Posts by vtcodger 2029 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2017
FWIW -- Wikipedia has a list of the world's busiest airports. I looked up the number of runways at a few of them. The only one with 7 runways is number 3 DFW (Dallas-Fort Worth). The busiest -- Hartsfield in Atlanta has 4. The second busiest-Dubai has 2.
I gave you an upvote because I agree with the sentiment that many/most IT industry ideas of "modern" are just plain silly. But really,the problems with Air Traffic Control are deeper and more fundamental. The reality: The system(s) have to combine inputs from many sources in many formats -- the aircraft themselves, ground radars of many sorts, pilots, ATC operators, weather information, many of those in multiple version (e.g. civilian, military(multiple autonomous agents), etc, etc, etc ... And some information is, of necessity verbal, not digital. And they have to do it in real time. AND THEY CAN NOT MAKE MISTAKES -- EVER.
It's a tremendously difficult problem. If you ask me, it's amazing that the "system" (if that's even the proper term for it) works as well as it does.
I've never worked with ATC although I did work on the SAGE Air Defense System in the early 1960s which had to deal with some overlapping issues. But it's been my impression that the ATC system(s) have always been in dubious condition and that it is something of a miracle that they work as well as they do.
I'm far from sure that we even know how to "fix" ATC even if there were adequate funding and a will to do so.
I believe this to be incorrect. Although some people do in fact refer to the memory crystal storage capability in Windows65536 and later as "6D", it is actually a Summer Coding Project spin off based on Memory Crystal 4D without the massive MC 5D fixes and additions and with some quite incomprehensible additions of its own. The actual (draft) 6D standard has been stalled in an IETF committee for 13 years.
How do you explain git?
Well, it has always seemed to me that configuration management of a large system -- especially one with contributors scattered all over the planet -- is an incredibly complex task. I assume that Torvalds put together a system that he felt supported ALL the needs of that kind of effort including as many as possible of the weird edge cases. No surprise that what he came up with is complicated and obtuse. At least I find it to be complicated and obtuse.
But what I don't understand very well is why folks whose needs are simpler far insist on using git. I mean, you don't need $10000 worth of tools and diagnostic equipment to deal with a burnt out headlight or flat tire. I can only conclude that they are so smart that git seems simple to them or that they are too dumb to figure out that there are simpler answers to the problem that work fine for their needs.
Agree -- Nano or Joe or any of a dozen other simple, straightforward, text editors.
Unless ... you are addicted to one or more of the features of emacs or vi.
In my case, it's emacs org mode. Outlining, simple spreadsheets, tables, links -- pretty much everything you could want in a Personal Information Manager. And if you aren't completely happy with some feature, you can change it yourself. Good news, bad news joke there. The good news -- Yes you can easily modify how emacs works. The bad news -- emacs is written in lisp.
I'm straining to remember what we actually used for text editing 4 decades ago. In the DEC rsx environment it was something called TECO which was, as I recall, easy enough to use but had a rather terrifying potential for destroying your file with a single keystroke error. On PC clones it was edlin -- not especially fun, but usable. Before that, was the era of punched cards edited by punching a new card which didn't seem all that onerous at the time. vi was around on Unix systems. But I, at least found it to be unusable. Don't remember what the alternative was, but it was less obtuse. At least so it seemed to me.
Prediction: A replacement pinhole will cost $300 at the dealer's service counter. Installation, should you let the dealer do it will get you a bill for 2 hours labor at well over $100/hr. You can replace it yourself (a 10 minute job), but you will have to get the dealer to reprogram the vehicle computer to accept the new device. The dealer's maintenance software will refuse to acknowledge or accept aftermarket pinhole assembles (available on Amazon from several vendors for $5.99). Isn't capitalism wonderful?
Let's see if I have this straight. Tesla -- which apparently can't build a lane-keeping/collision avoidance system that isn't perpetually just one or two more fixes away from working right doesn't like LIDAR. Waymo on the other hand -- which many people think to be the clear leader in the field -- uses LIDAR (albeit in conjunction with just about every other remote sensor technology known to man). Which would you make you feel safer if you saw it bearing down on you while you were crossing the street -- a Tesla or a Waymo Jaguar I-PACE?
I agree that most companies outside of the entertainment industry and some parasites thereon like advertising will actually find "AI" to be cost effective. And their computing needs while probably massive will be localized. All in all probably less of a total resource sink than crypto "currency".
But based on what I've seen in the past six decades, I fear that outfits that have invested heavily in AI will insist on using it whether it works or not. I hope it won't happen, but I expect that in the not too distant future, we will see useless "customer service" operations replaced by even more obtuse AI agents. Not to mention oceans of crummy software of all sorts trying to anticipate our desires and then acting on its lousy "thinking." May God help us users, each and every one. We're likely going to need all the help we can summon from the heavens or anywhere else.
No, the internet isn't secure by design. Neither, in all likelyhood, is it securable in practice. But that's not really a reason not to slap a few bandaids on some of the places where it's bleeding badly and maybe apply a little antibiotic cream as well. Regrettably perhaps the modern internet isn't all cat videos and crypto scams. It's being used by critical infrastructure. Might be best if that stuff kept working.
A quibble. Allen Stanford was indeed a banker. Strictly speaking Bernie Madoff was a broker not a banker although he apparently decided at some point that actually trading in securities was a hassle and quite unnecessary because claiming to trade was every bit as profitable and a good deal less stressful.
I'd guess more like 30 years than 10. And that's the minimum. It could be a lot longer.
And why is the industry so sure that after investing a fortune, they will end up with a sort of digital Mahatma Gandhi rather than a bizarre collection of digital Elon Musks, Vladimir Putins, and Donald Trumps?
"Not paying bills was also Trump's MO..."
e,g "Bankrupt Rudy Giuliani Sought Trump Payment ...'
Newsweek
https://www.newsweek.com › donald-trump-rudy-giulia...
Jul 5, 2024 — Giuliani said that his invoices to Trump were ignored, leaving an outstanding total figure of "about $2 million."
And still unpaid as of yesterday apparently.
CNN
https://www.cnn.com › giuliani-trump-legal-bills
Aug 17, 2023 — With his attorney in tow, Rudy Giuliani traveled to Mar-a-Lago in recent months on a mission to make a personal and desperate appeal to ...
New York Magazine
https://nymag.com › 2023/08 › trump-giuliani-begged
Aug 19, 2023 — Lawyers representing Rudy Giuliani say he's broke, due to multiple 2020 election lawsuits and now Georgia criminal charges. Donald Trump ...
DEC wasn't killed by management, poor engineering, or poor marketing. The company lived and prospered for a couple of decades in a niche between mainframes and devices of many sorts that did useful stuff and needed a bit of dedicated on-board digital logic to function. DEC computers were, for the most part cheaper to buy and run than mainframes and, being programmable, quite flexible. Lots of market for that. By the late 1980s it was apparent that microcomputers could, or would soon be able to do the same stuff. Cheaper. Sure enough DEC simply couldn't compete and was bought out by a Microcomputer operation (Compaq) in 1998.
No, you're quite right. Here in the US even new ICE cars lose almost 10% of their "value" as soon as they get a few hundred meters from the dealer showroom. And they lose another 10% per year for the first few years of ownership. Financially, the optimum strategy clearly is to buy a three or so year old low mileage used vehicle. Preferably a model that hasn't proven to be a reliability disaster in its first few model years. I don't imagine that the situation is much different in the UK.
Currently, EVs and PHEVs are, not unreasonably, even worse than ICE/HEV depreciation wise. I'd quote some numbers, but the ones I find online seem to me to be probably distorted by Hertz-Rent-a-car dumping a large number of EVs into the used market, Musk's aggressive price cutting, and high interest rates. Ignoring all that, EVs are still quite costly to begin with, and it's not all that clear what maintenance costs on an elderly EV/PHEV are going to be whereas it's pretty clear that a ICE (or older HEV) without excessive miles may well last well into its second decade before it becomes too aggravating/unreliable to keep on the road.
Apart from the vehicle redesign issue, there's the problem that EV batteries are quite expensive. How anxious are you or anyone else likely to be to swap their expensive brand new battery for a unit of unknown provenance. That doesn't apply to fleet vehicles where the operators own the battery that will be swapped in as well as the battery swapped out. I expect that's where battery swap will eventually become commonplace.
in the 1950s, the American car makers actually were making profits from sort of OK (for the time) cars sold at reasonable prices. Later attempts to replicate that success (e.g Ford Pinto) didn't fare so well. My belief is that most (all?) subsequent attempts at an American economy car were based on European or East Asian platforms. But I'm not a car buff. Maybe I'm wrong.
Yes, much of the world can do just fine with what amounts to glorified golf carts. And the Chinese look likely to lock up that market at least until some other country comes along that can stamp the things out even cheaper.
Some problems with deploying them in the US. First, US car makers apparently can't make money selling cheap mass market vehicles. Expect all sorts of legal barriers to their import, sale and licensing. Second, building a cheap EV that meets US safety standards is probably going to be quite difficult and compromising those standards is likely to be a tough sell. Third, much more of the US road network than city dwellers appreciate is either unpaved rural roads or paved, but one lane in each direction. For the most part, people that use those roads don't much mind slowing down for the very occasional farm vehicle (or herd of livestock) moving from field to field via the highway. But large numbers of vehicles that can't travel at the prevailing speeds are not going to be well received.
Well, yes, batteries will get better. Albeit slowly. LOTS of folks working on that. But there are theoretical limits to how good they can get and my impression is that current batteries are far closer to the best that can be done with regard to energy density than most people think. It sure looks like they will likely never come close to the energy density of chemical fuels. Yes, chemical fuels are inefficient (unless you need the "waste" heat for other purposes like keeping the payload alive in Winter), but it still looks to me like pure EVs are unlikely ever to match the capabilities we routinely expect from ICE vehicles. Doesn't mean EVs are useless. Does suggest to me that the current crop of EVs might be a bit overpriced and oversold for what they actually offer and that lawmakers who wish to ban ICE by some date certain are likely a bit naive.
Probably hybrids are an answer for those who really need extended range per "fueling".
Could I be wrong? Of course. But I actually have worked the numbers such as they are several times. Wouldn't mind hearing from some one who actually knows what they are talking about.
Hmmm. Seems to me that with a suitable adapter, you could take care of any arc welding you might need done while waiting for your Tesla (or other EV for that matter) to charge. Memo to self: look into patentability of the concept.
BTW, other than the possibility of driving the battery cells into thermal run-away, what could possibly go wrong? And wouldn't you want to prevent battery thermal run away, by monitoring battery temperatures not charger handle temperatures? What's that? Excessive heat could destroy the charger. So what? It's not the vehicle owner's charger.
"Fewer cars need fewer chargers"
Ahem ... Sales rate is the rate of increase in the fleet, not the ratio of chargers to vehicles. Unless Tesla die and are scrapped at a rate higher than the sales rate, the number of Teslae on the road would still be increasing --- albeit not so rapidly as in the past.
It's hard to imagine a platform more ill-suited to space exploration than humans. Fragile. Require massive elaborate support systems for even the simplest tasks. Adequate sensors, but they cover only a very small selection of EM wavelengths. Poor and erratic recording capability. Moderately flexible, but not all that reliable.
Aside from which, our exploration machines get smarter every year. Humans on the other hand ...
The only thing that humans have done in space that seems to me to justify the costs and risks are the Hubble repair missions. And it won't be all that many decades before we'll have machines that do things like that adequately and less expensively.
There's a series of one hour documentaries (OK, OK 50 minutes plus commercials) called Mayday that occasionally are shown on documentary channels like Quest. Mostly aircraft crashes, but a few train crashes and at least one shipwreck. They're very well done.
I thought it would be appropriate to mention Richard Feynman's Appendix to the report on the Challenger disaster. It's at https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm" and I'll just quote the first three sentences "It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management." Sound familiar?
Anyway while looking for the URL for Appendix F, I came across this https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf which turns out to be Feynman's informal article on how the analysis was done. It's highly perceptive and well worth reading.
Motion Pictures have been filmed at 24 frames/second for nearly a century although much higher rates have been possible for a long time. Apparently 24fps is good enough for Hollywood. Maybe 60Hz refresh really is good enough for (almost) anybody,
(If you want to be picky, PROJECTORS, sometimes repeat each frame 2 or 3 times to reduce flicker.)
Ahem, You wouldn't happen to know where I can come by one of those Captcha solving bots? Being human, I'm not especially good at solving them, so a bot to handle the damn things would be a most welcome addition to my workflow. (Linux or ChromeOS only, thanks. I used to try to keep a Windows machine around for emergencies, but I only needed it about once every two years, and the misbegotten box invariably failed to do anything remotely useful when I did try to apply it to some problem.
My rather vague recollection is that our Republicans here in the US tried that in the early 1980s. And, as I recall, they -- being rather less demented than their current namesakes -- actually did a not half bad job of it. The problem. Within a decade or so, all the exceptions, complexity, and outright lunacy had found it's way back into the US tax codes.
Might want to send Toyota management a note to inform them that those Mirai that they've been selling for a decade (albeit in small volume) can't possibly work. You're sort of correct though, they're hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, not internal combustion. However if what you want is rotary motion, Hydrogen really can do that reasonably well.
Let me quickly add that there are lots of other things wrong with hydrogen as a fuel -- starting with it being incredibly bulky unless liquefied (boiling point 20K = -253C) or stored under really high pressure. Bulky is handy if you're building an airship. For most other applications it's likely to be quite inconvenient.
My impression is that Microsoft might be addressing that problem. Most likely in the near future instead of page cannot be found you'll get some AI generated WAG as to what it might have contained.
User: "Hey Clippy, how do I print this thing, there's no Print Button"
Windows: "To print, mix 15g or eye of newt with 7g of frog toe. Add 20g of bat wool and ..."
"First, if you have a backup from before 1900 UTC yesterday, just restore that. If your backup habits are lax, then you're going to have to repair the OS disk offline."
Fortunately, I'm long since retired. And, I quit using Windows a LONG time ago after concluding that the system was far too buggy and poorly documented for serious use. And in any case, the idea of automatically loaded updates, has always seemed quite Utopian to me. I mean, like what could possibly go wrong? Aside from supply chain attacks? And quality control problems in agencies you have no control over? And a huge exposure surface for sophisticated national agents to attack if (likely when rather than if) international tensions boil over.
An accident waiting to happen if you ask me.
But, no matter. I do have a couple of questions about this particular ... ahem ... "situation".
1. If your system, virtual or real, is stuck in a boot loop, how the heck do you load this here backup?
2. Are you going to lose all the transactions entered after the last backup? Isn't that going to be a substantial problem for many businesses/organizations? After all, a lot of outfits purportedly use their computers to sell stuff, and/or buy stuff, and/or to keep track of things like attendance, work hours, medication lists, nuclear warhead inventories. Mundane stuff like that. Of course, if the computers are only there so the bosses can play Solitaire and send emails between important phone calls/meetings,maybe it doesn't matter all that much.
AI = Job security for whole generations of lawyers. I'm not sure whether that's good or bad. On the positive side, it keeps the wretched creatures from alternate activities. On the other hand it will likely encourage the breeding of even more of them. I'm not sure how they propagate. Spore's maybe.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." H. L. Mencken ·
There are a plethora of reasons that making ransomware payments illegal is probably an RBI (Really Bad Idea). For starters, it would probably be a dandy way to drive most of a country's larger businesses to some off-shore haven with less draconian laws. Why would any remotely sane corporate officer stick around in a place where they are likely to be confronted an day now with the choice of shutting down the business or going to jail?
What's an alternative clear, simple, and probably wrong idea? De-anonymize cryptocurrency. Require all crypto owners to register their "coins". Require every coin to be reported to a national authority within 15 days of being minted and require every transaction to be reported to the appropriate authorities within 48 hours. (Or better yet, do as China has done and just make the stuff illegal.). Why won't that work? For one thing, an illegal trade in unregistered cryptocoins will surely exist as long as some folks think the stuff actually has value. For another, most ransomware actors don't appear to be especially dumb. They'll come up with some other way to get anonymous payments.
Not that regular security audits would be a bad idea for every business with significant on-line components (most everybody nowadays?). But there is one minor problem. We've spent three decades building a digital communications/interoperability framework that is wildly insecure. It seems likely to me that trying to paste a framework of security best practices on top of that is probably more cosmetic than realistic. But even Potemkin security might help a bit at times even though it's not likely to do wonders for usability.
"Surely its just easier and cheaper to host everything in house...
The problem with hosting "in house" is that results in information being in the wrong place (e.g. Canberra or Sydney) when it's needed somewhere else (Darwin or Broome or maybe on a warship in the Indian Ocean. Or vice versa. And it won't get to where it's needed unless someone where it is knows where it's needed. And actually sends it.
On the other hand, there are problems with a "cloud". For one thing, it will likely be used for routine as well as critical stuff. Which means that it's a single point of failure for much of your operation. If your communications are hosed for one reason or another, your operation is crippled. Example -- many auto dealerships in the US have been severely impacted by a recent ransomware attack. Last month it was prescription drug dispensaries. Another problem is that if a foreign power manages to crack your encryption, all your data belongs to them.
Given the current state of digital communications security, and the rather sorry history of challenging IT projects, I suspect this is not a that great an idea.
Why is internet so expensive in the US?
Distance does have a lot to do with it in rural areas, but basically, because the big communication companies have us by the balls and our hearts and minds (if any) have little choice but to follow. (Paraphrased quotation turns out to be from Theodore Roosevelt. I thought it was one of our Vietnam war generals). Not much can be done about the distance, but the corporate abuse could probably be solved by electing some sensible politicians. If only we could find some.
42? Well ... yes ... but also 40,41,43,44,109,1044,1492,1235468923473,-17,3.14259,16i ... and too many more to list. And also, so far as I can tell none of that has been confirmed on actual running hardware.
But if they ever build one that works it'll apparently be able to do super fast Fourier transforms. I suppose that's something. Can blockchain or LLMs do that?
I don't think auto sales are that much of a problem. It's not like car salesmen are now, or ever were, overburdened by the need to find accurate information. If they don't know an answer, they will, as is traditional in that trade, just make something up. Service however, They need to schedule appointments, check inventory, order parts not in stock, create invoices, etc, etc, etc. Hard to do when your data is on an inaccessible computer, and much of your essential communication flows through that same inaccessible computer.
Why licence anything when you can just use CUPS?
While I'd agree that CUPS has come a long way in the last quarter century, when last I looked, the CUPS ppds specified what print driver to use to process print requests for each printer it knows about. I doubt that just invoking CUPS will bypass the need for print drivers that run properly on ARM. I'd like to find I'm wrong about that, but my guess is that I'm not.
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