Posts by Ken Hagan

AMD crashes Windows 8 tablet party with ultrathin hybrid

Re: Dates and Products please!

Don't hold your breath.

"We can take Trinity and put it in a 17W VGA and it can give us over 10 hours of battery life"

Is 17W typical for a laptop display? It's not that hard to run the whole of the rest of the PC on less than that, so the display is now more than 50% of the total power budget. This has interesting implications.

Firstly, there's no overwhelming benefit in using a clever ARM CPU that sips only milliwatts. You won't actually be able to see anything (ie, use the computer) until you turn on the screen and at that point the CPU hardly matters. Once Intel have got "sleep" consumption down to the same ballpark, ARM's advantage is lost, at least until we address the second implication...

Secondly, the real breakthroughs in laptop battery lifetime will only come when people develop display technologies that drink about a tenth of the current ones. E-ink is obviously the sort of direction to go in, but it isn't much use for video. (Still, you can get a lot of useful work done on a high-res low-colour-depth grayscale display as long as the stupid programmer hasn't decided it would be "cute" to animate everything.)

Vint Cerf: 'COMMUNISTS want to seize the INTERNET'

What's missing from this picture?

Ah, yes! What's missing is even the vaguest description of how the ITU, UN or any other body could "take over the internet". Let's try a few scenarios.

1) Dr Evil (for want of a bogeyman) takes over ICANN and re-assigns all the IP addresses so that the USA doesn't have any. Bwuhahaha! Except that the USA just carries on business as usual and anyone connecting to a US network who doesn't use the USA's addressing simply doesn't get their packets delivered. Assuming both sides dig their heels in, the USA gets shut off from all the spammers and malware eminating from Dr Evil's country and Dr Evil stops getting Gootube and Windows update. (Everyone else is free to join whichever party they choose.)

2) Dr Evil (now pretty pissed off, so he's having another go) firewalls his country so that no-one can pass packets in or out without his permission. Bwuhahaha! Except that we *already know* how this one plays out because it has already happened and basically no-one outside the afflicted countries is actually affected.

3) Dr Evil really needs a third strategy because he's trained in rhetoric and knows about the rule of three. Unfortunately, he can't think of one. It seems there just isn't any way to "take over the internet".

Pausing for reflection, Dr Evil wonders how this can be so. After all, if it is impossible to control the internet, how have the Americans gained such a dominant position? Reluctantly, Dr Evil concludes that US dominance rests on the fact that US companies and institutions generate loads of content that foreigners want, and those foreigners have to play by US rules if they want to talk to a US server. In fact, it is just like Dr Evil's own country, except that no-one outside Evil-land gives a stuff about the content on Evil servers, so poor Dr Evil has less leverage than Californian porn providers.

US officials confirm Stuxnet was a joint US-Israeli op

Re: would it be obvious

Of course, if the major (geological) powers were working in concert to hush things up...

Re: would it be obvious

"What would happen if a nuclear weapon were detonated under the deep sea? Would it be obvious or would the aftermath be thought to be a natural catastrophe?"

Since seismologists are generally willing to offer a figure for how deep an earthquake was, and since that figure is generally measured in kilometres, my guess is that they'd have no trouble at all in detecting an earthquake whose centre was basically at surface level. (That's ocean-bed surface rather than sea-level, but since transverse waves don't travel *at all* through liquids, it is the ocean-bed that counts as surface in this context.

Even if you took a sub down, drilled a big (wide) well and dropped a nuke down the hole, I think you'd get found out. BP did.

@b 3

"we just have to hope that the VERY SIMPLE IDEA of a state being able to CREATE MONEY and not BORROW IT AT INTEREST off the banking mafia, will finally sink in"

Yeah, coz treating economics as a zero-sum game worked sooo well in medieval Europe and state-sponsored inflation worked sooo well in 20th century Russia, so trying out both ideas at the same time (and damn the internal contradiction) couldn't *possibly* have any downside.

Re: Confirmation

"So now we have confirmation..."

You might have. I don't. These guys are paid to lie. Presumably they aren't *so* bad at their job that they are unable to do so. Whilst I am loathe to give succour to internet conspiracy theorists, I have to concede that having unnamed US officials "confirm" that their government is conducting an undeclared war against Iran in an election year doesn't quite meet my own personal standards of evidence.

Council builds £2.8m shared database of vulnerable kids

Re: valid, moral or legal

Depending on the data that is shoulder surfed, why is this necessarily a problem? There may, for example, be a legal requirement to share certain data and if they currently live on a system that includes non-shareable stuff then your available options are:

i) fail to share the data

ii) get someone who is authorised to search the database to find the data and then exclude the non-shareable parts before letting the recipient shoulder-surf

iii) Build a new unified database that applies a more fine-grained security model.

Since (i) is illegal, I have some sympathy with a council that does "(ii) until we can implement (iii)".

How to give your applications a long and happy life

Re: The real way to guarantee a long life for your program

Nice troll, but...

Note for younger programmers: Correlation is not causation.

*If* a program has a long life, it will eventually outlive the careers of those who first wrote it, it will originally have been written in a language that is not now fashionable, and it will have been continuously modified to meet evolving requirements. By the time *you* review the code, it will be spaghettified crap in an arcane language with no written spec, let alone documentation. However, this is not "best practice for new projects".

Oz has to go nuclear, says Adelaide U scientist

Re: better way to extract the energy

The energy arrives in the form of heat, since the annihilation of a nucleus requires very small tweezers to perform in a more controlled fashion. So your choices are pretty much "what to heat up" and then "what work to make your heat engine perform".

People have looked into piping plasma through some cunning array of magnets to generate electricity directly, but several decades of (admittedly low-level) research have failed to make that method any better than turning a wheel.

Techies beg world to join the 1% on IPv6 launch day

Re: all well and good

Andrews & Arnold are offering IPv6 *and* will send you a Technicolor router that you can use to connect to it. I dare say there are others. Your pessimism has been good for about 10 years but things are finally starting to move in the UK.

NTT demos double-sided see-through smartphone

Re: strangely enticing

Yes. To give credit where it is due, this could have been done some time ago and wasn't, so it has novelty and non-obviousness in its favour. It has, as I see it, two ergonomic advantages.

Firstly, by distinguishing between front and back dragging, it provides a natural way to express a desire to "rotate" the UI object. It probably does this rather better than a conventional touch-screen gesture.

Secondly, fat-fingered users will appreciate not having to see through their own hands. This, however, will be much less of an advantage once they scale up the display.

Time will tell if it is all worthwhile, but it is certainly interesting. At least someone appears to believe that innovation involves coming up with new ideas rather than simply copying what everyone else has been doing for hundreds of years. (Rounded corners, indeed!)

Big Data is now TOO BIG - and we're drowning in toxic information

Didn't go far enough

Matt, I think you hit the nail on the head, but inexplicably failed to apply any downward force.

In most cases, there is not 0.05% signal, or even 0.00005% signal. There is *no* signal. That's a huge qualitative difference, because in the first two cases you might be tempted to look harder (or "smarter", in bullshit parlance) and in the latter case the only sane approach is to stop looking. That's what the first 90% of the article said, and then you went and spoiled it by asking for tools to filter the ocean of raw data.

White AMERICANS will have become MEKON brain-men by 3000AD

Re: Of many explanations

Very true, but perhaps unnecessary.

A height increase of 5.6% is mentioned over the same period. (The article says this has stopped in recent years, but there's no evidence that the head increases haven't stopped, too.) That's a volumetric increase of 17%, which on an average modern brain size of 1260 cm3 (wikipedia) would be an increase of 190cm3 from an inferred 19th century value of 1070cm3.

UK music-rights collection: Where does all the money go?

Re: why I have to pay

You have to pay because it is the law and you and your like-minded friends have so far failed to elect sufficient numbers of MPs who are minded to change the law.

But I suspect you were looking for a moral justification, rather than a legal one, so ...

The moral justification is that maintaining the rule of law and a democratic system for changing it is far more important than having the right laws. If the law on a particular subject is a bit daft, but you've maintainined consitutional integrity, that law can be changed without excessive bloodshed. If, on the other hand, you've decided to replace the system with a benign dictatorship, history teaches us that they don't remain benign indefinitely and are rather harder to change once they go off.

So I suppose it is a case of "Never, never let go of nurse, for fear of meeting something worse.".

LucasArts unveils Star Wars game for grown-ups

Re: We made random stuff up

The point about the "Star Wars universe" is that on this occasion they largely *haven't* made stuff up. All the cultural back-drop has simply been cut-n-pasted over from other Star Wars games.

Why don't the best techies work in the channel?

Re: Sales != Technical Skills

"I think that the best person to sell "complex" goods is someone who understands it. "

Speaking as someone who occasionally *buys* stuff, the person I'm most likely to buy from is someone who looks like they could make their product solve my problem. In my experience, that usually requires *some* technical competence, if only because *I* am a techie and therefore bother to think about what the words mean. If you are just spouting buzzwords, I'm going to spot it.

Now, if you are selling to someone who hasn't a clue what their own problem is, you don't need technical skills at all. You need to be able to make the buyer think that their own failure to understand their own problem is not an issue because your product will not only solve the problem but also teach them what it was. The whole exercise becomes purely an exercise in make-believe.

I suspect that the reality of most sales pitches lies somewhere in between.

Advertisers slam Microsoft over 'Do not track' decision

Re: You might was well not have it in any browser now.

That was always the case. Any scheme that isn't wholly enforceable by the browser regardless of the wishes or level of co-operation from the advertisers, is not worth having. In fact, since it probably reduces the pressure to come up with a *real* solution, it is actively harmful.

China wants to be techno SUPERPOWER

Re: Hang on a second...

I have no problems with separating the CCP From Chinese culture. The CCP themselves describe their doctrine as "communism with Chinese characteristics", implicitly accepting that the party's main doctrines are a European import, over which some traditional values have to be laid before the results are palatable to the local population.

Similarly, I have no problems separating the politics of Hitler and his cronies from "German culture". Indeed, a failure to do so generally results in people getting upset and mis-using the word "racist".

Communism in China has to survive until the mid 2020s before it outlives even the Russian version. Compared to the broad strokes of Chinese history going back 3000 years or so, the CCP are a flash in the pan.

I need to multitask, but Windows 8's Metro won't let me

Re: Bogus argument

The article is about Metro. The clue is in the title.

Julian Assange extradition: What's next for WikiLeaker-in-chief?

Re: Who Cares?

"Why should Assange expect never to be held to account by the US administration for tapping into their comm's and publicising them?"

Umm, because *that* isn't a crime outside the US and he was outside the US at the time. Your "argument" is clearly nonsense if we substitute "North Korea" for "US".

Feel free to argue that it was rather naive of him to do this in a country that is so closely allied to the US, but please accept that it isn't *immediately* obvious that he has broken any law that he is actually subject to.

Free Windows 8 desktop app development is dead

Re: How do you switch metro off.

Officially, you don't. Unofficially, my guess is that as soon as MS commit to a final release it will be worth someone's time and energy to figure out how to restore a normal desktop.

As a first cut, it wouldn't be too hard to create a bog-standard Win32 app that sat in the bottom left-hand corner and whenever you clicked on it you were shown a cascading menu of all the shortcuts under your startup folder. (Probably only a few hundred lines of code.) You'd still have to go through the metro abomination once when you boot up in the morning, but thereafter you could stay put in a familiar environment.

There's really not much MS can do to stop people running Windows apps on Windows. In the unlikely event that they ever succeed, they'll have removed the only reason that anyone still buys their wretched OS in the first place.

"Even the generally reviled Vista was kind of a necessary step on the way to Windows 7"

Historically, I don't think Windows 7 was ever the destination. Vista was the destination. They reached it and discovered that it was a horrible swamp of a place and asked themselves "Where now?". Win7 was the nearest high ground.

Going the wrong way is an occupational hazard of leading the way. Still, you've got to wonder who's reading the usability map over there.

Re: "raw C\C++"

Is that like a Windows spelling of "raw C/C++"?

Absolutely. In fact, use VS2010 in preference to VS2011 *anyway* because the only changes in the latter are the grey colour scheme and the ability to target WinRT. Most amateur developers won't want either.

Also, *any* Windows compiler produced in the last decade or two can target the Win8 desktop. All you need is a linker capable of setting /subsystem:windows (or console, to taste) and the headers for a recent SDK. The fact that MS have produced a compiler so lame that it can't even do that is (perhaps) newsworthy, but it is not the death knell for cost-free programming on Windows.

In fairness, El Reg isn't the only site that has completely over-reacted on this one.

People-powered Olympic shopping mall: A sign of utter tech illiteracy

Re: The problem is kiloWatt-hours

"It should help remind anyone with a few brain cells to spare ..."

Yes, it does, but when it comes to "Hard Science" such as this, most people apparently don't have a few brain cells to spare, so I suggest that those who do should adopt language that is less gratuitously confusing.

To judge from the replies, the El Reg readership is populated by an enormous number of people who are very eager to demonstrate that *they* understand the concept, but not remotely concerned with ideas about why so many others don't. Perhaps this is why we live in a society where the vast majority go through life in scientific ignorance and the situation does not improve from one generation to the next.

Re: The problem is kiloWatt-hours

"No, the "-hours" tells you it's energy not power."

Congratulations. You've missed the point of my post, which is that the vast majority of the population *don't* understand that (or simply don't hear the "-hours" suffix). The two units (kW and kWh) *sound* similar and therefore when people hear about something involving a few hundred of either they jump to the conclusion that this is comparable to a few hundred of the other.

We have two options. We can improve the quality of science education and wait for an entire generation of arty types to die off, or we can choose units for energy and power that sound different. Guess which is easier?

The problem is kiloWatt-hours

This unit should be banned from public use. It is evident that the vast majority of the population do not know what it is and the name serves merely to oscure a valuable distinction between energy and power. Anyway, it's only a factor of 3.6 different from the proper SI unit, which even has a shorter abbreviation -- MJ.

This is probably more important that anyone's metrication fetish. A continuining use of miles has not led the average driver to confuse speed with distance. Neither has our love affair with the traditional pint led us to speak of yards of ale, except in jest. The next most dangerous unit, in fact, is probably the pound, but since weight and mass *can* safely be confused in the majority of terrestrial scenarios, even this dimensional dumbness pales against the kilowatt-hour.

Technically minded authors and publications could lead the way. (El Reg, do you fancy making a New Year's resolution?) Over time, we'd arrive at the happy state wherein any article that used the kWh unit could be safely dismissed as innumerate. (To be honest, we are pretty much there already.)

Steve Jobs' death clears way for vibrating Apple tool

You should have read more carefully between the lines then.

'Dated and cheesy' Aero ripped from Windows 8

Re: Yaaaaawn

Everyone is a fricking expert because the topic is usability and we are all users. I'd guess that most of us here are fairly heavy users and have far wider experience than average of different UIs on various systems past and present.

Not being funny, but the real question is what are Microsoft smoking? Twenty years ago, GUIs were sufficiently close to being "designed" that vendors frequently issued design guides with references to actual research in human-computer interactions and models of how people think when they approach a computer. Every version of Windows in the last ten years is sufficiently far from those models that MS don't dare publish similar guides. They may have something called a design guide, but it doesn't reference research and is instead full of arty comments about the emotions they want the UI to inspire in their users.

Re: For your own good

Jeez, to judge from the downvotes as I post this, nearly 95% of the El Reg readership have a sense of humour bypass. Do we need to make the use of the joke and troll icons mandatory?

Re: Why?

I think you are worrying too much. Apart from replacing the start menu with a scrolling screen of pain, the desktop experience on Win8 is not noticeably different from 7.

As I noted in an earlier comment, Win8 is 6.2 at the API level, so you'll be able to treat it the same way you currently treat Vista. Focus your efforts on XP and 7. Perform basic sanity checks just in case you have customers blighted by having to use Vista or 8, but focus the testing efforts on XP and 7.

Re: XP Anyone?

"That's fine until you buy some new hardware whcih will not have drivers for XP."

Nah. You run XP in the VM that you are running on top of the proper OS. That way you get all the driver support and security of the maintained modern OS, plus an ability to run all the inevitable Windows apps that your job forces you to use.

Re: Hello McBalmer! Wake UP!

I think the problem is that they *have* looked and have drawn entirely the wrong conclusion.

They seen that people don't always upgrade and have concluded that the only source of revenue for a new version of Windows will be OEM sales on new hardware. In fact, this is arse backwards. They already *have* a product for new hardware (Win7), whose development costs have by now been amortised to nil. All the cash they've spent developing a new one only makes sense if they can persuade existing customers to upgrade (i.e., selling them Windows for a *second* time). Then there's the fact that an OEM licence for Windows on new hardware makes them sweet FA whereas each upgrade makes them several times as much.

Commercially speaking, upgrading existing customers on existing hardware should be at the forefront of their minds whenever they design a new version of Windows.

Re: By that logic we'd still be using Win3.1

But using it on machines that can handle many cores, many GB, and periphericals with every modern bus you've ever heard of.

You're right. It would be awful. Every action would just complete immediately and there'd be no time to make coffee or crak open a <icon>.

MySQL's growing NoSQL problem

Is this innovation, or just diversity?

Are these products genuinely different, or are they merely "pretty much the same code, performing the same end-user functions, under a different licence"?

The billion and one different Linux distros aren't innovation. The choice of LibreOffice versus OpenOffice isn't innovation. Even comparing the JVM and CLR, which are normally thought of as different ecosystems, I see basically just a clone of the basic features of a runtime environment as pioneered by ... well probably someone in the 1970s that I haven't heard of.

For me, when someone starts talking about "innovation", unless they immediately provide pretty startling evidence of novelty, I just assume that it's marketing/management bollocks. Sorry, but that's a 99% effective filter and it is really easy to apply.

How to keep your money safe if the euro implodes

Re: Cui Bono

No idea, but in a world where you can take a "position" on the future price of just about anything, I'd be amazed if there weren't quite a lot of people out there who would gain. You might be one of them. Perhaps the question you meant to ask was "Who *knows* that they stand to gain and has enough influence to push?".

And the worst film NEVER made is...

Re: Poster?

Sadly, you might need to float the idea past your legal team, too.

Passwords are for AES-holes

Re: If that's so, then why

"What's the biggest single security hole passwords have these days? People writing them down."

Seriously, I think I'd need to see the stats to back that one up.

You need to consider the attack vectors. For something like online banking or internet shopping, the vast majority of attackers are in a different country from the piece of paper where you wrote the password down. If you can live with the inconvenience of being unable to bank or shop except where your piece of paper is, you can make the password as strong as you need.

In an open-plan office environment, where the attackers are disgruntled or mischievous co-workers (or sub-ordinates), the system probably isn't internet visible and the *only* attackers are ones who occupy the same building as your piece(s) of paper. It ain't such a good system then. At least part of the password needs to exist inside your head.

NHS axes HealthSpace: 'Just too difficult' to use

And in other news

The NHS is going to have everyone's records online by 2015, through the magic of the private sector and competing innovators or something.

Yeah, sure.

Top Facebook exec begs students: 'Click on an ad or two'

Re: Gerald Ratner

No. This week's Gerald Ratner moment was surely Stevie B saying that the two most recent versions of Windows were "cheesy and dated".

LG pitches £7k 55in OLED TV, again

Infinite contrast ratio

So either:

* They have managed to stabilise several million miniature black holes.

* They have an infinitely powerful energy source driving the OLEDs.

* They are lying.

Gosh! I wonder which it can be?

China turns on the sprinklers with ambitious rain-making plans

"look to increase artificial precipitation by 3-5 per cent"

Presumably they are hoping to change the *targetting* of the available (fixed) rainfall. Or have they figure out a way of increasing the number of clouds in the sky?

Russian satellite beams home 121-megapixel pics of Earth

Re: Flat Earth Society

The American branch, in particular, think the image is a fake.

Canary Islands host long-distance quantum teleportation

What's the El Reg unit of bandwidth?

"The weather, they note, delayed the experiment for a year."

So perhaps the most awesome thing about this experiment is that it gave us a real-world opportunity to use the word "nanobaud".

Why on Earth is Microsoft moving to Euro pricing now?

Re: Not for business use but...

This is a real problem. It's been a long time since ordinary punters actually saw real installation media and so "the product" is actually a 25-character text string. That's not hard to "import".

Do we have any evidence that the 25-character string identifies where the licence was bought? Are copies of Windows regionalised like DVDs? Am I just giving Stevie B ideas by asking such questions in public? (Probably not. I doubt that Windows could legitimately refuse to function just because it detected that it had emigrated from its place of origin. Surely...)

Windows XP update fails in infinite .NET patch loop

Re: Removal works

I heartily agree. Unless you have something that needs .NET, you should remove it. (No part of the basic XP system uses it. Sadly, this isn't true for later versions.) This advice applies separately to the three versions: 1.x, 2/3.x & 4.x. Fortunately, there's a handy tool for doing this.

See: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2008/08/28/8904493.aspx

Review: Raspberry Pi

"rumours about Oracle porting a JAVA VM persist"

Rumours may persist, but no-one familiar with Oracle's current efforts is going to hold their breath waiting for a JVM that fits in 256MB.

Why can't ICANN just 'get s**t done', ask dot-brand hopefuls

Re: Boycott

Bit difficult when said software is open source. Also, you couldn't possibly argue that there was a technical problem, since arbitrary DNs are handled fine at the next level down.

No, the people most likely to sabotage gTLDs are authors of web browsers and firewalls. You probably could make a case that at least some gTLDs are just channels for unwanted content (.xxx anyone?) and therefore ought to be something that admins and end-users can opt out of.

IP law probe MPs hunt for smoking gun, find plenty of smoke

Re: IP the savior?

"Well it's not true anymore; and they are clever; they invented paper and fireworks while we were scrathing on cave walls."

The achievements of their great**N ancestors are hardly relevant. Genetically we are all the same and culturally we can all change.

The ancient Greeks had electricity, analog computers and steam engines if the archeological evidence is to be believed. The Romans did for them (and the Celts) and it took a couple of millenia to recover. Similarly, Chinese insularity and civil service incompetence left the country so crap that the round-eyed westerners were able to overrun it and screw them over for a couple of hundred years. (Let's hope they've forgotten that bit.)

Given that we have a massive head-start, the only possible reason for the West not to be still running the planet on its own terms in a thousand years is cluelessness. Fortunately for everyone else, *that* appears to be a renewable resource.

Re: Incentives. - Absolutely

You might almost say "The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers.".