
Re: Trust M$ with my biometric data????
Er, alphabetic order would be: "Amazon"," Apple", "Facebook", "Google"
1313 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jan 2010
"With modern poor road maintenance, bushes tend to get a bit of a hard time.
Oh, you mean mechanical bushes - it all makes sense now.
For a moment I had a picture in my mind of a car bouncing off the pot-holes and disappearing into the undergrowth.
Elizabeth Willing Powel: "Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy?"
Dr Benjamin Franklin: "A republic - if you can keep it."
Conversation recorded by James McHenry in his Journal on the last day of the Constitutional Convention, 18 September 1787.
I suspect that in this case the "AI solution" will be a database query as you suggest. Possibly one that is already being done under a different name.
Don't forget that "We implemented an AI solution" sounds much better than "We ran a database query", and scores more points on the buzzword bingo card.
If, however, the powers that be bring in one of the consultancy friends, then we can expect to see a multi-billion plan wrapped around the same query.
One of the fears of historians at the moment is that we are entering a new "Dark Age" where it is soon going to be almost impossible to research anything that happened after the middle years of the 20th century, from primary sources.
A friend was commissioned to write the history of a company that had been founded in Victorian days. The firm still had the minutes of every meeting written down in huge ledgers which lined the walls of their boardroom. Apparently she had so much material that writing the firm's history was very easy, with the hardest part being deciding what to omit.
These days most firms hold such records electronically and almost certainly delete them after a certain time. Quite often they are legally required to delete records that are no longer needed. To produce a similar history of contemporary firms you would often have to use potentially inaccurate secondary sources.
Obviously not every record survived when they were held in physical form, but it is a lot easier to casually wipe a hard drive than it is to dispose of a cellar full of filing cabinets and folders.
I did some testing for a hand-held test equipment manufacturer in the mid '80s.
One of their sales reps had turned up at a potential customer's factory to demonstrate an instrument to a very disinterested manager. Part of his sales pitch emphasized the robustness of the instrument, which was one of its main selling points.
The manager stopped him at that point, "What do you mean by robust?"
Their rep led the manager to an adjacent loading bay and threw the unit across the factory yard, where it bounced off a wall and landed in a puddle, without noticeable effect.
He said afterwards that he had half expected the unit to shatter into a million pieces, but it was the only way he could think of to get the order.
"The databases have no version control systems. Important fields for identifying individuals were used inconsistently – for example, containing junk data, test data, or null data ..."
Sounds like just about every corporate database I've ever been asked to merge, convert, transfer, etc.
"Well not all our customers have a VAT number, so we use that field for their nickname. If they do have a VAT number then we put that in the Fax field, as we don't want to confuse anyone ..."
While I was working on a large corporate site, there was a medical emergency - first-aider, paramedics, ambulance, trip to A&E - in one of the training rooms.
Their employee giving the presentation, in order to connect the ceiling-mounted projector to his laptop, had climbed on an office chair (with castors) that he placed on a folding table, with predictable results.
The front-desk mounted connectors, next to his laptop, were all found to be working correctly as was the IR remote. He had just failed to use any of them.
Ironically the presentation was about health and safety at work, and the presenter ran that department.
Nowadays the perpetrators would simply be interviewed to find out what their motives were, and who they were working with.
Following those discussions, concrete proposals would be set out on how the persons involved could become useful members of society.
A supporting role in highway development might well be suggested at this point ...
"I think pretty much all attempts to measure the productivity of software development have failed.
I worked on a contract where the project manager decided that such productivity could be measured by counting the number of semicolons in the source code, and got someone to write him a script to do so.
Soon after this edict, function description blocks started becoming outlined in semicolons rather than asterisks. Two blocks a day was the informally agreed rate among developers IIRC.
I'm reminded of a PHB who, needing to pin up a chart in his newly refurbished office, borrowed a contractor's Paslode nailer while he was at lunch. Like most nailers the machine will not operate unless it is in contact with a surface - an important safety feature for something that can pin battens to steel girders.
The PHB didn't know this so when he "test fired" it nothing happened. Thinking it was broken he patted the business end ...
"There will be an expensive contract to develop a phone scanner that will tell an officer whether someone has veilid or any other prohibited software on their phone."
Followed quickly by discovering that, because of inadequate field testing by the contractor, a common app accidentality confuses the scanner and produce a lot of false positives.
After the first few high-profile false arrests, smart lawyers would ... [continued p94]
A few years ago a newspaper* in the UK ran a competition to find the most revolting drink that could be made from ingredients found behind the bar of a typical pub.
I can't remember the exact recipe of the winner, but it used the liquid from the jar of pickled eggs ...
* OK it was a long time ago.
I wonder if anyone has actually done a study in to how many actual sales result from targeted advertising, compared to the scattergun variety?
I presume there must be some sort of benefit to the advertiser given the time, trouble and expense required to compile the targetting data.
Perhaps only the companies selling the advertising space benefit from this.
Just in case there are any advertisers reading this, may I politely point out that it is extremely unlikely I will need another washing machine until the one I recently bought keels over. I mention this as you appear to assume I am some sort of manic washing machine enthusiast who is anxious to complete their collection.
Many years ago I was working for the consultancy arm of a large OS supplier. We were working at the head office of an insurance company and our team occupied half a floor of the tower block.
One morning an officious person from HR appeared, shoving papers in front of everyone present and demanding they sign them "at once" on pain of being escorted from the building.
Our boss intercepted her as she was about half way round the room. He took the remaining papers from her and read one while she got more and more annoyed.
He eventually handed back the papers saying, "You clearly are unaware who we are or what we are doing. Please gather up the rest of the papers, then go and do some basic research."
She didn't return.
"So what would happen if there was an actual air raid at noon on the first Wednesday of the month?"
I worked in a building where on one occasion a fire in the switchroom had been discovered by the person sent there to do the weekly fire alarm test.
There was apparently some difficulty getting people to evacuate the building, so the rules were changed. When I worked there everyone now had to leave the building when the alarm went off - unless told not to by the fire wardens.
Reminds me of the report into a "spotting" autogyro designed to be towed by a WWI U-boat. The report noted that in an emergency the U-boat crew would cut the towing cable and crash dive.
"The autogyro would then descend into the water and the observer would drown in the usual manner."