Posts by GrapeBunch

The Great Brain Scan Scandal: It isn’t just boffins who should be ashamed

Re: Other fads - AI is based on stats too

"It took Google about 100 computer scientists to feed the Alpha Go database with millions of past historic documented Go games."

I doubt it. In chess, databases of millions of games have long since been compiled. Without huge effort, you can also choose to compile a database of the extant million (or three) games played by the tested best players. If the quoted statement is true, it could just as well be argued that the 100 scientists (and it could more cheaply have been 100 lay people or 100 teenagers with direction) were first filling a surprising lacuna in the culture of the game of Go. I've read Go books, and the approach is a lot like chess books: here is a technique, and here is a game that illustrates the technique. Rinse. Repeat.

In chess, it is not difficult with a high degree of reliability to evaluate each move of the 6 million games. The, ah, Art has sufficiently advanced that the evaluations of expert human commentators have been checked by computer chess engines. I'm guessing, but I suspect that was not so easy in the game of Go, as the new program did not have so much in the way of shoulders to stand upon.

The failures of programmers to replicate the ways they thought the human brain worked, while winning chess games, led pretty much to redefinition of what AI was. The chess programs that play at human World Championship level (or higher) do not attempt to mimic how a theorist thinks the human brain works. The programs that did, were left in the dust decades ago. Although it might be fun to bring back one of those programs on modern hardware. Chess has ratings. If your rating is 200 points the higher, in a match of 4 games, you will win about 3. A rule of thumb is that doubling the processing speed of a competitive chess program will improve it by about 20 rating points. Between the World Champion and the level of those dusted programs on their contemporary hardware is in excess of 1,000 rating points. But I'd rather liken it to the exercise of looking back at Phrenology and rescuing the parts of it that sort-of were valid.

Re: Proustian neuroscience

"If you're going to call the author of "À la recherche du temps perdu" a loony, I shall have to ask you to step outside." Oops. There is no outside.

Typo made Air Asia X flight land at Melbourne instead of Malaysia

The highlight of the trip for me

was the adverts for cheap flights to the orient that accompanied the article. It's technology wot caused the bother. 50 years ago they would happily have navigated to their far-off destination with the help of: looking out the window; and, a wristwatch.

Sex is bad for older men, and even worse when it's good

Re: So ?

I remember decades ago a space opera novel where much of the population had undergone an operation (or maybe implants, it doesn't matter) to say bye-bye to the familiar patterns of exertion and rest, waking and sleeping. So a guy who had not undergone the procedure was travelling (in a space ship, naturally) with a woman who had recently taken the plunge. Because she didn't tire, they were now "incompatible", and he suffered all manner of existential angst. But if I recall correctly, they encountered a situation where his rhythms saved them from a crisis. So maybe all was forgiven.

Re: Did they check

"for the consumption of "supplements" by the men involved?"

That would do it. Boner pills do affect your blood pressure. Men who aren't having sex aren't taking boner pills ("it is sincerely hoped"), so if they didn't correct for boner pills taken by the geezers who *are* having sex, their study may be hooped. Or maybe it says more about boner pills than it does about geriatric sex.

Before reading the remark of "Justicesays", I was going to suggest that the story was a mathematical joke. April is the 4th month. 4=2^2. September is the 9th month. 9=3^2. September Fools!

Nul points: PM May's post-Brexit EU immigration options

Re: Recount

"Except he did (even though he says he didn't)"

Farage said, giving examples, "Schools, hospitals, GPs". That doesn't mean giving all the money to the NHS. I'd imagine that starting a (working) medical training facility, which would fulfill all three suggestions, would direct a substantial portion of the dosh to the University of Short Strand, or whatever. You might accuse me of splitting hares, but at least that's better than composting vampires.

Re: Re:So poor people have less of a say in economic decisions?

Yabbut then the rich people, feeling put upon, put more money in Panama, or withdraw from their local trading bloc, lol. Democracy and Capitalism aren't monolithic, they're a battlefield. Except that large chunks of Capitalism have been and are being taken off that field by Free Trade agreements.

Re: IT skills shortage

Being in Lithuania would heap extra exigencies on the worker. For example, you'd have to tune in the weather for Luton or Victoria or Valparaiso, Indiana rather than the real (for you) weather in Vilnius. And you'd want to change your name to something less Lithuanian. If your name is Vladas, you'd have to remember to be something English and reassuring to the callers, such as Bada$$.

And oh yeah, my Math degree was never worth more than taxi-driving here in Canada. The only reasons I didn't become a taxi driver were: never learned to drive; lacked the social skills of a typical Math grad. LOL at my own joke.

Latest Intel, AMD chips will only run Windows 10 ... and Linux, BSD, OS X

Re: @fandom

Forgive the naive question, but my recollection from the days of 386s and 486s is that the main hurdle to running Linux back then in a 386 or 486 system was RAM. The typical 386 system did not have enough RAM to properly run Linux. So has Linux become slimmer in the ensuing quarter-century?

Foundations used to solicit the donation of old computers. I was considering such a donation and asked the obvious question. It turned out that the desktop box I was considering to donate was not powerful enough to donate to them. Then I did a double take, because the most powerful computer in the house also was not powerful enough to donate! This is part of the "naive" in my question.

Childcare app bods wipe users' data – then discover backups had been borked for a year

Re: Not surprised...

Dear Odd,

We are reliably informed that the IT-technical term for erasing a working system before the new system is up is "hubris".

Even at home, you replace a hard drive long before you expect it to fail, because new hard drives are quieter / more capacious / more reliable than the one you're using. Then you put the old drive on your secure shelf as a known good working backup. In addition to any other backup systems you have in place. It's "free", or nearly so.

Is it time to unplug frail OpenOffice's life support? Apache Project asked to mull it over

Re: The problem with LibreOffice is it is not a software development entity..

Yeller pills? YELLER PILLS?? Charlton Heston would never take no yeller pills.

It's OK to fine someone for repeating a historical fact, says Russian Supreme Court

So the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany jointly invaded Poland. But the latter part of the post, did Bandera declare Ukrainian independence while in a German concentration camp? I read here that he declared Ukrainian independence first and only later did the Nazis decide they didn't need his ilk. So that would be inaccurate. It seems harsh and unreasonable to us that he would be convicted on such a small inaccuracy, but there it is.

Here in Canada we have free speech, yet Holocaust deniers have been convicted of spreading hate. Did any of the cases hinge on such a subtle point of logic? I have not a clue.

Of course Putin is a jerk and Russia is the scary enemy, but let's not be too proud. Here's an example. The new Canadian government is better than the previous one, but--when is a sacred trust not a sacred trust?

http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/robyn-urback-after-campaigning-off-the-backs-of-veterans-the-trudeau-government-turns-its-back-to-them

Still got a floppy drive? Here's a solution for when 1.44MB isn't enough

Copy protection

In the old days, some software copy protection relied on damage to an area of the diskette. It would look for data in a certain area, and if an unreadable error code came back, it would let you proceed, but if the read came back with data or zeroes or unused area, HONK, you're out. I wonder if this system lets you emulate unreadable areas on a diskette? And is it programmable enough to emulate 5.25" or even 8" true-floppy disk interfaces? Returning to my Datavue Spark laptop, AFAIR its diskette drives are not full size, so this would be a non-portable solution for it. I'm not complaining, this seems like it is geared to be a godsend to some ("the few") with thorny and potentially very expensive problems to overcome, not a hobbyist toy.

Datavue Spark

In the basement I have a 1980s Datavue Spark, which boots DR-DOS from diskettes. In the 1990s and 2000s I wondered if such a thing would ever surface, but now I'm guessing that it's too late and too expensive. My other retrofit wit dream was drop-in processor replacements with no wait states and negligible power consumption, but again I guess the donkey has bolted on that one too, as tens of millions of old desktops have long since turned to rust in landfills, socketed motherboards and all. One retro-project that I did attempt was to put an 8 GB (8 because the computer won't see any more) IDE SSD in a circa-1994 Thinkpad 701C (butterfly keyboard), for sexy and silent (no fan) computing--but I didn't make it work. In theory it seems straightforward, but I've never seen anybody claim that they have one working.

Holy friggin' Dell! $67bn EMC mega-gobble to complete on Sept 7

Re: so,

Dell Virtual Machine Technologies ?

Is it possible that VMware could just make us a PC operating system. You know, a proper operating system. And we could forget this Windows-Inquisition?

EU verdict: Apple received €13bn in illegal tax benefits from Ireland

Re: Apple have strong bladders..

"At least the money won't go directly to Brussels but to the Dublin Government."

I imagine that within days, the bills will be going out from Brussels to Dublin, reassessing whatever bailouts and subsidies Ireland has received in recent years, an amount that might exceed 13 bn, especially if penalties and interest accrue. And some or maybe even all of that will be going to other Euro nations.

I like the analogy of the stolen car, though I don't know how accurate it is. The Irish gov't will not "go to jail" for misappropriating money from the other EU nations, but they may have to pay it back, with penalties and interest. I also like the analogy of seizing the assets of the tax payer; wait and they could disappear as easily as they were created. The 13 bn could end up as an uncollectable bill, on more than account.

As to the USA's role, remember this one: "The business of America is business." They may have said other things too, but beside that first one, everything else is crocodile tears.

Chinese CA hands guy base certificates for GitHub, Florida uni

The long road out of this valley.

Remember the programs that would import bookmarks from all your browsers and then export a combined list to any of them? They've been partly superseded by in-browser facilities that store your bookmarks in the cloud. Neither solution has been ideal. I wonder if we can't expand the original concept to import and export CAs and heck, anything your browser or OS has a list of, with fine filtering capability (for example, I don't want bookmark X to appear in browser Y because it doesn't properly render X's pages; or I don't want bookmark Z to appear when my device is connected to a less than 100% trusted WiFi; or I want my Windows computers to NUL any transmission to certain IPs, but on an Android machine that would be irrelevant; I don't want CA W to be trusted on the machine where I do my banking ...). Would such a thing be a good foss-project?

The thought of each user editing his CA list, separately in each browser, on each device, is a forlorn one. What you want is to be able to import a list from somebody that you (really) trust, while maintaining whatever distinctions you've already made. At the same time, I understand why browsers would not want your CA list to be easily editable. They don't want malware to be able to get at it.

Another possible collaborative project is a single program that would update tags in your images, audio, video, and ... files, rather than four or more separate programs. Same sort of concept, just no security-consciousness required. Thank you for reading this naïve overview.

LinkedIn sues 100 information scrapers after technical safeguard fail

Re: I dont have a Linkedin account

"We'll you've clearly saved you password and you've agreed in the past to let them have access to you contacts."

If you say so, but could it be something as simple as them slurping my password because I opened google Contacts in a different tab in the same browser window ... or could they even have paid google gmail for my contacts list? Or was I tricked? Yes, I told LI an email address, but I did not knowingly authorize them to access it nor give them my password.

I work in a field so obscure and unremunerative (spell checker says that isn't a word) that I don't get any of the spam job offers that others have reported. So maybe the joke's on LI. Having somehow revealed my contacts list to LI, I am very careful NOT to invite people unless I'm sure they already have an LI account. LI tells you that. They could be fooling me, but that's a subject for another day.

Tech fails miserably in Forbes' most innovative companies

Re: Chipotle?

"It also includes plenty of companies that have notably done poorly in the past year, a good example being fast-food company Chipotle."

Of course they're doing badly, they don't even know how to spell their own food, which is chilpotle. Dios mio.

Robot babies fail in role as teenage sex deterrents

I am reminded of

when they studied teenage girls' emotional responses throughout their monthly cycle. Who to use as a control group? Of course, boys of the same ages at the same schools. The result? The boys showed more emotional variation than did the girls. Therefore, I humbly suggest that they try a robot baby experiment on the boys instead. I am soooooo glad that I'm too old to play subject in such an experiment.

A USB stick as a file server? We've done it!

"Also, those sizes - esp the 200MB one - match..."

What do you call a router with a 200MB stick acting as a media server? Hub-ris.

Watch the world's biggest 'flying bum' go arse over tit in a crash

Tummy Makem's take: "He Liam".

False Northern Lights alert issued to entire UK because of a lawnmower

Of course,

the Spitfire had a wooden body. The Lancaster idn't. It wasn't a wooden lawnmower, so the sun didn't spit fire. What was all the fuss about?

Paper mountain, hidden Brexit: How'd you say immigration control would work?

Brokenshire

Is that more like Middlesex, or Westmorland, or Sussex, or Yorks? Or is it another way of saying that Hobbits gained safety not through obscurity, rather through unemployment?

Microsoft has open-sourced PowerShell for Linux, Macs. Repeat, Microsoft has open-sourced PowerShell

Re: "On Linux we’re just another shell"

Is forking (not a variant of double chess) in play for these conundra? Personally, I like verbose; I'd rather script in a structured BASIC than in REXX or perl or whatever.

Microsoft’s stealth scripting engine arrives on Android

Sharepoint glow

Interesting. The most negative review of Sharepoint I found in a brief survey was this:

https://www.itcentralstation.com/product_reviews/sharepoint-review-31821-by-sam-montoya-csm

two stars out of five, although this snippet seems pretty damning for a business product:

"When installing the R2 update, it did end up creating issues with the .NET code and eliminated some of the extensions. For example, the Excel extension that is used to view Excel spreadsheets within SharePoint was either damaged or deleted. This has caused issues with exporting to and from SharePoint and hasn't been corrected."

But if one didn't read TheReg and relied say on Wikipedia, one might come away with a much more glowing impression.

Personally, I don't mind Windows, but I turn off everything I possibly can, from scripting to indexing. I even paid money for software that would remove IE from Win2K, not sure that's an option any more. The whole relation between MS-OS and MS-add-on-software is invidious, and should have been Anti-Trusted long ago, for everybody's benefit (except perhaps MS's).

Post-Silk Road, Feds bust chaps for 'dealing heroin, coke' on world's largest dark web souk

$1000 a month is around what alcoholics spend on themselves.

"a quarter of buyers were spending over $1,000 per month, suggesting that they are reselling the goods to others"

Huh? A recent BBC documentary had buyers of experimental recreational drugs (which are now illegal) spending about that in a week for their own use. The ~suggestion~ is a lie, and it is a lie with a purpose.

Networking wonks say lousy planning, not DDOS, caused #Censusfail

fwiw, Hoxx VPN Proxy (free) reports 11 Australian servers.

"There dismal of the suggestion" Just wait until I get ~my~ dismissal in their. Then yule sea sump thin.

Adblock Plus blocks Facebook block of Adblock Plus block of Facebook block of Adblock Plus block of Facebook ads

Re: BLOCK WARS

"Help me, Addywan Begonni, you are my only hope!"

I'll have to take that to the AddyWan Ker Chief.

Dedupe, dedupe, dedupe dedupe dedupe... Who snuck in to attack Microsoft Edge?

Will Life imitate Art?

"Rowhammer involves rapidly writing and rewriting memory to force capacitor errors in DRAM that can then be exploited to gain control of the system." Imagine that a "capacitor error" is an actual fire, as one might find if the attack conduit is a Smart Meter, and the "memory" is simply the On/Off of a device in its network.

TP-Link fined $200k, told to be nice to wireless router tinkers after throwing a hissy fit

Mork lives in your neighbourhood and still calls home regularly.

London's Met Police has missed the Windows XP escape deadline

Re: Perhaps not entirely surprising...

The apparent fact that they are willing to accept on their network machines that run Win10--which is forever to be in flux, and thus cannot be subjected to the same level of screening, ever, and certainly not yet--means to me that they are not relying on the OS for any measure of security. If so, that could be a Good Thing. You'd have an intranet with most of the computers on it. Then all of your internet-capable machines would go through a router, with your wonderful security software on it. A computer could be one of the above, but never both. Then of course you'd have a bunch of machines that were neither. I imagine that the head honcho's secretary's machine would have a keyboard, mouse and scanner (but not USB, CD, diskette, PCMCIA, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Telephone etc etc) and for output, a printer via parallel port. Not a single machine would have its own firewall, anti-virus etc etc because it would all be handled by the server (in the case of the intranet) and by the router's firewall (in the case of the internet). That sort of thinking didn't quite work out for the Iranian nuclear plant, but maybe they weren't strict enough (humour noted). I seem to be advocating BOFH over Boff. Maybe I'm advocating a Fool's Paradise, so go ahead, refute me please.

How many zero-day vulns is Uncle Sam sitting on? Not as many as you think, apparently

The Producers

Company X knows that embedded programmers will create backdoors and give / sell them to spooks. So it proactively creates one of its own and then sells it, in advance, separately to each of the spook orgs. This maximizes utility and profit for Company X. Soviet Communism fell because of not too dissimilar madness, "so it can't be all bad".

Mozilla 404s '404 Not Found' pages: Firefox fills in blanks with archive.org copies

It's tedious for the site-owner to do this by hand

If you write a web page with external links, typically 90% of those links will be 404 after a few years. The pages largely still exist, but the site has been moved or the pages in the site reorganized. Installing the latest and greatest content management system used to break most of the links on a site.

It's faster to change the links to point to IA than, in general, to find them anew. After one boring session of editing links this way, I was tempted to suggest pointing to the IA version from the very start. Another pitfall avoided is when the link still exists, but its content changed. For example when a domain is allowed to expire, then is taken over by pr0n or worse.

I hope that IA doesn't delete, but rather deep-archives sites that are requested removed from public access. Eventually, what's on them will flow into the public domain. OK, most would be best forgotten, but the gems justify the overburden.

Windows 10 Anniversary Update: This design needs a dictator

From your Wau-ten, I'd choose wotten = rotten, in a certain accent.

From "windows_10_anniversary_update", it might be contracted to ~w...ate~, which, spelling corrected, might be:

wait - to see what we do to you, --or

weight - our full corporate weight upon you forever.

It used to be an operating system, something you didn't need to lather yourself up about.

Re: I HAD Win 10...now I don't. You can't get there from here.

Would it be incorrect or merely impolite to call what Win10 did to your hard drives a rootkit?

Re: The Dutch have the perfect explanation

> W10AU keeps making me think they made a version specifically for Australians.

Does it have dangly things suspended from the brim of its hat? I mean, more than other MS software does.

Doctor Syntax

Nice example. In the 1960s, IBM published readability figures for matte paper. Perhaps that's why so many brochures were printed in blue ink on white paper, which colour combo was the most legible. I wonder if over the years the same work has been done for various screen technologies. One obvious hit against a white = 255-255-255 emittive screen background is that it can get glaring if you turn up the brightness.

In the days of DR-DOS, most drop-down menu apps (including M$) went with white text on a deep blue background, which was great except maybe that it was ubiquitous. It's definitely "an 80s look". When I have the chance, I put deep yellow text against a dark red background. These are both basic-16 colours. If the font is not spidery, it is quite legible--and different.

An issue with light colour on dark is that when the application shows--gasp!--images, it has to be ever so slightly intelligent not to show images in reverse. A simple rule to accomplish that would be: show images in their original colours. A printer driver also needs to be ever so slightly intelligent. If 10 birthday suit is white (or grey, yuk) on black, maybe we will see these issues solved, ha, or maybe we'll relive them.

Re: Windows Version Numbers

Just yesterday, in an expansive mood, I thought it would be fun to start a rock group called "Windows Nine". On stage, the group leader would ask the audience: "A lot of you have asked what the nine stands for," followed by appropriate noises from the bassist and drummer. "And nobody asks about Windows, we just like to break 'em."

Windows 10 still free, even the Anniversary Update, if you're crass

Re: yep. absolutely would use it

Köszönöm. With the score standing 0-3, I upvoted this post because on my Thinkpad W520, MS refused to automatically install Win10 because it was not ready ... I wondered if the W520 was "ready" for Win 7 Pro 64-bit, which it came with from the factory. There definitely are bugs in Win 7. Most obviously, I turn off the trackpad in Control Panel, but if I have to reboot, Win 7 turns it on again. Networking isn't up to snuff, and troubleshooting / diagnostics is just as useless (which is "completely") as it was in Windows 95. If we're Windows "fans", and I guess I must be because I continue to use it, the reason is that it does certain things well, not that it is a panacea. I used to like OS/2. [insert emoji].

Ineffable lightness.

I downloaded the latest Win 10 iso, 64-bit, and then just let July 29th pass. Can't say I was "too busy". Did not put the Win 10 on a stick, nor burn a DVD+-. Just let it go. Aaaaaaaaaah. I'd have to say that my Windows 10 un-Experience so far is calmness, like a G & T late on a muggy afternoon. Not a 10, maybe a 7.

Kaspersky so very sorry after suggesting its antivirus will get you laid

The Placebo Effect

Is a many-splendoured thing.

Milk IN the teapot: Innovation or abomination?

I apologize in advance. I wanted to upvote an existing post, but couldn't find just the right one. As I understand it, tea requires really hot water (86 ?) on the leaves themselves to bring out the proper flavour. But if you heat milk to that temp, you will ruin / curdle it. And if you gain any time, some poor sod will lose it by having to scrape the crud (the correct scientific term) out of the pot. Or the sod will omit to clean, and you will be left with an even worse return engagement. Conclusion: "list it".

Following Edgar Cayce in this matter, I take coffee black, and by extension, tea without milk. I also prefer the stuff made in glass or ceramic, because metal may impart an off-taste.

UK's 'Sir King Cash' card fraudster ordered to cough up £560,000

> Is 5 years (Or even 2.5?) of one's life really worth that money, assuming he hasn't already spent it that is!

I'm sure that prison time is hell or death to many, but if he's already survived the initial 7-year sentence, he will be well stuck in. Penance or networking? Depends on him, where they put him, and luck. I know what I would do, in his shoes.

They should revoke his passport until he pays, but even post-Brexit, I imagine that lack of a passport would be a minor impediment to world travel.

A "real" victim is John Q. Public, who must pay increased prices (which include merchant credit card fees), even though John himself may not have a credit card. Some (many?) jurisdictions do not allow a merchant to discount a price for cash payment. Could credit card companies do a better job to prevent fraud, that is before it happens? Some say that they could.

What's ordered in Vegas, doesn't stay in Vegas? $6.7m of printer ink 'stolen by office worker'

Re: accounting 101 anyone

"they have lots of paper bills to send out"

Just guessing, but woudn't ten of thousands of bills at a time more efficiently be printed on non-ink printers, or contracted out? I think we're talking about office inkjets in the low hundreds. If it works anything like here, the water district would not be sending out individual bills anyway. They'd bill each municipality (and maybe there's only one, because Las Vegas is pretty big), and the municipality in turn would bill the punters. Maybe the first six years of audit investigation failed because they were looking for the person who had printed 10,000,000 images of his or her bum. "But it was a really shapely bum, Missuz Krez Ghee."

The return of (drone) robot wars: Beware of low-flying freezers

Re: But shirley...

> Drones might replace WVM to get stuff to the lockers, though said drones might struggle to get items into the lockers, but isn't that what university graduates are for?

No, that's what university Mathematics graduates are for.

Re: speakers

Throatwobbler Mangrove, don't denigrate this method of marketing. I got a great set of Kuss speakers that way. They're the dug's nugs for playing gronge ruck.

Re: Waiting around for home deliveries?

About 20 years ago at work, of an evening, I ordered an electronic doodad from a company 2,000 miles away. Since it was already late, I caught some winks and woke up the next morning to find the doodad being delivered to the office door. For a while I thought that maybe somebody had spiked my vegetable juice. Honest, ma, I wouldn't ingest any substance that would defile the holy temple of my brain. The brain isn't dead until God says it's dead. Anyway, later I came to understand that vendors may have one or possibly multiple warehouses not at their nominal place of business and that they have doodads delivered from a warehouse that might actually be quite close to your office, sod the 2,000 miles.

Windows (er, the windows that we don't hate) can have a coating that is claimed to reflect IR light but obviously allows visible light to pass. If, of an evening, one wishes to malefact about, but have one's licence plate be invisible to IR cameras, could one not apply a spray-on version of said stuff, and wipe it off later, with the minimum chance of detection? If only one could wipe off all one's miscues with the Minimum Chance of Detection (TM) cloth. Though one supposes that if one is prepared to go to that degree of bother, then other solutions might be more effective.

What's long, hard and full of seamen? The USS Harvey Milk

Re: Funny thing

In retrospect, then, the USN destroyers stood a ghost of a chance.