Posts by Phil E Succour 110 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2012
> In all honesty, I'm surprised that (m)any people would be still using usenet at all these days. It sadly
> (mostly) stopped being useful for me (apart from a few excepted groups which somehow still
> maintained strong communities), and became completely swamped with spam, and new users
> stopped arriving, a looong time ago…
I believe the inflection point was when it was taken over by Google.
You make a good point which shows true redundancy can be very difficult and/or expensive to achieve. Imagine you want redundant power feeds from separate sub-stations for your facility, the power company are happy to provide them, but it so happens your facility is the other side of the freeway from the substations and there's only one nearby bridge with a suitable cable culvert crossing that freeway. Both cables end up crossing the same bridge, and then a truck hits the bridge and you have a single point of failure. Most bean counters wouldn't sanction the extra cost to build the infrastructure to fix that, claiming it's an "acceptable risk", which is why things like a single sub-station fire take out Heathrow Airport for 24 hours or more.
>>I would have sworn that a drummer from Spinal Tap was killed by a re-entering satellite
I thought he either spontaneously combusted or choked on vomit (although they didn’t specify whose vomit). They've had so many drummers though that if a satellite strike hasn’t already taken one out it would be a good bet for the future.
I’ve not seen any confirmation of what happened, but my understanding from reports I’ve read is that it hadn’t (and wasn’t intended to) reach orbital speed, so unless the detonation accelerated some debris to orbital speed the resulting detritus will have found its way back to the surface somewhere.
I used to work at Heathrow in the 1980s, and when a Concorde lit the afterburners for take off and rolled down the runway the vibrations used to set off lots of car alarms in the multi-story car parks.
Never flew on it myself, but my parents went on a day trip to Egypt on Concorde! Happy days.
Absolutely there are cases where the technique (and I agree it’s not “intelligent”) can be applied to specific domains and yield some useful results.
That doesn’t though make it a panacea that will cure all of a company’s ills, however many wet dreams it might give the consultants and senior management. I’ve sat through too many presentations with titles like “Blockchain – how it will revitalise our company and transform the industry” (spoiler alert – it didn’t), or seen things which are successful in one domain taken up by management consultants, who generalise it and claim it will apply everywhere, but it doesn’t (six sigma I’m looking at you).
So, you’ll have to forgive me if I pass on the opportunity to sign up for the AI cheerleader training.
It will be the emperor's new clothes again. Hoards of consultants and PHBs with MBAs will spend three or four years driving AI projects which deliver very little, if anything, of value to their companies, then they’ll move onto the next fad leaving a horrible mess behind.
Maybe I’m getting cynical, but I’ve been round this cycle so many times now it’s getting boring.
InSight met its fate because its solar panels, the lander's only source of energy, were covered by Martian dust, making it unable to draw enough power to carry on with its mission.
I get it that adding some kind of mechanism to clean the solar panels would be more mass to lift to Mars and would potentially introduce extra failure modes, and that such a mechanism wasn’t necessary to reach the design life of the mission, but…
It always seems a shame when these landers crap out because their power source is covered in Martian dust but their instruments are otherwise functional. Perhaps, if dear old Elon ever makes it to Mars, NASA could supply him with a feather duster and a French Maid's outfit and he could drive around in his Tesla MarsRover dusting off solar panels for them?
Just when you think the madness has reached its zenith, the entertainment continues as Twitter drops its policy aimed at preventing misleading information about Covid-19:
https://news.sky.com/story/twitter-quietly-drops-policy-preventing-sharing-of-covid-19-misinformation-12757898
When you add up the numbers of staff who have left, or will shortly, as a result of the CEO's flailing around, there can’t be many employees left, and those that are still around won’t necessarily have the right mix of skills to keep the ship afloat, never mind implementing whatever Musk comes up with next.
I was going to say it’s like a soap opera, but if this was fictional it would have jumped the shark several episodes ago.
> As of October 2014, Google says the plugins most frequently launched
> by Chrome users were Microsoft Silverlight, Google Talk, Java,
> Facebook's video chat plugin, the Unity gaming engine, and
> Google Earth, in that order.
I must be living in the dark ages, I've don't use any of those plugins.
And yet, I don't feel I'm missing very much somehow....
>>And the lawyers keep on getting richer....
'twas ever so. I'm not aware of any legal system which actually seeks justice, truth and fairness for the parties involved, the whole set up is designed to keep the laywers in yachts.
The British satirical magazine Private Eye hit the nail on the head many years ago now when it printed a photo of a high profile libel lawyer and their client following the failure of their case in court. A speech bubble added to the client said "We lost", the speech bubble added to the lawyer said "No, YOU lost. Here's my invoice".
