Posts by mevets

Tesla axes software engineer for allegedly pilfering secret Python scripts after just three days on the job

Re: How long is a man-year?

200 Tesla Engineer Person days == 4 AnyOtherOrg Person Days.

Metallica

Remember when Metallica lead the charge in the protection of intellectual property? That was a lot to unpack; Metallica and intellectual in the same chapter, much less paragraph, sentence or phrase was a grave dissonance spiraling ever closer together.

Good on Tesla, being able to find a scapegoat in their endless quest to achieve mediocrity. I hope this helps.

Screw you, gadget-menders! No really, you'll need loads of screwdrivers to fix Apple's AirPods Max headphones

Re: £550 headphones

As not an audio profession, but somebody who likes sounds a lot, I wonder if you could expand on this. I have Seinheiser {spell?} monitor-style headphones, and it took me a good bit to find something I liked. Most seemed to colour the world in a way I didn't like.

"the more a consumer spends..."

I think you are scratching at an intersection of numerous biases with that one. Egocentricity is obvious -- I am smart and I bought X, thus X is what smart people buy. Without this, Silicon Valley house prices would collapse. Conformity is certainly second, although it is layered upon the association fallacy - I perceive that the group of people I want to be like ( and liked by ) would respect people who buy X; therefore I buy X.

But the underlying psychological trauma is that of adopting the role of a consumer, and thus having to choose amongst things you don't need, or even truly desire, to fulfill your role. Welcome to Delta, whilst being stroked as Beta [brave new world ref].

One SV company, almost 5 years ago, published a $300 picture book of products they had made. Gen X and before would recognize this roughly as a catalogue, the sort of thing you would throw away without looking at. But the self-aggrandizing brilliance of this was to encourage those afflicted with consumerism that they had, indeed, made very wise choices; while extracting 1/2 the price of the trinkets described in this article; or a months groceries for a family of 3.

Another Rust-y OS: Theseus joins Redox in pursuit of safer, more resilient systems

Re: Oh look, the principles don't hold in the real world

You don't happen to use an iphone, do you? NT is not a hybrid; or at least that is what its author claimed at USENIX micro-kernels and other architectures when unveiling NT.

Re: Security is a word

C was written for UNIX, then used to re-implement UNIX.

Loser Trump is no longer useful to Twitter, entire account deleted over fears he'll whip up more mayhem

Re: An elephant in the room

Right, It is also moronic to think a band of toothless hillbillies could storm the Capitol building and force the entirety of the USA Congress and Senate into gas masks, crawling on the floor through an escape hatch.

Unless I took a little too much acid on wed, I think that happened.

Any prognostication on how the USA works, or more importantly fails, is just that.

At this moment, nobody has any sense of what that authority structure in the USA is, and for that reason alone, the USA President must be removed. It probably wouldn't hurt to take down the Vice President for good measure. While they mightn't be in collusion, it seems there is an orbit of insanity between the two.

Re: An elephant in the room

That was mainly to make sure the military didn't interfere with his plans to start a civil war. Who is he going to nuke? Russia, uh, no, his boss told him not to. Gina, no his other boss told him not to? SF, ok that is a possibility.

Really the only targets for the `great orange jobbie` are in the USA, which while nobody deserves that sort of attack, some places ore more deserving than others. 49.5%.

Google says it’s the cleanest cloud, also reveals deal with Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company for new cloud region

Yup, newsflash, google is disgusting, news at 11.

Re: So, Google is consorting with more anti-democratic overlords. And ?

It also bowes before Washington. It just isn't as obvious, but it is completely in line with the transformation of the USA into an authoritarian regime. It is even helping, alongside its buddies.

Elon Musk says he tried to sell Tesla to Apple, which didn’t bite and wouldn't even meet

Re: A Television you say...

Have you never watched the Simpsons?

A Television you say...

"Apple building a TV rumours. The latter never happened." I think this example is a bit of a give away. I mean, suppose Apple did build a TV, but decided not to produce it. Then the rumour is both true and false.

Like the square root of one hundred, I suppose it is something we will never know; unless somewhere there is some one who saw the alleged TV or Car for that matter.

ps: Rogers, a Canadian component of the ruling media duopoly, let verification of the Apple TV leak about 6 years ago via an over-enthusiastic employee as part of some sort of certification ritual.

SolarWinds releases known attack timeline, new data suggests hackers may have done a dummy run last year

Re: Dummy Run

All your dummies are belong to US(A).

We're not saying this is how SolarWinds was backdoored, but its FTP password 'leaked on GitHub in plaintext'

Re: But the Certificates!

uhhh bad state sponsored actors, I think you meant. Who else has access to github.

FBI confirms Zodiac Killer's 340 cipher solved by trio of amateur math and software codebreakers

Not so good at history?

It is a funny sort of causation where the original is altered by the derivative. At best, you might suggest that USA-English (aka merkin) transliterated many common idioms; at worst a broader swipe about literacy.

X

Rogue ex-Cisco employee who crippled WebEx conferences and cost Cisco millions gets two years in US prison

Crippled Webex?

Who could possibly have noticed? Cisco's malware has been a blight on the remote worker for over a decade. I remember having an old laptop, network isolated in the corner just for webex meetings forever ago. What could this sad sack have possibly done to make it worse or less secure. It is a POS that thankfully has been driven out to the margins. Apparently blackberry still use it. :)

Adios California, Oracle the latest tech firm to leave California for the wide open (low tax) Lone Star State

No one expects..

Our fourth weapon, fanatical devotion, requires a desperation to cross the finish line. This is integral to the valley mystique. People in the valley aren't particularly smarter compared to say those in Rochester or Minnesota. The special sauce is just a tarted up version of the carrot on a pole that has bamboozled generations of donkeys. When you can actually afford your lifestyle, destroying yourself to benefit a Chief Psychopathic Officer is a non-starter.

If the valley empties, short BMW, Porsche, Tesla, ....

Re: About time.

Don't worry about the folks in Austin; they are used to dealing with assholes. Pull up a map.

Apple's M1: the fastest and bestest ever silicon = revolution? Nah, there's far more interesting stuff happening in tech that matters to everyone

Re: Natural selection

2020s edition of the isa bus is thunderbolt, which really is just an external pci bus; you can connect a chassis up with all the cards your heart desires without having to burden the vast majority of owners that will never do such a thing.

Expensive? Those IBM PCs were $3000 + in the early 80s, about 1/2 price of an efficient vehicle.

A tale of two nations: See China blast off from the Moon as drone shows America's Arecibo telescope falling apart

5g?

Was Arecibo some sort of 5g concentrater?

When it comes to taxing tech giants, America is out, France is in, Canada and Indonesia are going their own way

Re: Conceptually not bad but ...

There are ways around the zero sum.

While not free, as in air, digging something out of the ground provides the ability to create wealth rather than exchanging it. Limiting that is the economy does not wait for you to dig it out, rather re-establishes its gross value once it is discovered. A bit like schroedingers cat in that way; perhaps quantum economics will be the next prevailing theory.

Another is economic warfare via stagflation. Suppose you find your adversary has a weakness, like an insatiable desire for opioids. By selling this precious substance, you not only get money you can spend on non-destructive things like ipads (oh, wait...), you also harm their productivity, thus lowering the price of ipads. This was of course done for tea & spices a century ago, and may be happening currently again for ipads.

Mysterious metal monolith found in 'very remote' part of Utah

Human?

Certainly no human could build something like that!

[ apologies to Harold Ramis and Bill Murray ].

How the US attacked Huawei: Former CEO of DocuSign and Ariba turned diplomat Keith Krach tells his tale

The invisible finger.

I wonder if Adam Smith, when conjuring the metaphor of the invisible hand, quite saw the opportunity for such a cartel-based approach to give the finger to all competition. A great day for laisse faire...

Re: Why 5G ?

I heard it said by somebody, not me, that it was to help Gates spread covid.

Re: "People trust the USA ?"

The US President is less trusted than the Russian or Chinese Leaders.

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/09/15/us-image-plummets-internationally-as-most-say-country-has-handled-coronavirus-badly/

Apple's global security boss accused of bribing cops with 200 free iPads in exchange for concealed gun permits

Re: Concealed?

Pedestrian statistics: https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/pedestrians20

In 2019 6950 people were hit by automobiles in the USA.

Gun statistics: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/

In 2017 (last year on record) 39,773 gun deaths.

And according to https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-cdc-is-publishing-unreliable-data-on-gun-injuries-people-are-using-it-anyway/

There are somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 gun injuries.

So, of the gun deaths, 26,000 are suicides, which likely aren't an external risk unless you are very unlikely or the person is a very bad shot, so 14,000 deaths, which is about twice the number of pedestrian collisions.

Blindly assuming that about 2/3 of the injuries are self inflicted, that leaves about 20,000 gun injuries.

So you are right, you are about 3 or 4 times more likely to be hit by a bullet than a car. Thanks for the clarification.

Re: Concealed?

Born & Bred in Canada. Seeing someone with an openly displayed weapon who is not effectively required to carry it by profession is a loud signal you are in the wrong crowd.

In the USA, you are twice as likely to be hit by a bullet than a car, and they aren't great drivers either.

Gun culture is narcissistic with an evil back channel - the majority of gun owners are just enablers of people who will take the gun, use it against the owner, then others. Almost as bad, so many eventually feel foolish for buying a weapon for no reason that they seek out an excuse to use it. There is a famous 17year old in Illinois who might be contemplating this right now.

The rest of the world looks at the USA the way the USA looks at Tiger King. Do not normalize it for a second; it is as deranged as their outgoing President / Traitor.

Re: Concealed?

Probably part of the culture. The sight of weapons can disrupt mindful meditation, this way they can just circulate among the flock. 'A glok for the flock' is not a bad jingle.

Bloated middle age beckons: Windows 1.0 turns 35 and is dealing with its mid-life crisis, just about

Re: Celebrating!

Raise a glass with you. The last windows I used was 0.8, as a student picking up stray contracts in either 83 or 84. I still had the 8 Beta disks & hugeass folder until a friend with a fetish for useless technology adopted it a few years back. Weird ass piece of shit (the software, not my friend).

At the time I ran a pirated copy of QNX 1.0 on my XT. I have still never installed or owned a windows machine since then; though was parachuted onto them occasionally.

Obsessed with originality...

Does anybody talk about the latest CPU ripping of Shockley's transistor? Turings Machine? Von Neumans implementation?

There are plenty of nearly valid reasons to hate MS/Apple/Sun/Linux/... that aren't based on a lack of originality. Set Theory's specialization in Boolean Algebra was the first glorious standing on the shoulders of giants moment in computing. The trend has continued ever since; be glad, not spite filled.

Apple Arm Macs ship, don't expect all open-source apps to work without emulation – here's what you need to know

Re: Having no Virtual Machine support

I think it is a way of expressing disagreement, but could be general dislike.

Max Schrems is back... and he's challenging Apple's 'secret iPhone advertising tracking cookies' in Europe

Re: Gotta love this dude

A few cheers for the EU are in order too! You certainly won't see North American governments passing laws to protect personal freedom. Just a hand over the heart and salute the flag.

Worn-out NAND flash blamed for Tesla vehicle gremlins, such as rearview cam failures and silenced audio alerts

Re: Autopilot is part of the "infotainment system"?

Aircraft autopilots actually work, with well defined boundaries and abilities. Tesla's is a joke, so yes, entertainment is quite appropriate.

Apple now Arm'd to the teeth: MacBook Air and Pro, Mac mini to be powered by custom M1 chips rather than Intel

Re: Confusing much?

Maybe for about as long as the ppc emulator was available in intel macs (about 1 version). It is likely a transition tool to give ISVs a year to type make.

Facebook tells academics to stop monitoring its political ads for any rule-breaking.... on privacy grounds

Re: "the browser plugin scrapes information in violation of our terms"

I'm surprised they haven't tried to blackout the github page. It isn't exactly a sanctuary site.

Not one to be outdone by Microsoft, Apple's cloud fell over too. Unlike Microsoft, it hasn't said what happened

Re: Hosted on Azure

I know you said joke alert, but at one point at least part of icloud was on Azure, and it is very likely still partially served on it. From no less a reliable source than: https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/02/icloud_runs_on_microsoft_azure_and_amazon/.

It is 2020, what was once hilarious and unimaginable is commonplace. Watch some clips of the first US Presidential debate if you don't believe me.

Nvidia says regulators will be 'very supportive' of $40bn Arm buy despite concerns about chip designer's independence

Re: How can ideas be controlled?

Have you been paying any attention to how the US has been using trade embargo as an economic weapon in the last 4 years? It isn't just Jina, they are simply used as the whipping boy example for the world to understand what happens if you don't do precisely what the US wants you to do.

Worse, if you think this derangement is just part of nightmare on trump street; you need to take a step back. A non-asshole government could be elected, but the peace it inspires could be undone in 4 years by asshole-gov-pt 2 ( actually I think it is part 37 by now ). This flightiness is an underlying attribute of the USA (among others) and is a huge red flag to stable trade agreements.

The USA can't be trusted; and their form of communism permits them to use private intellectual property within their country as a weapon against the world. Either ARM has to be kept from them, or everybody needs to move to RISC-V immediately. I know where I am buying stock.

ps: any chance the UK had of wrestling control back was likely ceded by BrExit. I hope you enjoy the fish and coal.

Forget Terminators, says US military, the next-gen AI battles will hinge upon net infrastructure, not killer robots

Good strategy...

You will never see the killer IOT device if you are busy verifying your ip filters. Mercifully the efficacy of the Pentagon makes the Orange Derangement look like a mastermind; so less on this later.

Re: Why wage war ?

Sure, you can't mine the silicon out of silicon valley; but to think that the collapse of an artificial economic equilibrium is the end times is a bit silly. As in the past, it will be replaced with a new balance, and we will move on. In five generations they will laugh at our concern for the value of bits of paper the same way we laugh at the value of tulip bulbs.

AI in the enterprise: Prepare to be disappointed – oversold but under appreciated, it can help... just not too much

Yeah, No. It is a pity both can't lose.

Both sides are little more than apologists for the inability of the marketing automated regression analysis as AI. Since the first was buffoon enough to quote an actual respected scientist in the context of a pulp science fiction writer, then an implied rebuttal from David Parnas: "Artificial intelligence has the same relation to intelligence as artificial flowers have to flowers" is in order.

There are other quotable bon mots about why anybody with a working limb would choose an artificial one that are pertinent to the discussion, but the base line is the same: marketing hype, nothing to see here. Array processors are much cooler now, so we can do better statistics, end of story.

Classy move: C++ 20 wins final approval in ISO technical ballot, formal publication expected by end of year

Re: "Competent, core language"

Bollocks; I've been paid to write kernel code for the past 30 years. It is precisely the ability to have a predictable response from operations that distinguishes a language useful for manipulating low level facilities from one that isn't.

Case in point, an Ottawa firm, once renowned as a tech darling for its pbxes, voicemail and lawnmowers, wrote the entire system in a lightly extended Pascal in the early 80s. Hopelessly stuck, the eventual solution by early 2000 was to run a 68k emulator on a SPARC server -- there was no other reasonable path to delivering the functionality on modern hardware.

About the same time as that company had started doing its thing, Sun had been rolling out 68k workstations. By the time the emulated solution was delivered, Solaris had shipped on several 68k editions, 4 editions of SPARC (including a 64bit), and moved from 1 cpu to 64 physical processors, all writtenin C plus a small bit of machine language. In 2001, for kicks, I ran /bin/ls from a 1988 SPARC-1 compiled binary on a 64-bit E10k; it still worked.

If 'application' developers choose a lower level language, the fault is clearly in the insufficiency of application level languages; be it conceptual innanity, runtime overhead, quality of implementation - a trifecta best called C++. Mercifully languages like Go may provide an antidote.

Re: C++ – never classy

The logical successor is Go, except for the lowest level machine interfaces in which C + asm shine. C++ 1.2 (circa 1990) was the last reasonable version, even still was riddled with `half thought out ideas, implemented half well` to paraphrase a luminary.

Supplimentarly...

Many of the new features should never be used, ever. Remove the +'s, and you have a competent, core language.

You Musk be joking: A mind-reading Neuralink chip in a pig's brain? Downloadable memories? Telepathy? Watch and judge for yourself

Shiny happy neurons everywhere...

If you spend time working with the predictive engine people on a project, you gain a lot of insight into the limitations that multiplying large arrays can offer those seeking quasi intelligent results.

A speaker at GopherCon 18, talked about a system that you jammed go programs into, and it got upset if your source was unusual.

He gracioiusly showed the early efforts, where they fed the array a bunch of good go programs; then fed it new programs. The prediction engine became upset, because the copyrights in the comments didn't match those of good programs.

Try 2, feed the output of the a lexical analyzer into the prediction engine; better, but unless you follow Pike/Cox naming convention, you are a radical outlier, thus suspect.

Eventually, feeding the abstract syntax trees yielded more useful results; possibly an automated code reviewer, that doesn't judge, just states : "that is unusual".

If not for Colorado's lenient drug laws, I might be able to recall the speakers name, and more details of the talk. He may have spoken French, but I was kinda high.

At any rate, it did illuminate the possible value of unconstrained search in a restricted domain, in a way that unregulated markieting bullshit from companies like TESLA never do.

Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles

Re: Local 'languages'

I don't think that is the only place he is known as that.

Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly via TCP, UDP. Obviously, nothing can go wrong

It has the potential to

" It has the potential to enable better web mail clients and apps based on decentralized peer-to-peer routing based on distributed hash tables."

Funny I thought web mail clients and apps were clunky and hard to use because they were shit, not because of routing inadequacies. If anything, a bit less hash might make them a bit more lucid.

Recycling Pied Piper release notes to launch your big idea does take quite a pair. Well done!

All the container folk will barf; after spending a decade re-implementing every network protocol to ride on top of layer 7 strtok() based routing ....

Jobs for life.

Arm China brands itself a 'strategic asset', calls for Beijing's help in boardroom dispute with Brit HQ

Re: A failing experiment

At what point did "the west" become non oppressive? From involuntary enslavement through wold wars, resource wars, systemic racial division, "the west" is far from a flag bearer of tolerance.

They/we can't even lay claim to "free-thinking markets", since the reality has been more of a russian doll: free-thinking markets within militarily constrained boundaries.

I think that the crunch you are perceiving is the sound of a group of western leaders driving their respective countries into a wall.

Sick of AI engines scraping your pics for facial recognition? Here's a way to Fawkes them right up

Re: Photos look obviously distorted

So it is a Pete Townsend generator... cue my my my generation..

Trump gloats, telcos weep, and China is furious: How things stand following UK's decision to rip out Huawei

Not tories - brexit

I think the first UK:USA trade requirement has been delivered. Isn't independence great.

Sure is wild that Apple, Google app store monopolies are way worse than what Windows got up to, sniffs Microsoft prez

Re: Stores might suck, proprietary protocols are the real killer

You can rail against slack/hangouts/(pile of shit); but I have slack (for example) on my ios, macos, linux and android devices. In contrast, because I once had an IOS cell phone device, I am eternally stuck on people upset that I didn't "respond to their text". The kindly reminder that they didn't send a text, rather they used that asshole companies proprietary thing lands on cold ears.

Protocols aren't the problem, people have shifted to certain behaviors; it doesn't matter how open Slack is; it will not have an iMessage bridge until Apple grows a pair.