Posts by Ken Hagan

"IE is no longer in a monopoly position."

Firstly, *IE* was not the monopoly that Microsoft were trying to extend. That was Windows, and by the standards set by law, MS still have a monopoly in that market.

Secondly, since when does your liability for past criminal activity lapse as soon as that activity ceases to be illegal?

Re: Wait a minute...

You may already (since posting this) have caught up with the replies to previous posts, but just in case you haven't:

No it doesn't. Support for Win7-with-SP1 ends either two years after SP2 comes out (it may not) or with the end of the product lifecycle, whichever is the sooner. For Win7, the product lifecycle has mainstream support going through to 2015 and extended support to 2020. Using past performance (ie, XP) to interpret those statements that means MS will continue supporting Win7 in Windows Update until 2020 as long as you have whatever is the latest service pack by then.

Ergo, any corporate currently in the middle of an XP-to-7 transition has 8 years to enjoy the benefits. They probably will, too, since MS are looking increasingly *unwilling* to deliver a viable desktop platform to replace it. People *talk* about waiting for Win9, but no such product is on the drawing board and when it does appear we might find that it is another phone OS.

Re: a real story

I beg to differ. Most search engines that operate in China *do* censor results, so if Siri doesn't then that's newsworthy. I wonder where Siri is getting her information from. I wonder if the local plod are already using her to track down down people who they regard as criminals.

Re: "I think you'll find it uses TCP so it IS stateful."

Running a stateless protocol over a stateful one does not make it stateful, any more than sending broadcast packets over a point-to-point link makes them unicast, or using perfect grammar makes an erroneous statement any less wrong.

Re: DNS is a bad idea.

"It also requires the use of a centralised body"

Ah, no. Actually it probably requires the *absence* of such a body, but ICANN have missed this point.

The old system broke up the top-level space into a handful of historical accidents (.com, .org, etc) and by country code. If you forgive the historical accidents, and accept that sovereign nations each get one top-level domain which they can then screw up as they like, the administration of the top-level in the hierarchy (the only piece that has to be universally agreed upon) is completely trivial and uncontroversial.

And so it was until ICANN changed the rules and opened up the top-level to the highest bidder. This made ICANN a distinctly controversial body performing a non-trivial role for the benefit of the highest bidder.

There are rabbits, too. I'm pretty sure I heard something about rabbits once. Or have they "gone native" and now bounce around chewing people's rocks off?

@James Micallef

I'm inclined to agree with you on free speech, but I don't think Twitter should be responsible for changing German law, nor do I think their German operation should be allowed to break it just because they are a US company.

Re: "something like "Naturally Speaking" from Nuance"

Dear God, no! It's bad enough having to listen to "Honey, I'm on the train." without having to listen to some early-adopter dictate the same in an email.

Voice, like touch, is only going to work in a very small number of scenarios. You can rule out just about any environment (from office to pub) that has other people in it. However, reaching such environments was pretty much the point of making the device portable, so voice is a non-starter.

Re: If the car industry were like the PC one

Ah, but those Beetles, Kimbis and Trabants would have warp drive, big bigger on the inside than the outside, and would be free with your breakfast cereal.

Intel seem to be doing fine, despite their crappy arch. I've been hearing about how ARM were going to take over the world for almost as long as I've been hearing about Linux on the desktop. Given what Intel do to batteries and what Microsoft have done to my desktop, I'd be delighted if either scenario came to pass, but after 10 years or more, I'm still waiting.

Re: THESE child workers were NOT making Apple products

They were doing something else for nothing which allows us to undercut the competition when it comes to bidding for the Apple contract.

As you say: hurrah, indeed.

I feel insulted that this was even offered to me as an excuse.

Re: Causes need figure heads

I think the cause suffers if she is just a figure head. Fortunately, we have the likes of Faraday and Babbage to speak up for her. Unlike the modern day revisionists, they actually knew her and they were demonstrably top-flight scientists themselves, so if they reckon she was in their league then I'll settle for that.

Re: 100MB files? Pah!

Presumably a couple of feature length porn movies embedded in an XLS to try to sneak them under the radar.

@JDX

You seem to be dividing books into "reference" and "paperbacks". Looking at my own bookshelf, I'd say that *most* of my non-fiction titles are larger than a paperback and hardly any are works that I just just dip into to look something up. Also, there's a huge number of technical works (e.g., PDFs) that are pre-formatted to a fixed width. Viewing those on a standard kindle requires a combination of "smallest font size" and "landscape orientation".

Amazon seem to want to get out of the e-Reader market, having presumably sunk quite a lot of cash into establishing that market. Any economists out there care to suggest how that makes any kind of sense?

Re: 'Facebook's European headquarters are in Dublin, Ireland.'

Be fair, the American habit stems from the fact that most of their place names were copied from Europe. As a result, for any large European town or city an American audience probably does know a tiny hamlet somewhere near where they live that has the same name.

It's still an annoying habit that El Reg shouldn't copy, but it wasn't an unreasonable invention in its original context.

Re: Did the NSA get a bulk discount?

Nah, they just tendered too low.

Hint: Is there any proof that Trailblazer actually did what it was paid to do? Is there any likelihood that the UK scheme will? No, in both cases. The figures you just quoted are merely what those in charge have decided is a politically reasonable amount of cash to grab for spending on projects that they don't want to admit to. There is, in fact, no absolute requirement that either project ever existed, since revealing any such evidence would be a breach of national security and revealing that the money was actually spent on something else too secret to even admit too would be an even more serious breach.

By their very nature, state secrets are where democracy stops and dictatorship begins. We either prohibit the whole notion of state secrecy or we trust that the dictatorship is benign. On the historical evidence, the latter is only likely if the dictatorship is fairly narrow in scope and its personnel drawn very widely from society as a whole. Both of those requirements can be policed by democratic representatives, but only if the latter are fairly smart and aware that this is an important part of their job.

Re: "Immersion, lake and palm 'er" Oh God. You ought to be shot for that one Caleb!

Did you mean "shot" in a nice way? I rather enjoyed it. (The subtitle, that is, not being shot, which thankfully is an experience still on my to-do list and with any luck will stay there.)

@The New Turtle

For my part, I'd always assumed that it was just a picture of an apple. Y'know, having just called his company Apple Computer Co, for want of a unique name, he then chooses a picture of an apple as the logo because, well what else is he going to use? Taking a bite out of it was as far as his imagination went in that department. Frankly he had more important areas in which to direct his creative energy.

Re: Do it once and do it right.

My reading of the article (and knowledge of the history) is that BT have not done anything to the (majority of) lines between cabinets and homes, even once. As and when they do, they will "do it right" with a fibre. The issue is not "upgrading to last century's technology". It is "not upgrading everything everywhere all at once".

Unless you know of some magic pixie dust that makes financial realities goes away, rolling out FTTC across the country before rolling out FTTH seems perfectly defensible to all except the "You've got birds in your garden so you deserve shit broadband." wing of the Me Me Me party.

Re: x86 isn't that much better

The author may or may not be aware of this, but it is Linus who is ranting about ARM diversity and presumably he has forgotten more about x86 flavors than any sane person would ever want to know.

Re: I'm missing an option...

If you want to nit-pick, I expect the pedants will claim that if it's "wanted" then it isn't an "interruption".

Re: Optional

"You slated LeMay"

Tell ya what, why don't you crawl back into your hole and read what I said and not what you read. Start at the very beginning, before you'd said anything, when I was replying to a guy who claimed that the US response to the Japanese had been forgotten. Along your way, you will note that I go out of my way *not* to slate Lemay for anything he might have done in WW2.

Once your reading comprehension has grokked both the original context of my remarks and the remarks themselves, you may be ready to re-enter the discussion, but given that I've already addressed your points several times without you acquiring anything resembling a clue, I shan't wait for you.

@solidsoup

Or 4) You've got the game theory wrong.

Re: "David Icke or El Ron Hubbard"

Well make your mind up. David Icke is a rather sad case of mental illness. El Ron Hubbard was an entirely sane man who figured he could swindle gullible people out of money and thought, "Well, why not?".

"A Free Market for Identity Providers"?

Identity provider? No thanks, I already have one.

Oh, you meant "identity thief". You want to take my identity so that you can make money out of giving it back to me when I need it online.

Re: Call a spade a spade

It's misleading because with only one way in and one way out and dumb forwarding between the two, you could argue that there is no "routing" going on. (I'm not sure I'd bother to have that argument, though.)