* Posts by Ken Hagan

8559 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Trump tariffs turn techies topsy-turvy as US braces for PC tax

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Everyone is betting heavily that Trump will continue to TACO

"Trump is all about his personal image, so if he thinks he is being mocked (which he is, justifiably) he will dig in."

I'm not so sure he is fully aware. (He's surrounded by yes men, after all.) Putin has been oprnly taking the piss for months now with no comeback beyond some empty rhetoric.

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Re: Idiotic tariff nonsense

Americans will just have to learn to like tea instead, like normal people.

AMD warns of new Meltdown, Spectre-like bugs affecting CPUs

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only?

"AMD said it could only be carried out by an attacker able to run arbitrary code on a target machine."

So, bad news for any cloud providers out there then, whose line of business is literally letting third parties run arbitrary code on their machines.

ChatGPT creates phisher’s paradise by recommending the wrong URLs for major companies

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Re: AI summarises lies

The lies do cause harm and there is such a thing as "negligence", so if Google are profiting from the lies then there is a case to be answered.

AI scores a huge own goal if you play up and play the game

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Re: @AC - Nah!

"list all the European Union member countries in alphabetical order of their capital cities"

The correct answer here is to break the 4th wall and reply "How the blazes should I know?!". Anything else just labels you as an AI trying too hard. Of course, an LLM could eventually learn this and start refusing to answer hard questions, at which point it simultaneously becomes more human and less useful.

Scholars sneaking phrases into papers to fool AI reviewers

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"TL,DR: don't do it unless the paper is slop, and don't submit slop. Reviews help science."

Yes, and "banana" makes the unhelpful reviews easy to spot (at least until the AI people tweak the algorithm). I'd have thought you'd be in favour of such a scheme.

Trump administration announces tariffs that may make plenty of tech more expensive from August 1

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Re: Not content just to TACO on the tariffs

Do the BICKS countries gave an agreement that makes them a trading bloc?

UK police dangle £75 million to digitize its VHS tape archives

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How much?

I followed the link to the tender, but as far as I can see the tender does not say how much material needs to be digitised. £75 million might be ridiculously large or small (and the same could be said for the timescale).

Am I missing something or is it normal for government tenders to be a pig in a poke?

UK puts out tender for space robot to de-orbit satellites

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Re: Surely the people, companies and countries?

Because it isn't the kids' fault, but it is the kids who suffer the resulting child poverty.

If you have a problem with feckless parents, your solution ought to be something that targets them rather than their children.

Airbus okays use of ‘Taxibot’ to tow planes to the runway

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Re: HERON?

The position does affect which part of the sentence happened last week. Common sense can override that, but the default meaning of your third variant is certainly not better than what's in the article.

Musk's antics and distractions are backfiring as Tesla's car business stalls

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Re: Tragedy

So a post that merely cites data (and provides a source reference) gets downvoted.

Does someone out there hate facts?

Uncle Sam wants you – to use memory-safe programming languages

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Re: Uncle Sam wants Microsoft to use memory-safe programming languages?

Windows sits on top of the registry in the same way that Linux sits on top of the /etc directory tree.

(It doesn't, in any meaningful way.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Not addressing the real problem

Nit-pick: C++ has had a memory-safe subset since day one. The various projects alluded to in the article concern ways of statically enforcing the use of that subset.

The main reason that most real projects go outside that subset is that the interface to the OS is not memory-safe. This is because that interface is a C interface and C++ can use that interface directly.

With most other languages, that's hard-to-impossible so someone actually bothers to wrap a usefully large chunk of the OS interface for the new language.

The same problem also applies to many domain-specific libraries. The "official" interface is a C interface and a binding for your favourite language is your problem. Python's utterly massive collection of libraries is actually a huge feature in this respect. It represents a massive amount of work by many people and yet it is just there for the average Pythonista. In comparison, most other memory-safe languages have a fuckton of catching up to do before they are serious options for writing non-trivial apps.

Your browser has ad tech's fingerprints all over it, but there's a clean-up squad in town

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Cross-App & Cross Device Linking

If your analysis us correct then WhatsApp are equally guilty of accepting such data and they are a much more tempting target for anyone who wants to play with lawyers.

I'm sure El Reg will cover the story when it happens. Until then, I won't hold my breath.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "not something your grandma would glom onto"

Surely you just allow the cookies, secure in the knowledge that your browser drops them on the floor as soon as you close the page.

There's no international protocol on what to do if an asteroid strikes Earth

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Re: I suspect..

"Pretty much what the international protocol is for pandemics...."

A depressing (or is it, in this context?) number of ultra-rich seem to be prone to the "anti-vax" mind virus so regardless of the international protocol I doubt they'd be among the survivors.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Skid Marks

I think the curvature of the Earth's surface puts a fairly low upper limit on the length of such a skid mark.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Too true. This was pretty much his suggestion for hurricanes. (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-nuke-hurricanes/)

UK to buy nuclear-capable F-35As that can't be refueled from RAF tankers

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Re: Please explain

I think we need to be careful about the wording here.

Russia currently controls 20% of Ukraine. Three years ago, it did not control 25%. It merely had some cannon fodder sitting there. But the OP said "occupied" so I'd say you are strictly correct but the OP's intended meaning was also correct.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"the US has control over whether or not these missiles are used and what they are aimed at."

So they could get very, very cross with us if we use them wrongly, but that would be after WW3 so perhaps no-one in the UK would really give a toss about that?

Huawei's latest notebook shows China is still generations behind in chipmaking

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Re: HarmonyOS?

I mentioned the new form factors, like phones, precisely with this argument in mind. They had no compatibility constraints and did develop new idioms for UI but saw no reason to re-invent things like filesystems or process models.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: HarmonyOS?

And yet, no-one seems to have come up with a better way to write an OS in the last fifty years. (There would not be a problem to "get it widely adopted". We've seen several new form-factors for computing devices in 50 years and several new OSes, but the survivors always seem to end up looking like UNIX.)

OpenDylan sheds some parentheses in 2025.1 update

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" Who knows, maybe if Dylan had used {curly braces} it would have been a big hit?"

I've heard sillier ideas.

You have to remember that when C was young it was competing against languages that used actual words for scoping, like BEGIN / END or IF / ENDIF or (boggle) case / esac. The choice of { } resulted in an immediate and obvious improvement in readability in most people's opinion. (This was even true compared to languages that already used brackets, but insisted on using round brackets for /everything/.)

So yeah, a lot of people are now just comfortable with languages that use bracketty things for containment and which use a variety of kinds of bracket to improve clarity still further. Any language that doesn't is just starting 10 metres behind the rest of the field waiting for the starter's pistol.

Exif marks the spot as fresh version of PNG image standard arrives

Ken Hagan Gold badge

A bit of a stretch to say "22 years on from the last spec, you can now animate your PNGs".

Animated images were part of the original design, but animation just wasn't felt to be very important so MNG didn't get the love. (Presumably internet users were more focussed on actual content back then rather than shiny things.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-image_Network_Graphics

Xlibre fork lights a fire under long-dormant X.org development

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Good to know. This is surely the dominant use-case and probably always has been, which makes me think that if X11 window managers (and Windows and...) had offered this sort of interface 40 years ago then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

If you are really concerned about the logical incompatibility then it would be equally reasonable to ban tiling window managers because they can't handle window placement.

Of course, both positions are stupid, because they are absolute.

A more reasonable approach is to allow apps to say "if I can position my windows, here's where I'd like them" or even "it's me again, please try to put me where I was last time". No absolute guarantees, but no ban hammers either.

Fact is, most end-users don't switch between overlapped window managers and tiling ones or VR bunnies, so they don't care about the kind of future-proofing that the designers are aiming for.

Dems hyperventilate about Palantir's work with the IRS in letter to CEO Karp

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: No (smo) king...

Obviously not a serious proposal but ... since you ask I feel obliged to point out that pretty much every former colony now has its own parliament with home-grown pollies. They just share the head of state.

American coders are most likely to use AI

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"Coupling this effect with occupational task and wage data puts the annual value of AI-assisted coding in the United States at $9.6–$14.4 billion,"

Value, or cost? I don't see any mention in the article about whether these commits worked. On the other hand, Microsoft's quality control has sunk a lot in recent years and their claimed use of AI has increased a lot, so there certainly is anecdotal evidence that AI code is shite.

Logitech's latest keyboard and mouse combo is wired, quiet, and suspiciously sensible

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Re: Why didn't they plug the mouse into the keyboard

Ta for the tip-off. Just ordered one.

LibreOffice adds voice to 'ditch Windows for Linux' campaign

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Re: Problems

If fleet administration is a factor for you, you are almost certainly a business and not the target of this campaign.

User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Meh

Ah, the lens cap thing. I was guilty of that only yesterday. Fixed by my boss who spotted the problem in a few nanoseconds, but then had the good grace (or presence of mind) to explain that this was because I was the second person in a week to suffer this problem.

Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 to drop X11 in GNOME editions

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Re: Devuan and FreeBSD

I think you will find that this "group of people" are a company, who do indeed want to gain control of Linux on the desktop and who regard free-thinkers as enemies to be driven out.

Peep show: 40K IoT cameras worldwide stream secrets to anyone with a browser

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Re: insecam

Possibly installed by a well-intentioned but naive family member.

Cisco president says dredging coding syntax from wetware memory wastes engineers' expensive synapses

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Re: what if the AI is wrong

Your competitors. Particularly the ones smart enough to stay off this bandwagon.

UK bets big (and small) on nuclear as datacenter demand expected to climb

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Re: Its lucky

Well, historically, these politicians were around at the time and only bothered to do something about it when they personally started having trouble breathing.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: There's always Thorium

There's also fusion, which is about as close to being a reality. Make of that what you will.

Howdver, I would agree that, certainly with hindsight and possibly this was even understood at the time, uranium was the wrong place to start. I would also note that we've had half a century or more to realise this and get off our collective arses and do something about it.

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Re: Finally

" (as we pretty much knew back in the early 2000's) "

If you are talking about clean energy with a dependable delivery then I think you mean 1950s. We haven't suddenly found a flaw in our previous plan to leave nuclear as the only remaining option, unless you count "discovering" that we've consistently only spent a pittance on developing fusion over the past half-century.

Chinese spy crew appears to be preparing for conflict by backdooring 75+ critical orgs

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Re: Well done

Well yes, but two wrongs don't make a right. I think it is fair to ask modern-day China to respect modern-day national boundaries.

As Europe eyes move from US hyperscalers, IONOS dismisses scaleability worries

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Re: Here come the cowards!!

I think your opening paragraph is saying the opposite of what you intended, but yeah.

AI can spew code, but kids should still suffer like we did, says Raspberry Pi

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Re: The AI coding fallacy

And no formal language definition.

What will UK government workers do with an extra 26 minutes a day?

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What is a Teams summary and why would I want a civil servant to be doing it, at any speed?

If CoPilot is merely accelerating tasks that aren't worth doing, there is a cheaper and even more effective way of improving productivity.

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

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Re: Wordpad

Since the cancer definitely dies with the host, I think you may just have contradicted yourself.

You were, I imagine, thinking of a parasite rather than a cancer. Now it may be that an obsesssion with adding features is a parasitic mentality that has parasitised Microsoft, but that's a whole other discussion.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin suggests threatening AI for better results

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Re: Why does it work?

Probably ...

It doesn't work, but human beings start polite and get increasingly frustrated and wound up until the damn, blasted, stupid PILE OF SCRAP, FINALLY !!! ... delivers a reasonsble answer, at which point the satisfied human recovers their composure and idly wonders "Was it the verbal abuse?".

No. You just retried many times until you were happy/livid.

Crims defeat human intelligence with fake AI installers they poison with ransomware

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Only they will fall for it, but the consequences may then hit everyone else who works for the same company.

MIT boffins claim liquid sodium battery could one day power aircraft while sucking up CO2

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Re: Just where is this Sodium going to be coming from?

There is no inevitable link between energy use and global warming. Take a clean source (probably geographically fixed and highly non-portable), and use it to produce sodium for use in this fancy new portable thingy.

Signal shuts the blinds on Microsoft Recall with the power of DRM

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I doubt that is the plan, since they have no viable products if Windows died out. It may however, be what happens. Trump trying to persuade the world that US products and services cannot be trusted probably isn't helping either.

I don't know how much of it is being picked up by US-ians yet, but there's a helll of a lot if goodwill and trust being burned up by USG and US businesses right now.

AI can't replace devs until it understands office politics

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Re: This is what I keep saying

Your example sounds a lot like how we used to use documentation, back when libraries came with such a thing. We'd search the docs for an example that wasn't very different from some of our requirements and we'd yank out the bits that looked useful. Then we'd massage the code to meet our wider requirements, which (as noted in previous comments) most certainly would not be clearly specified anywhere but would instead be distilled from a mixture of real-world experience, conversations with customers and domain experts, and the common sense that comes from being a real person.

If AI can generate plausible documentation for the very many libraries that sadly don't have any at the moment, perhaps it isn't completely useless to a programmer after all.

'Close to impossible' for Europe to escape clutches of US hyperscalers

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Umm, because they are stupid?

Next question...

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Re: "would rather get a root canal than start over"

The greybeards are actually mentioned in the article, though not by that name. They are the people who knew how to run stuff in-house, who were sacked to provide the short-term saving that made the cloud migration look attractive to the bean counters.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

They wouldn't have us. We're waayyy more left-wing than any mainstream political grouping in the US and we outnumber the existing US population by about 3:2.