Posts by vtcodger 2030 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2017
Updating OS kernels is (usually) tractable. I can test the new kernel for hardware compatibility and other issues without destroying my system. Or if the testing failed to show a problem that becomes all too apparent later. I can (probably) recover from a problemetic update one way or another.
BIOS and other firmware upgrades OTOH have the potential to be a "final solution". If I brick the hardware, am I going to be able to unbrick it?
"The fact is that the number of the officials and the quantity of the work to be done are not related to each other at all. The rise in the total of those employed is governed by Parkinson's Law, and would be much the same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish or even disappear." Parkinson's Law -- C Northcote Parkinson 1955
Is anybody around here actually familiar with what JEDI is supposed to do? I did some Googling and found lots of articles about the process of awarding the contract, but very little about what the $10B actually is to buy. The closest I could come was from the BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50191242
The Department of Defense wants to replace its ageing computer networks with a single cloud system.
Under the contract, Microsoft will provide artificial intelligence-based analysis and host classified military secrets among other services.
...
It is hoped that Jedi will give the military better access to data and the cloud from battlefields.
That looks to me to be quite nebulous. They're going to draft Clippy and send him off to fight ... Who? How? Why would anyone even think that might be a good idea? They are going to make battlespace management dependent on some sort of AI entity/entities at the end of a probably questionably reliable communications link?
This sort of reminds me of the 1960s era USAF Automated Logistics System which managed to burn through $250M (big money back then -- a couple of billion in current dollars) on a poorly defined mission and ended up with pretty much nothing to show for it.
I imagine that Microsoft will make money off this. But I wouldn't be shocked to find that in the long run there will be a lot of folks at MS who will end up wishing Amazon had been awarded the contract.
I think this a dubious idea.
But I do recall that back when I worked for big companies, at some level managers (where I worked at least) had a small discretionary budget they could spend without stumbling through the requisition-purchase order-whatever jungle. Perhaps that sort of thing is what is being targeted.
They (probably) can't ban it. As far as I can see, they are just doing this to harass Snowden and to discourage future leakers. If I recall correctly, Snowden's publisher is in England which will probably make it somewhat more difficult to seize profits which they quite likely could do if the publisher were in the US.
"I installed Tiny Tiny RSS on a private webserver ..."
The thought of using RSS never crossed my mind. But I'm tired of dealing with with Google's crappy Javascript that works properly nowhere but (possibly) chrome and slows information delivery to 1200 baud modem speed. A couple of tests look like RSS feeds might be an answer.
Thanks.
The previous owners of this house apparently had a toolkit consisting of a hammer and a roll of duct tape. You can do a lot with a hammer and duct tape. Who could have guessed that duct tape used in place of a proper joining fitting between a bathtub and the household drain pipes could last for decades before failing and flooding the garage?
Your local hardware store will probably sell you a small bottle of purple liquid for about the cost of a cup of machine coffee that will permanently glue PVC piping together. OTOH odd though your setup looks, there's a lot to be said for if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
If current trends hold, the yellow delay on internet connected traffic lights will crease at 1.013 sec/yr as the traffic lights send increasingly detailed images of you, your vehicle, and everything on the seats to Google, Facebook, and Amazon. That's on top of the existing CIA/NSA delays and the packet delay time to Croatia.
Do not be surprised when ads for car washes and auto repair shops start appearing in your email and instant messages. The only way to avoid those will be to keep the exterior of your vehicle in pristine condition.
LSI is NOT a product of the space program. In point of fact space qualified electronics takes so long to develop and test that it is generally a few years behind what you can buy at Best Buy or your local drugstore by the time it actually makes it into service. There are other concerns -- power budgets, radiation hardening, vibration hardening materials limitations, temperature ranges -- that also hold space qualified designs back a bit relative to commercial products. If you are curious, here's a link that addresses a few aspects of space qualified electronics. https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/challenges-for-electronic-circuits-in-space-applications.html
The only example I can think of where "space" work actually drove civilian technology was the funding of supercomputers by the Anti-ballistic-missile people in the 1960s and 1970s, and I honestly don't think it made all that much difference. The oil companies needed big iron for seismic data analysis so supercomputers probably would have happened anyway. The oil companies even built their own supercomputer, the TI Advanced Scientific Computer.
Maybe GPS counts. It's certainly very important. But it's a military technology that has been hijacked by civilians. It's not a fall out from the civilian space program. The same is sort of true of other enormously useful satellite technologies -- weather satellites, communication satellites, satellite resource mapping.
I think if you do some research, you'll find that NASA does a lot of great science. But the notion that it's a wellspring of useful innovation that then makes it's way from space to civilian products is mostly a product of the dubious mental processes of PR folk.
That's actually not a bad idea. In *practice* it's impossible.
Perhaps it's impossible. But we could try to avoid doing things that obviously aren't very productive. Right now -- and for the foreseeable future I fear -- an appalling percentage of our space activity funding is going to be spent on building huge rockets rather than on the payloads. Seems to me that's closer to pyramid building than science. Spending resource to get the (spectacularly late and over budget) James Webb Space Observatory out to L2 certainly qualifies as science. Hopefully the damn thing works.
Spending resource to get a few astronauts back to the moon OTOH seems mostly pointless.
Don't you think the requirements of a sustainable moon base might have some spin offs in areas like water and air purification as two easy examples?
Probably not. Those are problems that have been extensively studied over the last century for a variety of reasons. I imagine existing solutions will be used.
Historically, the cross over from space exploration to other situations has been surprisingly small. Doing stuff that could be done in labs on Earth at the end of long and exceedingly costly supply chains is unlikely to be a cost effective way to approach most things.
Of course, some stuff can't be done on Earth, but I don't see a moon base -- or the ISS for that matter -- as being the best way to get that research done. I think Skylab -- an orbiting laboratory that is occupied for a while every now and then to do complex experiments that actually need to be done in space and can't easily be done using unmanned vehicles was probably a better approach.
Moonbase? Not a current need I think. Instead, spend a lot less, spend a couple of decades looking at the moon intensively with rovers and low altitude observation satellites. Then -- If there is stuff that actually needs human inspection, by all means, send some folks out to look at it.
Buildings, roads, and properties that cross borders are probably the least of your problems. Famously the Haskell Library/Opera House(Auditorium) in Derby Line, VT/Stanstead, QC not only straddles the US-Canadian border, it was deliberately built that way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Free_Library_and_Opera_House The Mohawks manage to somehow control a modest territory including parts of New York, Ontario and Quebec. If they can keep two countries, a US state and two Canadian provinces at bay, I expect the Irish can work something out provided they don't get too much help from Westminster and Brussels.
Pretty much everywhere is your neighbor in cyberspace. I find it hard to get worked up about email hacking. If you're doing stuff you shouldn't be doing using email, figure out how to use encryption for heavens sake.
But when some bunch of ninnies in Washington or Moscow or Peking or somewhere else aggravate Iran or Taiwan or North Korea or the Grand Duchy of Fenwick into actual cyberwar, the cyber warriors are not going to stop at turning all the digitally controlled traffic lights in North America permanently green. They are going to try to turn off your and my electricity and drive every vehicle that does over the air software updates into the nearest structure and shut down air traffic control with hundreds or thousands of planes left to figure out how to land safely with no coordination and do all manner of harm to all the poorly planned infrastructure unwisely hung off the internet.
I suppose that we really should be more concerned than we are.
At least if everyone's on the same model of 'smart' meter, it's likely that model will continue to get supported.
If Silicon Valley were involved, you'd have two months to "upgrade" your meter. And after much protest, that would be extended to four months and the cost of the upgrade would be cut by 15% so you could claim a victory.
What, Big Tech predatory? How could you possibly think such a thing?
... to see how this all works out. About 60 years ago, some friends worked on a project to determine the feasibility of launching satellites from aircraft. Difficult as it may be to believe, it was perfectly possible back then to design an aircraft not dissimilar to the 747. The B-52 -- still the American standard long range bomber -- dates to that timeframe.
As I recall, their conclusion was something along the line of. Yes, you can (probably) build it. Yes, it will (probably) work. BUT There's no particular benefit to doing so. The aircraft's velocity does subtract from the roughly 17000/24500 mph/kph necessary to stay in low Earth orbit. But you still need one big mutha rocket to get the rest of the way to LEO.
And launching from say 30000/10000 ft/m does eliminate some atmospheric drag. But rockets don't travel that fast in the lower atmosphere where drag is greatest. They are still accelerating at low altitudes.
A flying launch vehicle is going to be complicated and expensive. Where are you going to mount the launch vehicle? If you sling it below the aircraft, how will you take off? If you mount it above, how do you get it clear of the rudder assembly when the aircraft and launch vehicle separate? How will you make sure that the second stage doesn't damage your flying first stage when it is released and ignited? All (probably) tractable problems. But problems non-the less.
Time will presumably tell.
"Not correct. The GDPR applies globally to the information of EU citizens and US based websites most certainly are in scope and liable to fines."
True. However, considering the difficulty you folks have getting US corporations to pay their taxes, I wouldn't be overly sanguine about your ability to collect fines from them. A more effective approach would probably be to arrest corporate officers whenever they wander onto EU soil, and lock them up for 30 days or so.
I downvoted this and I don't believe in downvotes without explanations.
In point of fact, most spreadsheets make perfectly usable SMALL databases. Most are sortable and searchable. For many people, much of the time, that's all they need. Excel, which is prone to capriciously alter the user's data, is the exception, not the rule.
BTW, the much simpler Microsoft created spreadsheet distributed in early versions of MS Works worked fine for undemanding situations and did not surprise unwary users by helpfully changing their data in unpredictable ways. Personally, by the time I finally encountered a problem beyond the scope of the works spreadsheet, I'd had sufficient experience at work with Excel and its peculiarities, that I downloaded Open Office -- a choice I never regretted.
For the curious, the command bunker complex is marked on Google Maps. It's at 49.699118, 7.083355. There's what I take to be a trailhead ("Wanderparkplatz traumschleife Boerfink") on the road a few hundred meters SW of the buildings with a path that will probably take you and 599 of your closest friends into the heart of the surface complex without having to bother the folks at the gate.
"Yes, you can still lose out via PayPal, but it's pretty rare."
Back in the days when Google gave us a hit count, a search on "PayPal Sucks" generated a truly impressive number of hits. Anyway, in the US where I live, PayPal operates as a largely unregulated bank. My dear old mother was a fan of "Trust But Regulate" Overall, I have to think that entrusting financial details to an unregulated bank may not be prudent. Not to mention that PayPal is almost certainly very high on the list of hacker targets.
Things may be better in the EU where I believe PayPal operates as a real, regulated bank.
Ah yes, Adelphia. They were once the cable company in this particular part of the Vermont countryside. I recall that at one point back when 32K modems were premium devices, there was a bit of a hubub when tests showed that Adelphia cable internet service was somehow SLOWER than Bell-Atlantic dial-up. The Adelphia operation was subsequently bought out by Comcast which actually seemed like an improvement at the time.
Ironically the supplier is probably losing money on the £10 battery as well.
Sounds credible to me. Decades ago I was a fly-on-the-wall observer of a group of middle managers in a major US defense contractor discussing whether they could profitably manufacture and deliver an aircraft toilet seat for $600 under the existing US government procurement rules. Their conclusion -- almost certainly not.
"Please explain why a voting machine needs an overblown behemoth like Windows to run ?"
And while you're at it, explain:
1) Why you would connect a voting machine to the internet.
2) Why you would even think about updating the operating system on a voting machine.
3) Why you continue to use voting machines when paper ballots are clearly more secure and the results are auditable.
"For some unfathomable reason the purge appears to have sidestepped North America."
One possibility is that there are no sources of suspect information in North America.
Another is that the job of identifying misbehaving accounts in North America is simply too large to contemplate.
But most likely I think is that the best known North American source of disinformation on Twitter is the President of the United States. Canceling his account would probably annoy 40% of the population of the US. Not canceling his account would presumably annoy the remainder.
What's the point of drone delivery[?]
Unfortunately, there actually is some stuff where delivery is time critical. Not just Pizza. Organ transplants come to mind. And auto parts stores here in the US generally keep one or more cars out on the road pretty much non-stop delivering parts to auto repair shops and picking up parts from their "warehouses". I suppose drones make sense for stuff like that. Too bad if you ask me. Drones are going to probably going to be yet another pain the rear end for the average person on the street. Noisy and intrusive.
So I'm guessing that was somebody else's return that got fixed...
That's maybe OK as long as they don't claim it's new. However, the replaced part may be a returned part whose fault they couldn't identify and which they are assuming is OK. Not so OK maybe. The thing was returned for a reason.
BTW, We should keep in mind that production runs of parts are not infinite. It's perfectly possible that a manufacturer has no new parts in stock for some warranty repairs and that they no longer make the device and thus can't replace it with a new one. What are they expected to do other than use a refurbished/recycled part?
None of which excuses misrepresenting what they are doing or charging a new product price for a reused part.
"It only protects against one phantom menace, that your current DNS provider or ISP is spying on your queries. But they're not."
AFAICS, the only reason that Comcast for example wouldn't be spying on user DNS queries would be that doing so requires a certain amount of intelligence -- historically not Comcast's strong point. I'm sure that the same is true of many other ISPs.
But overall, this sounds like a dubious idea. Why not let the user (me) decide if they want to "secure" their DNS queries? And default to "the way it's always worked" rather than "The way we think is good for you."
duckduckgo is fine for many folks. But in its early years Google spent a lot of time and money archiving data on old public domain documents. As a test, I asked both search engines for USGS Professional Paper 43 -- a number I picked at random. DDG wasn't useless. It gave me some links that might have allowed me to eventually find the paper -- as well as a bunch of links to random USGS publications. Google OTOH knows about USGS 43 -- "The copper deposits of the Clifton-Morenci district, Arizona". It gave me a link to the abstract and another link to a pdf of the document -- apparently a digitized image of the book from the USGS library.
I think for researchers that Google may be a more effective search engine than Duck Duck Go.
I downvoted this because it seems to me to be yet another example of the "blame the user" mentality that pervades far too much technology today. (e.g. "You're holding it wrong"). I do agree that paying Tesla $5000 for their "Autopilot" technology, then turning it on may not be overly clever. Seems to me that there are simply too many complex driving situations that today's technology is unlikely to resolve optimally to let a computer "drive" a car on any typical roadway. OTOH, I haven't used the system. Maybe it works better than it sounds.
In a better world, Musk probably wouldn't be allowed to peddle this crap in its current form and if he did, people wouldn't buy it.
In this case, the problem apparently wasn't anything exotic. The Autopilot drove into the vehicle in front of it -- which happened to be a fire truck. If that's the full story, it's pretty damning. What good is a collision avoidance system that fails to avoid easily avoidable collisions?
"I haven't seen any of those things on my devices in a long time."
Nor have you seen much of anything else I'll wager. After you've avoided the garbage, there's seemingly not all that much left. I'm beginning to think that the Internet except Wikipedia and the odd corner of sane content here and there is an interesting, but failing, experiment.
Better still ban electric toothbrushes, it's not as if the really improve dental hygiene. Instead they sit in their chargers
A lot of studies have shown that electric toothbrushes really do a modestly better job of cleaning than manual. Aside from which, a pair of AA cells (cost about 50 cents each from Amazon) will power a cheap electric toothbrush for 4 to 8 months. Why battery power? The brushes are portable. And I'm not a big fan of line voltage powered devices other than built-in lights and fans in bathrooms.
"I would argue that we haven't seen a really decent one since the days of Windows Program Manager"
Nothing against xfce. But if you want minimal and use a Unix, how about one of the boxes -- fluxbox, blackbox, openbox? I've used fluxbox for years with no real aggravation. Does workspaces. Supports wmctrl, etc. I assume that the others are fine as well.
I should think that any server is going to need some sort of resident basic text editor to sort things out if one manages to break the configuration beyond the ability to talk to the Store. Maybe Microsoft will ship with edit.com or edlin if they actually remove Notepad.
How does one deal with Windows (hypothectical) inappropriate attempts to use the Store? Beats me. Probably something in the registry. I gave up on Windows decades ago. I'm not smart enough to deal with it. I doubt anyone is.
Wrong issue. The vehicle has to recognize problems soon enough to slow/stop and notify the resident human. The human is there to get the vehicle past whatever situation has arisen -- accident, incomprehensible construction signs, washed out bridge, heavy snow (dust in Arizona), etc,etc,etc.
You're correct. The notion that human drivers can consistently observe that the vehicle traveling at speed is exhibiting poor judgment and override its poorly considered actions is quite peculiar.
"Basically this is an attempt to reinvent trains"
It might look that way, but probably not. I imagine trains will still be used for long haul like traffic from the massive container port at Wilmington(Los Angeles) California to distribution points hundreds or thousands of miles/kilometers to the East or North. I think automated trucks will be used for short and medium haul. Phoenix to Tucson is, as I recall about 100 miles/160km. Moving a load onto a railroad car then assembling a train then offloading at a destination is probably substantially more aggravation/cost than just backing a tractor up, connecting some "wires" and hauling the trailer off for an hour or three trip.
Except for amusement park rides on dedicated tracks (e.g. the automated SUVs in the Jurassic Park movie) long distance trucking looks to be one of the easiest situations for autonomous vehicles. But it's still damn difficult. It makes sense for those in the business to learn how to do it and plug away at getting to the point where drivers are so rarely needed that the trucks confronted with difficult situations can simply pull over and wait for someone to come out and sort things out. But that point is likely many, many years away.
Safe, 100% reliable, autonomous vehicles look to be a HARD PROBLEM And nothing we've seen so far makes them seem any easier.
Google will simply conduct an auction for top placement in their job widget. The site what pays the most gets top billing. No judgment calls. No bias. Just cash on the barrelhead. What could be more in keeping with modern Silicon Valley ethics standards?
Entering quibble-mode:
885,000,000 is rather a large number -- 16% of the population of the planet ... give or take a bit. I suspect that what was intended was either 885,000 persons or, probably more likely, 885,000,000 sequentially numbered transaction records including data on an unknown number of entities.
Whats the point of it all[?]
You have the roles confused. You and I are not the customer. We're the bait. Google's customers are advertisers. And frankly advertisers don't seem to be overly clever. If they were smarter, the ads served up might well targeted and might actually be interesting some of the time.
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