Posts by Lusty 1632 posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
It’s funny I thought it was a reference to black and white magic by the nerds who created computing and our community/culture. As such I actually do see this as undermining my own culture and history. If you see race everywhere these colours are used then that’s on you, leave my culture alone because I see it as a reference to a great wealth of fantasy and fiction you’ll probably never understand.
“ make an array you need mix the light from all the telescopes while arranging for the optical path length to be the same to sub-micrometer precision no matter which telescope the light enters.”
Not true at all. If you want an easy build then yes, but computational photography techniques in 2020 can easily compensate for different placements if the devices are in space. It may not be easy, but it’s certainly possible. We don’t do these things because they are easy...
Microsoft is not the same as the incompetent admin in charge of that billboard. Just like Ford aren't necessarily to blame when a car hits another car. It's unlikely that the systems mentioned are being used if a reboot warning is on the screen, since the system would just reboot at a suitable time.
Management applications is probably the answer to that. Drivers, networking, remote deploy and more are all easier at scale with Windows (or were when these were created). At the time of Vista, Linux didn't even have good sound card support, let alone management apps to control hundreds or thousands of remote kiosks. For this reason, at the time, it would have been cheaper to just pony up for the fairly cheap licence.
in 2020 things have changed a bit and Linux is probably the better option, although Microsoft deployment and patching is still top of its game.
"require additional supervision to check and manage. And no, I'm not joking unfortunately."
Your mistake there is the word "require". It's not required, it's just what councils do. Accepting that what is currently done is what is necessary is the reason councils are as bad as they are. We don't need to separate the finding and filling either. Send two workers out in a truck with everything they need to fix potholes. Have them document what they fixed and which roads are done. That's all you need. No work list, no database, no walkers, no additional layers of managers.
AI is fixing the wrong part of the process.
That was me that spotted the privacy policy change and they eventually backtracked there too. Original articles were on el reg.
It’s worrying that the Reg have misinterpreted this new appology though which clearly states that old and new will continue to work but only separately. That’s the same message the original mail had just sugar coated with an apology.
“ Please note that because Sonos is a system, all products operate on the same software. If modern products remain connected to legacy products after May, they also will not receive software updates and new features.”
So apparently my brand new Sonos kit won’t get updates if I don’t bin my old Sonos kit. WTAF?!
"Clearview says it's using publicly shared photos, and thus isn't doing anything wrong."
They are incorrect. This is the very definition of personally identifiable information - they are actually using the data to identify individuals. That suggests GDPR should give them a very heavy kicking over every instance of EU citizen data held.
It won't, because this is too useful to law enforcement. Best case is this gets pulled inside an agency instead of being a private company. Then GDPR won't apply anyway.
Just imagine engineers saying "All bridges collapse" and just sort of accepting that under normal everyday circumstances a bridge might fall down. All software does not crash. Well written software will deal with known and unknown circumstances. Occasionally, yes, something weird might happen. At that point you want your system to fail to another host or stop, not just restart and hope for the best. We don't rebuild bridges to the same spec during a hurricane because we know the new one would break immediately. A crash should be your warning that something is very, very wrong and unusual. I'd almost suggest that instead of restarting the service a system ought to keep a record on a three strikes principle - if software crashes three times, permanently block it from running to force a real solution to the problem!
No, IT are on the hook for services they provide withint the SLAs agreed with the business. Everything else is out of scope. If you don't feel able to push back on things you don't support you either need to leave or get better at interacting with the business. It's not IT's job to shackle the business. It's not even IT on the hook for compliance, it's the business. In my experience the professionals within a business outside of IT are more attuned to compliance than IT are. It's rare to even find an IT person who's read the regulation docs, let alone understand them. Usually IT just block everything, store everything and hope; usually becoming non-compliant in the process. The number of 7 year backup retention regimes I've seen pointlessly implemented and costing millions unnecessarily is astounding.
"I doubt it."
I fear you're lacking in ambition. Everything that has energy can be used as a power source, and these have enormous energy. What we currently lack is the ability to harness that energy. When I was growing up it was a "fact" that slowing an F1 car wasted energy and required brake blocks and heat. Now we have KERS in every day EVs being driven on the streets. NEVER underestimate how quickly humans can innovate, things will always move faster than you expect.
"The issue is not the cameras, but rather the height and distance that modern drones can fly"
No, the issue is that when they did a "chicken test" against a jet engine, the Titanium drone parts ripped the plane a new one rather than just killing the engine like a frozen chicken would.
"I think many of us live under the basics of maritime law - essentially 'the bigger vessel has the right of way'. "
Maritime law, or Colregs as they are known don't say any such thing, and a supertanker or container ship will absolutely give way to a small sailing boat - I've seen it many times from the deck of my small sailing boat. The exception is that if either vessel is constrained in some way (draft, manoeuvrability etc.) then they need to make that known via signalling and will get precedence.
What the colregs also say, which is the smartest part, is that no vessel has "right of way" and that in collisions all parties share responsibility. To put this in car terms, I could be driving the wrong way up the M40 and you're still to blame if you hit me, because you should also have been looking where you're going and at a reasonable speed to be able to avoid collision. Works better at sea, but it's definitely words to live by. Personal responsibility is key.
"approximates theory of mind"
Nope. It's perfectly feasible to do this without AI, just slow the car to a stop in any and all circumstances when the lane is not clear then let the human take over. It's not a requirement for cars to proceed at speed or at all, and until we get that out of the design we'll keep failing. It's the same reasons humans keep crashing - we think it's necessary to go at speeds which are often too fast for conditions. It's not.
"why aren't there processes in place to intercept the requirement and do the job "properly" *before* someone else does the job?"
Because most people in IT don't actually know how and are too busy hiding that fact to learn. Instead, they divert attention by moaning about lack of policy and requirements or documentation until the business gives up and cuts them back out of the loop.
The business only approaches IT when they forget how incompetent IT is
"Microsoft are basically enabling users to (inadvertently or otherwise) subvert the data governance of their employer."
Utter nonsense. If I don't have permission to access data, Power BI WILL NOT magically give me that permission.
If your data governance isn't sufficiently strong to include permissions on your data sources that is not Microsoft's fault. Neither is it their fault that you've not provided the users a suitable way to access the data they need to do their job (and pay for you to do yours!).
You seem to have confused tools with policies. GDPR doesn't differentiate between electronic and paper - perhaps we should prevent people bringing their own pens and paper just in case they write down some PII? Electronic tools have many uses outside of PII, and it's your job to keep the PII in a secure location, not to prevent people using tools to achieve their goals.
The word you're looking for is digitalise, not digitise. Digitise is scanning a document to make a digital copy. Digitalise is making an electronic form so that there never was a paper copy to digitise. There's a world of difference in the value offered by these things so it's important to understand the difference.
I disagree. Politics is all about making concessions and compromise to prevent conflict and war. Whether you brand it terrorism, civil war or something else, the roots are all the same. The EU was designed to prevent more war in Europe (and to create a plausible alternative to the USD, which failed thanks to UK). The current wave of nationalism in multiple countries is destroying that peace. We should all be resisting nationalism a lot more than we are as it never leads anywhere good.
There are ifs and buts though. If the population were lied to (they were) and this has been shown to be the case (it has) then a new vote is absolutely the way to go. If the experts who were voted into parliament to represent the majority decide that there is no way to move forwards without causing collapse of the country, then a new vote with new information is absolutely the way to go.
If I decide to move out of my house, and later find out that I have nowhere to go and will be homeless, should I still just leave and throw a match in as I do so? Any reasonable person should be able to understand changing circumstances and act accordingly.
You've still misunderstood. When you're at 10m depth the pressure is 2 bar and the SCUBA gear delivers air at 2 bar. At 20m air is delivered at 3 bar. The gear literally delivers at the same pressure you're at, so it's not high pressure it's zero pressure compared to what you experience. As such, ANY pressure at zero ambient (aka space) will explode the human.
I think you need to stop wondering and start reading some science ;)
No, as mentioned SCUBA gear delivers air at ambient pressure, not high pressure. As also mentioned, in this instance ambient is around zero. As such there are only two outcomes:
1. Astronaut suffocates when no air is delivered.
2. Astronaut explodes because someone who doesn't understand pressure modifies the system to deliver air at above ambient pressure.
3. Astronaut burns in a fiery accident sequel because someone else who doesn't understand fire used pure O2 to reduce required pressure. Again.
Calm down dear. Those third party tools are simply unnecessary. The ENTIRE fallout of a "bloated" registry is that up to 1MB of your disk will be consumed. It's a complete non-issue that only those with severe OCD are bothered by. Your PC won't run slower or faster regardless of what's in the registry, it's just a database of settings.
"Windows 10X is primarily designed to run UWP (Universal Windows Platform) applications, but will run Win32 desktop applications in a container. UWP applications use WinUI visual components and are based on the Windows Runtime, first introduced in Windows 8."
I read this as UWP apps will require a runtime, while Win32 will run natively inside a container. Why then, does TFA repeatedly use the word native the other way around? Have I missed something important somewhere about the word native being used for a new purpose?
No it's not just the solicitors talking, the email specifically says those are the terms agreed and asks for acceptance of those terms. That, in the UK, is a contract.
In the USA you may have a different system that requires a special document on special paper, with special pens (I don't actually believe you do since your law is largely based on ours), but here that stuff is all for show and has literally nothing to do with the legal status of a contract. Contracts here are an agreement to terms, with the document (in whatever form) simply existing to record those terms. What this judgement seems to say is that as long as it's clear someone intended to send those terms, and that it's clear who that person was, the contract is valid. In this case both of those things were clear from the communication since we know who sent it and we know he said those were the terms. Simples.
They can add that if they like, but it contradicts the manually typed content of the mail so any reasonable judge would rule the same. The sentence “I am pleased to confirm that terms of settlement between our respective clients have been reached on the following basis:” suggests the email does in fact include the final contract terms.
In reality, lawyers need to start treating all communication methods equally, and this judgement forces that behaviour. If you don’t want to make a contract, just don’t write an email saying these are your terms and please confirm. That’s literally what a contract is, not the fancy legal words surrounding the contract.
I don't think hybrid cloud means what they think it means. In 2019 if your request to "the cloud" requires an engineer with a screwdriver and a change control approval to complete then it's not really a cloud it's just hosting and colo.
I say in 2019, really the year makes no difference because that's always been the case. What I mean is that in 2019 this sort of shit should really have ended a decade ago and everyone should know what a cloud is by now.
Not true. The in memory networking will still hit the network stack of the VM, it just won't ever touch the physical network stack of the host. This means that you will still have a network FIFO queue on the vNIC and therefore latency will exist even if very low.
Intel based virtualisation has the exact same technology, and they also make the same spurious claims.
Their skin in the game is their reputation and thier business. They don't need to be paying for something to feel the hurt of an issue. At that point, yes, they can, should, and usually do pony up directly for some contractors to fix the issues in the open source product. If they wanted to pay developers all the time, they'd do it in house and wouldn't share the code, and that certainly is human nature.
You've completely misread my post. Part of the freedom of open source is that it doesn't get pushed in unpleasant directions just because someone is paying. Under the current system, everyone is free to hire and pay developers to implement features or fix bugs. Under a system where you pay directly to the project, the project then becomes a commercial software house and will protect their position to protect that income. That's about as far from OSS ideals as you can get without closing the source, and I've seen a LOT of instances where the paid code doesn't end up in the open repo but in a separate paid for closed source extension to the open repo.
There's more to free than money, and in the last few decades I've seen this play out a lot of times. The best and only solution is free, free and free in all senses of the word. Businesses can easily contribute by paying their own staff to contribute or hiring developers to contribute. Those developers might just be the ones working on the project, in which case that's a win-win.
And that bug was fixed. Without payment to developers. Your example doesn't change in any scenario - if the code was internal, the bug would have existed and been fixed. If the FW companies were contributing the bug would have existed and been fixed. If they had been paying the FOSS devs the bug would have existed and been fixed. As it was they didn't contribute, the bug existed and was fixed.
Money doesn't change this story at all so the OP point stands. The whole point of FOSS is that the code is available so when a bug is found and a fix is needed then anyone and everyone can contribute and get it sorted. Sometimes people are motivated enough to hire devs to get it fixed quickly, but that's on them.
But then it wouldn't be FOSS, it would be paid for software with all the crap and politics that comes with. The whole point of FOSS is that nobody has more influence just because they pay more. They are free to pay their own devs to add code, and the community is free to reject those changes, forcing a company to fork the project. If the "community" was actually a business they wouldn't make those same choices.
"On the high seas the smaller (powered) ship is required to give way unless it can't."
Nope, not even close. There are very well defined regulations (colregs) for sea and small boats use the same rules as large ships unless one is constrained by draft and showing suitable signals. This could well be a relatively small yacht with a deep keel. Out on the "high seas" that doesn't apply since draft wouldn't be an issue, so you're back to passing port-port, or using the traffic lights on the side of the boats (nav lights are green on one side and red the other, showing who should yield). Finally, in a collision scenario such as this, the most alert skipper must take action since nobody has right of way.
Your question remains though...who is actually planning and preventing disaster? I feel it's nobody right now and that's a worry.
"The product that was purchased retains all of the functionality that it had when initially purchased"
No it doesn't. The TV adverts clearly state they come with inclusive anti malware (and incorrectly imply Windows doesn't). Updates stop, AV stops, and that is functionality which was promised to be included for free.
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