Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
My thoughts exactly, but if I'm reading the linked article correctly, the figures being compared are the *hardware* costs grouped by OS, which strikes me as a perverse statistic to quote. It is certainly not possible to infer from this any measure of market share for Windows versus Linux.
"(i.e. stored such that they didn't 'revert back to normal after a few cycles'...)"
Hold on a minute there. This is news *precisely because* no-one has ever seen an atom that was not at its normal size. And I'm talking normal to an extraordinary degree of precision here, since we've been measuring atomic radii and firing X-rays at crystals for a century now, and a lot (most?) of physical chemistry would be very different if atoms weren't as interchangeable as lego bricks.
I'd say that's a *pretty big hint* that nature doesn't let you store "inflated" atoms without a constant pumping from an external energy supply.
Yes, and then they had to go and spoil it with some brainless wittering about quantum computing and storage. (Instant fail --> if your technique needs a laser, then it will never be smaller than the wavelength of the light, which is substantially larger, per bit, than existing tech.)
Hey guys, you scaled an atom by about 4 orders of magnitude. You don't need to tick the "relevance" box. Just wallow in your awesomeness and be done with.
Yeah, just like you can guess the domain name from the movie's title.
Get real, anyone looking for the site of a movie will use a search engine, or read the advert.
Of course, this is a killer argument against gTLDs generally. All the really obvious domain names went about twenty years ago. Ever since then, the only reason to have a meaningful DN is so that *after* your customer has used a search engine to find the site, they will reckon that it "feels legit". Placing it underneath a reasonable root is part of that process.
In the case of films, placing it under the studio's DN makes lots of sense because *only the studio can do that*. In point of fact, creating an entirely separate DN is stupid, because even *I* can do that. It just screams "unofficial site". But studio bosses do this anyway, presumably because they've got their brains in their dicks and pharmaceutically enhanced egos to nurture.
Dunno, to be honest, since I don't write AV code. But I can speculate.
Heuristics are unreliable, so a system based on heuristics needs lots of ticks on its check-list before it dares to flag a program as a virus. Therefore, small changes in behaviour may well be enough to get past heuristics, unless the heuristics are cranked up to Total Paranoia mode, in which case the heuristics probably start flagging up the OS as a virus. (Guess: this is already happening and is the real reason behind the occasional tendency of some AV offerings to brick Windows systems.)
Signatures similarly can't afford to be too short, or else legitimate applications will, by chance, have the same sequence of instructions. Almost any modification, and that certainly includes patching by another virus, might be enough to invalidate signature-based checks, possibly even for both viruses.
On the other hand, this is not a new phenomenon. It has *always* been possible for one virus to infect another. Therefore, I think we already know how effective AV software will be, because it already *is* dealing with this problem.
"BitDefender doesn't have historical data to go on."
"All of the malware hybrids analysed by BitDefender so far have been created accidentally."
"BitDefender carried out its study after finding a sample of the Rimecud worm that was infected by the Virtob file infector."
Erm, so BitDefender have made the "discovery" that viruses infect files and the separate discovery that (on an infected machine) some of those files will be other viruses or worms. Furthermore, they apparently *haven't* made the discovery that usually this is done on purpose. (Modern malware generally combines several different strategies to maximise the chances of success. Even in the popular press, virus descriptions generally make this point.)
So in the absence of any clue, or historical data, they are announcing that the sky is falling. Sheesh! Even by the standards of AV press releases, this one is pretty lame.
Try Xubuntu and wave bye-bye to all those "user experience" designers, returning to something that just works and then gets the heck out of the way so you can do your job.
Are screens different now? Are keyboards? Are mice? No, so why should Xerox's orginal concept (that has so obviously made computers accessibly to the unwashed masses) suddenly require a rethink?
Methinks Ubuntu has made the same mistake that Microsoft did. After years of bringing PC operating systems up to snuff, there's actually very little *visible* work left to do. (We can argue about kernel facilities later, but the average Joe is never going to upgrade because of a new kernel feature.) So in order to pull in the punters for the next version, they're just changing visible things for change's sake.
Of course, when Microsoft did it, they were the first. It was a daft idea and they've back-tracked (adding more menu-like features to their new ribbon). Ubuntu have Microsoft's experience to learn from and apparently just can't.
Substitute "a high-ranking person" for "US govt" and I think we have the only explanation that makes sense.
From a pure security viewpoint, McKinnon allowed the US to learn *without penalty* that their systems were wide open. However, those lax practices were somebody's fault and presumably that person's career progression stopped at that point. To judge from the subsequent brouhaha, either that person wasn't busted down to private, or they have friends still in high places. Either way, the whole business smacks of petty revenge.
And *that* should be a concern to the *current* administration. Somebody somewhere is using the system to pursue a personal vendetta rather than whatever their job is.
Theoretically nothing. For example, El Reg *could* decide tomorrow that they were going to sell all the personal info I provided when I signed up.
In practice, I haven't provided much info and most forums don't ask for much, so there is never going to be much to sell. With Facebook, however, the whole point of the site is (more or less) to centralise personal info in one spot.
Also in practice, forum managers don't but Facebook does.
And another thing...
Most of the article focuses on blocking incoming nasties, but El Reg carries stories every few months about some clot who has made their own video nasty and unwisely posted it to the waiting world (either by internet or phone). Is that a sufficiently serious risk that it is worth blocking outgoing content? Or do you just grab 'em by the lugs when they're young and force them to read *every* such story on El Reg until the hard-won experience of others sinks into their heads.
"One imagines that once the children can configure their own DNS then they're probably old enough to cope with the consequences."
Small nitpick, whilst we're collecting requirements for this project. -> Once the *oldest* child can configure their own DNS, you'd better hope that the youngest child who has access to the same device can cope with the consequences.
That doesn't surprise me. I've had ppsx documents that Microsoft's own converter (for Office 2003 and earlier) couldn't cope with. I imagine Open Office (or Libre Office) is "playing by the spec" and consequently covers 99% of cases fairly well, but it only takes some author set in their ways to have something that doesn't work well built into their standard templates and suddenly none of their documents are convertible.
I'm well aware of what a textbook is. I can walk into my local bookshop and see thousands (one of the perks of Cambridge life). That's more ways of presenting the information than any normal student could possibly get through in their college years.
But I'm also aware that for every textbook, there is now a free website doing the same job. This is new in the last generation or so. For the previous 500 years, the alternative to paying for a textbook was "nothing". Now it is "several different presentations of variable quality". The facts will be the same in all. (Well, perhaps not, but that's true of textbooks too and cross-checking is far easier online.) The presentations may or may not hit the mark for you, but if not then there are others to try, all for free.
I'm not saying text-book authors shouldn't be rewarded. I'm just pointing out that they have to be a damn sight better at their jobs than they did in my day if they want to win customers. The market has changed, but the industry players don't seem to have noticed yet. Given the willful blindness of the music industry, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by this, but for Apple to have failed to notice seems extraordinary.
Maybe it's all the Web 2.0 twitter-fluff. Maybe everyone has forgotten that Web 1.0 was designed for the dissemination of information, published by the masses, for the masses, all at such low cost that there isn't room for a profit margin. (Actually, who am I kidding? Hardly anyone in the publishing industry seems to be aware of Sir Tim's original design goals. If they were, they wouldn't keep banging on about how "participation" was a "new feature of <some dross site or other>".)
"That said, any effort to lighten the backpacks of students overloaded with hefty textbooks, along with making it easier for textbooks to be updated as scientific progess and historical events warrant, should be given a fair shake."
It's a solved problem. We call it "The Internet". Perhaps you've heard of it. Apple's product managers clearly haven't. Perhaps their walled garden is so effective that they've forgotten the outside world exists.
Factual material lends itself *extremely* well to websites because it has an extremely long shelf-life and no copyright protection.
If something is true, it tends to remain true. This is provably so in mathematics and certainly true in practice in science and engineering until you are well past undergraduate level. Indeed, it would be rather scandalous if this weren't true across the board, since that would imply that we were teaching students something that won't be any use in twenty years time /even in that academic discipline/.
Similarly, if something is true, you can't copyright a statement of the fact. Others are therefore free to take "the truth" and present it in their own way on their own web-site. Experience shows that quite large numbers of people do this quite voluntarily and there are whole web-sites devoted to small articles about stuff.
And lastly, increasing numbers of lecturers put their course synopses online. These summarise exactly what students need to know for exams, which is a convenience you'll never get in a textbook. (I'm assuming that most students, for most of their courses, mostly just want to pass the exam and move on to the next stage. Is that too cynical of me?)
Why limit yourself to 10 years? Those arguing that the sky is about to fall in seem to be pretty confident about how many minutes we'll be out by 2100, so why not write up a schedule for the next 90 years and revise it in 2060?
This "six months notice" business arises from a desire to keep UTC and solar time within 1 second of each other. Nobody outside the clocks community gives a monkeys about that level of accuracy. Loosen that to about 10 seconds or a minute and surely it all becomes more predictable.
Amused by: "The King's College study shows a lack of respect for what women say."
Sure, coz the existence of an anatomical structure is best determined by what someone says, particularly the one person on the planet who is physically incapable of looking. (Or can French women do that? I think we should be told.)
The point of the FFT is that it turns an O(n^2) algorithm into an O(n.log n) algorithm. For interesting problems, that's a factor of hundreds, thousands or millions. Problems that were far too large to even consider running on the largest supercomputer money would ever be able to buy during your lifetime suddenly fitted onto a machine with the computational grunt of Bjarne Stroustrup's rice cooker.
What is described here sounds like premultiplying the big-O by a slightly smaller number, at some loss in accuracy. It may prove to be useful, but it's not in the same league as the original discovery.
Actually we don't. That would only deal with the bits large enough to justify a multi-million dolar flight, and *those* are not the dangerous ones because they are much the easiest to track. Also, since this stuff is a worry *because* it is dangerous, you'd have to be pretty nuts to propose using a manned craft to hoover it up.
Heh! You know as well as I do who was right, and why.
What engineers call a backup, the market calls inefficiency.
Once again, politicians who have spent their entire careers singing the praises of free market economics demonstrate that they haven't the first idea of what it actually means.
Icon: The house of commons in 2017 when the lights start to go out.
With hindsight, that was either the wrong phrase or not nearly a long enough phrase.
To audiences of the time, Star Wars was mind-blowing. Not high-brow art, but quite mind-blowing in terms of sensory experience. The special effects were so pervasive that they ceased to attract the attention. There was hardly a scene in the last 15 minutes that wasn't blue-screened several layers deep. (Blue-screen meant something else then.) That was new and even without hindsight the audiences of the day knew they were looking at the first of something new rather than more of the same.
Kids today can't watch Star Wars and have that experience, because the effects (even after George has finished fiddling) aren't "vastly better than anything else they've ever seen before". (Maybe if you looked them up from birth and only let them watch Star Trek, 2001, Buck Rogers and Forbidden Planet for their first 10 years.)
*Maybe* there has been some more recent film that has had the same sensory impact, in which case there might be "something modern" you could show to your children to see the same effect. Then again, maybe not. I can't think of one.
You've already got *your* memory and neither you nor Lucas can have *my* memory.
Furthermore, I suspect that seeing it for the first time, as a child, probably isn't something that can be burned to disc. The closest you can get is to have kids of your own and watch them whilst they watch something modern.
"Lastly, and specifically for the banking sector, I'd be very surprised if .bank was not requested, and if run correctly, could ONLY be used by a legit bank."
In the UK, I believe there's a *.ltd.uk (or something) domain that you can only get if Companies House are convinced that you are legit. The intention is exactly what you suggest and it already exists, with the additional guarantee that you are a UK company and can therefore be taken to a court in the UK by a UK customer who is unhappy.
None of the UK banks use it. Lloyds TSB, for example, use a .com.
Indeedy, and part of the reason for that is that .uk domains are subject to my local law whereas .com domains are subject to the whims of some judge in Kentucky. Anyone outside the US who has been training users to suspect addresses outside .com should apologise immediately.
And on the subject of the article, presumably *.idiot addresses will be subject to the jurisdiction of the country of whoever paid the cash. For the average end-user, that's just unknown.
Pure speculation, not least since (as already noted) various natural processes release far more energy and the Earth has been getting large lumps of rock thrown at it for millions of years without serious consequences.
When Alvarez wanted to turn the idea of nuclear winter into a serious theory of mass extinction, he had to posit a lump of rock that would release *far* more energy than the world's nuclear arsenals.
And even that (or mass volcanism, or whatever) didn't leave just cockroaches.
"50 years of nuclear, and a lot of that time with enough bombs to destroy every living thing except maybe a few cockroaches."
Dunno what *that's* based on. The scenarios I've read never even managed to extinguish us, let alone any other part of the ecosystem. I did once read what might be required to accomplish what you claim. It seemed to require many orders of magnitude more bombs than we were ever likely to have, *and* some sort of mechanism to repeat the exercise every few million years.
Of course, if your sole objective is to screw *humanity*, you are better off weaponising something like ebola. Bio-weapons are *much* scarier than big bombs.
Erm, I'd have thought that wikipedia was one of the highest profile cases where the site depends for its very existence on the goodwill of *a* web community, and technical ownership is no use if the content dries up. Then again, as far as I'm aware, Jimbo realises this and did consult fairly widely amongst those who contribute.
That's funny. The version I read is at .org. Have I been spoofed?
But yeah, blocking access only to people in the USA would have been proportionate *and* served to demonstrate to the US that even if they screw up their own competitiveness, the rest of the world does not necessarily have to follow.
That would be the devil in the details, then. AFAIK, predicting the need for leap seconds is not practical if you want UTC and solar time to be precisely aligned. The Earth wobbles and no-one is quite sure in advance how much it is going to shake next year.
However ... over the very long term it is certainly possible (which is why people are making predictions for the next millennium or two) so a reasonable compromise would appear to be: "Legislate for some Gregorian-style fudge that will work for the next thousand years or so and just accept that you might be several seconds out every now and again.".
This has the enormous benefit that someone who burns the current rules into a ROM for a non-networked, innaccessible device, doesn't get caught short by an earthquake on the other side of the planet.
Windows has always supported third-party file systems. For ext4, I think you want http://www.ext2fsd.com/.
'Course, that's a little different from Microsoft implementing it and making sure it is as thoroughly tested as their own NTFS drivers. An official implementation of ext2, for example, would be a serious threat to their "FAT patent" revenue, as discussed on these forums from time to time.
From the blog: "The NTFS features we have chosen to not support in ReFS are: named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes, and quotas."
Microsoft never did like hard-links, but presumably there will be complaints from the POSIX crowd about this. As for the rest of the list, "Meh!".
@Sean: That downvote, eh? Ya gotta laugh.
@Downvoter: Seriously, what gives with you? Sean merely stated the known facts about Win8 on ARM and pointed out that it addresses the point raised by the previous poster. Where I come from, that's a constructive contribution to the discussion. Where the heck are you coming from?
Presumably those benefits were calculated by placing a value on human life and health. Is the broad range caused by the difference between "US health insurance" values and "third world dictatorship" values.
Actually, I'm pretty sure there are places out there that wouldn't value a human life anywhere near $700. That's a lifetime's accumulated wages in a Yorkshiremen sketch. Why spend so much improving the quality of life when you can just rape your next door neighbour and make another one?
"Then when I'd got them all applied and disabled all auto patching because I want to select when I get them, it started downloaded more behind my back."
You want to learn how to disable all auto patching then. Try reading what's on the screen when it offers the choice of "download and notify" versus "just notify" versus "none". Unless you've already been rooted, the very last of these most certainly doesn't carry on downloading stuff.
"Other Operating systems don't put you through this torture. Is it any wonder that many people don't apply any patches at all?"
Really? You try installing a Linux distro from the same era as the initial Win7 release. You'll get *lots* of patches offered, including kernel updates that require a reboot, only to be followed by fresh app updates now "unblocked" because the kernel has gone in. Depending on your distro, you'll also be offered a major distro upgrade or two, which aren't the default option. If you are unfortunate enough to use Ubuntu, you'll find that you can't do a distro update to the very latest in a single jump. You'll need at least two steps.
Microsoft *do* suck, but advocates of rival operating systems need to get their facts right if they want to be taken seriously.
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