Posts by Joe 35 174 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jul 2009
The default seems to have been that every time the object classification changed it decided it must static since it hadn't seen it before, rather than being able to "understand" that object type A then B then C, D,C,A,X, etc was a single thing that had a trajectory. Thissoftware seems to have some fundamental gaps in how to process new information and relate it to past information.
Many years ago, working on an OS as a naive and new support tech, I cam across some obscure code written in assembler that looked like the programmer was showing off and should be rewritten in the high level language that everything else was written in. What it did was commented for the call, but how it did it, wasnt documented at all.
i showed it to the manager and asked about rewriting " ah yes he said, no one really knows what that does, but it seems to work so so dont **** with it"
I suggest a slight amendment to your otherwise excellent plan
"It works by applying 40,000 volts to its structure if anyone mentions Brexit."
The 40,000 volts should be applied not to the structure, but to the dangly bits of anyone who mentions the B word.
I had something similar in the mid 80's with reversed wires though much less dangerous, i was on site to assist to shut down and then restart a system should there be problems, after the electricity board had done some work outside which necessitated shutting off all electricity to the building.
When power came back on, the machine looked good, lights came on, but it wouldn't boot from disk (similar type of 50Mb multi platter disks) even though it was spinning.
After some investigation it seemed the electricity board had swapped two of the three phases outside the building somewhere since the disks were spinning backwards ! Fix was to reverse the wiring inside the disk cabinets !
What were the "ranges of all electric vehicles developed prior to Tesla producing a single car (including models from Toyota, Honda, Fiat, GM and others".
I can think of the GM EV which i think they made 100 of and the Toyoya RAV4 EV, a few thousand tops.. That was one model each. Not exactly a "range".
Note your words, "all electric". So Prius for example doesn't count.
And more to the point all these were "compliance cars" built to fit certain criteria on volumes, once they reached those, that was it they weren't interested in selling any more, indeed the CEO of Fiat recently actually asked people not to buy the Fiat 500 EV as they were losing money on it.
They will buy some, to test, so they can get the jump on their competitors. If you are Walmart with a zillion trucks spending several zillion on diesel every year, buying 6 or even 66 as a test isn't exactly risking the business when the payback might be huge. As in saving 2/3 your diesel costs.
Trucking companies arent dummies, if its cheaper determined by relatively quick ROI (2-3 years), they will buy it like its going out of fashion. Its not like a consumer making a point by buying a car that loses money, trucking companies make hard boiled decisions based on real numbers not fashion so all the naysayers here wittering on about Tesla groupies are missing the point, if these hard bitten numbers people are buying its real.
So, adjust the original posts terminally flawed maths that forgets that diesel engines are 100% efficient, and even from those figures, its a clear money saving proposition, with massive ROI at certain mileages and travel distances.
Whether they can be produced on time, at the advertised cost, in the quantities needed, that remains to be seen. If they can, its a slam dunk.
No one with a brain cell is disputing that a deer cant damage a car.
Anyone with a brain cell is disputing that any type of autonomous driving function would relay data back to the cloud to make real time driving decisions to feed back to the car.
So this is a risible example, and all the worse because it implies they cant think of a real one.
The article has this bit wrong, it wont act "as a revamp as a way to boost sales of database licences" because when you buy a licence (and as long as you continue to pay maintenance) you can upgrade to a later version of the same edition (Standard or Enterprise mostly) without any charge.
So for examples customers dont have to shell out to Oracle to go from 7 to 8 to 11 to 18. (this is aside the other numerous costs of upgrades of course). But for once, no Oracle cost.
The issue is, forward payments.
Lets say it turns out that due to the arcane way the license works, you owe them £5M for licences each year. OK they wont ask for the back payment of several squidzillion, but an unexpected (on your part) £5M each year going forward is no chicken feed either. So, by genuinely not asking for backpayment, SAP still clean up since you've effectively just promised to pay them some large amount ongoing without even understanding what it will be until you ask !
Any sensible organisation will be using specialist 3rd parties to audit connectivity and recommend how to adjust systems so they dont contravene, or at least significantly minimise contravention, and *only then* go to SAP.
Oracle believe it or not are generally better here, at least if you've managed to negotiate an employee based license for your finance etc, then it doesn't matter what or who you connect to. Do SAP not do such licenses?
"3. Where's G-Cloud? Why are they not using this if they've spent money on setting it up?"
Doh! You need a large cluebat about the head yourself to ask that !
G_Cloud isn't a cloud, its a catalogue of IT-related stuff that government bods can order from without needing to jump through (so many) procurement hoops.
Its no more a cloud than Littlewoods catalogue (and about as useful)
"First, you must separate between development and production. For development, I don't want to setup an bunch of users or other security constraints. So, no default security, that only would slow down development in the first place."
So now you have two different sets of code, one for production, secure, one in development, not secure. So HTF do you test if Prod is secure if the dev version isnt? Security is a lot more than what connections you have.
And HTF do you avoid bugs in Prod that are there because of the security you have in Prod that isnt there in Dev, so you can't test Prod code fully? "What, you found there is a bug when xyz secure feature or access via port nnn is turned on that deletes transactions at random? Who'd a thunk it eh? I certainly didn't when i shipped my code out direct from non secure Dev to Prod and only then and untested turned on a couple of Db security features"
"it depends"
The stories say 6 million records exposed, but from the sound of it it was a fairly low scale amateur operation one customer at a time to enable them to intercept handsets, rather than they downloaded all 6 million records and flogged on the info, which i'd have thought would net more than a few dodgy handsets are worth
.. to the problem of Google Maps "Hopefully this will eliminate the wrong turnings due to Google Maps’ erroneous audio guide that frequently yet inaccurately tells me to “turn left” when I should “turn right” (and vice-versa) regardless of what the street map itself indicates on-screen."
Simply walk backwards everywhere. Problem solved ! Simples.
"Why does everyone expect that the European community will just sit and wait while leaving the UK parliament decide everything? ."
Because (1) there is no mechanism to eject a member and (2) in a delicious piece of irony, were that ability to be introduced it would have to be done as a treaty change for which there would need to be a unanimous vote, which the UK could block (so we could leave when we wanted and not when Johnny Foreigner decided, thank you very much).
Blasting ammo away isnt as crazy as it sounds.
It has a "sell by date" so there's a reason to use it up anyway, and out of date ammo has a cost to be returned and "recycled" (you cant just chuck your old bombs in the local landfill as with your ginsters ! ) which can make it cheaper to use it than return it, and the deals to buy it are usually long term to assure supply so there's a constant supply coming in.
"Doesn't this mean that they are storing previous passwords in plaintext?"
In a word, no.
You enter "Password_4".
System sees last digit is a number, replaces that number with n-1, generates hash result (for Password_3 in this example) and sees if it is a match with existing password hash. If it is, slapped wrist.
"Introducing earthly microbes to the surface COULD pollute the environment"
Its pretty much certain that earth origin microbes have been landing on Mars, intermittently, for the past 4 billion years. This would be due to large scale Earth impactors spreading debris into space, some of which will almost certainly have found its way there, just as its happened in the other direction.
Sure there's a lot more obstacles in the way of an organism surviving than from a borked rocket, but over this timescale, it must be almost commonplace.
"Even worse maybe they analysed the problem/specification and knew that it would not solve the problem"
Anyone that did that, would not win the contract, because the idjuts who run these tenders dont want to hear the truth. To coin a phrase, they can't handle the truth.
So all you are left with, is people running teh same game as said early on, bid at a loss, make it up on changes.
This is why no SMEs will win these contracts either, they can't bid at a loss, nor can they accept the onerous Ts&Cs anyway.
What an amazing coincidence that it just so happens to cost a nice round sum of £50k to ensure that they run at break even, despite not knowing up front how many companies will certify and therefore how much revenue they will make. If there is an excess at the end of the year, will they hand it back?
I also wonder, how does mandating £50k a year fit into the SME-friendly mantra of GDS & Government IT?
Since with the app I use you can only pay for a whole day, I cant see that happening, but even if its by the hour, for someone with the capability to run up a fake GSM base station, I think bigger opportunities than stealing £2.50 from parking receipts will be available.
Renting to use it over very limited internet just doesn't make sense.
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You woudn't be doing that though.
You would be using it locally. The 'cloud' aspect is a misnomer, all it means in this case is, every now and again it checks you've paid your dues. All the photos and the app still reside on your computer.
Maybe the chip is 20 cents, but then there's repeaters every few metres which will bump the effective cost up to, errm, whatever a repeater costs, maybe $20, so the chip cost is an irrelevance !
Plus add the cost of installing the power cabling to run the repeaters, and the hassle of that.
So you might as well, as a comment above says, just run wires and embedded sensors.
Back to the drawing board I think.
Why are you wasting both your time and hers, and not telling her "we are buying cloud storage now" ??
Oracle arent just selling "in the old model" (and there are customers still buying "in the old model" BTWso they'd be mugs to stop selling that ! ), they will sell on premise, public cloud and indeed private cloud, if that floats your boat. same as do IBM I'm sure.
It does require an intelligent customer with the wit to ask though.
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