Posts by NeilT

Twitter is suffering from mad bro disease. Open thinking can build it back better

Rational View

I find it extremely interesting to find an author who can understand the technical details of a Mastodon mesh but fail to recognise the extreme transitive effect of a visionary who has extensive experience in the field.

Add to that nobody calculating the average cost of the employees being discharged.

Well on its way to $800m by the time the next lot exit.

The vast majority of the work done on Twitter is either not revenue generating and so can be culled. Or can be done well by smart AI.

Add on top the $4bn in Tesla shares Musk dropped and you have a company primed and in the starters gate.

Daily active users are up. The drag on revenue is down, dead wood is being burned and ideas are flowing freely.

The biggest oar in the whole thing is regulatory and for that the author couldn't even be bothered to research the control order.

Responsible journalism?

I'll take Musk and Twitter.

Tesla Full Self-Driving 'fails' to notice child-sized objects in testing

You couldn't make it up. Their own video shows that FSD was NOT engaged. So the driver drove the car up to speed, tried to engage FSD and when FSD failed to engage, the driver, not the software, ran over the model child.

Classic. Foot, aim, shoot. Reload. Shoot again.

There are other systems on board the Tesla which should try to avoid the collision. But they are NOT Full Self Driving. The human was still driving the car.

Re: Comparison

When you say something is in BETA, there are certain expectations set by precedent.

Beta us In Test, Not Tested, Not certified, expected to have bugs and fully expected that things won't work as advertised.

Not until it is Out of Beta should any expectations of Full Self Driving be set.

Even then FTFM. The information on the website Before you purchase FSD says that the product is not yet ready for release and that even when it is ready for release it may not be used until the regulators approve it.

I know that some people can't read English and that some people are hard of thinking. Apparently they have "expectations too". Should I listen to them???

Re: Comparison

No, actually people who don't have a Tesla, don't have the software and have never read the terms and conditions think that Tesla FSD, a piece of Beta software, which is unfinished and very much NOT "certified" for level 5 self driving, won't mow down something it does not recognise.

That doesn't make Tesla bad, evil or lying to people. It just proves that a hell of a lot of people are just plain STUPID.

BTW, Tesla does not market and does not have "advertising bods". Musk, the company CEO, talks about the progress they are making and the expectations for delivery.

People who DO have Tesla's, HAVE bought FSD and HAVE read the terms and conditions; are overwhelmingly in favour of FSD and are glad that they are getting to beta test it instead of waiting for the company to do it themselves and get it certified.

But that doesn't sell media or press. It also doesn't drive US senatorial bids.

Lotus Notes refuses to die, again, as HCL debuts Domino 12

Lotus Notes (server), with the Domino plug in, was able to support web apps with an interactive back end database back in 1996.

Notes and Domino is a PKI based system for which every user has a certificate and can sign or encrypt messages to any user in the system. Yes they dropped the ball on extending this to the Internet and that their certs were not compatible with the internet standards. But whilst Microsoft apps were exchanging clear text passwords, Notes and Domino were exchanging encrypted tokens.

The fact that companies cheapskated on hardware, or didn't understand how to build disk arrays to support Domino, meant that they wound up turning off Full Text search, leaving users believing Notes had no search capabilities. When, in fact, it had by far the best search capabilities and that same search syntax was extended to Notes apps and also to Domino Web apps.

Even then the awareness of users as to creating a local replica and enabling Full Text searching was never there and never taught. Users just wanted to whine and companies didn't want to train users.

In 98 we were building mail systems with 1GB mailboxes and multiple replicated mailboxes to ensure failover and continuity. When other mail systems were offering 50mbytes storage to ensure stability.

The client was immensely powerful but created by a team who thought it was their way or the highway. Witness the battle royal over NOT making F5 locking the client as opposed to refresh of the view as in almost every other system. YET, even today, when I want to copy a meeting owned by someone else, in my O365 mailbox, into a new meeting of my own, keeping attendees and subject, I have to completely rebuild it. Notes is and was, right click and copy into new (calendar entry or mail or task).

In Notes you could write your own automation including the command language in the toolbars and script in database agents. You could also have extremely powerful toolbar icons by using them to call agents in your local address book, over which you had full control. In Outlook this is a nightmare from hell which gets worse as companies lock out code due to the incredibly insecure nature of Outlook code. Notes has an Execution Control list with extensive controls on what agents can do, based on a 7 layer security model.

The back end server stuff for mail routing and database have already been covered.

Notes and Domino are littered with bad choices and bad attitudes from IBM and the Dev teams. The product, itself, was transitional and still is.

Annoyed US regulator warns it might knock SpaceX's shiny new Texas tower down

Re: Am I the Only One Who Wants to See Elon Frog-Marched Out of His Offices in Handcuffs?

Nope there are plenty more who don't give a crap about the environment and want incumbents to give us third rate products for twice the price.

Not alone at all....

Well he could be trying to set up a rocket launch business in Germany......

He can't be feeling as much frustration as he is over building his Tesla factory in Germany. Those guys don't have the word reasonable in their vocabulary. It is replaced with Comply in every case.

UK contractors planning 'mass exodus' ahead of IR35 tax clampdown – survey

Re: Anonymous Contractor

Typical know nothing moronic permie answer.

Contractor wages have been falling for two decades. I earn 20% less now than I did in 2001 and I get NO expenses.

So, what, get slightly more than a permie, no holidays, no sick pay, pay your own pension, pay for your company, pay employers NI and employees NI get fucked over for 52% tax (if you are lucky), then have NO job security, no union, no employment tribunal if anything goes wrong. Have to pay for millions in public liability and personal liability insurance for your company?

Then the government wants us to be flexible, work where the work is needed, as the work is needed, for as long as the work is needed (sometimes as short as 4 months).

Fuck you Very Much. I've already handed in my notice. The UK is no longer worth working in for a contractor.

Try reading some of the analysis about what happens if we stick two fingers up and walk away. Brexit? No comparison in economic damage.

Microsoft goes back to the drawing board – literally, with 28" tablet and hockey puck knob

If they want to start on 3D

They might actually want to start with the pile of horse dung known as the 2d, totally flat, Windows 8/10 interface and office 2013/2016 apps.

Then once we are, again, immersed in a 3D interface to rival Windows95, we might want to talk about 3d for other things.

It is unlikely I'll be able to avoid this "creator" edition, but the sad fact is that this journey cannot be avoided for poor SOB's who can't stand CrApple and can't live with Linux.

Researchers: Arctic cooled to pre-industrial levels from 1950-1990

Dear God Above

You want it all ways.

The planet has been cooling since 1998 and it's all about the Solar Output isn't it???

Really!

2000-2001 was the peak of solar cycle 23. Yet it was cooler than 1998. Why? Indonesia burned in 1997 putting another full 1ppm extra CO2 in the atmosphere for the 1998 summer, skewing the balance, which was redressed by melt in the cryoshpere.

2007 - 2010 are bookends to the lowest solar minimum since the Dalton Minimum. YET global temperatures have never been higher. By the time 2010 is over 1998 to 2010 will be the 12 warmest years on record.

The National Academy of Science (normally completely silent on items of dissent), have come out and completely exhonerated Mann. In fact Every Single scientist who has tried to reconstruct Mann's work has come out with a hockey stick of varying sizes no matter what *recognised* data set selection they use. The only Exception being the ONE report which claims Mann's work is rubbish. That report, on analysis, uses an unrecognised data set selection process. It's called "only use data sets which can't possibly produce a hockey stick"

Then we get ONE analysis of tree ring data in ONE place in the world and it's all over. Climate science is bunk. Never mind that Russia is burning because it's hot and dry (yes that was forecast in the climate models), let's debunk thousands of man years of approved and accredited work with ONE analysis. Oh and let's not forget that this kind of drought and fire risk in Russia was not forecast to happen for another 50 years yet.

I'm tired of "Drive By Disinfomation". I've decided that Drive By Reality should balance it out.

Are the ice caps melting?

What a mishmash of half truths

This is a well crafted piece of disinformation. The real Icing on the cake is the last statement.

Amundsen did, in fact, finish his navigation the northwest passage (there are 7 of them and he did NOT navigate the main one), in 1905.

The missing piece of information is that he set out in the summer of 1903 and it took him 2.5 years of jumping between cracks in the shifting ice to get there.

Last year you could have taken an unstrengthened super tanker down the main channel which has never (in human memory) been open before. Just a little different.

Most of the channels of the NW passage were discovered by foot and dogsled over the Ice.

The Arctic ice began 1M SQ KM in extent higher than 2007. By mid June it had equalled 2007. Now it is about half a million sq km above 2007 as it has entered the traditional warming period for this time of year. However this is a much cooler year than 2007 (to date) yet the melt extent already exceeds 2007 by half a million sq km. Remember that it bean 1M higher and is now only 1/2 million higher.

In the last two days circa 250,000 sq km of ice just vanished. Leaving a triangle of melting ice pointing right into the North Pole.

http://iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/arctic_AMSRE_nic.png

Oh yes, they were not talking about a few miles of open water at the pole. They were talking half a million sq km of open water. Your picture of a submarine would not have been possible because you would have needed a helicopter or another sub to take it as the whole area around it and way, way over the horizon would be open water.

I really hate it when someone who knows nothing about this cherry picks the sicence they wish to believe and then paints a completely false picture.