* Posts by Ken Hagan

8137 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Six months under water and iPhone 4 STILL WORKS

Ken Hagan Gold badge

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.)

Russian Christians boosted by Pussy Riot law spank 'sinful' Apple logo

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@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.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: It's a sad day for religion

Someone who has just been told that the gods have a very poor aim?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: There's nothing wrong with cultural sensitivity

I think it was always the comparison that was considered grossly offensive. The dolls just got caught in the cross-fire. That is, it was easier to remove all the dolls from society than remove all people who were wont to make offensive comparisons. (Perhaps the latter approach would probably have been better in the long term.)

Copper-obsessed BT means UK misses out on ultrafast fibre gold

Ken Hagan Gold badge

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.

Linux on ARM breakthrough to take away Torvalds' arse pain

Ken Hagan Gold badge

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.

Microsoft to devs: Bug users about security … now!

Ken Hagan Gold badge

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".

Rover spots 'possibly artificial' MYSTERY SHINY OBJECT on Mars

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Happy

Re: Is it just me..

Or maybe you need an aerial the size of Jodrell Bank.

Oh, and I thought we established some weeks ago that the actual bit-rate from Mars was pretty shoddy. You may still be getting a better signal, but NASA have more patience.

Campaigners roll out political-correctness Voight-Kampff CAPTCHAs

Ken Hagan Gold badge

And at www.godhatesfags.com ...

...we'll find the same questions, but with different correct answers.

Don't delete that email! Why you must keep biz docs for 6 YEARS

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Personal

If you can just hide stuff by calling it personal, what's the point?

There have been a number of cases of politicians hiding stuff from civil service (or equivalent) retention regimes. It's illegal, but it happens, so surely there would be a presumption that stuffed received at a business email address but labelled "personal" should be inspected. Otherwise the law makes an ass of itself.

US said to designate Assange 'enemy' of the state

Ken Hagan Gold badge

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.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Optional

You're still missing the point about scale and self-sustaining.

You're still missing the point about the OP referring to the response to Pearl Harbour being forgotten.

And yes, it was called WW2 for a reason, but only Britain and US actually fought in all theatres. The enemy didn't.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Optional

"Don't confuse a prior lack of resource with a lack of prior intent." Don't confuse intent with actually doing. A self-sustaining firestorm is a qualitatively different thing from dropping indendiaries. The damage of the latter is limited by what you carry to the target. The damage of the former is limited only by what is already at the target.

"Neatly ignoring that Axis cities were number two on the list of agreed targets after military and industrial buildings." How is that even relevant to the point I was making? Having chosen the target, for whatever reason, they sat down and figured how to attack that target in such a way that the firestorm would be self-sustaining.

"Oh puh-lease, get a clue! Science has always been used to make war more effective..." Nowhere have I said that it wasn't. My original point, which you seemed to miss entirely, was that it was quite ridiculous to describe the US response to Pearl Harbour as "forgotten", like the OP did. I cited LeMay and the A-bomb attacks on the assumption that just about everyone would be familiar with how the US response in the Pacific had proceeded.

Given that LeMay was in charge in the Pacific and the OP was talking about the Pacific, I see nothing particularly mis-leading in saying that LeMay was one of the inventors of the technique. Yes, it evolved over several years and hundreds of people presumably had a hand in it, but history tends to credit the generals with the victories.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Optional

Matt: go do some arithmetic.

The scale of bombing raids against Germany and Japan from about 1944 onwards was quite unlike anything that had gone before. Merely dropping incendiaries and burning the buildings that they hit is *qualitatively* different from sitting down with weather forecasts and theoretical models to plan where incendiaries would be dropped in order to create a self-sustaining storm. (The attack on Tokyo made conscious use of the fact that Tokyo's architecture was mostly wooden and the weather leading up to the attack had been hot and dry.)

People had bombed cities before, but LeMay was quite emphatic at the time that he was trying to step up a gear and exploit the self-sustaining nature of a firestorm to create a new weapon of war.

Perhaps the OP was correct, and the majority of folks *have* forgotten how WW2 ended. That would indeed be very sad. Future generations should be free to decide for themselves whether the allies over-stepped the mark or were merely doing what they had to in order to end the war with the right result. (Personally, I reckon the people best placed to make that judgement were the people fighting the war, so I'm reluctant to criticise even LeMay, although I think his subsequent behaviour during the Cuban Missile Crisis hardly inspires confidence in his general sanity.) However, we should not pretend that the war ended by the heroic efforts of GI Joe. It ended because the systematic annihilation of the homelands of the enemy was treated as a scientific problem and its solution resourced by everything that a fully industrialised society could throw at it.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: @ken Hagan

Ian: I wasn't expressing any moral position over the use of these techniques. I was merely responding to the OP's assertion that it was surprising how few people remembered who won WW2 and how.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
WTF?

Re: Optional

"It is really surprising that no one seems to remember how much of a beat down we gave the Japanese after their actions in '41."

Er, sorry? Are you referring to the war in the Pacific, which saw Curtis LeMay invent carpet bombing and firestorms, and the A-bomb attacks on Japan, against a nation that had basically said to the entire world "We don't care how many of you we kill coz we aren't ever going to be brought to book over it.", only find itself *so* badly broken that *unconditional* surrender to that same world seemed like the better option?

Nah. You couldn't *possibly* be referring to that, coz *everyone* knows about that. You must be referring to some other beat down.

Astroboffins to search for mega-massive alien power plants

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@solidsoup

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

Archaeologists resume Antikythera Mechanism hunt

Ken Hagan Gold badge

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?".

Microsoft puts Patch Tuesday on a diet, fixes Office flaw

Ken Hagan Gold badge

No public exploits, yet

"It should be a relief to many that none of the bulletins requires immediate attention, as none of them address vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild; all were privately reported vulnerabilities. This means that there isn’t any publicly known exploit code for this month’s bulletin cycle."

Well, not until Wednesday, by which time the black hats will have reverse engineered the patches. But I suppose if sys admins are going to lose sleep over the certificate change, it is probably fortunate that there aren't too many other crises in play.

STILL TRUE: Facebook and co to handle taxpayers' ID

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"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.

Skype touts FREE* Wi-Fi across the UK

Ken Hagan Gold badge

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.)

Microsoft releases JavaScript alternative

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "MS have [...] never been a Java house."

You need to look at the history, then. MS implemented the JVM on Windows (not Sun) until they fell out with Sun, at which point Sun started offering their JVM on Windows. The falling out was over incompatibilities between Microsoft's JVM and Sun's. Any such incompatibilities would, of course, reduce Java's "write-once, run-anywhere" property, so incompatibilities were a bad thing if you were Sun and a good thing if you were Microsoft.

It was, of course, pure co-incidence that Microsoft's own VM-based, garbage-collected, object-oriented language with C/C++ syntax happened to be released so soon after the big bust-up with Sun over Java. Oh hang on, no it wasn't, it was a direct consequence of MS hiring Hejlsberg to create a replacement.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@RICHTO

I'm right behind you on the shameful lack of security in current implementations of the JVM. To do that to a virtual ISA that was invented specifically to be provably safe and correct strikes me as a particularly cruel slap in the face to its original designers. However...

...I'm old enough to remember when Javascript was *habitually* disabled by anyone with a clue because every implementation was shot full of holes. There's no reason why the effort now being invested in either C# or this rather silly Javascript-front-end couldn't have been put into engineering a JVM that was actually safe for client-side use. Then you'd have a shiny new statically-typed, object oriented language with several billion existing lines of code and squillions of programmers who knew how to use it.

But no. Apparently we have to invent our *own* wheels. Even in the unlikely event that Microsoft have "round" in mind, this is still the wrong answer.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Actually...

"It's like C#, for the browser."

Excuse me? Some of us are old enough to remember when C# was a shameless rip-off of Java and the only reason for its existence was that MS had fallen out with Sun. It sounds like the 1990s are coming around for another go.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Facepalm

Re: because JavaScript was never intended for the roles it has found itself serving today

A statically typed language with classes, specifically designed to be safe to run in browsers.

Now *there's* an idea. I wonder that no-one appears to have thought of it before.

Paul Allen: Windows 8 'promising' yet 'puzzling'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "Desktop is dead"

Really? In a world where most business PC use is performed by someone sitting at a desk, there is no compelling argument to pay *more* for a system with a smaller screen and RSI-inducing keyboard.

So, what you are really asserting is that the days of the desk job are numbered and our children and grandchildren will work standing up, or wandering about putting in face-time with colleagues. That would probably be very good for the population's general health, but I don't see it as a productivity boost.

My own guess? In the future, the cost of a PC will cease to matter. Everyone who wants a portable device will have one. Every location that would benefit from a larger-but-fixed device will have one. Ergo, sales of "desktop" PCs will fall to about 50% and portables will rise to about 50% and there they will stick.

HMRC: Moving our data to the cloud will make it MORE secure

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Headmaster

IFRAME is your friend.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Can't leave "a cloud" on the train...

Since a username and password combination does fit on a stick, you most certainly *can* leave an entire cloud on the train.

But actually, since they refuse to discuss how they intend to control access, I don't think they can be using "secure" to mean "secure against intrusion". I'm assuming that they mean "secure against disc failures, accidental deletion or total failure of backup policy".

Top admen beg Microsoft to switch off 'Do Not Track' in IE 10

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Significant

Surely the wider significance of this letter is that it would not have been written unless advertisers truly believe that the direction of the default "opt" (opt-in versus opt-out) is hugely significant.

So, next time some weasel trots out the line "We're only screwing people /by default/. They can opt out if they want.", they haven't got a leg to stand on.

OK - who just bought a biz PC? Oh wait, none of you did

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: notebooks have the same power as the majority of desktops

They don't have the same screen sizes either, or keyboards.

Ergonomically, laptops suck unless you *do* actually need to carry them about.

Ubuntu 12.10: More to Um Bongo Linux than Amazon ads

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Is the love mutual?

Does Amazon's downloader now come in 64-bit flavour or do I still have to fire up a 32-bit system to buy their MP3s?

(Oh, and that *is* a rather good bug report. The comments thread took a few posts to get going but got there in the end.)

'Replace crypto-couple Alice and Bob with Sita and Rama'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@Crowley

And there, in fact, you have identified a principle that has been applied to far more fields of knowledge than Alice and Bob have ever been involved with, and which has gone largely unchallenged for a good deal longer than 40 years.

Can we have Brontosaurus back?

Can we redefine the electron to be positive?

Nominet mulls killing off the .co from .co.uk

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"they'll be making the owner aware first and giving them a period of time (days/weeks) to fix it"

But the scenario raised by the OP was "false positives". In this case, the software that needs to be fixed would be Nominet's scanner and consequently it wouldn't matter how long *you* were given to fix it.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Can't they just apply all these security features to the existing domains?"

Indeed. The most disturbing aspect of this proposal is the implication that DNSSEC might be something you have to pay extra for in the UK. Do Nominet intend to drag their feet over signing the existing second level domains?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: .gb

"And Northern Ireland use what exactly?"

I imagine half the population would be happy to use .gb and the other half are probably already registered under .ie so I really can't see this as a problem.

Google exec faces arrest after vid tears strip off Brazilian

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"One can assume you use the native name for any foreign city then?"

No, but even in English, it isn't San Paulo.

Google spikes old MS file formats

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"something like LibreOffice"

I'd think I'd want something *better* than LibreOffice. It's a fine product on its own terms but I find that about 50% of PPT files and a similar proportion of DOC files with complex (*) page layouts get horribly garbled or refuse to open. Having said that, there are two mitigating factors.

Firstly, the same is true for Microsoft's own converter trying to make their "X" formats readable to Office 2003. I don't know if accurate file format documentation exists within MS, or indeed if the various versions of Office over the years have been sufficiently consistent in their interpretation to make such documentation possible, but the evidence suggests that it isn't.

Secondly, "complex" in this context means some hideous abuse of floating text boxes and manual formatting, rather than the far simpler (and more reliable) use of styles and sections. <smug class="git"> I never have trouble with moving my own documents between packages. </smug>

If you see 'URGENT tax rebate download' in an inbox, kill it with fire

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Was this an actual study?

It's not terribly obvious what their sampling method was. They claim that their headline stats are based not on emails sent but on emails actually making it through corporate defenses, which implies either that they've installed monitoring software that counts malicious emails without actually blocking them (thanks!) or they are trawling through post-mortems.

If you only count successful attacks, EXEs will score well because however rare they might be they will have a near 100% success rate when they *do* get through.

Interesting to note that PIFs (remember them?) were still in the top 5 last year. Less interesting to note that ZIP is the number one malware extension by a long way. Clearly they didn't count "URL in the email text" as a vector, although it is probably even more common (and probably more effective) than ZIPs.

'Your app will work on Windows 8 - but please rewrite it anyway'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Scylla and Carybdis

"I've never come across anything - in 15 years of using Windows professionally - that absolutely had to run as a full administrator, usually it's a single registry key, file, or the like."

When I was in the market for children's (under-10s) games a few years ago, I found that just about every one insisted on Admin rights either because it needed to tonk all over my display settings or because it needed to hand-grease my CD-ROM's spindle to support some amazingly clever "anti-backup" mechanism.

I dare say that a few weeks spent playing with shims, registry keys, Process Explorer and the like would have yielded solutions in most cases. I'm prepared to bet that most of the general public just granted admin rights to their toddler's account and bought the software again when the disc got scratched beyond recovery.

Designing apps to avoid admin access SHOULD have been part of the Windows landscape for the last 20 years. (The security model dates from about '92.) Microsoft were still shipping violations about 10 years ago. The games market may be OK now (haven't looked) but certainly wasn't 10 years ago. If you've been fine for 15 years, you've been working in a fairly restricted portion of the marketplace.

"and really people relying upon this kind of legacy software should totally understand their software by now and know how to install it properly."

Is this the general public we're talking about? The same people whose existence made Microsoft hesitate for so many years to remove AutoRun?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@RICHTO

Too bad about those downvotes, but it does point to a significant failing in *every* OS.

Even if the facilities are there, only techies know they even exist on their own system, hardly anyone knows they exist on the "rival" system as well, and almost no-one understands them well enough to actually use them.

The BIG unsolved problem in computer interfaces is presenting existing capabilities in a language that normal people can understand.

Forget "touch" or "waving body parts at the screen" -- the next leap forward in UI design will be *words*. In particular, words that are sufficiently simple to understand but also sufficiently rich to convey the concepts needed.

Don't panic: Arctic methane emissions have been going on for ages

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Oh dear.

Most, if not all, of the mass extinction events in Earth's history are correlated with significant changes in ocean circulation driven by continental drift. In particular, really hot periods seem to be associated with having an open water channel around the equator. Right now there is the little thing called Africa in the way. The only significant threat to Africa in the short term is the likelihood that it will rift (North-South) at some point in the next few million years.

To return to the whack-a-mole analogy, we may have several reasons to fear a mass exinction is coming (habitat loss, pollution, ...) but actually I don't think that climate change is one of them. I just wish the so-called environmentalist movement would stop crying wolf over climate (and let the climatologists learn their subject without mass media coverage of every publication) and concentrate on the major ecological problems that seem both beyond dispute and within our ability to fix (like habitat loss and pollution).

Fans revolt over Amazon 'adware' in Ubuntu desktop search results

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Opportunity and motive?

"Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already."

I don't personally build my systems from source, but I take considerable comfort from knowing that quite a few people do. It would be Quite Hard for Mr Shuttleworth to abuse his "root privileges" and put something dodgy in the OS without being noticed. In contrast, we have no source code for how he processes the search data and deals with Amazon, so it would be Quite Easy to abuse that. (That's the opportunity.)

Then there's the fact that "a hard drive" generally contains vast amounts of worthless noise and whereas "my search expressions" are actually designed (by me) to be as rich an indicator as possible of what I want. It's the difference between searching my bookshelf and reading my personal letters. (That's the motive.)

Verizon CFO: 'Unlimited' data is just a word

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: deleted posts

I always assume that a deleted post is the initial reaction of someone who eventually calms down enough to write one of the later posts. If that is the case here, we may assume that someone needed a *lot* of calming down.

I can' t say I blame them. If "unlimited" is just a word, then so are "honest", "crooked", "criminal", "guilty" and "sacked".

I wonder if this guy's tax returns are "just numbers".

Google Go language gets used: For file-scrambling trojan, though

Ken Hagan Gold badge

How do they know?

If it is compiled, how do they know the original language? Is this the same group of researchers who speculated a while back about some new, "secret" language used by malware authors, which turned out to be C (but with unfamiliar compiler options so that the researchers were flummoxed by the generated code).?

Scottish islanders' wave power hopes sunk by 'massive costs'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "massive costs"

It does look like at least one side (and possibly both) is engaged in creative accounting. As far as Joe Public is concerned, the figure of interest is how much the scheme costs *in total* to generate electricity over there and deliver it over here. If that figure is too large, that particular green scheme is uneconomic and shouldn't be allowed to go ahead at the expense of better alternatives.

I'm sure we can all draw up proposals for low-cost energy if we aren't obliged to include all the costs. In particular, if you don't include the costs of building the station and clearing up afterwards, I think a pretty phenomenal case can be made for nuclear, coz the actual fuel is pretty cheap.

Made for each other: liquid nitrogen and 1,500 ping-pong balls

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@Sabroni

" You seem to think that the way to restrict the numbers is to make sure that only the rich can afford to go to university."

I feel I have to butt in here and say that didn't get that sentiment from the OP. On the contrary, they seemed to be bemoaning the fact that we had gone from 10 to 50 and *as a consequence* had to ditch the previous system.

Senate hears Microsoft and HP avoided billions in US taxes

Ken Hagan Gold badge

@Armando

'Remind me again what is meant by "paying their own fair share"?'

It's living in a society where there are things like police and doctors, and where the people around you were able to do some of these things and consequently haven't turned out frothing at the mouth like the extras in Mad Max.

If you want to live in a shit-hole with no public services, there are other countries you could emigrate to.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Happy

@Jon Press

"profit is essentially the inflexion point on the graph at which spending on accountants outstrips the reduction in tax."

Priceless! Thanks.

Deep, deep dive inside Intel's next-generation processor

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: FMA FTW

Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes. If you are issuing FMAs at carefully chosen moments to manipulate the least significant bits of your floating point values, you are writing the very small proportion of numerical programming that is capable of delivering exact results. I'm well aware that this can be done if you have assembly-level control over the rounding of your primitive operations. You are also probably writing a support library for the use of someone who will not have to care about these things.

However, the vast majority of numerical algorithms deliver results whose imprecision depends on the input data and is considerably greater than the machine precision. If one of *these* algorithms gives qualitatively different results when you switch hardware or let your high-level language compiler optimise a little, the cause is almost certainly an ill-conditioned problem rather than the hardware or the compiler.

The authors of such code still have *some* sanity expectations from the underlying arithmetic, but typically don't have specific requirements on the accuracy of operations. Rather, it is stuff like "(a+b)/2 should not be outside the range [a,b]" or "if a>b then I can divide by a-b without getting a divide by zero exception". There were some arithmetics in the 50s and 60s that failed at this level but IEEE took some care to eliminate them.

Hapless Kate topless, toothless law useless

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The elephant in the room

Since the snaps were apparently taken from about a mile away, the list of potential assassins would be fairly small.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_recorded_sniper_kills for a list.