Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: What about Apple

That's right. One rule for the OS vendor with 90% of the market, trying to use that monopoly to create or sustain a new monopoly in a different area...

...and one rule for the OS vendor with about one tenth of that share, who has no monopoly to leverage.

Re: Listen up, Google

"You can probably even provide a utility which will automatically translate app source code API calls to the native Linux ones, and probably even do the same for the binaries, so the "legacy apps" transition problem doesn't have to be a big issue."

You could even write a little "layer" that did this at run-time, so that existing apps didn't have to be modified. You could call it an "implementation".

Doable in seconds sounds nice, but actually I don't care how long it takes as long as it doesn't involve Flash. I'm not dead yet and I'm willing to wait for a solution that isn't infectious.

Thanks. MS actually pulled that update and didn't issue a replacement until this year: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/3033929.aspx

but I stand corrected. Apologies for the FUD but we hit this problem at work around Christmas and reluctantly concluded that Win7 was on life-support, but the re-issue makes using Win7 feasible again until the official end-of-life ... whenever that turns out to be.

Re: the 640k quote

Ironically enough, Bill's company went on to produce a real-mode memory manager for Windows that blew the 640K limit away (even on machines with only 1MB of installed memory) at a cost of only one tenth of that space (if memory serves me, the original KERNEL.EXE was a few dozen kilobytes). You didn't even need a 286. You just needed to be very patient.

So maybe this hypothetical billg should have stuck to his guns on 320KB and used the extra space to run a proper OS kernel. But then, that would have meant finding one that he could re-badge in time. (Not to pour scorn on Bill's own programming talents, but it is well-known that he just said "yes" to IBM and *then* had just a week or two to actually come up with an OS.)

"After WWII we should have ripped the industry out of Germany and returned it to the stone age"

After WW2? My reading of the final year of the war is that the aforementioned task was pretty much complete by the time of the surrender. The usual charge against Bomber Command is that they'd basically bombed the entire country back to the stone age, and *then* two collosal armies has swept across from either side annihilating everything in their path on a house-by-house basis.

In most other conflicts, the loser has surrendered before that point. (The question of why Germany didn't surrender is quite interesting, though perhaps not humanity's finest hour.) If you want a better example of returning somewhere to the stone age, you probably have to go back to Trajan, or perhaps the stone age.

Re: Purely physical critera

Charles 9: You seem to be implying that the IAU's decision on Pluto was principally motivated by a desire that there should be no more planets, ever. That seems, er, not just irrational but rather disturbed? Apparently it is so important to pull up the ladder that it didn't matter that Pluto was left behind in the rush.

No matter. Time will tell. Future generations will land on these objects and go exploring. They will want a single, short word to refer to the object they are exploring. My money's on "planet", because "moon" implies a larger near neighbour and no-one (and certainly not the IAU) is even trying to come up with a third alternative.

Re: Grudge

"I would suggest they look for a computer expert whose spouse had a affair they helped arrange."

Sadly, on John's evidence, you can scrub the "computer expert" from that profile and if AM's pre-hack publicity (about how great they are) is to be believed then that means a shortlist of a few tens of millions. The investigation could take a while.

Re: You've all been 'nudged'

What film? All I'm talking about is how unbelievably clueless Universal Pictures are. Was there a film somewhere in this story?

Re: How times have changed

It wasn't *that* recent. It has been a few years since MS declared that Silverlight was dead and would receive no major development love. I think Netflix adopted it a couple of months before the announcement. How we laughed. And then it hung around for years and years.

Re: Winaero

You should try 150% text scaling. There's *lots* of parts of Windows that don't support that. (They show up with the fuzzy magnification that means you haven't set the flags right on the EXE.) This is now, what?, 8 years after Vista defined the rules in this regard and still there are parts of the core UI that haven't had the five minutes or so of attention to make them work.

And I notice today that whilst Win8 knows where the bottom-right corner of a Window is, Win10 doesn't. (Mouse the mouse down to the bottom-right corner and explore just where the cursor changes to the NW-SE diagonal arrow. On Win10, it behaves as though there is a thick invisible border and the cursor changes when you hit that border, a few millimetres away from the actual window. On Win8, the cursor doesn't change until you actually hit the visible portion of the window frame.)

Other things left un-polished? If you have an application that uses the MDI model, such as Microsoft's own MMC.EXE, the child frames are styled as Win7 whereas the parent frame is styled as in Win8. Try it -- but bring a barf bag.

Has anyone got any experience of feeding a dishonest user-agent string to the BBC site and getting a flash-free experience on a Windows box? That would probably be even more useful than advising everyone to enable the click-to-activate feature.

Re: Baking != design

Not quite. You need to see the design. It doesn't need to be yours. I can imagine a completely open design that was "good enough" being favoured by many countries over a closed x86 product.

"But the brain has no pain receptors?"

But it sits on the shoulders of a very large number of them.

Re: How does this change ANYTHING?

Anyone still running XP online is *now* protected by whatever defences are provided by the root kit that took over their PC last year.

Microsoft have (through 2k3 support) been publishing zero-days for XP for over a year now. The act of connecting to the interwebs to update your Security Essentials package is probably riskier than leaving the machine offline. (In the latter case, you are limited to things that you import by hand and you have some control over those.)

Re: a kinetochore is

Sounds awesome! Where do I sign up?

(Even if these were the *only* things I could do by telekinesis, it still sounds awesome.)

Re: Excited

To a first approximation, being born later in history is a good thing (the approximation is even better for some sections of the population.), but you can't put it off indefinitely or you miss out on all the fun. This is a pretty good time for the sort of people who are reading this site.

Re: "...approximately 2,000 bits per second..."

"Where are the relay stations doing long elliptical orbits past Saturn?"

Unless they have dishes that are about half the (linear) size of the receiving dish on Earth, they wouldn't help. (Actually, that's the break-even point. To *help*, they'd need to be even bigger.) Also bear in mind that anything on a long elliptical orbit spends most of its time in a totally unhelpful location. You'd need *lots* of *big* dishes. Similar considerations apply to any interplanetary internet you care to imagine.

It seems to me that what we actually need is a better power source, so that the original signal can be several orders of magnitude larger. Or maybe some very carefully steered laser link, so that the limited power is directed more efficiently in the right direction.

Re: Guess again.

Actually, you *can* blame Windows 10 for that. For the last six months, anyone who wants to see has been able to look at what Win10 will be like. Apparently, the experience has been enough to convince a few that Sinofsky's vandalism is irreparable and so they might as well buy that Apple machine and see how well it actually works for them.

Re: Call me simple

That's why we need words that describe *what* and object is and different words to describe *where* an object is. (Suggestion: let the geologists choose the first set of words and the astronomers choose the second set.)

Pluto's orbit is actually a rather neat feature of orbital mechanics. It's in a resonance with Neptune, which means that the Plutonian system is in a region of space near Neptune that Neptune cannot clear. It's not a moon of Neptune, but the relationship has something of the same flavour.

"Why is the BBC still using flash ... ?"

...because Murdoch hasn't figured out he can run a smear campaign based on the fact that the BBC site is "forcing" the use of a known malware vector.

Re: Call me a cab . . .

It's called a "turn in the road" because you are not penalised for needing 5, 7 or 85 points rather than three. Mind you, if you need 85 then you might be penalised for "failing to make reasonable progress".

Re: Canecutter - 2 things wrong with IPV6

As normally deployed, the 128-bit address space is actually only 64-bits public. If your ISP gives you a /56, they're giving you 256 networks to play with. That's more than the 1 you need, but it is a far smaller chunk of the IPv6 unicast space than even a single IPv4 address is of that space, so calling it "wasteful" is harsh.

Also, and partly in response to another poster's remarks about routing tables, one of the reasons why they went for a 128-bit space was so that they had bits to waste. The idea is that quite a few routing decisions can be made without complex tables at all, just by inspecting prefixes. Ironically, the protocol that now needs massive tables is IPv4, which owing to the balkanisation of the address space now requires brute-force-sized routing tables in some places. There was an El Reg article about this a few months back, but I can't remember enough of the details to google it.

Re: Hallelujah - File Explorer's file path limit is not 256 any more !

I suggest you read the documentation. The limit most certainly *is* Win32's and the "\\?\" prefixing is documented as a way to skip Win32's validation and pass the filename blindly to the lower level. It sounds like you've failed to distinguish between the Win32 personality and the NT OS layer. MAX_PATH continues to apply to the Unicode APIs if you don't use the prefix and I don't think I've ever met and end-user who did.