Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: Protectionism

"I can't help but be impressed by China's home-grown tech companies, but they needed the protection to get established."

That depends on how much of their business is software. In software, you can "catch up" with the West simply by copying stuff. Actual manufacturing capability takes a few rounds of evolution, but you at least know what processes you are trying to perfect. I am therefore never surprised when a "third world" country catches up with the West in just a few decades.

Pulling ahead requires genuine skill and is no easier or harder for any country than any other. That said, there are simply more people in China than elsewhere, so if they have the education system sorted out (unlike us, sheesh!) then they are a very credible threat. In this context I would note the thousands of graduates from China who go to other parts of the world to study at a graduate or post-doctoral level. There's not much wrong with their education system. Right now, our best hope is that those students notice how much nicer it is to live outside China than inside it.

"effectively read (meaning you can read the bit you're looking for, not the whole thing) for free"

Well if there are only three pages worth reading in the entire book and they happen to come one after the other, then perhaps the book wasn't all that good in the first place.

Alternatively, perhaps you actually *would* be tempted to buy the rest of the book if only it wasn't so expensive. In that case, is it not reasonably to argue that Google are making it possible to sell the book at a lower price by making it easier for readers to find that, yes, this probably is a book they are interested in.

I've certainly bought books after reading tasters and snippets online. I've also browsed books in a real bookshop. I don't see much difference. It certainly seems at least a likely to reward authors as putting books in public libraries and paying authors some fraction of a penny each time their book is borrowed. (I've bought books after borrowing them from the library, too, which presumably paid the author and publisher an order of magnitude or two more than simply having the book in the library.)

Lastly, I think the ability of almost anyone to self-publish on the interwebs probably does as much to kill organised scholarly textbook writing. There's some great stuff out there on way out subjects, written by people who apparently do it for the pure joy of getting their *own* heads round the subject matter. The world is changing. Google is actually quite late to the party and is only picking at the left-overs. In this case, the left-overs are "anything from the past five centuries that still seems interesting, which to be honest is less than you might think".

Re: Try this on for size

So ... *she's* running an unlicensed copy of Windows and *Microsoft* upgraded the machine to Win10 without legal parmission. Piracy on the one side and unauthorised hacking on the other. Let's hope the lawyers never find out.

Re: Just a point of clarification...

Perhaps you're mis-parsing it. The BSA strongly urges (again) Congress to think.

Re: That reminds me...

Googling for "Streisand" delivers a top link to her own home page plus a wikipedia article on the Streisand effect, because that (to be honest) is what she is now best known for.

Googling for "Davis University" delivers a top link to their home page, but if you append "news" to that then I'm afraid you get a slew of articles about this incident.

Re: ORLY?

Interestingly, the use of encryption in https is not to hide anything, merely to prove that it really is you.

I'm sure it is well understood in these forums that a back-door would not only blow open secrets, it would make it impossible to trust anything. However, I see no wording in this bill about making it possible to impersonate others (perhaps, for the purposes of emptying their bank accounts).

Perhaps the best response to this bill is "Please publish your online banking details.". The idiots will wonder what you are talking about and deny that it is relevant, but if it becomes the stock response to all such requests, perhaps the more curious idiots (like, the ones voting in November) might make further enquiries and enlighten themselves.

Re: Bandwidth ???

Fair point. Two terabytes is about three weeks of maxing out a 10 Mbit/s connection. Doing it on the sly would require longer, or a fatter pipe, or MF's IT people being asleep at the wheel. What you wrote, though, was 2Tb and two terabits is something you could suck out in one night. Also, I imagine that these guys can afford a pipe the size of the nearby canal.

Re: Well, time to zap the blight

As far as I'm concerned, the BBC is the only one left. (That is, I've removed flash and the only site I care about that is broken by this is the beeb. Thanks to Man Bras!' comment above, I may not even care about that anymore.)

Re: OSaaS anyone?

Changing the terms and conditions, retrospectively, to turn something that worked into something that didn't unless you pay money. Hmm? How would that be different from injecting a virus that encrypts the hard disc and refusing to decrypt it until the owner pays you money? It wouldn't? OK, welcome to jail.

You *may* find that Win11 is OSaaS and that the support for Win10 expires 5 years after launch, turning it into a huge malware target like XP. If so, you *may* find that most customers just ignore the issue and carry on using their preferred OS, behind a firewall and/or in a VM as necessary.

To be honest, I can't see any long-term future for Windows *except* as a vehicle for running legacy Win32 software. If MS want to repeat billg's success, they need to do it with an entirely new product (and almost certainly not in the OS market, which looks incredibly hard to break into right now).

Re: Pervert.

"I feel sorry for Americans."

Objectively, then, you are in a minority because most of the world's population would be happy to have been born there. (The same goes for most of Europe, as is now painfully obvious.) Nowhere is perfect, but the USA is one of humanity's better efforts and we should recognise that even as we lay into its more imbecilic aspects and reactionary tendencies.

"America is held back by its Big Johns."

Not really. The Big Johns are making a lot of noise because the writing is on the wall and they've lost. Fifty years ago you would have found similar attitudes almost everywhere. Now they are confined to just a few places. In the USA, it is possible for the rest of the population to turn round and say "You're a reactionary imbecile." and then campaign against you and turf you out. In most part of the USA, this has already happened. The system works, eventually. (Obligatory, but affectionate, dig: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else,”)

Re: BBC's HTML5 beta

It doesn't work on all devices. (Presumably I need to reverse engineer something to figure out what unmentioned dependencies are missing on my (ARM-based) laptop, but at the moment the beta just says "Sorry, but not all device types are supported and guess which group you fall into.".)

I appreciate that this isn't necessarily the fault of the BBC's code, but I hope the error messages in the final product are significantly more helpful.

Re: What I've learned from the 'How It's Made' TV series...

"There will, of course, be useful exceptions for unique low volume items. By definition, that's not mass production. It's niche."

True, but there is currently a huge chasm between "mass produced and cheap but only barely suitable for the role" and "bespoke and expensive but ideal for the task". 3D printing may provide a third point on that continuum, or even several depending on the technology you want to use. Even the materials may not be a restriction if you can 3D-print the tooling for some other process.

At the moment, I can't see any of the above being interesting to hobbyists, but I'm not one of these people myself so perhaps I'm just ignorant.

Re: Microsoft are keeping quiet

"they're literally signing away their ability to get out in future"

In what way, exactly? If they need Windows, why would they not want the updates? If they don't need Windows, there's still nothing stopping them from installing something else, because all that UEFI FUD is still just FUD.

Every update published is an exploit given away for free to the Bad Guys. Month after month, a steady stream of ways to take over your PC and steal your work or identity. Why would you want that? Well, you wouldn't, obviously, so if you need Windows then you need the updates. Yes, the new UI sucks, but it isn't quite as bad as 8.1, which in turn was marginally better than 8, and let's be honest about 7 -- huge numbers of people thought that sucked so hard that they are still running XP.

But ... if you need Windows then you need Windows, so you've just gotta suck it up. Deal with it, or bite the bullet and figure out how to make an alternative OS work for you.

Re: was this Tay or a human?

"I'd convince Tay into being a Tea Party Donald Trump supporter."

I thought that was the original story. To be honest, I'm not sure how a politician on the stump (any flavour) would do in the Turing test.

Re: Betty's looking good on those coins

Likewise, let's hope they don't have to rub out all those thistles.

Re: swimming against the tide

Nothing wrong with swimming against the tide if the tide is going out.

In the short run, Slack does seem to be getting lots of attention, but I wonder how much of that is VC-driven. It is pitched explicitly as an email replacement by people who would clearly profit if we all stopped using email and started using Slack. Frankly I can't see the point, since email is a better interface for the sort of communication I do, but I'm aware that others like to work differently.

In the long run, Slack will survive if the people who use Slack actually *are* more productive than those who don't.

Re: Hardly entirely new ...

"Really MS should scrap Windows 10 and either give people a MS Linux distro and properly port all their applications as Linux native"

Whooosh! Way to miss the key point of the last 30 years of Windows hegemony over the desktop. Those apps that don't run on Linux? 99% of them aren't Microsoft apps and for half of them the chances are that *no-one* has the source code anymore. If MS ported their entire product line to Linux tomorrow and offered a completely free internet upgrade to the new versions, most MS customers still couldn't migrate.

Re: Article in brief

Funnily enough, I thought the article eventually homed in on *exactly* the point of this product and then failed to notice.

This product is supposed to be bought by commercial games writers (for whom the price can be called an investment) so that when version 2 (or 3) eventually turns up good enough for Real People to use, there will actually be some decent software for them to buy for it.

The hope of all the players in this game is that the best titles will be written for *their* gizmo, leading to an MS-DOS-style monopoly of VR in the next decade. As venture capitalist punts go, it's not the silliest proposition out there.

Re: So what actually has increased in average speed?

The article suggests that measured speeds were used: "[Virgin's] “up to” 200Mbps service recorded the highest average actual download speed at 174Mbps." (emphasis mine).

Re: It's the data harvesting

"If you're not paying for a product you're not a customer, just another product."

I agree, but the logical corollary to that is that MS are no longer in the OS business (at least for non-business users). Perhaps that is the reason why they no longer have a decent product offering in that market.

"Windows 10 is NOT an update to 7/8, it's a different OS."

I disagree. There's eff-all difference under the hood and it is being pushed like a service pack. The main difference from 7 is the amount of spyware and nagware.

"Is this not something we should expect an alien civilisation to use when communicating between systems?"

What "this"? Radio, transmitted conventionally through free space? Don't think so.

Ask yourself this: Do you really believe that in the next few thousand years we won't invent anything better?

Now ask yourself this: If alien civilisations only use radio on a large scale for a few centuries of their entire history, what are the odds that one of those civilisations happens to be passing through those few centuries at the same time as we are AND is within range for us to pick it up?

Re: Looks like everyone is being a dick

"At least the pitfalls of using something hosted elsewhere have been highlighted. If you want it, it should be on your own server."

I think it was demonstrated about 5 seconds after the web was invented that if you depend on an image from a third-party site then the site can replace your image with something defamatory. Translating that experience to "code from a third-party site" doesn't seem a very big leap IMHO.

On the other hand, I suspect that if web browsers started refusing to load images from third-party sites, we'd discover that people hadn't learned this lesson at all. (There must be a Firefox extension that flags up cases where this is being done, but it probably counts as a terrorism tool now.)

So my guess is that *we* already knew that third-party code was a rubbish idea, just as *we* know about source code version control systems. But I'm sure there are a lot of people out there whose web-sites were hit by this and who told their bosses in all honesty that it wasn't a problem with *their* web-site. It was a problem elsewhere and could (and did) have happened to anyone.

Re: Beginning of the end for Intel?

"x86 is ultimately a 40 year old ISA and has few redeeming features."

Intel's original floating point model hasn't seen light of day for about a decade, having been superseded by SSE2. Both integer and floating point arithmetic models have been evolving since the mid-90s with MMX and various other TLAs. A modern desktop chip also devotes more than half its area to an integrated streaming processor that owes nothing to x86. Lastly, since the early 90s, those x86 instructions have been translated and re-ordered on-the-fly into whatever was convenient inside the chip. A modern x86 ALU has dozens of registers and the L1 cache is only a couple of clocks away.

To be fair, everyone else's chips are the same. x86 lost the ISA wars against the RISC chips, but Intel responded with the ISA-less Pentium Pro and ISA hasn't mattered since then.

Re: I ran into this sort of thing once

"hen I saw the directory PORN with several sub-directories. I noticed a couple with names like GAY and BESTIALITY, and I decided I really did not want to view any of the content."

As someone has already noted, even viewing CP makes you a criminal in some places, so if you do have something to hide (like a passwords file, or financial data) then hiding it in a directory that any sane person is reasonably afraid to enter is (possibly) a good idea. You can also encrypt it if you like, on the grounds that anyone smart enough to decrypt it is probably smart enough to understand how bad it could be to decrypt something before you know what it is.

Re: Someone doesn't understand programmable logic at all !

"... the closest analogy to sofware would be to think of code where in theory all lines of code have the potential to be executed concurrently with no sequential flow or order whatsoever."

As it happens, I'm fine with that. Like many software developers, I *started* from a mentality where a=a+1 is Just Plain Wrong and I've spent the last decade or two so looking for easy ways to make my code less sequential.

Re: PS/2 Mice

I see no reason why an optical PS/2 mouse might not have a usable lifetime of 20 years or more, so as long as there is a socket on the back to plug it into, there will be people who use them. Why buy a new mouse just because you bought a new PC?

Re: I am glad I'm retired

"any article about a new technology which promised to do anything 200x faster would be heading for the recycle bin"

...and any company whose managers didn't do that would quickly find all their best staff heading for the door.

Re: Active Directory on linux

I'm sure MS haven't forgotten that. This might be part of the response. If we ever actually see the year of Linux on the desktop, MS are totally up a gum tree unless the rest of their product line runs on Linux.

What do people think will be Windows' market share on the client desktop in 10 years time? Yes, there are lots of Win32 apps that will run on nothing else, but with each year that passes the older apps are less important and newer apps are more portable.

(Afterthought: and if MS *do* need to go multi-platform then it is best to start the process whilst they still have a cash cow or two to finance it.)

Re: Compare and contrast...

And yet, oddly enough, Edge still seems to have *fewer* features than IE and more rough edges (bugs). It's almost as though it was the *newer* code in IE (which they kept) that was most flaky, and the older stuff (the dropping of which was the official reason to bring Edge in to being) was actually (eventually?) fairly reliable.