* Posts by Ken Hagan

8135 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Stanford super runs million-core calculation

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: At what point

At what point is it cheaper and simpler to build several dozen jet engines, each to a one-off specification, rather than build a simulation of just one and tweak its parameters?

"There, fixed that for you" as they say.

But yes, this beastie would be fairly close to that point. I assume it can also be used for other things, and I also assume that its builders have learned a fair bit about architecture and so the next one will be cheaper.

ITU signs off on H.265 video standard

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Silly resolution.

Human perception *is* that good because humans have this thing called a neck. You can sit close enough that the over-sized screen fills your field of view and then turn and look at whichever part of the image you like. If several of you are watching then you can all be looking at different things, just like a real audience/crowd at a live event.

Whether you want that level of immersion in your home is another matter, but it makes perfect sense for venues and there is demonstrably a market for "watching the match at the pub" and "going to the cinema".

Lotus 1-2-3 rebooted: My trip back to the old (named) range

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: It's called a slash

Credit where it's due. It was *IBM* who decided to use backslash as a directory separator and they made *that* decision because they'd used the slash to introduce command line switches in DOS commands (presumably as a respectful, or fearful, nod towards JCL).

There was a CONFIG.SYS switch to change this and restore sane behaviour, but no-one (end-users, that is) used it. In addition, normal forward-looking slashes were even then (and in many cases still are) acceptable as a directory separator. It's probably not too late even now to re-educate the end-users.

Naked intruder cracks one off in Florida rampage drama

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: tags

The only story so far .

Microsoft may be readying Outlook for ARM – or not

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: What trick is required precisely?

"so heavily reliant on the intel architecture and so old"

If they are more than 15 years old, they ran fine on MIPS, Power and Alpha, you must be talking about some new dependency on x86 that crept in *after* everything was ported to a flat 32-bit memory model and run in user-space. It seems unlikely that such a dependency could be all that hard to remove.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Stop Gap

That presumes you have your Windows desktop accessible in some way (VPN?) over the internet. It's probably the best way to use a slab, but equally it's probably beyond the average home user to set it up securely (or even insecurely) and beyond the average corporate user to persuade their IT security bods to do so.

Samsung demands Apple's iOS 6 source code in patent case

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Bored

They did. Unfortunately, someone else is now claiming it was *their* product.

Meet قلب, the programming language that uses Arabic script

Ken Hagan Gold badge

You don't need a new language for this

If you can't write a pre-processor to convert text from your chosen language into the character set expected by your compiler then you aren't a real programmer.

C++ makes it particularly easy because it allows a huge range of Unicode characters in variable names. (This ought to be true for any serious language, but I imagine there are exceptions.) In fact, *your* pre-processor would only have to translate the half-dozen tokens used by the C++ pre-processor and you could then use a header file with some well-chosen #defines for all the keywords of the actual language. Since this replacement doesn't actually change line-numbers, compiler error messages would still point to the right place and source-level debugging would still work.

Remember to write another translator for the reverse direction, so that you can import other people's code.

Translating the comments is "left as an exercise for the reader". For most code, simply removing them is probably the best bet, even if they were written in your own language.

Cameron's speech puts UK adoption of EU data directive in doubt

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Why so vague?

"Funnily enough, the majority of these 26 are doing anything from better to considerably better than the UK when it comes to their economy."

That would explain why we are a net contributor to the EU and they are busy arguing over when the Germans are going bail out the euro.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: If they exit?

"Free movement of goods and labour is a big deal, and financial services can and will easily move EU-related business to Luxembourg, Paris or Frankfurt."

Free movement of goods is largely guaranteed by the WTO. Free movement of labour is hugely unpopular amongst that part of the population whose wages are undercut as a result. (Net migration has been into the UK recently anyway, and Spain and Greece are already starting to offload the more mobile part of their population.) The financial services are not going to move from London, where Dave wants to give them an easy ride, to the EU, where they will face new taxes on transactions. (They could have moved when the euro came in, but none of them did.)

EU-wide mega-Leveson 'needed' to silence Press, bloggers

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Good news for the Guardian?

I think you mis-spelled "BBC". That's by far and away the most obvious model for a broadcaster or news organisation that enjoys public subsidy on the grounds that it provides pluralism and public service.

The failure to even try to define journalist or journalism means we can ignore the parts about enforcement and regulation. (Presumably they were asked to consider such things as part of their remit. It seems rather odd to even bring up the subject, otherwise.)

So all this report has really done is give the BBC a vote of approval and suggested that we could use a few more organisations like that. Hardly controversial, unless you're a Rupert.

Another new asteroid-mining firm: 'First commercial space fleet'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

I think its more a case of some people proposing the implausible in order to persuade other people to put their money behind it.

As for your phone, 20 years ago now only takes us back to 1993. Viewdata and similar systems were trialed for exactly this purpose in the 70s and the notion that the receiver might eventually shrink to a hand-held device would not have surprised any familiar with transistors. I imagine you need to be talking at least 50 years before the number of people "who could have thought" drops below a million or so.

And by a bizarre co-incidence, asteriod mining might actually be possible in 2063.

Microsoft to end Windows 8 discounts on January 31

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Just as a thought

A further complication is the number of corporate buyers who will get a new PC (with the OEM Win8 on it, because the majority of OEMs still don't give you a choice) and then just slap on the corporate volume-licensed image (either Win7 or XP). These people have technically bought Win8, but would have preferred not to and aren't using it.

I'm sure *that* figure is commercially sensitive, but MS must have a pretty good estimate because anyone with a volume licence for XP or Win7 but not one for Win8 is almost certainly doing exactly this.

Sheffield ISP: You don't need a whole IPv4 address to yourself, right?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: non-memorable addresses

IPv4 gave us non-memorable addresses. A memorable one uses words and has variable length segments that not only uniquely identify the addressee but also tell you how to get there. As proof of this, I'd wager that the ordinary end-user can probably quote you quite a few DNS names but no IP addresses.

Funnily enough, the reason the ivory tower academics jumped to 128 bits for IPv6 was the realisation that a longer binary address could be used the same way. I don't know how successful this is in practice, but the extra bits were supposed to be carved up so as to make it really easy to implement routing algorithms.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

that "better secured cloud" in more detail...

Perhaps the killer app for IPv6 is an appliance (quite possibly built into the domestic router) that lets you run your own cloud. You do the backups. You determine the privacy policy. No-one turns round a couple of years later and says "all your stuff belongs to us next month unless you find (and migrate to) a new provider".

It needn't be expensive. You need a disc large to store your crap on, something large enough to backup to, and a router capable of taking the "load" of your immediate family and friends all rushing for the baby video at once. An off-the shelf router with a couple of SD cards would probably be sufficient for most households. The only problem is installing, configuring and maintaining the software stack.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: No surprise, I predict that there will be more to come

"There are ways to add new features to protocols such that existing protocol stacks can still process them, while just ignoring the new features. The IPv6 designers chose not to do so, which may have seemed like a good idea architecturally but is now a severe disincentive to upgrade."

Back in academia, I think the assumption was that you would upgrade by loading up revised firmware for your router and run a dual stack. Back in 1995 or whenever, that would have had an expected financial cost of nothing and a labour cost of bugger all.

Fast forward to 2010 and the world is full of domestic ADSL boxes whose manufacturers refuse either to issue new firmware or to help anyone else write new firmware, because *they* want the cost to be "£50 for a new box thank you very much". (Rather ironic that the sticking point here is *software* that in nearly every case was Linux, gratefully picked up for free by the manufacturer.) Notice that extensions to IPv4 would have suffered the same fate. (One can argue that the ISPs are also part of the problem if they want to sell IPv6 as a chargeable extra.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: ISPs get toenail clippers from Dr. Gatling

On (2), I can't claim to have performed any market research myself but Andrews and Arnold are offering a Technicolor 582 router as part of the IPv6-capable package. They searched long and hard to find it. Chances are its the only reasonably priced ADSL box they could find.

On (3), yes even XP has an IPv6 stack, but the end-user has to do "difficult scary stuff" to actually switch it on so I imagine it is "off" on 99% of XP systems. I wonder if Microsoft would consider a Windows Update or "FixIT" to change that default, or would that count as "maintaining XP" and therefore violate someone's religion.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: IPv6: not enough incentive to move

"Consumer devices, OSes, etc. are all IPv6 ready."

All of them? Games consoles, ADSL routers, TVs and PVRs, particularly any of those that are more than six months old? On the other hand, most of them can work behind a NAT (whether it be domestic or ISP) without noticing. The device that really needs to be IPv6-ready and typically isn't (in the UK at least) is the ADSL router.

"They can all access IPv6 resources."

Yes, but (as noted earlier in this forum) the majority of online resources are only available through IPv4 addresses, so even where the customer and the ISP have both got their act together, you still end up using a IPv4 connection for most things.

US general: Beware of Iran's Revolutionary Cyber-Guard

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Stereotyping

They've managed to run a nuclear program despite everyone's best efforts to avoid helping. They were, until 1979, one of the West's main allies in the region and have an indigenous civilisation stretching back at least as far as any European one.

So you'd have to be pretty thick to be surprised that they can also program computers.

Google's JavaScript assassin: Web languages are harder than VMs

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: ...eyeroll...

Ditto.

"side effects" is the term used by most language designers to refer to "evidence that your program is actually running". If a block of code has no side-effects, the optimiser is allowed to remove it. If two blocks have the same side effects, it is allowed to pick the cheapest one. Side effects are not equivalent to bugs unless your code is 100% bug.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Phew!

In a perfect world, *all* programming languages would decouple their source syntax from their semantic elements. How hard could it be to write a front-end that accepted curly braces instead of significant white-space and then fed the resulting parse tree to *exactly the same* compiler? Probably "very", in real life. How hard *should* it be? Probably "trivial", since the formal tools for this were developed 50 years ago, by language designers.

In fact, my new figure of merit for whether to take a new language seriously is "Does the default distribution come with multiple front ends to accomodate the various syntax prejudices of the programming community?". If not, I'm not interested. :)

The 10 best … Windows Server 2012 features

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: @A J MacLeod

Five downvotes, eh? Clearly I've let the cat out of the bag. Sorry guys. (But not very.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@A J MacLeod

"Does somebody just go through the Reg forums clicking downvote buttons, or what?"

It's the "or what" I'm afraid. What they do is click on your name, which takes them to a list of all your recent posts, and *then* they go down the list clicking downvote buttons.

El Reg, would it be possible to limit the number of votes someone can make in a given time period?

Swedish school puts Minecraft on the curriculum

Ken Hagan Gold badge

See also

http://www.mojang.com/2012/09/mojang-and-un-presents-block-by-block/

Minecraft does seem to win over some surprisingly "conventional" converts. Perhaps we've now got a generation in decision-making positions who were brought up on games themselves and know from personal experience that (as MrT says) there's more to games than just playing around.

Or perhaps their personal experience is that there's *less* to urban planning than previously thought. After all, creative types like scientists and engineers have known for generations that the best ideas come from playing with the problem a bit.

Oracle patches Java 0-day, goes to Defcon 2

Ken Hagan Gold badge
WTF?

default security level

"Oracle has also changed Java-in-a-browser's default security level to “High”. "

Er, sorry? You mean the default level for *in-browser* applets hasn't been "maximum" for the last 15 years?

Fatty French Kilogram needs a new-year diet, say Brit boffins

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: 1.0000000000000000000 == 1.0

A fair point, mathematically, but there is a convention in science that says you retain trailing zeroes where the precision of the measurement justifies the additional digits. So 1.0000000000000000000 is 1 plus or minus 1e-19, whereas 1.0 is 1 give or take 10%.

For our standard kilogram, the claim is that it has "put on" 100 millionths of a gram, so we should quote its current mass as 1.0000000kg.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: how do they know?

There are several copies held in various countries around the world. The copies all still weigh the same as each other. The original seems to be heavier. You can either claim that the original has put on weight or you can claim that *all* the copies have lost *the same* amount of weight. Occam's Razor favours the former hypothesis.

Bob Dylan's new album is 'Copyright Extension Collection'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The value of real property ... after 70 years is generally worthless

"Strange, that's not the impression I get looking at the Antiques Roadshow on TV..."

I think that rather proves my point. The proportion of what was created N years ago that physically survives to the present day is *miniscule* and that (for some) gives it a rarity value. (To be honest, most of the stuff on Antiques Roadshow is worthless, mind. Kudos to those who can convince mugs to shell out dosh for it.) The point is that physical property degrades (at some rate) and the value of the property right degrades with it, so perhaps IP should fade away as well.

At present, the "lifetime" of IP seems to be advancing by a decade or two every decade or to, in response to lobbying by people who didn't create it. We need some notion of IP rights, since society is increasingly vesting economic value in non-physical artefacts, but the current direction seems to be for Disney and friends to own everything and that isn't something that the general public can support forever.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I don't understand this

I share your confusion, but perhaps the law is phrased such that the 20-year extension starts running from the date of last re-issue. Therefore, expect to see stuff re-issued 49 years or so after first publication.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: A massive 1962 revival?

Maybe not massive, but music has changed less in the fifty years since 1962 than it did in the previous 50. You can be sure that some 1960s music would be reworked by modern composers if it were freely available and quite a lot more would be incorporated into the live repertoire of modern performers.

History is no guide here, since we are only now entering the period where decent-quality sound recordings are available to pinch. No pop radio station in the 1980s could have played tracks from the 1930s even if they'd wanted to. (Well, OK, perhaps on AM wavebands no-one would have noticed... :)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: provided that all your property is forfeited [...] when you die

Fine by me, as long we're just talking about property that is itself 70 years old.

The value of real property depreciates. After 70 years it is generally worthless. The only physical items I still possess that I acquired more than 30 years ago are all materially worthless. I keep them because they have sentimental value, so in fact they are probably "intellectual property".

Intellectual property should depreciate in a similar fashion. 70 years is too long and there should be some distinction drawn between IP that is new, 20 or 40 years old.

Oracle, Dell, CSC, Xerox, Symantec accused of paying ZERO UK tax

Ken Hagan Gold badge

kitemarks?

"Frank Field, Labour MP for Birkenhead, said HMRC taxmen should issue "kitemarks" for firms believed to have paid a "fair share of taxes", thus creating a "white list" of suppliers suitable for the public sector."

Here's a better idea, Frank. Define in law what a "fair share" actually is. I really don't want to live in a society where the amount of tax I have to pay to stay out of jail is decided behind closed doors and without anyone telling me until after the tax is due. I doubt whether corporations want to do business in such a country either.

China throws 3G net over disputed island chain

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Chinese naval vessels have fired on Vietnamese fishing boats a few times ...

I took the phrase to refer to China's current government, and based on their treatment of their own citizens I have no trouble at all in believing that they are all acreholes.

Sinofsky's new blogski: Windows 8 king reborn as management guru

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Learning by Shipping

Quite.

"Learning from Experience" sounds like something a professional might do.

"Learning by Shipping" just sounds like "Aww, let's just dump the current shit on some end-users and let them tell us what's broken.".

Browser makers rush to block fake Google.com security cert

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Unhappy

" in August 2011, Turktrust mistakenly issued ..."

Is that a typo for 2012, or have the bad guys had 16 months to issue bogus certificates for whoever they like?

Though I suppose that 4 months is long enough. Ouch!

'Holey code, Batman!' Microsoft to patch 12 vulns on Tuesday

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: reason for Patch Tuesday

"(note that companies controlling updates can very well create a patch day themselves)"

It is a fact that as soon as patches become available, the bad guys reverse engineer them to figure out the hole they exploit. If a company chooses to delay applying those patches, they are exposed to well-known holes for a few days. If MS choose to delay revealing them, no such window exists, but any bad guys who already know about the vulnerability get a few more days of unrestricted malice.

In other words, it's a trade-off. For limited periods of time, security by obscurity is actually the best strategy. (Apologies to anyone who's slogan-based understanding of security is disrupted by this more nuanced view.)

Traffic app Waze 'turned down Apple's $400m, wants $750m' - report

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Black Helicopters

Re: The paranoid in me doesn't like this

That Hamas leader who was assassinated in Gaza in November had apparently been out canvassing. I wonder what sort of phone he had and whether he was using it at the time. Missile guidance doesn't need to be very sophisticated if your target is helpfully carrying a personally-identifiable GPS-enabled wireless tracking device.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Apple wants the patent Waze has

Or at the very least, they don't want Samsung to have it.

Remember, under the US system, "creating patents that might be harmful in the hands of a malicious enemy of your chosen target" is a business model for a little company.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: $400m sounds generous

Generous is an understatement. If Apple are to make a profit on the deal (and last I heard they were still a commercial outfit rather than a bonkers religion on a mission from God) then they will have to make that much *plus* all subsequent development costs, *plus* whatever interest and opportunity costs are incurred by spending this sum now and on this rather than later or on something else profit-bearing.

Tiny Brit island stranded after £10m undersea fibre plea sunk

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Argentina reignites Falklands row

Argentina "re-ignites" the Falklands issue whenever its government runs into political trouble at home. Since their economy has tanked rather badly in recent years, that means they rattle sabres every few months. However, the local population aren't taken in by this (unlike the UK press) so I doubt we'll be needing a runway on St Helena any time soon.

Besides which, we hardly have any armed forces anymore, so what exactly would we be hoping to land there? I suppose if the balloon goes up we could drop MoD paper-pushers and BAe lobbyists on the enemy. We seem to have an infinite supply of those. Might fall foul of an international treaty or two, though.

Official science: High heels make you sexy

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: the results for blokes wearing heels

They're here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Reid_(fighter)

And if you've followed the link, you'll now know why the article thought it best not to mention it.

Ever had to register to buy online - and been PELTED with SPAM?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: nastygrams

But surely that happens infrequently enough that you can bow to their complaint and allocate them the address "arkell-v-pressdram@yourdomain".

The LINUX TABLET IS THE FUTURE - and it always will be

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: did nobody at Microsoft TEST this crap?

I rather suspect that the problem is that no-one *outside* Microsoft was allowed to test this crap, so the only people involved in usability testing were either trained up in all the (undocumented) tricks or only asked to perform ludicrously simple tasks.

I also rather suspect that nearly all the usability testing was done on touch-enabled devices, with the assumption that anyone with a mouse and keyboard would go straight through to the desktop and stay there.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "Win 7 is by far better than XP"

At best, that sounds subjective. I believe that Win7 does a slightly better job of scheduling I/O than XP, but I doubt that's what you are referring to. I can't think of *any* end-user-visible feature in 7 that I'd rate as better than the equivalent in XP, and quite a few that I'd mark down quite heavily. But that's all subjective, too.

Also, remember that the dinosaurs did not die out because something better came along, unless your definition of better includes geological worst-case-scenarios and the pests/vermin that can survive them.

Yes, hundreds upon hundreds of websites CAN all be wrong

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I have a dream

...which curiously enough reminds me of the story that when the makers of Mamma Mia asked Björn and Benny what the backing tracks actually *were* the reply was "Er, dunno exactly, we just played lots of stuff and mixed it all up until it sounded right", followed by many weeks of sitting listening to tapes with the original sound engineer to try to reverse engineer what the hell had actually made it onto the album.

So if you really want to know what the keyboard player was playing in bar 7 that day, I think you should get hold of the original tapes and beg the assistance of M. Fourier.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Its is amazing

You may be right about spare capacity, or it may be that conscious parsing of speech differs from unconscious parsing, so something you can't understand when you try to listen suddenly fires the right neurons when you simply hear it.

I'm told that there's a known effect whereby you can be sitting in a room doing something and suddenly someone in the background mentions your name. At that point, despite not having been listening to the conversation you are aware of the whole sentence *prior to* the bit where your name was mentioned (and presumably also prior to the point at which you became consciously aware of the conversation).

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Oh

That's right, but the tricky part comes when you realise that some of it *can* be trusted.

Those selfies you posted ten years ago which now appear as the "I feel lucky" hit when you apply for your first job, for example, are completely authentic. We need to find a way to teach the younglings *both* of these truths.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Apologies to any affected Emerson, Lake & Palmer cover bands."

Well *that* image brightened up my morning...

China seeks ‘Oceanauts’ for deep sea exploration

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I wonder if they will go the U.S. route....

Surely no-one sends secret stuff unencrypted these days?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Clear parallels with space exploration...

You missed three points. Firstly, with the nuggets sitting proud on the ocean floor and the abyssal depths being fairly quiet places, there's bugger all thinking to be done. Secondly, if the robots fail to come back, it is just marked down as "operating costs". No-one starts campaigning for "this evil industry" to be made illegal. Thirdly, if you don't have to carry down a life-support system, you can probably make the entire craft solid state, which is going to be a massive weight saving and result in being able to bring up far more nuggets per descent.