Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
"if (version.StartsWith("Windows 9")) {"
It has the ring of truth about it. Using GetVersion() would be more obvious, much faster and incomparably more reliable, so I'm not in the least surprised by the assertion that the unwashed hordes spent the time looking for a slow and flaky alternative.
So much software seems to have been written by people with this mindset...
Exactly right, which is why it is so frustrating when people say
"One concern has been firewall penetration, as NAT provided an additional layer of security by separating the address spaces naturally."
That's just FUD. NAT *is* a firewall plus address re-writing rules. IPv6 does not increase your exposure to the wider internet. Your ISP (well, A&A, certainly) will offer you a pre-configured router that has all this sorted out for both protocols.
Probably worth adding that IPv6 also has a "link-local" address range (non-routed, exactly like 192.168.x.y). You can configure all your domestic services to listen only on link-local addresses if you want belt-and-braces security.
"Can HO2 (can't do subscripts) even be made - no matter how much you blast the atoms in a collider?"
Out in interstellar space, the rules are different. We can see spectral lines from species that are energetically unstable but which continue to exist because they can't fall apart without a third party to carry off some of the excess momentum.
Whether HO₂ falls in that category I couldn't say. Sorry, but I'm really only posting this to point out that Unicode contains a full set of superscript and subscript characters. The bit about interstellar space was just a hook. (True, though.)
Edit: Looks like I should have read some of the other replies before replying. At the bottom of the wikipedia page mentioned just above is a link to "List of interstellar and circumstellar molecules" which includes hydroperoxyl.
The context was quite obviously "What can you get down the existing phone line, by whatever means you like?" and it is indeed the case that the answer to that question 20 years ago was 56k and is now nearly three orders of magnitude higher. Obviously the means have changed, but equally obviously the original question deemed that irrelevant. (That's your "man in the street" perspective versus your "El Reg reader" perspective at work.)
At 80mbit, it will take 12 seconds to download each bit. Literally minutes might be enough to pull down a whole byte. The headers alone would take an hour or so for each packet.
If you're within walking distance of the exchange, might I suggest you stroll down there each morning with a memory stick?
"All the data we download and upload has to serve us meatbags in some way. Some of it acts as input to our brains."
This is a fair point, but I'll have a go anyway. How about a family of four, each watching a different HD video? Your mileage may vary but each of those channels /might/ be over 25Mbit/s after compression and your 100Mbit pipe will struggle to deliver all four without glitches.
On the other hand, a gigabit pipe will handle a set of 4K channels comfortably, so video probably won't be the reason that (eventually) gigabit isn't enough. Perhaps some kind of multi-player, immersive virtual reality? I don't know how much they use.
" I've never heard of anyone promoting the idea of dividing Germany again though, have you?"
They aren't very loud, but they certainly exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_separatist_movements_in_Europe
Prior to the nuclear stalemate, re-arranging European boundaries every 50 years or so was pretty much de rigeur. At the present time, the excuses for centralisation (financial and defence) are pretty much covered by the ECB and NATO. (Obviously one of these insitutions is currently working rather better than the other, but the official line is that both are here to stay.) That leaves the way wide open for the larger nation states to fragment in line with regional preferences. We have Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia as examples so far. (Ukraine is a work in progress.)
"If MS shift it to .NET and make a free plugin for VS Express, they have just captured pretty much the entire next generation of application developers."
That would imply that the next generation of developers are currently owned by Oracle, since Minecraft is all in Java. Oracle might like to think that, but I don't believe it is a fair statement.
It also implies that a plug-in API would be easy. It might, but all the existing mods are version-specific and Mojang have never published an API.
It also implies that forcing the entire Minecraft community onto Windows isn't going to fragment that community. It certainly will.
To cut a long story short, I find it hard to see how MS-Minecraft can be any more profitable than Mojang-Minecraft, and we know that the latter struggles. I think MS paid about $2.5 billion too much.
"...all three main parties will have no choice but to make a manifesto commitment against..."
...which, after the election, would turn out to be no more binding than the commitments that all three parties have made at the last *few* elections to reform the House of Lords.
"Liz isn't going to be happy if she is booted out as Scottish head of state and forced to sell Balmoral!"
I thought the SNP's current plan was to retain Liz as Queen of Scotland (which, historically, is correct because she's descended from James IV) and, I presume, to remain part of the Commonwealth. This may not be their long-term plan, but they were at pains to separate the monarchy from the sovereignty because Scots hate English Tories much more than they hate "English" monarchs.
"There will be this brand new country with no treaties"
IANAL but I suspect (*) that simply isn't true. A company can't walk away from a contract it doesn't like by transferring ownership to someone who didn't sign on the dotted line. Equally, I suspect that Scotland is under all the treaty obligations of the rUK and will enjoy all the benefits of those treaties as well until and unless all parties to the original treaties agree differently. Anything else would just be a get-out-of-jail-free card for a sovereign state that wanted to be shot of its own history. (There are several debt-ridden countries who'd like that, but as Argentina are demonstrating on a daily basis, the rest of the world isn't so keen.)
(*) Of course, if this were a sane referendum, voters would actually know the answers to these questions before they voted. But that's getting a little off-topic...
Feynman's own essay on the subject is quite clear that he was tipped off by someone else and merely provided the media presence necessary to put the evidence into the public domain. I'll stick my neck out here and say he'd be a little upset at the way popular culture has deified him. He enjoyed the limelight, but he'd have hated the thought that personalities might be bigger than either evidence or a decent bit of research by a competent nobody.
The victims are celebs with media reputations to protect, so it is likely that at least some of them are lying when they say the pictures are fake. The victims are also celebs rather than techies, so it is likely that at least some of them are making false statements (about deletion, for example) without even being aware of it.
With all due respect to the celebs concerned, I don't think we can believe a word they say.
"because they are considered totally separate Operating Systems as far as patching goes"
and yet MS also consider them to be the same OS for lifecycle purposes. (Win8 dies in a year or so.)
It is odd, though, that all the growth in Win8.x is happenning for x=1. Win8.0 is basically flatlining, with a hard code who were happy to jump into Metroland but not willing to adopt the almost imperceptible changes that came in the latest service pack.
HTML may not be programming but CSS certainly is and by the time you've added SVG and JavaScript I think you are well past what you could expect junior school kids to cope with.
Based on most of the web-sites that I encounter, you are well past what the average "web developer" can cope with. (Web-devs who actually have a clue must really hate the average member of their profession.)
"Valve have breached Australian Consumer Law by telling Australian consumers that they do not have a right that the law expressly grants them."
A big thumbs up to a legal system that prohibits this. In my experience, *most* EULAs and similar "agreements" are worded along the lines of "Your local law may override some of the following terms and conditions, but we aren't going to tell you which. Agree now, or else the deal's off.". This makes the EULA as a whole more an act of bullying rather than an agreement.
Why don't all router manufacturers use one of the several FOSS firmwares? This would mean they have more features and security updates for free. (They'd still have to contribute drivers for any bleeding edge hardware they used, but they must develop that anyway for their own purposes.
None of them actually sell the software, or enhanced add-ons. I can't see the economic argument for spending extra cash to produce a shoddier product.
"What doesn't it stand for..."
Wireless Protected Setup, it would appear.
(Seriously, guys? Hard-coding zero as the key? I assume that the WPS specification actually forbids this, so is there a case to be made that the vendor in question made a dishonest claim when they said they supported WPS?)
Indeed. I think El Reg's advice is very misguided...
"Vulture South recommends readers lock down or delete their explicit photos whenever possible"
Whereas *I* simply recommend that you don't take them in the first place. My policy is so simple that even a celeb ought to be able to manage it. El Reg's advice presumably requires some expertise in IT security, and even the NSA doesn't seem to be able to manage it, so how the hell are celebs supposed to?
"I spend a lot of time on client locations and systems, and very few offer me the option to use my own laptop on their network."
Fair enough, although it cost us bugger all to provide a separate free WiFi on site for visitors. However, have you priced up mobile broadband recently. Unless you spend a lot of time on site watching videos, your usage will be fairly light and so quite cheap. Also, if you spend a lot of time on client locations, you probably spend a fair amount of time travelling, too.
The problem lies with all those people whose houses adjoin the green belt. Since, under current law, they are immune to some jerk building an eyesore on the other side of the fence, these properties have a higher market value than others. Since the laws have been around for donkeys, it is almost certain that the properties' current owners have paid that higher value when they bought it. If you simply abolish the planning laws at a stroke, you wipe that out at a stroke. Abolition is an attempt to transfer thousands of pounds from the pockets of voters into the pockets of developers.
I say "attempt", since this is almost certain to face a legal challenge, just as the proposed HS2 route did. HS2, however, affected relatively small numbers of people along a single route. Green belt abolition would affect far more.
I think it is more like "Do not make copyright law the subject of mainstream pub talk, or else the whole show is over.".
Let's be honest here, most *normal* folks tolerate copyright law and most probably reckon it serves a useful purpose in allowing artists to make a crust. However, if it stops them enjoying their footy with their mates then IT SUCKS AND MUST GO IMMEDIATELY REGARDLESS OF THE CONSEQUENCES.
This may be where the Premier League's gravy train hits the buffers, a bit like the music industry.
This is getting silly.
Maybe we're pampered here in the UK, but I have half a dozen routers collecting dust on a shelf nearby, some going back over a decade, none costing more than a few tens of pounds and *none* of them have no firewall. So, just to illuminate the discussion, can someone please name a router (not a modem with a single port, which you'd have to plug into a PC, which all have firewalls these days and have had for about a decade), which is IPv6-capable, which doesn't have a firewall?
Sorry, but since the firewall is just software, and routers all run Linux, where the firewalling capability is free, and since IPv4 routers even at the cheapest end of the market have had proper firewalls since forever, and since IPv6 support is going to require a slight tweaking of the vendors preferred Linux image anyway, and since failing to include a firewall *might* be grounds for a case of negligence against the provider, I just can't imagine anyone producing an IPv6 router without one. So I'm rather minded to say "put up (examples) or shut up".
" but requires updating all your hardware and software and relying on a daemon on one box correctly informing everything else it needs to be updated."
Every desktop OS has been able to do this for donkeys years, and apps couldn't re-implement the network stack even if they wanted to. So for your PCs the hardware upgrade is going to cost you nothing. The OS upgrade will cost the same and the rest of your software will be half as much again.
There may be some devices that will require an IPv4-capable LAN, but I doubt that many of them need to talk to the internet, so a dual stack LAN and IPv6-only WAN is now perfectly viable and has been for many years.
"NAT, itself, however, evolved into a critical part of networking and much is built around it, not least the idea of a central device controlling access in and out of a network."
Firewalls and routing rules predate NAT by several years and both clearly involve the idea of a central device controlling access in and out of a network. I respectfully suggest that you present a fresh argument.
"The problem is that those pushing IPv6 view NAT purely as a work-around - a band-aid covering a problem of limited public IP addresses."
Perhaps they were around when the NAT RFC was published, and read it. I'm afraid that NAT *is* just a band-aid around limited public addresses.
Furthermore, not a lot of the coverage here is bothering to mention *why* the number of global routes has now passed 512K, so I'll let you into a secret. It is caused by people buying up small allocations of IPv4 one corner of the globe and using them in another. The address space has become horribly fragmented and the IPv4 internet is going down like a 99%-full hard disc using the FAT file system. And of course the reason everyone is still on IPv4 is because NAT has allowed them to punt this problem into the long grass for almost 2 decades. Well done NAT.
"Another robotic task?"
There would always be "connoiseurs" who claimed to be able to tell the difference between a robot and the real thing. More darkly, there would always be some who did it for reasons of power over another rather than the physiological response.
"Command and Control DOES work. BP, HSBC, Ford etc all perform over decades, and typically out perform."
That's partly because you've just chosen the ones that haven't gone bankrupt yet, and partly because they aren't a complete society. The comparison just doesn't stand up.
"My perfectly legal Windows 7 VM is stuck on IE 9 because Microsoft wants to install some kind of spyware to let me use IE 10 or IE 11."
Get over it, dude. If you use a computer with a non open source OS, you handed over the keys to the kingdom on the day you installed the OS. Since we're talking Windows, MS could have built in spyware in the original release, or they could have slipped some in as a security fix under Windows Update (if you've applied *any* updates since installation, which I hope you have). Whatever *named* package you are worrying about, if it is from Microsoft then it doesn't increase your risk of being spied on, even if it says "Microsoft Shafter for Windows" on the tin.
"IE is the underdog we have to pitty,"
I'd rather target a recent IE than an older webkit. The problem is not IE, per se. The problem is that Microsoft don't make their recent improvements to IE available on OSes that they claim to still support. I don't suppose it is even the fault of the IE product managers or developers. I'd be amazed if these decisions were not handed down from Stevie B, in a desparate and demonstrably self-destructive attempt to wring a few more upgrades out of "customers".
"Believe it or not, once upon a time that you might charge money for that was absurd."
Ah yes, the good old days when total vendor lock-in was just taken for granted as the only conceivable business model, if only because no-one except the original vendor had adequate documentation to write programs.
"but often they just happen to be in the right place at the right time"
In the case under consideration, the right place was a remote part of Borneo and the right time required a fairly prolonged stay. I'd call that fairly heavy investment, but maybe you spend months lurking in tropical rain forests as part of your day job.
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