Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
Three days at 9600 baud is enough to download a quarter of a gigabyte. So how slow was this connection and how big was the "program"?
Of course, if the "program" was the Win8.1 update, it would take about a month to download at that rate. And you'd only be running Win8.1 at the end of it. That *would* be irritating.
Why don't you substitute "straight" for "gay" in your post and see how it reads?
I think you'd be hard pushed to prove that gays are more likely than straights to make public displays of their sexuality. They start younger, too. The average secondary school probably sees boy-girl snogs on a daily basis but hardly ever a same-sex kiss.
Point one: You can't fix an inelegant language by adding features. Just about every widely used programming language ever proves this point. One of the good bits about HTML5 is its attempt to kill off some abusive contructs by saying "OK, the browser has to accept this, but the validator doesn't and it isn't HTML5 unless the validator says so".
Point two: JavaScript already has "types and classes" in the form of duck typing and prototype-based objects. That's actually a powerful language feature for small scale programming. Adding C++-style objects to the language will spoil the system for those who like it and fail to satisfy you because the old stuff will still be there. AND you'll have to produce a detailed specification for how the two systems relate. (Oh joy!)
Point three: If you want a classful language for writing client-side, platform independent web apps, be aware that it will probably never catch on. Java already exists, is well-specified and up until a few years ago it was almost universally deployed. Even with that "head start", it failed to catch on. Why should your new language be different?
"Even the reviled Windows 8 market share is orders of magnitude higher than Linux or Mac."
Actually we don't know that. The missing market share (XP's drop minus Win8.1's gain) appears to have ended up classified as "Other". That's probably Android or perhaps "people configuring their browsers not to say". (If the latter, the sudden surge in privacy-conscious users is much to be welcomed. Perhaps the stories around ShellShock and Poodle (or whatever the name is) have reached a wider audience.)
But it could, theoretically, announce the arrival of Linux (or BSD) on the Desktop.
It's worse than sinister. It's bad science. A pathology is a mal-function of some kind and brings with it the whole notion of "not supposed to happen". The phrase "essential step in defining pathology" makes the wholly unjustified leap in assuming that just because something is rare it is wrong and anything common is right.
By that measure, the common cold is not a problem and should be welcomed, not treated, but extraordinarily high IQ is a disease to be treated and (ideally) eliminated from society.
"Psychology is not a science"
Indeed not, since psychology is a domain of knowledge whereas science is a technique that might be applied to a domain of knowledge. You might as well say "London is not a mode of transport". (Is that close enough to a car analogy?)
"You click on the bloody great power Icon on the Metro screen, or right click on the "Start" button and choose shutdown."
Umm, neither of those were in the original 8.0 release. Their inclusion in 8.1 rather proves the point that normal end-users had to wait a year or so for MS to climb down from Mt Sinofsky and offer a more acceptable UI.
" if you're editing a 4K video stream in realtime, a 5K monitor is the only way to see your footage at 100% whilst still having room for toolbars around the side"
You mean there are still people out there who think they are high-end users but who only have one screen? Er, gosh! I'm a cheapskate but I've been using two screens for my work since the 20th century.
"@KenHagan, Debian long ago deprecated the har-de-har-har package format, so you were installing FF the wrong way."
If you check the OP, it wasn't me trying to install it. However ... for the benefit of all the down-thumbers mocking the OP and my own reply, here's a transcript of what happened 30 seconds ago on my machine running a fully patched Debian Stable:
me@ACER:~$ sudo apt-get install firefox
[sudo] password for sudo-root:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package firefox is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package 'firefox' has no installation candidate
me@ACER:~$
You see, when I made my "Probably Debian" remark, I knew about Iceweasel and I assumed that most of the Linux fans on El Reg forums would be aware of it too. Since quite a few clearly aren't, let me spell it out for them: Installing firefox on Debian is blocked by default.
"Micro$oft listening to their pockets"
Not even that, since the cheapest way to get a familiar Windows UI on a phone would have been to run vanilla Windows on the phone. This would have had the added advantage of already running all the customer's existing software (licences permitting).
No, this was Microsoft listening to ego-manical execs who wanted to "make a name" for themselves and had the whole company to play with for too many years.
@xerocred: Do you still remember the old menus? I ask because the corresponding keyboard interface is still supported, so you can (for example) bring up the Edit Links dialog by typing Alt+E followed by K. Bizarre, I know, but MS apparently implemented all of the old UI alongside the ribbon and then hid it.
"the 'correct' behavior"
That's your problem, right there. Since browsers generate output for human consumption and since humans are both tolerant of variations they like and intolerant of those that they don't, there may be plenty of cases where there are either zero or multiple 'correct' behaviours rather than exactly one.
And that's before you consider what the correct behaviour might be for an output device that isn't a large, high-resolution, full-colour display.
(I might add that the IETF has historically taken the view that there should be at least two implementations of a standard and neither should be considered a "reference".)
I bought that book the other week and I'd recommend it.
The page comparison can be read however you like. One way of reading it is to say that inside the 1096-page crawling horror that we know and hate is a much smaller and cleaner 176-page language wanting to get out. The book gives reasonable pointers for how that can be achieved in practice.
...in that all the major parties actually hire youngsters to tweet on behalf of their senior politicos?
That way the tweets look authentic (because the youngsters know what a tweet is) and they are always on-message (because the youngsters are paid to be on-message) ... but it is all a pack of lies.
the small matter of just how to get applications written for x86 running well under ARM
A very small matter. I doubt whether more than a handful of applications still depend on assembly language for anything and probably even fewer have actually been optimised with an eye to the strengths of the x86 family.
They'll run as well on ARM as they do on x86 and unless Microsoft's ARM compiler has gone backwards in the past ten years it will just be flicking a switch in your IDE.
"Surely this could just as easily be written as Apple backing up your work by default for you, for free."
Except that it is not free. Otherwise everyone would buy the cheap iPads (with hardly any space) and simply use iCloud as the main storage. Sadly, bandwidth costs and (if memory serves) space on iCloud costs as well.
Since I've never actually set up my iCloud account password, I'm curious to know just whose cloud I am "on, whether I like it or not".
Still, it is getting harder and harder to use consumer electronics without getting shafted like this. Why are we creating a world where you have to be a terrorist Linux or BSD user to have any control over your privacy?
I put it to you that your list of "big names" includes one that exemplifies why a domain name no longer really matters: Google.
People use Google to convert "what I want" into a domain name "cookie".
Their PC then uses DNS to turn that "cookie" into the current address.
Feel free to substitute your own search engine into my analysis, but as far as domain names go I'm sure that most people read no further than the top or secondary domain, just to make sure it is located in roughly the right continent. Ironically, gTLDs make that harder and so are less attractive to the few humans who still bother to either read or remember DNS names.
"having one really says nothing about the quality of the content"
A bit harsh. If you've spent several hundred thousand dollars just for the bleedin' *name* then surely you'd make a bit more effort (on average) than someone putting up their personal drivel outlet. Surely? Humanity isn't *that* stupid, is it?
Oh.
"What if that bike shop is in Berlin, New York?"
A bike shop in berlin would probably pay several hundred thousand dollars to register .fahrrad.
Or perhaps not. The point, surely, is that "cute" gTLDs need to be cute in whatever language your customers are using, which fragments the possible market quite horribly.
"More likely, "nein" is no in German, and ..."
Hang on a mo. Who dreamt up that load of effing cobblers?
If you show the string "Windows 9" to a German they'll read it as "Windows neun". The same presumably goes for the Japanese. No-one reads numerals in a foreign language and then takes offence at the bad pun that results.
"A few years ago, I saw an article that said there would only be a dozen fabs worldwide in a few years time... split between 2-3 manufacturers."
So (with due respect to the suggestion that he probably never made the original quote) Thomas Watson *should* have said, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers factories.".
"Though obviously the results would be more efficient, better designed and with less random bits hanging off because waiting for the glue to dry was BOR-ing!"
That would be sixist if you tried to argue that *all* boys and girls fitted the stereotype, but if you just arguing four or fives nines-worth then I think it would be a doddle to find the supporting evidence. (Disclaimer: I've just come home from helping at my local school's code club. My sample size is only a few dozen.)
This is easily dealt with. You pass a law making it illegal to vary premiums according to your medical condition unless it is self-inflicted. (Heavy smokers and alcoholics might be liable unless they could prove that their addiction had a genetic basis.) This would bring "your health" into line with "your sex", insofar as you can't (reasonably) change either and therefore it is only fair that insurance companies have to ignore them.
In the long term, the insurance industry wouldn't actually care. (I think they already word the policies so that they won't pay out for a pre-existing condition. The "no bias" rule merely stops them using your genetic pre-dispositions against you.) They aren't interested in protecting your future. To them, the whole thing is just gambling. The rules determine what they are allowed to gamble on, but don't significantly change the amount of money you can win if the gambles pay off.
In the short term, lazy or crap insurers who couldn't be arsed to learn the new game might make a lot of noise. Fuck 'em.
"AFAIK He-6 has a 1/2 life of <1 sec and decays by both beta and alpha emission."
In fairness, for both decay modes the products are nbon-radioactive and because the half-life is so short you could safely spew Helium-6 into the atmosphere and it would be safe by the time it left your chimney. On the other hand, I'm not sure you could fairly (as in, completely) describe any process as "producing" Helium-6. It *produces* Deuterium, Helium-4 and Lithium-6.
"And I hate to think of how Windows is going to manage the address spaces for containers in the same way it's struggled for years with JVMs. The architecture will have to be a bolt-on methinks."
The Windows kernel already supports multiple sessions. These are "fairly" isolated from one another. (They have independent object namespaces, for example.) I wouldn't be at all surprised if containers couldn't just be implemented as multiple sessions.
I feel obliged to add that the containers concept would have been baffling to an OS designer from the 1960s, because complete isolation of one app from another was what OSes were invented for. It is the plethora of inter-process communications methods that have been bolted on since then that has necessitated the re-implementation of the original concept.
You may be surprised. The thing you license is the OS and *that* is the thing that isn't duplicated when you are using containers rather than VMs. Logically, you should be able to run multiple containers in the same way that you run multiple apps.
WSUS is only useful if most of your machines fall into a few groups that can be treated identically. If you have multiple machines precisely because you need a variety of different environments for testing, then WSUS is a useless pain in the butt. It downloads far more than you will ever need and you still have to configure each machine separately.
"Leave it to Microsoft to design an operating system so dense and uncontrollable that one has to issue a non-maskable interrupt to get its attention."
That's a little unfair. I think IBM were responsible for the original PC hardware and its BIOS, and if you know how to shoehorn a proper OS into 16K RAM (or whatever IBM's minimum spec for the original PC was), then you are almost certainly also old enough to know that IBM under-spec'ed the PC intentionally, so it really *was* IBM's fault.
"come on MS, it's 2014, why doesn't Windows have a decent shell by default?"
Come on Kiwi, you know the answer to this. A decent shell would barf if you fed it a BAT or CMD script. Therefore, the only way you can get a decent shell onto Windows is if you leave CMD.EXE as the default and only use the decent alternative when the user specifically asks you to.
As I recall (and it was I while ago, so forgive me if I get the versions wrong) the early versions of Windows (up to and including 3.0) used the proper keyboard combinations for the clipboard because they followed IBM's CUA guidelines and IBM PCs of course had an IBM keyboard with Insert and Delete keys. Meanwhile, over on the Mac, no such keys existed and so the alternatives of Ctrl+C/X/V were devised.
Then, starting around the time of Windows 3.1, Microsoft decided to use the Mac keystrokes in Windows. Fortunately, they continued to allow (and in most places still do) the CUA keystrokes. Unfortunately, since they haven't documented them for 20 years, it is increasingly common to find third-party apps written by clueless youngsters who don't know about them. (This latter point is particularly sad when said youngsters have probably never used a keyboard which doesn't have the proper keys.)
"And while we're at it, move the capital to Carlisle, York, or Newcastle on Tyne instead of being stuck in the bottom-right corner bloody miles from anywhere."
Why stop there? Move the capital every 15 years to the most impoverished urban area in the country. Let the gravy train succeed where inept "development policies" have failed. It won't cost the taxpayer much, since all the taxpayer needs to move are the MPs and immediate support staff. The lobbyists, political advisers and hangers-on can pay their own relocation expenses.
"No-one seems to have been able to make the huge convergence and cash that was expected from controlling the TV."
There's no convergence to be had. There's a generation growing up who think that TV just carries X-Factor, Bake Off and the Footy. All the interesting content is being produced by small players and distributed on the interwebs. There are typically half a dozen or more screens in a house and controlling the TV means nothing if everyone is watching the other five.
tldr; TV is *so* twentieth century.
I believe that last time I set up a Win8 box I used "no@example.com" as my email address. It failed to validate, so I re-entered it and on the second or third attempt Windows said, "OK, you'll have to use a local accound instead". I don't recall seeing any small links at the foot of the screen, so perhaps in my case it really was in exactly the same colour as the background.
But yeah, deliberately causing an error seems to be the only way to use a local account.
"Actually, I don't care as long as it reduces the number of browsers and permutations we have to support in the ecosystem. Pick a damned standard and stick to it, not 95% of a standard and 5% of undocumented fluff!"
Well, make up your mind. Do you want a reduced number of players, which favours de facto standards of the "whatever the market leader does is the correct behaviour, so reverse engineer what that is and code to it", or do you want to pick a damned standard and stick to it, which is best policed by having at least three or four independent implementations (or interpretations, if the standard is not clear).
"So you are saying that you can't actually test whether this system is usable in any sort of real world situation?"
Well, duh, YES! We are at least a year away from release, according to Microsoft's own timetable, the kernel reports itself as version 6.4 (so eff all major internal changes, then) and you haven't paid Microsoft any real money for the privilege.
"What if I'm testing forward compatibility for our bespoke software products made for other people under which I am NDA'd and subject to the requrements of ISO27001?"
Then you can either not bother with the Technical Preview, or you can use it in a VM that has no network access, or you can hope that your NDA violation is anonymised by MS.
But whatever you choose, Microsoft were pretty clear in their announcements that the point of making the Tech Preview available to everyone for free is so that they can collect stats on your usage. The Windows 8 previews were all the same and Microsoft repeatedly defended the Win8 UI on the grounds that their "telemetry" contradicted the nay-sayers. There's no such thing as a free lunch and plenty of hints about how MS intend to benefit from your use of the preview. If you don't then read the EULA with some care, that's your problem.
"I sure hope that the IT techs they ordered to set this up kept written memos"
I expect they did. I imagine the investigators' conversation with management went something like, "Our preliminary investigation, which we conducted in the 10 minutes whilst we were waiting in the lobby, suggests an unusually large number of de-auth packets being sent on WiFi. Would you like to sign this consent decree now, or shall we call in your technical staff and ask them what's going on?".
" I'm surprised the FCC only slammed them with a $600k fine, I would hand them at least a $6 *million* fine to discourage not only them but any other establishment from doing this."
The discouragement is there for anyone with a brain. $600k was the price for "not pushing the investigation to its logical, legal conclusion". The next offender might reasonably suppose that they won't be offered that easy option, since the publicity surrounding this case means that "everyone has been warned".
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