Posts by IanRS 226 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2013
A two finger salute, before just a raised middle finger became the more common gesture, was a raised middle and fore-finger. It (apparently) dates back to when wars were common between England and France. The English archers were greatly feared by the French, who cut those two fingers off any captured bowman to render them harmless. Hence the meaning of the gesture was that the gesturer could still shoot you, and would be quite happy to do so.
AI is going to be a major transformation factor in the way everything works, just like blockchain was going to be too.
AI works well for pattern matching/recognition, so has potential there. For generative work you may as well employ a parrot - you get recognisable noises copied from elsewhere but no understanding.
Google keeps coming out with interesting looking hardware, at a hobbyist level: audio / vision AIY kits, Coral TPU, etc. Then, not much later, they completely abandon them. Yes they still work, but you have to use their old libraries, which are only compatible with language versions that were current at the time.
So, despite my love of fiddling with interesting new 'toys', I will never be buying any more hardware widgets from Google.
I tried using Ai assistance a while ago for a technically complex problem of displaying a 3D object under multiple configurable lights and a moveable camera. The AI recommended which graphics library to use, gave API calls and lots of demo code. It would have been really useful, except that the library did not exist.
The top 1% of earners contribute 29% of the tax take. The top 10% contribute 59%, and you don't have to be on a ridiculous salary to be in that 10% category: the threshold is about £75K. Since Labour came to power, 11000 from that top 1% have left the UK, leading to a tax loss equivalent to 500,000 average tax payers. If a wealth tax is introduced then you can say goodbye to the rest of them - they are the most mobile people in the economy. Who you will hit is all those who have an expensive property, bought 50 years ago or perhaps inherited, but very little income, who will then have to sell it to pay the tax on its value.
I used to be in a design role where I would design and cost up solutions and present them to the client. (I'm now in an architectural role, so I draw rectangles and join them together.) Our standard terms were for agreement within 28 days at the offered price. If it was for government (including public sector and especially including MoD) work, we increased the price by 20%, knowing that it might be six months before they came back and said 'Yes please.' The biggest risk was not our internal costs or the equipment prices being put up by the manufacturer, but the effect that currency fluctuations would have in buying US priced equipment in the UK. A contingency of 20% normally covered it, and if even that was not enough we just pointed to the 28 days clause and said we would have to requote. They would then have to start the procurement agreement process again.
Within the UK HMG scheme, CONFIDENTIAL does not exist any more, since the rearrangement in 2014. It used to be level 0 was not protectively marked, 1 and 2 were PROTECT, 3 was RESTRICTED, then up through CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET and TOP SECRET. The 2014 change kept the top two levels the same, and everything that was C was revised up to S or down to the new OFFICIAL. It was a pain for police forces, who were a significant user of CONFIDENTIAL and who did not want the trouble of operating at SECRET but considered OFFICIAL too low. The other problem with OFFICIAL is that it includes what was not protectively marked all the way up to quite sensitive information, so everything from the canteen menu to an individual's criminal records ended up in the same bucket. (Yes I have seen a government building canteen menu with OFFICIAL across the header and footer, because the rule there was that every hard copy had to be marked.) Adding -SENSITIVE does not mean a higher level of protection or necessary clearance, just that the need-to-know of the recipient should be more carefully considered, so access control is more important.
The old Business Impact Levels that were meant to help guide setting marking levels did have expected loss of life at various scales as one of the deciding factors. From memory, which may be faulty after 10 years, lots = 6, several = 5, at least one = 4 which was an indicator that CONFIDENTIAL was a suitable level, but those tables were deprecated in the same 2014 policy change.
Borland Turbo Pascal was good too, which evolved into Delphi for writing Windows programs (via an initial release as Object Pascal for Windows, of which the least said the better). They also had sensible pricing for the lower end versions, so even as a student I had a legitimate copy. Then it went to Embarcadaro who turned it into RAD Studio at enterprise-only licence costs. They have a community edition these days, but some surprising features are still enterprise only, such as connecting to a database running on a different machine.
I went on a course "Advanced troubleshooting for NT 4", or something along those lines. Throughout the course I kept thinking "I know this already ready. When is the Advanced bit going to start." Near the end of the week long course, the instructor got onto the blue screen of death, and said that the crash dump file provided information on what was happening when it crashed, and could be used to diagnose the problem. "Ah ha! This is what I've been waiting for" was my thought. "That is beyond the scope of this course," he continued.
Maybe you're younger than me, but I remember an old television advert showing how utilities were working together to reuse the same hole while it was dug up. 1980s at a guess. Why they were advertising this I have no idea. Maybe it was to try to boost their PR image, which was no better then than it is now. After water, power and gas had cooperated, a hearse turned up.
There will be some small print along the lines of 'all divisions must meet their targets' and one tiny division in the back end of nowhere will miss its target by 0.1%, so nobody will get a bonus. This will only apply below a certain level of course, as senior people make valued individual contributions.
I did have ADP turned on, so was also wondering what happens next? Not where to move my data as you are looking at, but what happens to the existing data? If it is/was protected to a level as they claimed that Apple cannot access at all then they cannot just give themselves access. I suspect that as you continue to feed data into the iCloud the new data will not be ADP protected, any replaced data (assuming that new-for-old can be identified) will not be protected, but any old data that is unchanged will stay within ADP, but cannot find any confirmation of the technicalities anywhere.
A few years ago I was doing some consultancy for a major supermarket. I worked across three sites, often within the same week, so sometimes took documents with me. At the exit they had a spot check inspection - push a button and it randomly says check or no-check. If you were to be checked a security guard went through any bags you were carrying. I got checked while carrying a folder marked 'highly confidential', the internal highest level. I was fully entitled to have it, and had even written some of it, but the guard didn't even question it. The office had a mock shop on site for scenario testing, and they were looking for people stealing the confectionary.
My father was involved in the early days of HDD development. Prototype drives that worked in the UK were shipped to the US, where they did not work. Closer inspection found that US customs had opened the package up, then what they found inside, and thoroughly poked around - there were fingerprints on the platters.
If you consider that 24/7 support is 7 days of 3x 8-hour shifts, then a week is 21 shifts. Most people work 5 of those, so 4.2 people for full coverage. Now allow for sickess, leave, etc and it is obvious that you need 5 people per support role. You might just get away with 4.75 if you have a large number of roles which can pull from the same pool of people. Anything less and you will get burnout or just piss them off. Either way, you will soon have no support team.
It is obvious to anybody who thinks about it anyway. Unfortunately, some people don't think.
A long, long time ago (about 20 years) I got a call on my home landline at about 11pm. It was about a system I was highly experienced with, but I was not on call. I was never even on the on-call rota for that system. The manager calling me started off by shouting that it had taken a long time to even find somebody who had my number. I asked her if she had tried the online BT directory enquiries. I have a rare surname, and just guessing that I lived in the same county as the office was in would have reduced it to two numbers. The other was my uncle. She had not thought to try that. I asked if she had asked my immediate manager for my number. She had not. This was a shame, as he would have been rather robust in his response. I then explained that I was not on call and if she had any issues with me being about to end the call there and then she could complain to my manager, but that it would be better to wait until the morning. The only comment my manager made to me the next day about the incident was along the lines of "She will not call you out of hours again."
I was fortunate at the time to have a good manager, who did not appreciate anybody bypassing the correct routes to get out-of-hours help: call the on-call mobile number, then the on-duty manager if that fails, then him (and sometimes he was the on-duty manager). In the last thirty years, I've only had two managers I would trust to cover my back like that.
The company I work for seems to be going a little AI mad at the moment, proposing the use of it for all sorts of things. Whenever I get drawn into the discussions I ask a simple opening question, "Can the problem be solved by either a good pattern recogniser or a parrot?" Sometimes it is the pattern recogniser they need, which means that they might be looking at the right tool for the job. Often, they turn out to be relying on the parrot.
About 20 years ago I briefly worked on the Galileo GPS system. Because this was an EU funded system, politics came into play, and all suppliers had to be from the EU. I had to configure some of the firewalls. EU supplier? Firewall? Yes, there was one, from Austria, that I had never heard of before and never used since. Their rules used what looked like CIDR notation, typically with /8 and /24 networks for what we needed, but they had their own special syntax, where the number after the slash gave the number of variable bits in the range, not the fixed bits, possibly copying the idea from the Cisco wildcard masks. Hence a /24 was a large network and a /8 was a small one.
I've been looking for a new keyboard recently, and thought I had found a decent one. German made, so the engineering quality should be good, and described as a UK layout. No pound (currency) visible anywhere on it. Shift-3 was the hash symbol.
I also have a laptop that has the pound symbol as shift-3, but no backslash (useful for Windows directories) or pipe symbol (which is really quite a useful key under Linux) visible. It turns out you can type them, but you need to know which meta key to use with which unmarked key.
When it comes to particles at a quantum level, they are pretty vague things.
The general meaning of 'particle' at this sort of level is a small self-contained package. Hence an atom is a particle, but if you split the atom you now have two particles, plus any loose bits such as alpha particles or beta particles (but not gamma radioactivity as that is in the form of photons rather than particles - light rather than lumps).
However, whether you count the atoms or the mid-level sub-atomic particles (neutrons, protons, electrons) or fundamental particles (quarks and other stuff, electrons are already fundamental as far as we know) only makes a small difference, as most matter is either hydrogen or helium and only has a few internal pieces. All the rest might be enough to increase the cound from 10^80 to 10^81.
The problem is not so much colour, as contrast. If the entire face is dark then it is harder to distinguish features. There would be just as much of a problem recognising caucasian faces in a low-light environment, but since using cameras to look at dark skin in the light is more common, and hence raises more false positives, than looking at light skin in the dark, it gets considered as a racist problem rather than just the limitations of the optics.
A long time ago, back when I was a techie instead of an architect, and so doing more interesting work, I had to fix a firewall problem. After investigating, I found that two commands would fix it - the first to remove the problem and the second to configure it correctly. The first also happened to remove remote access.
Fortunately, I happened to be in the same building at the time.
On the very first project I worked on as a full-time employee I ended up doing almost all of the printing functionality. (And the third too, but that is irrelevant.) Years later, while I was still within the same company, but the original project had gone into long-term support provided by a small core team, I got a call asking if I could go back and look into why all printing was failing in the test environment before they made the same change to production. Hurrah for good change control processes. Since that office was only across the road I went over at lunch time and started poking around.
"How long will it take to fix?"
"Probably about 10 minutes after I find out what the problem really is."
"How long will that take?"
"Good question, but it will be shorter if I can work uninterrupted."
The original solution used a custom printer driver on the unix servers, requiring that the standard LPR daemon was replaced. They had just upgraded the servers to the next major release of the OS, which re-enabled its own lpd, so the custom driver was failing with an address/port already in use error. It took surprisingly little time to find the problem as the error was clear in the the system log, but they had not looked. Printing was seen as a black art, so it was better to get somebody who knew about such things in if at all possible. It was of course pure coincidence that while on that original project my print jobs always jumped to the head of the print queue. (Not to the level of interrupting the current job, but that was possible.)
Forty years ago or more my father would sometimes bring home prototype printers that his company was developing, to see if me and my brother could crash them just through the buttons on the front panel. We sometimes could. Many years later I used my own son the same way while building an electric organ. Give a small boy access to a device with over 200 organ keys, buttons and LEDs which makes lots of noise, and the hard part is keeping track of what he is doing. The even harder part is prying him loose again.
No! No! No!
You want to give companies who are already the world's biggest trackers the information about where everybody is going for every site which is personalised enough to require an individual's data? And make it so that when their systems go down, nobody can get into anything at all? If you think they can make it 100% reliable, just consider Office364. And then store everyone's data on a blockchain? The whole point of a blockchain is that it is public so that data and changes to the data on it can be seen by all parties.
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