Posts by John Smith 19 16330 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
The corporations one duty is to make profit for its stockholders.
Period.
Any other goals are set by its Board and the CEO. Historically the reasons they have behaved any better than this very low standard are because of the view of the Board and CEO and / or government legislation.
Whatever else the corporation says it's committed to is PR BS if the Board and CEO don't give a s**t.
And can you incorporate any of those mechanisms into things humans can fly in space.
Being able to shut the body down completely for a few decades sounds like it could save a lot of food mass for example, while anything that increases radiation resistance should lower shielding mass, also good if you don't happen to have a convenient sized asteroid handy.
M12 work typically involves using shock tubes, giving such flows for less << 1 sec.
This is intriguing given the very low densities of the gases and plasma involved. In the universe these phenomena cover huge volumes of space so being able to model them in more detail, (like how they grow, what can make them shrink etc) should improve our understanding quite a lot.
Easy.
Use it in a fuel cell.
In the 1960 Phillips built an electric bike running on Hydrazine, which is a cousin of Ammonia.
It's also toxic in WMD levels of exposure.
I'd agree a liquid fuel is the way to go. My ideal choice would be sugar soln in a fuel cell. Grow plant, chop up, add water, warm up a bit, filter then pour into tank.
we use the wonders of telecommunication and automation to avoid the need for millions of poor bastards having to live in crime ridden urban squalor, this apparently making up for the inability of society to use the technology already at its disposal?"
And you can have that all, provided you're prepared to carpet bomb every city in a country flat to implement it. that's the dirty little secret of most "utopias," they start with a destructive event on an epic scale.
In London I'd start with all those empty "investment" flats bought off the plan by foreigners as bolt holes in case their mate, "El Presidente," The Great-And-Glorius-Leader or WTF the chief crook is called has to make a run for it.
Utopias are a bigger fantasy than a dystopia. IRL life if you want that lifestyle you can have it now, if you're prepared to make the sacrifices and compromises necessary to do so, as Lester Haines did.
Single person pod delivered to your door fresh and charged every morning.
Takes you to train station or work.
Picked up,cleaned and if necessary recharged then available to take mom to shops to buy stuff for later delivery.
Pod has high crash safety and hard upper speed limits. Yes it's transport as a service and hopefully a bit less fugly than the thing in the photo. Naturally it's all in the pricing of the service and the break even costing and ability to find enough electricity to recharge, mostly in the early hours.
But humans being human I don't think it's got a cat in Hell's chance of happening.
with the GPS, wireless and location turned off."
But, but, but how will you know where you are?
How will people know where you are? Your Facebook status would go un-updated.
You'll be in an information Black hole that could last for ages. Who knows what vital tweets you might have missed? Stephen Fry might have made an astonishingly erudite remark and you would not be able to instantly comment on it.
What I've read of it I liked, but given the scale of the NHS task even a little tweaking, when you're dealing with 10s of millions of records ( most of the UK population + annual births - annual deaths) could get very tricky. How any people in the UK have Erlang skills?
F**k me sideways. And Erlang as a language. Holy s**t. From what I've heard it's a solid environment for secure programming with hard real time constraints, as you'd expect from something designed to develop PBX's in. I just don't know how many people know it.
That said this demonstrates the best and the worst of these sorts of businesses.
IRL SW systems have URINE tasks (Uninteresting Research Into Necessary Equipment). The stuff the app needs to do but no one if given the choice wants to do. Comms protocols come to mind for example (tedious and error prone to implement without good support tools).
And in this case it looks like they finally realized you have to have a balance. Yes a distributed data base is cool (although I seem to recall hearing someone did a Lotus Notes app that was good enough to run a metals trading market about 20 years ago) but a fair share of URINE also has to be done by people.
But look. The companies virtually dead but the software is still both accessible and maintainable.
The codebase is still available.
Basho is dead.
Long live Riak?
"Microsoft had more money and more automated tools, and they could not find it,"
Did they go looking for it?
At Microsoft, he said, "They were very proud of the fact that they wanted everyone to reinvent the wheel.
So probably not then. After all users don't usually buy Windows, the PC mfgs do.
"The fact that this has been around for as long as it has been in open source, I think, is just one more case that should debunk the theory that open source programming is in some way more secure than closed source programming."
OTOH if you were really worried about the security of this section of code with a FOSS implementation you could eyeball the code yourself. Obviously everyone trusted everyone else and no one was responsible for checking it, so that's who checked it. He doesn't like this free software idea much, does he?
"That suggests the specification provided insufficient guidance. "
So who developed Kerberos again?
Lots of fail to go round on this one, by everyone.
Probably.
He also probably didn't want to make the AG's brain explode with too much complexity.
Which with this one seems a distinct possibility.
Lawyers are so used to making the law do whatever they want it to that they really can't conceive of a situation where this doesn't work.
If you think that's intrusive some security company control rooms have webcams allowing customer to watch what the staff are doing.
Welcome to the future.
In this guys case well smart people can be stupid too. And outside of their specialty they often are.
Something we should all keep in mind any time we get the urge to be "clever."
It will have allowed them to test design models against actual conditions as well as how well the hardware really handles them, allowing them to tighten up what they expect in terms of LISA's actual performance.
These tests will give them data on what extreme conditions look like in the data. Useful to know if the real system starts misbehaving.
Yes I know, dreadfully old fashioned but they are in fact powered by the exchange.
Which is why you don't have to keep fitting batteries in them, or they have a second cable running from a little brick plugged into an electrical socket as well to work. There is the option of piezo electric switches which generate enough power when switched to drive the rest of the circuitry (yes they are a real thing).
I'd love to see a truly passive, light driven landline telephone.
Openreach (or rather the infrastrucutre they are supposed to be maintaining) is a key part of UK infrastructure.
Yes historically most of it was installed by Bt and its predecessors but it should be open to all comers.
The trouble is properly setting up Openreach needs something like the National Grid arrangement. Essentially pull it completely off BT, set up a separate pensions arrangement and make it impossible for anyone (especially a foreign company) to gain overall control. IOW running it as a national resource for all of the UK. TBF those resources should also include the Vermin ducts as well, with the beardy ones minions likewise suitably compensated.
You can be that sounds far too socialist for Mrs May, and far too difficult, even with the help of her noalition colleagues (or the Men of Orange as you might like to think of them).
What is it about UK companies that make their highest goal to be bought out ASAP by anyone offering anything close to their real value?
UK Pharma companies are famous for it. Would ARM have stood its ground so long if most of its backers were not already American?
TBH it was just my boiler plate for how to approach govt systems in large countries.
They're big. Don't turn up if you can't handle 10s of millions of records minimum (think size of a population over decades, or number of companies registered at Companies House, also over a decade)
The UKG IT system is "mature." Lots of systems sharing data. In the case of HMRC also data transfer to other countries.
Paradoxically they are also moving targets, changing as the legislation changes on the large scale, changing customs duties and taxes during a budget.
As was noted in a Raik presentation "At small scale anything can be made to work." True.
Live government systems are never small scale.
Hence the talk of "transitional arrangements." OTOH they would bar the UK from negotiating those foreign trade deals with that nice Mr Trump Mrs May seems so keen on.
BTW....
According to El Reg
Aspire --> Fujitsu, Capgemini and Accenture
So with this collection of "The Usual Suspects (TM)" what can we expect?
Well they've already under sized the capacity of the system by quite a lot.
And the end goal is a moving target TBD by David Davis and his team on the UK side and the EU negotiators on the other (rather than 27 separate bi-lateral trade negotiations High-Chancellor-in Waiting Prime Minister May thought was going to be the case), so maximum flexibility would seem pretty important IE reconfiguration by driver files, not re writing programs.
And ability to specify multiple (and complex) interfaces to cope with linking into other existing large SW systems inside the dept.
Time will tell how accurate a description of the new software this turns out to be.
Even the UK, when it got the EU to accept the Data Retention Directive, could "only" manage to get 2 years.
I'm not sure what the Dutch for "data fetishist" is but they certainly have struck a blow for the cause.
The cause of having dirt on anyone in a country they can use as and when they need it.
Fortunately those countries with the resources to do so want carriers for themselves for the world wide willy projection capabilities they give.
However find a group or country that wants to ensure sea access for themselves against states that operate carriers and that story could change.....
In Europe I'd say the Dutch, the Swiss and the Scandinavian countries could have both the motivation and the skills to field an anti carrier weapon. The high tech one is the M10 ballistic missile but there are other options which are conceptually more creative, but rather cheaper and easier to implement, re-purposing parts of existing systems to do the job.
The other problem is that without access to satellite imagery finding them is going to be difficult.
Indeed.
I saw "Battle of Britain" again recently (such a weird movie). In it Sir Laurence Oliver points out that to win (the Battle of Britain) "Our young men will have to shoot down their young men at a ratio of 4 to 1."
Which seemed impossible.
Except they did.
"Can you launch something capable of taking out a carrier for $5 million."
Yes, if you can get close enough, and you're prepared to lose enough of them to get the job done.
.TBF the fall back in the MAC implementation could be an "At implementers discretion" choice.
The hard coded creds? This design pattern needs to be burned out of every devs toolkit. The "theoretical" simplicity of the security has demonstrated failure over and over again.
But what you've built one of you can build hundreds (or 1000s) of.
Note that fact the laparoscopic robot could be used autonomously and has been around for 2 decades but is not allowed to be.
Surgeons are a well financed and well organized trade union (amongst other things) and most of them will fight this.
OTOH hospital administrators will be eyeing up massive (potential) reductions in malpractice insurance, 24/7/365 availability and better than average survival rates (I'm hearing an Austrian voice saying "BONES 1 performs first autonomous operation under supervision on August 3rd 20xx. It continues to operate with a perfect patient safety record for ten years. A decade later all hospitals have them installed. Surgical graduate numbers have dropped by ninety percent as they cannot perform to the standard set by the robot").
Personally I think the developers of these ideas have gone for grandiose visions which antagonize surgeons. It is an astonishingly complex environment to deal with.
A better approach IMHO would have been to identify sub tasks the surgeons would be happy to outsource, so they can get onto the next patient. Opening up and closing up come to mind. Assistance with placing,tracking and removing surgical equipment and consumables in the patient also come to mind, allowing a very small team to act like a much larger number of hands and eyes.
My instinct is it would be better if such robots could use conventional surgical instruments, but possibly not with conventional "hands," to ensure more precise translations and rotations. Then again keyhole surgery already uses specialized instruments the surgeon has limited direct control over.
I suspect, like human surgeons, surgical bots will specialize. Ideally they will share a common mounting (not necessarily in the floor) with different sizes depending on how heavy the work involved is will be. I can imaging the orthopedic 'bots being quite hefty, to cope with joint replacements, likewise heart operations for chest cracking. OTOH going for other major organs slimmer, lighter appendages would be possible.
I'd check that story.
AFAIK the Japanese liked the tech but were not prepared to pay the MoD extortionate (to them) licensing fees..
Early Japanese LCD's were inferior.
They got better.
HMG sold off most of its defense research as QuintiQ, through an MBO to its civil service Directors, who made out pretty well.
Well done.
Next move. Slice most of the wafer away (and reuse it) to make them about 30x shorter.
My instinct is WDC don't want to pay the price Tosh need for this to get them out of the s**t they got into buying the Westinhouse nuclear construction operation, itself well f**ked by buying what looked like a large construction company but was actually cobbled together by some "entrepreneur" (does this word really come from the same root as "entrap"? It looks like it ought to).
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