Posts by Denarius

Yet another Big Tech exec heads to central government: This time IBMer Dan Bailey in 6-month stint

so suited clerks output will be just like clerks output, but expensive. Normal in the the Wests suicide. The more bureaucrats the better. After all, they know how to run your life and country better than you and citizens.

Samsung is planning to reverse-engineer the human brain on to a chip

its time

to read Roger Penroses two books, The Emperors New Mind and Shadows of the Mind. Another futile attempt because of oversimplified analogies. WARNING: Both books assume intelligence of reader. Some knowledge of set theory and basic understanding of Godel helps.

Self-sailing Mayflower ship to have another crack at Atlantic crossing next year

you mean

a smart ship that didn't even have basic equipment monitoring that even old clunkers have ? Generator/alternator fail and you get a red light. Simple fuel flow analysis to indicate fuel loss or engine problem, let alone gas sensors to alert to fuel leaks. And this was a smart ship with AI ? How stupid can humans get ? How did it even get a license to operate ?

'Quad' group seeks to set security standards for global tech industry

secure ?

@msobkow

Secure ? for whom? the Oz spooks and their handlers clearly want to be able to connect to, control and modify contents on any devices so that all suspects and maybe suspects can have the evidence found on their "secure" devices. So its the old magic backdoors again. As for a bureaucracy, especially a multinational one being innovative, hahahahahahah, chunder.

As for 5G, what does it actually offer users ? Something blocked by fog, rain, small distances, buildings, walls, trees. Right, so more masts/listening posts everywhere except where there is a need for the users. And which taxpayers/phone users will pay for this? Yes, above are right, back to the historical norm of totalitarian authoritarian incompetent government of the many, for the few.

Imagine a fiber optic cable that can sense it's about to be dug up and send a warning

Re: precision

Charles, so you have not seen encyclopedia pictures of Perth CBD and associated exswamp/mudflats titled Port Fremantle ?

precision

Perth WA is inland. Did you mean the coastal port of Fremantle and the ship dragging anchor in Gage Roads ? Gage Roads is the approach and anchorage area NW of Fremantle where ships hang around, waiting, waiting as Oz insane lockup drags on on, like an anchor...

As for technology of using cables as sensors, another reason to tread softly, and drive a JCB

Check your bits: What to do when Unix decides to make a hash of your bill printouts

UniPlex !

good memories of it. Did not like its old version of Informix as its database but when I first saw M$ Office and found how little it could do next to Uniplex and how slow Windows was on ( for then) high end hardware it was very annoying. I was baffled that it never became popular. I loved embedding SQL queries in spreadsheets ( in 1980s) to do formatting of reports. Just never got the hang of the report writer. COBOL report Writer is a different story. Loved that.

As for unix tty, yep, hated them but had to maintain and modify RS232 devices until middle 2000s. Ever tried to migrate old IBM RANS to new ones so that every dumb terminal and printer is still in same place. Easy enough once I had the scripts to collect config and recreate it on new hardware. Setting bits, baud, xon /xoff, whatever always made for a bad day on new kit. Especially on SCO boxes. cough, spit. Once working, document, document and make sure the rest of team knew where to find documentation. Have we all come back from a long leave and been told "X is borked, we cant fix it" and found it is a known problem, well documented in the unread, correctly located documentation but still somehow, returnees fault ?

Angry birds ground some Google Wing drones in Australia

worse than that

drone was not carrying food. It was someones morning coffee. I kid you not. Putting the nectar of $DEITY at risk, shame... So now farmers know what birds to encourage to destroy snoopers drones. Already have one pair of ravens nesting on my block

Microsoft Exchange Autodiscover protocol found leaking hundreds of thousands of credentials

almost enuf

to remember sendmail config with less loathing. Perhaps instead of "user friendly" or error tolerant programmers could revert to GOTO ERROR-EXIT. Making everything idiot proof seems to be just helping companies sell more junk software. Mines the one with Line Noise for Beginners in the pocket

It's the end of the world as we know it, and we should feel fine

Re: How about backup software that anyone can use reliably?

sometimes, if one keep the same brand. Why cant I just use phone backup to microSD card on new Android 10 phone. It might be hidden somewhere but all I can see under backup is a Slurp. On Android 7 I could do that.

Re: How about backup software that anyone can use reliably?

Wrong answer IMHO. How about backups that happen without the user being aware ? I know, Google/M$/Faeces slurp. However, after trying to recover data from mangled disks because of HW failure, OS failure or plain malware, I see the problem of users (speaking of WFH and home users here) feeling the need for backups to a common portable hard drive that is normally offline. As for corporates, am only too aware of major Oz site I used to work where all the older staff (ie over 24) were made redundant and cheap newbies brought in. They watched the main Windows backup hardware controllers fail and ignored the warnings because no-one knew of their significance. So problem is manglement are not being made to be afraid, very afraid of not mandating and testing quick backups and restores to be achievable. Something for the stockholders to chant and company AGMs perhaps.

Lastly, OS that allow any user data anywhere near the OS disk has to be made illegal under consumer protection laws. At least unix derived OS try to keep user files away from system areas. Most of us have seen /tmp or /var/tmp fill up due to inadequate use of disk quotas, or worse, crappy software writing logs into wrong places like /etc or going feral. Looking at you big colour TLA. Thousands of empty files per day in software working allocation.

In short, still much decluttering to be done in software standards for config. binaries, working space, data storage and logs with automatic log control.

Businesses put robots to work when human workers are hard to find, argue econo-boffins

Re: Robots

you mean we haven't ? So many papers are withdrawn as non-reproducible but get cited elsewhere so erroneous conclusions are built into the current soft sciences edifice. But they still get cranked out. And yes, there are (infinite regress coming up) papers about studies on non-reproducable results, outside the venerable AIR and JIR among others

Re: Slaves

Gene,

approximately correct. It was more the townies who died. That caused a concentration of wealth that was then available for investment. Meanwhile it accelerated the need for labour in country and town so the serfs who could, fled to towns post plague for better pay. This did cause a demand for better conditions in rural areas. The lord of local manor found he could not afford to really annoy the peasants as they had other options.

The parallels for us is the abolishing of blue collar jobs from 1970s had consequences as the skills were not replaced. Few skilled industrial jobs exist and the cultural preference for degrees meant even less technical hands on skilled workers got trained. Tried to get a tradie lately ? Combine this with the plummeting birth rates as the middle class expanded and you have shortages. Thats not to say there are no unemployed. West now have a rust belt problem with unskilled humans who have no skills or demand for their labour. So now what ? Historically a self appointed violent messiah complex group or figure arrives, creates massive mayhem, whether winning or losing the regional war

Re: Slaves

plague of what ? Overzealous bureaucrats or interfering pollies promising safety which is always a sign of impending totalitarianism. I believe it will be more pointless petty rulez, deployed because what else to process droids do

This is AUKUS for China – US, UK, Australia reveal defence tech-sharing pact

detecting subs

ITIRC that if the subs are moving quickly, very low level wakes do appear on surface imprinted on waves. So far not technologically possible to detect weak signal among a lot of noise. So they do not travel fast unless required to do so. Submerged depth matters too. However, the oceans floor, especially North Atlantic and near USA are covered with hydrophones, so anything moving fast will be heard there. Source I think was article a decade or two ago in Scientific American.

Re: Imagine: NATO Energy Security Agency

why bury trees ? Timber is a great housing resource and most of the world could do with more and better housing

Re: A hint at the UK's future

sort of AC. No-one is planning the for the main event of the 21st century. The collapse or retreat into irrelevance of the USA, followed by the collapse of the modern fiction of China. Its not really been a country for long. Usually about 3 regions feuding. So where does that leave the rest of Asia, let alone Oz ?

Re: Airstrip Two is much bigger than Airstrip One

except in the north the crocs and sea stingers tend to make the beaches very unsafe. Those jellyfish can kill more painfully and slowly than the crocs. Oh, the sharks are many and big too. As it is, US navy is building a new base away from Darwin around Gunn Point. Now that will require some dredging. Tides are fairly big there. At least the drug runners will get new airstrips to operate from. The WW2 ones are breaking up badly now.

Re: Shenzen, Shanghai, Beijing

nah, we Ozzies dont give a stuff about anyone's success or failure. Would interrupt the BBQs. Claiming bits of rock 1000Km from your shores to build airbases on them does bother others concerned with something called maritime law though. Though I note the approaching collapse of a Chinese building company is causing some sweated brows in Chinese banks, among other places. Thats the mark of real capitalist success, boom and bust cycles.

Re: Shenzen, Shanghai, Beijing

Meh, not even an original one. Another case of not a person having an idea, but an idea having a person. Ideologically imprisoned. I wonder how well it pays ?

Re: buy gold now

James, if demonstrators knew anything about the subject of their displeasure, (see Adam Brandt burble about nuclear subs being Chernobyls today) or were treated evenly by the courts, your comment would have merit. As it stands, XR can run riot and get a slap on wrist or be allowed, whereas merely standing in street praying outside an abortion clinic, driving a tractor alone in a paddock in Victoria or just posting skeptical comments on faecesbook gets the book and big fines thrown at one. In Oz as in the merkin hellholes, only approved demonstrations are allowed. Dissent is strongly discouraged in this country. Ask any Oz whistleblower, if you can find one not jailed by a secret court. Regrettably, I must disagree with your comment.

buy gold now

<rant> if previous Oz Defence "purchases" are any guide, just buying a standard item off the shelf is too quick, simple, easy and cost effective. The beancounter civilians would have no input, and thus not able to stuff up any design considerations made by engineers. Senior manglement will want bells, whistles and irrelevant changes in contract midstream, especially if poms involved. All changes gold plated and with ridiculous performance requirements. I doubt Oz will have anything launched and in service before 2040 if the SA ship yards previous performance is any guide. Finally, the Oz Navy cant keep submariner crews. Long trips breakup too many families, low pay does not help either. Nuclear boats have bigger crews than conventional subs. I do feel the frog sub contract was a disaster in keeping with anything Talkbull did but doubt this is a wise decision. In meantime, the hysterics that masquerade as environmentalists will have a ball predicting instant death, annoyance of the democratic, peaceful, non-threatening Asian country some distance to Oz north and mass deaths every time a sub arrives in port, even if they have to sink it to prove their point </rant>

Measuring your carbon footprint? There's no app for that

Re: Hello Australia

for starters, from the Japanese satellite that mapped CO2 flows in Earth atmosphere, Oz absorbs far more CO2 than it emits. Just from CO2 dissolved in dew reacting with bare rocks and our mostly empty continent covered in scrub, grasses and spinifex.

BTW, measuring CO2 footprint in itself is an interesting exercise in surveillance. As in measuring mining the rare earths and heavy metals for batteries and magnets, moving said ores, processing ores, moving refined materials, making bits for toys like electric cars and useful devices like phone, then shipping said products to sale points. Add in the massive emissions from building windmills with (in Oz) an energy production at best 15%, usually about 5% of rated output. Then the new costs and releases of CO2 to dispose of toxic end of life products like solar cells. Already an issue in my rural town. The bureaucracy involved would emit a lot of CO2 in the collecting, processing and bleating about it. It almost looks like a soft power influence of the gullible classes, ie academics, UN bureaucrats and aristocrats, wealthy and wannabe to benefit a single country.

Ghosts in the machine learning pipeline will be impossible to exorcise

Paul, agree with your assessment. ITIRC it was GK Chesterton who said that "a man looks to someone addressing him hoping to hear the unexpected" or words to that effect. That is exactly what you pointed out. Otherwise one indeed has a mere replay or worse, another twatter chatroom. Condolences on your loss

Off yer bike: Apple warns motorcycles could shake iPhone cameras out of focus forever

another excuse

to not buy a Harley ? Mines the one with the 1970s BMW workshop manual falling out of pocket and the Kwaka triple 2 stroke stains

BOFH: Pass the sugar, Asmodeus, and let the meeting of the Fellowship of Bastards … commence

utterly brilliant, accurate

nearly all my technology hates in one piece. Needs only the utter bu??eration of firefox reader view to be complete

A developer built an AI chatbot using GPT-3 that helped a man speak again to his late fiancée. OpenAI shut it down

Rinse, repeat

so after 30 years we are back to issues that occurred with Eliza. Sysadmins having to lock door to computing labs to stop obsessed users having conversations with a simple chat bot. I do not recall disasters resulting from use of Eliza. Obsessive personality types are common enough that something will fix their attention, somewhere, somehow. IMHO, OpenAI are (a) not open, (b) not interested in an interesting development and (c) like the rest of the ruins of the West, suffering from timidity, probably corollary to item (b).

Why we abandoned open source: LiveCode CEO on retreat despite successful kickstarter

or for the ambitious

Learn ksh93 and avoid dynamic associative arrays initially.

English like code ?

so learn COBOL

Italian stuntman flies aeroplane through two motorway tunnels

speaking of Ekronoplanes lately

so how did ground effect alter characteristics of plane. Just asking

Software piracy pushes companies to be more competitive, study claims

interesting

Would any study also show that open source software also encourages innovation among bigger software firms ?

US Air Force chief software officer quits after launching Hellfire missile of a LinkedIn post at his former bosses

never understood attitude

heard it many times and never saw it succeed. A good manager can manage anything. Nope. IMHO, based on been there, done that, a good manger may not understand technical intricate details, but does understand the field being worked in. A great manager may see their job as running interference for their staff to stop other manglement from bothering the crew doing the actual work. Had one those and the mutiskilled techs did wonders in problem resolution. Real issues were raised, timewasting was killed before it got in door. This person was an ex-tech who moved in management. I think Ben Richie in book "SkunkWorks" nailed it relating the comment made by an uniformed clerk on the inital build meeting with USAAF for what became the F117. Clerk did not care if it never worked, just wanted his paperwork.

Apple engineers complain of hostile work environment to US labor watchdog

Is it just me ?

From my limited knowledge based on decades of working for Merkin multinationals, are there hidden selection criteria for HR droids in manglement ? Perhaps suppressed anger, general control freakiness and a desire to climb a hierarchy by submission to the most sociopathic manglement ? Perhaps abolishing Human Remains as a department, creating a very basic payroll group and everthing else goes back to local management where it was before the whole HR as a skill set was created ?

Lest one think this is purely a Merkin phenomena, I note Oz Defence HR and Vet Affairs has the same style of behavior usually seen in the shonkier insurance companies. No doubt more will come to attention despite the draconian antiwhistle blower legislation in Oz.

NASA tests flying taxis made by biz dreaming of being the Uber of the sky

so Curtis-Wright X19 was merely undeveloped ?

Look it up and compare props and propulsion layout

Tachyum's Prodigy emulator achieves first boot, runs Linux and says 'hello, world'

a longer throwback

More like the goals of project Tangerine in 1980s. Apple, IBM and others. Add in Itanic to TransMeta reference and one can see how how goals have reduced until this came along. Cant see how it can claim speed increase. IMHO, the various ARM derivatives look a more likely bet for at least partial success. If they demonstrate lower leccy use, one may trully become dominant.

Chinese developers protested insanely long work hours. Now the nation's courts agree

Re: I remember my first corporate job

familiar. Long ago, not far away, working for a now dead US multinational. Corporate group lecture masquerading as company meeting. Local CEO informs local peons that a minimum of 70 hours a week is expected if one wanted to move into manglement. For some reason job enthusiasm plummeted from that moment.

Leaked: List of police, govt, uni orgs in Clearview AI's facial-recognition trials

AI and Improv acting

Oh joy. If there are biases in AI, a group notably woke, in my experience, will have "fun" doing Improv with this. OTGH, it may be entertaining to see what monotonous drone the AI produces. It might make modern pollies sound competent by comparison. On second thoughts, nah.

Infosys CEO hauled in to tell minister why India's tax portal is still a glitchy mess

no such luck

too much to ask. A great idea to motivate manglement to not lie about what can be delivered at what cost.

full marks

A government tackling the boss instead of offering more work. Astonishing and long overdue. Well done India

Razer ponders how to fix installer that grants admin powers if you plug in a mouse

the usual snark ?

Big business, Big government, same thing, different branch

A man spent a year in jail on a murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence. Now the case has been dropped

missing the point

the software/AI claims it identified location of gunshot, something that was never in dispute. The significant issue is someone was jailed on nil evidence. This suggests a degree of incompetence that rivals Oz public health administration and possibly, remarkably stupid bigots. It also demonstrates police training and local administration are also incompetent for allowing such inadequate staff to be hired and remain employed.

Japan's aerospace agency hooks up with Boeing to make planes quieter when they land

Re: Owls

infinite regression problem added to stupid/corrupt (but I repeat myself) local government. For airports good access is required. So airport built in scrub away from all and sundry. Developers see great road, make donations, and build suburb next to and eventually around airport. Cue noise from locals demanding airport goes away. Jandacot in Perth WA is a classic case. Miles from anywhere, used to trail bike in empty scrub disturbing only kangaroos. Now it is surrounded by suburbs, which whine about aircraft noise and is on top of a major underground water supply for city, now being polluted by garden waste, leaking pipes etc.

right enough. Turbojets have most air go through engine. A bit of air bled off for cooling. A turbofan has up to 20 times air going thru fan as engine. In short, a modern turbofan is a shrouded propeller in effect. Corrections ?

Re: golf ball exterior

Mythbusters found dimpling worked for cars, scaled up. Noise they did nt measure but suspect at the speeds they used would have been swamped by engine and type noise.

Re: Take a cue for the Shuttle?

Was an issue with early fiberglass gliders. Some had a tail chute to get a decent descent rate. Big problem if pulled too early. Fences are fatal. The chute could be released but then risks being lost. Chute was way too small to be a ballistic recovery device, unlike the ones used in some ultralites

Re: Others use ...

Fur ?

Considered in the 1970s IRCC. Like owl feathers at reducing surface vortices. Cant recall magazine, probably not Flight but more research. It was only about 50 years ago

A new island has popped up off the coast of Japan thanks to an underwater volcano

Re: Isn't it fresh rock though?

R U shore ? Isn't it a rock assembler island. Perhaps a stoned compiler ? Mines the coat with ash on it

Green hydrogen 'transitioning from a shed-based industry' says researcher as the UK hedges its H₂ strategy

Re: Why not

windmills. {S} Offshore yet. Very high maintenance, short life, costly to install. Only upside is fish attractor effects. At least the severe turbulence marine windmills make may not affect land based aviation much. Now do calculations of CO2 released during mining, processing of ores and hydrocarbons (where do you think carbon fibre and fiberglass come from ?) manufacture, transport of of parts, installation, more power cabling installation, more standby backup generators for those blocking highs that cover continents compared to CO2 released from just installing modern gas turbines or advanced coal power stations. And then we get to decommissioning costs and disposal of the blades, and toxic waste from solar cells. Oh, but thats all made in China so its not our fault dosn't cut it if there is really a planet threatening disaster.

As for blue hydrogen, for once I agree with OMG the sky is burning commentards. As for ammonia, if one has a solution for recycling safely solar cells, and a couple of continents to cover below lattitude 40 degrees then ammonia might supply part of a renewable fuel cycle, especially if a fuel cell of long life, high efficiency, high power and low cost exists. Does it ?

In short term it may have uses. Fertilisers perhaps, until planetary population begins to plummet, about 2060 on current trends.

Re: We already burn Hydrogen

er, no. The heat released expands the burnt gases, creating Carnot cycle. The mere phase change is a very small part of combustion.

China warns game devs not to mess with history

citations please

And there was I having learned it was mostly a revision of a two century old text from a learned dissenter objecting to doing all worship in Latin. See Prof FF Bruce, "The Books and the Parchments". This explains why KJV was old usage when it was newly printed. Also, it is not surprising that cultures use their current understandings of society and experience in their translation of other languages and sometimes unfamiliar concepts. I was around a discussion finding a way to express Good Shepherd to a tribe that only knew of cattle. Good Stockman worked well enough.