Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: Will all condifuration be done

Configuration will be done by "ssh -l root phone.yourname.me.uk dpkg-reconfigure", of course.

Re: conductivity

Only somewhat. Both are better when you have a crystalline structure (as in a metal), but whilst conductivity needs a band of free electrons, heat just needs matter, which is why even insulators conduct heat.

Also, even a 24% improvement in conductivity isn't going to be a game-changer for interconnects if they have very low resistive losses anyway. (I suppose someone who works in a chip foundry will now butt in and say that, in the very thin wires we're talking about, resistive losses *are* a problem. Let's see...)

Re: The mistake Microsoft made was...

"I expect that Win9 will be pretty good though, Microsoft has a distinct pattern with OS releases dating all the way back to windows 3/3.1 which sucked, 3.11 was pretty good. Win95/Win98 sucked, win98se was good. WinME was an abortion, Win2000 was ok but not finished, WinXP good, Vista sucked, Win7 was good, Win8/8.1 sucks, Win9 should be pretty good."

Er, there's no pattern there. Firstly, WinME and Win2K are from parallel forks even in terms of marketing (developers trace the fork back to NT3.1 versus 3.11, but marketeers insist that the first version of NT was 2K). Secondly, if you feel free to combine successive releases (as in 3/3.1 and 95/98) then pretty obviously *any* history which contains good and bad releases is going to be painted as an exact alternation good-bad-good-bad... Thirdly, I find it hard to believe you ever used 3.0 in anger if you can lump it together with 3.1. 3.1 had parameter checking on APIs. 3.1 was rock solid compared to 3.0 (despite being as flaky as hell to any impartial observer). 3.11 was such a minor point release that you're the first person in years I can recall who actually flagged it up as a separate release.

Re: The myth that IE is "part of the OS"

"This is not a myth. It is a legally established Fact."

Those aren't mutually exclusive options, you know. I indicated my reasons for believing IE is "just another application". You can check it all out with the SysInternals tools and a copy of the dependency walker from an old SDK. Or you can believe the lawyers. You choose.

Re: Great move, Mozilla

"Dell is going to stop installing Firefox."

If they're smart, Dell will also advise against installing Firefox (suggesting Chrome instead), pointing out that they'd love to support it but Mozilla won't let them.

Re: Waste of time for anyone but the lawyers

Follow the link to the site. Apparently no documentation is necessary. It looks like you just need a US mailing address and be old enough that you probably bought something that qualifies. (Hence the previous commentards remark that it is free money to anyone who can be bothered.)

In that light, the claim that it is "unlikely" that 5 million claimants will come forward (thereby exceeding the $50m pot for small claims) looks vulnerable.

Re: Run. Quickly. Away.

"Win8/8.1 is confused."

Only if you haven't read Microsoft's published statements on the matter. Win8.1 is considered a service pack for Win8 and so support for the latter will evaporate in 2016. From the end-user's perspective, since 8.1 *is* almost indistinguishable from 8.0, there's no reason not to install it (when you next have several gigabytes of download allowance per machine to waste).

"Win9 is rumoured."

2015 is also rumoured, in the sense that it hasn't happened yet but it would be rather surprising if it didn't. (I suppose there's always the possibility of some Ukrainian teenager shooting an Arch-Duke.)

Re: Unless you don't live in the US.

"he'd also disclosed how much the US was spying on the rest of the world"

Er, no, he hadn't. The rest of the world already knew that the NSA had a mid-blowing budget, legal powers to secretly compel US companies to provide unlimited access to customer data, *most* of the world's computing power (by any measure) and was tasked with hoovering up as much as they could about the rest of the world. So what kind of idiot would you have to be to have been surprised by the "revelation" that they were doing it.

Sorry, but the only bit that surprised the rest of the world was the bit where apparently the NSA regards their fellow Americans as "the enemy" as well as the rest of the human race.

Re: Headmaster

You must be one of these people who reached adulthood without passing through childhood, or indeed meeting any teenagers who you could observe from a safe distance.

Re: call me a cynic

I suspect your $£500,000 figure is high. I also suspect that the $10,000 figure is too low, since it completely ignores the loss of IP involved in publishing the necessary documentation. (As I understand it, this second factor is the official reason that folks like ATI don't just document their hardware and let the experts write the drivers.)

Re: Enterprise Edition features is a capability called side-loading.

Sorry, the next paragraph didn't help either.

It has been possible since the dawn of time to push apps onto a PC that joins a domain. If Win8 is *so* domain-hostile that you need a special licence to do this, then it is a no-brainer that it should never be allowed near a domain. However, I'm pretty sure Win8 can have stuff pushed onto it just like every other version, which brings us back to the question of what side-loading is in this context and why I'd be willing to pay extra for it.

Re: Ultimately...

"Once that happens, Silicon Valley will never again be the center of the digital world. Wouldn't it be hilarious if it was Russia that did it first?"

Nah. *Hilarious* would be if all the people currently working in Silicon Valley saw which was the wind was blowing and *relocated* to any country willing to guarantee the necessary freedoms. No way would that be Putin's Russia, but other countries exists and over the longer term the US needs to be something other than a "this'll have to do" option.

Re: Only during the day

True, but the material presence of the tree (compared to the seed that it started from) *is* the extent to which the daytime activities have exceeded the night-time ones.

Re: Time out a second here, Skippy

Logically, the fact that he made this statement, despite it being patently untrue, means the one thing that any intelligent observer now knows is that the scheme's backers feel the need to spout outrageous lies to keep their ship afloat. It's that bad.

Re: Consensus

Nice troll. By quoting the entire second half of the abstract, starting with "however", you provoked me into reading the first half, which is the principal finding and supportive of Lewis' take.

That said, the "meh" interpretation of a later commentard is probably where I'd stick my flag.

Re: Well, perhaps not all the tactics.

Yes, they'll try, and you'll be laughing out of the other side of your face when they succeed.

Re: Wah-way

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei cites the same source, but "hua"definitely isn't pronounced as "wa" in standard Chinese. (Why would you invent a transliteration scheme that rendered the same consonant in two different ways?) So is this some southern dialect (Huawei being just north of Hong Kong) or did the video get it wrong?

Re: Missing the point?

"The whole point of insurance is is to spread the risk across as wide a population as possible."

Two points:

1) If you apply for insurance you have to declare your medical history anyway and if you miss anything out then it may invalidate the policy (years later, after you've paid all the premiums, and now actually need a payout).

2) The point of the NHS is to make medical insurance unnecessary, by providing medical care according to need, free at the point of delivery. If that's not working for you, you don't need to worry about the health insurance business, you need to worry about the NHS.

Re: Who is Wun and how do I reach him?

Er, I think you mean "in this case, the compiler". If the unreachability requires knowledge from outside the function (so the optimising compiler can see it in a particular case, but the programmer cannot assume that for the general case) then the code should not be flagged.

Re: Sun

Interesting. That would presumably count as prior art.

Re: Citizen access and future compatibility

You forgot the free Windows licence, so that I could run that free version of Office in a suitable VM.

Re: You gotta be kidding

"Intelligent and well-meaning skeptics may offer alternative explanations for the inarguable rise in temperatures over the past 100+ years – such as solar and other effects, or random variations – but you can't refute the calculable effects of radiative forcing."

Can't speak for the OP, but I can certainly argue that the effects of radiative forcing are not calculable. The world is complicated and we know of several additional factors that will modify or even reverse the effects of radiative forcing.

Is it still true that we can't predict the last hundred years of the world's climate? It's certainly still true that you need to be able to do that before you ask the entire human race to restructure their economy and way of life.

Re: Prior art easier than you thought

"HOW THE FLYING F**k IS A BOOK PRIOR ART!!"

If it isn't prior art, it certainly drives a coach and horses through "non-obvious". Historically, a published description of an idea has always been something that would invalidate a patent. Even today, I think most lawyers would advise you to file the patent application *before* submitting that paper to Nature.

Re: The O/S services still have to be available to the applicatoins

"Modern VMs are largely a solution to problems originating from the Windows DLL Hell era, and that has been a substantially solved problem for a decade or more."

Doesn't look solved to me, but perhaps I have a different take on the first half of your sentence. Modern VMs are the solution to Windows being too willing to let independent processes party on each other (and on the OS). Mainframes had VM and UNIX had chroot long before Windows had a hypervisor. These solve the isolation problem *within* the OS, but since Windows is closed and Microsoft are apparently unwilling to introduce similar facilities, the only way to solve the problem was to emulate entire machines and stick a separate copy of Windows in each one.

Since we still have Windows, I can't see that the problem is "substantially solved", unless you are being particularly cutting about the inability of Microsoft to produce a popular successor to XP and their consequently dismal long term prospects in the OS market.

We were busy building Jericho, as I recall.

Re: Bah!

"Oh, I don't know. I think that Pythagoras' theorem is self-evident from this diagram"

Well it looks plausible for the values of a, b and c used in the diagram, but I'd need to print it out and measure it up with a ruler to make sure the artist hadn't cheated.

Re: the UK has no protected free speech

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_3_of_the_Human_Rights_Act_1998

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_10_of_the_European_Convention_on_Human_Rights

Article 10 is a right to free speech. Section 3 protects it.

"Uhh, is it just me, or [...] she explicitly does not seem to be saying that she wants Europe to build a network that's air-gapped from the rest of the world."

I read it as "As long as we're using US services at the other end of the wire, we are routed through the NSA. The solution is to get our our arses and create some European service providers who would be based in Europe (so no traffic passing over foreign wires) and subject to EU law (so it would be GCHQ doing the snooping, which is presumably OK)".

Possibly still a flawed plan, but not entirely ridiculous. It certainly *is* ridiculous to expect privacy if you are talking to someone based abroad who is obliged by their local law to spill the beans on your conversation. Apparently the EU leaders have finally woken up to this.

Also worth pointing out that if you select random members of the general public and say "Samsung" and "patent", then 100% will reply "Apple" and 0.43% will reply "Dyson".

If Samsung were truly worried about lawsuits that damaged their image, they'd sue Apple. In reality, they're just picking on someone who (they hope) isn't big enough to fight back. Quite how they think *that* won't damage their image is anyone's guess.

Re: New Barbarian Manifesto

"the government can create money whenever it feels like it (quantitative easing, anyone?)."

Depends what you mean by "money". If you're referring to the folding paper that has no value unless someone agrees to accept it for goods or services, then yeah, the government can print as much of that as it likes. Have a look at Robert Mugabe's patch for a view of how that one goes in the end.

If, however, you are using the term in the more generic sense of "wealth" or "buying power", then the government can't print a single penny. All it can do is issue more notes to cover the country's existing wealth. Implicitly, this merely transfers wealth from the bank accounts of anyone with savings (or a pension) into the hands of whoever is lucky enough to receive the new notes (usually some friend of the politician printing the cash).

"Quantitive Easing" is "Steal a little from everyone, and hope no-one notices". After you've totally broken the economy by bailing out reckless idiots who bet everything and lost, stealing the savings of those who were too smart or too poor to gamble in the first place may be the only strategy open to you, but it doesn't "create" anything.

Re: ::shrugs::

See Mycho's comment, a little below, but also...

In his case, the guilt is pretty clear, but in would-be-capital cases in general the evidence is more ambiguous. By never executing anyone, society avoids the impossible problem of where to draw the line. Given the small number of cases, rather than have a hugely complicated decision-making process, it is probably cheaper just to give up and always just imprison for life. (I believe that's what they've found in the US, which is hardly "a soft touch" in these matters, but has enough of a legal system that the cost of repeated appeals on a capital sentence exceeds the cost of imprisonment.)

So it's cheaper AND the bad guys don't like it.

Re: Just off hand

You seem to be channeling amanfrommars.

"Fubar the Hack"

You write that as though you were signing the comment, but you posted as Anonymous Coward. Are you messing with my head?

Re: Why are we paying for this?

"Where are the vendors supporting 13 year old Linux distros?"

Why is that relevant?

The problem with XP is that you had to pay to get Vista or 7 and the monolithic nature of the MS offering meant that if those OSes turned out to be incompatible in some small way then the entire migration was blocked. Therefore, migration away from XP couldn't happen, and only got harder (technically) and more expensive (for the upgrade licences) as the years went by.

With an open source product, you can upgrade the bits that you need to upgrade and maintain the bits that you don't. And the only cost is the labour cost of ensuring that stuff works, not a licence fee for each desktop.

Re: An Alternative Possibility

"The problem is infections can come in on the internet connection even if nobody is using it."

That hasn't been true for many years. The Black Hat conference actually gave up on their "Can you hack the bare OS?" contest around the middle of the last decade because none of the major OSes were vulnerable out of the box. You had to be running a bad app (usually from Adobe) or persuade the end-user to do something daft ill-considered.