Posts by Doctor Syntax 42414 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"you need to be play-booking the worst scenario of what a shutdown means,"
I'm not sure they'd be calling it "the worst scenario", more like a game of chess. It probably means preparing to roll out something called "Tock-Tick" or the like that they've prepared for just such an even and trying to work out how close to 180 days they can get and still be first mover.
Quite possibly it's dental stone - plaster of Paris used to make casts.
I used to get 25kg bags of that from a dental supplier in Belfast to be made up into 1lb bags for SOCO to make casts of footprints & tyre marks. The supplier decided to add a 2nd line of business - video store, back in the days of VHS. It made a strange contrast, his shop full of videos and his dental display item - an old dentist's chair complete with a pedal-driven drill.
I reckoned that rather than have the SOCO's add a bucked and stirring stick to their kit it was easier to make the bags big enough and tell them to add a pint of water and mix them in the bag by squeezing it a few times. I wish I'd patented the idea - a few years ago I came across bags of mortar or concrete mix in M&Q with hose attachments to add water for in-bag mixing.
"If you really wanted to be serious about this sort of thing, you'd take angular velocity into account and put the most frequently accessed files on the outermost tracks of the drive, and the least frequently used ones on the inner most tracks."
If you want to get into track optimisation you put the most accessed material as close together as possible to minimise head movement between it. To minimise head movement to the less often used material you put that most used material in the mid-range tracks so you seldom have to do a seek right across the width of the disk.
"Sort of like how it took them a few tries with Windows 10 to deal with the new policy of forcing updates that may require reboots. Yes, it's annoying since it seems like it always happens right when you're in the middle of something,"
I remember that one. At a local archaeology do, somebody was about to demonstrate his surveying S/W - luckily it was just to a few of us after his talk. His laptop must have picked up an open WiFi or something and phoned home to be told to update there and then.
"but if you stop and consider, a lot of the shit that we used to deal with (email worms, the messenger service reboots/spam) have almost completely stopped. Grand scheme, it seems like a small price to pay."
It only seems a small price if you don't know there can be a smaller price to pay by doing unobtrusive background updates that only occasionally go low enough to require a reboot after the upgrade's complete, and just plain reboots at that, When you know that it seems an inexcusably inordinate price.
"But, even on sites like this, which cater to more technically inclined users, rarely do you see anyone who has taken even basic steps towards debugging the issue to show that it really is the OS."
If the upgrades to the OS, made by the OS vendor who has charge Real Money for the OS (albeit via the H/W vendor) crash because, as you say, they've cut QA costs there there's no reason to look beyond the OS and its vendor.
We've seen a fairly recent example where the upgrade required a recovery partition larger than the default installation recovery partition and would either hang at about 20% complete or throw an error. And the vendor's advice to fix the "everything can be done with clicks" OS was to drop down to the command line, resize a partition. drop and recreate a partition (and hope the command-line newbie would drop the correct one) and then do some configuration based on information they'd recorded before the partition drop. W2K was a reasonably effective OS. The above is the reason a lot of us think it's all been downhill from there.
"In those days, for a server you used Novell Netware."
Oh no I wouldn't. I'd use a real Unix server. I had a very brief encounter with a Netware server. Trying to stop a database server brought down the whole thing because, as far as I could see they were doing the equivalent of running the kernel and all services as a single process.
You need to realise that there's and argument consider W2K was probably peak Windows and everything has been going downhill since then but you might have trouble running more recent versions on your old H/W anyway. It's always good to hear of H/W that was built to last, so much is built to be disposable these days. If you wanted that reliability of S/W there day's you'd be well advised to go for Linux or BSD,
You can always spot those whose knowledge comes from reading a post by someone whose knowledge comes from reading a post whose knowledge comes from Microsoft marketing* - or maybe a bit less direct than that. One thing they don't realise is that those of us who run Linux as a daily driver are often asked to sort out problems for those running Windows.
* The alternative is those who, despite never actually having installed Windows, have used it, now consider themselves a computer expert and made a ham-fisted attempt to install Linux by clicking all the non-default, wrong options.
"And now, there's nothing a mac or linux box does for an average user than a PC doesn't do better for still way way less money."
Yup, when it comes to crashing, slow boots, extremely slow and buggy upgrades a PC with Windows is way ahead of the the pack, or at least, way ahead of Linux. I don't have a Mac so I don't know for sure but I'd guess on those metrics Windows is ahead those as well.
"And no, you aren't going to install Linux on your non-technical household type users."
Odd you should say that. I installed Linux on my cousin-in-law's PC some years ago after she'd got hit with ranomware. She's still using it for web, email, maybe a bit of LireOffice, maybe not much these days, very fond of Google Earth. She's at least 90 and a in terms of long-ago work experience, used to be a hairdresser. Does that fall into your non-technical household type?
I think I have one possible useful application for such a device. Screening emails to detect those touting for reviews, ticking all the boxes for the most negative response and entering complaints about touting for reviews in all the text boxes, perhaps varying it occasionally to say "This reviews has been completed at random by computer".
BT's idea of rendering text to landlines leaves something to be desired. After no information since ordering one Amazon vendor started giving me a text commentary, quite useless as it was about delivery of a present a couple of hundred miles away.
The first word was, I think, "shipped" spoken very abriptly - but that's not what it sounded like.
And a hint for anyone whose business process involves sending SMS without checking that the destination really is a mobile: test it to see just what you're sending. Include a URL and a few numbers with more digits than a street number or a date. Then review your business development process.
As far as I can follow the discussion elsewhere the malware is introduced in a build-time script in the source tarball and, subject to various constraints might or might not be incorporated in the actual built library binary. It's crafted to attack SSH only but even that, again, if I've followed the discussion correctly, still depends on systemd's use of the SSH server. So MacOS might or might not have the relevant code into the built version it's unlikely to become a problem without systemd - unless launchd works in the same way in this respect.
At least some of the discussion hinges on this appearing to have been what used to be called a long firm fraud with a state actor as the likeliest perpetrator so the question arises as to how long and what else might they have got into, possibly using other handles.
The Amazon logistics set-up is a strange beast. Over the last year or so the predicted times when a parcel is out for delivery may very a little but usually settle down to a range of a couple of hours or thereabouts and the the delivery is usually within about 10 minutes of the centre of the range.
If that fails the system more or less falls in a heap. It looks as if there is no provision in the software to deal with a missed delivery. Apart from anything else, if the failures are not being caught not only can the customer not be properly informed what's happening, the data needed for quality improvement isn't being collected.
In the past errors have included the failed delivery being treated as a return with emails to print off an RMA and a courier arriving at the door to collect the package they never delivered. That's not happened recently - now there's just silence followed, eventually, if you're lucky, by the delivery information being updated to say it will be delivered at some unspecified time in the future. I'd guess their weaselling is to deal with the consequences of that lack of handling anything that doesn't go as intended.
"there's more money to be made by holding the excess cash through the summer and wisely investing it"
That's probably SBF's thinking but he was a bit unlucky. He probably genuinely, really expected to be able to get it back, plus what he spent on himself, friends and family, before anyone noticed; the self-delusion of everyone who gambles with other people's money and loses.
"a custom language model that evaluates unsubstantiated claims based on source documents"
Which source documents are these? The source documents that we really positively never touched because they're customers' property? The source documents that really are not in the model because the model is simply a statistical summary of lots of documents so it can't be a copyright infringement? Or the source documents which form a carefully curated, reliable training set as opposed to blindly sucking everything in sight into the general training set?
" If someone wants to insist that I have to watch their video adverts, well I don't need to view anything on their site."
And I certainly wouldn't want to buy anything they're trying to flog me. Paying to show me ads for their competitors might be marginally effective.
Of course if the advertising industry smothers them with statistics to show how accurate their targetting is they won't know they're wasting money. The two relevant data items the advertising industry won't be in a position to collect are that the lawnmower has been bought and the alternative one, that the potential buyer has changed their mind.
You're getting downvotes for coming so close to making sense here and failed.
How about they fling out the same ads to everyone visiting a site, without trying to make them any more relevant than "whatever the subject of the article is"?
The easiest and most accurate way to understand what's relevant to the visitor is the subject of the page. Why try to make them more relevant by tracking what the user has looked at in the past?
If, to take the example, I was looking at lawnmowers last week but looking at chainsaws instead this week it may well be that either I've bought a lawnmower, in which case ads for lawnmowers are irrelevant, or I've decided not to buy one in which case ads for lawnmowers are irrelevant (you might notice a theme emerging here).
There is, of course, one body of people who will make a profit by showing me ads for lawnmowers even if the evidence shows I'm now in the market for a chainsaw instead. They're the people who are selling my attention to lawnmower makers. It's not to fanciful to consider whether they're actually defrauding the lawnmower makers as well as invading my privacy by tracking me.
From the advertisers' PoV the best value is likely to be to show me lawnmower ads when I'm looking at pages about lawnmowers and chainsaw ads when I'm looking at chainsaws but then there's no expensive alleged targeting money to be made from that; the advertiser could contract directly with the site publisher and cut out the advertising industry middleman.
For avoidance of doubt I own a couple of lawnmowers, chainsaws, strimmers and garden shredder. I'm not in the market for any more so any advertising that I might fail to block would be an irrelevant waste of money but I would appreciate some decent weather to get out into the garden to use some of them.
I rather think "advertisers" referred to people working in the advertising industry. The ones who sell advertising to the actual advertisers. Of course the actual advertisers may well not like other people's ads but they themselves are so special nobody would want to block their ads. Or maybe think they're clever to know about ad blockers but think their target audience won't.
"I do it anyway because bad behaviour shouldn't be rewarded."
It certainly shouldn't. Don't use those sites. What's really alarming these days are the likes of FOSS projects who won't or, I suspect, can't put up a site to display anything useful without Javascript turned on. If a project can't do that I assume it has nothing useful to offer.
