beings (in which case, please do share) that *will* happen, and probably sooner than you think.

So the law bothers to go through something too boring for your puny mind called "due process".

Hackers waste Xbox One, PS4, MacBook, Pixel, with USB zapper

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: No shit, sherlock

"One notable lunatic nuked a brand new MacBook Pro, Google Pixel, and a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge ..."

If he did them all within a short space of time (*) then some collaboration between Apple, Google and Samsung might be able to identify who it is. (* Or even a fairly long period. How many people have bought all three of those and returned them under warranty almost immediately?) Perhaps El Reg could contact all three companies and spin some line about wanting to write the story of how they joined forces to identify the fraudster.

It’s Brexploitation! Microsoft punishes UK for Brexit with cloud price-gouging

Ken Hagan Gold badge

So you think MS survive (and make massive profits) despite being crap, by dint of their ability to lock-in customers and suck money out of governments both at home and abroad.

And you aren't impressed? I'd call that *stunningly* successful. If they were doing by merely by offering quality products at reasonable prices then that would be oh so boringly mundane and unworthy of comment.

Google turns on free public NTP servers that SMEAR TIME

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Frustration

"If OS developers wrote their OSes to use International Atomic Time instead of UTC as their base timescale, ..."

At least according to the documentation, Windows has used "seconds since 1601" as its base timescale for the last twenty years and UNIX has used "seconds since 1970" for rather longer. It has always been my impression that a conversion to UTC is purely a user-interface thing for the benefit of meatware. Any programmer baking Babylonian time-keeping conventions into their design really needs whacking over the head with a two-by-four clue-stick.

Microsoft, IBM, Intel refuse to hand over family jewels to China

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: China has demanded technology transfer for years

I wouldn't be too sure about the fate of Western engineering culture. Yes, over the past few decades a lot of manufacturing has been exported to where the labour is cheap (or free), but the R&D has not moved anything like as fast and (as noted in several Trump-related discussions on these forums) the manufacturing might be about to return to the West on the back of robotic manufacturing.

China's economic success appears to be predicated both on the idea that they can hold down their own wage costs indefinitely and also on the idea that this means the jobs will stay in China. Neither assumption looks good in the longer term. If the manufacturing moves back to the West, the Chinese people might start to ask their government what they'd done during the years of plenty to build an economy that can carry on working through the lean years.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Benefits...

"A lot of Japanese manufacturers decided that operating in China was more hassle than it was worth."

If Mr Trump has his way, a lot of US manufacturers might be pushed towards a similar decision in the near future. This may be all the nudge that they need.

I suspect the Communists are demonstrating their usual level of economic comprehension. If *I* pull out of China then I lose ground to all my competitors who are still in that huge market, but if everyone (for various reasons) pulls out of China then I lose nothing. By "everyone" of course I mean all the round-eyed foreigners. Huawei et all would be free to sell whatever they like. However, it is *just* possible that they may find themselves *less* free than before to export, since all the target markets would now be run by politicians who have lost any reason to suck up to China.

Sysadmin figures out dating agency worker lied in his profile

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Enter == submit

"The use of Tab to move to the next field is very unintuitive, as the typewriter tab key was almost exclusively used to indent text or type stuff in columns."

This must be one of those age-related pieces of intuition. Most people have only ever used GUIs and mostly the Windows flavour thereof. Certainly since Win3 and quite possibly since Win1, Windows has used TAB to walk round a dialog box and mapped ENTER to the default button. To fall into the trap described by the article you would need to be amongst the small fraction of the population who have data entry experience from 25 or more years ago and no subsequent experience with "ordinary" (ie, Windows) PCs.

Oh, and what's a typewriter?

Amazon tries again with AppStream because customers didn't like it

Ken Hagan Gold badge

So if this requires a licence for Remote Desktop and only runs on Server editions of Windows, what's the product here? I already have Remote Desktop if I want it, even on Linux clients, and it isn't restricted to what someone can encode via HTML5.

Plastic fiver: 28 years' work, saves acres of cotton... may have killed less than ONE cow*

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Fewer

If it had been fewer than two cows then I'd quite agree with you, but I'm not sure that cows are countable when in groups of fewer than one. You wouldn't say fewer than half a cow, for example.

American supremacy, space, liability, funding, openness – AI gurus lay it all out to US senators

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"The current congress is totally interested in lining its own pockets and those of its bedmates."

A boatload of AI hype sounds ideal then! (I expect cheap fusion reactors to appear before anything remotely resembling "intelligence" in an artificial system.)

SHIFT + F10, Linux gets you Windows 10's cleartext BitLocker key

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "dns claim my server is updates.microsoft.com"

You can certainly call yourself updates.microsoft.com if it floats your boat, but I suspect you will have more trouble pushing out "updates" that have been signed by a key that the target machine trusts for this purpose.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Whole-disk encryption is silly anyway

The OS files (which are the ones that MS wanted to update in this case) are not secret. The ones you actually want to protect are the per-user files, which MS never need to update and so they can be encrypted with a mechanism that doesn't need to have a back-door designed into it.

Traditionally, the objection was that Windows failed miserably to separate system files and user data, but that's actually been getting better (slowly) over time. These days, I suspect that *most* Windows apps can tolerate a setup where directories are either per-user-encrypted or read-only-for-that-user.

Imagine every mistake you can make with a new software rollout...

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "writing a Purchase Ledger system from scratch"

Almost certainly true, because none of the existing COTS offerings will run on hand-held devices and slurp contextual data from social media sites and stash it all in the cloud.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: No US coverage of this

"If there's one thing politicians and managers are good at..."

...then I've yet to hear of it.

Congrats America, you can now safely slag off who you like online

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Double edged sword?

They already are. If I want to be malicious, I will spend some time crafting a review that takes care to be plausible. That probably makes it more defensible in court. If, however, I just want to throw out an honest rant, I'll probably say something rash and that means I'll be wanting the sort of protection that this new law will provide.

50 years on, the Soviet-era Soyuz rocket is still our favorite space truck

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Also consider the fact that anti-ballistic missile systems were regulated by treaty before ballistic missile were, because the latter were considered an indication of offensive intent.

The real offensive weapons are the little ones (tanks, planes, boats) because those are the ones that you can actually use day-to-day to make war.

How-to terror manuals still being sold by Apple, Amazon, Waterstones

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: FTFY...

Under the unwritten constitution of the English language, corect is whatever most people do. (Placing the full stop inside the quotes marks you down as an Arts-y type, whereas placing them where they logically belong marks you down as a STEM-y type.)

No super-kinky web smut please, we're British

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "pornographic material or adult material"

Someone should ask her to explain (in the House, of course, so that we can all read it in Hansard for generations to come) *precisely* what the difference is, so that judges can refer to her definitions when deciding cases. (I'll wager that 99.99% of the population have gone through life believing that the latter is simply a euphemism for the former, so we'll all be *fascinated* to learn what the difference really is.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Why is it that watching someone else perform a legal act is illegal?"

It's for symmetry with all those cases where watching someone else perform an illegal act is legal.

SQL Server on Linux: Runs well in spite of internal quirks. Why?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: portability

True, but a more pertinent translation might be "Once we've got you interested by running this on Linux, the databases will be fully portable back to our Windows-based edition.".

Microsoft’s ‘Home Hub’ probably isn’t even hardware at all

Ken Hagan Gold badge

low-key?

"Echo itself was a spontaneous and low-key product released with almost no marketing beyond the Amazon store-front."

Almost no marketing beyond a front-and-centre splash on almost certainly *the* most visited shopping web-site on the planet? A location that, moreover, probably isn't even for sale to non-Amazon advertisers, no matter how deep your pockets are.

Debian putting everything on the /usr

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: only thing I ask

These days, I think it is easier to rescue a system from a live CD.

Reg man 0: Japanese electronic toilet 1

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: standard armoured car

I think the toilet paper is the standard. Armoured cars vary and most can be knocked out by a nuclear bomb, so they are measured in millizals.

China cites Trump to justify ‘fake news’ media clampdown. Surprised?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Surely the definitive put-down to this "fake news" hypothesis is that Hillary actually won the popular vote? (It was the electoral college system that won it for Trump, and the good gentleman is on record as saying he would like to change it.)

Kids' Hour of Code turns into a giant corporate infomercial for kids

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Scrap everything

Any commercial company worth its salt is going to have people whose entire job is working out how to exploit an opportunity like this, to pitch their products in front of school-children. They have 365 days to work on it and only 1 hour to fill. Teachers meanwhile, have to full every other hour of the school year with lessons planned to the best of their ability. They have neither the time nor the expertise to counter the pitch, and no incentive if a diktat comes down from on high that they must do this. It is a scandal that companies (and not even UK ones) are given such unfettered access to our kids on an annual basis.

Coding shouldn't even be a priority, not even for one hour. You can't *do* anything in that time and there can't be a child in the country who isn't already aware of the importance of computers and the fact that someone needs to program them. If they are interested, they've probably googled their way to the most common options for learning. If not, they won't become interested by watching a teacher discover that every other primary school in the land is also trying to access www.corporate-advert.com at this precise moment in time, or that "no, the school's internal network can't cope with every single computer in the building logging into the domain at the same time".

Meanwhile, the curriculum continues to narrow to strangulation point. In the UK, the only things that are tested (and therefore the only things that schools are rewarded for) at Key Stage 2 are English and Maths. All that time on science or humanities that actually makes the curriculum interesting gets you no points at the end of Year 6. Any politician who actually understood the free market could predict the outcome of that selective environment, but ... sigh.

Put down the org chart, snowflake: Why largile's for management crybabies

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Agile in a safety critical environment...

"I have no problem with the AirBus FCS being developed in an Agile manner. However I do have a real problem with it being TESTED in an Agile manner."

Agile looks like a plausible way of generating an "actual requirements spec". Its proponents seem very fond of telling stories about how several inches of "analyst requirements spec" ended up in the bin after the agile actually tried out a few use-cases with real end-users. Fair enough. I'm sure that most projects start out with *awful* requirements specs and unless that spec is judiciously ignored by the experienced staff (and not just the developers) the whole project is doomed.

It then probably makes sense to write down in some detail how you are going to prove that the software meets those requirements. If you can't do that, you need to fix the requirements or else you are just wasting your time implementing anything. If this sounds a lot like test-driven-design then you can call it that, but I'm not convinced it is exactly the same thing.

Then you need to actually implement it, but since you've done the Requirements first and then the Design and since the Acceptance Testing is easy (already planned, and quite possibly automatable), the only bit left to do is going to look a lot like a Waterfall process at this point.

Intel lays out its AI strategy until 2020

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Best architecture for "AI"

If, as appears to be the case, we are confusing AI with analysing all that big data being gathered by world+wife, then the big data is merely a large constant input and so whatever analysis we're doing is embarrassingly parallel. A stupidly-parallel cluster of cheap boxes with fast access to the raw data should suffice.

If we're talking about AI as in "the machine changes what it actually does based on the results of past activity" then it is not terribly obvious what the best architecture is because it isn't terribly obvious what the best algorithm is. As far as I'm aware, we still don't have either a definition of intelligence or an objective test for it. On the other hand, if you want to attach little windmills to all the hand-waving then we do have a solution to the energy crisis.

PoisonTap fools your PC into thinking the whole internet lives in an rPi

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: If they can physically access the computer...

The scenario isn't that far removed from a legitimate one: that of a VPN. That too is a new interface that appears after existing connections have been established, and that too is an interface that could reasonably be given priority for packets routed to a subset of addresses.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Can we start a petition on the government website?

How do you know that they haven't already done so, and you've spent the last few years whining about this issue to a bunch of black hats who have poisoned your DNS?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Hmm...

I think you are going about it backwards. dhclient is only in the picture if your ethernet interfaces are marked as auto or hotplug or some such. For a fixed link, you might prefer to manually configure things and fall back to "not connected" if you find yourself at one end of an unfamiliar network. But now we are back to the choice between secure and convenient.

Likewise, in the Windows world I believe that a domain-joined machine can be made to only trust the DHCP servers of that domain, but most home users don't have a DC and MS make it even harder by disabling the facility entirely in some editions of the OS.

Afterthought: quite a lot of security problems would be solved if someone produced an ADSL router that had a Joe-User-friendly firewall to protect Joe's IoT devices, some sort of net nanny or danse guardian to keep the politicians out of the loop on content filtering, and enough domain controller software to let Joe manage all his Windows clients, which themselves would have to have the domain-disabling disabled so that they weren't recklessly insecure.

Maybe if the next Raspberry Pi has an ADSL modem onboard, it could actually happen?

Experts to Congress: You must act on IoT security. Congress: Encourage industry to develop best practices, you say?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Be Careful What You Wish For...

Sounds great! Where do I sign up?