Posts by silent_count 636 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Nov 2011
Seems like the Rustofarians are facing the classic problem of trying to convert the worshippers from The Church of the Holy C. Yeah sure, the new God promises safety from the sin of memory leaks but the worshippers of the old God are happy with their religion and aren't much interested in learning any new prayers or hymns.
In a similar vein...
I'm currently writing a HTML canvas-based platformer game. It has nothing to do with any kind of critical anything. But the level data is validated, the scripts within the level data are validated, and if anything is not valid the game engine will not run that level. There are also runtime checks so that, for example, if a script tries to spawn an enemy outside the level's bounds, the creature will not be spawned. Nothing is allowed which will put the game into a potentially invalid state. And this is just a dinky game which runs in a browser and has an expected audience in the single digits.
The problem at CrowdStrike wasn't some specific, unforeseeable glitch at an otherwise well-functioning organisation. The several levels of incompetence displayed could only be the result of a completely incompetent management hierarchy which allowed it to happen. Not only did they fail at their job - preventing bad things - they made things demonstrably worse. Sack the lot!
G'day, I'm not all that knowledgeable about (de)compression routines but what you're describing sounds reasonable.
It may be worth going with smaller chunk sizes because, let's say you compress your 5GB file in four 1.25GB chunks but when it comes time to decompress, one core is busy with some long-running task. The three available cores will decompress the first three chunks but then two cores will be sitting idle waiting while one core does the last chunk. Smaller chucks would enable the decompression task to be more evenly distributed, albeit at the cost of some 'chunk management' overhead.
If you choose to keep data, it is your responsibility to keep it secure. If you choose to store it on a computer, it is still your responsibility to keep it secure. If you choose to use an external IT service, it is still your responsibility to keep the data secure. Notice the pattern here? As flawed as Microsoft is, this is solely Geisinger's responsibility.
They could have chosen to keep the data carved into 100kg stone tablets in a dark, remote archaeological site patrolled by a sabre-toothed tigers, scorpions, rats and all manner of Indiana Jones-esque traps. Could you imagine the disgruntled ex-whoever carrying the tablets out, one at a time, while having their legs chewed off?
Instead Geisinger chose Microsoft.
I bet they didn't even have the decency to cite Keynes, who was concerned that his grandchildren's generation would be overburdened by the vast expanses of leisure time available to them.
@amajadedcynicaloldfart
I obviously don't know A/C but I do occasionally chat with a blind gent who works in IT. (As a side note, he is highly sought after because of his interest in making accessibility better for people with bad or no slight, having the technical knowledge, and a knack to make feasible suggestions to get there).
Since he can't see, his phone reads to him whatever text is on the screen. Now I'm Australian, and a native English speaker, but his phone speaks so fast that I can not grasp what's being said... and he's able to parse it just fine. I don't know how many WPM it's at but to me it sounds like an audiobook played way too fast to be comprehensible.
I think with practice you can comprehend faster and faster speech but most of us are luckily in a position where we don't need to develop that skill.
Nobody is going to invade the US - they are a nuclear power. The US is not going to invade another a nuclear power - surely even they can't be arrogant enough to think that's going to end well.
For the kind of air defence fielded by countries which the US does find some moral imperative to invade, F18s do the job plenty well enough. Hell! A few Spitfires from your nearest RAF museum would probably get the job done.
Me thinks the whole F35 program is about funnelling money to defence contractors who will have an open spot on the board for good little politicians who give them piles of taxpayer dollars.
@Pascal Monett & LionelB
On your recommendations, I've installed Brave browser on Android and had a little play with it. So far it looks good. I am pleased that the settings have sensible defaults - they default towards privacy and having the extra bells and whistles switched off. It's a really pleasant experience!
Thank you both for the suggestion.
I am deeply offended by the notion that the language which I have thusfar been using is in any way non-inclusive or that my choice of language could or should be more inclusive. I am also offended by the fact that this, so called "inclusive" initiative does not in fact include myself. This demonstrates the lie of their alleged inclusiveness.
The initiative, by virtue of it's choice of name (being a "NAMING initiative") makes an intentional decision to exclude those among us that have, for whatever reason, chosen to leave the binary path of having a name and may have chosen to be partially named or have chosen to avoid having a name entirely. This decision is also deeply offensive to those of us in the tech field who have chosen to eliminate the distress caused by naming things and thus write code using purely anonymous functions.
Finally the decision to call their initiative an initiative is highly offensive because this could be taken to imply that they are initiating something, which is plainly false, or something which is worthwhile when this is also clearly not the case.
I hereby demand that the Inclusive Naming Initiative should be immediately disbanded, all members undergo extensive, mandatory inclusivity training, and a replacement should be instituted in the form of, "The Possibly Inclusive But Not To Offend Those Who Are Not Included In The Process Of Naming (Or Not) Things Which Might Be Named Or May Have Chosen Not To Be Named Or May Never Have Been Named Initiative Which Should Not Be Taken To Mean That Anything Even Remotely Productive Or Worthwhile Is Taking Place Or Ever Will".
Once this has been completed, I shall commit to attending the inaugural meeting of TPIBNTOTWANITPON(ON) TWMBNOMHCNTBNOMNHBNIWSNBTTMTAERPOWITPOEW, if only to insist that acronyms be banned (because this might offend people who have trouble remembering acronyms) and that the 'initiative' read out it's full name every time that it is referred to. That should keep them too busy to waste our time.
@Sykowasp
One way to push share prices up while doing absolutely nothing of value for the company is by doing a share buyback. Oh, just coincidentally, buybacks do increase the value of the shares of exec-level people who are compensated in shares. Oh and again it very coincidentally just so happens that the execs who are predominantly paid in shares are very much in favour of doing buybacks. Golly the coincidences just seem to pile up.
Microsoft takes less time to make a new Windows version in less time than it takes to fix a bug which, coincidentally I'm sure, happens to screw over a competitor. Me thinks it's time for a DoJ vs M$ rerun because it seems that Microsoft needs a good slap-around on a fairly regular basis.
Then the DoJ can find all three of their staff who don't use macbooks and smack Apple around for their you-can-have-any-browser-you-like-so-long-as-it's-Safari nonsense.
I'm not totally across UK politics but this looks to me like the mirror of the DCMA. The former seeks to make breaking encryption illegal while this proposal seeks to make encryption illegal.
Bet'cha those nasty pedos use DRM to hide their kiddie porn viewing from the authorities. Won't somebody think of the children!
I'd just like to chime in to say that thusfar the Chinese-hardware-is-evil thing comes across as paranoid nonsense along the lines of Bush's dosier on WMDs in Iraq. "Trust us that we have compelling evidence of... oh no! We're not going to show you any of it. But if we did you'd be really convinced".
If there was a single case of $THIS model of Chinese (Huawei or whatever brand) camera has a undocumented extra memory which stores pictures of your wife's nickers and tries to email them chairman Mao's private account every Thursday at 7pm... it should be fairly easy to demonstrate that the camera has this nefarious behaviour under $THESE conditions. Right?
@mr.K I don't know twitter or it's inner workings but my guess is;
- maintaining/updating apps for the vatious platforms it runs on
- running the infrastructure which the apps connect to (making sure their AWS instances or servers in various countries are working)
- tweaking their algorithm (so everyone sees pro/anti Trump tweets at twitter's preferred rate)
- staff to convince every android OEM to make twitter a "system" app
"The social media platform has become intrinsic to politics and media in many countries, and an indispensable tool to many professions, creative communities, and minorities."
In Pratchett's world gods only have power if people choose to believe them. I think this is a suitable analogy.
If you choose to buy into their walled garden, for better or worse, you're stuck with whatever Apple decides is best for you.
If you choose to make a propriety messaging platform "intrinsic" and "indispensable" then you are, for better or worse, stuck with whatever tickles the whims of the ownership.
The Kool Aid and that bitter, almond-ey after-taste are inextricably linked, and more fool you if you thought you could have one without the other.
Imagine someone trains an AI using Microsoft's source code and then distributes their Co-Penguin-Pilot AI using a creative commons license.
The argument is that the author is not breaking an NDA, distributing proprietary code or violating Microsoft's IP because the AI is only offering snippets of code. And those snippets may have come from the 4 lines of the author's own code in the training set.
Do you reckon there's even one of Microsoft's army of lawyers would consider that fair play?
But how is moving away from GitHub going to help, if you still publish your work as open source on some other platform? Or even just as source tarballs? Microsoft will simply scrape that instead.",
If I were a nasty person I'd find a way to detect when it is Microsoft scraping projects on the new platform and feed them poisoned code.
That would solve the secondary problem of know if MS is using "our" code to train its AI. If the copilot support forums are flooded with users who suddenly have mysterious and difficult to track down bugs... you'll know :)
The MS will then have to spend so much time and money ferreting out subtly bad and downright malicious code, they'll actually get negative value from scraping "our" site's code.
If I were a nasty person, that is.
@ThatOne
Your description is spot on. The alternative scenario is that the (relatively) rich foreigners stay (and keep their money) wherever they are. Are the locals better off that way?
Would the dog walkers/gardeners/housekeepers be unemployed burdens on society or would they learn to code or become an architect, or start the next google or amazon?
I don't know the answer but if the there's and enterprising economist out there, I suggest that this would be worth looking into. This seems like a situation which will play out with increasing frequency over the coming years.
While I haven't yet used the Brave search engine, I can see a case for boosting certain results. For example, when I type "assembly" into a search engine, the vast majority of the time I'm looking for something related to 'assembly language programming' rather than anything to do with physical construction or putting together Ikea products.
I think this is Facebook trying to screw over Apple. There are two potential outcomes.
a) Everyone gets loses their minds about this 'exorbitant tax on hard working content creators'. Then governments regulate the maximum "tax" a company can charge. This will hurt Apple, who makes serious money out of their app store while costing Facebook nothing.
b) Everyone decides that it's a free market. Then Facebook has just given themselves a 50% tax in a burgeoning market and Apple looks like absolute heels if they try to follow suit and raise their app store tax to 50%.
Neither of these is a bad outcome for Facebook.
As best I can tell, this proposed law is to prevent Google from 'stealing' from Australian news sites (by linking to their articles or presenting excerpts without paying them for the privilege).
Let's say this does become law and Google subsequently quits Australia. If the collective profits for Australian news sites decreases the following year, will anyone be willing to admit that the entire premise of this law was faulty?
PS: My read is that the government is extorting a foreign company and giving the proceeds to local media. Displaying typical journalistic integrity, local media will fawn over the government whose handing them bags of cash. The opposition is too spineless to oppose much of anything, lest local media say bad things about them, and are secretly jealous they didn't concoct this quid pro quo themselves.
The amateur econ student in me likes the fundamentally sound idea of auctioning off tickets, but how would you go about getting a contiguous set of seats so you can take your family to a show/concert/whatever?
There may well be a really simple solution which I'm overlooking but I'm tired and honestly can't see an answer.
ROG designs tend to be what you might call leading edge, i.e. outside the usual envelope. Whether that works for you is a personal choice, but I would never call them badly designed. And as for the no page up/page down/home/end keys? Seriously? You mark a 14" laptop down for that? I cant remember the last time I used those keys or even saw them on such a small laptop. And anyway you can set those sorts of functions in Windows, so whats the big deal?
Ok fine. If they don't want to have dedicated hardware keys for pgup/pgdn/home/end, given the laptop's size, I can understand that. But I can't understand why they wouldnt have some key-mapping for those keys. My wife's previous laptop (funnily enough an Asus which cost half as much) had those keys mapped to FN+arrow keys. As for not using those keys, pgup and pgdown see some use from me while navigating web pages, like scrolling up and down the Reg comments. I use all four while navigating source code. You can argue that a "gaming" laptop isn't for writing source code but writing scripts and viewing web pages is I'd suggest within the purview of gaming related activities.
As for their choice of aesthetic design, I'm indifferent. It's fine. My complaint is they chose not to include keys (or at least mappings for them) which are useful but did manage to find space for an "armoury crate" key. How often do you adjust the configuration of fan speed vs cpu or gpu temp such that you need a dedicated key for it?
I was given an Asus ROG 14" Zephyrus for my birthday as a personal (ie. non-work) laptop. Good hardware but the Asus software is junky. It does not do anything particularly useful but does inexplicably change Windows power mode to "high performance" (as in, flatten the battery) if the mains power ever becomes disconnected or switched off. No help from Asus support who do not even seem to comprehend that this behaviour would be undesirable.
It also does not have page up/page down/home/end keys, nor any key combination to simulate those keys. Who thinks that's a good idea?
I have had nothing but good experiences with Asus' cheaper laptops so I can only conclude that the ROG branding translates to "overpriced and badly designed".
If the genuine goal of these visas are to import people whose skills are desperately needed, why doesn't the government auction off the visas? Whichever company(s) have the most need to import talent would be willing to pay the most to meet their need.
As a side effect, the money from the auctions and could be used to train locals in those desperately needed skills.
It makes sense to me from an economics perspective. Is there anything which I've overlooked?
@APseudonymousCoward
I obviously can't speak for everyone but the deal breaker is not the form factor but the compromiss needed to get a phone so small.
Smaller phone means smaller (thus worse) battery, thus mediocre battery life, thus unimpressive performance because a good cpu (or display) would kill the battery life.
It's not that I disagree with you, I ain't Spartacus, but here's the flip-side.
The sites could put their articles behind a pay wall (a few do). The sites could make you login (even for free) to read their articles and the login would keep Google's bots out. The sites could just tell Google not to index their stuff.
But they don't want to do that because they want the benefit of Google's audience... but not the drawbacks.
Personally, I can't say I care either way but I do think this legislation is badly thought out.
It's not like Jeff has a solid gold toilet in each of his mansions and luxury yachts! The poor bloke, through his own, individual hard work and perseverance makes his first billion or so and you make it seem like he should waste his precious time by giving a stuff about the whiny, coughy people in the whatever place they're whining from. It's almost enough to put down your absolutely not solid gold chalice* of extraordinarily rare and expensive wine.
Seriously for a minute, I wonder about the people who spent their time in lock-down complaining on Facebook or instagram about how hard their life is while ordering garbage off Amazon. I wonder if they took even one moment to consider those warehouse workers. It's awfully easy to blame the billionaire when it means you don't have to look in the mirror.
* I know how you people think. It's encrusted with a combination of diamonds, rubies and sapphires so no, it is not solid gold. So there!
You are absolutely correct.
What you're missing is that governments have a massive hard-on for control. All of it. All of the time. The notion that you might not want to give them every conceivable bit of data is utterly foreign them. Whether they need it is not relevant.
Note that I didn't mention a particular party, or left or right or upside-down. That's because it does not matter. They're all the same.
@NerryTutkins
Microsoft is happy for you to spend your time and energy getting good at their environment/tools. And when you've made that investment, they want you to pay for the privilege of using their tools to produce software which helps Microsoft sell their OS. I can't speak for anyone else but that tastes a little bitter to me.
Since the world finally buried Flash and it's weekly parade of vulnerabilities in an unmarked grave, I suspect team wASm will have an awfully hard time convincing the populous to adopt another, "hey let's download and execute arbitrary code off the interwebs so it can encrypt all my files till I send my year's pay in bitcoins to some complete bastard".
That was my first thought too. No headphone jack or power cable plug would make a phone nearly waterproof by default. The catch would be the speaker and mic. To have decent sound in/out, you'd still need some holes in the shell. Unless, of course, apple displays some of their legendary, feature removing courage and starts selling phones which, not to put too fine a point on it, do not make phone calls.
I think what's missing from this thread is the distinction between code running on your private machine and code on the internet which someone wants to run on other people's machines.
I don't care if the former kind is impenetrable but the later kind should, ideally be clear and legible. The caveat is that I do have some sympathy for those who want to minify JavaScript to lower their visitors' bandwidth usage.
Damn these kids who want to express the intent of the code by using different looping constructs. You will have JMP and you will like it! If you're really, really good Santa might bring you a JNZ for Christmas so you can do conditional branching without having to overwrite opcodes in memory.
Anyone who can not infer the intent of your code from what it does is clearly a lesser programmer, verging on subhuman, who does not deserve to bask in the splendour of your code.
@doublelayer I would suggest that Google, Ford and Apple are identical in the sense that if you ask them for information, you will be told the answer that suits them, and which may not exactly align with your interests.
Speaking as someone who uses DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine and have at least tried Bing, I do not think Google has a search monopoly and Facebook will tell you that Google does not have an online advertising monopoly.
Unless there's a realky good reason not to, the work of public officials should be available to the tax-payers. That said, I'm finding it hard to care. I have little doubt that Google did favour their own products and services. So what?
I also have little doubt that a Ford dealership would recommend using Ford parts and getting your car serviced by a Ford mechanic, regardless of what make or model you drive. I also suspect that your nearest iThingy store will tell you to only take your iThingy to an authorised iThingy repairer and only use them with other genuine iThingies.
Time to light torches and wave the pitchforks in a mildly threatening manner?
Hi Marketing Hack,
If it's any help, I use AirVPN at work and NordVPN at home and haven't had issues with either.
I intend to stay with NordVPN for home use on the basis that they know they're one major screw-up away from not having a business. This gives them a great incentive to get their house in order, which it appears they're trying to do.
If you'd like a comparison list
https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-services-keep-you-anonymous-in-2019/
I think the best way to curb marketing bullshit is to make them actually walk the walk. This article mentions previous adds claiming that their routers signal "couldn't be beaten". Make them supply the best router on the market to their customers and upgrade it if someone makes a better version.
Yes, it would be prohibitively expensive. The word "prohibitively" is germane here. Being forced to make good on their claims will prohibit their marketing department from making nonsense claims in the future.
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