Posts by Paul Garrish 26 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Mar 2010
Isnt it sad that the only use these people can think of for AI is to make yet more money. No mention of using it to reduce the work for ordinary folk... not so much those lovely 1950's images of our 'robot helpers', far more the terminator style robot overlords, but funneling the money to the select few. bah.
that's from someone else's budget though so it doesn't count. Until the cost of supporting and fixing these systems (including all downtime, workarounds etc incurred by the user community) come from the same budget that 'saved' money by squeezing dev and testing time then these things will never get fixed.
The one place these have a real use for me is in the car. It's not safe to try and pick a song or send a text or select a call contact using the touch screen but all are easily accomplished with Siri (assuming there is a data signal of course). At home it's almost always easier to use a screen to do anything.
Whilst I agree Crypto seems very very prone to theft for a supposedly 'safe' system, have you seen how much banks and credit card companies lose every day?
"Experts have estimated that global card fraud losses will jump from $7 billion in 2017 to $35 billion by 2020." (no idea which experts, but assuming the 7Bn figure is real suggests credit card fraud is a BIG problem)
My ex employer was like that. They'd put you in a cheap hotel miles from site and pay a fortune in taxis or mileage but wouldn't budge on allowing a more expensive hotel to save time and money because of the 'policy'. All the processing was outsourced to eastern Europe and they had no leeway to deviate from process - an they applied it to the penny, regardless of the cost of dealing with it all.
Airborne software used to be really reliable, but was extremely expensive to create and test and dealt with a much simpler environment. Even so, it used to be subject to massive regulation and certification. Recent events show what happens when that process is 'streamlined' to save money through cheaper dev/test and/or reduced or sub-contracted certification.
What on earth do we think will happen when this sort of (much much more complicated) software gets developed for cars which are relatively cheap, more loosely regulated and developed by companies that focus on saving pennies on their multi-thousand pound products?
Aircraft software (airborne software) is documented to death, written in one of a few certified compilers, walked through and tested to death. It runs on old, very well understood processors and is generally pretty simple - look up tables with simple interpolation algorithms. All the data is developed on the ground, slowly, carefully and under a microscope. There are more than one of everything in the plane and if they disagree, they shut down and the pilot takes over. Yes the results are clever, but the implementation is clear. It is written for one type of aircraft at a time. AND IT IS VERY VERY EXPENSIVE!!!!!
Compare to the above - state of the art hardware (Pentium FPU anyone...), Consumer O/S (enough said), commercial constraints and minimal regulation, Dozens of types and models of cars, brakes, engines, steering etc etc.
Its a bit like Mainframe vs PC - would you trust your life to a PC?
So, we're all skint, prices are going up - and the response is to.... up the interest rate and make everything even more expensive??? How does that work then? If people are borrowing tons of money and spending it on 'stuff' pushing up prices, I can see how an interest rate hike would slow things down - but I reckon if they only measured inflation on needed things (food, energy, fuel etc) the figure would be even worse - and that's not driven by consumer spending - so.... how's an interest rate going to do anything other than slow everything down?
My son plays simple platform games on Friv using a P4 3.2 with 2GB Ram. It maxes the CPU all the time - my old Amiga 500 could have done those half asleep. Trying to play HD video using iPlayer - it can't, and yet the same machine can play HD video using VLC/MediaPlayer with only 10% CPU thanks to a cheap HD grfx card.
Flash is pants, used by numpties to write crap code..... but cos everyone has it, it's the easy choice. Can it.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
