Posts by Ken Hagan

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.)

Re: @A J MacLeod

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

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.

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.

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.

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.".

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.)

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.

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.

Re: nastygrams

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

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.

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.

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

Surely no-one sends secret stuff unencrypted these days?

Re: @Mark Shuttleworth: Comments Of An Ubuntu User

"Arrange your enhancements in such a way that you can charge money for them. RMS might be pissed, but that is not the key thing. What matters is what the mass of Linux users think, say and write."

I can't believe Canonical haven't considered this and decided that the nature of the GPL makes it very hard to improve a GPL-ed program for financial reward. Yes, you can probably write an *extensions* and charge for that extension. But merely fixing bugs and improving compatibility in dozens of tiny ways? That's not going to produce a separately identifiable package that you could charge for.

As far as I can see, there are no ways to make money out of Linux (or free software in general). You always have to be selling something else, whether it be hardware (like domestic routers) or sys-admin expertise. Canonical seem to be having trouble making much money by selling the latter. Since Ubuntu is (at its roots) a desktop distro, they'd be in a straight fight with Microsoft, Apple or Google if they tried the former. Maybe they just can't do it.

Re: designer coal

I think jet engine blade developers have a different idea of "exposure to warm air" from the rest of us.

Re: Flawed Assumption

There's a large dose of "temperment" here. Quite a lot of programmers will avoid jobs in a squillion dollar operation that works on a "must work perfectly yesterday or else we all die". That's not because they aren't good enough. It's because they'd rather do something else. Part of the pay at these operations is for talent, but the majority is in compensation for stress.

Re: Didn't someone once say......

This sounds like a hybrid of the quotes at the top of http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/qm.htm.

All three are quite funny, until you get far enough into the subject to realise that they are all true and you have an exam on this subject in a few months time.

Re: You might get lucky,

Previous comments have suggested that some of these products disable hibernation and others actively wipe keys prior to hibernating, so I doubt they will make the mistake of storing keys in pageable memory.

Re: USPTO=Incompetent

Yawn. The USPTO is simply doing its job. That job has been defined by the local politicians as "rubber stamp everything and let the courts decide". Blaming the USPTO lets the politicians off the hook. Please stop it.

Re: Iran

Probably not, now. Then again, unless the end-user is running as admin I think you'd need to be running a version of Windows that installed to FAT, so we're probably talking Win9x or earlier.

Re: Regarding extradition

That might *logically* follow, but the same Home Secretary has been trying to get someone extradited to Jordan for the past year or two and blows a fuse every time the courts say no on the grounds that he might come to some harm when he gets there.

So I don't think we should expect any kind of consistency. Indeed, the fact that these two cases have been playing out over the same period of time is (I guess) just God's little joke.

Re: SPAM

That'll be a long wait, then. As soon as I read: "cheaper international roaming, faster connectivity, less spam and an improved economy" I thought, "Well I know the bit about less spam is just bullshit, so I suppose the rest must be as well.".

If the ITU *want* to sabotage any and all credibility, this is pretty much the easiest way of doing it: tell internet users that you've found a cure for spam.