Posts by Ken Hagan 8365 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
Sadly I think we live in a world where both you and the Ferret can be correct. Of course, the formerly brilliant PAYG deal from 3 is probably a big part of why they are now broke. I can't have been the only person who spends enough of their life within range of friendly wifi that I could spend no more than £20 a year and still have all the service I needed.
"apparently, still in use nearly 50 years after I took A Level physics"
Very little of the A-level syllabus is affected by stuff we've only discovered in the last 50 years. If you only count theoretical predictions rather than actual detection, this even applies to the particle physics portion and so "very little" probably becomes "none whatsoever". Happy to hear about any counter-examples, though, since it is just possible that some discoveries in condensed matter are both recent and sufficiently interesting / accessible to have been pulled in, if only as examples.
"It isn't clear what kind of warning signs the driver could or should have seen, but the real problem here is an unfinished bridge being open to the public."
Quite. The signage is actually pretty irrelevant. At the very least, there should have been sufficient concrete in the way to force a driver to slow down to about 5mph, steer through a little maze, and then ask themselves "wtf?". Apparently there was nothing like that, since the fine article reports...
"Staff at the local public works department are also under investigation, as the unfinished bridge allegedly did not have barriers preventing entry."
"Intel never managed to be a genuine innovator, like AmD or ARM, or even Motorola going far enough back."
Really? The Pentium Pro was sufficiently innovative to make "x86" compdtitive with RISC (and wipe out most if the RISCs over the next decade). Itanium was also innovative, just wrong. In response, I'll credit AMD with having the guts to step up to an empty plate and deliver Amd64.
But ARM and Motorola? Haven't you got to go back to the 1980 to see their innovations?
Mind you, I'll happily concede that my examples are a qusrter of a century old. Where's the innovation in modern CPU design? Should I be ignoring CPUs entirely and looking for innovation in GPU design? But if I did, would I even find anything there that isn't 20 years old?
It probably depends on what you mean by "used".
I've *tried* it, just to see what experience is like, so that I don't feel like too much of an old fart when others talk about it. I wouldn't say that I've *used* it though, because I definitely haven't used it *for* anything.
Perhaps. Or maybe the real problem is that Chrome, through its dominance, is able to impose those frequent updates and persuade a load of dumb web developers to use them in sites, thereby excluding browsers that "only" implement the perfectly satisfactory specification of 6 or 12 months ago.
Media encoding standards aside, the vast majority of web-sites are not doing anything that could not be achieved quite reasonably with the HTML5 spec from (shuffle, shuffle) January 2008. So if there really are huge numbers of web-sites that don't work in other browsers (and actually, I can't say that I've encountered any) I think we're entitled to label them as "broken" and tell their designers to "get a clue" and "fix their shit".
Backwards compatibility is a bitch less than 1% of the actual silicon on any Intel or AMD processor. Has been for 20 years.
The ISA ceased to be a limiting factor on performance in the early 90s when the Pentium Pro showed up with out-of-order execution. That's why nearly all of the other ISAs around in the early 90s were gone by the end of the decade. The only survivor was an ISA that wasn't trying to usurp the desktop market.
"I have to wonder in who will actually build hardware to this spec."
Anyone who wants to sell their hardware as a Windows desktop. MS were pretty brutal in the 90s about making to easy for themselves to write Windows. Hardware that didn't meet the current "PC ninety whatever" spec wouldn't boot and so wasn't bought.
Linux has been the principal other beneficiary, although I suspect it also meant Apple had a fairly easy time moving to x86 when they did.
AFAIK nothing similar exists elsewhere in the industry, which is why Google can't (generally) provide Android updates for old phones and Linux distros (generally) are never available either, despite the average modern-day smartphone having vastly more impressive specs than a PC from (say) the XP era. Of course, this lock-in and short lifespan suits the vendors just fine. Funny, that...
That rather depends on what we're calling a thesis. If you count the write-up of an individual project, perhaps counting for about 10-15% of the overall degree score, then you are probably correct but the same UK universities usually use the term in the context of a Masters or PhD, where it is 100% of either 1 or 3 years of work.
"Musk has turned an about ~40 billion loss into likely profit through regulatory capture."
Likely? Hardly. If Musk can turn "being a friend of Donald" into 40 billion dollars then the US really has gone down the pan. DJT himself didn't manage to turn his first term into a big pot of cash for himself, so I can't see that he'll be able to help Musk in this regard this time around.
Thank you. That explains everything except ... what the blazes did anyone think that feature would be useful for?
I mean "~" is certainly nice and I can almost imagine a case for "~user" but "~*" just seems crazy. Why on earth should joe user even gave access to a complete list of user accounts, let alone a shortcut way of referring to their private directories?
But that's not your problem. Thanks again for the explanation coz there's no way I'd have guessed the existence of such a feature.
"> ... So if you've lost it it's no use to anyone else either..."
I can no longer see the post you were replying to but I might also add that UK law has the rather dumb requirement that "I've lost it." is no defence in court and so there is the whole question of how safe dare you make your system without placing yourself in legal jeopardy in the event of loss of hardware-or-memory.
A way of forwarding calls (without the caller knowing) to the AI number would be useful. Is this something that the mobile provider could offer?
It would presumably need a button in the phone app and a way for the provider to configure the forwarding number, but Android or iOS might be willing to add that, since it sounds like a pretty trivial mod. The real questions are: can it be done undetectably? is it legal to do so? and who pays for the call and for the AI?
I suspect it would be fraud to charge the scammer for such a call, so the mobile provider wouldn't be interested, but IANAL and it might vary with jurisdiction even if I were.
How many years did it take (or has it taken so far) to migrate from x86 to x64?
If the emulation is really good, there's very little need for end-users to re-buy their software and, consequently, little pressure on vendors (not just MS) to even offer a port. If the emulation isn't good, who's going to buy the hardware in the first place?
There is a case to be made that it should be men in blue coats and non-padded cells. The levels of cluelessness that some people are now claiming in their defence do not seem (credibly) consistent with them being highly skilled and intelligent folks who could justify their large pay packets. The obvious alternative explanation is "you turned a blind eye" and I think that case needs to be answered.
I don't think so. Those GPUs are not being made available to third parties for any purpose, not just training rival products, so in a sense MS just don't have a product on the market at this point.
You can't force a company to create a product just because you'd like to buy it.
It has also had quite an effect (beneficial, in my view) on the way that quite a number of academic institutions assess whether their students have actually learned anything.
Initially, the effect on society of lowering the cost of bullshit has been to increase the supply. Given long enough, however, it is possible that society might eventually figure out that the value of bullshit has also been reduced and that the people who dominated the bullshit market might be worth less than previously thought.
1000 is quite a big number.
If I want to increase the rate of rubbish by 1000-fold I have to shorten the useful life 1000-fold or increase capacity 1000-fold, or some balanced combination of the two. That seems unlikely.
It also increases my costs 1000-fold, which would have to be matched by a similar increase in income, which seems ... oh, what's the word ... unlikely.
'You forget that Khrushchev has some year earlier infamously told "We will bury you", a very ominous thing to say.'
Though I don't speak Russian, my understanding is that this is a literal translation of a common Russian saying and is no more ominous than giving a Gallic shrug and saying "whatever, we'll still be here after you've gone".
There are many aspects of business where people would struggle to find evidence that what they are doing actually works. I foresee a "lack of high-quality training data" being a chronic problem with most of the things that the snake oil merchants want to sell.
Fortunately (for them, not us) the target market is full of people who regard their own opinions as high-quality training data. It appears likely, then, that we're going to build artificial yes-men and they'll sell like hot cakes.
" So why were they allowed to use C strings in the first place? No code review caught that out? That could even be automated by getting svn and git to refuse commits which contain "char *". "
Good luck interfacing with an operating system (or many, many widely used third-party libraries) without using char*.
I mean, yes, one can in principle write some kind of safety layer, but to do so for a sufficient number of them to be useful would be a Herculean task. (There is a reason that most languages offer a way of binding to C-linkage APIs.) It might be quite a *useful* Herculean task. A complete (or even >50% complete) interface to Linux or Windows that was safe C++ would be a very useful thing. Many people would thank you and start using it immediately. Some of those would probably even join in and help you finish the job and maintain it as the OS evolved. But I don't see any evidence that such a thing has even been started yet, despite its utility. Perhaps it is just too scary to contemplate, or perhaps people reckon that writing an OS in a safe language is going to be easier.
"Is it though? Is it *actually* a good thing that you view “wiring a plug” as a scary risk?"
Yes, it is. The point you are missing is that while the good folk of *this* parish can almost certainly wire a plug safely, many people cannot and when you encounter a plug outside your own home you probably have no idea of and no control over who wired it.
'rather than "almost all known protein structures" -- which we already know'
Umm, no. We don't. The very next bit of the article is " - more than 200 million in total." and we certainly don't know 200 million protein structures. As I understand it, in the early days people used to sanity-check AlphaFold's predictions quite thoroughly. Perhaps not spending "years" on X-ray crystallography but certainly some substantial time. As the community slowly got used to the idea that "damn, the blasted computer is always right", the checking has become less and less. Nowadays, it is often omitted because frankly researchers can't justify spending time or money on something that is very unlikely to produce a surprise. Also, anyone who does check the result is going to be beaten by others to the interesting consequences.
In short, then, AlphaFold and its ilk have transformed this area of biology by being a magic box that produces protein structures in minutes which are as accurate as the ones you could produce in several years by traditional methods (and even that's assuming the protein actually exists in Nature to be X-rayed).
Odd that they've got the Chemistry prize for it though, since the (sole?) application is clearly to Biology and Medicine.
OK. So if the DBMS software has traditionally provided an abstraction layer around the data, you are now taking a gamble (*) that for a wide enough range of applications, the data will fit into a specific structure, which in turn allows a big enough performance win to be worthwhile.
(*) Given that the DBMS problem domain has been analysed to death and beyond for half a century, perhaps "gamble" is a little harsh!
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