Posts by Julz

UK govt: It's time to get staff back into the office! Capita: Hey everyone... about that...

Re: Isn't it ironic

For a while, I basically did the first two. Expense account was nice though.

Dell: 60% of our people won't be going back into an office regularly after COVID-19

Re: We seem to have lost the point of commerce

Raw Data => Processing => Collated Data

Arranging bits, bytes and nibbles (whatever happened to nibbles?) can also adds value, for some meaning of value.

Ex-Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain loses US appeal bid against fraud convictions and 5-year prison sentence

Sorry

Confused.

She was in the UK with diplomatic immunity, as both sides agree. So the alleged act was covered by the immunity, so no extradition as what might have been done can't be used as grounds for extradition.

She is now out of the UK, so no diplomatic immunity but the alleged act happened when she did. Still no grounds for extradition.

Am I missing something?

Re: I thought we had abandoned extradition

The question to ask is who was the senior spook, her husband or her?

Here's some words we never expected to write: Oracle said to offer $10bn cash, $10bn shares for TikTok US – plus profit share promise

Re: Keeping it local

Oh I don't know, if your a Brentford fan it probably does. Rightness is a bit like truth, mostly dependents upon who and when you ask.

That isn't the DoD contract you are looking for

Or perhaps it is...

Re: Keeping it local

Same or similar thing happens in most countries around the world. It's quite unusual that you get the situation you do in the UK, when pretty well anyone with pockets full of cash can buy whatever they want. Including it seems our national infrastructure. Some might question the wisdom of that position.

Or

Post 1989 Russia. Hum, perhaps talk of Russian interference was a mangled misinterpretation of the administrations adoption of perestroika politics. Let the reconstruction commence...

Worried about the Andromeda galaxy crashing into our Milky Way in four billion years? Too bad, it's quite possibly already happening

What

About the dark matter? If it is real and is responsible for the unreasonable orbits of stars in galaxies, then a merger like this is going to be an interesting ride.

Hidden Windows Terminal goodies to check out: Retro mode that emulates blurry CRT display – and more

Memories

Flood back. I wrote a cross compiler to drive a Tektronix's 4010(? I think) from a DG Eclipse written in PASCAL! You could take the output from the Eclipse and display it in nice green floaty lines on the Tektroniks. Give me a break, it was a university project...

Highways England primes market for £2bn tech spend as part of massive investment in crumbling roads network

Missed the joke icon. I had images of big bar codes running across the carriageways...

Where would you put the asset tags?

So long, Top Gun... AI software waxes US F-16 pilot's tail 5-0 during virtual dogfight drills

Re: One day maybe...

Absolutely nothing.

War, huh, yeah.

Still

expensive. A BVR missile like a meteor costs around £2,000,000. So by your numbers, a hundred dumb drones carrying a missile each would cost £200,000,000 to arm. The single F35 would cost the same to build (your assumption) plus it's missile load. Lets assume it's in a non-stealth configuration and is carrying six meteor missiles. This adds up to £12,000,000 for its armaments, a cool £188,000,000 less than the drones.

Yes I know I'm ignoring a load of other stuff, but this is just order of magnitude, fag packet (is that still a thing), arithmetic.

Watching

the video. The biggest difference seemed to be the 'AI' could shoot better. On each merge, the 'AI' did way more damage than the meatbag. Perhaps the lesson is to let an 'AI' be in charge of the gun.

This PDP-11/70 was due to predict an election outcome – but no one could predict it falling over

Re: Performance Upgrade

The microcode was absolutely unique to each set of 'cpu's' (pain in the arse when boards were changed). There was also logic built into the systems that could not be circumvented that implemented the slugging. If all was not hunky dory, it would default to the most restrictive slug. Again, a pain in the arse if you had an inquisitive customer.

Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly via TCP, UDP. Obviously, nothing can go wrong

Re: Cycles of re-incarnation

The universe that is the internet stopped being intelligent a long time ago.

Re: Yet

Love your choice of adjectives :)

Yet

Another attempt to make an application into an operating system without the fifty plus years of development, no instrumentation and piss poor resource control and security. If you want that sort of thing I guess you could buy a Chromebook, but most people don't. If you want to see how well this tends to pan out, just look at the mess that is you most/least favorite Java application server.

If you can't understand how Instagram 'influencers' make millions, good luck with these virtual ones doing even better

Re: Why bother with a real job...

It's always been thus. I would have had a really hard time explaining to my ex-coalminer grandfather what my job in computing actually was and why people would pay me money to do it. Value is what people at any point in time decide it is. A hundred years ago, lumps of coal. Fifty years ago, marshaling bits and bytes. Now, influencing what people buy.

Space station update: Mystery tiny but growing air leak sparks search for hole

What

if the leak is in the Russian living quarters?

SAP blogger reveals top tips for keeping clients happy: Don’t swear, remember to write a pithy subject line, and TURN OFF CAPS LOCK

Well

I think that actual credibility, enthusiasm and honesty is probably a good thing rather than, as the SAP wanker says, "staff should 'convey credibility, enthusiasm and honesty'". But I'm not an overpaid consultant. Well not anymore...

Sun welcomes vampire dating website company: Arrgh! No! It burns! It buuurrrrnsss!

Re: Inappropriate garb

I always find judging people by how they look and dress such a great way of determining the content of their character.

eBay won't pass UK Digital Service Tax costs on to third-party sellers – unlike Amazon, which simply can't afford it

Re: How convenient

Oy, stop being rational and reasonable. We all want to bash the big guy here. Exploitation by the bourgeoisie of the noble working classes. Up the revolution!

America's largest radio telescope blind after falling cable slashes 100-foot gash in reflector dish

Re: Aliens!!!!!

That concept was alien to them.

Microsoft spills beans on release, pricing for folding fancyphone: Start your Surface Duo engines now

Move fast and make mistakes?

NASA to stop using names like 'Eskimo Nebula' and 're-examine' what it calls cosmic objects

Re: Horsehead Nebula is OK

or the mafia...

Re: Human Nature

If only I could up vote more than once.

However as Trigun says there is more going on and I think it is far more dangerous than people merely projecting their own fears onto other peoples behavior. It is a sort of race to the moral high ground while at the same time castigation those that are not pious enough. I think it is a form of mass hysteria (hum, can we continue using that sexist term? :) amplified via the always on, connected and uncritical population at large. A race to find ever more things that might offend and ever more righteous ways of signaling your superiority to the majority by your awareness of these so call offenses. No matter there might not be any actual offense, that is of no consequence. It is the act of signalling to the uninitiated, the ignorant but most importantly to your fellow acolytes, that matters. Quite literally, that act of being holier than thou. This is the object of the exercise. Quite sickening.

As ever, a name has been coined for this, the purity spiral, and the chattering classes are all a chattering about it. How long I wonder before that term becomes persona non gratis. There is an ok'ish BCC radio shown exploring the phenomenon.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000d70h

USA decides to cleanse local networks of anything Chinese under new five-point national data security plan

The ever present danger of spell checkers combined with dislexia ;(

Back in the day when I had something to do with performance testing the silicone in ICL mainframes, there where 'additions' to the logic that I was told, in no uncertain terms (sackable offense), not to look at. This was not the license logic, which was also another not quite so no go area, but extra logic that did who knows what (I followed the advice not to look) but ran all of the time, was network aware and used up a small but measurable amount of a CPU (which is why I found it in the first place). I would suggest that you should assume that all current silicone is similarly compromised.

Re: I thought this was more or less known to be the case?

And don't forget the undersea (and other) wire tapping, the USA has been at it a long while. Don't know why but I'm always amused at the name of USS Halibut. Maybe from too much Tintin as a lad (yes, I know it's haddock...).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Halibut_(SSGN-587)

Well, that was quick: Google brutally culls Pixel 4 and 4 XL before successor hits market

Re: Why the surprise?

Hi-fi? I still use components I bought in the seventies so if phones and computers lasted forty plus years then I might go with your argument. If however you mean that one is tempted to 'upgrade' to the latest poorer quality equipment by the promises of useless functionality and 'modern' styling, then perhaps.

Amazon gets green-light to blow $10bn on 3,000+ internet satellites. All so Americans can shop more on Amazon

The

Satellites are to orbit from 56N to 56S which it OK for most of the southern hemisphere but tough luck for quiet a number of folks in the northern hemisphere. Most of the Scandies, the sparsely populated bits of Canada, all of Alaska, the wastes of Russia, but most importantly, no use for the Orkneys and Shetlands.

Australia to force Google and Facebook to pay for news and reveal algorithm changes before they whack web traffic

It's a quantum algorithm and would collapse if you took a peek.

Chinese ambassador to UK threatens to withdraw Huawei, £3bn investment if comms giant banned from building 5G

We could reanimate BNFL...

Amazon and Google: Trust us, our smart-speaker apps are carefully policed. Boffins: Yes, well, about that...

The microphone is probably in the remote.

With the US election coming up, when better to petition regulators for a controversial way to chill online speech?

Re: senility vs narcissism

From the linked wiki article:

"The occurrence of narcissistic personality disorder presents a high rate of comorbidity with other mental disorders. People with NPD are prone to bouts of psychological depression, often to the degree that meets the clinical criteria for a co-occurring depressive disorder. Moreover, the occurrence of NPD is further associated with the occurrence of bipolar disorder, of anorexia, and of substance use disorders, especially cocaine use disorder. In that vein, NPD also might be comorbid with the occurrence of other mental disorders, such as histrionic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, or paranoid personality disorder."

Maybe there will be an interesting 'kiss & tell' book coming out soon'ish...

Google allowed to remember search results to news articles it was asked to forget. Good

Re: Why I love the Right to be Forgotten

Back when the internet was just getting it's second wind I was responsible for initial interviews for external candidates to join the technical team I worked in. As part of my preparation for these, I used to look up all the information I could about the prospective people including from all of the nascent social media sites I could be bothered to join. I used this to get a more rounded picture of the people who where applying to join our group than I would get from their application (and interview) alone.

Did I rule out a person because they had a picture of themselves drunkenly leering at the camera at some party, of course not. Did I reject people out of hand because somebody else had posted nude or lewd pictures of them (happened on more than one occasion, go figure) all over the proto-internet, certainly not.

I don't know about the rest of you but I expect people to be people and have a life. There is a responsibility for us all to recognise this and not to castigate people out of some misguided tendency to herd together in the foothills of the moral high ground. Most philosophy's of life have something to say on this and it usually involves looking inward before being too harsh on others.

The right to be forgotten might have it's place although I personally think it's fatality flawed. But what we all have is a responsibility to be less trigger happy to leap to conclusions about other peoples behavior. Especially if we don't know them from Adam.

Class move, Java. Coding language slips to third place behind Python in latest popularity contest

Just

Makes me want to cry.

New Zealand government to explain its algorithms to stop robo-bias warping policy

Re: Remember to never forget the simplest of coding steps made by others. Don't be evil ....

Don't worry. Enlightenment doesn't hurt. Well, not much...

Intel couldn't shrink to 7nm on time – but it was able to reduce one thing: Its chief engineer's employment

Schrodinger's CPU...

Intel's 7nm is busted, chips delayed, may have to use rival foundries to get GPUs out for US govt exascale super

Re: 7nm is 14 Silicon atoms wide.

Maybe ask yourself about what are all the new problems that require all this new code.

Russia tested satellite-to-satellite shooter, say UK and USA

Re: Almaz

It was actually fired successfully before the ALMAZ OPS-2Salyut-3 was de-orbited. Not a great weapon though as it was fixed statically to the forward part of the station so you had to point the whole station at any target you might be interested in. It also had a bitch of a recoil which was why it was only tested when the station was unmanned and about to be destroyed as they feared that it might shake the whole thing to bits. It was fired three times but in a 'responsible' manner. They fired the shells retrograde to the orbital direction of the station so that they wouldn't stay in orbit too long :)

Frozen: Bank accounts of suspected Chinese Cisco counterfeiters who exploited pandemic shortages

Re: Wait....

When?

SpaceX pulls off an incredible catch, netting both halves of its Falcon fairing as they fell Earthwards after latest launch

The article suggest ~$6m per fairing, so ~$12m per flight. I don't think you would need to catch too many to make it fiscally worthwhile.

Edit, I guess it's more complicated than that as is seems you can refurbish ocean dunked fairings so I suppose the figure is less than -$12m. But by how much?

After banning Chinese comms bogeyman, UK asks: Huawei in this mess? It was a failure of capitalism, MPs told

Re: Devided Opinions Anyone

Ask anybody who worked for ICL how great Nortel was after their great pension grab.

Capita's bespoke British Army recruiting IT cost military 25k applicants after switch-on

Re: "it must still pay maintenance fees to Capita for the upkeep of the software"

I think you will find that the survey will be very carefully worded such that there is no legal responsibility taken by the surveyor or their company. They can be useful to get an overall idea of the sate of a property but they are useless as a form of insurance.

I once bought a house which had some off cuts of wood piled up in the cellar coal room. The survey 'usefully' pointed out that it might be a source of wet or dry rot. Well bugger me, who'd of thought. The same survey noted that a sink in one of the bathrooms was a bit crazed and should be replaced. No matter that it was a two hundred year old original fitting and probably worth more than the cost of the survey.

One of the main problems I see is that the fear of speculative litigation and the requirement to maximize profit has undermined one of the original purposes of such things. In our wonderful world, the exact wording of contracts is given much more weight than it's intent, not to mention the moral obligation of suppliers to actually providing usable goods and services. Doing a good job is no longer seen by such firms as part of their reason for being. Probably in part, because however shit their last delivery was seems to have no bearing on whether or not they will get another job in the future, even from the same schmuck.

Can't help thinking that if the only measure that is given any credence is money, then this mess is inevitable.

Bugger me, I think I might be turning French. The horror...

Alibaba's financial arm, Ant, files for monster IPO ahead of march on the world's merchants and shoppers

Re: Not only „traditional methods“

Might be useful if the USA decides that what you do is undesirable and stops all the USA based payment systems. I guess there's always JCB but it's a devil to get an account.

Report: CIA runs secret cyberwar with little oversight after Trump gave the OK, say US government officials

Re: But on the bright side...

Yes. Why do you ask?