Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: How about FLIR capability in a smartphone?

You can get them for cars, too, and that was always supposed to be the mass market application that brought prices tumbling down. These things are a lot cheaper than they used to be; 20 years ago, $300 wouldn't have bought the box your camera came in. But yeah, not quite "toys" yet. Perhaps the Chinese will oblige. FLIR-the-company is on the pricey end of the FLIR-the-product market.

I guess ... not many, but waaay more than "none"

I have a ...me.uk email address and still suffer from both of those problems. (The rest of the address is just lower case letters, dots and hyphens, so I'm assuming that some fool is complaining about the domain. Perhaps we should ask t.berners-lee to see if he's ever had problems with his amazingly unusual name. Oh, and as I write that, yes I'm thinking now of our regular commentard with the name O'Brien who is, if you'll forgive the phrase, "beyond the Pale".)

Happily, raised eyebrows amongst otherwise-tech-savvy colleagues doesn't stop anything working.

Sadly, email "validation" code does. Perhaps we need to send that memo round again:

You (yes, you, personally) cannot validate an email address. Every time you write code to try to do this, it costs you time to do it, time to deal with the customer complaints, and lost customers from those who can't be bothered to complain and just take their money elsewhere. There is no business case for trying to validate an email address. It just makes you look like an idiot when it goes wrong (as it will, see above). Stop it, you cretinous fuckwit. Go back over your life and remove all such checks from code you have written in the past.

Re: Question for you, Tim...

"With that kind of subconscious exclusionary policy, how do resolve the issue so that results or merit is the only factor?"

Sounds like you need to start hiring the HR staff on merit. The rest will follow.

Re: Server 2003

If I understand it correctly (and posting here is the easiest way to find out), your internet cafe customer would have to be connecting to an SMB share that had been made available on the public internet (not via VPN). Furthermore, to let the attacker use fake group policy to take over your machine, you'd have to be logging into a domain via the public internet. If you are doing either, then I don't think you give a monkeys about security and you are probably already running a rootkit both on the client and the DC.

It's an interesting case, but I think there's a reason why the design flaw went unnoticed for 25 years.

Re: Bad Title

I agree, the title is a bit of a troll. The actual source material has a low opinion of all politicians:

"With the present state of leadership (and not just in the United States) ..."

Anyway, if you gave Obama a gun he'd probably try to ban it. (Ducks for cover...)

Re: So far, so unsettling

"[...] most people [...] wouldn't be concerned at all."

It's currently the most read story on the BBC site. If you'd asked me this morning, I might have said much the same as you, but I wonder if this might be the start of a shift in opinion.

Unicode has superscript digits. (The one and zero are particularly well supported in everyday fonts.) When the superscript is important to the meaning, rather than the presentation, it is best to use those characters rather than messing about with formatting.

"The people selling food stamps for cash are generally junkies who will forgo eating for their fix. Of course they don't get full value."

That was Tim's point. They valued the liquidity more than the face value of the stamps.

Re: Its a planet.

Since dwarf in this context is an adjective, the term "dwarf planet" absolutely makes it a planet for any English speaker. One has to assume that the IAU boffins who dreamt up the term were leaving themselves some wiggle room.

Re: Wonderful...

Alternatively, until it costs more to settle than to insure against the risk, these things will keep happening.

Of course, no-one would take your premium unless you had an externally audited IT security policy, and what are the chances of that happening, eh?

Re: So "conditions may apply"

"Now we get down to Win Home versions only"

I suggest you re-read the article. It was pretty clear that Pro editions are included in the offer, so that's the vast majority of small business users covered.

Why should I read up on it? What difference would that make to the point that these comments are being made by people who claim to have understood its complexity.

Re: Perhaps if Microsoft stops treating developers like dogshlt...

"they should just release some open source platform that works with all of it products and leave the rest to the developer community. Java-ize it."

Without wishing to dispute the possible merits of open-sourcing some platform, I don't think you are wise to describe that as "Java-izing". There's been this little court case recently about just how open Java actually is.

Re: Read privacy statement

"Examples of data we may collect include [...] phone call and SMS data; [...] voice, text and writing input; [...]"

I really can't see *that* surviving in the EULA of the final release. How would Microsoft ever hope to sell a single copy into the business market with a threat to record pretty much everything you do on the device?

OTOH, I'm not concerned. Participation in the beta program is optional and I will read the EULA for the final release. (Microsoft ought to be a little concerned that the population of their beta program might be heavily skewed towards those who don't care about privacy (or, equivalently, towards those who aren't using the product realistically or with an honest ID). If MS are using beta program stats to guide design decisions for privacy-related features, they'll be getting the wrong answers.)

Re: Loved?

"here's not a chance in hell that I'm going to touch another MS OS at least until it's second or third SP."

This *is* Windows 8 Service Pack 4-ish. In fact, if you can see your way past (or disable) Metro then it is Windows 7 Service Pack 6 or Windows Vista Service Pack 9. Under the hood, MS have done sweet FA for the best part of a decade, except slowly scrub out the warts in Vista that weren't intended.

Re: RN "shitting themselves"

Relax. We're a rich country and 6bn probably wouldn't even pay the consultancy fee for the next round of NHS reforms.

Oh, hang on...

If someone downvotes without explaining why, it is probably futile for you to try to guess what they are thinking. These forums have plenty of examples of people downvoting purely factual statements, so it is unclear whether they were thinking anything at all.

Re: Theoretical limit

There's a fairly well defined point at which the solar wind ceases to be supersonic. I think that's the official edge. Outside of that, you can argue that you've left the region of space where the Sun dominates the physical environment.

Re: Achievement unlocked: The Scientist!

I doubt that an employment tribunal would reckon you had reached the required standard of proof there. "#scary!" is a comment and therefore non-executable. It proves nothing except that the author has a different sense of humour from you.

Legend has it there was once a comment in the UNIX kernel that said "You are not expected to understand this.". See http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/odd.html for an explanation by one of the authors. Would you sack him?

Re: ...everyone follows all the laws

Even better would be a system whereby an MP's vote in the legislature was weighted according to the number of people who voted for them relative to the total turnout. Voting for none of the above would then weaken whoever won. Not turning up, however, would achieve nothing.

Weighting MP's vote would of course require rather more hi-tech than the UK Parliament uses in votes, but most other legislatures seem to have electronic tallying these days.

"I haven't used Windows in years: have Microsoft fixed the laughably slow file copying yet?"

Yes, but they haven't fixed the bug whereby the two pane of Explorer (folder tree on the left, folder contents on the right) can be pointing at (ie, have selected) a different folder. On the other hand, they do claim to have UI tested every version of Windows in the intervening period with millions of real end-users, so maybe it's just me who thinks that is bonkers.

Re: More evidence that Microsoft have finally caught up to the 1980's

Poor choice of target, since NT 3.1 had multiple desktops back in 1993. The fact that MS have never bothered to make it a standard feature of their shell simply reflects how useless the feature is. (Multiple monitors are useful. Multiple desktops on a single monitor are no more useful than the ability to minimise a window. I tend to switch the feature off on my Linux desktops, since for me the only effect of leaving it on is that I can have all my screen contents disappear if I accidentally hit the wrong key combination.)

Re: Routers... in Space!

" Interplanetary comms relies on a massive dish/array at one end (for ease of logistics, we tend to keep that one on earth), and a small dish at the other "

To elaborate, the distance to Neptune (Pluto's orbit is irregular) is about 30AU. A dish near Jupiter (5AU) would spend roughly half of its time on the wrong side of its orbit and would actually be further away than Earth, so let's assume you have several. Even at its closest point, it is still 25AU from Neptune and to be worth doing, the dishes around Jupiter would need to be at least 5/6 of the diameter of the one on Earth. (They need to subtend the same solid angle.) Then they have to re-transmit the message back, but that's a much easier problem because the transmitter can be only 1/36 of the power of the one near Neptune and still deliver the same signal strength to Earth.

Move the intermediate to Saturn, at 10AU, and you need only 2/3 of the diameter of a dish on Earth, but you've got to get all the dishes out as far as Saturn *and* the retransmission needs to be four times more powerful.

It would appear that the economics are overwhelmingly weighted in favour of a single hop to a bloody enormous dish on Earth, where construction costs are essentially free (by comparison), power consumption (for transmission back to the craft) is no object, and there's always the options of technological upgrades and repairs whilst the mission is in progress.

"without leaving an audit trail"

In that context, the fact that it disappears on reboot might be seen as a plus.

Re: Am I a wrung'en?

The security for my online banking serves two purposes. Firstly, it stops others from seeing what transactions I am carrying out. If, as you suggest, the authorities are able to demand that banks hand over the transaction details afterwards, this still means that no-one else can spy on me. The banks probably don't care one way or the other.

Secondly, it stops me from turning round to my bank and saying "I didn't do that". I really, really doubt that the banks would be happy with that. If Dave really did manage to enforce a ban on encrypted connections within the UK, the City of London would have to find another country to exist in. I really, really doubt that Dave would be happy with that.

Re: Is Microsoft watching this case?

And anyone implementing some kind of VM for x86 is infringing on Intel's instruction set and IBM's PC architecture, large chunks of both of which have to be emulated with precision for the VM to actually work.

Fortunately, my understanding is that over in Europe it is expressly legal to implement an API for the purposes of compatibility, which is exactly what Android does, so whilst it is hugely entertaining for us to watch the lawyers slag it out, the reality is that if the US really is in two minds about this then they'll probably elect to follow the EU lead because it would clearly be daft to gratuitously differ on such an important issue.

Re: So ...

"The current setup involves a huge number of participants. [...] It's a sodding huge and actually rather delicate pack of cards - do you have any idea what a gentleman's agreement BGP is?"

So what you are saying is that ICANN haven't actually ever been in control. So it hardly matters if their oversight passes to a different body who isn't ever in control either.

Re: Antivaxers and Y2K deniers

Any departures and reservations system that couldn't cope with Y2K would have spent most of the final few months of 1999 increasingly unable to accept "new" bookings. The same goes for most other time-dependent software. If you are tracking time, you usually need to be able to handle the near-future as well as the present or the recent past. Y2K was never likely to result in a midnight shutdown and always likely to be a case of systems showing their inadequacy a (short) while before they became totally unusable.

In addition, the vast majority of genuine Y2K bugs could be easily tested for in advance, once it had occurred to you to do so, just as it is already possible to test systems for leap-second compliance or Y2038 compliance.

Y2K wasn't *all* hype and smoke, but Gartner's 11-digit dollar estimate for them to solve the problem most certainly was, and they weren't alone in brazenly trying to cash in.

Re: Desktops are becoming a niche product

"there can only be one reason for such market share growth"

Or ... the numbers just aren't that accurate.

Re: @ TkH11

"Which is a nice way of saying "guessing your way to the answer"."

Actually, no. It's a nice way of saying "guessing your way to the original question", since the hardest bugs will turn out to be the ones where you were given the wrong spec in the first place and enshrined that in the architecture. If Agile promotes "letting the customer use something as early as possible", then it probably avoids quite a lot of that kind of problem.

I say "if" because I confess I lost interest in software methodology when it suddenly became trendy enough for marketing folks to get involved and it became a tool I could buy (and keep on my shelf) rather than a method I could use on my own.

Re: Red grass?

Also note that the window for the visible spectrum on Earth is actually dictated by the molecules in the atmosphere, and the chemistry of any photosynthetic pigment is dictated by the same laws of physics and chemistry as here on Earth. Life on other planets may be very similar to life on Earth, at the cellular level.

Re: Huawei

"GCHQ should be able to reverse engineer out any backdoors in the pile of circuits and firmware, if they can't what is their reason for existence?"

Indeed. In almost any other context, commentards would be repeating the mantra that physical access trumps all security, so it should be impossible for Huawei to include a back door without us noticing.

I suspect the real reason for the scare stories about Huawei is that they are now making stuff that is good enough to put Western suppliers out of business. It's protectionism masquarading as security, and it makes it less likely that we'll believe the real security issues when they come up.

" "You know MySQL is free right?"

If your time has no value."

To judge from the article, the cost of using Oracle will include someone whose full-time job is tracking Oracle's latest licensing regime and making sure that you don't get screwed. So I suppose the real question is, do you want to hire someone full-time to manage your DB or hire someone full-time to manage your DB vendor?