Posts by alain williams 2887 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
Those were the days when a manufacturer make their money selling the physical item. These days there is a much greater emphasis on making it a service and thus getting perpetual income; there is a similar move with software - your private data being moved into their cloud for their profit and you lose your security.
We've won a major victory if a politician goes into committee and says, "Wait a second, an operating system isn't just Windows or MacOS."
And win another victory when a politician says "Not all computers are desktops or laptops or mobile 'phones."
to counter today's threat: drones.
But our enemies do not stand still, they invent new threats all the time. What needs to be put in place is an open door policy: "you have some interesting idea, come & tell us, we will try it and maybe roll it out" - ie a state of perpetual RFI. This approach will not sit well with the usual suppliers as small, new companies tend to be fleeter of foot but have the disadvantage of not employing navy procurement officials of 10 years ago.
If you murder the leadership and keep bombing their replacements, who's left to negotiate with?
This is Israel's playbook. They want all of the surrounding countries to be weak & unable to organise - their eventual aim is Greater Israel -- to take over huge amounts of the middle East, this colonialist goal is guaranteed to keep the area at war for many years to come. While they do this invaded countries, naturally, fight back - acts which Israel and a lot of the Western press calls "terrorism".
If Israel were to live within the borders created by the 1947 UN partition plan the world would be a much more peaceful place.
Netanyahu has to face elections, as does Trump. They do not care about anyone else until, suddenly, now they care about Iranian citizens.
An interesting view in perpetual war around Israel.
is that really a regime you'd be happy to see achieve nuclear capability?
No I do not, but it did agree to IAEA monitoring in 2015 until Trump blew that up in 2018.
I am far more worried Israel's nukes that it does not admit to and does not allow IAEA inspections.
So these idiots want to use the same amount of power as the peak winter usage for the entire country on a regular basis.
It should be mandated that these data centres should be located such that the excess heat can be put into heating for homes in winter rather than useless boiling of water and creating clouds.
Civilisations elsewhere in the galaxy end up producing AI, which is why we cannot see any of them.
I did not realize that the Pentagon had appointed a comedian as spokesman, or maybe he is just deluded.
What about blowing up small boats off the coast of Venezuela without any real evidence that those on board are drug couriers ? That is not legal under international law, maybe the law of the jungle which is all that the thugs in the White House understand.
Legal usage of Anthropic's AI, the Pentagon official said, is the department's responsibility as the end user - not Anthropic's.
So if a gun shop sold a weapon to a known hit man could they claim that people being shot is not their responsibility but that of the hit man ?
if they can be configured to use an owner's own servers and that they have said 'no' ?
Well, they are leaving the door open for someone to develop a similar product that did allow this, maybe even allowed owners to install their own firmware. Few would actually do so but enough, like me, would be interested to make this a viable product.
No new rules are needed just an awareness of the risks of using USA origin services. If these services risk being pulled on the whim of a politician then are they fit for use ?
Would you buy a car that had a reputation of breaking down ? Maybe if it was very cheap and the costs of fixing it and losses while being unable to use it were less than the price difference.
The bean counters often do not see beyond the initial purchase price.
Most people just surf the web and occasionally do a bit of word processing. That you can do on hardware that is a few years old - especially if you ditch the bloatware that is MS Windows and install something like Linux Mint.
Note that I say "most" not "all" people.
and servers into a separate company with one employee. That company then provides the services that run on Java.
Sounds like a nice idea but I suspect that this is forbidden somewhere in the license 'agreement'.
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The word 'agreement' is a lie, it is an imposition. The worst thing is that Oracle can change it at will to catch customers out in ways that they could not have for-seen.
We should not be comparing passwords character by character since we should not store passwords in clear text -- as it is a nightmare if/when some cracker gets hold of the password database.
We should store a hash or message digest of the password and when testing a candidate password hash/md it and compare that. Converting to a hash/md means reading *all* of the password and then comparing the result will give you no clue as to which pass of the candidate password is bad; so a timing attack will not work.
Anyway: the first step of authentication will be getting the password hash/md, very likely from a database. The time to access from a database will take vastly longer than character by character comparison.
So: I do not understand. Can someone please explain.
Thanks
It seems that Bezos is being well rewarded: Amazon ran a $1.2 billion tax bill last year, down from $9 billion the previous year, and even as its profits jumped by 45 percent to nearly $90 billion - a tax rate of 1.3% -- I wish that I could get that !
Bezos owns the Washington post and cut approximately a third of employees. I suppose that good journalism costs and that they can save much money by pumping out Trump supporting fake news - which will result in Trump awarding AWS many lucrative contracts.
would be needed to support not just Todd Miller but a whole host of small people who provide Open Source tools that underpin Musk's fortune.
The same is true for Bezos, Ellison, ... could all also do so with what they find after a quick grope in their sofa but none of them will as they are just interested in shovelling money into their wallets.
That is the worry. If they were of proven value people would not worry. (ie old eggs - the analogy breaks!).
Also usually no worry with a new company having large exposure to just one thing as a new company is prolly small and so it does not matter if it goes pop. But this is a concern about the AI companies: they are new but they have sucked in a lot of cash which could burn a lot of investors when they die. "when" not "if" as even if some AI companies survive others will not.
If you want to see something of that era running go to visit a replica of the Manchester Baby. It was the first electronic stored-program computer. You can see it running at the Science and Industry Museum. Well worth it if you are in Manchester.
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