Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
There is not the slightest possibility that the sampling is not skewed. For starters, it is skewed in favour of those with nothing better to do with their time than answer a survey, unless they paid for the data in which case it is skewed towards those for whom that level of payment is higher than their normal hourly rate and towards those who don't know what "hourly rate" means.
This line of argument, of course, applies to all surveys. Doesn't mean it ain't true.
I don't see anything here asking for continued support. I do see one or two people trying to explain why that is an issue. Specifically, they are trying to explain it to the holier than thou fuckwits who reckon that because you took a sysadmin's job that involved MS kit you are also taking on moral responsibility for the state of that kit.
For most of the techy population, turning round and getting another job isn't the easy option that some would like to believe.
What tying? FWIW, the "oddity" you mention is the only case where it was necessary to upgrade the OS in order to get the latest IE and the fact that Microsoft's HTML support is part of the OS has never prevented third parties from offering alternative browsers with their own rendering engines.
Oh, and it is hard to talk about Microsoft's "mistakes" in this area when their strategy of turning the browser into a platform succeeded so well that it knocked every other browser vendor out of the market for several years.
They may be evil but give them credit where it's due -- they are (or were) good at being evil.
The rules had better not say that. Walking down the group we have Fluorine, Chlorine, Bromine, Iodine, Astatine and <this one>. The "ium" ending is traditional for metals and most of the trans-uranic elements to date have been metals, but 117 is a halogen and any self-respecting chemist would insist on a name ending in -ine.
"collecting everything then applying the rules retrospectively"
I took his argument to be that the useful intelligence is not in the stuff that can be collected en masse. You get it only if you pull resources away from the mass slurp and put them into picking targets and following them more closely. If that is the case, there can be no "retrospectively" and the mass slurp costs lives because (believe it or not) the spooks' budget is finite.
It would be far better if they added such support *conditionally* on the browsing machine's DNS suffix *not* matching the website under view (at least to some level in the hierarchy).
Real end-users get the support they need for broken sites. The authors of those sites get a slap in the face. Everyone's happy.
Hmm. You make a statement of fact and you (currently) have one downvote but no explanatory reply. The possibilities would seem to be:
1) The fact is considered to be false, in which case some supporting evidence would appear to be in order since your claim is one I've heard before and I rather suspect you are correct.
2) The fact is considered to be irrelevant, in which case someone really needs to learn about primary keys before voting.
3) Citing facts is considered to be something one simply doesn't do, in which case someone is on the wrong site.
OK, number 3 isn't very plausible, but I was really struggling.
"It does however illustrate the fact that from time to time there is a genuine need for the state to identify its citizens..."
Equally it suggests that such times are rare. In addition, it suggests that a population that had just spent the best part of a decade battling against fascists were extremely keen to put such mechanisms beyond use.
A smell is a volatile chemical that has reached your nose. A sound is a wavefront that has reached your ear. Neither is durable, although the means of production might be. Then again, the means (recipe) would be subject to copyright, so there is really no need for this extension.
Are we really going to have a load of lawyers claiming ownership over chunks of the natural world simply because they had the necessary absence of scruples to register the claim first? Would it not be simpler to find the twat who came up with this idea and punch them in the face until our fists bleed?
"few things I've read recently trouble me as much as this article"
Really? The guy is so dreadful that even his own government, which *desparately* wants to hand over control to ICANN, felt unable to do so. He's now wandered off into the pocket of one of the internet's worst enemies (rather proving the point) and will disappear into oblivion as soon as they realise that he can't deliver.
It wasn't always true. There was a time when doing almost anything in the public sector (including nationalised industries) involved layers of crap inserted by special interest groups. This system had evolved over previous decades with weak politicians repeatedly reasoning that spending a bit more taxpayers money was always easier than tackling the SIGs.
When the time came for this insanely inefficient system to collapse under its own weight, transferring those functions out to the private sector actually did save money because the private sector wasn't doing the "same job" and was probably cutting out more middlemen than it inserted.
Something similar was true in the private sector as well, with many distinguished names in British industry making so little money that they were actually worth less than the equipment they were using. The result here was asset stripping, where observant investors bought a company, sold absolutely everything, and walked away with a tidy profit.
Sadly, in both cases you are dealing with a one-off. Privatisation and asset stripping haven't made much *financial* sense for several decades. Opportunities for asset stripping are extremely rare and privitisation only persists in the public sector because too many politicians are innumerate fuckwits who have somehow managed to get degrees in (politics, philosophy and...) economics without actually being able to count.
I'm not sure that society ever cared much about truth when it conflicted with short-term social or political prejudices. Gresham's Law applies to journalism, too.
However, this (and flaky money) are just examples of cheating and in recent years we've started to understand when cheating pays off and when it doesn't. (The "we" being economist, sociologists, anthropologists and others working fairly independently as far as I can see.) The future is not quite as bleak as you might imagine because there are long-term benefits to pursiing the Truth and long-term penalities for settling for easy falsehoods.
--
"Nullus in verba."
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
It won't remain profitable for ever. Eventually even the dumb-fucks who pay silly money to ad agencies will realise that there is no such thing as internet advertising. Once that happens, there is no longer such a thing as clickbait.
Ads on telly? Yes, you had a captive audience. If you made a good ad, people would remember.
Ads in the high street? Yes, people would pass the same ads every day and if they were any good and there was a hold-up on the road then they might actually bother to read them.
Ads on the web? Sorry, you've lost me there.
Is a false review (or wiki article) one that is factually inaccurate, or one that the author believes is factually inaccurate, or one that is factually accurate but the reader believes to be inaccurate.
Or, this being prose, not mathematics, is it more than one of the above at the same time.
Define your terms and *then* tell me whether your algorithm is 90% accurate.
No, not in the least like Newton's laws. Those have a well-defined domain within which they are a reasonable approximation that is easier to work with than SR or GR or QM. The things that the {super}-{string|gravity|symmetry} people have played with for the last 50 years are less easy to work with and so are only worthwhile if they explain stuff that the standard model does not.
Each time we get a discovery that rules out (say) supersymmetry variants, the corresponding body of work into that variant might as well not have been done and in a century's time may only be known to one or two people working in a history department.
I disagree. Finding this has required nothing more than engineering. You build the accelerator. They come. Explaining it might be worth a prize, depending on what it is, but probably only one and perhaps not even that if it turns out that the necessary theory was laid down by someone who is now dead. On which subject ... I think you meant "something new in particle physics" because the rest of physics has been getting along just fine for the past half century, thanks.
Having said all that, I share your excitement that something might be about to happen and I'm glad that I'm not a particles theoretician right now -- it must be quite nerve-wracking knowing that your entire life's work might be about to be consigned to the bin marked "interesting, but wrong".
"The problem with foisting an update on unsuspecting users is many wonder what broke..."
Why mince words? There are *definitely* devices out there that have driver support for Win7 but not Win10. (It is really rather common with printers and scanners, despite the fact that these are exactly the sort of devices that should be just a user-space protocol layer over a standard USB link.) If you forcibly upgrade everyone, you *will* deprive some of your users of the use of some of their hardware. It is really only a matter of time before the lawyers get involved.
"I've never seen it from my personal first-hand experience, which tells me either people are doing it wrong or are lying."
Er ... GOSH !! That's quite an ego you've got there.
It looks like some of the other posters here *have* seen it happen, so by your logic that must mean that you are doing it wrong or lying.
"many UK government systems process classified information and as such can only use systems which have been acredited up to that level "
An interesting mode of failure here: If it takes longer to certify the fixes (or replacement) than it does to discover the vulnerabilities, your certification system actually makes the system less secure than if you just took the vendor's word for it and upgraded anyway.
"the decision to allow NTLM to survive beyond 1996"
NTLM has been deprecated since pretty much that time. If you are complaining about support for it, may I be the first to point out that samba also supports it and therefore any system that can run samba (which I think includes all the BSDs as well as Penguins) is necessarily a piece of shit.
Or have I mis-understoof your logic.
"in the same vein that setting the localtime into the hardware clock"
The connection here is completely lost on me, unless you felt that case sensitivity was a little too debatable for your rhetorical needs and so you needed to hitch your argument onto a more blatant straw man.
"Why would I want to clog up my phone with an app I might use once a every couple of months to order dinner?"
Wrong question. *They* would want that because their app won't let you order from the competition instead.
"The worlds gone ape app-shit crazy."
Yes, but once the hoi polloi learn that apps are only a censored version of something that is freely available on the internet, apps will go the way of AOL's restricted view of the internet.
I think you are perfectly aware of the answer. Over half a century ago, when character sets finally became large enough to include two cases of letters, a native English speaker decided that centuries of common practice should be swept aside and case should be considered significant, because a case-sensitive search is just comparing bytes whereas a case-insensitive search requires more effort.
Time has demonstrated that this was short-sighted. Computer scientists had no trouble adapting to the new rules and occasionally bent them into a feature. However, as soon as computers were picked up by the general public, problems started, and for those who need the assistance of a screen reader case-sensitivity is the work of the devil.
Sorry to say it, but not very sorry, but BASIC and DOS got it right.
MS made it quite clear when it was announced, and the almost exact parallel in patching schedules since then has demonstrated, that Edge is just IE11 with the back-compat cruft taken out. It is touch and go whether we'll actually see something branded as IE12, but you can think of Edge as IE12 and you won't be far wrong.
Maybe if all the banks clubbed together they could afford this sort of bespoke development. :)
As an extra benefit, if all banks were using a common ATM design, there would be less to harmonise when the next merger happened. (That might be sooner than they'd like if some of them are relying on XP to keep their cash safe.)
AMD are currently facing a (spurious) lawsuit over exactly this. The number of cores in your chip is largely down to the preferences of the architect and may vary from one CPU generation to another. Quite how MS are going to cope as more and more work is rolled out onto the on-chip GPGPU I have no idea, because these beasts have hundreds of "cores", each of which is too feeble to justify the price that MS want to charge for a licence.
Charging per chip makes much more sense because the number of chips is much more closely aligned with both "total grunt" and "whether it's a big machine" and those are things that customers will understand and not feel totally ripped off when asked to pay for.
And I echo the above poster's comments about VMs. Charging twice just because the customer uses VM software is soo last decade.
The bugs that people are going to care about in a browser are going to be logical errors and algorithm-level foul-ups. These will show up on nearly every build target. There may be 32-bit-specific bugs to do with data formats and sign-extension or truncation.
However ... if you are testing the 64-bit build and you are continuing to support 32-bit builds for things like ARM (all those Chromebooks, remember?) then testing the x86 build is really just a test of the code generator back-end for your compiler (probably pretty reliable by now, eh?) and any platform-specific layer (which is as thin as it can be, right?).
The question is not "Why is no-one buying Win10?". The question is "Why is no-one selling it?".
The answer is straight-forward. You, as a vendor, have fifty billion OEM licences for earlier copies of Windows. You've already paid for them. There is no incentive for you to buy an OEM Win10 licence and there is precious little incentive for your customer to ask for one (because of the free upgrade). (On the contrary, if they buy one of your older licences, they have a choice.)
So channel sales are irrelevant. What matters is how many people take the upgrade when they get the machine home. Only Microsoft know that and they aren't telling.
If you have several dozen Chromebooks and you don't want to have to track which 7-year-old used which machine last time around, the only way to be sure that they can work on something two lessons in a row is for the software to store the documents somewhere other than the local machine. The default sync point cannot be "my school's server" because Google haven't a clue who you are.
There probably isn't an option to enable the use of a local server. My experience of Chromebooks (and I'm typing on one) is that the Googly version of Linux doesn't even have SMB support in the kernel. It just isn't their target use-model. (There are work-arounds, but it is easier just to bung a real Linux on the machine instead and if you know as much about Linux as most teachers then that's quite enough to dissuade you!)
Assuming there isn't such an option, the EFF might have a legitimate point if that's what they are complaining about. However, it doesn't sound like that *is* what they are complaining about.
"Even though Thunderbird has been ignored for at least the last three years, it remains one of the better email clients around (which is a very sad commentary on the state of email readers these days)."
This isn't at all surprising. The relevant RFCs have hardly changed in years, so Thunderbird is still good enough even though it has been abandoned since (at least) 2012, except for pointless tweaks to the shiny bits. It's also free and runs on everything, which means you have a *real* barrier to entry for any new rivals.
Much the same was true of web browsers for most of the period 2000-2010. Two things broke the log-jam. Firstly, Firefox finally made enough progress on standards that even normal people could see the benefits. That "revealed" the changes that had accumulated in the relevant standards. Secondly, Google decided that they'd like all our browser data. Their huge cash pile meant not only that the cost of development was unimportant but also that they could pay to have it bundled with loads of unrelated third-party products, so they were able to buy an installed base fairly quickly.
This won't happen for email. There is no evidence of new standards getting ordinary punters excited and no megacorp with loads of money wants to promote an offline email client.
"most business users use Exchange"
Well, if you've paid for an enterprise-wide licence for everything Microsoft do, then probably. However, I'd be surprised if most SMEs weren't using just Outlook or Thunderbird with an email server running on a Linux box. There are plenty of howtos for setting that up and for some companies (or, equally, their customers) there may be a legal requirement to avoid routing all your private correspondence through the US.
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