Posts by Denarius

Nvidia hits the gas on autonomous vehicle software

crap, the lot of it

Just had to drive new 4WD to near Sydney and back, a mere 230 km each way. Have a similarly configured unit in unit 5 years old which is a pleasure to use and very useful. The new one has every fault known to the shiny flashy brigade. Lane detection addicted to following ONLY the solid white line on edge of highway so constantly in dirt, pot holes and leaning on wheel against the software. Beeps, flashing lights often, usually when turning very tight turns on potholed roads or for now reason going straight and level on freeway. Everything in driver assists is a hindrance. Oddly, driving a new unimog was nowhere as near annoying despite coming from Europe, which shows it can be done.

Comparing this to my flight management software shows just how bad vehicle UI designers are. XCSoar and its relatives tells you what you need to know in context aware part of flights. No unneeded alarms, doesn't have the capability to modify control inputs.

AFAIC, good engine management systems is as much as I want. And not too clever so its unrepairable without a capital city dealership.

Mozilla frets about Google's push to build AI into Chrome

one more bit of software made unreliable, unusable

just No. Dont.

Sergey Brin promises next generation of Glassholes will be much less conspicuous

typical

ignore elephant in room and focus on shiny not so shiny. Still means more glasses wearers will be banned from public places in fear of privacy breaches. So more eye lens inserts to avoid glasses and misidentification of vision correction for spyware.

Microsoft-backed AI out-forecasts hurricane experts without crunching the physics

blow me down

does this indicate the old long term staff seen as an excessive cost by manglement might actually have useful rules of thumb/historical local knowledge not in the manuals or models that enables them to better estimate likely outcomes in complex systems ? Machine learning of this by studying the same historical events seems to be doing the same thing.

Unending ransomware attacks are a symptom, not the sickness

perhaps change incentives at top ?

Instead of shares and bonuses for CEO and boards fir just doing their job, how about a base salary and fines for not doing their job ? Also return to laws forbidding share buybacks to reduce incentives to fiddle financials to increase stock price artificially.

Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source

Re: Morons Are Governing America

so whats changed ?

seriously ?

Only SAP, Oracle and M$ can be bought, except for special institutions. All of this is kept updated weekly or monthly /s

Feeling dumb? Let Google's latest AI invention simplify that wordy writing for you

Re: Tldr

other way around

for the first time

If, big IF, this works as described, AI may have a real use since editors are becoming a rare species if some websites and the remnants of printed and TV media are any guide.

Something that can turn manglese from manglement (to coin a phrase I think) into information is a fantastic achievement. However I suspect output would be an empty page.

OTGH, turning turgid academic verbiage into information accurately is great. Merely translating from insider jargon to plain language is not dumbing down.

Ghost in the shell script: Boffins reckon they can catch bugs before programs run

Re: rc

So Peter, you dont have a copy of "Unix Shell Objects" ?

As for date munging, ksh93 has some undocumented time and date built-ins which are simpler that spawning another process etc.

The shell script forensics done over years has usually been required by shell expansion errors. The worst was nonrealisation that *. matches .. A nonrecursive cleanup became recursive down the file tree. Good luck with that shell script code checker. ksh93 -D can help with see what some "$VAR" values produce.

Satellite phone tech coming to your mobe this year – but who pays for it?

meanwhile in idiot Oz

All Oz telcos switched off 3G. Most of the country 150 km from coast then had very unreliable 4G. An inland drive from southern NSW to Qld border now has many no comms locations. Only 65 km from the hell hole known as Canberra, the national crapital, the summer visitors boating on Lake Burrinjuck collapsed my localities comms. No phone, no SMS. All of us had to drive 2 Km plus to a ridge to get line of site connection to a town tower.

Telstra, mostly the telco responsible, when questioned why phone service had gone so bad, responded with "Fringe area, tough" response.

as its a federal election year, political staffers responses explained that, in the fullness of time, government might ask if the telcos could connect to satellite services. In short "tough"

So the non large urban areas have largely gone dark. Yet oddly, not a peep from any of the media over a significant walk backwards in communications.

Technically, satellite to mobile is probably the best way to connect this sparsely settled land. In the meantime, outside the east coast , 3G should have been kept until satellite comms is available at an affordable price. Not many can afford a SPOT device

From pantyhose to power cells, nylon gives lithium batteries a leg up

Re: how does the length of a brontosaurus compare to that of a thesaurus

difference is great. Thesauruses exist, brontosauruses did not. Perhaps apatosaurus is meant ?

Please fasten your seatbelts. A third of US air traffic control systems are 'unsustainable'

Re: Get it Effin' Done

PCI video cards, ISA bus cards. In my shed for a little while. E-waste Recycling soon

not new situation

in 1970s a book "Safety Last " written by a commercial pilot had scathing assessments of FAA. Pre Y2K old El Reg had a few stories of FAA manglement IT procurement failures.

Tech jobs are now white-collar trades that need apprentices, not a career crawl

Re: Give me one solid reason...

Yes, encouraged grandchildren and nephews into any field except IT. And no, nieces already had other ideas. Grandsons doing well in trades

so true. Having worked under utterly clueless manglers I concur wholeheartedly. Seems the aristocrats attitude of many civilisations that the hands on skills of trades is beneath them and can be denigrated and ignored. After all, peasants are cheap and disposable etc. This attitude is so prevalent one wonders if the mangerial ranks have selection biases that attract sociopaths more than mere competence.

Ignorance really is bliss when you’re drowning in information

Re: Puzzled........

@Jospanner, any culture which sailed, or traveled over flat lands would have a good clue the earth is round. Not to mention eclipse shadows. Please inform us of any literature over 2000 years old that makes statement about a flat earth. See? It is _hard_ to break out of ones own subculture myths.

Re: Big problem requiring serveral partial solutions

actually, for scentists now, with the demand for publish and perish, more than a few assessments suggest peer review is borked and lying, cheating etc work for getting grants. This is not a good thing

Re: Big problem requiring serveral partial solutions

dont read much outside your circle then. How about that it does not work. Show me one marxist country people flee to.

Re: "Many of us are completely overwhelmed"

wrong I believe. Many of us are not overwhelmed. Selection bias. Those who never became addicted and those who have detached dont show up to be counted.

Re: Puzzled........

thank you for proving my point. Flat Earth is only recent. About 1809 ITIRC. Washing Irvings fault. Which demonstrates exactly the issue.. Whose "facts", whose truth ?

the other statements are also not complete. Placement of the Earth and astronomy was captive to Aristotle and his obsession with geometry and with the low quality of data the model worked well enough until Tycho Brahes observations which were accurate enough (and shared) so Kepler could see that the models needed updating. Formulated laws of gravity before Newton and got no credit.

leave amanfromMars1 alone !

Re: Big problem requiring serveral partial solutions

sounds like a good idea with terrible flaws.

a) humans, despite their beliefs, are terrible about detecting liars in front of them.

b) quis custodiet ipsos custodes. or one sources fake news is someones conspiracy. eg Covid stories. Also how are the teachers to know what is unsubstantiated and that which maybe true ?

c) human resistance to changing world view or ingrained ideas. eg marxists still exist despite 20th century

As for excess of connection, never understood why this is even an issue. Dont people ever want silence in their heads ?

OpenAI wants to blow through $500B on AI infrastructure for itself, with help from pals

so AI will work out where the electricity to power it will come from ?

shades of the Matrixl. Wont the USA going dark due to electricity shortages stop the data center build out ? Long term does not matter, the ruins of the West are insane anyway. Back to short lives,, exploitative taxation, totalitarianism and mad religions regardless of what gets elected. Hint, materialist world views like marxist cults. What passes for yank xtianity is mere materialism with a religious gloss, mostly. Otherwise the prosperity preachers would have long ago been jailed for fraud

Workday on lessons learned from Iowa and Maine project woes

long ago, far away

when I was in early IT training to code COBOL, the lecturer stated that out of the box software was the future as it would be cheaper, faster, tested as so on. Perhaps it is age, but given how many of these enterprise systems expensively fail, maybe just getting real Systems Analysts in the build a data dictionary, map work/data flows and build a bespoke solution with all source code printed out, archived and woe betide any PHB or entitled staffer wanting changes just for them RBN instead of after post implementation reviews, and upgrade scheduled if required in say 6 months. So often locally built applications worked the way the business worked rather than rebuilding the business processes to an alien ideal.

Will 2025 be the year satellite-to-smartphone services truly take off?

Re: There is no escape

you can repurpose tin foil hats. Though I note movements shunning all electronics. Music festivals where only analogue acoustic instruments can be used. Phones locked into metal boxes for duration. There is some hope. Also, in Oz there are large areas where there is no coverage by anything other than a sat phone. With Oz government and bureaucrats frequently demonstrating any committee is more stupid than its dumbest member, what ever turns up for unserviced areas will be crippled by idiot rules to protect incumbents nonperformance

here in Oz

so Starlink will deliver data from the highest cost source and voice from a firm I wont touch with a bargepole cleaned in conc H2SO4. As usual in Oz, we are screwed. In holiday seasons when Telstras phone towers more than 40 km from cities get overloaded by holiday makers fleeing the hellscape of high density flats, Telstras services stop for all in locality. Somehow there is never a problem with telco kit.

Second Jeju Air 737-800 experiences mechanical issues following deadly crash

Re: Several things first

agreed. Also note the high nose once on ground during slide into wall. Seems odd as maximising friction would mean getting fuselage onto ground also. Also sounds like another root cause being modern manglement beancounters

Report claims FAA ignores most whistleblower complaints

Re: Well, that's it then

FAA reputation was low even back in 1970s. See book "Safety Last" by a pilot

British boffins build diamond battery capable of working for a millennium or five

Re: First catch your carbon 14

along with other elements the atmospheric tests are a calibration point now they are sufficiently old. BTW, a nuclear decay power source is not a reactor. See nuclear powered space probes use of decaying uranium. However a great idea. Sometimes when I think the Poms are technologically spent something like this pops up.

You're so bad at recycling, this biz built an AI to handle it for you

Ai and garbage. perfect match. Might improve existing sorting machines.

How Chinese insiders are stealing data scooped up by President Xi's national surveillance system

just goes to show

you cant trust _any_ boss/government/system. Mostly everyone is for sale

Kyndryl's consulting business may be less than it seems

Anything IBM touches

dies, slowly, expensively IMHO. Including IBM. Just like Boeing and for similar reasons. I predict the next 3 years political uncertainty outside USA will encourage a move to inhouse everything except maybe, the hardware. However, given the appalling state of IT education. perhaps not

China launches AI that writes politically correct docs for bureaucrats

the old is new again

1960s called. it wants Mao's Little Red Book and associated chanting of "Correct Thought" etc back. Not much chance of that. The university manglements will hold on ferociously.

Congress ponders underwater alien civilizations, human hybrids, and other unexplained stuff

Re: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (hit "Translate" if you don't understand)

Catholic Church hung witchfinder generals in Italy and Spain to successfully stop the hysteria spreading . Mostly secular events starting along Rhine River which has historically been a hot bed of heresies and strange beliefs. I'm happy to go along with the priest of Egypt who told a Greek historian that the stories of the gods were probably exaggerations of stories about ancestors.

Re: So let me get this straight ...

radio transmissions detectable range? Not for a great distance. First speed of light, then back ground noise swamping any signal. Humans detect mostly huge events or low level signals from vast volumes such as molecular clouds, not mere megawatts single point broadcasts. (microwave ovens downstairs in Observatory excepted :-) As for technological progress, see Sabines latest videos about the dysfunction of science research. The greatest period of technological change was in middle of 19th century. Nothing new in physics for 100 years.

All bark, no bite? Musk's DOGE unlikely to have any real power

Re: There IS NO MORE CONGRESS

Da Komrade ;-) Klintons stories from 2016 still echoes in some heads. However DOGE is and will be part of the problem. Another damned bureaucracy. The real problem is too many Acts, laws and subsequent bureaucratic rules in response. Simple human behavior. For clerks, manglement et al, no news is good news so make rules to cover all contingencies so they cant be blamed for NOT having a rule for any given situation. The laws are usually well intentioned, but that paved road leads to a hot dark place. As then rules costs and effectiveness dont affects the clerks except to often benefit them because of the increase in paperwork, hence careers.

Just undo the laws back to minimum needed for society to operate. Avoid seeking perfection. Robert Heinlein comment " any societies whose laws cant be understood a normally intelligent person is unjust" applies IMHO.

The sad tale of the Alpha massacre

huge number of files to delete

had that issue on AIX. xargs helps. Other way was shell expansion rather than find or ls. Both stopped terminal dead for indefinite periods. Shell expansion worked as empty junk dirs were created with a predictable pattern so a few loops cleaned them up efficiently.

yes, IIRC correctly, making rm recurse without the -r. Had to debug a "cleanup" script that took out a prod server once. It had run for a while without errors but left hidden files alone. These also needed to go from a scratch dir which was filling up with them. Junior just added .* to his rm script run from cron as root. He was lucky to not be fired.

Re: I think...

which is why my scripts did a check of all required variables and settings before it did anything. If critical vars were not appropriate size script stopped with error message. I usually assumed scripts would be be run by successor admins of dubious competency. Worst case I had as middling experience admin was was an academic had a backup of all their work on a tape using tar, which they wanted to start from in the new $CAREER. Every file a single tar archive. By the time I worked out there was a couple of Gb files on tape which required use of mt initially then use of the norewind device to loop thru the tape I forgot which directory I was in, naturally it was tadaah /. The amount of extra files that needed to be moved taught me to do pwd before any tape read or write and scripts had an ENVIRONMENT section where variables were set with correct or safe defaults. At stable sites there was an agreed variables directory that all code that needed them could source. This meant far fewer running code changes with easy rollback.

Microsoft rolls out AI-enabled Notepad to Windows Insiders

Advancing backwards

Vi looks better and runs faster every couple of years. Yes, even in DOS days there was a version or two such as Elvis. Then Cygwin etc. M$ just get better and better at being worse.

Five Eyes nations tell tech startups to take infosec seriously. Again

Thank $DEITY I had put my coffee down out of reach or a new keyboard and screen wipe would be needed. For OZ, a placemat is a brilliant put down for this whole sorry cancerous growth of bureaucrats. With Oz getting a CDC, the next flu outbreak will probably have armed guards at all highway on ramps screaming "Papers, papers schnell"

As for security in software, not a hope until companies acts are rewritten so CEOS, boards and directors feel financial pain for stupidity or illegailty, before the shareholders.

Boffins explore cell signals as potential GPS alternative

Re: GSM

you dont have FLARM ? Useful for detecting those pilots that like to hide just above and behind you where most collisions occur. In Oz ADSB is now nearly mandatory and many gliders carry them meaning the flight24 and similar show you who is near, commercial and recreational. I believe glider specific flight management software can blue tooth to a mobile and add nearby aircraft to display. I still miss the club SZD481 Jantar. If it was possible to get the approved Wallington mods done restoring a Blanik for local soaring would be fun. I digress. Until 3G shutdown not had a problem getting a signal in air and used mobile phone to call base for status and inbound calls when battery died on long flights so radio unavailable. With arrival of 4 and 5G signals strength began plummeting. Thanks for nothing Big Swamp. (aka telstra) As for navigation, on 300 km plus flights still carry maps and check compass swing. In Oz there are places where even at 10,000 feet there is nothing distinctive below to assist fatigued pilots.

Boeing's new captain promises U-turn after Q3 nosedive

Re: There's your problem

Michael, exactly. If there is not a mass firing of the clerks in suits any change is a waste of time. Abolishing bonuses and share options will help too. One is paid to do a job. If suits need bribes to do job then it is self identified fraud.

IMHO Boeing is doomed anyway

Want to feel old? Excel just entered its 40th year

How much change

good idea for historical analysis to show the Pareto principal in software. Earliest I go get back to if I can wake up a 486 or early pentium is Excel 3. I suggest a test of abnitio usabbility where a computer illiterate has to complete a simple task on post 2007 and earliest Excel.

Re: What, no love for Multiplan?

Odd.

I liked Multiplan but first used Lotus 123 and found it OK. It could add up more accurately than humans and printed output was neat. Next was UniPlex on Unix 5.2 on a 286. Loved it. Spreadsheet had similarities to Multiplan that I found useful. Able to load data into database (Informix under hood I believe) and extract it quickly using embedded SQL in cells. Found an unused Uniplex install decades later on a local council server I was retrieving data from. No-one on staff knew what it was, let alone used it.

However loved Excel on first use, even if it was on a Mac. It followed the BO rule. Bloody Obvious that is. Until 2007 Excel was, IMHO, the one thing M$ did well. Now I cant even get it to sum up my flight log book hours as it insists on converting HH:MM to anything else. Earlier versions just worked. Using WPS now if I must.

As for Improv. Yech. Fed Gov department tried it on release. Soon replaced with excel. Tried a free Windows version a year or two later from a PC magazine disk. Crashed and burned more than a rocket startup.

As for its age, nothing gets younger and being alive beats alternative. I admire those original programmers who got good performance from low resource machines while creating usable interfaces that let so much number wrangling get done.

Post Office CTO had 'nagging doubts' about Horizon system despite reliability assurances

Re: Why always 'someone else'

Indeed. Seems KPIs are an excuse for saying the numbers are OK therefore nothing is wrong

Intel lets go of 2,000 staff at Oregon R&D site, offices in Texas, Arizona, California

Re: bloodbath

also known as Death Spiral. So much like CSC, EDS, HP, IBM. Also Boeing. At least ARM, Open Risc and AMD are still alive. Usually the manglement that kill companies are hired elsewhere as part of the fail upwards system that has destroyed many tech companies. This is what Dark Ages beginning look like IMHO

Ancient US air traffic control systems won't get a tech refresh before 2030

The cycle of life continues

I remember these sort of reports preY2K. Worst was outdated systems that were bought new that could not handle Y2K from IBM IIRC. IBM advised at time that life of IT was limited to 1999 and was unable to do upgrade. Book "Safety Last" from 1970s still seems to be accurate enough.

Australia’s government spent the week boxing Big Tech

Re: A bit of a circus

Bebu. Another myth about Pi. They referred question to department of Swamps. ie, sinkholed it