Posts by Dwarf 1527 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Dec 2014
Even with information, they don't act, as anyone will know if they drive the A3 to A31 junction and see the piles of fly tipping along the road. Many people have reported it, but they still don't clear it, even after a couple of months.
How will AI magic pothole detection help ?
So, he was half way through a procedure and left the tool in there.
I guess this means that that remainder of the procedure wasn't completed then ?
After all, if someone else came in with another identical tool to finish it, then they would have found the first one still in place. However, since they didn't then I can't see how they would have finished the procedure. Similarly, if they continued with existing tooling, presumably a step on their procedure is to remove the tool at some point ?
I wonder what was left disconnected / removed / not in its normal operating condition ???
Surely Microsoft need to use their own Azure Chaos Studio on their network. Once they have it all working and nothing ever fails, then and only then can they preach to everyone else.
Currently this just looks like a story of "we have a tool, but don't use it, but you should use it" implying that in some way, it would solve THEIR problem.. Muppets.
Real intelligence beats artificial intelligence as we've had millions of years to evolve to where we are now.
Anyone else notice that people always assume that AI is more intelligent than the average person, but it could equally be lower than the lowest intelligence person on the planet.
It is after all, just one very complicated stack of if statements and we can safely assume that it won't cope with all the edge cases that it will encounter on our road network.
Companies could not make a less productive working environment if they tried - and they tried really hard.
A few reasons why people hate coming into the office :
1. Small desks that make it cramped to work all day long, plus the fighting with the neighbouring clans who try to push their stuff into my space. This is how tribal wars start.
2. Hoteling and Hot desking - book a desk, it sounds great, until you get to it and find someone more senior working there already.
3. Having to clean up the previous inhabitants rubbish that they were incapable of putting in the bin / storing somewhere until next time they come in. If I find it on my desk for the day, its going in the bin. Is this really GREEN or just the previous inhabitant trying to mark their territory ? The modern way of animals urinating on things to say "this is mine, but it smells of pee"
4. The background noise due to the fancy new "no ceilings, no sound deadening walls in offices and people having impromptu meetings next to my desk as no meeting rooms are available.
5. Meeting rooms are always booked up and unavailable, or some one less important is overrunning and will only be 5 minutes (read 15 or 30 minutes)
6. Oh, the commute that costs us in money and time, plus its unreliable, un-necessary and always on strike.
Put bluntly, you couldn't create a less productive working environment
Good people are good people, where they live is not important. Deciding that they should be X miles from some random building you have decided to buy / lease is completely irrelevant.
Things should be output based, care about what people do, not where they are.
Bad employees are still bad employees, even if you can't see them shirking in front of your face, so don't penalise the rest of us that are trying to meet your impossible deadlines and deliverables.
If you can't figure this out, then don't be surprised when your competitors have and all the good people leave.
If I’ve purchased something, I get to choose when it’s come to the end of its useful life, not the manufacturer.
What we need is for businesses to be compelled to release the code for devices they can’t be bothered with any more so that others can make better firmware.
You can then bet that manufactures will then start taking more notice and building longer lifespan devices. This also helps to slow down the throw away culture.
Personally, I’ve got no interest in replacing everything I own every 3-5 years to help a bunch of companies bottom lines.
Back in the very dim and distant past, whilst using Unix - on an AT&T system with a 68000 cpu and Xenix on 286’s, I got to like the rm -r command and was frustrated because DOS didn’t have an equivalent, so I wrote my own, it was called prune as you could prune branches of the file system.
During development on my shiny new 486DX2-66 with Borland C, I was getting my head around recursive code that could wander around the file system, I learned a very important lesson of handling the . and .. folders. This was after a test on a small folder, where it was taking a lot longer than expected, it had wandered up to the top of the disc and wiped virtually everything. Luckily, my new machine also had a QIC tape drive in it and I had backups, so there was plenty of time to re learn about .. whilst the drive was rebuilt from tape.
All this, just because they killed the perfectly functional, but basic graphical editor in the OS on a platform they call windows.
You would imagine that if they understood anything, they would give choices, a CLI editor and a GUI editor.
An editor should be one of most basic tools on any OS, it just has to work when the admin has a problem, so no dependencies, no download on demand, it must be preinstalled as fault finding is hard enough already, so having to jump through other unnecessary hoops must be avoided.
I'd love to see a Pi come with the M2 socket on the bottom of the board, that way, no need for a Hat, cable to connect it, connectors both sides to plug the cable into and all the expansion pins and footprint for a HAT remain free. Surely this must be cheaper and more useful than this approach ?
It would be even nicer if the SD cards went away and a SATA port existed. The biggest problem I've found with Pi based projects is that the SD cards destroy themselves over a couple of years and you have to rebuild them from scratch again or implement off-host backups / regular imaging of the SD cards to fall back to when they start to fail. This is based on using well known branded cards and a reasonable number of Pi's doing useful things in a variety of places.
I've had similar experiences with tiny form factor USB storage, which is effectively the same thing, just in a different shape package.
Given that BT are removing Copper, since its valuable now and generally has been installed for a few decades so may be a bit corroded here and there, there is actually not a lot in it for the average punter. Sure, they will get a faster internet connection, but that's a by-product of the change to fibre running more modern protocols over the top of it.
The real reason is that fibre has no value if removed by yobs and presented at the local scrap merchant, similarly, BT don't have to provide 48VDC down the wires, so that will save them a bob or two for each house per month.
I wonder what householders will think when the power next goes out and their emergency phone no longer works. Yes, people have mobiles, but they don't work in all situations whereas a piece of wire will in more situations
Personally, I won't bother with any upgrades until BT beg me to come in and replace the kit free of charge. After all, they have to provide the service come what may. I don't care how as long as it works. Infinity 2 is fast enough for most stuff these days.
Please remember they are doing this for their benefit, not yours. Marketing are trying to spin it as a positive for you with the relevant price increase of course.
I'll sit here with my Tea | Coffee | Beer | Single Malt | Paper, etc until they come knocking to do it for free
@Mayday. You clearly don’t understand marketing.
Their is some expression about fools and their money.
Luckily it seems that we don’t fall into that category.
I was pondering the difference of a battery on a wire to power it vs just having a wire to power it this, thus getting rid of the battery, making the whole thing lighter and cheaper. Then I realised that I don’t understand [cool|sick|todays word for cool] either.
Perhaps he would learn more quickly if a bunch of day zero vulnerabilities are dumped on his lap as they are actively being used to attack his customers.
There is nothing like having angry customers on the phone or the product reputation going down the pan.
This should help in their anger management training and their learning of why vulnerability disclosure practices are like they are in the industry.
He should also learn about the payment schemes that others do for successfully identified bugs as obviously his own test teams are not doing their job.
GreaseWeazle is a solution for reading data off old floppies in a variety of formats
With their approach to quality control on their software - as evidenced by the constant breaking of Windows updates, I can only imaging the fun that owners would have not knowing if their car will start today, or if I'll suddenly have to pull over mid journey for 20 minutes whilst critical updates (candy crush or similar) is installed.
Then there will be the problem with the user interface, things will keep moving for no apparent reason, today we have decided to move the main user interface screen from centre in the dashboard to behind the light cluster in the boot. Next week it will be under the front wheel.
And of course, we've all seen the Microsoft vs General motors "If cars were like computers" joke from years ago which seems very appropriate right now. Perhaps this is about to become a reality, just with a different person running Microsoft today. Here's a copy I located on-line, not sure who the original author was.
At a recent computer exposition, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: “If General Motors had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”
In response to Bill’s comments, GM issued a press release stating: “If General Motors had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason, you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5 Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive – but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “General Protection Fault” warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10 You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.
This is a non-issue.
All silicon devices have yield problems due to defects that occur during manufacturing. Various processes are used to minimise the impacts of such losses on production, since lower yields drives up device costs.
On RAM devices, at the design phase, additional columns are added to memory devices and then during the post manufacturing test phase the devices health is assessed and there is a one-time process that blows fusible links within the chip to permanently disable failed columns, hence disabling them. After that, some of the spare columns are configured, again with fusable links to make them assume the address of the failed column, thus resulting in a fully functional device again.
As density increases, the number of failures on a device will increase fairly linearly. I guess it now makes more sense to map out larger regions and this results in the approach detailed in the article.
There is nothing wrong with this. The same technique is used in widely in the industry. Some examples are
CPU's are shipped with complete cores disabled when they failed during manufacturing and nobody cares since they get a cheaper CPU.
The same approach is used on EEPROM (NAND and NOR types), although the process differs. NOR flash (the more expensive ones) are shipped defect free and has the same approach of mapping out bad pages with some spares that are already present in the device.
NAND flash (i.e. the cheaper one) are shipped with defects present and visible and a process to allow the host processor to determine where the bad pages are and manually map around them. On Linux and embedded systems, there is the Unsorted Block Image File System (UBIFS) that handles this process. To ensure that the bad block map its self is reliable - since failures can statistically occur anywhere, the same approach of replacement pages is used on a small number of the first pages in a NAND flash, again to ensure increase yield.
Similarly, hard discs (of the spinning type) use the same approach with some spare sectors, these are placed in a number of regions across the disk surface so that fairly similar seek / access times can be achieved. Again, these are silently mapped in as bad sectors occur or grow on the underlying media. You can see this in the SMART metrics for the discs.
SSD's use the same approach as EEPROM's listed above.
I'm sure there are other examples, but this is just the list of what springs to mind. So, nothing to see here other than higher yields and lower costs for everyone, which is a good thing.
So, now the wheels have come off because of the way things have been run, then perhaps to "maximize shareholder value", you need to change something different, like, oh, I don't know the management approach / management team or something like that.
We'll all stand around with popcorn and see what happens next as everyone likes a bonfire.
I bet Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard are spinning in their graves with what's happened to date. Such a shame from what used to be a good company but got sucked into so much greed. Well, I hope you are happy with what you got.
Everyone knows the stock line that investment companies always use
The value of stocks and shares may go up or down. Past performance is not an indicator of future performance
I wish they had stuck to doing their primary job and use actual intelligence, rather than the fabled artificial intelligence, which generally is fairly dumb.
When will vendors realise that attempting to strong-arm a customer into their vision (usually aligned to larger profits) will not work.
Customers choose what works for them and if your product no longer meets the need, then they will move on.
Doing this with only two months notice is extra nasty. Even if customers are forced to move to their cloud offering because of the aggressive time limitation, then you can bet that they will look in their own time at what the longer term replacement product without a Sage badge will be.
Pre-Pandemic, most office spaces were so cramped due to the cost per m2 of space in each city and that resulted in the quality of working life being low. This was before they went all funky and did the open ceiling and uncarpeted floor thing, which just vastly increased the amount of background noise.
Then they converted many meeting rooms into collaboration spaces, so you just had lots of conference calls going on and people turning up at desks and perching on desks whilst they talked. This increased the background noise again as everyone tried to compete to be heard. In short, we created a really poor working environment for everyone.
Working in an office with your headphones in to drown out the background noise makes you far less productive than working at home in a nice comfy office or at the kitchen table where you don't have to start each day by removing the junk left on the desk by yesterdays inhabitant that hopes to grab the desk again tomorrow. Nor do you need to do all the hoteling to book a car parking space, meeting room and a desk.
Companies should be paying employees to have their own kit at home, for the better quality broadband service and because their heating will be on for longer during the winter months.
Personally, I find that I'm much more productive at home, since I can focus on the deliverable and not have so many interruptions, I can also meet with people in seconds anywhere in the world via a simple video conf. call on whatever tech stack the company is using.
There's also the environmental aspect of not needing to get transported to some other desk and back each day so for those that actually need to go somewhere for their job, then the roads, trains and underground networks are less busy so everyone gets a better quality of life and the amount of infrastructure projects can be reduced.
Then there is the increase in personal time, no commute means a better quality of life as I can spend some time with the family and have far greater options for when I walk the dog or go to the gym, before, during or after the work day, since I can work more flexibly on time as I'm no longer racing for a train at a specific time each day.
Roll the clock forwards a couple of years and I expect that those that are forcing for the return to the office have either got real problems recruiting or they will have gone bust due to the far higher operating costs compared to their competitors.
Petrol stations have been saying for ages that there can be no mobile phone use on the forecourt due to the perceived issues around RF and the possibility of sparks, yet at the same time, they allow the installation of hidden mobile phone masks within the forecourts that send the exact same signals, just at a higher power level, but those are apparently OK.
I'd be 900% confident that the risk of dirty great batteries being charged at high current and in close proximity to petrol vapour is a far higher risk. One spark due to a bad connection or something electronic releasing the magic smoke and suddenly there will be a lot more smoke.
Yes, I know that the electronics will be handling charge currents and ramping it down to 0 before a disconnect etc, but what about in fault conditions.
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