Posts by Paul Garrish

South Korea enlists AI to spot pump and dump schemes on social media, or in Spam

Re: Agent Orange

The accounts I thought of immediately I saw the title of this article...

Managers are throwing entry-level workers under the bus in race to adopt AI

So many firms are already struggling with a "hollow middle", replacing the new intake with an expensive, proprietary, un-auditable bit of software will just mean that in 20 years time they have no knowledge in the company any more. All the old bods have gone and no-one left will have a clue. Then they'll wonder why nothing works.

Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that

Re: It's all about government surveillance

labour have had a hard on for ID since Tony Blair's time.... And this lot have Palantir whispering in their ear far too much. This is all about control, nothing about protecting kids. That was proved when access to the new Corbyn/Sultana party sign up site came subject to the act.

Post Office and Fujitsu execs 'should have known' Horizon IT system was flawed

Re: The scandal continues

Its not even large amounts. They could give every one of those poor postmasters a million pounds and it would barely register on the governments accounts. Then take it back several times over from Fujitsu and the PO execs, as pounds of flesh if necessary.

Satya Nadella says AI is yet to find a killer app that matches the combined impact of email and Excel

Sad

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.

Feds want devs to stop coding 'unforgivable' buffer overflow vulnerabilities

Re: Are the Feds willing to pay for it?

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.

Trump nukes 60 years of anti-discrimination rules for federal contractors

Re: Oy! Get your SF authors right, youth

The real world is doing it's best to prove them right (certainly the fictional aspect). Same with Starship Troopers it seems.

The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty

We can barely test human written software to any decent standard (technically, we can test it very thoroughly but not at a cost any corporation is willing to pay). AI is totally un-testable by definition. Thsi is really not going to end well is it....

Intel CEO suggests AI can help to create a one-person Unicorn

Can we get AI to start by replacing anyone who puts their fingertips together to talk? Powerhands need eradicating.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Our tech and corporate overlord will admit AI can do their jobs better than they can and give up all their money and positions in a gesture of generosity

TSMC and pals dream of €10B German chip fab

Covid and Evergreen have taught industry some hard lessons about supply chain resilience. Unfortunately you don't unwind decades of 'cheapest is best' quickly or cheaply.

Miniature nuclear reactors could be the answer to sustainable datacenter growth

Re: Amazon

Every time I watch Wall-E the similarities between Buy-n-Large and Amazon get stronger

Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

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.

Binance robbed of $600 million in crypto-tokens

Re: FFS !!!

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)

Brexit dividend? 'Newly independent' UK will be world's 'data hub', claims digital minister

Palantir...

Given how much influence Palantir have in our government, this smacks of trying to enable even more data access for them. GDPR upsets the US tech firms so it must be good. (hence, it must be bad if you are a UK Tory being 'lobbied' by them)

How to polish the bottom line? Microsoft makes it really hard to claim expenses, say staffers

Re: How do you get a 50p coin out of a Yorkshire person's hand? With a spanner...

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.

Most 'company' credit cards are in your name so you're carrying the risk if they choose not to reimburse you or pay the card.

In 2006, Amazon debuted EC2. 15 years on, HashiCorp says firms blowing their cloud budgets is all part of the fun

worrashock

So companies, who've frequently gone for the cloud because they couldn't forecast what they needed on their own hardware, have used more than they intended....

For the price tag, this iPad Pro keyboard better damn well be Magic: It isn't... but it's not completely useless either

Re: Because ... it’ll just work : Nope

Just did the same with a 1992 A1200. I don't miss flickering CRT monitors though...

Queen Elizabeth has a soggy bottom: No, the £3.1bn aircraft carrier, what the hell did you think we meant?

Good job something is (in full working order, that is)

Tesla’s Autopilot losing track of devs crashing out of 'leccy car maker

Really?

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?

High-freq trade biz sues transatlantic ISP for alleged spiteful cable cut

Re: High-frequency trading companies = parasites

agreed, boo-bloody-hoo for people who do pointless stuff... maybe we should cut all their flipping cables.....

MPs of Europe unite: Listen up big biz, air your tax deals in public

And who do you think the corporations pass that tax bill onto? Consumers DUH!

You say I mustn’t write down my password? Let me make a note of that

That reminds me

That story reminds me of when I went skip diving in Panama last year......

My self-driving cars may lead to human driver ban, says Tesla's Musk

Software?

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?

$10,000 Ethernet cable promises BONKERS MP3 audio experience

Not the whole story

Surely, you need to have it professionally burnt in before it will give it's best....

http://www.russandrews.com/product-Cable-Burn-In-Service-BURNIN.htm

Olympus trio escape jail but firm fined £4.6 MEEELION

So yet again the employees will pay for the ineptitude/criminal behaviour of the execs. Company fines just get passed on as layoffs or price hikes or both.

War On Standby: Do the figures actually stack up?

Try sorting out industrial power usage first

When I can walk down a street at 10pm and all the closed shops are unlit, then I'll worry about my TV being in standby overnight.

Osborne promises 'Budget for growth'

Interest rates....

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?

Steve Jobs Flash rant put to the test

Agree

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.