Re: Better than a PM
I have definitely, in the past, use the "eject" command on a machine to physically locate the one with the CD tray poking out :-)
36 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Feb 2007
"Absolutely agree, nuclear is the only valid solution to our energy needs"
Not necessarily true.
If we get green hydrogen (other energy storage systems are available) sorted out, there's no reason to think that we can't have a load of wind farms driving the process when it's windy/solar farms when it's sunny; and then hydrogen powerstations for when it's not.
Leaving aside the legal issues on "lane splitting" in California, about which I'm neither qualified nor experienced to comment on....
Presumably the GM self-driving software (and hardware) was written by car drivers, for car drivers. Is it possible that it simply didn't recognise the much smaller motorcycle as another vehicle, as it never occurred to the developers that vehicles could be that small? Therefore it didn't make an allowance fo its presence, perhaps.
Unforunately it's quite possible to have good "no pluggable media" policies implemented directly on top of old working practices and/or equipment. Thus making the job difficult, if not impossible.
Cue the "manager" who orders his minions to just "get it done" because he/she doesn't want to look bad, but doesn't care enough to actually do anything about it....
PS Where's a PHB icon when you need one?
I am remined of when I was working for my PhD. We had a stabilised power supply for the labs/building, which you could plug your instruments into, and be assured that no voltage spikes were going to get on to your chart recorder because they made the pen servo jump.
Then we found out that someone in the lab next door had plugged their 'fridge into the sabilised supply, and every time the motor kicked in....
D'oh
(Edited for attrocious spelling)
The fact that the certificate has expired today does not make it any less secure than it was yesterday.
The expiry date is simply an arbitrary vaule applied by the CA calculated on the basis of how much money you are willing to pony up. It has nothing to do with security per se.
There may well be perfectly good reasons to regularly update your certificates, but the calendar rolling over isn't one of them.
"I use the internet to seek it out at my chosen vendors. I don't believe I have EVER clicked on an internet ad banner intentionally. Why am I the only person ON THE PLANET who operates like this?"
You are very much not alone in this.
This is why the cash-back programme has flopped, and presumably why his ad-click revenues aren't as high as anticipated either. I find it hard to believe that people who search for something are then going to click on ads instead of the search results that they just asked for. I'm sure there are some who fall for the "pretty" ads and do this, but the vast majority surely not.
Presumably LGT Treuhand AG will have informed their customers affected, when they discovered the data loss. And it seems likely that said customers will have changed/close/moved their accounts for security reasons shortly thereafter.
I don't suppose they thought that the perp after their bank accounts would be HMRC, but the effect is the same don't you think?
I understand that at the resolution of the Chinese satellite's cameras the remains of the NASA Lunar Landers would cover about 1 pixel.
So even if the Chinese were going to take time out of the lunar program they've spent millions on developing, just to assuage some paranoid fantasists, we still wouldn't be able to see anything useful.
And anyway, if people don't believe NASA's film and photographs, why would htye believe the Chinese either?
If MS distributes SuSE Linux, and that contains some GPL3 code, then MS is bound by the GPL3 for that code. There is no loophole.
Code distributed under GPL2 or earlier is indeed unaffected, but as was pointed out above, many open source licences state GPL2 or later. So MS could be in trouble with them too.
MS only have a problem if they don't want to follow the licence conditions of the software they're distributing. The GPL is very fair in this respect as it grants the same right to the recipient as to the distributor. Of course this doesn't fit in very with with MS's business model of End User Licences and retaining control even after you think you've bought the software from them.
Also, as pointed out above, MS already distributes GPL2 code (gcc etc) in violation of GPL2 because it doesn't make the source code available, and that's just the stuff we know about. In their closed-proprietory model in is almost impossible to say what other violations may be going on unseen. This is why there is a fuss about SuSE Linux and GPL3, because we can see it. Microsoft don't like this. What does that tell us about their motives?
It seems to me that America is making a rod for it's own back here, and taking the rest of the world along for the beating with it.
There should be no TLDs other than countries, and it's only America's refusal to use its .us suffix for its domestic sites that prevents this.
Working with country TLDs would then automatically put the censorship (and similar) issues with governments, at the expense of inconveniencing truly global companies who can actually justify being in a TLD. The legality issue is also addressed as domains would (have to) be set up in jurisdictions where they are legal.
Having worked with Inmos Transputers and Intel i860s in the 90s this does all sound rather familliar.
However, although there defintely is a need for a parallel programming laguage for high performance applications, for most needs this is a red herring.
Modern operating systems run many separate processes to perform individual tasks, even Windows. So once the kernel can handle a a large number of processors (not necessarily a trivial task), the general application layer can carry on as before with the many processed geninely getting run in parallel.
Indeed, when I was doing parallel simulations it was impossible to beat the overall efficiency of running a complete simulation on each processor, rather than running a succession of parallel jobs really quickly.