Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
"Try looking in your address bar some time Ken. Google automatically redirect to your local country page."
Try thinking a bit more before posting. Where google redirects after I've gone straight to their .com portal really doesn't matter. If they didn't have the .co.uk address, it could easily redirect to google.com/uk.
If they are openly contemptuous of the Japanese legal system, I'd have said it was a racing certainty that google.jp will disappear. It's probably the only thing the court can actually do.
Whether that actually has *any* discernable impact on Google's operations is another matter. There's a google.co.uk but I imagine hardly anyone takes the time and trouble to set up their browser to use it.
I think the low-hanging fruit are gone.
HTTP is already designed to permit static content to be cached, so the "container" you are looking for already exists and is called a "file". If the prospect of lots of little files annoys you, there's another existing standard (mhtml) for storing multiple elements in a single file, that is supported to some degree by most browsers.
I also think the high-level fruit are likely to remain unreachable.
Sites that insist on base64-encoding the client's autobiography in the URL, or putting time-dependent trivia on every page, or offering personalised content to each visitor, are broken at the application-level (authorship) and cannot be fixed by changing the transport protocol.
In much of the world, oil costs what the local taxman decides it ought to cost. Each step forward in extraction technologies and (by comparison to the tax, modest) step upwards in price brings yet more raw material into economic viability.
We are probably 100 years away from the price of the raw material being the barrier to its use. When you consider the changes in society and technology that have happened within the last 100 years, it becomes entirely plausible that we will *never* run out of oil.
People are starting to use the phrase "perimeter security" as though it were short-hand for a bad thing. It isn't. It is always a good idea to fend off the unsophisticated attacks at the border, if only as an exercise in noise reduction for whatever measures you have in place within.
The bad thing is to have nothing within. PS is necessary, but not sufficient.
You still do. For XP, MS advised that bitmapped resources (mainly icons, cursors and toolbar buttons) should be provided at 96 and 120 dpi. For Vista, they added 144 and for Win7 they added 192. These correspond to the desktop scaling (100%, 125%, 150% and 200%) offered in Control Panel. I'd be gobsmacked if Mac programming guidelines haven't said much the same thing for the last 10 years.
It doesn't mean that everyone does, though. I suspect that most Windows apps have 96dpi and nothing else.
I really doubt that the limiting size on current SIMs is the microelectronics. Therefore, there *is* a universal method for making SIMs smaller. However, it is the fairly obvious and non-novel one of putting the electronics onto a smaller package.
Even if it *was* the limiting factor when current SIMs were designed, such things *have* (as is generally known in this forum, you must be *really* new to IT) shrunk at a fairly predictable rate over the years and so it would not be the limiting factor now.
Go and troll somewhere else.
"which the NIF described as being 1,000 times more energy than the entire US uses "at any instant in time"."
I hope they didn't. It's 1000 times more than the *power* drawn by the US over any normal timescale, but the failure to distinguish between energy and energy-per-unit-time is a bit sad, given that the point of the sentence was to play a game around that very idea.
I'm fairly sure I have read recently (perhaps in a Win8 context) that Microsoft are indeed considering exactly this.
It wouldn't be targetted specifically against Chrome (and so wouldn't pop up anything asking about browser defaults) but some future version of their freebie AV package might default to nuking any EXEs that get written to application data folders.
You're right. It won't.
The flat line for Firefox is presumably explained by the fact that it is nobody's default browser, except for Linux distros with bog-all market share. If you are a FF user, you've probably installed it in bother places. If you stick with the default, you use a different browser in both places. (Opera's line looks flat, too, but it is so low that this might reflect the resolution of the graphic rather than the raw data.)
Chrome's rise is probably also explained by its being a piece of malware that bleeds onto machines whether you wanted it or not. At work, you may have a sys-admin willing to block malware trying to install itself without any administrative blessing (*). This is much less likely at home (hence the dichotomy) but eventually either or both of MS and AV companies will wise up and start blocking "drive-by XCOPY installs from untrusted web sites" and then Chrome's main distribution mechanism will be gone.
Probably. I saw it and thought the intersection of "smart enough to have a net worth of $500k" and "dumb enough to sell it all for a one-way (*) trip to Mars" was probably quite small. However, I then read the first dozen of so comments and it appears that the El Reg readership are willing. I think there's something Darwinian going on there.
There are two reasons why it would be one-way. Firstly, you've sold everything on Earth and would return flat broke. Things would have to be near-terminal on Mars before you'd contemplate that.
Secondly, the Martian environment is nowhere near as hospitable as TV and films make out, and even if the rocket trip were absolutely free, $500k is not going to change that. You'll be living in a very confined space, eating your own shit, drinking recycled piss and breathing your neighbours farts, for the rest of your natural like. Happily, that's such an unhealthy lifestyle that you won't survive very long. In fact, you probably won't last as far as the next launch-window for the return trip to Earth. Even if you did, you'd be trampled to death in the rush.
Email providers (ISPs?) don't do this because being lazy has no downside.
If there was an *easy* way for end-users to identify the "source ISP" and add it to their personal blacklist, then things might be different. Customers of lazy ISPs would start receiving messages to the effect that "The recipient has received too much spam from your ISP and is not satisfied that your ISP takes the problem seriously. Therefore, all mail from this ISP is now *automatically* rejected. You may be completely innocent, but your ISP is not. Your options are to change ISP or give up on the idea of being able to email this person."
It would be interesting to see how people used that facility and what effect it had on ISPs. Obviously one could unfairly blacklist an ISP because of one bad experience, but you'd be cutting yourself off from legitimate senders every time you did so. In the long-term, the incentive would be for recipients to blacklist only as a last resort and for ISPs to help their own customers avoid being spam senders.
But it does rely on having a *reliable* way to identify sender *ISPs*.
There's a saying: the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones.
That coal is only an important natural resource as long as the technology of the day depends on burning it. If we ever switch over to a low carbon economy, the only use for coal (and oil) will be in the chemical industry, which has a vastly smaller appetite for the raw material. Supply will then exceed demand by several orders of magnitude and the price will fall by a similar amount.
There may be good reasons to keep coal in the ground, but conservation *of coal* isn't one of them.
An interesting link, if only to see the number of Americans who believe that the "ate" form is a Britishism. Speaking as a Brit, I can assure you that it bloody isn't. It's wrong over here too. It has *always* been object-oriented.
Doesn't stop people making the mistake but that, in turn, doesn't mean we have to roll over and let the language get mangled again.
"We've been fannying about for 25 years and completely missed the boat to replace our ageing power stations with something that is either clean or dependable, and the North Sea is just about empty, so we're going to abandon all our carbon targets and base our medium term economic prosperity on the whims of foreign gas suppliers. Please don't expect us to think about this again within our lifetime. Energy minister is a very minor job, politically speaking, and I'd much rather spend my time playing politics and trying to unseat my more senior colleagues.", the Minister said.
If I remember my history lessons, the *idea* of a single OS running on different "sizes" of hardware was the big gamble of System/360, so Microsoft are about half a century out. Not for the first time, they call it "innovation" but the idea is actually older than most of the staff developing it.
The article says he retained a copy of the film and could have simply re-posted it somewhere else but he'd still have been vulnerable to the other person requesting a take-down from the "somewhere else". Therefore, he had to obtain a definitive court win before this obvious remedy was practical.
These five suggestions are all things that a customer could live without for ages and then purchase only the bits they needed. If the product is really important to you, you'll probably build up enough in-house knowledge to work out most of the answers yourself. Lastly, it presumes that the product is sufficiently obscure that customers won't be able to find each other on the internet and exchange knowledge.
The church would be better advised to do nothing. No-one in their right mind could possibly take the sites seriously, and most of the world probably has .xxx blocked by now anyway. The most likely explanation is that the xxx registry is trying to drum up a few news stories about people using their TLD. If the church actually engages with these idiots, they are merely encouraging the problem.
How does this count as "not installing any files"? Sure, it doesn't install any of its own files, and it taken a somewhat indirect route to installing this one, but if it survives a reboot (which the article states is the point of the exercise) then that sounds a lot like a file to me.
Now I could imagine a virus whose author was sufficiently confident of his ability to re-infect you after the reboot, who therefore chose not to install any files so as to increase the chances of going undetected. That would be an impressive piece of chutzpah and newsworthy.
But this, I don't think so. On the evidence of this article, it is just another delivery mechanism for a bog-standard file-system-based Trojan.
...and when they *did* finally finish it, they found that they were bankrupt and the Americans had won the Cold War.
Only then did it dawn on them that *this* is what the US shuttle program was *for*.
But the punchline is that (by that time) the US themselves had forgotten this and continued to bank-roll the program for two decades.
"The USSR developed a space shuttle because their engineers looked at the design and concluded it could not be operated for the costs NASA claimed (which was true). Russian politicians concluded it was a conspiracy to do something else and insisted on having one just like it."
So they knew it was a stupid idea, so therefore it had to be something else in disguise, but they didn't know what, so they did the same in the hope that they'd figure out what it was for by the time they'd finished it. Ah, the Cold War. Happy days...
Education is good, and has other benefits, but even cheaper still is simply acknowledging the legal and social rights of women. It turns out that, given the choice, most women choose not spend their adult life being pumped for babies until dying in childbirth around 40. (OK, mild exaggeration, but still...)
"Also when the Japanese had to shut down their nuclear capacity, they were very glad they had other sources of electric supply. Much better to have your eggs in more than one basket."
If they hadn't any alternatives, they might not have taken nearly all their reactors offline. Most of them aren't actually damaged and the risk of earthquakes or tsumamis hasn't actually changed. It is local politics that is keeping them offline, just as it is politics rather than evidence that keeps the exclusion zone around Fukishima so large.
You are correct and I feel your pain. On the other hand, evolution *is* a menu that random chance gets to choose from and natural selection then demonstrates which lucky descendants had a good choice made on their behalf. It's easy to see why so many people end up using the language of choice and success. (But a glance at the Intelligent Design crowd reminds us that evolutionary biology desparately needs to come up with something better.)
In Graham's defence, nowhere in his piece does he actively suggest that the squid (or its genome) is making a conscious choice. Also, I've tried to produce an alternative wording for his penultimate paragraph that adequately conjures the right imagery in my own head. I failed. It isn't that easy. (IMHO, a modest improvement might be obtained by saying that "all except 5" are "unsuccessful". This at least reflects the truth that the vast majority of mutations are selected against.)
No. It's Sinofsky. He put the ribbon on Office and probably more than anyone else has put alternative Office software on the map as millions of users screamed "Is there an alternative? Please tell me there is an alternative!"
Then he moved to the Windows division. There he found Vista in a state of self-gravitational collapse. Realising that he couldn't screw this product if it died straight away, he produced a massive XPsp2-like service pack to bring it up to snuff. Which he charged money for. Then he set about screwing Windows the same as he had Office.
Balmer's done nothing except sit and watch.
It's not a deception if all those rusty PCs were paid for. Steve Jobs would have sold his testicles to enjoy the market share that Bill Gates enjoyed. You have taken leave of your senses if you believe that Apple "don't care" about the corporate market. They just don't have a way in.
Yet.
You missed a step. First you have to replace your "Consumer Preview" with last year's "Developer Preview". *Then* you can switch off Metro.
This has been mentioned in these forums about a dozen times in the last fortnight. Unless you've spent the last month on Mars, I suggest you need to brush up on your reading skills before posting.
The point being missed by Mr Sinofsky and his friends is that *right now* Metro has no ecosystem either. Therefore, the choice facing developers is where to port to.
1) Make a one-way port from Win32 or .NET to Metro/WinRT, removing features in your app that depend on capabilities that haven't been included in the latter. (Functionally, it's a subset of the older API sets.) Unless you *also* continue to maintain the original source code (doubling your future development and maintainance costs) you've just slashed your potential customer base down to zero.
2) Make a port to some cross-platform framework, again removing features that aren't universally supported. However, given the functional convergence of Windows, Macs and Nixes over the last decade, that's not much. Consequently, you probably can ditch the original code after the port is finished. Congratulations, you've not only just increased your potential customer base (albeit by a tiny amount, since Windows already had 90% of the market) but you've now got an insurance policy against the Sinofsky faction winning this absurd battle within MS. (If Sinofsky wins, you can be sure that Windows 9 will be positively eye-popping.)
For Windows 7, yes. See http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/licensing/sblicensing/pages/downgrade_rights.aspx where you will read "Another compelling reason to encourage customers to move to Windows 7 is the ability to downgrade to Windows XP.".
However, this is a notable exception. See http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=13029. OEM and Retail licences (which between them cover the majority of systems purchased by consumers) do not have downgrade rights. You need to have a volume licence.
Clearly they don't include reading conprehension or anything in the social sphere, or you would have realised that the suggestion wasn't intended as careers advice. Try technical support and find out how those without your skills get on when they use the systems that your genius has produced. Then have a think about whether you need to broaden your skills base.
Umm, no they aren't. The point of the article is that the poor tech companies are going to have to find another country to build their factory in.
My guess is that they'll find one. The world is not short of wretchedly poor places to be born. As soon as the Chinese go all "Korean/Taiwanese" and start demanding a standard of living commensurate with their economic strength, they'll find that they aren't so "competitive" anymore. They may also find they don't have the right kind of government. Nothing is forever.
Your arguments against Metro apply to the desktop, too, and it is being pushed there regardless. I think Microsoft just feel they have to push their phone UI everywhere. They want the same market share in phones as they have in the desktop space.
Let's hope they get what they wish for. :)
On the other hand, if they've made a genuine effort to mitigate this by making the Powershell UI a complete solution, you might (in this coming version) be able to do without your multiple management apps.
My thoughts in reading all this were simply that someone must have put a petard under the seats of Microsoft's management. Radical improvements to their server offering? Why would they do such a thing? Oh, yeah, they've noticed that they are losing market share in servers because its one area where FOSS offerings really can offer exactly the same functionality for most customers. Another such area is web browser, where we saw MS doing sweet FA for several years after IE6, until Firefox came along and started hoovering up market share. MS suddenly discovered a need to create a more standards compliant browser and (a couple of revisions later) have pretty much managed it.
Er, yeah, coz the Daily Mail readers won't mind that in their back yard at all. I think you'd have more luck proposing a nuclear power station. At least their safety is a matter of public record, for better or worse. Whacking great magnets take us completely into uncharted territory.
Oh, and really *big* quantities of superconductor aren't "fairly available" on my planet.
"...that full copyright was required for the merchandising exercise..."
Presumably this is untrue and presumably this Foundation took some legal advice prior to setting up this scam. The possibilities at this point are therefore:
1) the Foundation's legal advice was *really* bad and they ought to seek further legal advice (from different lawyers).
2) the Foundation are lying to an interested and informed journalist, and they ought to seek PR advice (from someone with a clue).
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