* Posts by Ken Hagan

8135 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Intel tock blocked for good: Tick-tock now an oom-pah-pah waltz

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Beginning of the end for Intel?

"x86 is ultimately a 40 year old ISA and has few redeeming features."

Intel's original floating point model hasn't seen light of day for about a decade, having been superseded by SSE2. Both integer and floating point arithmetic models have been evolving since the mid-90s with MMX and various other TLAs. A modern desktop chip also devotes more than half its area to an integrated streaming processor that owes nothing to x86. Lastly, since the early 90s, those x86 instructions have been translated and re-ordered on-the-fly into whatever was convenient inside the chip. A modern x86 ALU has dozens of registers and the L1 cache is only a couple of clocks away.

To be fair, everyone else's chips are the same. x86 lost the ISA wars against the RISC chips, but Intel responded with the ISA-less Pentium Pro and ISA hasn't mattered since then.

Microsoft to add a touch of Chrome to Edge

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Just say no!

If the basic browser supported HTML properly, you wouldn't need extensions.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"The problem for Microsoft is that take up of Edge by users is very, very poor."

That would be because the version that shipped with Win10 was so feature poor (*). Most people I know who have tried Win10 have asked themselves, or someone else, "How do I go back to using IE instead of this Edge crap?". Having found the answer, they are not inclined to try Edge again unless they are bored and curious and that's no way to win market share.

(* Extreme case in point: during the beta, I discovered that Edge simply did not run in non-cloudy accounts and therefore I *had* to figure out how to disable it in favour of IE for *all* web content. Having done this, I have no idea when (or whether) Edge was finally able to run in a local account. MS put this application out to public beta *way* too early.)

Telling your wife why you were fired is the only punishment

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I ran into this sort of thing once

"hen I saw the directory PORN with several sub-directories. I noticed a couple with names like GAY and BESTIALITY, and I decided I really did not want to view any of the content."

As someone has already noted, even viewing CP makes you a criminal in some places, so if you do have something to hide (like a passwords file, or financial data) then hiding it in a directory that any sane person is reasonably afraid to enter is (possibly) a good idea. You can also encrypt it if you like, on the grounds that anyone smart enough to decrypt it is probably smart enough to understand how bad it could be to decrypt something before you know what it is.

Here's what an Intel Broadwell Xeon with a built-in FPGA looks like

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Someone doesn't understand programmable logic at all !

"... the closest analogy to sofware would be to think of code where in theory all lines of code have the potential to be executed concurrently with no sequential flow or order whatsoever."

As it happens, I'm fine with that. Like many software developers, I *started* from a mentality where a=a+1 is Just Plain Wrong and I've spent the last decade or two so looking for easy ways to make my code less sequential.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: timing seems interesting....

Well, duh! But if you aren't switching to Win10 in the next year or two then you are presumably switching away from Windows altogether, because the older versions will go the way of XP in a few years anyway. (8.0 is already dead. 7 and 8.1 are on life support and the ongoing saga of Windows Updates makes it perfectly clear to me that MS would switch them off tomorrow if they thought they could do it without being sued.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: One thing I don't understand is, why?

"Except that programming tools for FPGAs suck donkey balls big-time."

That's partly because embedded hardware designers have no clue whatsoever about programming languages. (Half of them are still push home-grown C compilers, FFS.) I expect that will change once Linux and Windows define an API to let anyone write new tools.

Yes, there *will* be Visual Basic for FPGAs, but there may also be rather nice innovations.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: timing seems interesting....

"On the other hand I'd like to see how it works in a virtualised environment. My guess is simply that it doesn't and it won't be supported regardless of either host or guest OS."

It won't, to begin with. However, unlike GPUs (the nearest comparison) the on-chip FPGA is arriving after virtualisation has become mainstream and is clearly targetting server acceleration just as much as workstations. I expect once Linux and Windows settle on their respective APIs, we will find that those APIs have been designed with virtualisation in mind and the various virtualisation providers now support them.

Since this *is* the direction of Intel's designs, it would be pretty suicidal for anyone not to follow this roadmap.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: timing seems interesting....

"How many of these fpga's can run on Windows boxes?"

With a suitable driver, all of them.

It's no different from putting a new GPU on the chip, which Intel appear to do with each iteration. Someone has to write the bare metal Kaby Lake support, but once it is done the applications can just use DirectCompute or whatever you prefer.

There will be a DirectFPGA. MS will write the driver, based on early information from Intel who have no reason not to tell them. You will write the applications that use it.

Linus Torvalds wavers, pauses … then gives the world Linux 4.5

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: PS/2 Mice

I see no reason why an optical PS/2 mouse might not have a usable lifetime of 20 years or more, so as long as there is a socket on the back to plug it into, there will be people who use them. Why buy a new mouse just because you bought a new PC?

Go DevOps before your bosses force you to. It'll be easier that way

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I am glad I'm retired

"any article about a new technology which promised to do anything 200x faster would be heading for the recycle bin"

...and any company whose managers didn't do that would quickly find all their best staff heading for the door.

So you wanna build whopping pools of PCIe flash? Say no more, whisper Intel, Facebook

Ken Hagan Gold badge

That FPGA thing ...

I have no figures, but my gut feeling is that there are quite a few applications where a relatively small amount of custom hardware would make a phenomenal difference, particularly if it was really close to the CPU. (The "next" video compression standard, where "next" is "the one after this chip was made" springs to mind, but cryptography and even funny kinds of string searching are probably fruitful areas to explore.)

So in 5 years time are we all going to look back at 2016 and think "Gosh, they were still wasting 2/3 of the die area on a GPU that was old-school before they'd even finished the design. What fools they were!" ?

SQL Server for Linux: A sign of Microsoft's weakness. Sort of

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Active Directory on linux

I'm sure MS haven't forgotten that. This might be part of the response. If we ever actually see the year of Linux on the desktop, MS are totally up a gum tree unless the rest of their product line runs on Linux.

What do people think will be Windows' market share on the client desktop in 10 years time? Yes, there are lots of Win32 apps that will run on nothing else, but with each year that passes the older apps are less important and newer apps are more portable.

(Afterthought: and if MS *do* need to go multi-platform then it is best to start the process whilst they still have a cash cow or two to finance it.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"The only surprise for me is that it's SQL Server going to Linux first. I honestly thought they'd port the cash cow that is Office to Linux desktops first."

Perhaps they are testing the waters. Perhaps all their product teams are /considering/ this sort of move and the SQL team were asked to try it first. (I imagine that a DB engine is much easier to port than a very graphical desktop product.)

Perhaps Active Directory will be next: either the server-side (which is another GUI-less pile of code that might be easy to port) or (more interestingly) the client-side. That is, AD support for managing Linux desktops. Quite a few people must have wondered how hard it would be to migrate "email and web" seats over to a Linux desktop. Increasing numbers are actually doing it. Providing decent AD support might be the only way MS can retain any of that business. (I note that MS have basically given up on trying to make money out of Windows client licences, so logically they shouldn't actually care about people switching to a Linux desktop as long as they continue to run MS products on the server.)

2016: Bad USB sticks, evil webpages, booby-trapped font files still menace Windows PCs

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Compare and contrast...

And yet, oddly enough, Edge still seems to have *fewer* features than IE and more rough edges (bugs). It's almost as though it was the *newer* code in IE (which they kept) that was most flaky, and the older stuff (the dropping of which was the official reason to bring Edge in to being) was actually (eventually?) fairly reliable.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Hmmm..

"If I could just find a way to do without Flash - too many sites still rely on it :(. "

Just tell the site owner that they've lost your business because friends don't ask friends to drop their trousers and bend over.

Microsoft has made SQL Server for Linux. Repeat, Microsoft has made SQL Server 2016 for Linux

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Joke

Re: Help us Mr Torvalds!

Sadly, Mr Torvalds has never expressed an interest in gratuitous breakage.

Happily, Mr Poettering will probably help out, knowingly or otherwise.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"It would just be a hassle to migrate."

If only DB clients all used a common language to talk to the server. Something with a proper standard behind it, ideally established years ago so that everyone had correct implementations by now.

(Edit: Yes it can't be *that* simple or else there wouldn't be so many people apparently stuck on the most expensive provider, but speaking as someone with no DB background it does appear odd. On paper, changing your DBMS should be no harder than changing your browser or compiler.)

E-borders will be eight years late and cost more than £1bn

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Stepping back for a moment...

...it would, I think, be instructive to gather up the costs and delivery dates of all government projects initially estimated at over 10 million.

My guess is that that you'd find that the cheaper ones more or less came in on time (plus or minus a predictable factor, which would be worth learning about) and on budget (ditto). Above that there would be a region of flakiness, where the initial estimates were just wrong, but the project eventually delivers. Above *that*, there would be projects that just eat cash indefinitely and never deliver anything of any value. (Most are eventually "declared finished", but closer inspection reveals that this is bollocks.)

I'd *really* like the government to learn where that second threshold is, and just refuse to begin projects that are initially estimated above it. Even if it simply resulted in large projects being broken into smaller ones it would be worth it because the smaller ones could be properly tracked and cancelled or put back out for tender if necessary.

Based on several decades of rolling my eyes from the sidelines, I'd guess that the second threshold is (at today's prices) somewhere around a billion or so. Any project larger than that is pretty much doomed.

Uncle Sam's boffins stumble upon battery storage holy grail

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Maybe we're think about this the wrong way

Everyone is trying to solve the problem of storing energy so that they can smooth out the differences between baseload (~50%) and peak load. That's proving hard, but wasting energy is really easy, so perhaps we should just up our baseload generating capacity to the current peak and arrange to dump the surplus. For the dumping, you'd need an energy-intensive process that could be rate-switched up or down as quickly as consumer demand went down or up. (Electrolysis of water to drive all those hydrogen cars might do.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Has anyone

They'll tax electricity. It's such an obvious idea that they won't even have to think of it.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Electric Cars: Rich People

In fairness, the kWh is a ridiculous unit for energy and has probably done more to confuse and put off secondary school pupils than anything else in the science syllabus.

A Norris-Double-decker-bus is much better (though smaller).

Facebook can block folks using pseudonyms in Germany – court

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: So which Irish law requires users to disclose their real name?

"Does everyone with a middle name on their birth certificate who doesn't include it on their Facebook account flout this law?"

In the UK, there is no such thing as a real name. Long-standing practice is that you can call yourself whatever you like as long as it isn't for fraudulent purposes. It follows that anything written on your birth certificate is purely advisory (since *you* certainly didn't choose it).

Since Ireland inherited much of its law from the UK, it may well be that there is no such notion as "real name" in Irish law.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"telling any site that breaks local laws to just host abroad and nothing will happen"

Umm, that sounds perfectly reasonable to me. If some guy in the Middle East starts spouting "all Westerners should be exterminated" then my options are to tolerate it or to desist from connecting to that site. Contrary to what some (usually quite lowly) courts occasionally decide, I don't have the option of enforcing my local laws in a foreign country.

It's not a new problem. It pre-dates the internet by centuries and has been satisfactorily solved for almost as long. I find it extraordinary that otherwise intelligent people seem to think it is some new, unsolved, internet-specific issue.

'$5bn for Slack?! I refuse to pay!' You don't pay – and that's its biggest problem

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"They are betting if they throw enough money at this, their dog will become not just that sector’s big dog but its only dog."

Ahh! You mean like how MySpace completely cornered the market for social media, making it well worth Rupert's $580m, only for the world at large to demonstrate that the Internet makes it *really* easy to switch "provider". Hmmm. I'd value Slack at below zero, since it presumably costs something to run and there's bugger all hope of ever getting a return on the investment.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Speaking as someone who knows bugger all about Slack..

"What advantage does it confer over traditional email?"

Pros: Someone else is responsible for backing up all those conversations you had.

Cons: Someone else is responsible for backing up all those conversations you had.

Of course, you'll know that Slack has really arrived when the bad guys put the effort in to figure out how to send phishing messages.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Paris Hilton

"...it has been absolutely brutal on my productivity"

Is that something that either I or my employer should be pleased about?

We're doing SETI the wrong and long way around, say boffins

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: IANAA (I'm not an Astronomer)

Actually, here's a better answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_Sagittarii#/media/File:Sagittarius_IAU.svg

I think the ETZ in the article is a band either side of the Ecliptic, which is shown on the chart. It's a narrow band and probably no thicker than the blue line! The source of the WOW signal is the Chi Saggitarri group which is next to the word ECLIPTIC. So ... outside, but not by much.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: IANAA (I'm not an Astronomer)

Off the top of my head, no. WP reports that "The declination was unambiguously determined to be −27°03′ ± 20′." and I think the Earth Transit Zone mentioned in the article is a circle at an angle of 23.5° to the equatorial plane (declinaion 0), plus or minus 0.262°.

Whether this is off by 3.5° or 50° or something in between depends on the right acension in ways that exceed my unpracticed brain's pay grade. Since guessing wrong on the internet is probably the best way to find out, I'll guess that it is the former and so the WOW signal probably came from a source lying close to the Earth's orbital plane, but a few degrees outside the ETZ.

Disclaimer: I am not an astronomer either. (Yes, it shows, I know.)

Ofcom should be the BBC's ultimate overlord, UK.gov told

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"AKAIK most of its 'good programs' are made by external companies."

Possibly true, but those external companies wouldn't have a customer for their programs without the BBC's "telly tax".

Maybe telly doesn't matter anymore, what with infinite YouTube videos on every possible subject, but if you actually want quality programs then the only proven method for producing them on a large scale over a prolonged period is to force everyone to help pay for them.

'Boss, I've got a bug fix: Nuke the whole thing from orbit, rewrite it all'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: C is a glorified assembler

"all of this to be compatible with platforms long gone and forgotten"

It didn't even get this bit right. If a function is missing on your platform, your response should be to provide *exactly* the function that is missing and *only* use your implementation on that platform, so that everyone else is allowed to enjoy bug fixes as and when their platform provides them.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Beastly, Just Beastly

"There's a reason gotos get used in highly complex C projects such as the linux kernel and its not because the coders are amateurs."

Well actually that's a whole other can of worms you've got there, because the choice of C as the implementation language is highly questionable. For pretty much the entire lifetime of Linux as a project, a C++ compiler has been able to generate equivalent code with "no overhead for the stuff you don't use" and using RAII would eliminate most uses of goto, reduce the number of lines of code and be a darn sight more reliable when extra code gets added a year or two later by a different programmer.

But no. Instead we get a tired old list of excuses about how someone once heard that their friend had compiled a 10-line program (which on inspection turns out to be a carefully crafted straw man of no possible utility in the real world) and been rewarded with a 100KB executable, or some random wibbling about how floating point or exceptions aren't allowed in the kernel, apparently oblivious to the fact that you if you don't use them then any half-decent implementation will not link in the supporting library code (as has been the case for 20 years or more), or some other wibbling about the complexity of a C++ compiler which ignores the fact that GCC is a living demonstration that only the front-end is complex and that part is shared across every target platform. (Seriously, why in the name of fuck do embedded chip vendors write their own IDE and C compiler rather than just contribute a back-end to the GCC project? It makes their project more buggy and less flexible. Always. Predictably so.)

The Linux kernel devs clearly know their shit, but they are as prone to programming prejudice as the rest of us. They do what they are comfortable with and in the short term that does lead to better code. In the long term, it leads the whole project down a one-way street and at some point everyone will wish that "they" had bitten the bullet many years ago and used a more modern language.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Well, this article'll cause some arguments, eh?

"First rule of engineering is you are not as clever as you think you are"

Nah, the first rule is that debugging is harder than writing it in the first place so if you write code that is as clever as you think you are then you won't be able to debug it.

The example shown can be handled more simply (and so, more reliably) by using nested if-statements and just accepting greater levels of indentation. Lexical scoping makes it manifestly obvious whether you've paired up creation/deletion steps and it is robust against someone coming along a year or so later and adding code in the middle. There is no excuse for using a goto statement in C. It ought to be removed from the language and any significant body of code that thereafter fails to compile was almost certainly buggy as hell beforehand but you didn't know it because you're in denial.

Wakey wakey, app developers. Mobile ad blocking will kill you all

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: HTTPS

If it is being done by blocking the content-provider's site then whether that site uses https or not is unimportant. The only fix will be for those whose pages/apps are littered with ads to start hosting the ads themselves, at which point (as an earlier comment noted) they might start to question the cost of the bandwidth and perhaps even their content and suitability.

Microsoft sneaks onto Android while Android sneaks onto Windows

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Android tablets apps can't be compared to Windows tablets.

Except that the ARM-based Windows tablets couldn't run those apps, because MS couldn't be bothered to include a suitable translation layer, despite having written and deployed one about a decade ago for machines with a fraction of the power of a modern ARM tablet.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Microsoft's biggest enemy: Microsoft

"The company is so huge no one ever seems really sure who's actually making the decisions for the $PRODUCT team."

But, but, but, they only have half a dozen products that anyone cares about and they only have a few thousand employees. There are *much* bigger companies out there with *much* wider product ranges. How hard can it be?

Building a fanless PC is now realistic. But it still ain't cheap

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Nothing new?

We've had fanless, silent, x86-architecture PCs for at least a decade now if you were willing to pay a premium and accept lesser performance. The premium has slowly dropped away and the increasing focus in datacenters with flops per watt means that the performance hit is probably less, too. (*) Realistically though, you will still pay more and get less.

Against that, it is probably now true that for many domestic workloads (like, kitchen PC or lounge media centre) performance is no longer an issue and if you live in an otherwise silent house (so, probably no kids then) the difference between "honest, you'll never notice the fan" and "no fan" is quite significant. I am a little surprised that the concept isn't more mainstream.

(* Free plug from satisfied customer: http://www.tinygreenpc.com/.)

Pentagon to Dept of Defense: Give us $580bn for cyberwar and spacewar

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Curious that they want all that money for a domain where they are barred by international treaty from actually deploying weaponry. Sounds to me like they could save themselves a packet by doing a deal with the Russians and Chinese to, er, stay on Earth. Enforcement would be fairly straight-forward, since getting anything into even low orbit is a fairly conspicuous business and likely to remain so for the next few decades.

Yelp minimum wage row shines spotlight on … broke, fired employee

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: speak for yourselft

"it's a job, and if you don't take it then..."

Well that depends on the society you live in.

If your society has no minimum wage and no benefits system, those without jobs have an income of zero and slowly starve to death. (How slowly depends on whether they turn to crime first.) Frequently such people have children and the wider society gets all icky about *children* starving to death.

So the wider society introduces some sort of benefit system to provide a safety net. Great! Now the cheapskate employers don't have to pay a living wage because the taxpayer will pick up the difference. Sadly, the wider society now gets whiny about why the taxpayer is being forced to subsidize *specifically the meanest* employers in the land. Businesses in particular get uppity about subsidizing the competitors simply so that those competitors can pass on lower costs to customers.

So society introduces a minimum wage. If you aren't prepared to pay that, you can't ask a member of society to work for you. That's annoying, but it is less annoying than being forced to subsidize your competitors.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Anonymous reviews?

If a website cannot trace the origin of third-party content but chooses to publish it anyway, it should be considered as the web-sites own legal risk. If it turns out to be libellous, the site ends up in court. If it is false and commercially damaging, the site ends up in court. If it doesn't want to end up in court, it must take steps to ensure that it can trace where the content came from so that when someone complains, they can pass the buck.

Otherwise you are just profiting from anonymous click-bait. That damages everyone in society except the profiteers and I don't see why society should tolerate that.

Intel shows budget Android phone powering big-screen Linux

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "same kernel" ... such a huge success

Yes, MS had to do all that, *even though* the Linux distro in question sucked so hard it showed up in LIGO data.

'I bet Russian hackers weren't expecting their target to suck so epically hard as this'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Nicely deadpan

"You can probably guess what he did to fix it."

Lemme see, he measured the speed of his current PC and *worked out the number that would now be required ... to *several significant figures* because, well, he's a pro who takes pride in his work as opposed to the original numpty who just picked a round power of ten.

Gov must put superfast broadband along HS2 rail line, says Parliament

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Commercial viability, WTF?

If it was commercially viable, government wouldn't need to provide either incentives or encouragement.

So what's this viability test all about? Is *government*, well-known for being the most economically clueless part of any modern state, really trying to lecture private enterprise on the important of (wait for it) "making a profit" ? What next? A bill providing educational services to grandmothers who have eggs going unsucked?

Easter Islanders didn't commit 'ecocide' after all, says archaeologist

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Define collapse

OK, so that sequence of events sounds like a proper collapse. Thanks for answering.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Define collapse

If the Polynesians are as mobile and sea-faringly awesome as popular culture would have us believe, then does the depopulation of a single island actually count for anything? Did the people there at the time regard this as a terrible collapse or was it just time to move to a new island and let this one recover? (They would have returned a few centuries hence, except that they bumped into us first.)

Solution to tech bros' disgust of SF homeless people launched

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: coins are cash

Yes, but they are only legal tender up to certain amounts.

For the UK: http://www.royalmint.com/aboutus/policies-and-guidelines/legal-tender-guidelines

So (for example) if you collect only coppers then you'll never have more than 20p in legal tender.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Ah that's sweet

"The next version will also allow the tech bros to blank out women in meetings."

and for a modest sum the premium version replaces them with ... ok, let's not go there.

Actually, all this sounds terribly do-able with current AR technology. Someone, somewhere, probably has gone there already and is about to launch.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Almost the right product

Too many of us are already running this product in our own heads. In the UK, there's a fairly long-running ad campaign by one of the big charities that displays a normal street scene (with a normal homeless youth in a corner somewhere) and then on the following page has an ad with the line "Did you see John?".

What we need is the inverse product. Happily, this almost certainly already exists. (That is, it's almost certainly already in use by the armed forces somewhere.) It is software that analyses a scene and spots homeless people (terrorists) in doorways and highlights them to make their plight (threat) more visible to the casual observer (soldier). Sadly, if you released such a product then you'd probably be accused of providing something that is useful to terrorists in an urban environment.

Dan Kaminsky is an expert on DNS security – and he's saying: Patch right God damn now

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Lingering in the cache

"But here's the kicker: let's say the attack doesn't work, but the payload lingers in the ISP's DNS cache."

For most broadband customers there is probably an additional cache in their home router. Such devices are rarely restarted, and in the vast majority of cases never patched, so it *will* linger there.

Microsoft patent filing confirms existence of 3D Jedi gesture phone

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Scarily prescient

That quote's from a very long time ago, you know.