* Posts by Ken Hagan

8137 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Space elevators, vacuum chutes: What next for big rocket tech?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: > you spend most of your fuel getting the rest of your fuel up to mere subsonic velocity

Mongo, you are also missing the point that it is bad by design, because that is good.

Consider a Saturn 5 engine block. It generates a certain amount of thrust if you pump fuel into it fast enough. Imagine that you have a rocket with only 2/3 of the amount of fuel that NASA actually used. It would weigh substantially less and yet have the same thrust. It would therefore accelerate much faster. So why didn't NASA do it this way? Well, they did. Once you've burnt 2/3 of the fuel in a real Saturn 5, you have exactly the rocket I've just described, except that you are now "launching it" from a platform five miles up traveling at Mach 1.

The optimal launch weight of any rocket is "as much as it can lift". In the case of the Saturn 5, at the moment of launch you have a 3500 ton ballerina balancing just above the launch pad on a downward thrust of exactly the same. (In fact, just to be sure that the launch is truly optimal, I think they overfill it slightly and it doesn't start moving until it has burnt off a little fuel. Fortunately, at 5 tons per second, that doesn't take long.)

Researcher hacks aircraft controls with Android smartphone

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Pilot can regain controll

You probably don't need *much* of a deviation in some parts of the world to send a plane into restricted airspace, at which point someone else will do the shooting down bit.

NASA-backed fusion engine could cut Mars trip down to 30 days

Ken Hagan Gold badge

My car accelerates rather smoothly to 60mph. This system appears to pulse once per minute. I think that was the OP's point.

Tax man to take a bite of tech employees' free meals?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Not worth the effort of counting it accurately.

It isn't a proper tax loophole unless it can be exploited. I find it hard to see how you could exploit a free food arrangement for significant gain without equally significant (health-related) costs further down the line. Go on, then. Defraud the tax man of a few pennies and then die before you are old enough to collect your pension.

German court says nein to Apple's slide-to-unlock patent

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Its our fault

The US (and others) restored democracy to Germany a while back. Perhaps they'll return the favour.

Office for Mac 2008 support umbilical chopped off

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: You forgot the other difference...

A number of Office licences allow installation on multiple machines and most people don't have 5 machines they might install on, so I think the original comparison was fair.

Publishing ANYTHING on .uk? From now, Big Library gets copies

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"If the website T&Cs say "thou shalt not copy my content", then they can just move on and go collect the next website."

Does your browser do that? Mine doesn't. Mine ignores any and all such non-executable requests and instead makes a copy of the content for my perusal.

If you want such wishes to be executed, make them executable by not serving up the pages to everyone who passes by. *Many* websites do exactly that, and only dish content to paying customers. I imagine that *those* will not be appearing on the archive.

As another commenter explained, this is a natural extension of existing (and very long-standing) copyright law to a new medium.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Beano

"And can anybody explain why an alien university such as Trinity College Dublin should benefit from the free handout of books?"

Oh, that's easy. The Republic of Ireland was created by a British government that expected them to come back one day.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: What about our copyrights?

I expect the UK government's attitude would be that (since the .uk namespace belongs to them, even if they do delegate its management to Nominet) if you publish under a .uk address, you are putting the material (and perhaps yourself) under UK law. If you are re-publishing stuff which you don't have the right to put under UK law, that would be a matter between you and the owner of the stuff you are re-publishing.

Swedish linguists nix new word after row with Google

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: @Nicho re. 'google the un-googleable'

"I think we should use the excellent Swedish word, 'ogooglebar' ..."

Swedish? I think you'll find it is English now.

Next from Microsoft: 'Blue', the Windows 8 they hope you don't hate

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: apparently look a lot more like Windows Phone 8

Fair point. Hands up *anyone* who has ever used the calculator maximised, rather than sitting next to the window where they are doing proper work.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: desktop

"purely because it needs to support it's legacy apps"

"purely"? You make it sound like legacy support is some tiresome extra that "real" users do without, rather than the only reason to put *Windows* on the PC rather than any other OS.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Lipstick on a pig...

Sadly, I think the problem is that your 55000+ workstations don't mean anything to MS either. They appear to believe that the entire desktop ecosystem is an infinite pile of cash that they can burn in their increasingly farcical attempts to conquer the "device" market.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: How many programs...

The raspberry pi uses a "toy" ARM processor and manages to run a normal desktop OS. That's *probably* because 2013's "toys" have more oomph than anything you could buy in previous years, but it *might* also have something to do with the OS not being a bloated steaming pile.

Universe gains an extra hundred million years

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@I am replete

Yes, it wasn't a great piece of prose.

"Light existed before this time, but it was locked in a hot plasma similar to a candle flame, which later cooled and set the light free."

Light wasn't locked in at all. The entire universe was simply smaller. As others have noted, plasma *is* rather good at absorbing light, but if the plasma fills all of space then there is no "in" to be locked in.

Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Thumb Up

Re: Nvidia

With any luck, this will be the push that persuades nvidia to get their act together.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

FAIL fail

He said "unlikely", not impossible. Do you know of any other back doors in open source software?

And since I'm nit-picking, 1984 was an era of UNIX tapes being passed among friends and I doubt that even Linus could pull off the same trick on Linux today.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

the largest market?

"With a population of 1.34bn and rising, China is all but certain to be the largest market for desktop operating systems in the world in terms of users"

What are you counting as a market? http://www.britishcouncil.org/learning-faq-the-english-language.htm suggests that the market for English speakers is about 50% larger. Even if you restrict yourself to a single country (and I don't think big business works that way) there is rather more potential in countries like India where they have a vaguely functional legal system that will respect things like contracts. After 1991, everyone thought Russia would be a huge market, until they realised that none of the inward investment was ever going to come out again.

Come back and tell me about the potential of the Chinese market when they've erected that huge monument in Tiananmen square to the victims of the present regime.

Oi, Microsoft, where's my effin' toolbar gone?

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Facepalm

Re: Did Mrs D contact anyone at Microsoft

Submitting bug reports costs money. MS charge if you want anyone with a clue to read the submission and you only get your money back if they agree with you. That's not a gamble that the average user is prepared to take.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Trollface

Re: Swap partitions

And yet ... Everywhere I look I find people saying that you will struggle to measure the performance difference between a swap partition and swap file, at least for any remotely recent kernel version. Perhaps MS were simply ahead of their time.

Nvidia to stack up DRAM on future 'Volta' GPUs

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Huang said that the future Volta GPUs would have an aggregate of 1TB/sec (that's bytes, not bits) of bandwidth into and out of the stacked DRAM, and added that this would be enough to pump an entire Blu-Ray DVD through the memory in 1/50th of a second."

You were OK until you mentioned "an" entire Blu-Ray DVD. The big caveat to this massive bandwidth is that a single component only sees a tiny fraction of it. It would be more accurate to say that if you happened to have a DVD already divided into several thousand shards then you could stream each shard past a different (and isolated) processing unit in that fiftieth of a second. Obviously that's less impressive. Actually processing that data as a coherent whole will take longer.

Freeview suddenly UNWATCHABLE dross? It may just be a 4G test

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Coat

Re: Guard bands

"For many decades now those in the business of spectrum planning would leave "guard bands" between user segments to avoid possible interference..."

Guard bands? I thought they were called "shopping channels".

$1.5k per complaint. Up to 1,900 gTLDs. Brand owners, prepare to PAY

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Money... That's what they want....

"Leave the "old" .com, .org etc for true multinational organisations."

I'm afraid you've missed the point. I don't want there to *be* any true multinational organisations. When I access a server via DNS lookup, I want to know what laws apply to the server just by examining the TLD. If .com continues to mean "global", I can't do that.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Money... That's what they want....

"I was happy when all we had was .com .co.uk .org and .net"

Sadly that only works if everyone agrees to abide by US law, and most people don't have that option. Even within the .com domain, most sites probably aren't exposed to the ire of a US court to any extent beyond losing their domain registration and that only costs them a few dollars. ".com" might as well be ".anon" for legal purposes.

The current crop of gTLDs are, indeed, a complete waste of time. However, the country code TLDs could be turned into something useful if the rules were changed that you could only have foo.{cc} if you set up in {cc} as a legally liable entity with a cash pile appropriate to your parent organisation's size. (Ideally, we'd align IPv6 address ranges on the same lines.) End-users could then assume that anything on *.{cc} obeyed "local law" and that the local entity could be forced by a local court to pay out a sensible amount in damages if they lost a case. Politicians could pass laws applying to anyone with a {cc} domain and have a reasonable chance of enforcing them. End-users could then choose to filter their internet usage by {cc}.

This doesn't even need international agreement, since the registrars for the {cc} domains generally already are within the legal jurisdiction in question. Anyone who doesn't want to live by the new rules is free to "emigrate" by moving their operation to a new domain name.

This would leave .com, .org, etc. to those who want to be part of the US. I'm fine with that. They, in turn, would have to be "fine" with consumers in every other country on Earth preferring to deal with a site under the local {cc}. The big multinationals seem to have those registrations already, so I doubt it would be a problem.

Given that all of us are subject to some legal system, it is frankly amazing that the internet has become so pervasive without any serious effort to partition it into legally coherent sections. All we've had so far are (local) politicians queuing up to call for a (worldwide) ban on stuff they don't like. It's almost as though humanity at the end of the 20th century saw the possiblity of creating something that would by-pass all existing legal restrictions and everyone thought: "Yeah, let's move all our social and commercial lives over there. Who needs laws anyway?".

Watch out, office bods: A backdoor daemon lurks in HP LaserJets

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: What the fuck is PC LOAD LETTER?

It's the error you get when viewing west-pondian documents on an east-pondian PC with software that is too stupid to make the obvious adjustments.

Samsung's new co-CEO: 'Windows isn't selling very well'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Why Care About The OS?

"Why does anyone care about the operating system used on a mobile telephone?"

No-one does, but the youngsters have started using the word "phone" to refer to a hand-held PC. Usually these have SIMs in them, so they aren't actually not phones, but calling them phones is a bit like calling your car a portable radio.

I, too, have an elderly phone that does what I need, so you're speaking my language. Sadly, we are no longer speaking the vernacular.

Who's riddling Windows PCs with gaping holes? It's your crApps

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I'm amazed "how to create security holes" is not a part of *every* CS course.

Cutting corners (and introducing security holes) saves developers (or their employers) money and gets them to market ahead of their competitors. The costs are borne by the customers. The customers can only move to a better supplier if the better supplier hasn't yet been eliminated from the market (owing to their higher development costs).

Any developer with half a clue can write shit in any language. Bugs have nothing to do with programmers, languages or education. It's all economics.

eBay: Our paid Google advertising was a total waste of money

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"companies are largely blackmailed that if they do not buy their brand terms someone else will"

Is this a problem? (*) If I search for an actual brand name, I'm looking for that brand (duh!) and will certainly not be spending money on some time-wasting lying swine who wastes my time with a deliberate red herring. If they were on my short-list (and I'm searching for each one in turn), they will be crossed off it.

(*) Who knows? Almost certainly no-one. What passes for "analysis" in the advertising world wouldn't pass for bog-roll in the hard sciences. It's cargo cult stuff, just a story told by marketing execs to whoever sets their budget.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@Havin_it (Was: i'm confused...)

Unless own-site-search has improved in recent years, I'd say that googling with site:whatever will never be worse, so should always be the only thing you try. Is anyone aware of sites where this isn't true?

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Paris Hilton

Re: "A Google spokesman ...[said]... the company's own research had different results."

We need a Mandy Rice-Davies icon.

Perish the fault! Can your storage array take a bullet AND LIVE?

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Coat

Re: in short..

"flawlessly translated into proper Queens' English"

Would this be the wrong moment to point out that the apostrophe is in the wrong place?

Microsoft preps UPDATE EVERYTHING patch batch

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: At least it GETS official updates

'Tis a pity that these old Android systems aren't FOSS.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Facepalm

Re: XP through to Win 8....

"Don't MS keep telling us that all the code is new at each release?"

You actually believe that? How many hundred million lines in a Windows release, and you seriously believe that they chuck the whole lot out and start again for the next one?

Earth calling Anonymous Coward: Microsoft's marketing department doesn't always tell the truth.

BRITAIN MUST DECLARE WAR on Cervinaean menace

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Earning their keep

"I strongly suspect he'd be in for a shock if he ever caught one"

That's generally true. I've seen cats catch fairly large birds, only to regret it a few seconds later. I've heard that a cornered rat is equally unco-operative. I imagine that scaling the whole process up to the size of a deer is quite interesting.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"It's lean, rich and lower in fat than the main meat groups."

The main meat groups were domesticated and bred into the grassy equivalent of couch potatoes several thousand years ago. It's hardly surprising if they are now a bit flabby. Is venison leaner than, say, wildebeast?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@Ru

I suspect the green solution to your little poser is simply to increase the amount of habitat available to the deer. After all, we've spent most of the last 10000 years deforesting and generally nicking land from the rest of the ecosystem, so it is not surprising to find that "wildlife" is short of space. Of course, allowing wildlife to increase its resource consumption isn't a sustainable policy, but having got all the people out of the way you can *then* release the bears and wolves.

Nature got along fine for a few billion years before we showed up. It's not actually an unworkable solution, but I suspect most of the human population will reckon that a cull is a better one.

Next Windows 8 version can ditch bits of Metro

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Odd - only suspending those?

"If you can still see that it's Windows after the boot screen, you probably didn't do it right."

Metro looks nothing like Windows. Does that mean Windows 8 is *already* the embedded version?

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Making Windows 8 look like Windows 7 isn't a climbdown?

There is no infinitive there to be split. Perhaps you, too, need to "seriously read a book" on grammar before reaching for that particular icon.

On the other hand, the most horrendous abuse of English was in the original article where it talked about the "vocabulary" of gestures in Windows 8. Where's a vomit icon when you need one?

Penguins, only YOU can turn desktop disk IO into legacy tech

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: Have I missed the point?

With apologies to those who aren't Windows developers. You won't get the references, but you can probably guess.

Having recently used PROCMON.EXE, I may be a little biased (or bitter) but I suspect that reading in the EXE is a pifflingly small fraction (<1%) of the time spent annoying the end-user with an hourglass ion. Before you even get as far as WinMain(), you have loaded and run the DLL entry points of several dozen system DLLs. For every one of those executables, the kernel will have crawled over the registry to see if various app-compat hooks or debugging hooks are required. If your program ever shows a file dialog box, you'll pull in all the shell DLLs, which rejoice in trawling the registry and file system picking up the current user's preference for just about everything that you can configure in Control Panel. Each of those registry accesses checks per-user and per-machine hives. Depending on how old the app is, every single one of those registry and file system lookups might be virtualised, so each registry access also checks the Wow64Bollocks parallel universe in both hives. File system accesses are similarly virtualised because you can never have too many directories pretending to be System32.

And by the time you've done that and reached the very first instruction of the actual program the end-user wanted, your memory hierarchy is absolutely cache-busted, so everything runs like molasses.

Torvalds asks 'Why do PC manufacturers even bother any more?'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: When are you going to quote Torvalds properly?

"Remember that he's working exclusively in Linux, so the idea of switching to another keyboard and monitor just to work on one of his other machines is a completely foreign concept to him."

I see the point about X and remote access, but ... really? I don't care how good your laptop is, it will never come close to the quality of the keyboard and screens I have on my desktop. Portability is its only advantage.

US lawmaker blames bicycle breath for global warming gas

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Carbon Cycle 101

I was about to make a snarky remark about this legislator, but it appears that all the El Reg commentards (so far) have missed the point as well, so I'll be kind.

CO2 emission is not in itself a bad thing. There is a natural cycle and as long as you are respiring/burning/carbon that is already part of the current natural environment, you aren't changing the amount of carbon in general circulation. Therefore you won't cause the atmospheric concentration to change. You could burn the whole cyclist and it wouldn't affect global warming.

The problem is in releasing fossilised carbon. That adds to the total carbon in circulation.

Yet another Java zero-day vuln is being exploited

Ken Hagan Gold badge

What's this "until it is patched" rubbish?

"and until it is patched everyone should disable Java in their browser."

The vast majority of users have no need to enable Java in their browser, ever. Any installer or update that re-enables the browser support without getting the user's permission first is IMHO performing an unauthorised modification and is therefore probably in breach of the law in several countries.

Squillionaire space tourist offers oldsters a holiday to Mars

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Not for me..

You do realise that it would be fitted out with cameras. ("Day 500 in the Big Brother Spaceship...") Also, given the deliberate simplicity of the mission, you'd hardly get any of the credit for the mission. Rather, you'd go down in history as being the most sex-crazed and shameless couple in human history.

I'll pass, thanks, but I might tune in for some of the later episodes.

US insurer punts 'bestiality' to wide-eyed kiddies, gasp 'mums'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: They are taken seriously because they are organised

OK, so I'll make an ungenerous assumption about why *she* cuts out all the nude girls, but that still leaves me wondering why *he* compiles the list of advertisers. (IT angle: given that he can't start compiling the list until the magazine has been made safe, the process is strictly serialised, so they can't even claim it is more efficient this way.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: American organisation offended by breathing

"For some reason in the US, these people hold views which are taken seriously."

These people would certainly like you to believe that they are taken seriously, but they are probably responsible for the under-performance of the Republicans in recent years. I'm sure Barack Obama reckons Sarah Palin was a gift from God. Like terrorists, there are probably fewer of them than they'd like you to believe.

Microsoft finally ships Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@mmeier (Re: XP Holdouts)

"And a well planned switch takes time"

My switch from XP-in-a-VM to Win7-in-a-VM took no longer than the time to install the OS and apps, and then to swap over the virtual discs containing my data. I wouldn't call it well-planned -- how else could I have done it.

It was, of course, just one system and one that I was intimately familiar with. But then, that probably describes rather a lot of systems. If I were migrating my company from XP to Win7 then, yes, I would expect to do quite a lot of planning, but the people who currently face that problem have probably already started work and if they haven't then it is probably because they do intend to "run it in total isolation from the Internet".

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: So, will this get rid of...

I'm not holding out much hope for Windows XP Embedded. It is almost exactly the same product and so if MS kept the patches rolling then all XP users would be OK until 2016. However, I think it is far more likely that MS will take the view that embedded systems are not internet-facing and therefore don't need patches.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I have XP here so no use

That's OK. I've just played their minesweeper demo using Opera on XP.

You've made an app for Android, iOS, Windows - what about the user interface?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Lowest common denominator

"the lowest number into which a specific group of numbers divide exactly"

You posted this at 2am GMT, so perhaps you need to get some sleep, but...

It works for me. You have a group of numbers (the factors) and you can consider multiples of each one. The lowest such multiple that is shared by the whole set is the lowest common multiple. The LCM is useful where the original factors are the denominators of a set of fractions, because it can be used as a denominator for all of them. For those of us who dislike (computational) complexity, choosing the minimalist solution (lowest common denominator) is then the clearest indication of excellent mathematical taste.

Any other choice just marks you out as a bit of a wally.

No mobile signal? Blame hippies and their eco-friendly walls

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Any self respecting hippy would use straw and lime wash

That was sort of my thinking too. The vendor is pitching at institutional customers, not domestic, so we're talking about the sorts of building materials used in larger buildings, not houses, and a purely economic desire for insulation, not an ideological one. Hippies just don't come into it.