Posts by Doctor Syntax

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

Re: Such memories...

You could have cut notches into the other sides to give yourself more opportunities.

Re: Such memories...

"There are eight ways of inserting a diskette into a drive. Only one is interesting."

Ancient proverb.

British motorists will be allowed to watch TV in self-driving vehicles

Re: Too early.

Some people deal well with edge cases and some not at. That doesn't alter the fact that evolution has brought basic ability to a higher standard than you believe.

Re: Clippy behind the wheel

OK, try the opposite. When is it not safe to drive at the speed limit? That's one that calls the whole issue of speed limits into question. "We" set speed limits on the assumption that we can do better than the driver on the spot and yet in adverse conditions "we" expect the driver on the spot to set a safe speed that's lower than the speed limit. So what's the basis for that assumption?

In any difficult situation relating to driving it seems that it's the driver, on the spot, seeing the situation, feeling how the car responds to steering and breaking input, that is to be relied on to make the best decision.

"a quantum leap forward both for Safety and Climate change."

If by "quantum leap" you mean a step change and not a small one, then the best option is to rejig the way we work to reduce communing, We've just demonstrated that that is possible so why not make it permanent?

Re: Clippy behind the wheel

When you get a long convoy occupying a lane how does another vehicle get to change lane into it or through it, e.g. to get to an exit?

I've lived through quite a number of governments now. I'll concede that Gordon Brown's policy of buying elections and charging the cost to the future (tax on dividends of shares held in pension funds, pretending house prices didn't affect cost of living when setting interest rates, student loans, etc) were dire but not even Blair's* government wasn't as badly stricken with hubris as this one.

*Smirk-on-a-stick's smartest move was stepping aside just as the Browns stuff was about to hit the fan.

Re: Too early.

There are probably some situations that are so out of the ordinary that the only reasonable action to to pull over and try to get a human to help take the blame.

FTFY

Re: Too early.

Drive to the motorway - tell the car what junction you want to get to and relax go to sleep. Not a good way to arrive at your junction.

Re: Too early.

One thing the human brain has evolved to do is calculate intercepts between objects in relative motion. In fact that seems to be a widespread ability in mammalian brains - hunting and prey animals rely on it.

Re: Clippy behind the wheel

if AI reduces those numbers even by a fraction

"If". That's a heavy load for a small word to carry. Consider the number of vehicle miles travelled during that time. When you work miles travelled per accident you're setting the AI a tough challenge.

"If". Aye, there's the rub.

Re: It's a paradigm shift

"Autonomous cars will cope very well with a regular environment. So city centres, motorways. Less so leafy country lanes."

I live in an area of leafy country lanes. Well, not vary leafy; most are bounded by dry stone walls.

"to the extent that self-driving cars will cause fewer accidents than the average person"

The average person? Or the average of all drivers where all includes learners and the inexperienced, just passed the test drivers. It also includes the over-confident numpty, the drunk and/or drugged and the over-tired who should have taken a break. Is this a good average to aspire to?

Even so, if you take whatever estimates you can find for number of vehicles on UK roads, average number of miles per vehicle and the number of fatalities you'll find that the number of miles to drive per fatality by the average driver is still a pretty high target to meet.

"In a moment history may judge as legislative hubris"

Hubris is SOP for this government.

Google tests battery backups, aims to ditch emergency datacenter diesel

Re: Can someone do the math for me please?

But lead/acid is so last century.

Re: Can someone do the math for me please?

There's no visible CO2 production when running from a battery.

But batteries are already used in UPSes so all this does is make a longer-lasting UPS. The point of a diesel generator is to back up the UPS when the power-cut lasts longer than the UPS will provide for. In the event of a really lasting power outage the diesel tank can be topped up. How do you pour a few gallons of electricity into a battery?

Putin reaches for nuclear option: Zuckerberg banned

The same expressionless stare.

Re: Well, damn

"Putin hasn't stooped that low yet."

Yes he has. Novichok.

Oracle users fail to get that moving apps to cloud means business transformation – Gartner

Re: Incredible

How is it that nobody among those CEOs called up Larry and said "Are you done fucking with my business ? I've got money to make and markets to corner, I don't have time to waste lining your wallet" ?

If they were going to do that wouldn't they have done a long time ago?

So, what happened with GitHub, Heroku, and those raided private repos?

Re: Bit by bit, we will learn

In ten years time there'll be fresh categories of lessons to learn and that will be in addition to the existing lessons, still unlearned by those who will learn by no teacher other than experience.

'IBM is now a very different company' says CEO as Q1 2022 beats expectations

"client engineering"

A new one for the Bingo card.

AMD: Our Epyc CPUs helped Mercedes win F1 Constructors' Championship

"The F1 team rely on second-generation Epyc processors in its servers to power the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software that is critical to modeling and testing the aerodynamics of F1 cars, which in turn can give them an important edge in driving faster."

Maybe this isn't the best time to be pushing this line. Whose CPUs do Ferrari use?

Netflix to crack down on account sharing, offer ad-laden cheaper options

"I think they just need to understand exponential growth is impossible to sustain"

What sales and marketing fail to realise is that they don't have exponential growth. Never have, never will. What they have is sigmoidal growth which looks like exponential in the early stages.

I think he may have been an optimist. It certainly would be optimistic these days. Of course ad blockers help sort that out. It's odd that the advertising industry doesn't like them. Or maybe not.

Ads. That always seems to be the solution: more ads. Is the ad budget seen as an endless well of money? At some point advertisers' managements are going to start taking a closer look at what they get for that money.

Microsoft plans to drop SMB1 binaries from Windows 11

Re: That NAS under the stairs

Same here. Debian & Devuan stopped talking to it with SMB some time ago but it also has an FTP server so it's still reachable. What's more the Brother all-in-one scans to it so it's still in use.

Beanstalk loses $182m in huge flash-loan crypto heist

Re: Where do I go to borrow one billion dollars?

It's the quantum mechanics idea of virtual particles applied to finance.

"popular on wall street at the end of the yuppie era"

And at any other time.

IoT biz Insteon goes silent, smart home gear plays dumb

"mulling the possibility of a class action lawsuit"

Against whom?

Scraping public data from the web still OK: US court

Re: Just for bots

Probably a good match for some agencies' job ads.

You'd need to define authorised access and scraping.

Re: Misdirection Of The Public......Again!!

@A/C

Do you have a vested interest in violating the public's privacy?

It cuts both ways. If they block access for those not in the anointed few they can't complain if the rest of us ignore them. Even less can they complain if we choose to use some other site that doesn't have the same attitude.

Re: site stupidity.

Once upon a time robots.txt was there to stop scraping but that seems to have worked on the principle of a gentleman's agreement. There are no gentlemen in big tech any more.

IBM ordered to pay $105 million to insurer over tech project's collapse

"IBM has form in screwing over its salespeople."

Maybe it's mutual. The salespeople are screwing over IBM by selling what can't be delivered.

Twitter faces existential threat from world's richest techbro

As with others, I can't see Twitter as being comparable in any way with a rain forest. It's true that when a brand gets taken away from its originators it's apt to go down the tubes. And, do you know, in the case of Twitter, I couldn't care less.

An early crack at network management with an unfortunate logfile

"I became convinced that no one ever read it"

Always assume that in X months/weeks/days (and it's always sooner than you anticipate) you will be confronted with this piece of code to fix or amend and you won't even remember which idiot wrote it. What would you want in the way of documentation and can there be too much of it?

Twitter preps poison pill to preclude Elon Musk's purchase plan

Re: How many

This is a difficult question to answer. The number seems to keep going up with no indicaation that we've got to the final total.

"Another thing worth mulling is, where would the $43billion come from."

Debt. If he's got that value in assets he can use that as collateral against a loan. Once he's got the company he lumbers it with the loan. Even better is the possibility that he finds someone else to sell it to; after a few cycles the amount of debt sinks the company and Twitter has tweeted its last. Normally I'd think that's a bad thing (e.g. Maplin) but I'm prepared to make exceptions.

Re: Poison pill

"somebody who is a bit of a dick"

And in some cases a complete dick.

A plague on both their tiresome houses.

Re: 'I have much trouble agreeing with'

"So, wait, you're for or against free speech?"

Yes.

Cybercriminals do their homework for latest banking scam

Re: Tell me again...............

"(2) How my sofa is SO much more convenient than an actual bank

(3) How my laptop is SO much better to deal with than a real person"

The reality these days is that actual bank branches are becoming increasingly remote and when you finally complete the treck to one the staff are disempowered and unable to do anything except tell you to go online or ring. Having dissuaded everyone that it's not worth visiting their "local" branch they can close if due to lack of business.

Trying to phone, of course, results in getting a recorded announcement that they're experience an unusual number of calls (for at least the last decade) and you should go online,

The fact that this exposes you to fraud is your problem, not theirs.

Re: be wary of anyone providing personally identifiable information as proof of their legitimacy.

Hello NatWest HSBC, looking directly at you.

Re: You're the bank, do it yourself, that's the natural response.

I take it that this was your former bank.

"What's the past of least risk with greatest reward? "

Path?

Climate model code is so outdated, MIT starts from scratch

Re: A language they cannot read?

You probably discovered it's possible to write a BASIC program in any language.

You can buy a company. You can buy a product. Common sense? Trickier

Re: 'twas ever thus

I worry when it looks as if that stuff has been programmed in someone's sleep. Especially if it's in /etc

Re: 'twas ever thus

"If you're lucky, the windows may be included as well."

I've seen a Will where the testator specified the window panes were to stay with the house. However it was a C16th Will and at that time glass was so expensive that if you had more than one house you might take the glass with you when you went from one to the other.

COVID-19 contact tracing apps were suggested as saviors. They sometimes delivered

In the UK HMG seems to have somewhat surrendered to the "Let's just forget all about it." wing of the Conservative party so it's not surprising the whole thing is being wound down. It didn't help that the whole thing was given over to someone who's competence is among the lest trusted in the UK IT community. Also the first element - Test - seems to be overlooked; why else have free lateral flow tests been wound down? If you can't test you can't trace.

IBM not cooperating with discovery, say attorneys in age-discrimination case

An good question. Probably half the answer is that the concept of self-incrimination only applies to criminal cases and the other half from the fact that lawyers' children can't be allowed to starve, or something like that.