Posts by alain williams 2882 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
I am on the local community group committee. We report pot holes to the Hertfordshire county councillor who just tells us that it is policy to not fill/repair them until they are big enough:
"Overall for HCC potholes it’s 5cm in depth and 30cm in width – at the higher end as per the article sent through, and of footways for trip hazards its 2cm."
So: how is AI going to improve that ?
Will the debris be less damaging/polluting than when a metal framed satellite it hit - thus reducing impact of Kessler syndrome ?
I suppose that the contents will still contain much metal, so the box/contents ratio might be important.
So: the experts have been proven right -- what a surprise. But I doubt that the politicians will learn and start listening to experts in other fields. One set of experts that I would like them to listen to are the climate scientists, some do, most pretend to.
The USA is about to get a dictator who will shut own and ignore all experts that say inconvenient things.
Not living in the USA I am more worried about what happens at home (UK) than in the other side of the pond.
The USA is a large economy and provides a lot of tech and buys a lot of our goods -- but not all of them by a long way.
Trump will try to tie other countries up with individual trade deals, do not do what he says and he will yank the trade deal away.
If the rest of the world unites we can force Trump to behave to everyone's benefit rather than what Trump thinks is best for him personally (and the USA secondly).
Nice in theory but getting countries to act together is very hard. A few will be seduced by Trump offering trinkets - this will seem good in the short term until Trump changes it when escaping his clutches will be hard. Forward thinking is needed - something that our politician are not known for
what did the US do to be saddled with the likes of Trump, Musk and co?
It is what they did not do: not listen to the what Trump was saying and think it through; not understand that Trump's low morals, lying, made up facts are not what is needed for a good president; not look at the reprobates that Trump surrounded himself with; ...
Do ? Listening to Fox news is a good start.
Look at the data collection policies of a lot of sites and they include the right to 'fingerprint' you and track you 'across various devices'
My point is that they should only be able to follow those policies once a user has agreed to them, just viewing a web page is not enough.
It is my opinion that a website should never require javascript to work and also should never require any third party scripts to work.
I very much agree. Without javascript some fancy features might not work, but basic viewing, form filling, etc, do not need javascript.
I will accept that a small number of web pages need javascript, eg estate agents that let you "walk" through a house.
You want some energy units for small amounts of energy. One that you might want to use is the energy stored in a molecule of ATP -- used by biological systems. This is between 20.5 and 45.6 kilojoules per mole. Dividing by 6.02x 1023 means one molecule produces between 3.4×10-20 and 7.6×10-20 joules. Pick the average: 5.5×10-20 joules.
But that is too boring for the discerning El-Reg reader. An bacterium flagellum uses some 6.6 × 104 ATPs per second or 36×10-17 joules per second.
An AI PC is one that is compliant with the current marketing bullshit.
For most people their current PC is plenty powerful enough to do what they want, so why go to the bother and cost of replacing it. That is good for users but bad for vendors hence the marketing nonsense. This is nothing new.
The world could be a nicer place to live in for everyone if we used our, supposedly, intelligent big brains for mutual benefit. But instead the sociopaths, a minority who only care about themselves, act to disrupt others to persue aims to get themselves more than they need - even to give themselves a luxurious lifestyle.
The really harmful ones are those that get into top political positions. I could name them but some one my list would upset some people.
So now the worry's about Chrome taking over the internet.
And it will serve its makers best interests, eg by crippling the APIs that allow ad-blockers to work.
I just hope that we do not get many web sites that only work properly with a chromium engine -- which might happen if chromium achieves dominance & lazy web developers only test chrome/edge/... Fortunately we will prolly be saved from that as Apple's Safari uses webkit.
Probably the Wright Brothers Medal would be more appropriate.
All programmers need supervision and all programmers need to supervise.
Supervisors or rather managers are part of the problem that is all too often forgotten. Many were never programmers and so do not understand what makes a good environment to program; or of they do their own managers will not let them do the right thing.
A large part of the problem is budgets and timescales. Managers want programs produced in as short a time as possible and as cheaply as possible. The result is that proper design and documentation is not done, testing is skimped.
Some of that is understandable in a competitive environment: if Microsoft had ensured that its products were properly tested someone else would have beaten them to market and they would not be where they are today.
it is still uploaded to Strava's servers. This will make them a target for $EvilEntity to crack and slurp data. Yes this will require effort but if you are the sort of organisation that is seriously after presidents then you will do it.
The other obvious target is the mobile 'phone comms company - this has to track where the 'phone is so that it can route calls.
How safe do you want to be ?
Did not Boris promise that we could fund the NHS £350 million extra a week when we leave the EU ?
frustrated i told them not to bother as i would find an insurance company that could provide a service
The trouble is that your comment will prolly not be fed back to the C-suits who think that AI is a great way of saving money - but who do not realise that it is losing them business.
A lack of regulation was one of the factors behind the Grenfell Tower disaster.
The watering down of financial regulation led to the 2008 bank crash.
So the government is ignoring history to make a quick buck in its term in office but storing up potential liabilities in the longer term future.
Why do we end up with monkeys like this ? Not that the Tories would be any better.
Good advice but readers of el-reg are at an advantage:
• They are aware that their TV is spying on them
• They are technically capable of blocking it at their firewall
Manufacturers do not worry about losing the small numbers of technically aware users - they will make plenty of $£ from the rest of them.
but then realised that it was different from Missing Thunderbirds footage found in British garden shed.
Do remember that there is a big push to having software run in someone's cloud (to generate perpetual income). So what software running locally would need AI hardware ?
The marketing people need to work that one out.
Also: what is the extra energy requirement of this extra hardware -- even if it is not used ?
Under the GDPR scripts from either of these should only be run with the end user's opt-in consent.
If the UK ICO (Information commissioner) was doing its job it would have a field day as almost no web sites do ask consent before running Google scripts. But the fact that everyone does it does not make it legal.
Because there is an access door on the side that was "never" used but could foment fast ingress of water.
Interesting theory but it would need a crew member to "accidentally" leave the door open. Please follow all crew members and see if one of them suddenly retires with unexplained riches.
I love a conspiracy theory as much as the next man. However I think that it is improbable that HPE has the ability to conjure up a storm that sinks one particular boat outside Porticello.
Yes: Mike Lynch & Stephen Chamberlain died a day apart but coincidences do happen.
A system is only as reliable as the weakest component. The more parts there are the more likely that one will break and bring down the whole house of cards.
There is a cost equation to evaluate, which is greater: outsourcing IT to someone's cloud; the cost of not being able to do business when the cloud is not available.
A big unknown is how often said cloud goes down.
You have said what I came here to write.
The trouble with backups is that they are a complete waste of time ... until you need them. Thus the C-suit can not do them (or not do them properly) and no one will notice - until that fateful day.
I fear that the only way of ensuring that they are done (& tested) is by use of a big stick: insurance companies demand proof that they are being done; or government legislation (which will lead to cries of "nanny state"). Anyone any better ideas ?
This is where a bit of enlightened cooperation can pay big dividends. If you are a large VMware user then club together with other large users and fund developers to add whatever you think is missing to open source VMware replacements. It might take a few months and some ££ but you then get what you want and save lots more ££ over years to come.
However it is psychologically hard for the large corporate C-suits to do this - they just see it as making payments when others, not in the paying club, get the results for free -- why should they do that ?
But that is how FLOSS works: some pay, some do not, all benefit.
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