Posts by Howard Sway 2050 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2020
It'll never catch on.
Never mind, the C suite can pat themselves on the back and convince themselves they've invented another new paradigm, now that they've admitted to the lesser ranks that they're all out of ideas. Why not call it "Internal Cloudsourcing" or something equally dismal?
Sure, slap on the wrist, don't do it again, we won't punish you any further because all you did was steal $300 million with a bunch of russian gangsters........ they're not exactly dissuading people from doing this, are they?
I'm starting to think that the powers that be have let the scale of the entire crypto scam become so huge that they're scared to actually move in and put a stop to it. Which just lets this shit continue on a daily basis. "Lola Ferrari" FFS, there must be no limit at all to the gullibility of the poor fools out there, they could have still got the cash if they'd called themselves Rich Moneyshitta and Mike Ryptoscam.
Not true. IBM's i series (or OS/400 as it was) has exactly this. OK, define "mainstream" however you like, but it's in use in lots of industries and still runs lots of large businesses. I worked in a couple of places where it was in use, and generally worked with it from its unix command line, but that is just a shell that works upon the underlying object based storage system, as is every other type of user program. Basically everything that is created is an object, and persists until it is explicitly removed. Whether this is in memory or on disk is completely under the control of the operating system.
Its native command line is horrendous, but you can work directly on every object with it, regardless of where that object actually is in storage at any point in time. I would have hated this idea to be transferred to any sort of personal computer, but the architecture was definitely interesting and it's well worth a look at if you've never encountered it.
If the electricity supply gets eaten up by the cloud, then you won't be able to access Netflix and Office 365 from your home and office as there'll be no electricity there. If the power goes to your home and office instead, there'll be no electricity to run the Netflix and Office 365 clouds.
But he did close the deal, by signing it, because he very definitely could. Launching a confidential countersuit after the trial has been confirmed looks like a very desperate last throw of the dice. The sort of thing people do when they know they've lost.
This comment is quite funny if you grew up in 1970s Britain.
From cars whose engines overheated when the sun came out, to regular visits from a man who used to have to do strange repairs to the telly with just a soldering iron (never with any new parts, or seemingly any solder, just applying the iron and making fizzing noises and making bits of smoke emerge from the circuitry).
There was quite a popular subscription model for hardware too, called "Radio Rentals". But that was weekly or monthly, definitely not "lifetime", although they could have got away with that, as the lifetime of the electrical goods was often able to be measured in weeks or months.
Sure, they're selling something. But they're not wrong in pointing out that the costs of decent prevention are much lower than the costs of a catastrophic breach. Burglar alarm manufacturers did the same thing.
Passing the costs of attacks onto customers does of course also make you uncompetitive on price compared with a better secured competitor.
And there we all were thinking it was just going to be about skipping through a world of fluffy clouds and rainbow happiness with our bestest friends.... and not at all some ad-drenched surveillance dystopia full of goons being bombarded with psychological damage every second that they're there. Imagine the lengths Zuckerberg will be prepared to go to when the revenue streams initially fall well short. He'll know so much about people that there will be pizzas arriving at people's doors 2 milliseconds after they've decided they want one.
Unfortunately they won't be able to heat the water enough for this to be useful - data centre cooling is about taking heat away quickly from the hot chips, not letting the water stay there long enough to reach a high temperature. What's really needed is cooling towers so that most of the water could be reused. But there's currently no economic incentive for this at the moment - they would probably needed to prodded into it by charging large enough amounts for the water to make it economical to do so.
The web would have thrived very easily without these features. And it will continue to do so without them, as its core functionality does not rely on them at all. Whether large tech companies remain as profitable is another matter altogether, but remember that eventually laws had to be passed to stop bakers using sawdust as the primary ingredient in their loaves, as the promised self regulation against abuse of customers never actually happened - a bit like here where Google is conveniently finding removing these features to be an almost insurmountable technical challenge that will apparently take this huge company with thousands of expert developers many many years to solve.
It's this type of tone deaf arrogance and greed, in the face of what is going to be a painful time for so many who aren't part of the gilded circle, that is going to exacerbate the backlash from workers and the general public. If he had the sense to announce that in solidarity with the workers, he was going to limit his pay rise to the flat rate £1500 too this year, it would have calmed the employee anger significantly, which might have lessened the appetite for strike action, and therefore been beneficial to the company.
Deciding that moderation is only for the little people and it's time for the big cheeses to fill their boots is just inviting a huge backlash. (Also, don't inform me that it wasn't his decision, but the remuneration committee's - they all sit on the committees of each others companies and award each other these huge pay rises).
This is web3. He could dance in the street waving fistfuls of banknotes about shouting "this is a miniscule proportion of the money that suckers have invested in my worthless crap, and I'm going to pocket it all for myself" and still the millions would keep rolling in from even more suckers who still believe it's a one way ticket to riches involving no work.
Personally, I would recommend running a mile and ensuring every last penny of your money goes nowhere near this convicted fraudster whatever junk he's pushing, but that's just me : unfortunately there are always going to be plenty of fools who are still willing to listen to him and get suckered in to his latest bullshit scheme, which he's launched a mere 2 months after finishing a long prison sentence for the last one.
I've found those 2 things to be mutually exclusive. True software talent is allergic to being shoehorned into forced weekly shipping deadlines. This shows that they still have a production line mentality, thinking that x units of software should roll out of the software factory every week.
Please arrange to do this on the exact moment I get paid every month, so that the payment system goes back in time after the first payment is made, and then pays me again a second later.
However you choose to mess with time, there will always be edge cases like this that cause problems.
Or alternatively, they could decide to just stick with the one regime that they have already complied with. In Brexit Headcase Land, the rest of the world is going to put in huge amounts of expensive work to comply with the UK's new shiny different-for-the-sake-of-being-different regulations. In reality, browser makers and foreign sites aren't going to bother rewriting stuff just to serve the whims of what looks like a government in chaos in one country. Especially as they suspect that new rules won't be enforced, due to the cost of doing so, and that any attempt to enforce them can easily be beaten by simply stopping their service for UK users, and waiting for the public outcry that follows to force the government to back down.
Mr Crater, a wonderful example of nominative determinism, has been somewhat innovative here I think, and pointed the way towards a much more efficient model for cryptocurrency. Instead of wasting vast amounts of energy on mining, blockchains, crypto exchanges and all that jazz, he has simply ignored all those steps and gone straight to the stage where the currency founder pockets all the money.
He should be applauded for having solved the problem of doing crypto without all the ecological damage of massive electricity consumption.
Who bothers with counterfeiting these days? Modern technology such as expensive GPUs lets you create fake money that you can use to pay for as many beers as you want, due to a similar advance in modern stupidity that believes it's worth exchanging for real money.
The whole damn thing's a fraud. How can they have not yet realised that whoever was behind this bunch of new "currencies" that have been magically conjured up from nothing are also holding back a substantial amount and are waiting to cash out as soon as enough fools have rushed in with real money? Until they start hitting this at source, the proliferation of worthless crap will carry on, and the ultimate crash when everybody and his dog wants to create their own coin will be utterly disastrous.
The cry will go up : "what were we thinking?". The answer will be : "you weren't".
They’ve now got patrol dogs who are barking, which helps deter drones
Sure, they can't make him behave. But Tesla is listed on the Nasdaq and this is all taking place in the Land Of The Lawsuit, so if he's seen to be not taking his responsibility to shareholders properly and actively damaging their investments, he'll find himself being sued by more than the board of Twitter.
Just a reminder, Musk is far from the only investor in Tesla, and this loss may have been caused by him, but it's also been incurred by all the other investors too. Whether they're all fanbois who don't really care because they still have blind faith in their guru, or whether they include lots of institutional investors who very much will care is something I don't know, but if it's the latter he may soon be faced with some meetings where the money men tell him to stop clowning about with videos of him smoking weed, pissing about with Twitter, etc and concentrate on properly building the company or put someone else in charge who will.
Selling off that much has also caused the price of bitcoin to fall further, so the 25% he's kept, presumably as some kind of hedge, is now also worth less too.
But this is Tesla's money, not just Musk's, which means that the 40% drop in the Tesla share price this year can be partly attributed to the crypto crash, but mainly due to to the stock markets deciding that Musk behaves like a reckless fool.
And entirely predictable, given how bloated and monolithic Windows is.
Trying to make its development agile was rather like trying to fit roller skates to a Diplodocus. The beast may move more quickly, but the crashes are bound to be frequent and disastrously damaging.
Some people will be - the minority of people who bought into Google Glass before the realisation hit them that it wasn't enjoyable or useful in any significantly better way than getting information from a screen (either on a phone, tablet or monitor). Plus the large majority who took the piss out of them and called them "glassholes", because they'd realised this would be the case without having to buy and try the product first.
The fallacy that all it needs is better graphics and a bigger hype to make the idea catch on has arisen amongst those who ignored this basic lesson in their desperation to be pushing "the new thing", as easily proved by the stubborn non-adoption of the VR world by the general public. I think this is because many people are fully able to imagine what the user experience will be like, and conclude that it's not really going to be worth buying, as it doesn't offer much that they'd really want.
Bombarding the public with adverts featuring lots of happy smiling attractive young people pretending to be having a great time whilst having VR headsets strapped to their faces will, I suspect, be met with much more derision and piss-taking than those trying to push this idea expect.
It's really not a surprise that those who were gullible enough to fall for the crypto mania in the first place are also gullible enough to fall for all the wallet draining scams that have multiplied in its wake. They've put a sign on themselves saying "easy mark" just by being involved, and the scammers know that their greed is greater than their sense.
It seems that in most of these scams, there's a common "connect your wallet in order to have this free thing" step, and then the wallets get drained. As if in real life you'd hand over your actual wallet to someone you don't know on the street who says "just give me your wallet, and I'll go away and put lots of free money in it for you".
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Hacking around with the kernel can be great fun, IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING / DON'T MIND REINSTALLING EVERYTHING IF IT FAILS.
And we should have all had plenty of experience warning our less technical friends to never, ever do what they read in a "here's a magic trick which will enormously speed up your computer" article - because too many of them are ways of actively inflicting harm.
This article obviously isn't trying to do that, it's for interested techies. However, proper caveats should still be given, even though nearly all Linux users here will not need them.
Or maybe you need to think about what you need in order to do the things you want to do. And to have employed people with sufficient knowledge to be able to do that. Because otherwise you end up cluelessly flailing about and end up wasting fortunes on worthless Gartner verbiage and vast amounts of time thereafter trying to turn their "analysis" into some kind of concrete action.
My God, I'm having horrible visions of an election manifesto being presented in the form of a massive UML diagram.
I read something today where she claimed that this experience will help her to go back and analyse all the country's problems from first principles and develop appropriate solutions if she becomes prime minister.
It's a shame that the idea of doing this has previously never occurred to her during all the years she's spent on the back benches as a total unknown.
So, this MP thinks that defeating the bill in the British parliament is going to get trump back on twitter?
Trump's tweet telling his followers "Be there. Will be wild!" the day before the Capitol riot was a transparently obvious attempt to get people to join what he hoped would turn into a coup that would end democracy in the USA. If it "cannot be right" that twitter don't want to host that kind of stuff, then how would he feel about someone trying to organise the overthrow of British democracy on social media? I doubt he'd be jumping up and down defending their free speech.
You make plenty of good points, then stir in this mindless insult about "socialism" which is irrelevant to the story of what an idiotic right wing populist conservative government is trying to pass into law.
Nadine Dorries is a socialist? No, she's just another over ambitious Tory cynic, grubbing for votes amongst the easily influenced, with little thought about any consequences which are nothing to do with how popular this bill might make her.
Yes, and all those who should have been regulating what was in effect an investment bank, but didn't because it was the new magic miracle money, and everybody said how exciting this all was, should be ashamed that they ever let these companies accrue such eye wateringly large liabilities on those balance sheets and they were too scared to move in and put a stop to it.
Their customers who aren't going to get repaid can console themselves that they've just joined the ever increasing list of suckers who had more greed than sense.
If you think this is bad, just wait until they bring out their Softwear range. You'll have to pay a monthly fee to rent it, it'll be full of holes that reveal embarrassing private details, and it'll only come in massively large sizes.
Don't forget that he also invested massively in crypto over the past year, so with the huge gains that all his magic internet money must be making he'll easily be able to afford the settleme.......... oh dear, looks like he's also lost most of that money too................... and even some of his idiot fan club might not fall for his pump and dump scams any more when they see what an enormous balls-up he's made of his Twitter takeover.
