* Posts by Ken Hagan

8128 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "They have that kind of money"

For the price of a Ferrari, would it grey?

Sunak's defunct SaaS scheme spent seven percent of budget designed to help 100,000 SMEs

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Re: One for the how not to text books

Surely incompetence is exactly what leads to a pattern of behaviour? Or did you believe them when they said "Lessons will be learned."?

Developers beware, Microsoft's domain shakeup is coming soon

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Nah. If they wanted to play that game they'd just buy Montserrat. (Population under 5000. GDP around $60m. Country code .ms.)

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

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Re: Confused

Thunderbird can talk to exchange using a paid-for add-in. I used to use it but then my Exchange stopped serving anything except trusted clients and that didn't include "thunderbird on a linux box outside the usual domain". A fair admin policy decision, but not a technical limitation. A friendly Exchange admin might even enable the IMAP support, in which case no add-in is required. Again, a policy decision rather than a technical limitation.

Perhaps if MS really screw up Outlook, Exchange admins might be irritated in their own daily usage and be open to the idea of facilitating broader access.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I need classic outlook

I run an IMAP server (dovecot) on a machine that I have locally. That's more portable than PST files, but you would need to spin up a Linux box, such as a RPi, to run it if you didn't already have one.

Microsoft Copilot for Security prepares for April liftoff

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Re: Papering over the cracks

Yeah, but they'll be papering over those cracks at machine speed now.

Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0

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Re: 30 years later...

I think you are confusing two things. Win3 could run in "real mode" where it did indeed do all that shuffling. It was a fantastic overlay manager and ran quite happily on an actual 8088. Sane users ran in "386-enhanced" mode where the windows kernel was a protected mode OS moving segments by fiddling with descriptors.

Then of course there wasthe third thing, where DOS device drivers were "supported" by running them in the first VM and redirecting all device I/O from other VMs into the first one so the poor little DOS driver never had to worry about being "instanced".

Impressive, in a depressing way, that it ever worked.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Microsoft Presentation for the 1989 IBM PS/2 forum

“I have written a PM app that hangs the system (sometimes quite graphically)”

This was a design flaw in OS/2 (or Presentation Manager) which MS avoided in NT. PM used a single thread for keyboard and mouse input (which put it at the mercy of one badly written app. NT decided very early on (that is, entirely within code that they controlled) which app would get the input and maintained a separate input queue for each app.

I suspect that if OS/2 had won the day then this design flaw would have been fixed. (Perhaps it was. I didn't keep up after it was clear they'd lost the market.) But it was definitely there and MS definitely learned the lesson.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Very Different

"The existence of _MS_ OS/2 2 shows it didn't happen like that and even as MS was getting ready to launch Win3, it had MS OS/2 2, lacking only the WPS."

I'm a little puzzled by this. I too, was around at the time and I was aleays under the impression that Win3 was a bodge job: taking the (beta) OS/2 kernel and running the latest development version of Windows (then a 286-friendly but strictly 16-bit system) in one of the virtual DOS boxes. This explains why Win3's "virtual device drivers" used the same "linear executable" format as OS/2 device drivers. They were basically the same.

Microsoft's real commercial genius was to realise that there were bog-all OS/2 programs (all 16-bit) but lots of Win1 and Win2 programs, so what people would actually buy was a better way of running the latter, not the former. Win3 was that better way.

It was also possible, though I can't recall the details, to launch Windows in such a way that only KRNL386.EXE was loaded and not GDI.EXE or USER.EXE. this gave you a DOS session running in the virtual DOS box. It was a nice illustration of how 16-bit Windows was always just a fancy DOS program, but it wasn't actually useful because at the time there was really only one DPMI-capable program in the universe and that was Windows.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

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Re: simple.

I don't know how you are defining "national infrastructure", but I'm fairly sure that setting fire to telecomms kit is "criminal damage" and already punishable on those grounds. All you have to do is catch the criminals.

Grab a helmet because retired ISS batteries are hurtling back to Earth

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Re: On every level: no

"Bezos is the one talking about millions of people living and working in space."

Trying to think of a task that is easier to do in space than on Earth that would not also be far better performed by a robot rather than a ham-fisted monkey.

...

Nah. Can't think of one. Not for the first time I'm left thinking that these "tech billionaires" are actualy just billionaires and haven't a clue about the tech. They're businessmen who got lucky early and haven't regressed to the mean yet. (Though Elon is having a damn good go. I wish him luck.)

Euro-cloud consortium issues ultimatum to Microsoft: Fix your licensing or else

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Re: Irrelevant

Even if the gouging is between consenting adults, it needs to be legal gouging.

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

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Programs are just config files for the hardware. Turing completeness isn't a bad thing per se just easy to abuse.

Copilot can't stop emitting violent, sexual images, says Microsoft whistleblower

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"I'm waiting for some really compromising Ai videos of Trump."

Far more damaging than the scenes you suggest would be footage of golden showers in a Moscow hotel room, since some people believe that genuine footage of that nature is out there waiting to be leaked.

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Putin recruited convicted criminals. It doesn't mean he likes them.

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"I wonder what an AI would be like if its training data only came from black bin bags full of magazines found in the woods?"

The porn would be milder, since there are laws about what you can publish in a magazine and economic factors mitigating against appealing to the most extreme (and hence, smallest minority) tastes.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

If these idiots had really solved the AGI problem, like they keep telling us they have, then explicit guardrails wouldn't be needed.

Anthropic unlocks Claude 3, claims it's better than ChatGPT and Gemini

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...except that it is, but don't tell the Pope.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Here's my test for AI

Another test of AGI is "can it drive a car?" because nearly all adult humans can with a very modest amount of practice.

There are doubtless many other examples and all are perfectly fair because if you are going to claim general then you must be prepared to be tested generally.

Copilot pane as annoying as Clippy may pop up in Windows 11

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Re: It'll get a LOT worse

If it is reading your window and sending some of the contents off to a US server (coz I assume CoPilot isn't running locally) then there had better be a way of turning it off that doesn't involve 5% of annual turnover.

Rapid7 throws JetBrains under the bus for 'uncoordinated vulnerability disclosure'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Not at all. It is simply naive not to assume that all companies are subject to the whims of the spooks in their home country. It is literally (part of) their job.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

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Re: BBC article

She's lucky. Non-leaplings don't discover the company is clueless until after they've signed up.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Owners of Fastrack FS1 smartwatches have reported the clocks being stuck

"a watch, which has the one main function..."

Ah. You probably think a phone has one main function, too. Welcome to the modern world. You may take some time to adjust.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"some form of regular calendar that didn't slowly get out of synch with the seasons across the generations was vital"

You say that, but Nature always grants you the option of dying. You're just prejudiced because you are descended from a long line of nerds who didn't fancy dying.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: We're very hard coded for a 24-hour sleep cycle

I did it when I was a student (apart from the hiding from daylight part) and both my sons did it extensively during the Covid lockdowns.

We may not count as fully human but none of us had (or have) any trouble at all in adopting diurnal cycle well over 24 hours.

Miracle WM, a new tiling window manager built on Mir

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Re: up to me, the user, to do the hard work of readjusting some developer's tool

The code *should* write itself, in the sense that anyone writing a new window manager should (1) suspect that there might be a standard for thus, since the concept is older than they are, (2) bother to look for it, and (3) offer it as the default behaviour.

I'd offer a car analogy but you ought to be able to supply that for yourself.

'How do I reset my router' isn't in LLM corpuses. An alliance of telcos wants to change that

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Re: I don't see this working...

Oh, and for added brownie points, the instructions for a factory reset should include a clear description of how to change the router access password away from the default and a warning of the dire consequences for the owner's bank account if they fail to do so.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Facepalm

Re: I don't see this working...

The smartest response from an LLM to this kind of problem is to direct the questioner to the website of their router manufacturer. That would a perfect (and universal) answer if router manufacturer websites were designed so that a person could easily find the answer from there.

But no, let's try and teach the LLM about every kind of router ever made (or rebadged) by anyone.

US military pulls the trigger, uses AI to target air strikes

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"Every step that involves AI has a human checking in at the end."

...because in a war zone the AI is really bad at recognising your own team, whereas a human is merely unreliable.

(In most modern conflicts, the hi-tech weaponry is only on one side, leading to the exacerbating factor that only one side is actively trying to hide from the AI.)

Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not

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"Unless big strides are made for localhost LLMs"

Well that would be useful. The training (using public data) might still happen elsewhere, but using the model could run (using private data) on-prem. You'd still only need a few such machines though, since there's this amazing new tech called a LAN. Perhaps Dell have heard of it?

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

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NVidia will be fine since their products do a decent enough job. OTOH, anyone who has bet their life savings on the share price never falling ... ... tulips.

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

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Re: Well, at least this reminded me to have a play

At least in python, the "semantic white space" is merely an insistence that you indentation must agree with your scoping. As far as I'm aware, it is universally agreed that a failure to agree in this way is a horrible thing to do, so what's the objection to taking advantage of it?

China breakthrough promises optical discs that store hundreds of terabytes

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Re: Yawn

By the time it arrives, flash storage will be cheaper per TB, orders of magnitude faster, smaller, longer lasting, and physically more robust.

Are you ready to back up your AI chatbot's promises? You'd better be

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Re: "In a few years, it will be a different story."

You could start by only using accurate training data, but that's much more extensive than simply hoovering up the easily accessible chunks of the internet.

BOFH: In the event of a conference, the ninja clause always applies

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In fairness, the bit about aliens is half true.

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Your microwave demo needs to turn the microwave off after the first pulse to be realistic.

The 'M' of EMP probably is much less of a problem now. Back in the day you could wipe a floppy disc with a magnet but modern HD and SSD media can withstand far more abuse.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Use of weapons.

" But heavy, and I'm guessing rather tricky to cool. "

Just a bit! If your reactor is 50% efficient (which is optimistic) then for every megawatt you use you need to radiate another one into space, or else your satellite will warm up and eventually melt. That radiation has to come from components that are at-or-near room temperature, so we're talking about a lot of surface area.

Microsoft warns Dev Drive daredevils to back up or beware after latest build

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Re: So the moral of the story...

It's worse than that. MS have outsourced testing to a group of people who are willing to work for free and who don't care if their stuff breaks. Unsurprisingly then, recent builds of Windows are worthless and break easily.

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

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Re: We need a new Unix

There is no moral difference between a service provided by DLL and one provided by a separate process. In both cases you have the benefit of being able to patch all clients simultaneously and the risk of breaking them all if you are careless about defining your interface.

Venus has a quasi-moon and it's just been named 'Zoozve' for a sweet reason

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Re: Geesajobe...

Knowing how Academia works, my guess is that they get paid the square root of fuck all but are expected to do the job as part of their "duties".

Dutch insurers demand nudes from breast cancer patients despite ban

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Are these companies subject to GDPR?

Just wondering out loud here...

Seems like a fairly egregious loss of personal information and moreover of personal information that they were specifically not permitted to collect in the first place.

India to make its digital currency programmable

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Re: CAP theorem

Perhaps India has the same exemption from the laws of logic that Australia does?

Microsoft seeks patent for tech to put words into your mouth

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Re: Microsoft’s filing doesn’t state the intended purpose of its invention

Point 2 means that we don't even need to assume point 1.

Microsoft are a big enough target that any and every troll knows where to go to fill tbeir trousers with undeserved "royalties". Microsoft know this. Therefore they have to defend themselves by being an even bigger troll.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Prior Art

But neither prior art nor obviousness seem to disqualify you under "modern" patent systems. From being a way for society to reward inventors, patents seem to have become a way to prevent the use even of pre-existing inventions.

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

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Re: Black hole time!!!

"a joint venture with the Canton of Geneva to finally have a road tunnel under the lake"

I doubt they'd be able to share the tunnel. The road users would produce a lot of vibration, at least until they were killed off by the synchrotron radiation.

That's not the web you're browsing, Microsoft. That's our data

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Re: Remind me again

Where does the OS come into it? The article claims that one instance of Chromium (branded Edge) is trawling the open tabs (each of which is a separate process) in another instance of Chromium (branded Chrome).

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a Chromium mechanism for trawling "all open tabs" and not terribly surprised if it can't distinguish between Edge and Chrome. That would make this a legitimate trawl implemented carelessly.

Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday

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Re: Being remote is career limiting

The best people also like being with the other best people. If you scare half away, the others may follow.

Zen Internet warns customers of an impending IP address change

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Who the fuck isn't dual stack? Windows, Mac and Linux have been dual stack for about 20 years. What are they running?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: For UK home users ? No. Its pretty much A&A or nothing.

Can't believe that other ISPs are still offering the obviously fraudulent "as much as you like at a flat rate".

Maybe it's just me, but an element of charging by use has always seemed just more honest.

Things are going to get weird as the nanometer era draws to a close

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Re: Hold up!

I doubt you'll find too many relativistic electrons in a CPU. Not for long, anyway.