Posts by I am the liquor 447 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Oct 2013
Economists confuse me.
All the transport workers, sandwich makers etc. who were previously supporting production in offices are no longer required. That sounds like an increase in productivity to me. Producing the same output with fewer people; a solution to the crisis of productivity stagnation that those economists have been complaining about for ages. But no, apparently now it's "a big problem for the economy."
Interesting book (well for certain values of interesting):
How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk
The basic point is to come up with a measure of the true cost of failing to address your risks, in a language that the bean-counters can understand. He's targeting security risk, but you could equally apply the same principles to obsolescence/reliability risk.
They had a numerical and chronological relationship. You had Win 1.0, 2.0, 2.1, 3.0, NT 3.0, Win 3.1, WfW 3.1, NT 3.1, WfW 3.11, NT 3.5, NT 3.51, released in that order. Then came Windows 95, which I guess the marketing department decided was 91.49 versions more advanced than 3.51.
Frequent renaming of things is another Microsoft predilection. I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky it's still called an XBox, and hasn't suffered multiple rounds of inexplicable identity changes like Team Foundation Server/Visual Studio Team Services/Azure DevOps, or Office Communication Server/Lync/Skype For Business.
It was 95 OSR2, after 95 and before 98.
Clearly the point is made that Microsoft has considerable form for confusing version numbers. No-one can quite remember what order they came in. It was all sensible up to Windows NT 3.51, then Windows 95 came along and all sense of numerical continuity went out of the window.
Death by dangerous is what the CPS decided to charge her with. In fact the seriousness of the charge was cited by her lawyer as a reason for her not to be extradited from the US.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-50870459
Presumably the CPS considered driving on the wrong side of the road to be "A brief but obvious danger arising from a seriously dangerous manoeuvre", a level-3 death-by-dangerous with a recommended sentence of 2-5 years custody and mandatory disqualification:
https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/offences/crown-court/item/causing-death-by-dangerous-driving/
Even for death by careless, disqualification is mandatory except in the most exceptional circumstances, and it is definitely not "about the same as speeding on the motorway."
So you're saying that people with any ethical standards shouldn't take jobs where they might be asked to keep secrets?
You've also misunderstood the term "public interest". It's not what the public is interested in. It's what's in the best interests of the public.
When I see these stories about the latest CPUs, I start thinking it might be time for an upgrade. But as a non-gamer, I have to admit my 10-year-old Intel is fast enough.
Then on the odd occasion, I turn off NoScript in the browser, the CPU fan starts making like Concorde warming up for take-off, and maybe I do need some extra CPU power after all.
Seems like there's something wrong when browsing a shitty web site is the most computationally demanding task of the day.
I'm sure the DoD's QA is excellent, but you'd hope the standards for civilian aircraft would be orders of magnitude better, not worse.
F-16s don't have to carry passengers, and the pilot knows they're signing up for a certain risk of death when they take the job. Though they do have the means to descend safely to earth without the aircraft, which is a nice reassurance to have.
People would rightly have conniptions if 15% of all 737s ever built had crashed, but that's par for the course for a lot of fighter aircraft, including the F-16.
INT: COLONEL STICKLER'S OFFICE - DAY
COL STICKLER
What do you mean you accidentally left your packed lunch in the cargo bay? That was a max-load test flight! You could have crashed the plane!
SGT LOAFER
Well, it didn't crash, did it.
COL STICKLER
Hmmm, no. I guess the max load is a pound more than we thought it was.
Never mind bodyweight, they use pounds alone for everything, no matter how ridiculous the numbers get. They will tell you with a straight face that the cargo capacity of a C5 is 281,001 lb or that the Statue Of Liberty stands on 54,000,000 lb of concrete.
What happens when you scan the QR code? Presumably the phone's browser does a GET request to the URL in the code, and then...? Or do you have to scan the code with a specific app?
I'm talking about these existing QR systems that are already in use, as described by mark l 2, not the future NHS contact tracing system.
The flip-phone was the real winning format for pocketability. One of the last good ones was the Samsung E1150. They replaced it with the E1270, which was a flimsy, plasticky piece of shit, and then decided no-one wanted to buy flip phones any more. Now the only flip phones you can get seem to be off-brand toy phones marketed at your gran.
migrating code will be easier for Win32 applications than for UWP applications
migrating UWP applications is intended to be "mostly automatable"
If "mostly automatable" is the best they can promise for your UWP codebase, then it looks like UWP is getting thrown under the bus.
All those "dinosaurs" who stuck with Win32-based programming and refused to engage with anything Microsoft invented after about 2005 must be feeling pretty smug now.
There must be some law of software development that says something like "the newer an API is, the more likely it is to be obsolete."
Certainly they have "aimbots" that fire the gun automatically at the right moment, the pilot just has to point the plane in the right direction. It doesn't seem much of a leap to have the computer steer the aircraft as well does it.
But arguably they've already been doing that since the 1950s: the computer in the air-to-air missile works out how to steer itself at the target. And it doesn't even need "AI" to do it.
Come on though, clearly "everything you do on your tablet" is much less than "everything you do in the same room as your tablet". Well, perhaps not for some people, but I'm going to guess that Jimbo and sabroni are both over 30 and inhabit a world outside of touchscreen devices at least some of the time.
The success of one attack motivates the attackers to repeat it against others, causing much greater losses to the wider economy. Losses which are not borne by the original victim - to them it's an externality, which doesn't come into their financial calculation about whether to pay the ransom or rebuild their data.
The idea of threatening sanctions to force companies to consider such externalities is hardly a new one. It's why companies get fined for polluting water courses or exposing our personal data.
Fines are the appropriate sanction here, though, not prison: you just need a sufficiently large monetary penalty to alter the financial calculus for the company, à la GDPR.
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