Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: They missed one or two things....

"They can't monetize or target those of us who have gathered round the water cooler or pub table and talk cars, clothing, music, food, etc. "

Ah, but they soon will be able to. Your next (* or the one after ... it's only a matter of time) mobile phone contract will have smallprint to allow the operator to leave your device in listening mode all the time. The sound will be converted to text where possible and tagged with your phone number. (Actual speaker identification will come later, once technology improves still further. For now, it is just "you or one of your friends".) All that semi-anonymous speech gets poured into a big data mine run by the phone company, gets correlated with the speech sent by other phones, and sold to brand owners who want to know what "people" are saying about their latest gizmo.

Or you can pay extra for a contract that doesn't include that option. But most people won't and you won't be able to trust that the person you are standing next to isn't one of the sheep. And because it's all automated and semi-anonymous, it doesn't count as snooping. (The NSA said so.)

Re: Careful with that Acronym, Eugene

"something rather different these days"

These days? It always has done. I was using it in the "modern" sense for years before encountering a very respectable gentleman on Usenet using it in the "point of sale" sense. Quite a double-take, I can tell you. It was like grandpa suddenly swearing to the vicar.

Re: Good

Historically, internet protocols have tended to follow the "two interoperable implementations" rule before being adopted as standards, which is the reverse of what you've just advocated. Design is nice, but very few people can anticipate every detail of how a network protocol will respond on all kinds of real-world network.

Re: HTML5

It exists, but don't hold your breath. As long as a substantial minority of your users are running prehistoric versions of IE there is a dis-incentive to create new web-sites that depend on HTML5, and of course there are always reasons not to re-implement an existing site that "still works".

I expect genuinely new sites to be planning to use HTML5 now, since (despite Microsoft's U-turn this week) it is clear that it is only a matter of time before the number of unpatched and well-known holes in IE8 start having a Darwinian effect. (I'm sure careful people will manage to keep XP systems running for years behind corporate firewalls, but I'm equally sure they won't be allowing IE8 onto the public web.)

I don't expect any existing site to switch over to HTML5 sooner than their normal maintenance cycle would demand. For some, perhaps many, sites there is no such maintenance and these will carry on using Flash until their owners go bust (because no-one visits them anymore) and stop paying the hosting bills.

Re: Microsoft is getting really schizophrenic lately

Nah, the lesson is that the "XP is dead" party was so good that MS have only just sobered up and remembered that they have to keep the patches rolling for Server 2003.

Re: Back to the Future?

"Containerisation means each container can operate in its own filesystem, meaning you can have entirely different userspaces on top of the same kernel."

Interestingly, 64-bit Windows does virtualise the filesystem (and registry) for 32-bit processes, but doesn't make the facility available to end-users to create their own. It also virtualises various other parts of the object namespace through its session objects. Obviously "faking it" and "hiding it" are the essential functions of any OS (and always have been) so we shouldn't be surprised to find that the mechanisms are already there and affordable. I wonder if we'll see this amazing new feature in Server 2015, or whatever the next new release is.

Re: Good!

"Are you browsing the web for any site from a server? 8-O"

We don't know. Just because one is using Server 2003, doesn't mean the machine is an important "server". Indeed, anyone who still thinks there is a difference between a server OS and a client OS, apart from the application software workload, needs to stop drinking the cool-aid. Using the word "server" to mean "valuable" or "powerful" is like using the word "proprietary" to mean "better". It's what the marketeers want you to believe, but surely everyone reading this site knows better?

It may be true that most consumers are complete idiots, but the ASA should not accept that as a defence. If you make a statement that is false, it remains false no matter how many stupid people you get to read it. If I stand up in court and make a false statement and then say "Well, no-one else in the court knew any better..." I'd expect the judge to take a dim view.

If the ASA is to have any purpose whatsoever, they have to base their judgements on what is objectively true, not what some twat down the local pub thinks after a few drinks.

Re: The future...

I'm sure this boffin chappie is well aware of the IBM quote, which makes his willingness to go public with an apparently equally short-sighted remark all the more interesting and newsworthy.

@Valeyard

I imagine the law is the same in NI as in the rest of the UK, but it is clear from your testimony and my experience that this works out differently in practice.

I don't think I've ever lived in an area where there wasn't someone collecting the numbers. I know what they are doing and what they aren't allowed to do. I've never been asked about my vote and I have even had one tell me that they can't take my number until after I vote (which I didn't know at the time).

Since I generally welcome people getting involved in the democratic process and live in a place where the mere act of voting is both optional and risk-free, I don't mind the parties knowing that I turned up. Mind you, these days I *know* half the candidates personally anyway, so I probably wouldn't actually need to give my number.

Re: World's Worst Terminal?

"Samsung must have rocks in their corporate heads."

Well, keep banging the rocks together then...

"By all means, contend all you want, but it IS censorship. Whether it's done by some dictators "blue pencil" office or by a court makes no difference. "

By all means lean on your strict dictionary reading all you want, but no normal speaker of English would use the word censorship to describe a court, for example, protecting a vulnerable witness against potential lethal defendants. The word has very negative overtones and so I hope your dictionary quotation is incomplete. When a court balances the rights of various parties in accordance with ages-old practice (as I was suggesting in my original post) it just isn't what the man in the street calls censorship.

Re: But the Other Way Around

"Samsung won't care about Yankees claiming ownership of idea space."

Not least because hardware manufacturers don't need to care about software that *they* aren't selling and that customers install post-purchase.

Re: Dear Sirs

"One of the early promises of .NET was an end to "dependency hell"."

That was the clearest possible indication that the early promises were worthless.

Dependency hell is caused by people releasing new versions of old libraries that have different behaviour from the old ones. Shock news: you can do that in *any* language or platform. Indeed, it would hardly be a platform worth using if you couldn't produce a version 2 that fixed the bugs of version 1. Dependency hell is therefore caused by a lack of testing and discipline by practitioners, not a lack of appropriate technology. Anyone trying to sell you a solution to a behavioural problem is selling snake oil.

Meanwhile, unseen (and probably unused) by most, Microsoft have actually rolled out a thoroughly-horrible-but-functional solution to dependency hell, through the medium of activation contexts and manifests. Nothing particularly to do with .NET, though. They are supported for both native and managed code.

Re: Jerks

Even if the source isn't a duplicate, the optimising compiler will often generate the same object code if it is any good. If you like, it is a search engine. You describe what you want the code to do and it goes away and finds the most efficient implementation, which may of course be the same as it found for someone else's source code. An optimising compiler's specific function is copyright infringement.

Unless of course you can offer one of the following in defence:

I don't write object code -- it was the machine wot did it.

From the compiler's viewpoint, the duplication is a mathematical requirement.

From the end-user's viewpoint, the duplication is an accident.

From a statistical viewpoint, the duplication across the whole code base is insignificant.

IANAL, so I've no idea whether any of the above would stand up. Actually, the evidence of these high-profile spats is that even if I *were* a lawyer, I still wouldn't have any idea. These massive companies with huge legal budgets still seem to blunder into court with no idea about who's going to win. A scientist might take that as experimental evidence that the legal system is unpredictable even to experts in cases where the evidence is not in dispute and therefore the system is not fit for purpose.

Re: Getting more peopel to adopt IPv6

"The protocol should have been designed such that it would take into account that A) device vendors are not going to put even the faintest bit of effort into creating devices that do more than the bare minimum and B) ISPs will not all "follow the rules" and assign whole prefixes."

Sorry, Trevor, but I'm really struggling to see how anyone can design a protocol that is resistant against people just ignoring the protocol and doing something else.

You are right that you have options and your personal priority should be to make things work for you and your customers. I just don't feel that the IPv6 protocols are a sensible target for your anger.

"The response of the ivory tower types? "The community must pressure these organizations into compliance." That was a spectacularly stupid plan for dealing with these issues and it didn't fucking work."

Actually I'd hold your judgement on that. We (as in end-users) haven't really tried that yet. As IPv4-fixated ISPs try increasingly unfriendly options (like CGN) to postpone that job they don't want to do, customers (largely isolated from the problem until very recently) may start to take an interest and, then, letting the market sort itself out may prove to be a perfectly reasonable way forward. We're told that the backbone is already IPv6-friendly, and modern OSes are certainly happy to use it. ISPs and their bundled routers are really the only sticking point and in many parts of the world there is competition in that market.

Re: Well if it involves...

"Yes I'm that shallow."

And for the GCHQ strategy of "stiff upper lip" to succeed, we need *every* IT admin to be "not that shallow". Hmm ... I think I see a teensy-weensy flaw in this plan.

Meanwhile, other parts of the Establishment are trying to increase the numbers of women in IT.

Re: Better alternative

I'm sure the dataset is already polluted beyond redemption (*), so I'm amazed that anyone spends advertising money on web sites, but as long as they do then I don't see why El Reg shouldn't profit from their stupidity. (* I think I saw an ad on El Reg the other week that actually looked interesting and I was surprised because I couldn't remember that *ever* happening before.)

A simpler response is to block third-party cookies. (That presumably blocks all Yahoo! cookies because who the hell actually goes to the site anymore? Every time they get mentioned in a story I think "Are they still going?".) This is an option that has been available in most (if not all) browsers for ages. It is under the end-user's control and there's little the anti-DNT crowd can do about it.

The one thing left to track is your IP address, but everyone is in denial about IPv6 and so most consumers will be behind CGN in a year or two.

Re: Those bloody monks

lower case is fine. it's easier to read and write. that's why it exists. the mistake was failing to deprecate (and eventually stop supporting) upper case. it is particularly absurd in this instance because hardly anyone in the modern world actually understands the languages that the upper case letters were originally used for. the script has actually outlived the language!

Re: Bah!

It's worth the same as a Bitcoin or a Renoir -- whatever you can persuade someone else to pay for it.

Re: I see two possibilities...

I go for option B.

Maybe flying the US flag inside-out is a bit like flying the Union Jack upside-down: a distress signal. Maybe these people need help.

Re: WTFFFFF?!

"Windows 3.11 worked."

No it bloody well didn't. It crashed and burned as soon as fart in its general direction.

You must be thinking of NT 3.1. That worked, slowly.