* Posts by Ken Hagan

8135 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Sex offender wins case against Facebook vigilantism

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5 more sites

Since no-one in their right mind could believe that these new sites are co-incidence and not motivated by a desire to cock a snook at the judge, can we now expect those responsible to be chased down by the courts for contempt?

Microsoft Office 2013 heads for the cloud but fails to soar

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Re: UMMMMMMM......

Ah, yes, but those were the Windows 7 guidelines. Human beings are different now.

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matching the OS

This is true, and true again for Visual Studio and Internet Explorer, but no less of a balls-up for all that. Following the OS style is the default option. To present an alternative look and feel, someone has to go to a lot of effort to bypass the OS in order to create a jarring presentation that violates Windows Logo Program guidelines. It has always amazed me that MS are so keen to do this. To me, it is like displaying a big splash screen on startup that says THIS PROGRAM WOZ RITTEN BY A CLUELESS TURD!!!, except that the splash screen eventually goes away.

You can be sure, of course, that Office will *always* get a Windows Logo on the box. It's only little people who have to follow the rules.

VPN ban makes for nervy times behind Great Firewall

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Re: SSL VPN through Port 443

"Why is the consensus that this would be difficult/impossible to filter?"

Probably because this is a tech site, populated by people who know that simply blocking as you describe would (a) fail to prevent VPNs using any other method, and (b) succeed in knocking out vast chunks of the web.

You, however, appear to be one of the few who realise that the Chinese authorities are *not* tech experts and therefore, knowing neither of these things, will quite happily do just this and not care about who is inconvenienced.

At least, until the effects on the Chinese economy become clear. Perhaps by then it will be too late. If China makes itself unsafe or unsuitable for business, there are plenty of other countries who will happily step into the gap. The world is not short of poor countries. This doesn't have to be the Chinese Century. It could instead be yet another century in which China screws over its own people and achieves bog all of historical note.

LHC CMS yields unexpected 'new stuff'

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Unhappy

Re: Flattened gluons?

It's the cluster that gets flattened, not the gluons. However, I do have problems with the explanation offered here.

"At relativistic speeds, matter compresses along its length; [...] The effect of this could be to create a “wall” of flattened gluons, and entanglement between the gluons explains how particles created by the collision can “share” direction information."

My problem with this is that the gluons are *relative to each other* not moving at relativistic speeds at all. Therefore *they* see no flattening. Presumably the explanation offered here is a crude attempt at hand-waving for the benefit of people who want to know but lack the necessary theoretical background. The problem is that it only works for those in the target audience who don't think it through. Those that do simply hit the next conceptual problem and need the next (slightly more detailed) hand-waving explanation, and so on until you've actually explained the whole theory.

It follows that any attempt to make science accessible to the lay public only works for those members of the lay public who weren't interested in the first place.

Amazon's secret UK sales figures revealed by Parliamentary probe

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The "reason why its European business was structured like this" ...

...is because the various lawmaking institutions around Europe make this the most sensible way to do it if you don't want to be sued by your shareholders. (See today's story about HP.) If you think Amazon are actually committing fraud, tell the police. If not, don't blame them for playing by the rules.

Let's not lose sight of the fact that every *legal* tax dodge indicates that the *politicians* have screwed up.

Man facing rare refusal-to-unlock-encryption charge: Court date set

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Re: Very interesting case ....

Why so curious? Isn't it obvious that they'd assume that you'd given them the wrong password and that the file therefore contained instructions for how to create radioactive child porn?

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Re: Making a stand.... or just thick ?

"making a stand to get RIP struck down"

I hope this is his intention. There have been anumber of societies in the past where the authorities regarded the insides of people's heads as a legitimate target of investigation. None of them were nice to live in.

Where were the bullet holes on OS/2's corpse? Its head ... or foot?

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Re: OS/2000

Perhaps they had the sense to realise that most PC people associated "2000" with the millennium bug.

Then again, around the same time Microsoft produced a version of Windows that was named after both the bug *and* a disease.

Mint Linux gifts Unity haters with 'Nadia' ... plus her Mate

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Re: So, do people want choices or not?

They want choice, but the default option to be good enough that they don't feel obliged to learn about all the options before the system becomes usable.

Sticking with the defaults makes it easier to get help on forums and it makes it far more likely that you are using a configuration that plenty of other people have tested. But if the default is Unity or Metro, people want a choice.

IBM insider: How I caught my wife while bug-hunting on OS/2

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Re: File Renaming Magic that Windows Could not Do...

That sounds a bit like the NTFS feature where each file in a given volume has a unique object ID. The feature obviously doesn't get any exposure in Explorer because humans don't like the idea of a completely flat and numeric namespace for their hard discs, but various link-tracking facilities in Windows have used it since the dawn of whenever.

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Unhappy

IBM also charged an arm and a leg for the SDK at a time when MS were giving away the Windows SDK for free. Unsurprisingly, no-one bothered to port their apps to OS/2.

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I thought Scott Adams cut his teeth at PacBell?

Having only observed this from the outside, I have to say it is terrifyingly plausible and explains lots of things that are otherwise mysterious to anyone who naively assumes that *some* degree of common sense was applied on a day-to-day level.

But could it really have been *that* dysfunctional?

Pirate cops bust LITTLE GIRL, take her Winnie-the-Pooh laptop

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Re: Orlowski will be able to put a positive spin on this

I doubt it. My guess is that he absolutely hates this sort of thing because it is something that really *is* capable of convincing the general public that intellectual property rights are inherently evil and must be abolished.

If you wake up in 2020 and discover that inventors and artists can no longer make a living selling their talent and that your international rivals can steal whatever they like from your employer's product line, blame the record companies.

Texan schoolgirl expelled for refusing to wear RFID tag

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IT Angle

Re: Christ (oops!) bloody religion again???

"You mean, most non-Muslims who think they've "read the Koran" are considered to be wrong by those who believe it to be more than just a book."

Actually, I think that's exactly what he means. As far as I can tell, the believers use the term "Koran" for the word of God. If you happen to read and write Arabic, it is possible to reproduce those words in book form as a mnemonic, but that book isn't the real Koran and (quite possibly) unless you are a true believer merely reading the mnemonic won't count. I assume you have to be moved by the spirit to hear the actual words whilst reading before it actually counts.

IT angle: It's a bit like the difference between an EXE file and a running program.

Ten Linux apps you must install

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Windows

Re: Not just a Linux problem

If you are shipping CD-ROMs to people who might not have a network connection, .NET 2 is around 235MB, because MS don't make it available to redistribute in any form except "blob that deploys everything on anything".

Conversely, if you are targetting Windows 8, Microsoft don't make it available *at all* and you *have* to have an internet connection to pull down the special Win8 version. So that's zero bytes on your CD-ROM but you have to ship a SIM to each customer.

So I think you Linux types have it easy.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Mushroom

Re: "RAR extraction, an archiving option popular in the Windows world"

Popular? Not in either sense of the word. Why would anyone use RAR when ZIP is universally understood, already supported by your OS, free and just as good?

I've only ever had to deal with one. A quick surf of the internet suggested that there were no decoders from any source that looked *remotely* trustworthy, so I fired up a virtual machine, installed an OS, downloaded a (presumably) virus-ridden pile of poop, extracted the files and then threw the VM away.

You probably don't want to know what I thought of the person who sent me the archive.

How Intel's faith in x86 cost it the mobile market

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Re: x86 on mobile platforms...

"Intel should have been helping shrink the storage footprint of x86 software - not just the power consumption..."

Actually, x86 software is usually smaller than the equivalent ARM code. The bloat you refer to is Microsoft being crap, not Intel.

How spreadsheets (nearly) conquered and killed the financial industry

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Re: Agility requires robustness

"You do have tests for your spreadsheet? Or do you prove it works by drinking Red Bull and thinking really hard?"

I think that was covered (very briefly) in the early part of the article. Companies that insisted on properly tested anything quickly went bust, overtaken by those of their rivals who were reckless enough to just go for it and lucky enough to get away with it.

From the point of view of an individual company, the best strategy is harder to judge. Spend too much time on testing and you will lose to *someone*. Spend too little time on testing and (eventually) you will lose everything you gained. From the point of view of the ecosystem, however, at any given time *someone* is winning so who cares how much blood is being shed in the process?

35 US states petition for secession – on White House website

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Re: White v Hispanic and Black

"In some parts of the US only Spanish is spoken as there is no need to speak English."

In mitigation of this coming crisis, perhaps I should point out that if *everyone* only speaks the *same* foreign language in 2050, no-one will care.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Trollface

Re: English independence from Scotland ?

That would have the added advantage that Scotland would retain the UK's EU membership, UN security council seat and nuclear weapons.

Sinofsky OFFSKI: Is Windows 9 now codenamed 'Defenestrate'?

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Re: Are you by any chance a moron?

In fairness, it sounds like *you* are unaware that you need to change a rather obscure setting before your solution actually works. Perhaps a grown-up changed it for you before giving you the machine. Perhaps you should have read the OP's "spoiler".

Ballmer comes not to praise Sinofsky but to bury him

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Meh

Nothing to see here

Much as I'd like to sit back with popcorn and watch some skull-duggery, I have to say there's nothing in the two letters to support the conspiracy theorists.

Sinofsky has probably gone about as far within Microsoft as he can without displacing Ballmer. He probably reckons that isn't likely. He is probably financially secure for life. If he stays at MS, he will either a sideways move or be stuck maintaining his Win8 creation. It seems perfectly possible that these two prospects have given him itchy feet. It would be odd if a man with his background *didn't* have a whole pile of ideas that have been accumulating in his head these last twenty years, always being placed on the back-burner because the day-job was taking his full attention.

Ballmer needs to establish the new management team as quickly as possible, so he is brief about Sinosky and concentrates on the merits of his successor. You could also argue that this is just basic politeness.

UK's planned copyright landgrab will spark US litigation 'firestorm'

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Oh the irony...

Nice to see the US returning to the wording of the original international treaties. Perhaps next they'll turn their attention to the original treaties on patents. I'm pretty sure there's wording in there about "prior art" and "obviousness" being disqualifiers for granting a patent.

But yeah, Cable's department needs a damn good kicking.

Coders grill Herb Sutter on future of C++ at Microsoft

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WTF?

a version 1 release of ARM

"We have a really mature compiler and optimiser. It's been around for a decade or two, on x86 and x64. Then we have a version 1 release of ARM. You can expect that to get better."

The Microsoft ARM compiler is not much younger than the x64 compiler. The former dates back to the early WinCE releases, and the latter post-dates the era when Intel were trying to convince everyone that there would be no 64-bit extension to x86. If Microsoft's ARM compiler is immature, it certainly isn't because it is new.

Steady Antarctic ice growth 'limits confidence in climate predictions'

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Facepalm

Re: Higher temperatures =

You may not have noticed boltar, but Lewis isn't the author of the Nature paper.

One in four don't clean their stinky old browsers - especially Firefoxers

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Re: Well I use....

Off-topic, but since you mention "repository" and use a Penguin icon I assume you are running Linux. If that happens to be a Debian flavour, you might be interested in http://www.opera.com/support/kb/view/841/

(If not, please excuse the bandwidth, but I suppose someone else might be interested. Certainly, there are no fundamental reasons why closed source should mean it's not in a repository.)

China blocks all Google services as new leader anointed

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Re: legitimate?

In fairness, the author of that article is quite obviously oblivious to the meaning of the words "legitimate" and "democracy".

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Re: Is China really a Tier 1 Nation?

"everyone I talked to said how much better it is now than in the Cultural Revolution times"

That's what we call "damning with faint praise".

The GPL self-destruct mechanism that is killing Linux

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Linus doesn't scale?

"Linus" as a project management methodology does not *have* to scale.

The principle (and it is both ancient and not particularly related to software design) is to maintain a single coherent vision of what the project is supposed to be. You do that by having a small group who do that and then organise the rest of the work-force to be delegated to so that the architect(s) can spend time maintaining conceptual coherence. (Brooks had a whole chapter on this, IIRC.)

Of course, finding people to play the roles is tricky. The hard part is when the architect needs to say "That's shit." (or words to that effect) rather than "Are you sure about that?". At that point, the underling needs to have sufficient respect for the architect that they don't kick back. Linus seems to manage this. Bill Gates was supposed to command similar respect but I haven't heard similar remarks about his successors.

Sellafield's nuclear waste measured in El Reg units

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Re: very large egg whisk

No need. It is an article of faith in dark green circles that any contamination introduced at one point in the world's oceans immediately spreads to every other point.

Naughty-step Apple buries court-ordered apology with JavaScript

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Re: Stupid, stupid move.

@Matt: Maybe those books *work* on hippy children, at least in the sense of making them grow up into more hippies.

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Trollface

Re: Stupid, stupid move.

"There are a hundred ways to get children to behave that don't involve yelling. Y'all should try reading a book on the subject sometime."

Nice, but you should have posted under your own name so that you could choose the right icon.

The genetic button that could turn a WOMAN into a CHIMPANZEE

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Re: Readability

Is 36.11 low? Is it a problem?

I pasted the web-site's own text into the box and it came out at 36.40.

Fujitsu guru: Win 8 will triumph. And we'll have brain plugs in 2027

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" in the long term, he said, "backwards compatibility is just not sustainable""

You what? So someone who spends thousands on apps but paid only twenty quid for an OEM licence to their OS should ditch the former investment because it just isn't "sustainable" for the vendor of the latter to avoid breaking stuff?

Jeez, I hope my pension fund doesn't have Fujitsu shares.

To anyone with a clue, the success of OS/2 and Linux-on-the-desktop proves beyond doubt that backwards compatibility (or cross-compatibility in the case of anyone wanting to break into the market) is not just sustainable, but is in fact the only game in town. It's certainly the only reason MS are still in business.

BIONIC MAN makes it to top of Chicago skyscraper

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Thumb Up

Re: The leg weighs about 10lbs.

That was such a good link I forgot to actually read the answer (7kg, btw, which is slightly more than 10lbs), so I had to click it again.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Happy

Re: WHY ARE EL REG USING UNNECESSARY CAPITALS IN THEIR HEADLINES?

THEY aren't. YOU are the one being UNSELECTIVE in what you capitalise.

Scientists ‘untangle’ quantum communications

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@DanDanDan

You have missed the distinction between algorithms and phenomena that was the whole point of the OP's post. If I have a PC that is running a program that implements AES, I can break it by dropping it off a really high tower, or by running a second program that reaches into the first one and writes junk into its address space, but neither of these things break the algorithm in any meaningful way.

With quantum cryptography, however, the actual "crypt" part relies on physical inaccessibilty rather than mathematical irreversibility.

Verizon staff arrested for stealing customer's nude pics

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Re: "So the lesson here..."

That may be the lesson from this isolated example, yes. However, the lesson from reading El Reg over a decade or so is basically never, ever take any picture that you wouldn't be happy with your relatives finding on Google Images one day. That may be over-cautious, but I think it ought to be the starting position when we come to educate the next generation.

Perhaps El Reg, in the spirit of public service, could introduce a tag for "pics or it didn't happen", to link together every story that involves some hormonally over-charged teen ending up on Google and regretting the whole business. Then we could just point our sons and daughters at that and say "Read, Laugh, and then *Learn*".

Five go wild with the Administration Tools Pack

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Re: "Linuxes"?

I'd have gone for Linices, just as Vaxen ought to have been Vices.

Microsoft: TypeScript isn't a JavaScript killer

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Re: There MUST be subtraction of features

I think you are right about "fun" features, but you've failed to follow the logic through.

I can't think of any case where a descendant language has successfully subtracted features from its parent. There are certainly languages with "deprecated" features, but it takes decades for those to finally be removed. You have to look at truly ancient languages like Fortran and C to find examples. Backwards compatibility appears to be an essential property that any child must have, or else it will be still born.

It follows that any "fun" features that are present in a parent language essentially doom that language and all its descendants. You may *think* you have given yourself a clean slate with a new language, but you haven't. You *would* be better off spending the same effort on improving the original language.

Wannabee language designers out there, take note. There are *very* few languages with no such features and certainly none with a sizeable userbase or collection of handy libraries. Most modern programming is done using languages that are clearly band-aids around the original Lisp, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, Basic and C. In most cases, they haven't even got around to changing the name yet. (I could probably be persuaded to add JavaScript to that list. It is a little young but, then again, so is its target platform.)

Obviously there are a *few* exceptions but there have been thousands of attempts and you can do the maths yourself. Statistically, it is almost inevitable that your language will fail. Stop it.

One in seven North American home networks full of malware

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Timely

And to think only a few days ago we were wondering why spam levels were so low after Sandy.

Still, I can't recommend it as a solution. Given a choice, I'd rather deal with the spam and have the several hundred people back, thanks. (Hullo, ghod? Are you listening up there?)

Windows 8 'penetrated' says firm which sells to world's spy agencies

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Re: "We welcome #Windows 8 with various 0Ds combined to pwn all new Win8/IE10 exploit mitigations,”

Since the professional security researchers are French, it is entirely possible that they outsourced the task of tweeting to someone who knows more about twatspeak than English.

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Exclusive!

I, too, have developed a 0-day exploit against Windows 8 (and Server 2012).

I, too, will not be offering details to anyone who tries to verify my claim.

Nationwide to perform IT equivalent of 'replacing jet engine mid-flight'

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Re: Mainframes are actually brilliant online transactional platforms

"You have just written a press release for SAP..."

If the whole thing goes titsup this weekend for the next fortnight then SAP might not be so glad of the publicity.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "Voyager"? Interesting choice of Project Name...

Like hi's in fact. (And her's, except that I expect there are numpties out there who actually use the latter, so it isn't such a good example.)

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Pint

Re: and to think I moved accounts from Nat West to Nationwide

Let us know who you jump to next, won't you?

Meanwhile, have a beer for your (probably considerable) troubles.

Hurricane Sandy: Where are all the cynical online scams?

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Re: No scams because..?

This does seem rather more plausible than El Reg's (tongue-in-cheek) version. After all, the emails don't come from the scammers' machines. They come from compromised boxes owned by others. There are a lot of boxes on the East coast and they probably enjoy better bandwidth than average.

Nobody knows what to call Microsoft's ex-Metro UI

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Re: WPDE

Why bother even mentioning the desktop? This interface is only ever going to be seen on (a few) phones.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

NSIS (http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page) were using the name "Modern UI" quite a few years ago. Even "Modern UI 2" is now 5 years old.