Posts by vtcodger

You won't get Huawei with this, America! Chinese giant sues US government over 'unconstitutional' ban

Re: I don't think that will happen

Well, yes. The US government does have broad powers to exclude foreign companies. But it has to follow a bunch of rules when it does so. It appears to me that Huawei is arguing that the government has failed to play by the rules. They may well be right.

That doesn't mean that Huawei, even if they prevail in court, is actually going to get their gear into US government IT systems. It would likely just mean that the US government might have to do a better job of making their case(s) against Huawei (and ZTE).

Nice 'AI solution' you've bought yourself there. Not deploying it direct to users, right? Here's why maybe you shouldn't

Re: "No one really understands why machine-learning code is so brittle"

they do stuff but we don't know how

Sort of like eight year olds with a hammer, chisel, and an antique watch. What could possibly go wrong?

Uber won't face criminal charges after its robo-car killed woman crossing street

Re: What? The car can't do emergency braking on it's own?

I don't think the Uber got a pass on liability. Liability is a civil issue not a criminal issue? That is to say that Uber can presumably still be sued for a zillion or dollars or so.

That said, I have trouble seeing why, from the information presented, Uber is not guilty of negligent homicide or involuntary manslaughter or some such. They killed someone dammit. In an entirely foreseeable fashion. In what way are they not criminally responsible?

Cheap as chips: There's no such thing as a free lunch any Moore

Re: Nothing new...

Indeed. I've been retired for a decade, but I make a practice of asking clerks, professionals, and others I encounter in day to day life about how they like their computer. Their major complaints? They can't understand the User Interface and the bloody thing is SLOW. My physician indeed has hired an assistant to do much of the routine computer stuff -- updating prescriptions, taking medical notes, etc -- because his choice was fighting with the computer or attending to we patients.

Boot up time is a particular complaint and seems to be being addressed. A few years ago, people in medical offices were complaining about 20 minute boot up for Windows computers.

Re: Nothing new...

This is purely a software problem.

If not actually caused by software, more disciplined software practices are almost certainly an answer to poor performance on current products. The underlying problem is likely depending on Moore's Law -- capability grows exponentially over time -- while ignoring Malthus Law -- capability grows exponentially ... until it doesn't.

Techniques for speeding up software (profiling, a bit of refactoring, etc) are well known, and not too difficult to apply. Once anyway. One problem is that no one -- especially not system decision makers -- much cares about performance. The second is that the software architecture we have inherited from mid-twentieth century mainframes assumes that performance is not, never will be, and indeed can not be, an issue. The third is that faster is not necessarily more secure. Making software and hardware faster often makes it less secure -- and vice versa. People didn't use to actually care very much about secure, but thanks to the internet, security has become an overriding issue -- rather to the detriment of performance sometimes.

Official science: Massive asteroids are so difficult to destroy, Bruce Willis wouldn't stand a chance

I think you could just spray a coat of reflective paint on the thing and achieve the same effect as attaching a solar sail. ... BUT ... I think one would need a LOT of lead time. And tracking/ orbit prediction software of extraordinary capability. You'll get no end of criticism if you inadvertently steer a rock that was going to miss the Earth into the North Atlantic. And there is, of course, the question of designing a paint sprayer that will work in space and creating a paint that will coat surfaces that are either exposed to direct sunlight with no atmospheric attenuation or are really, really cold.

ReactOS 0.4.11 makes great strides towards running Windows apps without the Windows

Y'know, there are many "little" programs designed to do useful things on old versions of Windows. One example that come to mind is the software to check the OBD-II codes on my 15 year old car. Another is a collection of little educational games that the school I used to work in made available in 3rd and 4th grade classrooms when the weather precluded outdoor lunch or recess. The kids seemed to enjoy them and I think that they may actually have learned a bit about arithmetic, history, or whatever. I doubt most of those things will run on a modern Windows. And I doubt they've been replaced by something "better". Some would doubtless run on Linux under WINE. And some doubtless wouldn't. I'm sure there are many other useful programs in school, business and personal contexts that have been left behind in the relentless march toward some glorious future that I must confess I can not quite visualize. If REACT extends the availability of old, useful, software, that's a good thing I think.

Sniff the love: Subaru's SUVs overwhelmed by scent of hair shampoo, recalls 2.2 million cars

Re: This is what happens when you implement diversity and equality...

I still find at least one bobby pin every couple of months from the previous owner.

Bobby pins are thought to be a stage in the complex life cycle of an obscure and poorly studied organism. They seem to appear spontaneously, but actually are the spawn of wire coathangers that have been stored near a phone that is exposed to repeated robocalls. Left alone in the dark, they will eventually morph into single socks that do not match any other stocking you own or have ever owned,

In hilariously petulant move, Apple shuts Texas stores and reopens them few miles down the road – for patent reasons

Apple's still going to be sued

Apple will surely still be sued. And they surely know it. They presumably just want to escape the frequently bizarre results of jury trials in the Eastern District of Texas and are willing to give up a few sales in order to get their cases into the second most plaintiff friendly court in the country wherever that might turn out to be. I'm not Apple compatible and have always found their stuff to be expensive and not especially usable. I don't own or use anything Apple. But the US patent system is an affront to civilization and I can't say that I blame Apple for taking one small step toward protecting themselves from it.

Linus Torvalds pulls pin, tosses in grenade: x86 won, forget about Arm in server CPUs, says Linux kernel supremo

DEC built their business on excellent machines that were substantially cheaper to deploy than mainframes. And the reason they aren't around any more is that PCs were substantially cheaper than DEC's offerings and eventually became as capable as VAX and PDP and DEC's other offerings. It was pretty obvious even in 1990 that, barring a miracle, DEC was doomed. If ARM eventually becomes as capable as X86 and offers substantial cost savings, it'll eventually come to dominate server space, and workstation space, and every other space. But it's far from obvious that ARM can/will be much cheaper/better than X86 in the very long run.

And for this year, and next, and the year after, Torvalds is right, For the time being, all other things being equal, X86 platforms are a bit less risky from a business point of view than ARM.

I'm no fan of X86 BTW, It'll please me no end if that shambles is eventually replaced by something less ugly.

Japan's Hayabusa 2 probe has got the horn for space rock Ryugu – a sampling horn, that is

Fascinating

Good for them. One of the fascinating things about this effort is that Ryugu is only about 1km in diameter. The gravity there has to be close to zero. "Sticking" to the surface tightly enough to collect samples has to be a major problem. Seems to me sort of like a neutral buoyancy swimmer trying to collect concrete samples from the bottom of a swimming pool full of water.

Now you've read about the bonkers world of Elizabeth Holmes, own some Theranos history: Upstart's IT gear for sale

Re: This was always a scam

Of course Theranos was a scam. What ought to be a concern is how many similar high profile, high "value", operations are equally vaporous.

Chrome ad, content blockers beg Google: Don't execute our code! Wait, no, do execute our code – just don't kill us!

Re: Browser developers hate users

Hate users? Heavens no. It's been quite clear for decades that browser developers are barely aware that users even exist. Hating users would be like hating hops pickers, sailmakers or clam diggers -- totally irrelevant to the browser developer mental model of their universe.

Just do IoT? We'd walk a mile in someone else's Nike smart sneakers, but they seem to be 'bricked'

Re: Self lacing?

No Internet Connection required ...

But ... but ... but ... How are they going to track you without an internet connection?

White House and FCC announce big, broken solutions to America's pitiful broadband

Re: Oh, great

What a crock of shit. I'm never going to be able to ditch Comcast, am I?

Not until your Public Utilities Commission grows a pair and yanks Comcast's operating license. ... And, in the unlikely event that happens, they'll probably be replaced by some company that's even worse.

Amazon triples profit to $11.2bn, pays ZERO DOLLARS in corp tax – instead we pay it $129m

Re: Tax

The median Amazon wage was $28,446 last year. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/24/thousands-amazon-workers-receive-food-stamps-now-bernie-sanders-wants-amazon-pay-up/?noredirect=on) Not a lot in a high cost of living area like New York City. Maybe the locals are exercising better judgment than their leaders in deciding to pass on 25000 probably mostly low paying jobs from an outfit that seems more than a bit predatory.

The Wall

No, No. Mexico is paying for the wall. They're just a bit late with the payments. Give 'em a bit of time to pawn Baja California or something. They'll come through.

It's now 2019, and your Windows DHCP server can be pwned by a packet, IE and Edge by a webpage, and so on

Re: Job security

You remove low paid, low skilled checkout workers. They are replaced by fewer, but much higher paid engineers, designers, installers ...

A number of prominent economists agree with you. Of course, economists haven't had much credibility for about 50 years because their predictions tend to have a lousy track record. On the average, one is probably better off treating them as C Northcote Parkinson suggested dealing with the guy whose predictions are always wrong. Ask them what to do. Then do something, anything, else.

Job security

Assuming that there are only 1,000,000 significant security bugs in Windows, at 75 bugs a month, the system should be perfect sometime around March of 3230 A.D. Of course, that assumes that no new bugs are introduced in the meantime. Want a secure future? Learn to sysadmin.

AI gets carded, China and US agree on robot wars, Amazon claims Rekognition is just fine

What could possibly go wrong?

there won't be any humans in future wars

Boy does THAT sound like the premise for a negative utopia novel. "What could possibly go wrong?" taken to a new and horrifying level.

Accused hacker Lauri Love to sue National Crime Agency to retrieve confiscated computing kit

Reasonable action?

I suppose the reasonable and rational thing to do would be for the police to copy the hard drive(s) in case they ever need whatever evidence might exist there, then give the equipment back to him. It is after all, his. Anyone want to bet on that happening?

LibreOffice patches malicious code-execution bug, Apache OpenOffice – wait for it, wait for it – doesn't

Re: Someone please explain...

It may be unusual to use a scripting language in a text document. I can't recall ever doing that or even wanting to do that. But let me assure you that the folks that control your budget are not going to be pleased if you don't give them a scripting tool in their spreadsheets.

No, sir.

Not pleased at all.

Re: Tried Libre about 3 weeks ago....

Is the nomenclature different in leap year? e.g. Office 366 ... 365 ... 364 ...

OK, it's early 2019. Has Leeds Hospital finally managed to 'axe the fax'? Um, yes and no

Re: Problem ?

If faxes work, and folks are used to them, what's the issue?

The issue is that much of the human race prefers illusion to things that actually work. There are some real problems with fax. It's slow, Isn't always provisioned with paper when it should be. Thermoprinted paper used in inexpensive fax machines fades over time. Etc, etc,etc. OTOH, the shiny digital solutions preferred by many tend to be costly, complex, not to be interoperable with other shiny digital solutions. etc,etc,etc. They have a bunch of problems of their own.

Personally, I belong to the "If it isn't broken, don't fix it" school. But some things really do work better after proper repair. The optimum way to deal with an older technology is probably to ask first if it really needs fixing, and second if there is a tested, widely deployed, solution that actually fixes real problems and doesn't come with unfortunate side effects.

Bug-hunter faces jail for vulnerability reports, DuckDuckPwn (almost), family spied on via Nest gizmo, and more

Re: SS7 hacked?

Telphone network hacking goes back about 70 years to the time when automatic devices started to replace rooms full of operators manually patching calls through complicated switchboards with a zillion jacks and a lot of cords with plugs on the end. Recommended reading: Secrets of the Little Blue Box by Ron Rosenbaum published by Esquire in the very early 1970s. Full text is at http://www.lospadres.info/thorg/lbb.html

One suspects that it's easier and more lucrative now that everyone and everything is cloudy.

Sprint subscribers: What do your updated iPhone and Tonga have in common? Both are cut off from the world

Re: Break?

For a lengthy and entertaining primer on undersea cables, try Neal Stephenson's lengthy WIRED article http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html Is it accurate? Probably not. It is, after all, 25 years old. But it is a very good read.

Wow, fancy that. Web ad giant Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome. For safety, apparently

.There are other good choices available. ...

Perhaps, but fewer and fewer every year. If one doesn't like Firefox much either, the options seem to be becoming quite limited. Thanks to Javascript (Yechhh) and the insistence that we must all use https, even venerable tools like links can no longer access many sites.

I'm thinking that in not very long at all, one's choice for Internet browsing is going to be down to chrome or firefox with maybe some variations in colors, imagery, and menus. Many view this as "Progress" (toward what destination?). Personally, I'm inclined to view it as the Internet going to hell in a handbasket.

Surface: Tested to withstand the NFL. Microsoft firmware updates? Not so much

Confused

I'm a bit confused. I'm 98% certain that Patriot's coach Bill Belichik quit using his league provided Microsoft Surface a couple of years ago and went back to older technology. His ostensive reason -- " their [sic, but probably a typo by news sources as Belichick was "speaking" at the time] just isn’t enough consistency in the performance of the tablets." And indeed, sideline shots during Patriots games sometimes show the coach with a clipboard(?) and pencil(?). See https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/18/13320664/bill-belichick-patriots-microsoft-surface-tablet-nfl

Apple hardware priced so high that no one wants to buy it? It's 1983 all over again

Re: As a dev system?

I had the opportunity to play with a Lisa for an hour or so shortly after it was released. My take away -- the one I used was incredibly, unusably, slow. And that was in a time when expectations were not high. I had a similar experience a few years later with Windows 2 run from floppy disks. Those systems may have been of interest as a harbinger of things to come. But as tools to do actual work, they seemed pretty much useless.

Say GDP-aaaRrrgh, streamers: Max Schrems is coming for you, Netflix and Amazon

I have a gut feeling that the proposed "similar to GDPR" bill is going to be silently tabled.

Barring some sort of digital disaster that moves our legislators to action, I wouldn't expect significant privacy legislation in the US before 2021-2022 at the soonest. The self-immolation of the Republican Party assisted by the Democrats enthusiastic Molotov cocktail bombardment will probably paralyze the government this year and the 2020 election will do the same next. Privacy is a complex issue. If our legislators can figure out that they actually have to think (for a change) before passing privacy laws, it'll take a few years to get a law passed and placed on the President's desk for signature.

US midterms barely over when Russians came knocking on our servers (again), Democrats claim

It's what spies do?

Seems to me that the Russian equivalent of the NSA would be sadly remiss if they WEREN'T regularly trying to break into the DNC and RNC servers, as well as a wide variety of state, US government,US military, law enforcement and Military Industrial Complex servers. That, I believe, is what intelligence agencies do nowadays.

However, I suppose any weird scenario on could conjure up COULD be in play. I can't imagine what the point of the court action against Russia is, but that doesn't mean there isn't a point buried somewhere in the murky depths of international law and the US legal system.

Or maybe the Democrats are just trying to somehow score political points against a President and political opposition for whom they have roughly zero affection.

I used to be a dull John Doe. Thanks to Huawei, I'm now James Bond!

Homebrew?

As I understand it, all you need to get into the spying game on behalf of everyone's favourite inscrutable superpower is to own something with a Huawei logo on it.

Cash is a bit tight at the moment. And I've never been able to figure out anything a smart phone might actually be useful for. But spying sounds like fun. Can I maybe use a felt tip pen to convert my old Nokia Trakfone into a surrogate Huawei device?

Iran satellite fails: ICBM test drive or microsat test? Opinion is divided...

Pfaghhh!

Ironically, Google Maps or Open Street Map should be orders of magnitude better than sufficient for targeting a nuclear warhead. It's only when you try to deliver a conventional payload to a specific target without vaporizing its neighborhood that you need high precision satellite imagery. There are, however, numerous rationales for operating spy satellites that don't involve nuclear weaponry.

Sadly, the record shows pretty clearly that one can't trust the governments of the US, its military allies, Israel, Russia, North Korea, China, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, etc, etc, etc to tell the truth about much of anything. I doubt Iran is very trustworthy either. Who can one trust? Maybe the Swiss, but what incentive do they have to share their secrets (if any) with anyone who isn't paying for the information?

Come mobile users, gather round and learn how to add up

Re: Itchy Chin

In Python 2+2 = 4, "2" + "2" = "22" and "2" + 2 generates an exception "TypeError: cannot concatenate 'str' and 'int' objects" Forgive me, but in what way is that not perfectly reasonable?

Jeep hacking lawsuit shifts into gear for trial after US Supremes refuse to hit the brakes

WTF is the entertainment system able to talk to the engine management system at all?

- Vehicles already have way too many wires threaded around through holes and in nooks and crannies. Separate data buses for entertainment, emissions, engine management, ABS, etc would add more wires. More complexity. Less reliability. Higher repair costs

- The entertainment system, pathetic though it may be, has by far the best User Interface in the car. Do you really want to try to decode which tire needs air by entering an inquiry in some Morseish code using the ignition key (if you have one) then counting flashes of the dash lights? That's pretty much exactly what was done to read engine management/emissions codes prior to the advent of OBD2 connectors in 1996.

Sharing the bus and UI hardware/software probably isn't something that most engineers would be overly happy about. But it's probably the least bad solution.

Gyro failure fingered for sending Earth-gazing Digital Globe sat TITSUP (That's a total inability to snap usual pics)

When building spacecraft, adding a backup means increasing weight

On top of which, my understanding is that satellites have rigid weight budgets imposed by the desired orbit and the capabilities of the launch platform. If your camera comes in 2kg over what you'd planned for, you don't just write a check for the weight overage. You cut weight elsewhere. Perhaps the planned backup gyro has to go.

Stormy times ahead for IBM-owned Weather Channel app: LA sues over location data slurp

I'll have the super large bucket of popcorn

it's not yet clear how many reside in California

I expect that data is available from IBM ... For a price.

Nobody in China wants Apple's eye-wateringly priced iPhones, sighs CEO Tim Cook

Re: There's disposable income then there's

Hold their resale value? If I buy a £120 quid ...

Sure. But will that cut rate Android gidgee BEND? Betcha not.

It's all a matter of of what your priorities are.

China's loose Chang'e: Probe lands on far side of the Moon in science first, says state media

Re: Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

Might it not be a good idea to find out what's actually there before planning to colonize that rock? My guess is that what's there is nothing worth spending impressive amounts of money on in order to put humans up there. Robots can do the exploration better and cheaper.

Probably in future centuries some combination of need and reduced costs will justify humans in space. AFAICS, men on the moon or, worse, Mars, aren't likely going to happen in this century. At least not for more than an incredibly expensive photo-op. For that matter, why are substantial resources being wasted on the more or less pointless ISS? My opinion. Go back to the Skylab concept of a manned lab that is occasionally used when enough meaningful experiments that require direct human overersight are ready to be run. Spend the money instead on unmanned probes like this one, and on exploring the largely unexplored 70% or so of our planet that is permanently under water.

Congratulations to the Chinese for doing something in space that is actually cost effective.

Oregon can't stop people from calling themselves engineers, judge rules in Traffic-Light-Math-Gate

OMG

was fined in 2016 for calling himself an engineer in correspondence with state officials and doing math.

Really now. Can you imagine the chaos if we let just anyone wander in off the street and start doing math?

Re: Great for this Engineer

But what really gets my goat is people calling themselves "Software Engineer" when they have no academic qualifications in Software Engineering, nor membership of a professional body.

I can't say that I've ever been overly impressed with academic credentials per se, or, in many cases, with people who tout them. However, there's are bigger problems with "software engineering." For one thing, there is very little actual core information about software other than descriptions of programming languages and some discussion of algorithms. With a few exceptions -- cryptography, what else? -- there's simply no body of solid body of theory on which to base practice engineering. For another, few software practitioners have actually read many, or even any, of the core documents documents that do exist -- Hamming, Knuth, etc.

I think it may be symbolic of the state of "Software Engineering" that only three and a fraction of the planned seven volumes of "The Art of Computer Programming" have ever made it to the publishers.

EU politely asks if China could stop snaffling IP as precondition for doing business

Re: so just like the US before 1914 then ?

Someone has stolen their trick of stealing IP to become a world leader.

We (the US) largely gave up stealing IP many decades ago. For example, we passed on the opportunity to grab the tooling for the VW Beetle after WWII. So did the British -- on the grounds that the car was "Ugly and noisy". http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20130830-the-nazi-car-we-came-to-love

(But we did grab Werner von Braun and much of his rocket team from Peenemunde.)

Re: Have the cake and eat it

The problem is more one of access to the Chinese market. That's 1,300,000,000 consumers many with some amount of disposable income. Average Chinese income looks to be about $10000 USD per year. That's real money, not PPP. It's a big market and growing at a respectable rate despite the efforts of President Dingbat to spread chaos and disharmony across the planet -- a process known as "Making America Grate Again"

Average Chinese incomes appear to be only a fifth of American, so probably China should still be given some special treatment. But it may be time to start slowly phasing special treatment out. After all, China will likely have the largest economy on the planet within a few years and it does seem a bit weird for an economy that size to get special treatment designated for the "least developed countries"

Re: @TheSkunkyMonk

China doesn't make things better, they just make it cheaper than the competition, ...

Replace "China" with "Japan" and that's pretty much word for word what American companies were saying in the 1960s and 1970s. And the 1980s as well right up to the point where the Regan administration "negotiated" a "voluntary" agreement with Japan to limit the number of cheap, high quality, Japanese vehicle imports that were destroying the US auto industry.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the same happen with Chinese products sometime in the next decade or so.

Suunto settles scary scuba screwup for $50m: 'Faulty' dive computer hardware and software put explorers in peril

Re: Fuck!!!

when they introduce self-drive cars; you just know it will not end well for too many unfortunate people.

Let's try to keep some objectivity here. Autonomous cars are surely going to have accidents and are going to harm people and stuff. What is at issue isn't whether they sometimes harm people and property but whether they do less harm and damage than cars driven by people. Keep in mind that autonomous vehicles are not just a tool for getting drunks home safely when the pubs close. For the elderly, visually impaired, infirm and seriously ill., the benefits of reasonably safe autonomous vehicles seem very great.

There are companies -- Waymo(Google) for example -- that seem to be extremely conservative in their approach and which so far have a really good safety record. I don't know whether they can achieve acceptable levels of safety in all sorts of driving conditions. I doubt they know. Probably no one knows. But it's probably worth giving them a chance.

There are other companies -- Uber and Tesla come to mind -- that seem to me to have demonstrated sufficient disregard for reality and common sense that yanking their driving licenses permanently seems to me to be advisable. If/when they need vehicle autonomy, they can buy the technology from someone whose first priority is safety rather than profits.

IBM: Co-Op Insurance talking direct to coding subcontractor helped collapse of £55m IT revamp project

At its heart, the Co-Op's suit claims that software written by IBM subcontractor the Innovation Group had so many "deficiencies" that it was not fit for purpose – and had missed its deadlines.

Broken and late? Isn't that pretty much current state of the art/best practices for every software development methodology? Why did the insurance folks expect anything different? Not that I don't wish them luck with their litigation. AFAICS the only thing that might reign in the rampant overpromising and outright lying by software vendors is being held financially liable for their failure to keep their promises.

At its heart, the Co-Op's suit claims that software written by IBM subcontractor the Innovation Group had so many "deficiencies" that it was not fit for purpose – and had missed its deadlines.

Sounds like current "best practices" to me. What are the insurance folks whining about? Surely they didn't expect a working product delivered on schedule?

Vitamin Water gets massive publicity for new flavor: Utter BS

Re: Food for thought

"the authoritative Amish America website.'

The whaaaat?

Would that be the same people as this one http://ludditelink.org.uk?

Boffins build blazing battery bonfire

Re: Balls

I'm not sure we'd want an actual sphere. Maybe a cylinder with rounded edges. The problem is that if the floor under the storage tank moves at all -- e.g. earthquake or subsidence -- the tank is probably going to try to move. Since it will likely weigh 500kg or more, typical interior walls -- at least in North America -- probably won't constrain its motion much, We'd probably prefer that our hot water storage tanks stayed put.

My parents had one of those big tanks as part of a solar hot water installation. Per code -- doubtless written with typical tall, thin domestic hot water tanks in mind, that storage tank was securely strapped to an interior wall. It was pretty clear that if that tank decided to move, the wall was going traveling with it.

Lots of choices

There are dozens of energy storage options out there, and many look great on paper. In practice? Often not so much. Lithium-ion's strong point is high energy density which is very important in a vehicle smaller than ,say, a cargo ship. But it's not necessarily a big deal for a fixed installation. In point of fact the preferred utility grade storage option is often pumped storage which is quite cheap (a few cents per kwh) if you use it a lot, have lots of water available, have suitable topography and don't mind losing about a quarter of your input energy to various inefficiencies. Pumped storage has very low energy density.

A storage vessel for molten Silicon? Let's put it in your backyard, not mine. Same for Sodium-Sulfur storage which is actually in use here and there.