Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
"how many of the buggers knew how many other buggers were on her phone?"
Probably none, since the signal is broadcast and easily deciphered so you wouldn't need much more than some fancy radio equipment to become one of the other buggers. As the story mentions, this is all so well known within security circles that there almost isn't a story here. To a state-sponsored spook, a mobile phone is basically an unsecured medium, like plaintext email, or postcards.
Google could set an example by only offering an https service, worldwide. This would annoy spooks in every country (except for the NSA who have a legal backdoor) and perhaps encourage a few more sites to start offering private services. It would be nice if we could get most of the web on https before the next idiot politician decides to "solve" a problem by mandating deep packet inspection of everything everywhere.
"When I left the UK in mid '84 they were still using non-metric measurements for everything except petrol and packaged food."
We still are, which is all the more surprising when you realise that schools stopped teaching the old system in 1972 (?) and therefore most of the population have been taught only to use centimetres, grams and litres (Well, actually I was taught to use grammes. Perhaps one of you youngsters can tell me when teachers finally caved in on the spelling.)
But the French still seem to use livres in their supermarkets, so there's no rush.
Given that your example is Visual Studio Express 2013, I think that should read "This sort of stuff is why tech people use free software -- it's just less depressing when it doesn't work if you didn't actually pay for it.".
So are uppercase letters. :(
The reported error was simply "invalid email address" and I had to view the HTML source and find the offending script to figure out WTF it was complaining about. I think it was for some school-related website so I imagine that folks without a working knowledge of Javascript just aren't allowed to have kids these days.
"(eg incapable of telling that whatever 3547+2974 might be, it's not 4xxx or 5xxx)"
I think it has always been true that most of the population is incapable in that sense. :(
Kids today have separate maths tests where they are or aren't allowed to use calculators. In the ones where they aren't, they get tested on the kind of numeracy that you refer to. In the others, they get to show that they know what operations ought to be performed on larger calculations, without being held back by the tedium of performing them.
I'm a big fan of mental arithmetic and estimation skills, but I still think calculators are a good thing. In fact, I think the solution to the endemic innumeracy problem is to split "maths" into the elegant stuff and the practical stuff and let those who aren't keen on triangles and quadratics equations drop them and concentrate on areas and averages. (For similar reasons, I'd like kids to be able to drop English Lit and concentrate on the English Lang skills that might let them put a coherent document together, or understand one written by someone else. I do think that one of the more damaging tendencies in education in recent decades is ministers who think the solution is to broaden the core curriculum year on year until there's no room for the "lesser" subjects that might actually interest 80% of the teenage population. Yes it would be "nice" if everyone knew a little physics and biology, but it would also be "nice" if everyone knew how to read music and knew that there *were* such things as the rudiments of harmony even if they didn't understand them, had some idea of the last 500 years of European history, some idea of the artistic movements that had accompanied it, some idea of where it took place, and some idea of the religious certainties that had motivated almost everyone until at least 1800 and a whacking majority until very recently. The moon on a stick would be nice, too. But no. We have to study triangles and quadratic equations and Chaucer and poetry.)
I'm sure he's referring to the fact that you have to add a keyboard, mouse and screen before the system is useful and not everyone has those lying about spare. Most families now have laptops rather than old-fashioned desktops with discrete parts and before you mention the TV as a screen, consider how many families would be happy to give up the evening's television because their offspring wanted to use the RPi for homework.
"But the basic injustice still stands. That mega-corp only has to send out a letter to effectively suppress any comments that they might / do / could decide were not wholly to their benefit."
But what comments are "not wholly to their benefit"? As far as I can see, if I stand up and say megacorp are a wunch of bankers then 99% of megacorps will simply ignore it because they've heard of the Streisand effect. (For the 1% of megacorps who haven't heard of the Streisand effect, nothing is more educational than raining libel writs on Joe Public. Such corps will learn or perish.)
To actually incur the wrath of their lawyers, my statement has to look like it is making a specific allegation against them, like they ripped me off. In *that* case, their lawyers might want to consider that I might actually have documentary evidence proving that, in my case, they failed to "live up to their high standards of customer service". If I have my day in court and convince my peers that I have a case, it is then quite legal for *everyone* to say that megacorp are a wunch of proven bankers.
It's not all stacked on the side of the rich megacorps. Consider how Starbucks responded to the tax brouhaha by making some voluntary payments to the Inland Revenue. They had the law on their side and weren't even taken to court and they *still* felt they needed to give way for the sake of PR.
"Other instances are: when your name appears on any public records (company records, electoral rolls, official gazettes, ...), when you for whatever reason make the news (you're an athlete and appear in competition results, which are btw aggregated by various sites that create "your profile", you're a researcher who publishes papers─also aggregated─or you have made a noteworthy discovery, you found oil in your backyard, ...)"
None of these examples invade your privacy and none of them are different now from how they were a generation ago. What's different now is that people choose to put genuinely private material online (apparently in the belief that the web is like one-way glass) and the way that a computer can automatically trawl through everything so there's no need to hire a traditional private eye to build a file on a random person. The first is the technology out-stripping our social intelligence and I was reading the other day that present-day teens are much more wary about social media than the previous generation. (This is the "Facebook is for parents" generation.) The second might well remedy itself if the next generation grows up to view such trawling as grossly invasive, like peering through a bathroom window.
Society has changed an awful lot since we were running around on African grasslands. The legal framework is often one step behind technological reality but rarely more than two. It is within our power to protect privacy and my guess is that future generations will do just that.
Possibly true, and I'm sure Michael Faraday thanks you for re-iterating this point.
However, do note that there are several examples of services where you pay a flat rate to be connected (which may imply a cap on your rate of consumption) but are neither charged nor even metered for actual use. In the UK, nearly all roads are provided on this basis, water still is for a significant proportion of households, and broadband can work that way if you choose. (I suppose membership of a private club often also works like this.) The phrase "too cheap to meter" is not as dumb as it is usually made out to be.
" the opportunities for remote working being a bit more realistic and practical"
Well if you have roughly £1000 per head of population to spend you could probably wire up the whole country with fibre and wireless. (Unless you let the big telcos run the project, of course.) In fact, you'd probably have enough cash left over to replace the Victorian signalling on the railways we already have.
"Sadly, economic markets generally do not consider long-term effects a relevant factor either, which is what has led us to this current state."
Ah but they do and that's precisely the problem. Any cost that can be kicked into the long grass for long enough is effectively zero because you can invest a penny today, let the interest build up and then pay the bill in a hundred years time off the interest. (The actual numbers may differ, but that's the principle.) This is perfectly valid economic reasoning, as long as you can be confident that you will still be around in a hundred years time and that the economy won't have tanked in the meantime. Historically, both of those assumptions have held good over the long term.
"I've seen arguments recently that "hydrogen bombs" are not even really fusion bombs - they rely on making the fission explosion much more efficient with clever engineering."
That I doubt. Although I'm not privy to the experimental data, my understanding is that the yield depends on how much fusable material you include in the package and the fissile element (pardon the pun) is kept as small as possible. If so, that would imply that the source of (most of) the bang is indeed fusion of light nuclei rather than fission of heavy ones.
It is of course possible that the heavy nuclei are destroyed to a greater extent during their time in the sun than would be the case if they were left to their own devices.
"His recent involvement with Bing suggests Microsoft wants a techie tuned to the integration of web search and online services with Windows devices."
Wanting this is the root cause of most of Microsoft's miss-steps in the last decade. We'll know if the company has a future fairly soon. If the incoming boss doesn't pretty much reverse the policy then they are doomed.
That's not because they couldn't be a player in that market. It's because all their attempts so far seem to have involved walking away from (alienating) the desktop market. That's just daft. There's an ad going round for Microsoft's CRM software that says it costs six times as much to get a new customer as to retain an old one. Why are they walking away from the biggest monopoly in the industry to try to steal customers from their two richest competitors?
"Oh sure, the Servers and Tools division is still going to turn in healthy profits..."
Without all those clients, why run a Windows Server or write apps using the Tools?
At this point in time, I'm tempted to say that the source code for the Windows Desktop is Microsoft's only significant asset. (Their management certainly isn't. I wonder just how many of the good developers they still have?) Office is replaceable unless you are a power user (and there aren't enough of them to keep the cash coming in) and I can't think of any other MS products with a near-monopoly market share.
"Why is so much of the muck-slinging, accusing everybody of being shills, being done by AC's."
If they posted drivel under an identifiable handle, people might block them and then they wouldn't be famous on the interwebs. (Thought experiment: what would the forums look like with all the AC posts blocked? How hard would it be for El Reg to enable this so that we could try it out?)
"How long has the support cycle been known for?"
The support cycle has been known since XP was launched. At various points along the way Microsoft have *extended* the support life either by issuing service packs or by simply declaring that they will support it for longer than previously advertised. However, if you've got to 2014 and are surprised to see XP losing support, you've been asleep for at least 13 years. (Possibly longer, since Microsoft's support life-cycle policy pre-dates XP.)
If you've only just woken up, can I just point out that Win7 goes out of support at the end of the decade?
" ( seriously, we did have sign off Y2K on things that didn't even have clocks! )"
Was that not a clue that at least some of this 18 month marathon was actually unnecessary?
I'm sure IBM's mainframe division did sterling work in keeping up their systems, but that was a purely internal matter for IBM. In the more open PC world, where most of the y2k analysts lived and worked, there was never much to worry about in the first place. Most software that had to handle dates had needed to handle post-2000 dates long before y2k. Most of the rest was never likely to cause more than minor inconvenience.
Greece, Egypt, Syria ... but only Roman by conquest and the ruling culture regarded mathematics as something for slaves to do whilst they sorted the design of some seige machinery. In at least some of the cultures they conquered, mathematics was a higher calling and practised by the nobs.
Ramanujan lived in what was then part of the British Empire, but I wouldn't call him British.
"One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs."
Co-incidentally, "zero" is also the number of notable mathematicians produced in the entire 200-year history of Rome/Byzantium.
Unless you count the murder of Archimedes, in which case their tally is probably -1.
Exactly. This is *Apple's* problem, not Microsoft's. Any tablet that does the job is good enough. It doesn't need to have a fruity logo on the back. If it doesn't, we'll still call it an iPad.
Back when an MP3 player was a separate thing (rather than a feature of your phone), the young things called *any* MP3 player an iPod. Tablets will be no different.
The idea is certainly in keeping with past efforts from MS, but actually I don't think it would work.
Using Linux instead of Windows is a non-starter for the vast majority of people because it only takes a few compatibility issues before the cost of migration (even if it is mainly re-training, which in most cases is probably being over-optimistic) exceeds the savings.
Using LibreOffice instead of Office 2003 is probably viable.
"the advanced maths functions would level a phone processor"
That phone and its feeble processor is significantly more powerful than the desktop PC of twenty years ago and Office had all those "advanced maths functions" back then.
The reason Office/RT ought to be feature stripped is because the Office team are fully aware that only an idiot would try to make a hand-held device share the same UI as a desktop device.
I think you'll find that the writers long ago resigned themselves to the fact that there are so many internal contradictions in any plausible "canonical subset" that we have to resort to waving of hands and references to crossed time-lines.
That's one problem with the current fashio for story arcs -- it encourages the audience to think about how the episodes all fit together into a coherent whole ... and for the most part they don't.
It's newsworthy because at no point in this ad's journey through the agency did any of the highly paid execs (either at the agency or at Microsoft) think that because they are advertising to a numerate customer base it might be worth checking some staffer's arithmetic.
"If your stupid enough to run a xp machine with IE7 you need shooting, which Ubuntu or Linux mint will run well on with 512meg ram and far less targeted operating system"
Apologies for feeding the troll, but...
Nobody runs XP. Many people run apps that require some version of Windows. Your 'buntu or mint machines might as well be doorstops if you are trying to run the averagely-obscure Windows apps that make most people's world go round.
Millions of "stupid enough" people who know almost nothing about computers understand this point. Why don't you?
"Or it relies on functions/libraries not available in W7, and are not trivial to backport. At least plausible."
Two of the features listed are high DPI support and phone number recognition. The former has been something that MS have pleaded with developers to support since XP. The latter doesn't sound like it depends on some arcane OS feature. Both, in fact, sound like things that you'd have to make a conscious effort to exclude from the Win7 build, once you'd got them working on Win8.
I have to say I'm struggling to imagine the actual reason. No technical issue seems at all plausible, and even the tin-foil theories are unconvincing since surely even the Microsofties are aware by now that end-users have a choice of alternative browsers. (MS themselves have had to write the "app" that informs users of this choice.) I'm afraid the only theory I've come up with so far is that the management at Microsoft have drunk so much of their own kool-aid that they've gone collectively bat-shit insane.
"That's going too far. What's a good open source phone?"
The only open source phone I'm aware of is the Ubuntu one, but I don't know if you'd call it "good" yet and the only supported handsets seem to be the Nexus ones so you'd still be sort of supporting Google.
(Can one put Debian Wheezy on a phone, anyone?)
"The ad-free alternative would be no free software, and having to pay big money just for simple utilities."
Ah yes. Those first GNU offerings, and the early Linuxes, and the Windows Internals tools, and ..., were all hellishly expensive. Thank god RMS saw the light and hitched his wagon to the advertisers.
"The Internet model does seem to be ad based."
I wonder if there is any good evidence that this (or any) advertising works. When I say "good", I'm thinking "would convince someone with scientific training" rather than "would convince the marketing exec who has a budget to spend and can blame the sales exec in the next office if the company doesn't actually sell anything".
"Why no IE11 for Windows 8?"
How about ... because 8.1 is a free upgrade and therefore there is no reason for anyone to still be using 8.0? As a general rule, I'm unsympathetic to customers who don't install service packs and expect me to support the un-fixed platform as well as the one the other 99% of my customers are using.
Purely from a technical viewpoint, I wish they'd open source IE but not abandon it. Then we'd have a credible browser implementation that wasn't webkit. However, regarding the rest of your post, I don't think they can do *anything* with the current version of IE that will relieve your suffering at the hands of a 10-year-old version. You know as well as I do that the only solution there is user-education. (That is, persuade them to use Firefox.)
True, but the word "manufacture" comes from roots meaning "hand" and "made", so I think the vast majority of the materials goods we buy and sell are stretching the original definition slightly.
And anyway, it isn't *so* long since "release to manufacturing" actually meant "start stamping out those CD-ROMs". Or am I showing my age?
"The boss of GCHQ claimed to Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee that Snowden's revelations had directly helped Al Qaeda"
He *claimed* that, but his actual observation is simply that they aren't talking as much as they used to. Perhaps this is because the ones who were just larking about have realised they are being eavesdropped and the only ones still talking are the ones stupid/dedicated enough not to care. If so, the disclosure has hindered Al Qaeda by blowing away some of their cover. We just can't tell. Come back in a couple of years with some stats about actual criminal acts rather than speculation based on volume of gossip.
"Gmail is the end point of your e-mail, it is not intercepting it."
Umm, I think the person who has the account is the endpoint. gmail is simply the second last computer in the chain. (I'm assuming most gmail users use webmail rather than commuting to the Googleplex and logging in locally.) You might as well argue that the postman who delivers your letters is the end-point and therefore perfectly entitled to steam open your envelopes before shoving them through your letterbox.
"Logically the one which started hotter will always be chasing the cooler one."
As I understand it (and I'm only reading the article, not the paper) their hypothesis is that hotter water is effectively a different material than colder water (hysteresis at work). So if the rate of cooling both samples is faster than the rate at which the hotter material "relaxes" into the cooler material, the hotter is not the same stuff even when it reaches the starting temperature of the cooler sample and therefore is not obliged to follow the same cooling curve.
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