Posts by Doctor Syntax 40432 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"I really don't want to go on a recruitment merry-go-round only to then discover that the environment is just not for me."
It sounds as if this research put numerous people on a recruitment merry-go-round for jobs that didn't even exist, all to prove the bleedin' ovious. What did their Universities' ethics committees make of that one? Why does it remind me of that research project submitting bad pull requests to Linux?
Boot a Linux system and it probes for peripherals. I assume that Windows does too and has done since the Plug and Pray came into use. If it finds something it loads the driver. If you initially boot your persistent memory device, use it, switch off and later restart having plugged in or unplugged something how does it cope with that? If persistent memory means, for example, it can be just switched off and on again it will continue without making the necessary driver adjustments.
I suppose you could have all the drivers loaded all the time but then there are probably many more times the drivers that need to be there and the kernel needs to manage all those. What worked on a Spectrum doesn't necessarily play well with modern hardware.
To make use of a very different memory model requires a different approach to software; I think we're all agreed on that. The question is, whose responsibility is it to develop that. Intel seems to have put the hardware together on the basis of "Build it and they will come.". They didn't. I'm sure that Intel will have contributed drivers to enable Optane to work in as a conventional filesystem device or as a cache but it doesn't appear that they have done the development work for the novel approach that would be needed to make it a persistent memory device.
When I bought my current laptop I had the option of configuring it with an Optane or SSD. I looked at that, thought I'd vaguely heard of Optane but didn't really know what it was I was being offered or how I might be able to use it and it seemed expensive for the the size. So I plumped for a 2Tb hard drive for /home & /srv and an SSD big enough to hold the rest at least a couple of times over.
Optane didn't have the price per Gb to make it a mainstream storage device nor the software support to make it a mainstream persistent memory device. The former was probably an insuperable problem. The latter might have been a possibility but it would have needed at least a proof of concept OS to take advantage of it and enough time for that to be built on.
The thing about files is that the provide pieces of storage with a purpose.
This collection of bytes is a cat picture, that is a letter and the one over there is a spreadsheet. I want to delete the cat picture and email the letter (or vice versa). Even as regards programs, this is the desktop manager and is in use pretty well all the time. That' one is dia and I only use it every few weeks or even months when I need to edit a diagram. By allocating names to them we're able to manage them.
Files are an essential part of managing data. Even without secondary storage we had files. They were boxes of cards or (probably) card images on tape.
Don't forget that these are the folks who'll push all sorts of crazy cost-cutting ideas.
Having said that I've mentioned here before the client's accountants who, having been provided with and completed user acceptance testing of a nice Y2K compatible version of their S/W running on brand new H/W insisted on not taking the risk(!) of moving from their old, non-Y2K capable version until they'd finished closing out 1999 in mid-January 2000.
The problem seems to be power distribution capacity rather then generation. Given that it's easier to move data than power we should see data centres clustered round power stations. That would include the landing points of the off-shore wind farms.
It's not too difficult to envisage trade-offs - housing developers buying a data centre's power allocation when it moves.
"But I get the feeling an amount of irreparable harm has already been done to both parties"
Who are the actual parties? Musk, yes. Twitter the business? No. The other party is the Twitter shareholders. Whether irreparable harm has been done to them depends on the court's decision and the court is likely to protect them if it sees them as victims. Irreparable harm to Twitter the business? Very likely but it's just the football.
I can't think of many things that he could do to aggravate the judge more. However, this is Musk. Although presumably there'd be some administrative hurdles to jump. Would these include shareholder agreement. It might also prompt Twitter to ask the court to take control of his shares pending a decision.
"The more appliances such as these aircons, electric cars, domestic heat pumps etc can adapt to consume 'cheap' electricity, the smoother the consumption curve will be, until you will basically have a flat demand, and no 'cheap rate' electricity - at least not in the sense we now know it where night-time electricity is cheaper because of reduced demand. Instead what will probably happen is that the cost of electricity will depend almost totally on available supply rather than demand"
It's the other way round. Some uses are elective and some aren't. By reducing the price when non-elective use is lowest steers the elective demand to those times. It's the variable pricing that would smooth the demand, not the smoothed demand that would kill the variable pricing.
"No, that's a classic example of selection bias. We've forgotten all the crap that died right away and we only take note of the few survivors that are still around."
Many of us remember the pain of dealing with the low quality of 70s stuff & forget that anything that lasted actually belongs to those times.
"the ignition system that was right behind the front grille"
I believe the car was designed with the ignition facing inwards. Late in development the engine was turned round, hence the grille-facing ignition and the noisy gearbox. I suppose the original version had problems routing the exhaust. It would also have had problems with frozen carburettors in winter.
"I'm hoping something similar will happen with digital stuff."
It won't Making cheap expensive stuff that wears out is far more profitable.
My dad worked for David Brown Tractors. The farmers couldn't wear them out. DBT were taken over and closed down years ago.
"This comment is quite funny if you grew up in 1970s Britain."
Not so funny if you were already an adult and were paying for it.
The engineering involved a great deal of precision. It had to do to ensure it lasted exactly long enough to get to the other side of the factory gate.
Medium and media have the same problem as datum/data.
Worse, I have a book on XML Schema by an author (or maybe his editor) who obviously thought they were clever enough to know "schema" followed the same pattern and was a plural noun. It isn't. Schemas seems to have become acceptable as a plural alongside the original schemata. But the frequent use of "schemas are" sets my teeth on edge. Oh well, I don't need to read about XML very much these days.
A big problem here is that marketing departments persist in training customers to be phished by repeatedly sending out emails indistinguishable from phishing. The emails purport to come from the company but actually come from a spamming digital marketing company and invite the recipient to click on links. The worst of all are those (banks I'm looking at you) who include links that require a log on. They may claim to have undertaken anti-phishing training but to send out such emails they must regard responding to such emails as normal and their resistance to them is likely to be weak. And, of course, their victims customers are being trained to be phished.
The most useful thing the Online Safety Bill could do would be to include a clause punishing such behaviour with a mandatory 1% global turnover fine. Preferably doubling it for each successive batch sent.
"The reason is quite simple: for proper IT organisation you need expertise at multiple levels and money."
This is a managed service provider. Providing multiple levels of expertise is their job. It's not some small fashion retailer down the street, this is what they do for other people for a living. The entire business is paid to provide expertise.
FWIW my last gig before I retired was at a digital print service provider. Not quite the same as this but providing a secure IT-based service was their job. A separation between the office and the production system was absolutely fundamental to the way they worked. That was the best part of a couple of decades ago; it could be done then and its should be done now.
I do wonder, however, if a managed service provider could be vulnerable via one of their customers. If so then segmentation between customers should be standard.
I wonder if such businesses take elementary precautions such as keeping their office systems separate from those they use for providing the customer service. And maybe even segment the latter so that if one segment gets popped it doesn't affect the whole customer base so they really can say "only a small number...." and mean it.
Maybe it should be the trials and approvals that carry the rights to be licenced, along with the methods of synthesis if these are novel.
A molecular structure is, if not a natural occurrence, at least a possibility of nature. It should be no more patentable than an algorithm. Proving that a substance is an effective and safe treatment and in what circumstances, on the other hand, is what makes it valuable.
"Traditional modelling methods (10 years or so ago) would take the model of the amino acid sequence, simulate heating to a high energy state so the chain moves around a lot in to random confirmations and then reduce the temperature and simulate the rearrangement in to a low energy conformation. "
I'd have thought a more productive approach would have been to simulate the synthesis, adding one amino acid at a time. As each emino acid is added there must be relatively few low energy configurations which wouldn't involve a reconfiguration of the existing molecule so substantial as to require significant energy input.
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