* Posts by Ken Hagan

8137 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Snowden dodges US agents in Moscow, skips out on flight

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Also on Monday, US secretary of state John Kerry wagged his finger at Russia,

"Putin is all the more dangerous because he doesn't drink and all his decisions are made after clear headed contemplation and calculation"

When you've got your finger on 1000 nukes, I don't think being sober makes you all the more dangerous. It may be irritating to Western governments to have someone in the Kremlin who is essentially sane, competent and loyal to his own country, but it's better than the alternative.

Quantum transistors at room temp

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: But here's the $64m question.

The large dimension might be vertical. Also, if the physics of this device allows it to dissipate significantly less heat per transaction, you can pack them in 3D to whatever density you like.

Gartner magicians conjure technological TUBE MAP

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I must complain about the picture caption

"My offspring is having fun pushing toy cars around it though."

Congratulations on finding the only way in which it is useful.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Pass the aspirin

"No doubt from'over the pond' - if so I wish they'd keep such bastardisations over there."

Yup. I'm afraid we East-Pondians gave up on proper English Language education a generation or two back. The only people who still care over here are those who do it as a hobby. Everyone else is dead.

By the way, shouldn't it be spelled "bastardizations" on your side?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Harry Beck

On the other hand, everyone gets the reference and (surely) nearly everyone knows that it was the inspired creation of one particular guy rather than a committee.

RBS Mainframe Meltdown: A year on, the fallout is still coming

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"several days without money is tough"

If you're counting since 2008, it's quite a bit longer than that.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "monster list of exceptions which..."

...is exactly the list that elicited the comment "you actually understand all that stuff?" when a previous commenter waved it at the people who (through their management decisions) actually wrote it.

It's a bit like politicians and tax law. They've made it so complicated that they don't understand it anymore and when it starts delivering the wrong answers they blame whoever or whatever is following the rules.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: It ain't broke??

It adds up perfectly. It's just doing a different sum from the one you wanted.

By throwing a big pot of cash at the problem, the management appear to be taking "tough decisions" to sort out the problem, thereby justifying their "compensation packages". They don't know how to actually fix it, but this should get the regulators off their backs for a while.

I expect Bruce Schneier would call it "management theater".

Leaked docs: GCHQ spooks secretly haul in more data than NSA

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Quoting Terry Pratchett???

Today's new word is "Orwellian". Look it up.

US DoJ: Happy b-day, Ed Snowden! You're (not?) charged with capital crimes

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Motives.

I imagine he went into the job believing that the NSA were operating within the law. His published statements indicate that his reasons for leaking (and the information he leaked) are motivated by (and describe) the nature of the NSA's mis-behaviour.

Whatever *you* make of his actions, they are perfectly consistent with *his* understanding of the situation, which is about as much as one can ask of any human being.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

As far as I can tell, Snowden hasn't leaked anything. He has allegedly leaked that the NSA is breaking the law, but since *that* can't be true, Snowden's allegations can't be true either, so surely they don't count as a leak.

Conversely, if Snowden's *has* leaked something, he has defended the US constitution against someone else's treachery.

Rise of the Machines: How computers took over the stock market

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Or time to stop bailing out the losers. If you made it perfectly clear that there is no happy ending when your clever algorithm bets the entire bank on the 2:30 at Ascot, this would all be self-regulating (at least in the next generation).

Also, stock markets that didn't allow selected customers to buy themselves into a privileged trading position might suddenly find that sane companies wanted to be listed there, rather than live with an ever-present threat of waking up one morning to find the (real) company has been wiped out has been wiped out by some cheeky rocket scientist on $1m/year.

Bjarne Again: Hallelujah for C++

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Any programming language is a tool

"C++ is stuff grafted onto stuff grafted onto stuff grafted onto stuff grafted onto C, with each grafting adding complications solely to desperately try and retain backward-compatibility."

For the C subset, C++ is demonstrably cleaner than the C it came from. I say "demonstrably" since most of the features added to C since '89 have come from C++. As for the non-subset: no-one is forcing it on you. You can use C++ as a cleaner C99 or cleaner C11 if you like. What you don't use, you don't pay for. It's one of the guiding principles of the language's evolution.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: What flannel about VM languages etc.

"The dotNet VM has some similar capabilities to the Java VM, which is why Microsoft have shifting a lot code off native C++ onto dotNet."

Microsoft have shifted almost nothing to .NET. They've written vast "libraries" that are thin .NET callable wrappers around the base OS facilities. They've written extensive development tools to let other people bet the farm on .NET. (Irony alert! One of the exciting new tools for .NET developers in VS2013 is a memory leak finder: http://coolthingoftheday.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/teched-na-2013-day-1-announcement-round.html.)

But shipping products? Nah. All the stuff they actually make money on is native code.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"(and &&? Really? Why not choose something not already overloaded to confusion?)"

Care to suggest something? For added points, ensure that your suggestion is syntactically brief (because rvalue references are intended to be used in end-user code, not buried in the magic parts of some library), is conveniently representable in all national character sets of note (for the same reason), does not involve any alphabetic keywords (because at this stage in history the chances of you *not* conflicting with several squilion lines of existing code are precisely zero), and ideally "reference-related" (at least in the minds of long-term C++ programmers, who I'll concede have probably developed a different aesthetic from most folks).

&& is brief, ASCII, syntactically distinct, and (to a C++ programmer looking at a function declaration) clearly something to do with references. Of all the syntax contortions in C++, I'd say you were picking on one of the least unpleasant. Now if you'd been slagging off lambdas...

Ken Hagan Gold badge
FAIL

"I'd take a language with first class support for threads and a coherent memory model over something kludged in via a third party library any day."

I'd refer you to the relevant sections of the C++11 standard, but I don't suppose you really want to learn. Executive summary: C++ has both of those things. Life is short and there are too many languages to attempt even a cursory study of all of them, but if you don't know that the very features you ask for are two of the headline additions to the language you are criticising, you end up looking at bit "uninformed".

Microsoft breaks bug-bounty virginity in $100,000 contest

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Paris Hilton

$100,000 ... plus a laptop ?

$100,000 probably covers all my "laptop" needs, thanks. No need to post a crappy Surface machine as well.

IT mercenaries and buy-to-let landlords are my HEROES - here's why

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Alternatives

I'll accept your first point but leave your second on the table.

Surprise! Intel smartphone trounces ARM in power trials

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The waste of talent

"The x86 must be giving them a 2x penalty."

Uh? It's 2013! Out of order execution and micro-ops mean that the ISA's only impact on performance is instruction decode, and instruction decode is about 1% of die area. On desktop-sized chips, ISA hasn't been relevant since the last century. It would be fair to assume that it hasn't mattered on mobile-sized chips for quite a few years either.

What matters is where you choose to invest your development budget. Intel are now putting theirs into mobile.

MPs demand UK rates revamp after Google's 'extraordinary tax mismatch'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "pay its fair share of tax" - @ the goalpost-moving politicians:

"...I've not seen anyone argue it's moral or fair."

OK, I'll bite. The loopholes exist because at some point Parliament decided that the system would be *fairer* if an exemption was permitted in specific cases. We call those loopholes. Creating them required more effort than just having a flat rate. They would not exist if MPs didn't think they were fair.

REVEALED: The gizmo leaker Snowden used to smuggle out NSA files

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: “Systems administrators.." "..low level, typically have the highest access to systems and data"

"Many organisations ban removable writeable media unless the need is justified."

They may claim to, but these days even a mobile phone could easily be a removable writable medium. Now, I'm sure there are some organisations out there who realise this and ban personal phones in some parts of the workplace, but I doubt there are "many".

US Supremes: Human genes can't be patented

Ken Hagan Gold badge

" If they can just produce essentially the same thing with a minor change artificially and claim it as their own work"

...then someone else can make a different minor change and get around the patent.

Whoever recently showed us the secret documents: Do get in touch

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: How will you communicate back?

"I'm guessing steganography."

That would explain some of Lester's bootnotes.

Windows NT grandaddy OpenVMS taken out back, single gunshot heard

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Won't or actually can't, port?

Seems unlikely. I've heard a lot of bad things said about the x86 and its successors, but Turing incompleteness isn't one of them. I suppose if this was /quite/ a few years ago then they might have been complaining about the lack of an NX bit, either in AMD's offerings or (equally importantly, if you are trying to flog an OS) Intel's offerings. But that hole was plugged about a decade ago.

Do you recall (or can you say) roughly what sort of instructions they had in mind?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: How Windows NT got its name.

I don't think those who know ever spoke out, but there are other equally plausible origins and it is likely that the name was actually chosen because it "worked" in all those different ways. So ... partly true, literally.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Vax Notes

"version 43 would not be deleted, until you had accumulated too many versions of the same file."

That rather depended on your sysadmin. A friend of mind found she was working with a BOFH who had PURGE as a scripted nightly (*) task, just to keep the disc lean you understand.

(* OK, I don't think it actually survived to run a second night, but that was the original intention.)

US spyboss: Yes, we ARE snooping on you, but think of the TERRORISTS

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Who'd have guessed it, NSA exceeding their remit

"You want "anonymous" data? Convert each phone number to a one-way hash key. "

Wouldn't work in this case. The number of possible *messages* (phone numbers) in this case is small enough that you could brute force yourself a set of tables to reverse the hash.

We're losing the battle with a government seduced by surveillance

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: You should expect this from a "liberal" government more than any other

...or time to consider whether those "self-professed adherents" actually adhere to what they profess. *I* don't doubt my worldview, and watching the US flush itself down the toilet is merely another data point to show that the Founding Fathers got it right. There really isn't anything special about Americans. The special thing was the set of rules they lived under. Once that was gone, they went down the same plughole as every other former Top Nation.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Whack-a-mole

Er, if they've left their phone at home, there's no need to go to "dark country". If they walk, there's no need to disable the car's GPS. In fact, just going to the pub would appear to suffice.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: URL to your past posts

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2013/06/07/hold_the_death_of_conspiracy_theory_for_conspiracy_science/#c_1853775

Nope. It looks like you can click on the "Posted Saturday 8th June 2013 17:36 GMT" text and that creates (and goes to) a permalink to the particular reply.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: URL to your past posts

Interesting question. I'll try an experiment...

NSA Prism: Why I'm boycotting US cloud tech - and you should too

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Hello pot, this is kettle.

"That's a good argument and I applaud it ... but are you so certain the your spooks aren't doing the same thing?"

Dunno about Canadian spooks, but the GCHQ story suggests that the UK and US are simply using each other's spooks to get around local laws against spying on your own folks. If we all follow Trevor's advice we'd probably end up with many more such bilateral understandings, but probably not much more privacy. The real problem, and I think Trevor's article makes the point perfectly well, is that even the best constitution in human history isn't worth a hill of beans unless you actually enforce it.

Police 'stumped' by car thefts using electronic skeleton key

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Sonic Screwdriver

"I think being a policeman attracts people who are just as bad as the criminals most of the time."

I think you've got that backwards. Being a criminal makes becoming a policeman attractive. Society just has to ensure that there are checks and balances within the police force to spot people who have joined in order to be bent.

Kinky? You're mentally healthier than 'vanilla' bonkers

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Standard Stats jargon, but do they understand?

If one of the measurements you are making is "agreeability" then I don't think any amount of statistics can save you.

Tim Cook: Wearable tech's nice, but Google Glass will NEVER BE COOL

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Apple isn't cool

Because most people aren't cool. Vague memories of my teenage years suggests that a 20:80 split between the (largely self-identifying, I have to say) cool set and the plebs isn't too wide of the mark.

Google cyber-knight lances Microsoft for bug-hunter 'hostilities'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The SYSTEMATIC Fix

Followed the link. Found nothing beyond a pre-processor that only lets you use smart pointers. Good luck interfacing with existing libraries and good luck trying to persuade someone who already *is* using smart pointers to insert a little-known and barely supported preprocessor into their tool chain for zero benefit.

May threatens ban on 'hate-inciting' radicals, even if they don't promote violence

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Nodody is claiming...

"Nobody is claiming that any of these snooping measures would have prevented those events, ..."

Aren't they? Boris Johnson said at the weekend that it was too soon to say whether they'd have been stopped but we should have the measures anyway. Now Boris is supposedly a smart guy and perfectly able to follow a line of reasoning, so for him to advocate having the measures anyway makes no sense in this context unless you take him to mean that they might well have stopped it, and the first half is then just cowardly wiggle room.

As the days pass, it becomes clearer that there is no email or internet trail that might have allowed us to prevent this. On the contrary, it looks like good old-fashioned detective work had already brought at least one of the perpetrators to the attention of MI5, to the extent that they had spoken to him so often that he felt harassed. You can't *be* more on MI5's radar than that, but still he "slipped through" because people like that are just unpredictable. As a society, we need to face up to that. 100% security is not possible.

Industry execs: Network admins an endangered species

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Humans, the weak link.

"If you work in technology, you are responsible for putting people out of work. That is our job."

No need to buy into the Luddite analysis. One could equally make the case that we are responsible for keeping people in work, by raising their productivity to the point where it can finance the salary that pays the bills charged by the rest of society. There are more people "in work" these days than at any point in human history.

Reports: New Xbox could DOOM second-hand games market

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"what happens in 15 years time when all these servers that are set up to allow you to play the games you have bought get turned off?"

This? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/22/acetrax_closure_drm_woes/

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: @Greg J Preece

"Second hand cannot directly benefit the game industry, it has nothing to do with it except taking the money that should have been poured into said industry."

Which is the better deal for you: £10 for a game you can re-sell later for £5, or £8 for a game you can't? And if the person making the second-hand purchase is willing to pay £5 but not £8, the game industry is only going to sell one copy, so it is better to sell it for £10 rather than £8.

FLABBER-JASTED: It's 'jif', NOT '.gif', says man who should know

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Thumb Up

Re: explanation here

"Cookies, elevator, french fries, truck; don't say 'petrol' or you suck."

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"The conventional pronunciation of a sequence "gi" at the beginning of a word is as if it is "ji", although "git" is one of a number of exceptions."

Whilst I appreciate the method to your madness, I'm not sure that the exceptions don't out-number the rule-followers in this case.

Giant, giraffe, giblets, gym, ...

Gift, give, gimbal, gimp, gibbon, ...

And pause for a moment to consider a related dispute. The giga- prefix comes from a Greek word with a hard 'g' which in English is 'giant', with a soft 'g'.

I think we just have to go with established practice on this one, so it is hard cheese to this guy and hard 'G's to the rest of us.

More than half of Windows 8 users just treat it like Windows 7

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Happy

I read it. Even better, I replied so it is no longer at the bottom of the fourth page.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Headmaster

You need to move that apostrophe down and to the left.

'Leccy car biz baron Elon Musk: Thanks for the $500m, taxpayers...

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Mushroom

Re: @Thomas 4

There's even more. Well actually, there wasn't. They didn't have enough for a fourth bomb until November of the same year. The US was briefly a nuclear power, then a non-nuclear power.

Mind you, even if this had been public knowledge, only a fool would have called their bluff, since three months down the line you'd be toast. Actually, given the subsequent spy scandals, it is quite probable that the Russians *did* know, and weren't fools. Nukes, eh? Gotta love 'em. The only known mechanism for persuading even the most beligerent politicians and generals to get a clue.

If you've bought DRM'd film files from Acetrax, here's the bad news

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Misdirected hostility

My reading of the article is that pirates are unaffected and it is only those who paid good money for the content who are now screwed.

What the "content" industry needs is unbreakable DRM. Unfortunately, their business model is based on delivering a signal to the display that a human being can watch. The signal must be unprotected at that point for a human being to be able to watch it. It follows that all the tools needed to crack your DRM have to be contained in the box that you mass produce and sell to any anonymous punter who has the cash.

So, in the absence of unbreakable DRM, what the industry needs is to rely on the general honesty of the majority, charge a reasonable price for the product, and stop penalising those who choose to pay.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: ...-gardening

I'll dispute it (though not your implication that English is an illogical pile of toss).

Gardening is a on-going process (of taking care of something). The need is continual and the actions required on any different day are not the same. So you can stop gardening, have a sleep, and start again, but it is still gardening both because you are doing something different and because the objective never ceased.

Downloading, on the other hand, is a completable action and when you do it again the next day it is exactly the same repeatable action.

Also, from a stylistic viewpoint, the word "re-gardening" makes you want to sigh or weep with despair, rather like having to re-download something because of a broken business model.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Lawsuit in the offing here.

"The company you contracted with is gone, and they took your cash with them."

Perhaps I mis-read the article, but it sounded to me like the company was bought by Sky. Presumably the law takes the view that Sky bought all the contractual obligations as well as the assets. Last I heard, Sky were still trading.

BT Tower is just a relic? Wrong: It relays 18,000hrs of telly daily

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: It was the tallest thing in London until ... 1980

You're thinking of the Pantheon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_domes.