Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: store as a familiar and 'safer' way to install?

"When Ubuntu started supporting USB3, the drivers weren't back-ported to the LTS releases, and neither was the Unity interface crap, so why should Microsoft do things any differently?"

Because Ubuntu will product a new LTS release within a year or two and won't charge you for it when it arrives. Unless you are bursting for USB3 support (and LTS fans probably aren't) you can just wait. Even if you are bursting, it is possible to upgrade your kernel to one that does USB3 without dragging the applications up to the bleeding edge. (Imagine that, Microsoft, upgrading to the Win10 kernel but keeping the user-space portion unchanged from the one you trust rather than being forced to hoover up a truck-load of fresh bugs. What silly ideas these penguinistas have!)

Re: Creepy

In urban areas, a post-code might well identify a group of addresses that mostly within 30 yards or so of each other. Combine that with your entirely human tendency to remember the occasions when it was (by chance) scarily accurate and I don't think you have anything to worry about.

Of course, if this is happening to you and you live in sparsely populated country, you may have a point.

Re: Er... ? Comparing different providers to the same property?!

True about shite lines, but a sufficiently shite ISP can make even a good line perform badly.

My reading is that there's a new VB runtime in town (or its moral equivalent). This one has been "ported" to Linux, where ported means "completely incompatible implementation of the same original idea".

Re: It seem to me

It tells *me* that anyone else selling diesels in the US should be investigated. If the test is so hard that VW thought it was worth the risk of cheating (the company may go under now) then the chances are no-one else can build one either.

I think Pokemon Go demonstrates that GPS and mapping are now (almost?) at the point where the real world can be used as a stage. I also know that you're not alone in being uncomfortable with "eyes moving but balance organs static" and AR games are presumably mostly immune to that problem. What I can't imagine is *quite how awesome* it would have been if all those games we played at primary school had been enhanced with a head-up display.

I assume that various groups are already working on these, so the parents of the next generation will spend as much time trying to get the kids to come in as the previous generation spent trying to get them to go out.

Re: Buh?

I think the gist of it is that someone with a Nobel to their name (and who therefore presumably knows how thin the ice is this far out) reckons they have identifed a system which *in its lowest energy state* is in some sense "in motion". This is apparently a novelty. Furthermore, a group financed by Microsoft is now going to try and create that system to see if the wacky idea is true.

Re: kick from a cow

That's sounds more like they don't want to be not milked. At the very least, it raises philosophical questions about whether they want to want to be milked.

Re: Shoddy code reviews...

They did, but it was a case-sensitive search.

Re: Does this mean...

If so then I'm not bothered. Most Android devices will never get the update.

(If only they were attached to some sort of global wireless network so that updates could be sent to them automatically, as and when they were produced ...)

Re: Just another NTLM hack

If it is an NTLM hack then Microsoft fixed it years ago. NTLM isn't enabled by default anymore and corporate users should have disabled it back in 2000 or so when NTLMv2 turned up.

Funny how Linux supporting (optionally) ancient hardware and protocols is a sign of how great FOSS is, whereas Windows doing the same is a sign of why closed source is evil.

"Why has Hanff changed his tune from 2008 after the Phorm trials when he was busy proclaiming that consent from both sender and recipient was needed to make any interception legal?"

Perhaps because blocking is different from snooping. In the latter case, either sender or recipient may be unaware that there is anything going on.

Re: Bah!

What furor? I don't see anyone who is actually involved in propogating high-precision measuring equipment who is arguing against the desirability of this. Sure, if you buy a ruler at the newsagent then it probably wasn't calibrated by counting wavelengths of anything, but it was almost certainly calibrated against something that was itself calibrated against ... [repeat no more than a few times] ... exactly that.

And those clever engineers building moon rockets would almost certainly have wanted a fairly precise ruler to build the parts for their air-tight capsules, or those engines that burn 5 tons of kerosine per second and only stay solid because they have five tons of coolant (kerosine, as it happens, because they had some handy) flowing past on a one-way trip.

Re: Speeding up web browsing by a fifth

You forgot about the DRM. If the web server at the other end of the wet string and your own PC have to apply and then remove a load of DRM, then CPU may still be the bottleneck at one or other end.

Going further, we have a collection of "Trusted Roots" but do we also need a collection of "Dis-trusted Roots"? Simply removing a CA from the former list means that its certificates will show up as someone the browser hasn't heard of, but that's nothing like as alarming as "I've heard of them and they are rubbish.".

If memory serves, Windows has a "Revoked" list for actual certificates, but no equivalent list for authorities. (Happy to be told I'm wrong on this count.)

Re: Make it up in volume!

Volume doesn't help if the multiplier is negative. Brand recognition doesn't help if people buy a hoover made by Electrolux or don't even know that there was ever a pen company called Biro.

Re: Killing spreadsheets for fun and profit

You appear to be assuming that everyone using Excel is using it as a database. Actually, some of us use it as a spreadsheet and it works fine.

But the auto-formatting, auto-correct, auto-as-you-type... Yeah, they all need to die. They also need to die in word-processors. (End-users should learn how to spell and computers should stop trying to enforce one rather ignorant person's grammatical and stylistic prejudices.) Actually, the only instance I can think of where I am occasionally grateful and never actively narked by a computer trying to change what I type is Google's search engine.

Re: Shrug

"Maybe it's a confuence of various bits of other software causing the issue?"

A lot of USB3 chipsets (or their driver stacks) are still fairly crap in my experience, and by "fairly crap" I mean that the USB 1 and 2 functionality is broken, leading to random disconnects or other trouble.

Re: I wish they would can "Operation Starshot"

"And the sensors are too small to return any meaningful data."

Correction: the craft are too small to return any data whatsoever.

The inverse square law applies. 4 light-years is about 250,000 AU which means it is about 2000 times further away than Voyager 2 right now. The latter is a much larger craft than this "postage stamp with a sail" and can only deliver 160 bits per second where it is now. Reduce that bit-rate by 4 million. (1200 bits per year = 150 bytes per year.) Then try to deliver a 20-kilobyte JPEG of Proxima Centauri. Plan to wait about 150 years for the results. Then remember that you've forgotten to reduce it still further to account for the lower transmission power of a postage stamp. I'm not sure what an appropriate guess would be here, so you can make up your own and multiply the 150 years by whatever number you think of. Finally, realise that after 150 years of travelling at 20% of light-speed (because you've no brakes) the inverse square law *still* applies and you are wasting your time.

Edit: No, *finally* stop and wonder what the fuckity-fuck Stephen Hawking is doing lending his reputation to something so innumerate.

Re: Reminds me of a very very old joke from the 90's...

To be honest, I'm not sure that the C standard at the time (C89) *did* allow it. There was a pretty strong presumption that "long" was the longest integer type. Since ptrdiff_t and size_t had to be 64-bit, that meant inventing a long long that could be used for them, thereby breaking an assumption that pretty much all C programmers had made for the previous quarter century.

The trajedy is that it was so unnecessary. Porting from Win32 to Win64 was going to be a line-by-line re-write no matter what you did. (MS introduced a plethora of COBOL-esque typedefs to help, but none of them really helped you any more than size_t and ptrdiff_t.) Keeping long as 32-bit merely forced you to re-write for Win64 differently from Unix64.

Perhaps that was the plan. Assume that Win32 shops everywhere would have the porting resources for just one re-write and then fix the rules so that this re-write only targets one 64-bit platform. Then sit back and hope that everyone chooses Win64.

Re: True enough.

"Just pick an existing language that was designed with security in mind and support it in browsers."

Hmm. The idea sounds familiar. I'm sure I've heard of such a thing mentioned in the past. Quite recently, in fact. I just can't quite place my finger on it.

More seriously, today's story demonstrates that the language needs a third attribute, beyond secure design and widespread support. It needs to be one that anyone can implement without getting their arses sued off.

The article goes into some detail about how the new command does dependency checking that "mount" never did ... and then uses the aforementioned to do the mount.

So it is a pretty good example of what you just wrote. Somehow though, I think you were being sarcastic. Unfairly in this case.

Re: CONGRATULATIONS

If it serves no useful purpose, it isn't work. It is just a way for some unemployed people to enjoy a higher rate of "benefits" than the rest.

I see no basis for that assumption. He is quite correct to note that an opt-in program for a service (bad coffee and worse search results) that most people probably don't want in the first place, is no big deal.