Posts by vtcodger

Quantum computing is a different kind of computing, says AWS

Re: English Translation

Afterthought: I suppose if one were sufficiently baffled about possible uses, one could ask their Quantum Computer what it is good for.

English Translation

""Because the quantum computers built so far have not shown yet to be impactful in business problems," says Severini. "The hardware will not bring any advantage at the moment. But the trajectory of quantum computing will be that at some point, for certain specific applications, for certain specific problems, [they are] much much faster than any other type of computer we can actually build ..."

ENGLISH TRANSLATION: We haven't got the slightest idea what quantum computing is or what, if anything, it could be good for, but there's no way this Quantum Computing ship is sailing without AWS.

US chip group: $52b is not enough, we need an extra $30b in federal funding

"Or, at the very least, the cash injection is in exchange for shares, maybe non-voting,"

ISTR that the US did something along that line 15 years ago when General Motors and Chrysler went under. I don't recall all the details, but I think it worked out not too badly. The car companies are still in business and not too unhealthy. And unless I misremember, we taxpayers got our money back after a few years.

Might be worth considering.

‘Mother of Internet’ Radia Perlman argues for centralized infrastructure

Re: Horses for courses

Bitcoin is mostly used - as a store of value

The current bitcoin price is $16,956.30. The all time high value on Nov 8 2021 was $68,789.63. To get back to the Nov 2021 value, Bitcoin needs to increase by 305%. Not my idea of a store of value

Gold on the other hand .. Nov 8 2021 = 1,824.58. Yesterday 1,803.30. Increase required 1%. I think the "Store of Value" argument for Gold has some merit. Bitcoin. Not so much.

I'm not especially a fan of Gold for reasons too lengthy to go into here. But compared to Cryptocurrency there is a LOT to be said for Gold and other traditional value stores.

Telecoms networks could provide next-gen GPS services without the need for satellites

Feasible -- probably Useful -- Who knows

Sounds feasible. But does anyone really need it? I can't think of an application where differential GPS wouldn't provide all the accuracy one would need. But that may just mean that I have no idea where accurate position might actually be helpful. Surveying maybe? And I have no idea how well/badly DGPS works in the worst cases. The internet tells me how DGPS works (already knew that), but not as much as I'd like to know about practical limitations. I'd like to hear from anybody who has hands on experience with this stuff.

It seems to me that the range of this system is going to be limited. How many cell tower signals would one need to get an accurate position? (three?) In rural areas in North America you're often lucky to get one signal without stopping, maybe climbing part way a hill, and holding your phone just right.

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

Re: And to think that 30 years ago...

Downvoted for petulance. Come on man! The guy just wants people to explain why they downvote. In what way is that an unreasonable request?

CT scanning tech could put an end to 100ml liquid limit on flights by 2024

FWIW

I was curious if tinfoil might actually be useful to protect your film. And I came across this:

https://petapixel.com/2021/07/06/what-happens-if-your-film-goes-through-the-tsas-ct-scanners/

Their take: A single CT scan of unexposed ISO 400 film won't do much harm, but scanning exposed film does have some impact on detail in low light areas. Is that true? It's the internet. Who the hell knows?

Tinfoil? Don't know. And not sure where one finds tinfoil nowadays. Aluminum foil? Probably not--not dense enough to block X-rays? Lead foil. Maybe. But for some reason I think lead foil is expensive and hard to come by. Besides, there's some possibility that the Airport people may actually look at their screen when your carry-on floats by and take umbrage at a strange, opaque package.

I don't actually care. My standards are not high, and digital is good enough for me. And air travel has become so aggravating in recent decades that I'll use virtually any alternative mode of transportation in order to avoid it.

Jaguar Land Rover courts coders caught in big tech layoffs

Re: Need more than coders

"He has driven 60 miles home before with none of the instrument panels working."

The spirit of Joseph Lucas, the Prince of Darkness, lives on. Good to see some respect for tradition.

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

Re: TAI = UTC + 37 seconds, am I missing something?

I'm fascinated by what you mean by "do some actual research". Could you explain

Fair enough. What I'm suggesting is that very little in this climate mess stands up to scrutiny.

So, what I'm suggesting is take a claim -- most any claim -- and investigate it. Who made it? When? What's the evidence for the claim? Is the evidence credible? Is there contrary evidence that is being overlooked? I'm suggesting that very little in the "climate crisis" will stand up to that sort of scrutiny. (And yes, the claim that CO2 emissions will affect climate actually does stand up well although the exact impact is not so clear)

I'd also suggest that a good place to start would be the claim that wind and solar can satisfy humanity's energy needs. Why that one? Because it's pretty clear that for the most part they can't. And investigating it doesn't require much more than a bit of grammar school math and a lot of digging for data. And maybe if enough people develop a healthy skepticism about that, the use of wind and solar can be held to what they can actually do well. They are not totally useless. But their utility looks to be pretty limited and it's possibly important to move on to "If not wind/solar, then what?"

Re: Climate pseudo-science versus science

The first part of your post is fine. CO2 does interfere with the progression of radiation from the Earth's surface to space. And right near the peak level of the Earth's IR emission. A bit of playing with the Modtran program online will show that to anyone who cares. Some then reasonable, but now questionable assumptions were made a century ago. We know (or think we know) now that IR absorbed by CO2 is not immediately converted to heat. Rather, it makes the CO2 molecule rotate faster. That's latent energy and doesn't show up on thermometers. From there it's unclear whether the IR is reradiated with much of it eventually finding its way to space or whether it is converted to kinetic energy (heat) during collisions. However, there seems to be a plausible case for reradiation being a minor mode. Assuming 100% conversion to heat unless and until something different is demonstrated seems OK with me. But it's not really settled science ... yet.

The last couple of sentences however .... No, we do NOT have good observations of climate and CO2 for the past millenium. Good observations of CO2 concentration only date from the mid-1950s. Before that we have some scattered observations of quite questionable quality. Temperature is a bit better, but good observations worldwide are a 20th century thing.

And do keep in mind that there is strong evidence for past climate excursions -- the "Little Ice Age" of the 16th-19th centuries for example -- that currently don't seem to be CO2 related.

The claim that CO2 concentrations and climate are correlated simply isn't yet supported by credible data. Not that some correlation won't very likely be shown ... but you really ought to wait for the data before declaring the issue settled

Re: TAI = UTC + 37 seconds, am I missing something?

Downvoted because you're apparently getting your climate information from the BBC/Guardian/NPR/New York Times and probably other sources that don't seem to know squat about the consequences of climate change. Mostly, they seem to make stuff up then quote each other.

FWIW, the consequences of climate change are NOT well understood. Note that the Earth is in one of its colder periods -- source -- the Paleomap Project scotse.com/climate.htm figure 2. Observe that most of the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and early Tertiary were seemingly far warmer than today. Far from struggling, life apparently thrived. Conclusion -- climate change is not likely an existential threat to humanity.

Let me encourage you to, rather than depending on "experts" with dubious expertise, do some actual research on both climate change and mitigation technologies. I'd start with the latter. It's far easier. I expect that you'll rather quickly develop doubts about the ability of non-nuclear climate change mitigation strategies to do what they are expected to do. Nuclear will work, and may very well be needed simply because fossil fuels won't last forever. But nuclear comes with a long list of caveats and concerns

Biden administration earmarks $13b to modernize electric grid

Re: IT does not matter

Downvoted because that's NOT what happened. What happened was that Texas being Texas, the regulators of the state's electric system (ERCOT and the PUC) didn't believe in regulation and depended largely on the free market to control things. And that worked pretty well until Texas had one of it's once a decade or two serious cold snaps. Unfortunately, because ERCOT/PUC, hadn't required sensible precautions for an extreme event and because sensible precautions would have cost money for gas line freeze protection, provision of emergency power to power generators, and possibly adequate interconnects from the Texas grid to the other US grids, a lot of generation fell over and there was next to no possibility of importing power from elsewhere.

The wind turbines -- 20% of Texas power normally -- did shut down early on for a few hours because of low wind., And when they did come back, they were nowhere near sufficient to overcome the shortages caused by widespread failure of natural gas powered generation. And yes, sensible planners (if any such exist) would try to do something about that in the future.

Result: 250-700 fatalities, $195B in damages and economic losses, And the members of ERCOT and the PUC all resigned. (In Japan they would presumably have gone out to the parking lot faced East, mumbled an apology, and slit their bellies open. Not in Texas).

Texas now requires power suppliers to cold-harden their equipment ... someday ... when they get around to it.

Source: https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/15/texas-power-grid-winter-storm-2021/ But there are lots of other sources if you don't like that one.

It would take a 'catastrophic' recession to stop tech spend growth, says IBM boss

A small circle of friends

"“almost none of them are talking about cutting down technology spending," he said.

Why did Phil Ochs singing "I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody outside a small circle of friends" pop into my head when I read that?

In point of fact, I should think that IT spending will be one of the first casualties if it becomes apparent that Plan A -- freeze everybody's budget at last year's levels -- isn't going to restore health to bottom lines.

FTX disarray declared 'unprecedented' by exec who cleaned up after Enron

Re: Finally?

"Is this the final rug-pull?"

Given that there seemingly never was any rug there to pull, No. Besides, in a rug-pull, some miscreant walks off with your money. In this case, your money has apparently been vaporized.

Bitcoin is trading at about $16,700 this morning. About a third of its "value" a year ago, but four times what it fetched four years ago. So, it looks like it'll take more than the public transformation of a few big players into housemice to discourage crypto fanatics.

re the FTX debacle, here's an amusing quote attributed to Matt Levine. https://fortune.com/crypto/2022/11/15/ftxs-balance-sheet-from-hell/

If you try to calculate the equity of a balance sheet with an entry for HIDDEN POORLY INTERNALLY LABELED ACCOUNT, Microsoft Clippy will appear before you in the flesh, bloodshot and staggering, with a knife in his little paper-clip hand, saying, ‘Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?’ You cannot apply ordinary arithmetic to numbers in a cell labeled ‘HIDDEN POORLY INTERNALLY LABELED ACCOUNT.’ The result of adding or subtracting those numbers with ordinary numbers is not a number; it is prison.”

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Re: Waste El-Reg Space

"Don't be daft, Name another slow motion train crash with even a fraction of the highly entertaining schadenfreude this is generating "

Agreed, this debacle is vastly entertaining. But don't overlook the ongoing cryptocurrency implosion which looks to be getting more dire by the day, is more likely to impact thhee and I, and is not really getting all that much attention in the Reg. Sam Bankman-Fried may be more likable than Elon Musk (not a high bar) but he appears equally detached from reality. He also appears to be in a bit of trouble as it appears that the last financial statements for his company FTX might have been ... ahem ... perhaps a bit too creative. See https://fortune.com/crypto/2022/11/15/ftxs-balance-sheet-from-hell/

Waymo turns its driverless cars into roving weather stations

Simplifying assumptions

This being San Francisco couldn't they just assume either fog or drizzle and deal with exceptional conditions like sunshine later?

Nvidia, Lockheed team up to build digital twin of the Earth for climate researchers

???

This sure looks like the Reg's reworking of a press release written by a "Communication Specialist" who has next to no idea what what the tech people are telling him about their system. It's possible that the system is the greatest thing since sliced bread. But it's hard to tell from the description how it differs from, for example -- https://ventusky.com Ventusky is kind of fun to play with BTW. It's a sort of Google Maps for current worldwide weather (not climate) with a bunch of overlays (temperature, wind, precipitation, etc) and some limited prediction capability

Twitter is suffering from mad bro disease. Open thinking can build it back better

Vote A.O.!!!

Let's face it : the Republicans are no longer a political party, they're a religion

Largely true. And the Democrats aren't much better having embraced a crusade to fix a largely imaginary "climate crisis" using a tool kit (wind and solar) that any clever twelve year old can figure out almost certainly can't do what they want it to do. I infer the situation in the UK isn't much better. Likewise, the EU although many of their current problems are due in part to Putin.

My daughter and I were discussing this the other day and concluded that American voters are thoroughly fed up with BOTH our political parties, and would be only too happy to vote Alien Overlords into power if they were on the ballot.

Twitter CISO flies the coop

Re: Socially distanced

"surely letting people work from home where you then don't have to keep the office heated or lights on is a way to save [explitive deleted] money."

Good point. Where is Elon's vaunted vision? Why does Twitter need an office? Probably should have given the staff two weeks to get the hell out and get online, then turned the utilities off.

Oh well ... maybe next week.

The Osprey has landed: IBM's 433-qubit quantum processor

A Potential Winner

"Meanwhile, Fujitsu said that it was working towards offering customers a computing workload broker that will use AI to automatically select the most "optimal" resources for an application from a mix of HPC and quantum computing technologies."

AI [✓], Quantum [✓], If they can somehow get blockchain into the mix, they would seem to have a surefire winner there.

China's first domestic single-aisle jet, the C919, scores 300 orders

and the home market will keep them busy for a long time.

Y'know, you're likely right. Setting up a production line for a product like a jet aircraft is surely a major effort. And it probably isn't easily sped up. I was treated to a tour of the Douglas Aircraft DC6 production line in Santa Monica about six decades ago. A huge building. They started putting the airframe together at one end and towed it step by step to the other adding parts until a finished aircraft emerged.

Not a rapid process I think. To give some idea of the speed, they were in the process of switching to a stretch version of the aircraft. The planes rolling off the completed end were the older version. About half way back along the line, the aircraft being built suddenly got longer and wider. Not only did the aircraft get wider, so did the factory building. They were moving the factory walls out one station at a time as aircraft needing the extra width moved up the line.

Maybe things are different and speedier now. But maybe not. My impression is that aircraft have only gotten more complex and construction more demanding over time.

Re: Historically

Downvoted because this is the same nonsense I've been hearing for the past eighty years wrt the capability of the enemy d'jour. Japan, Russia, Japan again, and now China

FWIW, China has nearly 40,000 km of High Speed Rail operating which looks to be more than half the total in the world. Accidents? Not a lot. One major crash in 2011. HSR may not be as complicated as a modern airliner, but it's pretty complex. It has proved to be well beyond the capability of the US whose flagship "HSR" carrier Acela averages a whopping 66 mph. I think that's about the same as the Super Chief of the 1950s. Anyway, there's no reason other than hubris to believe the Chinese can't build aircraft competitive with Boeing and Airbus.

OTOH, I can't imagine why any airline outside China (and perhaps North Korea) with a choice would opt today for an unproven Chinese airliner over proven designs from the major vendors. ... Maybe, if the Chinese product is really inexpensive to buy and operate they might sell a few outside China. But not a lot?

Mostly this is probably a bet on the future. If the C919 performs adequately in China for a number of years, they may start to sell some outside China. And maybe in a few decades they will be seriously competitive worldwide.

Musk sells $3.95 billion in Tesla shares, paid eleven times more for Twitter

Re: I don't see the problem...

The[re] is no way he's using any of that money for a new venture.

You certainly could be right. On the other hand, Starlink in particular has to be chewing through capital at flank speed. It's possible that it needs a modest loan to make it through until payday -- whenever that is.

Tesla recalls 40k cars over patch that broke power steering

Re: Maybe the roads will last longer

That "average US car weight" looks substantially too high to me. 4156 seems about right for full size SUVs, but most of the vehicles in the typical parking lot here in the US are substantially smaller and lighter. Mid range sedans like the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord come in around 3500 lb. Compact vehicles like the Kia Soul weigh significantly less. I think that pickup trucks must have been counted as "cars" in those numbers. Or else the vehicles were weighed with a full fuel tank, a weeks groceries, a large dog, and five American football linemen on board.

Adding 60-100 lbs the the ICE for a reasonably full fuel tank seems fair to me. But that doesn't begin to account for the discrepancy.

The Tesla numbers look OK.

Twitter layoffs were bad but Meta's mass ejections could take the cake

The value of data

Eventually all that data wont be worth much.

Of course the data is not worth very much. You know that. I know that. I think a lot of IT people know that. But we aren't the ones that dictate "value". Valuations are set by marketing people and gamb...^H^H^H^H^H investors.

Good, useful data has a value of course. But it's difficult to believe that the vast heaps of disorganized information being collected by every commercial or government operation that can spell dataset have much real utility. Or that what little value is there is worth the cost of collecting storing and mining the data.

Sooner or later, this Big Data thing will quite likely come crashing down. Looks like it might be sooner. Good.

Twitter employees sue over lack of 60-day layoff notice

Any Publicity Is Good Publicity

Let's see if I have this straight. Musk has just spent a ludicrous amount of money for a crap website whose only known value is in its broad user base. His actions to date seem to indicate a desire to alienate as much as possible of that base as rapidly as possible. I can only guess that Elon belongs to the Any Publicity Is Good Publicity As Long As They Spell Your Name Right school of image management. Either that, or the strain of living with the consequences of his bad judgement in tendering a bid for Twitter has driven him mad.

It'll be interesting to see if this seemingly quite peculiar strategy works for him.

Multi-factor auth fatigue is real – and it's why you may be in the headlines next

The cure is ....

"Educate your employees all you like but in an organisation of thousands or even tens of thousands of people people there's always going to be someone who fucks up."

Indeed. From my experience in a kinder, gentler, time there is a significant population of intelligent, capable people who simply can't be educated about some aspects of security. It's not part of their world view. They simply don't understand what you are talking about. The only way to discourage them from doing things they shouldn't would appear to be amputation of their mouse hand -- which is kind of drastic and probably illegal in many jurisdictions.

Crowds not allowed to leave Shanghai Disneyland without a negative COVID test

Re: I would have thought it was impossible

I started off to say that China's zero-Covid policy worked very well in 2020 -- a world with no vaccines and no effective antivirals. But I have some doubts that it's still a good idea.

Compare China -- zero-Covid policy, only a few (but severe) lockdowns, less than 6000 Covid related fatalities in a population of 1.3B -- with the US -- pretend Covid doesn't exist policy -- widespread, long lasting lockdowns and collateral economic damage, over a million fatalities in a population one fourth that of China. Hard to argue that early on, zero-Covid wasn't a far better strategy.

But today we have vaccines and Paxlovid. So one questions that zero-Covid is still a good idea.

Except, when I went to look up some numbers, I found that the US is currently experiencing about 300 Covid related fatalities a day. (It varies week to week apparently) That's about 110,000 a year. China? Close to zero. I wouldn't be surprised that China's numbers are less than completely honest. But probably not dramatically so. We'd likely hear about 9000 deaths a month if their numbers per capita matched the US. It does look like zero-Covid still works well enough to prevent a lot of hospital time and deaths and associated financial and social costs

My take. It's not as clear as it was early on in the pandemic. But maybe the Chinese do know what they are about. (And maybe they don't).

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin: If Musk's Twitter flops, it's not such a bad thing

A world without Twitter

I have spent 60 full seconds contemplating life in a world without Twitter. I think it might be tolerable.

Tiny quantum computer plugs into top Euro supercomputer – because why not?

60 years since ...

It's been 60 years (59 if you're picky) since Richard Feynman told us that nobody understands quantum mechanics. Still true I think.

I certainly don't understand quantum mechanics. And I'm almost as hazy on Quantum Computing, but one of the few things I might know about quantum computing is that about the only thing quantum computing can (currently) (possibly) (on really good days) do is superfast Fourier Transforms. And about the only thing those SFFTs might be good for is cracking some forms of cryptography.

Can anyone who actually understands this stuff straighten me out? And, even if Quantum Computing can actually do wonderful stuff, are only 5 bits -- even 5 super duper quantum bits -- likely to be good for much of anything?

60 years since ...

It's been 60 years (59 if you're picky) since Richard Feynman told us that nobody understands quantum mechanics. Still true I think.

I certainly don't understand quantum, but one of the few things I might understand about quantum computing is:

-- About the only thing quantum computing can (currently) (possibly) (on really good days) do is superfast Fourier Transforms. And the only thing those SFFTs might be good for is cracking some forms of cryptography.

Can anyone who actually understands this stuff straighten me out? And, are only 5 bits -- even 5 super duper quantum bits -- likely to be good for much of anything?

Machine learning research in acoustics could open up multimodal metaverse

A multimodal multiverse?

A multimodal Multiverse? I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they told Pandora would be in that box. My recommendation -- Don't open it. Sell it to someone on eBay. Or give it anonymously to someone you don't like.

Kioxia warns of potential cost of US chip policy over China

You're probably right

I upvoted you because, your argument is coherent and quite possibly correct. And also because the rather chaotic US policy seems driven by domestic politics, not by any actual understanding of the world or realistic vision of the future.

But I would also mention that the difficulty of achieving state of the art design varies from field. For example, I'm told that Chinese airframe designs seem competitive with those of the US,France,Russia. But Chinese Jet engines aren't, I'm told, quite up to best in the world standards.

OTOH, It's not clear that semiconductors that are a few years behind the best possible technology aren't perfectly fine for making consumer goods and equipping an army. It takes a long time to design, build, field test, tune and deploy a weapons system or complex consumer product. By the time your cruise missile, walkie-talkie, or electric car reaches the troops/customers, their electronics won't be state of the art anyway.

Enterprises are rolling out more AI – to 'middling results'

"Just apply enough pressure."

If you can't force it, you need a bigger hammer?

If you think 5G is overhyped, wait till you meet 5.5G

“We can also refarm the sub-6GHz spectrum to achieve ultra-large bandwidth for 5.5G,” Wang added.

Does that mean that I can look forward to the Guardian, NPR et. al. telling me that the current farm architecture of the sub-6GHz spectrum is an existential threat to human civilization that must be addressed forthwith?

Tesla reportedly faces criminal probe into self-driving hype

Re: Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy

FWIW Mythbusters did a segment on drafting behind semi trailers back in 2007. They got an MPG improvement of 39% at a following distance of 10 feet (3 meters) at 55mph.. However, tailgating a truck at 10 feet while driving i\at highway speed is neither legal (even in Boston) nor safe. The didn't measure savings at a safe distance (150 feet), but they did try 100 feet and got an 11 percent improvement in fuel economy.

https://www.autoblog.com/2007/10/28/mythbusters-drafting-10-feet-behind-a-big-rig-will-improve-mile/

Foxconn's largest iPhone factory back under COVID lockdown

Bad News for Apple?

Depends. Are the Foxconn workers locked out of the factory or inside the factory?

Microsoft's Lennart Poettering proposes tightening up Linux boot process

Re: *I* propose ...

If Potty favors it, I'm against it?

Yeah, I think I can live with that.

(And I can sure as hell live without TPM, UEFI and secure boot -- at least on my own home machines. Might feel differently if I were crazy enough to sign up for the thankless and very likely impossible task of securing the software on corporate machines.)

Texas sues Google over alleged nonconsensual harvesting of biometric data

Re: Mr. Meseeks

I'm not especially a fan of Google, but I did actually read the article (for once):

"Of course, this is only visible to you, you can easily turn off this feature if you choose and we do not use photos or videos in Google Photos for advertising purposes. The same is true for Voice Match and Face Match on Nest Hub Max, which are off-by-default features that give users the option to let Google Assistant recognize their voice or face to show their information. We will set the record straight in court." ®

I'm pretty sure that says Google does not use the image info from Google Photos in their advertising services -- perhaps because they have not yet figured out how to monetize it. And also that at least some of their similar services are in fact opt-in.

Bottom Line: Perhaps only selectively evil at this point in time.

Chip fab locations more important than oil well placement, says Gelsinger

Copyright Mandy Rice-Davies

Intel exec pursuing government handouts:

"Where those semiconductor fabs are located will be more important in future than where the oil wells are."

Well he would say that, wouldn't he?

Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel

Re: Genuine question...

"I don't understand why things like COBOL are still alive"

It's because there are large business and banking systems -- think hundreds of thousands of lines of business logic -- written in COBOL half a century ago still in use today. Replacing them with a language that you like better would cost a fortune and would probably create thousands of new and potentially devastating bugs. It's easier, cheaper, and safer to scour the Earth for a Cobol programmer to do the occasional enhancement than to rewrite the stuff.

I'm not a COBOL programmer BTW. I don't think I have the patience. But of all the dozens of programming languages I've encountered since I wrote my first program in 1961, COBOL is by far the most readable.

Firefox points the way to eradicating one of the rudest words online: PDF

Re: Use tools for what they are good for

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language, not Hypertext Layout Language. No it won't look the same on all devices. It's not supposed to. It just presents the same content in a hopefully acceptable, but device specific, way on all supported devices.

I suspect an HTLL were it attempted would produce quite awful results much of the time.

Re: I don't mind PDFs

Y'know, I used to dislike PDFs. Slow, kluncky way to present information. And trying to extract text from them for notes, comments, reference can be painful. Or outright impossible. But a number of years ago, a lawyer pointed out to me that HE liked PDFs because documents in PDF form look more or less exactly like their paper and ink equivalent and in his profession having proper layout is important. It sometimes tells him whether material is substantive or explanatory or opinion. And he can go quickly to the section(s) of interest to him.

He's got a point. If users like/need PDFs. We should probably try to give them what they want instead of trying to force them to use some "better" alternative that they loathe.

President Biden still wants his cybersecurity labels on those smart devices

Re: "I can't help but think that such labelling is pretty pointless"

China? None of that. We're moving manufacturing back to North America (just in time to be replaced by a massive wave of automation that actually works -- but that's another tale for another time)

In the meantime, this is your shot at a killer business startup. Making pointless security labels for companies to paste on useless (or worse) internet connected electronic gear. Remember -- Move fast, break things. Get to market first even if the labels are wrong and stick only to those trying to apply them and possibly to household pets.

The label

The label will be a tiny yellow stick-on thing printed in 3 point type and placed on the side of a screw well or other inaccessible place. It will designate the device as falling into one of a half dozen standard catagories. Minimal, Ineffective, Token, Problemetic, None or N/A. The last is for dumb devices such as paperweights and thumbtacks that have no electronics and are therefore actually secure ... at least for the time being.

Aerobot designed for hell-world Venus first braves something worse: Nevada

Aluminium?

"On the flip side the Yanks have to acknowledge that aluminium is correct."

To inject a bit of Strine -- Not bloody likely.

One can only assume that your British penchant for injecting random vowels where they are clearly not needed is due to the proximity of France. It has long been believed that excess vowels -- abundant in France -- assemble on the beaches of Brittany and Normandy on moonless nights in Summer and are carried off by the tide to afflict victims worldwide.

Sulphur? Sure. We yanks have never been all that certain about that one. But Aluminium? Never.

Just $10 to create an AI chatbot of a dead loved one

A Possible Use Case

Would I pay $10 to talk to a simulation of my deceased cousin Gregory? I most certainly would if I thought there was any chance it would tell me where he hid the $228,000 he stole from the Bank Of America in 1988.

Disclaimer: I have no cousin named Gregory. And if I did, he was nowhere near West Covina on the morning of the robbery.

========

Comment: I find people talking to Alexa creepy. I expect I'd find people talking to emulations of their deceased loved ones even creepier. But it doesn't matter what I or anyone else thinks. If it somehow comforts them, that's what matters.

Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop

Re: #@$Drivers

Well, let me give you an example of the kind of problems that I, and many others, have had. Our family doesn't do a lot of printing, but I have two printers on our network -- and Inkjet (HP1112) and a very low end LaserJet (HP1102W). The Inkjet hasn't been a problem as long as I print a test page every two weeks to keep the jets from clogging.

The LaserJet? Mechanically it's great. Reliable. Supports many network protocols. Warms up in seconds. Feeds paper even in the occasional periods of North American Summer tropical humidity. In fact, it's our standby printer and gets used not only by me, but by the whole family every time Microsoft screws up and kills their printer setups. They just email the print file to me, and I print it from Linux until someone finds the time/inclination to reinstall the printers in Windows.

Software wise? Not so good. Two problems. Initial Setup and Printer Protocol.

Initial Setup. Presumably to get around the fact that not all PCs have floppy or CDROM capability, this thing fresh from the box pretends to be a storage device. You need to connect it to a Windows computer which can then read the Windows (but not Linux) drivers from the device, install them and reconfigure the thing as a printer. Is there a Linux program to do this? As I recall, yes. But it didn't work. No problem. We just set the printer up from Windows and once set up, it'd talk to the Network. (But USB from Linux still thinks it's a storage device. No matter. Network only is good enough for us). I attribute this design to forebrain destroying contaminants in the drinking water in Silicon Valley.

Printer Protocol. The HP-1102W uses the relatively uncommon ZJS protocol instead of PCL or Postscript to stream data to the printer. One needs a a driver to convert other representations to ZJS. For Linux HP provides a driver (which works--Yeah) and an automatic installer which in the tradition of automatic installers everywhere and always, didn't. So I had to dig out and download a copy of the #@$driver (hpijs I think) and a ppd file that I had to tune to my configuration. This took a bit of time and modest amount of cursing.

My current problem: I have a chromebook that I'd occasionally like to print from. HP, to their credit, supports printing from chrome to many of their printers. BUT, the HP1102W is one of the ones they don't seem to support. Probably can't just copy the driver from my Intel Linux machine to the chromebook and I am afraid to try. What could possibly go wrong? Don't know and don't want to find out the hard way. So I'm thinking in terms of a server on some unused port on the Linux machine that will look like a printer to the chromebook and can then print via my existing software. Can that be done with existing Unix tools plus perhaps a bit of Python? My guess is yes. How? Haven't the slightest. Maybe I'll work it out someday. Or not. In the meantime, I print to pdf on the chromebook, copy the pdf to a usb stick. Move it to the Linux machine and print the pdf. OK for once a month or so.

#@$Drivers

One problem for many (most?) businesses and individual users is the lack of unix drivers (that actually work) for many older peripherals. Linux is good with networking, file systems, and monitors. Printers,scanners,etc? Not so much. Custom hardware? Forget it. And unix is a hell of a lot less aggravating for system administrators to work with than Windows. (No Registry for starters). But if your workflow depends on some older piece of gear, you may be stuck with Windows pretty much forever.

Mormon Church IT ransacked, data stolen by 'state-sponsored' cyber-thieves

Re: Meanwhile

Amusing Post. I upvoted it.

But I'd note that many Amish and Mennonite sects allow some use of technology (including the internet) as long as the usage is deemed to be beneficial to the individual/family/community. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_way_of_life#Use_of_modern_technology

As I observe the use and abuse of technology in society, the more rational the Amish POV seems to me. I don't actually agree with them. ... Yet. ... But the way things are going what with the bizarre actions of big tech, the whackiness of (most of) the IoT, and the willingness of industry to foist seriously flawed technology (e.g. Tesla Autopilot) on the public, I may come around eventually.