Posts by Pascal Monett 19434 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
There is a third thing to do : make sure that the cleaning personnel understands the Golden Rule : to not unplug anything in order to plug in the vacuum cleaner.
The first time the cleaner makes a mistake, report him to his superiors and forbid him access to company grounds. The second time the cleaner makes the mistake, sue the cleaning company and tear up all contracts with them.
So, Computer Systems Analyst is 57% at risk of being automated ?
Bullshit.
There is no computer that is going to be able to sift through the contradictory declarations, backhanded dealings and outright boordroom dominance battles to produce an application that is in any way going to be able to be accepted and paid for (let's not mention work).
So, physicists create a list of jobs and their automation risk, and find that their profession cannot be automated ?
Color me surprised.
Wrong question.
The right question is : what the heck gives Zuckerberg the right to get this data at all when it was not entered on a Facebook website ?
The answer to that question is, obviously, nothing.
Zuckerberg and all of his managers should be flogged in public, then given a month to mend their ways.
If, 30 days later, the problems persist, another flogging, and so on and so forth until the problems have been solved.
Interesting argument, but I'm pretty sure that the countries buying F-35s are getting the same version that the US military is getting.
When France sells an Exocet to another country, it is selling the same version it has.
Arms dealers cannot sell if it becomes known that they degrade their export versions, their reputation would be trashed.
As far as software is concerned, Lotus Notes once had a degraded version specifically for France because the French government wanted to be sure that it wouldn't have too much trouble with a 128-bit encryption key, so (IIRC) it had it degraded to a 56-bit key (or something along those lines). That is now consigned to the dustbins of History, and every Notes customer has a full-fleged 256-bit AES encryption key for the ID file.
So, I don't think that there are that many "local" vs "export" versions any more.
What there might be is countries not selling a particular bit of kit (for National Security reasons, obviously).
So what is it you actually want this for, taking pics of penguins ?
Honestly, an unmanned ship is good for what if it is not transporting cargo ? It's not like you can task it with conducting scientific surveys on land.
Sure, you could tell it to go to a given "remote point", and then what ? It takes some samples of seawater and a video of the shore ? And ?
The only reason for automating a ship is to make cargo ships that don't need personnel on board. Anything else is just pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.
Okay, I'm ready to respect that - at the condition that the user does not take it as an excuse to assault, insult and harass another user.
Respect of privacy works both ways, and if you do not respect the individual you're talking to, you have no right to expect anonymity.
It is high time that policing of the Internet happens. I would actually accept a scheme where my posts could be anonymous to users, but targetted to law enforcement if that could cut down on the amount of assholes who think they can insult my mother in any way they see fit without consequence.
Free Speech is not an excuse for gratuitious insults.
Well yeah, they're unspecified because the non-compete clauses are illegal.
Remind me why this is a problem ?
If 25%/year of the workforce is going to work for competitors, there is no way Infosys has enough money to drag them all before a judge.
Chrome does indeed have a near monopoly, and the only reason it doesn't have 99% of the market is Safari.
All of the other browsers are in the very low single-digit market share.
But that is not because Google is pushing Chrome, it's because users do not understand - or care - about which browser they actually use.
Funnily enough, they care enough to not use Edge, though, but you can't legislate on that.
I would contend that there is actually a need for regime change in the USA.
For far too long has the political pie been carved out between Dems and Repubs, and the latter are going decidely loony.
You need another political party to shake up the house of cards you've got going over there. It's starting to smell bad.
Indeed.
I once had the opportunity to go do helpdesk stuff in a warehouse that stored milk products (ice cream, etc). It was cooled to -30°C.
It was in winter, outside temperature was around 0°C, but sunny. I spent all of twenty minutes there.
When I left the place, I had to take my coat off. For a few minutes, I felt like I was on the beach, what with the sun and all.
Of course, 0°C caught up with me pretty quick and I put my coat back on after a few minutes.
Still, I don't think there'll be a lot of helpdesk people poking around racks that are cooled at 4.7°K.
I can't imagine the amount of energy that is going to be needed to cool an entire server farm down to that point.
So, the bottom line is Alibaba is polluting more.
Well, increasing the number of datacenters is going to have that effect. As such, you can apply that argument to every single tech giant today. Amazon, IBM, Borkzilla, they're all doing it. And ?
The bottom line is this : nuclear (fusion when we get it) is the future.
You don't like that idea ? Fine, throw away your smartphones, your IoT shit, your electric car, your washing machine (and dryer), your dishwasher and everything else but your LED lights, your fridge, freezer, TV and sound system.
If we get back to the bare minimum, then yeah, solar, wind and a few coal plant will be enough. But we're not going to do that.
So, while Greenpeace studiously ignores all the coal plants that are being fired up to cope with the fact that its activities for the last fifty years have stifled the only viable solution we have, don't blame datacenters for doing their job.
We need nuclear. Not pressure water reactors that make plutonium so we can get yet more world-destroying nuclear bombs, no. We need Thorium reactors, and fusion reactors when we can get them. Once we have that, two smartphones and an electric car per person will be less of a problem, and datacenters won't be a problem at all.
I seem to recall that a simple white noise generator (check V for Vendetta, among others), aka the go-to spy covert-conversation-protector, is largely enough to confuse a microphone while retaining human ear's capability of listening to one's neighbour.
Have physics changed, or has that always been a red herring ?
It never ceases to astonish me how software vendors (Borkzilla, Oracle, etc) redefine the business environment without for one second asking businesses if that is what they need.
More astonishing is the fact that businesses appear to not mind very much, given the lack of lawsuits over being forced to change when no change was needed from a business point of view.
And we're not talking about mom&pop shops, we're talking about Fortune 1000 companies. How is it that nobody among those CEOs called up Larry and said "Are you done fucking with my business ? I've got money to make and markets to corner, I don't have time to waste lining your wallet" ?
And I'm supposed to believe that these Fortune 1000 CEOs have no clue as to what they got themselves into ?
That is a hard pill to swallow.
I would agree with you completely if not for that fact that, if those workers got a job at Amazon shifting boxes, it's likely that they didn't find a job anywhere else.
I doubt very much that any Amazon employee set out one morning with the urge to get a job where pissing in a bottle to not take a break is almost a routine procedure.
So, yeah, I'm all for making robots to handle dull, repetitive tasks, but what happens to the people who lose their jobs to it ? Are they going to be able to find work somewhere else ?
And if they could, wouldn't they already have ?
You can lift a finger, and banks will fall over themselves to loan you billions more.
I fully understand the financial operations involved, and I get why the banks are willing, but honestly, with his fortune, shouldn't the banks just be : "meh, you've got the money, finance this yourself" ?
But of course, that's not the kind of world we live in.
I would tend to agree. It's a game. It doesn't need to be 100% photorealistic.
It does, however, need to be optimised to not create lag simply because there's too much to render.
When I'm playing Minecraft, or Diablo III, I'm not interested in realistic. When I'm playing 7 Days to Die, I find the world quite realistic enough.
We're good on realism, I think. Let's get this thing optimized even more to up the framerates. There's never enough of those.
All these online repositories are teaching us security in a way a classroom just couldn't.
There's nothing like real-life situations to raise awareness, and the Internet makes security a 24/7 affair.
I guess in ten years' time, there will be exhaustive classes on security, full of "lessons learned" (or an Internet Security For Dummies* book), that will actually be useful enough to ensure that people who take them will know all of what to avoid.
* : yes, I know, there is one already. What I mean to say is that, in a decade or so, we'll likely have enough experience to ensure that all aspects are covered, including online repositories, stacks and other VMs. We're not done finding out how our data can be hacked, is what I'm saying.
The fact remains that a URL is not much help when your desktop is screwed to the point where it cannot connect to the Internet.
Once upon a time, documentation was a local affair, and it was more or less useful following how much work was put into it.
Nowadays, it's just a throwaway thought and you've got to scour the Web's technical forums and pray that enough people have had your problem so that somebody might have been good enough to post something somewhere that is actually a solution.
But actual help from the original vendor ? Or some technical specifications that are up-to-date ?
Rarer than hen's teeth, these days.
Warning that costs are high, the workforce is scarce, etc . . all of that is just laying down the groundwork for when the Texas plant will never open.
Or, when it does, it will be with reduced capacity and it will stay that way for all the years TSMC has tax exemptions for.
Then it will more everything back to Taiwan.
Just you watch.
