Posts by Ken Hagan

If you wanted Windows 10, it looks like you've already installed it

Re: Optional?

No version of DirectX has ever been "killer" unless you are a games junkie.

Ubuntu 15.10: More kitten than beast – but beware the claws

Re: when did. ..

I think Windows Vista was the pioneer. I can't help with the followup question of who ever thought that copying Vista was a good idea.

What is money? A rabid free marketeer puts his foot in lots of notes

Whose fiat?

Government may be able to print more of their own money whenever it suits them, but they can't print anyone else's and sooner or later have to buy stuff from overseas. So your fears about modern monetary theory surely only apply once we have a World Government.

And then ... Nature typically has pretty rigid ideas about the cost of doing something and all sorts of activities (even those confined within a single currency zone) have to deal with her, so we're back to money being a measure of how much work you are owed. (On which note, I applaud Neil Barnes sentiment, but would point out that debt obligations are generally accepted to fade away with time (is that inflation?) whereas the good lady Emmy Noether tells us that the failure of physical laws to do so results in the conservation of the quantity measured in MWh.)

Woman makes app that lets people rate and review you, Yelp-style. Now SHE'S upset people are 'reviewing' her

Re: What was the business model here?

"It doesn't matter if your business idea involves serving turds on a stick, if you convince the VCs that you're going to reach X million people, you get the money."

Which merely defers the question: where do the (idiotic) VCs get *their* money from?

I'm genuinely puzzled because I appear to live in a world where large numbers of unspeakably idiotic twats have access to large sums of money, and I'm feeling left out. I'm as big a twat as the next guy, but no-one has ever offered me cash it.

Edit: It would appear that Craigness has found the source of money. Apparently we paid for it.

What was the business model here?

Presumably it costs money to set this up and presumably she was hoping to make some money out of this once everyone started using it. Any idea how? Were the startup costs sufficiently great that she needed to convince an investor to back her? If so, how the hell did she do it?

Want cheaper AT&T gigabit service? Move to a Google Fiber city

Re: AT&T have a new strategy

To judge from tacitust's post (which, at time of posting, was just below your one), all Google need to do is threaten to come to town and the incumbents will suddenly offer cheap long-term contracts.

Are Samsung TVs doing a Volkswagen in energy tests? Koreans hit back

Thumbs up for "doing a Volkswagen"

Excellent verbal boffinry there. I look forward to seeing it on a regular basis when I go vulture spotting with my mobe.

Massive global cooling process discovered as Paris climate deal looms

Re: neither a believer or denier make

"6. Who told you science was ever settled?"

Just for fun, I googled exactly that phrase. It would appear that quite a number of politicians and similar advocates have used either that exact phrase or something that any native speaker of English would take to mean the same thing. 'Tis true that there aren't too many (if any) scientists willing to put their names to such a daft suggestion, but 'tis also true that it is the politicians and activists that make the most noise.

Share-crazy millennials spaff passwords ALL OVER the workplace

I'm confused

The article talks about people who can still access former workplace accounts and then implies that this is the fault of the former employees poor password hygience. Uh? Surely the previous employer should have revoked the youngster's credentials on their last day. I'd be pretty surprised if the average "former employee" ever had the admin rights necessary to do this for themselves, let alone still had them after leaving.

Move to the latest IE, or suck it: January’s cold comfort for Microsoft hangouts

Re: where are all these people hiding?

"We've tried to convince our users that IE should be used ONLY for access to these apps"

Can you not enforce this through creative use of firewall rules or GPO? A little googling suggests that there are GPO options for blacklisting or whitelisting particular sites for IE, but I freely admit that this isn't my day job so perhaps it is harder than it ought to be.

Re: I understand...

"The company invested millions at the turn of the century in this technology and aren't yet ready to re-invest in getting it updated to modern standards."

I wonder if the directors are still running around in company cars from the turn of the century. Oh, silly me, of course not. Something as important as a free set of wheels needs serious investment to keep it up to date, whereas the means to actually operate as a business can safely be neglected for a decade or two whilst we cash in our share options.

Lies from VW: 'Our staff acted criminally but board didn't know'

"One tiny accelerometer and ..."

I'm sure I read at the weekend that there was a concealed mini-tank of chemical designed in as well. It had enough capacity to get the vehicle through the test but obviously no long-term value.

It appears that the software has a legitimate reason to recognise that it is on rollers and the accelerometer would (I imagine, and let's concede) also be a legitimate part of the design anyway, but this tank is a piece of hardware (so, a different group from the software designers) that exists solely to cheat and presumably requires some explicit, if trivial, software control.

I think once you have several distinct groups of designers conspiring to create a system that cannot be used *except* to cheat on the emissions test, you have a problem that is larger than one or two rogue minions.

Re: We only found out about the problems in the last board meeting

Possibly better would if the shareholders decided that "Well, if you aren't paying attention and aren't taking responsibility for what's happening, you can wave bye-bye to your stupidly over-inflated compensation package.".

Time and again we hear that these board-level salaries are justified because you need the very best at the top level, and then as soon as it transpires that we haven't actually *got* the very best at top level, they swear blind that they have no idea what their minions are doing. W.T.F.??

Smuggle mischievous JavaScript into WinRAR archives? Sure, why not

Re: Wait...

Sadly not, because the world is full of people who think that you should avoid a widely implemented and published compression method just because an undocumented one with a single implementation is promising a percent or two improvement on some kinds of files.

Is Windows 10 slurping too much data? No, says Microsoft. Nuh-uh. Nope

Re: Where does this lead?

"Unless MS is prepared to write off this community of users, there has to be a paid, non-volume, version of W10 with no spying and no forced updating."

Just block the outgoing connections. Too much (ongoing) effort? Well...

It's a market opportunity for someone who already has blacklisting software and who already maintains the blacklists that drive it. Of course, that would require the AV companies to grow a pair and actually take on Microsoft, so I won't hold my breath.

Re: Nothings Changed

"It's part of the whole BYOD thing. None of these will run on Linux and trying to run them in a VM will get me fired for going against company policy."

I'm not disputing that this is a "real world" example, but I have to shake my head at a real world in which employees are forced to buy their own computer and then told that they can't run a VM on it.

Will IT support please come to the ward immediately. Weeeee have a tricky problem

We need a whoosh icon.

Dear do-gooders, you can't get rid of child labour just by banning it

Re: Child?

"As for dealing with poverty, the one thing that really matters is to bring birth rates down."

One thing that is quite strongly correlated with falling birth rates is rising female education rates, so it looks like school dinners could be the answer all round.

Official: North America COMPLETELY OUT of new IPv4 addresses

Re: IP8?

That's roughly what they did.

*Any* address size other than 4 bytes is going to break wire formats not only for IP but also for pretty much every transport protocol that goes on top, so 16 is roughly equal to 8 in this context. Then, having broken all other protocols (mainly in layer 4 but obviously also some address discovery protocols below and DNS stuff above) you have to specify exactly how you are going to repair them. So they did that, too, because they had no choice.

Another area where they had no choice was to produce *some* sort of 4-6 interop and (would you believe it) they did actually try the obvious solution (a special 12-byte prefix means an IPv4 address) suggested by three or four commentards here. Sadly this turned out to have issues and even if it hadn't, *any* interop solution requires changes to the IPv4 stack as well as the IPv6 one, so you are still faced with the question "How many times do we want to change the length of an internet address?". (Clue: the answer is "Zero, but if you put a gun to my head I'll do it once and fix everything whilst I'm doing it because there's no fucking way we will ever get this chance again.".)

Beyond that, the extra guff in IPv6 is a load of security which is optional but increasingly implemented in IPv4, some working multicasting which is again optional but almost universally supported in IPv4 routers, and zeroconf LAN configuration, which turned out to be such a good idea that people have tried to reinvent it for IPv4.

So I'm struggling to see what the problem is.

NIST's quantum boffins have TELEPORTED stuff over a HUNDRED KILOMETRES

Re: Communication sub C

"I think it's value to crypto comes from the fact that it cant be fudged with along the way without messing up the entanglement."

That's my recollection, too, but there is nothing in the diagram that makes that point, which is a pity. As it stands in the diagram, the whole thing is open to a MitM attack. I assume there is an answer to that, but it doesn't appear to be in the article so I'm left thinking " Umm ... quantum ... magic .. awesome stuff ... too complicated for my little brain".

One shouldn't *have* to go googling in order to understand why an article is worth reading.

Re: AFAIK

Whereas having to subtract a well-chosen infinity from every calculation in order to get the right answer isn't magic at all. It's straightforward, in fact.

Sorry, but whilst I'm happy to accept that Bohm isn't any better than the conventional interpretation, I'm not happy to accept that it is much worse.

Look out, world! Apple is about to launch .apple

Indeed, it has been proposed (by Google, if memory serves) and rejected by the IETF on the grounds that single-name URLs already mean something -- they refer to a machine on your LAN. Using them as suggested here would run a serious risk of hi-jacking either legitimate services on your LAN (by external agents) or legitimate services out there (by other users on your LAN). Probably both.

It's alive! Farmer hides neglected, dust-clogged server between walls

Re: "The farm decided to go with a more modern, off-the-shelf software solution."

In terms of the hardware, it is surely now possible to provide the same processing grunt in a box that requires *no* air cooling (except for exposing the case to room temperature).

I find it "surprising" that we still build, and buy, machines that require the circulation of clean air to keep them running, knowing full well that they will spend their entire working lives in a dusty environment, or worse. If you are a gamer -- fine, it's your choice and you know how to take care of your machine. If you are operating a server farm -- ditto. For just about everyone else, whether it be a laptop or a traditional desktop, just ditch the bloatware and run on a fanless, sealed, system that still has more power than money could actually buy just a few years ago.

Hate noisy jets above you? What if they were charging your phone?

Re: Air

"So, if you're lucky, maybe a few watts from a big array."

So just to finish your calculation... Over an entire day, maybe a kilo-Joule of output, which is enough to run an electric fire for a second or two, in a world where you can run that fire for an hour for about 10p, so the earnings are about 3p per year.

I suppose if interest rates stay at 0% for the next couple of geological eras then you might turn a profit.

(Actually the best bit is that you'd need to keep the patent alive for several millenia to repay the filing costs. Even Disney might have trouble with that.)

Sshhhhhhh!

This is clearly a case where an engineer was ordered by a PHB to produce more patents. As long as it doesn't go viral on social media, the engineer will get away with it.

If there are any PHBs reading this ... it's a fine idea and you can ignore the naysayers and detailed calculations in these comment pages.

D-Link spilled its private key onto the web – letting malware dress up as Windows apps

Re: I'm wondering

I think "best practice" is that these certificates are stored on a handful of machines, away from the developers writing the software, and that only a handful of staff are therefore able to sign executables and only then as an act outside of the normal development process. Passcodes would live in sealed envelopes, or something, and would not normally reside on any machine.

Clearly that didn't happen here and we know of at least one certificate that has escaped as a result. I'm somewhat staggered that a company as big as D-Link would be willing to play so fast and loose with their company's reputation. Let's be clear; as of this morning, a D-Link signature carries slightly less weight than, say, mine. (And I'm not boasting.)

One final point: if your only D-Link product is a cheapish ADSL box or network switch, rather than waiting for D-Link to re-establish some credibility, you could just replace the box. I wonder how many admins will respond to this by plonking D-Link on their Sony list.

US govt: Why we're OK with letting control of the internet slip into ICANN's hands

"handing control to ICANN is like Caesar handing over his throne to Stalin"

There is no throne. The job is just keeping accounts and publishing standards. If ICANN were to try anything that actually stops foreign powers using the internet the way they want, those foreign powers would just tell ICANN where to stick it and do what they want anyway.

Or to use the traditional meme, the internet will just route around the damage.

Obama edges toward full support for encryption – but does he understand what that means?

"It has not been clear to me since the early 1990s [...] just why any government would entertain the notion that they would be able to prevent criminals from encrypting communications if they chose to do so."

It's because they didn't understand what was going on then and so didn't learn the lessons and so don't understand now, either.

You want to DISRUPT my TECH? How about I DISRUPT your FACE?

Quite right, but there's really no mystery here. Everyone agrees that being on the receiving end of disruption is unpleasant, so the consultants have noticed that they can sell disruption as a product, to the managers, with the line that "This way, you are the *cause* of the disruption rather than the effect.". From the viewpoint of a sufficiently dumb manager, that means they look far-sighted and perhaps get an opportunity to dispatch one or two disruptive employees (ironically using the excuse that they weren't disruptive enough). From the viewpoint of the consultant, they only have to deliver chaos -- the more the better in fact.

Don't want to upgrade to Windows 10? You'll download it WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT

Re: "Personal" computer no more

"hogging a whole 3GB on my new 128GB SSD lappy"

Speaking from experience (with a Win8.1 128GB SSD lappy) the real problem is that the Windows Update database can consume nigh on 30GB and Disk Cleanup is apparently unable to resolve the problem. I've no idea why this particular box is affected. None of the other 8.1 systems that I have access to suffer in the same way, but on top of the 20-odd GB that appears to be the 8.1 baseline installation these days, plus a few bloated applications, and you've lost half the SSD before you put any of your own data on it. And of course, SSDs have that wonderful combination of "relatively low capacity" and "relative dislike of being full".

Apple's big secret: It's an insurance firm (now with added finance)

Hardware as a service

Is that "renting"?

Roll up, roll up: Microsoft, those Irish emails and angry Feds

Re: "Microsoft maintains that the data is secured under EU data protection laws"

I shall save everyone the effort:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside."

The phrase "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is not required unless there exist persons born or naturalised in the US who are not subject to the jurisdiction thereof. Therefore, far from asserting the supremacy of US law, the sentence presupposes the opposite.

Are you avoiding tax, big tech firm? Not any more you won't, growl MEPs

Re: Those companies aren't doing anything that....

I didn't see this as an attack on the companies. It seemed much more to be directed against the governments striking deals to reduce a company's liabilities as long as the reduced liabilities end up in that country. In other words, the countries are the tax cheats here.

So Quantitative Easing in the eurozone is working, then?

Re: "You're still here, aren't you?"

"What is the 'systematic removal of the points on the left hand side'? Is it people starving to death?"

In the past, removal meant just that. In these more enlightened times it tends to be companies going out of business and their employees having to find new jobs. It is systematic in the sense that it is not random.

It is about traits if you accept that your position on the distribution depends on something you are or do and that future companies can adopt the more effective policies or business models from the right-hand side of the distribution. I'm not too bothered about whether these traits are passed down a particular line of inheritance. Apparently Nature isn't too bothered about that either, since epigenetic traits have presumably operated for as long as genetic ones and the rise of humanity over the last ten thousand years has been largely memetic.

I would still call this last example /natural/ selection rather than a process of design, since we became the dominant species long before we had any idea that we were the dominant species and the cynic in me would argue that we still don't govern or plan in a rational manner at the highest level. In fact, those of a more apocalyptic bent would argue the very opposite -- that our inability to create or implement a sustainable way of life will be the cause of our own natural selection. (For the record, I disagree with that viewpoint as well.)

Re: Fiat currency?

"This comment is more just in case people assume your facts were correct; I wasn't trying to denigrate the joke."

Ta. I plead over-eagerness to make a joke for the strained translation. (I'm happy calling money that is legislated into existence "manufactured", but less happy calling a car "done".)

I stand corrected on the acronym, which I'd forgotten about, but the idea that it was a play on words is not just me (see, for example, http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/10/automotive-etymologies/). I suppose I'd need to point to some remarks from the company's founders before I could say it was intended, though. Your Nylon example is a perfect example of how some words lend themselves quite easily to backronyms.

Re: When do we get to win?

You're still here, aren't you?

Natural Selection is often characterised as "survival of the fittest", but it is rather better described as "non-survival of the least fit". NS and free-market economics are ways (well, the same way) of moving the centre of a statistical distribution to the right by systematically removing data points from the left-hand end. You "win" (move rightwards) simply, and only, by staying in the game. There are no medals.

I suppose this is implied by the bit in Tim's article where he describes the benefits of a small amount of inflation. In any economy, there are always a few people who are getting paid less this year than last, because their work is less useful. They are moving left. Inflation is like moving the x-axis scale to the left at roughly the same speed so that everyone feels better about that.

Re: Fiat currency?

Both names are taken from the Latin for "manufactured", so it's all down to whether the manufacturer knew what they were doing. I suspect we know more about making cars than we do about macro-economics.

I have no problem with this. Whether it is intended or not, one of the messages coming through from Tim's articles is that macro-economics is very *young* science and it is still perfectly possible that everything you ever learned about it at school will turn out to be wrong. Big names from only a few decades back are now taken with a pinch of salt.

You don't get that with physics or chemistry. It's pretty rare with biology, although Nature is a big tease and it has been fun to watch Lamarckism (er, I mean, epigenetics) re-appear in the years since I was actually taught how stupid it was. Computing is even younger, but we know the basic building blocks (since we built them) and so we can quite easily figure out which results from other disciplines (maths, language, ...) are applicable in any situation.

Macroeconomics is still at a stage where the interesting new results *can* be explained to a mathematically minded lay audience. It is ideal material for a site that claims to cover all aspects of science and technology for an audience that is willing to read articles with equations in them.

Hackers spent at least a year spying on Mozilla to discover Firefox security holes – and exploit them

Meh...

I appreciate that letting someone else find the bugs and then peeking at their results is a slightly simpler way of finding them, or at least the ones that they have found, but since the Firefox source is available to anyone anyway and almost certainly contains many more bugs that haven't made it into the private part of their Bugzilla database yet, this doesn't strike me as a biggie.

Also, wouldn't it be easier to contribute features to the product and "accidently" leave subtle flaws in. Of course, most wouldn't make it into production and those that did might only remain open for a few months before someone else spots them, but I imagine that a deliberate bug could be made harder to find than a truly accidental one.

West's only rare earth mine closes. Yet Chinese monopoly fears are baseless

Re: The comic book element Thorium..

"the US and UK aren't, for the simple and pesky reason that is very didficult to make weapons from a thorium based system."

Do keep up. That was the historical reason. It's decades since the US and UK have done any research into any kind of reactor, weaponisable or not.

Ex top judge admits he's incapable of reading email, doesn't own a PC

"I guess they're taking the "liberal" in their name from "liberal economics" rather than, say, liberal anything else?"

It's more likely that they looked at the 3-way political split of the mother country, between Tories (reactionary aristocrats and their lackeys), Liberals (the rest of the middle and upper classes) and Labour (working classes) and thought, "We only need two of those.".

The US doesn't have any reactionary aristocrats either, but split before the working classes had been invented. Consequently, they only have one party, but pretend to have two to make elections less confusing. The pretence is nearly perfect, except that they got the color-coding back-to-front.

Google tells iOS 9 app devs: Switch off HTTPS if you want that sweet sweet ad money from us

Sadly that won't happen. What *will* happen is that advertisers (not programmers) will make the switch because advertisers will notice that they aren't reaching the audience that kept HTTPS on and so they'll upgrade their content delivery.

This isn't Google's problem. This is the advertisers problem, and the fix is easy.

Legal eagles accuse Labour of data law breach over party purge

Re: I do wonder...

I did read a column somewhere last week where someone claimed he'd been rejected because he (well, actually some family pet) wasn't on the electoral roll, so it looks like they are using that as a first sweep.

French woman gets €800 a month for electromagnetic-field 'disability'

"It is notable that nobody has these illnesses in countries without a welfare system."

I don't think that statement is encumbered with the overwhelming burden of proof that you mentioned earlier.

Also, the judge appeared to be of the opinion that her illness had been diagnosed by a doctor, but not explained or treatable, so by your logic anyone suffering from a poorly understood and incurable disease should be left to fend for themselves.

Re: inverse square law and all that

"I get my TV from satellite transmission. If it can reliably get a signal to my satellite dish, then I do believe that my body is also "receiving" the signal."

True, but the only reason your satellite dish can pull the signal out of the noise is by restricting itself to an impressively narrow band of the spectrum. It is "unlikely" that any part of your body is as well tuned to any frequency as the satellite dish. For any reasonable width of spectrum there's probably much more EM noise coming from the Sun than the satellite.

Sufficiently powerful antennae can (in operation) generate enough power to light a fluorescent tube and phones use frequencies not terribly different from a microwave oven. Given the inverse square law, someone who works with the transmitters on a daily basis is probably exposed to a thousand times the radiation of someone living underneath the antenna. I am willing to believe that they may *eventually* cook their testicles.

Re: Despite dispute over the very existence of the syndrome

John: I suspect that this is just poor phrasing. If Mage had said "imagined" rather than "imaginary" then that would have been clearer that the *cause* is not real rather than the symptoms. (The placebo effect is perfectly real, to give a related example.) As you say, since the symptoms are real, we ought to deal with them.

Picking up on your example with wasps, you don't even need the wasp. Most people can be adequately freaked out by a loud buzzing sound behind their neck and the people standing in front of them saying "Wasp!". To get from there to electrosensitivity one only needs to slowly crank up the implausibility of the cause and the severity of the symptoms. Both can be done on a sliding scale and there's no objectively right place to draw the line.

Re: It must be spent

A suitably tuned aerial would presumably do the trick. One can reasonably say that it absorbs radiation at the offending frequencies from the environment (and sinks the energy into a resistor). If we are talking about the frequencies used by modern gizmos, the "EM sponge" would be fairly small and therefore wearable.

Psychiatric treatment would consist of demonstrating said equipment in a proper lab and proving that it actually works. Then you sit back and let the placebo effect work its magic.

The most tragic thing about the Ashley Madison hack? It was really 1% actual women

Well f*ck me! (or not, it would appear)

So we have a service whereby you can add some woman's email address to a big list of adulterers and it doesn't cost you anything, but obviously *she* will get the "welcome" email and it will go straight in her spam folder and there's no way for the original perpetrator to ever use the account so it lies idle.

I am not in the least bit surprised that this happened several million times. Nor am I surprised that AM made no attempt to remove these accounts from their membership statistics.

I am, however, puzzled that anyone ever thought this was a suitable website to give their credit card details to.

More deaths linked to Ashley Madison hack as scammers move in

Re: Insane

"And procreate!"

Relax. They're Ashley Madison users, so they aren't actually *meeting* the opposite sex.