Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: I thought this was by Ron Hubbard?

Nah. Immanuel Velikovsky got there yonks before Hubbard did, and I don't suppose he was the first either.

Re: "nobbles DNS lookups"

"Step #4: Search for [*removed by No 10*]"

Of course, a quick Freedom of Information request will deliver the actual list of banned sites, maintained at tax-payers expense for the convenience of teenagers too lazy to search for their own porn.

Re: The real issue is - once again - IBM

I think both IBM and Novell had problems with price. I recall a comparitive review in PC Magazine between the fairly new NT and whatever Novell were offering at the time. Novell had roughly twice the performance on any metric you cared to ask, but the MS reply was simply "but the price difference is so large that you could by a dual processor box with gobs of RAM to run NT on and it would wipe the floor with Novell's offering and *still* be cheaper".

Which is the main reason that Linux was able to wipe the floor with Windows Server several years later.

Re: I like how people here are so quick to condemn anyone

"Gates took 35 years to get the cmpany to where it was"

More like 20 and then he cruised for a while, unable to make further progress, before handing it over to his buddy coz the job (making money) finally started being less fun than the alternatives (spending it).

At this rate, Ballmer isn't going to last 20 years and the job won't be any fun at all when he hands it over unless you are a lawyer.

Re: Strongly Agree: Backups don't really matter.

"Rarely has so much wisdom been concentrated in so few words in The Register."

We can probably precis it down even further to just point (2), though. Really the other 9 follow logically from there.

There is no such thing as backup; there is only restore.

Ben? Ben Franklin? Is that you on the interwebs?

Re: Ubuntu, the Maralinga of Canonical's nuclear testing

"Because in his mind (and Microsoft's, mind) they're a dying breed."

I think that's the central assumption -- that even if we still have ten trillion desktop computers in 2020 there isn't going to be any money in providing the OS for them and so if you are currently in that business and you want to be making profits in 2020 then you need to find a new market to sell a new (if related) product.

Personally I'm not convinced. Despite the best (?) efforts of the industry for a decade or more, I still haven't seen a UI that that fits on a phone-sized screen and doesn't need a keyboard but is still usable for content creation rather than mere consumption. Given the combined limitations of my anatomy and my typical working environment, I don't ever expect to either. I find it utterly bizarre that anyone in the industry thinks this is possible.

Re: Encrypted service has nothing to do with freedom loving

(4) is technically impossible, unless you deliberately place a reporting device alongside the GPS receiver. (Hint: it's called a receiver for a reason.)

Re: Using the proper date format.

"The proper date format would be 2001-09-11."

What's all this crap about "proper". The only numerical date format is the ISO one. Any other arrangement of digits is just a typing error. In particular, anyone who has used a date format with two digit years in the last decade needs to be beaten about the head with a blunt instrument until two more digits drop out.

Re: Office 2000

I think 2003 has slightly fewer bugs. There's not enough difference to make it worth paying for 2003 if you already have 2000, but if you ever find yourself in a position where you can choose at no cost, you might choose 2003.

Re: Shocker

"Wow.. people aren't interested in expensive gimicks"

There. FTFY.

Re: Metrics tell you what but they don't tell you why

So design by metrics is an algorithm that converges on a product with no features at all.

Re: Poor choice of name

"If someone asked you who provided the iPlayer service would you say Apple?"

Funny you should mention that one. Given their track record, plus the example outside the IT world of Easy<whatever>, I am astonished that Apple didn't sue.

Re: Mandatory XKCD comic

Not quite. It isn't just fading away with 1/r^2 or something like that. The solar wind (blowing outwards) means that the solar system is a bubble with a shockwave on the outside. Give or take a few squillion miles, that bubble has a defined edge and that edge is in a physically meaningful way the limit of the Sun's domain.

Re: The New Tech Mantra: 'When its broken don't fix it just hire good PR...'

"Its clever marketing though...."

Er, not really. You see, plenty of fairly dim-witted marketroids have thought along these lines. The result is that "Modern" is the brand for a now-well-out-of-date style of quite a lot of things. Yes, we all know what the word means, with a lower-case "m", but the brand with an upper-case "M" actually means old crap. Case in point: "Modern Art" refers to something from the early years of the last century. Even "post-modern" is now a bit of an old joke.

No. Clever marketing would have been to build on your existing brand that is recognised and tolerated by 99% of your customer base. Revolutions are for people who aren't currently in charge. For an established player to seek a revolution is suicidal.

Re: I kinda like W8 Pro

"Getting the button back will be really useful for Windows 2012 R2 - no start button was a huge pain when you're logged in via RDP (which is the way to log into servers, really)."

Don't hold your breath. The "returned" start button just takes you to the tiled Metro screen, which has perhaps a dozen apps visible, rather than the hierarchial Start menu, which had no trouble showing several times that number. If you use your PC for more than just email, web and media consumption, Win8 blows.

Re: I bought the S3 because of this legal nonsense

"If only Apple made fridges and microwaves I could really stick it to Samsung."

They'd also need to sell food, otherwise you wouldn't be able to buy anything to put in them.

Re: Opera Next @Lee

"its development has taken resources from the browser projects"

I've seen no evidence of mail development in the last half-decade or so and it's what I use as my mail client, so I think I would have done.

Re: WINE or VM?

"My guess is that Linux's cacheing of the hard disk to RAM is greatly superior to Windows'."

It could just be as simple as the VM host "optimising" any flush-to-disc operations from the guest. Alternatively, the (modern) host may just know a much better way of accessing the disc than the (10-year-old) XP guest.

I don't doubt your personal experience. I do doubt whether you have the correct explanation.

Re: I wanna shutdown ? .. hit Start...no, I said shutdown

"which you were told about the first time you logged on"

Whilst I realise it is possible for an OEM (or perhaps even a nice sysadmin) to give you your new machine in a state that displays this tour on *your* first login:

they probably didn't, and

anyone who is offered a "Tour of the new features in your software" and actually takes it, is certifiable.

There has never been a "Tour of your new ..." that wasn't a complete waste of time. (The Win8 tour is no exception, being 99% concerned with trying to convince you that you no longer *want* to be able to use all your existing PC expertise on your new machine and would instead like to be transformed into a dribbling newb who knows nothing.) It is utterly unreasonable to expect users to sit through such a thing. Microsoft's inclusion of a tour merely demonstrates how little they understand of interface design (and human beings generally).

Re: He can stay at mine if he likes

"sashayed away in her 'haha husband logic fail' shoes"

You're married to Eadon?

Re: But here's the $64m question.

The large dimension might be vertical. Also, if the physics of this device allows it to dissipate significantly less heat per transaction, you can pack them in 3D to whatever density you like.

Re: I must complain about the picture caption

"My offspring is having fun pushing toy cars around it though."

Congratulations on finding the only way in which it is useful.

"several days without money is tough"

If you're counting since 2008, it's quite a bit longer than that.

Re: Quoting Terry Pratchett???

Today's new word is "Orwellian". Look it up.

Re: Motives.

I imagine he went into the job believing that the NSA were operating within the law. His published statements indicate that his reasons for leaking (and the information he leaked) are motivated by (and describe) the nature of the NSA's mis-behaviour.

Whatever *you* make of his actions, they are perfectly consistent with *his* understanding of the situation, which is about as much as one can ask of any human being.

Or time to stop bailing out the losers. If you made it perfectly clear that there is no happy ending when your clever algorithm bets the entire bank on the 2:30 at Ascot, this would all be self-regulating (at least in the next generation).

Also, stock markets that didn't allow selected customers to buy themselves into a privileged trading position might suddenly find that sane companies wanted to be listed there, rather than live with an ever-present threat of waking up one morning to find the (real) company has been wiped out has been wiped out by some cheeky rocket scientist on $1m/year.

Re: Any programming language is a tool

"C++ is stuff grafted onto stuff grafted onto stuff grafted onto stuff grafted onto C, with each grafting adding complications solely to desperately try and retain backward-compatibility."

For the C subset, C++ is demonstrably cleaner than the C it came from. I say "demonstrably" since most of the features added to C since '89 have come from C++. As for the non-subset: no-one is forcing it on you. You can use C++ as a cleaner C99 or cleaner C11 if you like. What you don't use, you don't pay for. It's one of the guiding principles of the language's evolution.

Re: Alternatives

I'll accept your first point but leave your second on the table.

Re: The waste of talent

"The x86 must be giving them a 2x penalty."

Uh? It's 2013! Out of order execution and micro-ops mean that the ISA's only impact on performance is instruction decode, and instruction decode is about 1% of die area. On desktop-sized chips, ISA hasn't been relevant since the last century. It would be fair to assume that it hasn't mattered on mobile-sized chips for quite a few years either.

What matters is where you choose to invest your development budget. Intel are now putting theirs into mobile.