Posts by Ken Hagan

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?

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.

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".

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.)

Re: legitimate?

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

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.

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.

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.

@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.

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*".

Re: "Linuxes"?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Re: WPDE

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

Nope, and certainly nothing to do with the release that was so awful they actually back-tracked the very next day and suggested that their users should ditch it, too. Apparently quite a few did, but did not simply roll back to the previous FF version.

Re: Build Quality??

"Assembled by, and designed by are not the same thing."

But if the phrase "build quality" refers to either of those things, it must surely be the former, so I think the OP's question stands. Perhaps the answer is that this is advertising, and since the "build quality" is actually identical, it follows that the advertising must pretend otherwise. Otherwise, where's the FUD?

Re: Gartner's predictions are meaningless

Gartner's actual claim is that Android will be "used on more systems" than Windows by 2016. I've heard similar claims for the keyboard controller chip on the original IBM PC. It tells you nothing about where the money is.

Re: He hasn't been found guilty of anything yet.

He isn't ever going to be "found guilty" of anything now, since no-one will bother to prosecute someone who is dead. I suppose he might be found "guilty by implication" if some other decision is logically dependent on an assumption of his guilt.

But what do I know? I'm not even able to understand why anyone would want to pay real money for a Jim'll Fix It ring-tone.

Re: Battery power

"...was nothing that Samsung did."

More like "something that Samsung didn't do." Specifically, they didn't sue the arse off a third-party for manufacturing compatible kit. But yes, that's an excellent reason to choose one hardware vendor over another.

Re: I think this shows one stark fact about folks in the IT profession......

Nope. What is shows is that people who work in IT have the confidence to blame a bad interface when they see one, whereas those outside IT are more likely to blame themselves for being "poor with computers".

With Win8, MS have actually hidden many important elements and deliberately neglected to put any visual cues in to point to the hidden stuff. This is a text-book example of what we have *known* to be bad UI design for several decades. No amount of hype will polish this turd up to a shine.

Re: IP spoofing?

Presumably buying through a VPN is the electronic equivalent of buying abroad and bringing it home in your suitcase without declaring it in customs. It's illegal, but it's a tax dodge against you own government rather than a copyright violation against the content owner.

I wonder what the appropriate analogy is when you store the purchased file in a cloud storage striped over three continents and access it through an RDP link to a VM hosted in a fourth. (Probably not viable yet for video, but perfectly viable for books and audio.)

Also, I wonder what our elected leaders will decide the appropriate analogy is.

Re: Microsoft was levering their monopoly ... to create an unfair advantage in the browser market.

"Like they're going to profit billions from that..."

They almost certainly *did*. though whether they still do is another matter. IE6 became a de facto standard in the business world, making it that much harder for rival OSes to offer a viable desktop. In fact, even once Microsoft themselves wanted to kill IE6, they found that they couldn't do it and there are plenty of companies who are still using IE6 or IE7 on XP. In short, Microsoft's practices were so anti-competitive that even Microsoft's future self has suffered. (Serves 'em right, I hear you say. I shall not argue.)

Re: The Reg is overstating the claims

So what he is saying is that this time round there happen to be none of the sort of updates that MS generally withhold for a while. That's *still* not a new feature. It's just an accident of history.

Given the hype that MS are trying to blow up around Win8, I think El Reg are perfectly entitled to take a sharp pin to it when it goes too far.