Posts by Bebu 2075 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2022
《new solution design to reimplement Oracle in a more “out of the box” approach with few modifications, changing business processes to accommodate the software.》
You would have to wonder whether the existing business processes were ever going pass a decent audit.
Even Oracle's software tat would not create money from the vacuum nor vanish it into the void.
So deciding on a reimplementation or modernisation of the business processes to meet contemporary standards should have been the first cab off the rank followed by evaluating the available software that implements those processes.
Actually looking at similar organisations that have successfully made the leap and adopting their systems and processes in toto has a lot of merit.
I would wonder with the sums involved whether it would be cheaper to employ a host of clerks and go back to journals and ledgers. :) Goose feather quills and inkhorns?
《Deadset, this drongo is as mad as a cut snake on a hot tin roof.》
I suppose this mob of demented crystalgazers are going to keep the fascists out of Coles supermarkets.
Why would you rationally name your business after some magic stone spheres that looking into would either send you raving loony or by which your soul would be sucked out by a fiend?
They probably started with the Minas Ithil stone. ;)
《pass by value / pass by reference,》
And of course pass (or call) by name [Algol 60]. (And Jensen's device. :)
I imagine lambda expressions serve the same purpose in the fashionable languages to day. :)
When you think about it why would AI coders need high level languages they could just dive into the instruction set architecture and produce binary directly. :) They could fiddle with the microcode in processors families that allow that (Alpha PALcode?) I assume global optimization would then be a doddle.
Anyway I think he is likely right but probably not for the reasons he thinks.
I.T. was the "steam" of the age of railway mania or the "electricity" of middle 20th century. During those two periods steam and then later electricity were used for all sorts of ludicrous purposes - some just plain idiotic, stupidly dangerous - which have passed into well earned obscurity. I.T. is currently used for similarly ludicrous purposes which will also vanish.
The next hundred or so years are going to pose such challenges that much of the worse than useless contemporary bullshit will be discarded very rapidly.
Unsurprising that the manufacturer of the hardware of which AI/LLM needs truckloads, to run on would be boosting AI [MRDA.]
One of his mates in the middle kingdom should ship Space Karen a really high spec Chromebook with the login fiddled so he isn't hassled by that peasant concern. I imagine it would be so instrumented that he could scratch any part of his anatomy without its being meticulously recorded in Peking.
A box with Plan9 preinstalled would probably send Space Karen sufficiently ballistic that could reach the red planet unaided.
The sods keep turning off network generations. First 2G - had nice small, light, long battery life phone for years until they pulled the plug on 2G. In a few weeks the 3G network will be gone and my Asha 300 is then ewaste.
I think the EU retained 2G and retired 3G when adopting 4G/LTE?
I guess used/refurbished phones in AU aren't going to be too old because of this.
My main gripe is that recent smart phones are mostly large >6 inches (>150mm) and heavy.
The samsung galaxy core prime at 4.5" (115mm) was about the right size for the shirt pocket - not that shirts seem to come with pockets these days (I suppose I should be grateful they still button up on the same side. :)
In these parts once you omit the flagships products and anything apple and most samsung the remaining brands have a much smaller market share and are priced very competitively - especially the older models.
Prepaid offerings from the major providers (telstra, optus, voda) are/were often at fair discount but are/were locked to the provider's network but if you were already using that provider anyway the phone would work with your existing sim.
I found the cheaper nokias are not too shabby at all, and a cheap 3G huawei was as good as a more expensive samsung. For lightness I use a smaller opel very very cheap, nasty perhaps not too nasty but can't keep the time(?) and loses the plot if VoLTE isn't enabled. Not the middle kingdom's proudest export I suspect.
Anyway not many people would want to call me. ;)
I think Singtel also owns Australia's Optus so new lows in support can be expected.
After last year's Optus router outage fiasco I probably wouldn't let them reset my router. :)
I recall being intrigued back when (90s?) reading GO Corp PenOS doco the the application's text was executed in-place on the devices non-volatile storage ie it wasn't copied into ram.
I don't imagine these devices had demand paging or copy-on-write, or indeed a mmu at all, but I assume the non-volatile storage was roughly as fast as the processor or a fairly large ram cache.
An early australian 8 bit z80 pc, the Applied Tech. Microbee used 6116 cmos static ram which could be battery backed to provide non-volatile storage.
I always thought Multics approach of making everything a segment was an idea worth doing properly - 64kb segments are just plain silly but 2^64 byte segments could fly. I imagine mmap(2) took part of its inspiration from this.
I suspect flat address spaces are pretty much the rule partly because its the unix way and the complete dogs breakfast the 80286 made of segmentation. Although I think at one stage on x86_32 hardware you could run the linux kernel in one segment and the user space in another. I assume the intersegment call were slow so was a space v time trade off.
I think I read that one of ethernet's inventors (Bob Metcalfe?) greatest regret was the aui connector - the retaining sliders I think.
The fairly heavy media adaptors were always falling of the back of machines.
Fortunately once twisted pair became de rigeur the e-waste box of old cards and adaptors filled quickly. :)
I would guess for any system (set of states, and the permitted inputs and the consequent transitions between states) sufficiently large its possibly impractical to prove a particular property holds in the face of all possible inputs.
I suspect this gets precariously close to the halting problem.
Real computer systems have an absolutely humungous set of states of which the vast majority will never occur during the life of the system.
I guess security comes down to attempting to partitioning a system into a very much smaller number of equivalence classes on which a security property can be demonstrated to hold.
The hazard even here could be not capturing the entire set of states in the first instance so that you have equivalence classes that don't cover the whole system.
The old saw that complexity is intrinsically the enemy of security (or correctness) now applies in spades.
When you think of a LLM's gazillion states and lack of observability things are about to get a lot worse.* ;)
* From my school days one of my favourite phrases from french was de mal en pis which I liked to think meant 'bad enough to drive a man to drink.'
"Intel Foundry's 18A process node"
I am assuming 18A is 1.8nm aka 18Å.
I don't think there is an el Rego unit for IC fabrication process sizes - I imagine something like what you get when subdividing 1 imperial foot into (12)^6 parts so it would be an embuggerment to go down to next scale viz 1ft/(12)^7 :)
(Troy weight is still around and we could have easily kept 12d/1s if we had moved to the duodecimal number system [and sprouted extra fingers] - 10d/1s, 6d = .6s, 18s/£ 19s/gn but probably replace the £ with a twelve shilling $ :)
《It's really impressive just how awful these tech execs and boards are》
With such awful (as) people who are equally awful in their roles its incomprehensible that these corporate Titanics have not yet met their iceberg.
I don't imagine anyone gives a tinker's about the C-Suite slicing up each other, but the poor souls who put in the hard graft that build their company who get the chop have my sincere sympathy.
"Roundhead's helmet"
Probably not the most politic to bring up the Lord Protector when the crown rests on head bearing the name of a rather less fortunate Stuart monarch.
Cromwell is much maligned by the later writers of the victors' history and the Protectorate, by comparison with the current schmozzle, has much to recommend it (Ireland excepted.)
《why would a minister give a sign-off for a website to remove the word "beta"?》
With the current dismal crop of ministerial talent I shouldn't be surprised if they were to think that beta meant better.
I don't suppose anyone would notice or really cares whether the web site sports a Tudor or St Edward crown icon. I am not certain the average Brit would notice if the diagonal red parts of the Union flag were removed (but they might in Ulster. :)
When I saw the image fronting this story something vaguely familar about the figure ineffectually attempting to conceal himself behind a potted plant which appears to be what is commonly called Mother in law’s tongue (Sansevieria trifasciata) in these parts.
Just came to me that the figure resembles 11th Doctor sporting a decent beard (not the ones in the Day of the Moon, or The Wedding of River Song) looking like he is avoiding her indoors who has got the hump with him and is on the warpath.
Anyway I learnt the PFY's name is probably Stephen. Like the the stoned martyr. :)
I had concerns for PFY's wellbeing when the AED (packerwhacker) was mentioned and retrieved.
Getting a belt from one of those could be life changing. (Yes I know the AED actually tries to detect cardiac electrical activity before discharging but operator incompetence or bastardry might also apply.)
In any case the barman's £20☆ was explained by the more liquid heart starter being substituted.
In the interest of accuracy there was "AI" twenty plus years ago and oddly decision trees in the guise of expert systems were one of its things back then.
☆ legitimate business expense.
《..who believes that Bill Gates is buying all the land world-wide (and the Moon and Mars), who heard the Head of WHO proclaiming the decimation of world population to 10 per cent, and who knows that Covid doesn't exist and in fact was invented to reach the mentioned population target.》
Substitute Musk for Gates and in this business just being the same room these days you will have at least two of these spewing this sort of nonsense and much, much... worse. Verging on Vogon poetry. Although to his (dis)credit Elon is doing his very best(worst) to live up to these ravings.
《buy paper maps and a compass.》
Don't blindly trust the compass either.
The magnetic declination of Weipa +4° (E) and Brisbane +11° (E) and the odd mountain of magnetite could ruin your day. :)
Are kids still shown how to use their wristwatch to locate north from the sun's position? (Presumably accounting for DST in those benighted states that fiddle with the clocks. ;)
"You could make it out of paper,"
Bloody hard to get get actual maps these days and expensive if you can. At least in AU. Street directories for the main cities still published (I think) but always slightly out of date (especially new housing developments) where gmaps can often help.
Regional maps are a bit scarcer but in the more touristy area the local authority often gives them away at their tourist information booths. Finding decent regional route maps is harder every year.
Back in the '90 before visiting Bangkok I wanted a street map before arriving and after finding there were no english (or thai) maps I stumbled over a german (language) map in a Sydney news agency. ;)
The irony of trying to navigate on foot with a german map sprinkled with Straßen, and whatnot, wasn't lost on me further compounded by all the street signs only being in thai script.
Online maps aren't the problem so much as the dependence on the magic voice to direct your movements.
Very early on I used to print a copy of the map I was going to use but with time that became more and more difficult to get a useful print out.
These days I scribble a mud map with the main road and a list of the two or three cross streets before my turning (rinse and repeat.) I also note a couple of cross streets after the desired turning (and fallback turning) if I happen to miss or unable to make the turning.
With a quick explanation a passenger can use the mud map to act as a navigator looking out for the cross street names.
Sometimes we wonder on what the crocodile subsist when there are no german tourists on the offing. ;)
Cape York is extremely remote even by AU standards. Even after the 40 years since I was there I would be surprised if google anything worked there. The coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria is pristine but if the crocs don't get you the sharks are waiting. No need for swimming costumes unless its the Weipa public pool and so few people up there anyway why would you bother spoiling the wild lifes' enjoyment of their food.
Basically consult the locals about the hazards and your route. Leave an itinerary with the local authorities and check in at your itinerary's next stop so if you do fall off the radar you will be missed. Always carry plenty of drinking water and sufficient non perishable food. An epirb probably a good idea too.
Australia is big, much bigger than most septics or europeans imagine.
《A paper trail is absolutely key and always be wary of those who try and avoid it.》
Its a pretty common modus operandi in many organisations encompassing plausible deniability, blame shifting and general arse covering.
The number of times I have received a phone call in response to a written communication which the caller would have preferred the contents of the conversation not to have been recorded. ;)
The very effective vaccination for this affliction is to promptly and invariably send a precis or minuted summary of the conversation to the caller by organisational email.
《you wouldn't happen to remember the password would you, the support company don't have it on record.》
I would have written it on a label I stuck on the bottom of the box, or on the inside of the lid etc, or on the gyprock wall next to my then desk in very light pencil. No password managers back then and little black books get mislaid and I can not ever remember passwords and nothing needed to be secured much above physical security.
The gyprock walk came in handy when, affer a few years post my departure, someone had a pressing need to uninstall an antivirus application from a PC but needed a long lost organisational password. (It was a quite long randomly generated string.)
《A) Confirm all the data were not actually deleted contrary to the customer's wishes and go ahead with potentially gaining a reasonable amount of money from a data extract. There couldn't possibly be any potential unwanted consequences to this whatsoever.》
"Sorry all the data was expunged but we still have the hard disks whose logic boards were fried ages ago by a lightening damaging a server that might have had an old copy of your data.
"We can retain data recovery expertise on a cost recovery+ basis for a best effort attempt (prepayment required) to try to restore all or part of your data.
Just ensure you can put your hands on a dozen or so completely dead*, sufficiently old drives☆ in case subpoenas and warrants start flying. ;)
Doesn't anyone actual archive their records or data? BACKUP ≠ ARCHIVE !
* oddly in my career I always seemed to have had boxes of old dead(ish) drives (scsi, ide, sata, sas etc) although in this use case I would utterly destroy the magnetic media before depolyment.:)
☆ a rookie mistake to paint an old master on a contemporary canvas.
《intimate you know where the bodies are buried without being too specific, just enough to make them ponder what exactly you do know and how big the shit storm would be if certain bodies got unearthed....》
A bit too literal in the BOFH's case. ;)
The carpet coffins are a dead give away but it would require a soul braver, or more foolhardy than I to intimate any such thing to said BOFH. I am certain he gets a bulk discount on carpet and equally that the firm pays for it.
《... is because so many people never have had a good manager, and so don't realize that they exist, though they truly do.》
Not sure about unobtainium (t1/2 < tp < 1qs) but dark matter might be favourite although I suspect its the quintessential component of all management.
A competent manager would be heaven sent or a non-interfering incompetent one woud be refreshing. (I quite liked young Mr Grace :)
《we only talked during the annual performance review.
Can't beat that.》
Mine completed the online form and ran it past me to approve. :)
No possibility of promotion or performance bonuses so was really only annoying administrivia.
KPI: didn't screw up last year. [] not met [] below expectation [] met [×] exceeded
Performance goals: not to screw up this year.
If manglement had any appreciation of reality (and the realpolitik of their organisation) they would inflict orders of magnitude less damage but of course that reality is that they don't. :(
I believe some of FDR's New Deal measures were ruled invalid by the Supreme Court on constitutional grounds.
By the time those measures were invalidated they had often served their purpose. ;)
FDR faced plenty of opposition at the time and I would imagine the constitutional soundness most of these authorities would have been tested at that time (the 80 years too late?)
With the current bench who knows what further insanity they might release from this Pandora's box?
《So don't lightly dismiss free ad-funded services. The alternative would see the internet used about as much as private viewdata services were in the 1980s.》
At this point this alternative is really quite attractive.
Internet ca 1996 wasn't so bad - you had proper trolls (who probably owned a bridge or two) and could compose a grammatical, if demented, sentence even stretching to a paragraph without (immediately) descending to outright abuse.
With Altavista etc you had a fair chance of locating relevant material now with the lashings of AI/LLM mixed into current search engine mess you will be lucky to get only "... defining loads of buttered grin..."*.
A world without Alphabet/Google/Youtube etc, Amazon, Meta/Facebook etc, X, Tiktok, etc etc doesn't look too bad to me.
* The output to a query whether dogs can safely eat Fruit Loops or some such.
《There was an excellent Britcom in the 90s called Brittas Empire.》
Arnold Rimmer's retirement job. :)
Excellent series.
In this case more like halfarse empire.
I imagine a fool winning some mega-lottery and buying a Nimitz class carrier without thinking what he actually was going do with it, or indeed be allowed to do with it, except in Musk's case it would be a Ford class vessel.
《Earlier space efforts were built on rigor, lengthy and specific and detailed checklists that were themselves built on checklists, and everyone involved was focused on getting as close to perfection as humanly possible.》
This was brought home to me years ago when visiting the "Powerhouse Museum" in Sydney where there was some Gemini hardware on display that a visitor could inspect closely.
I was really surprised at the precision and fineness of the workmanship. There were wired seals everywhere which presumably denoted completion and provenance.
A different culture and attitude.
Another thing I noticed at the time was that much of what I could see wasn't all that complicated. So perhaps St Exupery's aphorism from Terre des Hommes (Wind, Sand and Stars):
《 Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher》
was implicitly understood by those engineers, scientists and technicians.
《In today's global technology revolution, we believe in-person connections paired with a flexible approach are critical to drive innovation and value differentiation.》
The particular infernal circle that houses the utterers of such nonsense must be bursting at the seams.
The Hornèd One will likely require some D9 cats to enlarge his Pit - I don't imagine that enterprise entertain hybid or remote in any form.
I would concede this particular pearl has the hallmark (watermark:) of ChatGPT or its ilk which is very definitely the product of that sable gent.
More seriously if this mandate does so disproportionately disadvantage female employees I would have thought at least in some jurisdictions this mandate could be contested, as a class, under local employment discrimination legislation. Probably another argument for labour organisation.
When I survey the 2020s and I see that so many of the all powerful and insanely wealthy appear to be bereft of any semblance of a soul which leads me to wonder whether some offenses don't await the decease of the damned before their soul is dispatched to the pit.
"There is hole in my bucket, dear Lisa..."
I get the impression this speaker at the conference hadn't exactly sung for her supper as I assume she was a drawcard if not a keynote and consequently with possibly some less than impressed attendees.
The adage: "if you have nothing to say, say nothing" could equally be applied where there is nothing you can say.
Perhaps for the next conference the director of the Ruritanian War Department's High Performance Quantum Computing (HPQC) facility should be invited to share his/her insights into their neurobiotechnology based HPQC system Bourbaki developed by Vincent Teutonstein.
"Bourbaki is self securing as it can with quantum magic alter reality, or the perception if reality, but we are not sure which or possibly both and as it keeps growing new capabilities who can tell? How well does Bourbaki work in practice? Well. Have you tried booking flight to Streslau, Ruritania?"
Perhaps Bourbaki's director has but the record has been "derealized." :)
《which makes it hard to get staff for defence HPC》
These kind of facilities, I believe, normally lack windows of any sort which I suspect would rather cramp the style of a chronic defenestrator. :)
Given the BOFH penchant for terminating discussions with his adversaries ex fenestra one has to wonder whether he was trained by the south african security services, kgb or was an associate of Cheney and Rumsfeld.
I assume the speaker's presence at this conference was to pitch the advantages of working for defence HPC. Come join us fame and fortune await... actually no fame, ... not so much fortune either, ... you get to get to work with one of the world's top 50 HPC systems but I cannot tell you what it is☆, ... will be doing CFD but cannot say for what [splitting the beer atom? Or where the AUKUS submarines detectable* in AU's shallower waters?]
The Devil has a better(sic) prospectus. ;)
☆ Half a billion surplus transputers and the joys of Occam.
* If the astronomers ever devise a sensitive, directional neutrino detector then I imagine one of the pillars of deterence evaporates. If a neutrino astronomy suddenly goes quiet you might well be suspicious. ;)
《difference between interpreted and compiled languages,》... is?
A language is defined by its grammar/syntax and semantics. Its purely a matter of implementation whether the its interpreted or compliled and even then the boundary is blurred by just-in-time compilation, microcode and even threaded interpreters.
I assume the muddled question might have been to elicit the differences between compilation and interpretation: contrast and compare. Even Smalltalk was "compiled" into byte code which was interpreted and indeed there was hardware Smalltalk on a Risc (SOAR) which was roughly a Smalltalk processor.
Even 40 years ago I concluded that it took a very special kind of retard to work in defence science and would have avoided the sector like the plague. It appears most of the Australian talent have reached the same conclusion and the sector is decidedly very second eleven (B-team.) The requirements of AU citizenship and an intrusive security clearance process pretty much preclude poaching talent from overseas.
Probably fortunate that this bit of hardware is somewhat hush hush as it will save the embarrassment of trying to pronounce the name correctly. I am only guessing that its tai-ngi-wil-ta and ng is ñ otherwise its tangy wilter.
《"...lures their customers into signing complex and confusing agreements, with terms thrust on the customer at the last moment without adequate time to review, and with key parts of the agreements hidden in hyperlinks."》
Sorry, we will need time to run this past our people. Come back in a month with the identical agreement when will have properly considered your offer. Oracle sales droids even 30 years ago had very prescriptive performance targets very tightly tied to their compensation so any delays in closing really hurts them. :)
Personally: dealing with Big <Colour> ... just say no.
《Hopefully AI Powered Bing will get the ‘Shall we invade Poland’ question right and not a racist positive summarisation of the benefits of Bkitzkrieg..》
I am not so sure... Bing might have said Dantzig ok. But give Barbarossa a miss.
Letting LLM loose on the totality of german textual material might produce some interesting models. 19th century german philosophy could produce some peculiar AI hallucinations as would Malleus Maleficarum which, although in latin, was written by two 15th C. german clergymen.
I imagine it might wonder why JFK proclaimed himself a jammy doughnut. ;)
whether the unfortunate discarded signora was more interesting than a dozen linux servers. :)
A misspent youth.
Seems a bit fishy that the expat spouse didn't write a letter (snail mail) or even telephone after his emails went unanswered. A bit odd that if the mail wasn't being delivered to the hospital server the originating MTA or any destination backup MXer should have timed out after 5 days (normally) and bounced the mail. I can only imagine /var/mail was full but /var/spool/mqueue wasn't so sendmail was accepting mail but local delivery was broken.
Back then correctly configured email rarely lost email - it either was delivered or bounced.
《keeping your smartphone out of the biscuit tin》
this phrase seems to describe this lunacy and much other contemporary insanity.
Clearly a cellphone kept in a sealed metal container (Faraday cage) isn't ever going to receive any calls, texts or any RF signals and by analogy its owner is impervious to any sort of sense.
Thirty second of thought would suggest that if an EM pulse weapon or Carrington event could fry your phone the cell hardware would also be fried and any electronics involved in your broadband connection (and cell backhaul) and even your Tesla vehicle (cybertruck?) would be stuffed. There's someone whose phone is shoved deep down into the biscuit barrel of barminess. :)
I think even an old vehicle with a mechanical ignition system would require replacing the coil, alternator, starter motor and wiring including the ignition leads. Need a rather large biscuit tin.
I would have thought laser weapons in space would make slightly more sense.
Its the title of an AU book and film but a fair comment.
The good part is AU is such a large country (7.7m sq. km between lat. 11°S and 43°S) that you can choose any climate you desire and outside the large coastal cities you can find as much seclusion as anyone might desire. The bonus is there aren't a whole lot of gun crazies trying to kill you although the wildlife isn't so considerate.
I am pretty much lifelong resident and still its a very odd place which I suspect many immigrants don't really ever understand but are extremely grateful to live in a stable nation where the expectation of surviving to the next day and not starving is taken for granted and for their part migrants are typically extremely motivated and grasp every opportunity with both hands to the great benefit of the nation.
Even our rather mediocre politicians understand long term immigration is crucial for nation building and its only their neglect of other long term policy areas such as housing and taxation that has caused a short term collision with immigration policy.
Sometimes I think Terry Pratchett's continent of Fourex is only very slightly satirical caricature of Australia.
I thought New York's Madison Avenue had forever captured the world title for this sort of nonsense but I have to concede the subcontinent is a real contender. ;)
Artificial Wisdom really Mr Modi?
Wisdom is largely evident from its absence and definitely not much wisdom here.
《sources of data that describes how people move around Indian cities.》 Legs might be favourite here. But fair enough - asking between what points citizens travel, the mode of transport, the times and frequencies with reasons behind those choices do inform urban planning decisions but this is neither new nor rocket science.
This has to be the pearl:
《for clarity of horizon and creative exploration to unleash potential.》
which means? I doubt the horizon is much in evidence from smog afflicted Delhi. The second part suggests a fool trying to defuse a bomb.
There are a very large number of extremely clever and capable people in India with some very impressive achievements but like everywhere they aren't obviously present in political life.
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