Posts by Howard Sway 2050 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2020
That's a nice way of saying that the sheer stupidity and incompetence of the government has resulted in a permanent river of taxpayers money flowing into the disaster they've created, in a desperate attempt to salvage the project, which may still fail anyway.
"the systems at the benefits agency could not support this"
So you're seriously telling us that either a single column in a database table containing a payment amount, or possibly a hardcoded amount in a COBOL program cannot, in any way whatsoever, be updated? I would be demanding some kind of technical report explaining just exactly how such a simple commonplace task is supposedly "impossible", as every IT system I have ever encountered would have had some way of quickly making such a trivial change.
I'm interested to learn how it's going to predict the outages caused by the office cleaner accidentally pulling out ethernet cables in the server room when hoovering too enthusiastically, a regular occurence at one place I worked.
If you've got what you think is a decent plan to make a business bigger and more profitable, you wouldn't try to reduce your own stake in that business, you would try to increase it.
Just a hint to the Musk-dazzled who don't understand the basics......... he's trying to reduce his own risk here and get the investment banks take on more of it - a sign he feels his own plans could possibly backfire.
This is like saying there's a problematic side to breathing, because living people could do something harmful.
God forbid they should ever send a minster for "digital" on a one day course explaining what digital computing actually is, they might stop thinking that it all runs on magic, and realise that algorithms and computer code are the same thing. I await Mad Nad's law mandating that all code be sent to the Algorithm Police so it can be checked for unbadness before compiling it, and being hauled in for questioning as to what harm this suspicious add(x, y) function is going to cause.
Unfortunately the powers that be will quickly put a stop to the virtual anarchy, mandating that all these features be disabled for the ordinary users in the office through Metaverse Active Directory group policies. This will make it more vitally important than ever for techies to stay good friends with the sysadmin team, so that at least we can enable private Tiswas Mode during meetings and send a continual stream of custard pies into our bosses face when they annoy us.
That's not an 'I' and 'O', that's a 1 and a 0. Presumably thought up by some techie who can only think in binary, and assumes everybody else will understand it too. There can't be any other reason, unless they thought that users wouldn't be confused as to whether 'O' stands for On or Off.
The same government that this year also said the following about its intent to ban end to end encryption :
“There is a risk that end-to-end encryption, without the right safety capabilities, blinds companies and law enforcement, taking us backwards. Neither this government, nor society as a whole could accept that.”
Presumably quantum government means existing in a state of wanting to both encourage and ban something at the same time, and only when you observe whatever thoughts emerge from Priti Patel's brain at a particular moment in time do you discover what the current state is.
That's right, because nobody else in the IT industry uses creativity, technology and intelligence do they?
If you're going to pay a fortune to some "branding imagineers", at least have the braincells to check that what they come up with isn't total bullshit before you proudly announce it to mass derision.
Not that this will stop their clueless corporate clients from queuing up with wheelbarrows full of cash, desperate to buy a "metaverse strategy".
Or even simpler : use one of the major cloud providers such as AWS or Azure, and they'll run the test for you at irregular intervals.
I was involved in running the same sort of test 20 years ago when working at a bank that had a complete failover datacentre. It was only one network zone in the datacentre that we tested, but it worked, although it too had been expensively designed from the ground up to do so.
I never even noticed it - not a good sign, especially as it is of course also the sign for 'not'. Now that I spent a bit more time looking at the language spec, it's a real horrid way of dealing with function failures, basically a sort of crash or try and plow on regardless indicator (you use '?' instead to in effect throw a kind of exception if a call fails, and mingle handled exception types with return type). And of course they've reversed type and name for parameters
fn writehello(path: str) (fs::error | io::error | void) = {
const oflags = flags::WRONLY | flags::TRUNC;
const file = os::create(path, 0o644, oflags)?;
And then there's this horror :
for (let i = 1z; i < len(items); i += 1)
That's enough for me I'm afraid, it appears to be the language equivalent of a stroppy teenager who's dyed their hair in order to look different.
This is what I see from their example compared to C and its offspring :
use instead of #include
addition of unnecessary "export fn" to function definitions
move return type so it's after function name instead of before it
addition of unnecessary "=" after return type
have to specify fmt:: namespace explicitly (which is the exact opposite of C++'s "using" keyword which lets you omit namespace prefixes and keeps code tidier)
I don't see any productivity gains at all from these "improvements", it looks more like changing things around just for the sake of being different, and will of course be a source of errors when people used to C/C++ try to adjust to it. They really need to better explain in some detail why they consider their code examples to be better than other languages, because this example doesn't do that at all. And even worse, their website insists you watch videos, rather than read some text as an introduction to the language. Any "how to" meant for programmers that's done as a video is an instant avoid flag for me.
Welcome to the world you've just bought yourself that is shortly going to be testing that claim to destruction.
Let's all have a bet on how long it will take before his absolutism mysteriously disappears when he realises how much shit he's invited upon himself.
Far better in my opinion to have a friendly encouraging attitude and try to engage device manufacturers and explain why it would be nice if they open sourced the firmware. Then leave it up to them to make a choice whether they do or not, with hopefully enough praise having being given to those that do to make it seem attractive and even a positive selling point (and not piling in with criticism about open source license wars or nitpicking the moment something's discovered to be 0.00000001% non-compliant might help too).
Open souce is a bit of a red herring here. You may believe that having the source lets you have 100% awareness of what's happening inside the hardware. But unless you can inspect a full circuit diagram of all the chips inside it, work out how they work and check that each chip conforms, you have no guarantee that that code''s actually being executed, or doing what you think it does.
Does a hugely debt-leveraged buyout really seem such a good idea when they're betting the money on such a loose cannon as Musk? To recoup that sort of money Twitter will have to become drenched in advertising, and when that's combined with the unfiltered sewage that will deluge the place once Musk's free speech crusade gets underway and the inevitable paid promotion of tweets and "premium" subscription memberships arrive, there's surely a risk that a more sane competitor site might spring up and sink them and make that investment vanish quite quickly.
which has brought us to the level where idiots like transport minister Trudy Harrison make stupid decisions like this one. Or are given responsibilities like that at all.
And supposed geniuses like Elon Musk can say things like "Oh, it turned out that building actual AI was difficult when I thought it was easy, because I hadn't thought it through properly, but I think I can solve that in a year, because I've like totally learnt that lesson now".
They must be amazed to discover that making their customers throw out and replace every PC in their business with a new one in order to run exactly the same software as before wasn't exactly "compelling".
You've obviously never read the little known sequel, where Jack buys a premier league football club with his gold, gets slapped with an unexplained wealth order, then finally gets his comeuppance whilst trying to flee on his superyacht when the crew mutiny because he's paying them below the minimum wage.
Don't they already have that ability, by choosing what they do and don't post. I mean, if you post something then it's "available", that is the whole point is it not?
Anyway, it's LinkedIn, all you can really find out there is that everyone in the world has led a team and successfully delivered a project on time and has good communication skills and all the rest of the seemingly compulsory bullshit that is needed to pass the first stage of recruitment processes nowadays....... Save yourself the effort of web scraping and write a program that stores that against every name you have instead, it'll save plenty of time and money and be no less worthless.
I think the key to understanding this is to look at the nature of the environmental film missions that they will be funding themselves to go on, once they've publicised their worthy cause enough for sufficient numbers of mugs concerned citizens to have purchased their NFTs.
Will "Ocean Collective" be braving the rough Winter seas off Greenland to make documentaries about the damage being done to some rare species of brown seaweed that can only be found there? Or will they perhaps conclude that their cause is best served by heroically sacrificing their time cruising round the Caribean for a couple of years filming the brightly coloured photogenic marine life there, subsisting on little more than sweet rum cocktails and other such deprivations?
NFT in this case surely stands for Numerous Free Tickets.
It never ceases to amaze me just how trivial the little things can be that people will take with them when moving out of their home. For instance, when I moved into my new secret volcano lair, the previous owner had even taken their massive laser death ray with them! Fortunately even he couldn't be bothered to drain the piranha pool and move all the hungry fishes.
I expect it had much more to do with the fact that the Isle of Wight is populated with quite wealthy, often retired people, nearly all of whom have smartphones. Newham is one of the poorest boroughs in the country, and therefore possession of a smartphone is much less likely. It really struck me when watching the government ministers bragging about the tracing app, that they just seemed to assume that everybody has a smartphone, simply because everybody THEY know has one.
I don't think this attempt to to be thought of as a bunch of great philanthropists is going to work so well after it's taken them so long to painfully drag this penny out of their own pockets. Their indifference to morality and desire to keep the money flowing in at all costs has been well noted now, and they've realised far too late for this donation-as-PR-exercise to wash away the reputational damage it's caused.
Not like the 47% that has been applied before this stage is anything like a tax at all is it?
Gonna be quite expensive, mooching around the metaworld in your NFT-shirt, wondering why it's so quiet and boring, hoping that someone will be willing to make something good for you despite the fact they're going to get milked so much by the owners.
Isn't the real problem that PC (and processor) manufacturers have just been trapped in a cycle of having to constantly stay at the high end of the latest and greatest chips, because that's what people have been taught to buy to run up to date software.
How many office workers need a 4Ghz processor in order to run the software they use? Almost none, but that's what you'll have to get if you buy a new one. Why aren't 2Ghz based machines still available, and at a much lower price point?
If you want a new car, you don't have to buy a Ferrari, you can buy a modestly performing one for much less money to meet your more modest needs, surely this should be the case too for PCs.
Having to live 24 hours a day surrounded by your own Imperial Guard because of so much paranoia about the number of people who might be out to get him doesn't sound like such a pleasant existence to me. No wonder he was so attracted by the idea of a virtual world where he can exist in safety, and most others thought it sounded like a terrible way to exist.
Never mind Mark, just put the headset on and relax, nobody will be able to get you now, that's it, slide slowly into the nutrient tank and feel the warmth, there's no risk that someone will discover the secret code that activates the skull probes................
Yes, I was pretty gutted when Libre Office increased their prices from £0.00 to £0.00, the aggressive bastards. That's an increase of infinity percent!
And what's this excuse about your competitors raising prices anyway, I thought you were just meant to simply compete on price, not announce that because others have increased prices that you feel you're able to get away with doing the same. With hundreds of millions of users, the cost of all these extra features per user is going to be so small as to be barely noticeable (it's called an economy of scale), just admit that you're doing it to keep the profits increasing in order to satisfy the stock market gods and you might get a reputation for being slightly less weaselly.
It's almost the perfect investment, because once the glued in, sealed in irreplaceable battery on the phone dies in two years time, it'll be as pointless and useless as the NFT you bought with it.
If only the fish-tracker people could have been told about this offer before it was made, they could have done a far more interesting experiment. Simply install a twat-tracker app on the phone, and gather data about everything the sort of person who would waste quarter of a million on this "classy" luxury does for the next 2 years, and we could have a rich source of data enabling us to work towards ending such gaudy wasteful awfulness by publishing it for everybody else's amusement.
This will be useful, because if you're drilling into the water main 8500 times to tap into the cable for each individual customer, there are probably going to quite a few more of them. Also, won't the water supply need to be temporarily cut off for the whole street every time someone signs up for broadband fibre in order to drill a new hole for them?
It's very revealing how the words they wanted to ban say rather a lot about Amazon and the unpleasant truth its executives don't want the outside world to hear. The only thing that surprised me was that "piss in a bottle" wasn't on the list.
Please can we stop accepting this sorry little pseudo-excuse after breaches. Of course you have "no evidence" because you don't have access to every credit card transaction on every card in the world so you wouldn't be able to know if had happened, even if you had somehow tried to find out. What do you think stolen card details are going to be used for?
So, facebook paid a company to spread challenges on its own platform encouraging kids to assault their teachers and vandalise their schools?
Just because it was done by the not-at-all-sinisterly-named company they paid to do it doesn't absolve them of responsibility. Incitement to violence and destruction isn't some small thing, it's a serious crime. I would expect a thorough and far-reaching police investigation into all this, as it's somewhat beyond legitimate lobbying and campaigning. Plus massive civil lawsuits for any damages caused as a result of paying to encourage kids to commit serious crimes.
Ruin kids lives, just to try and preserve your own profit making? Must seem like the logical next step to them after they've been allowed to trash so much else with impunity.
Isn't that what China is already doing though? Just because they choose to do that, it doesn't mean that everybody else is going to. If it comes down to a competition between the current decentralised Internet, and a bureaucratic, centrally controlled Chinternet, I can guess fairly easily which one is going to win on grounds of efficiency alone, let alone freedom. There's a reason why AOL disappeared and the web replaced that primitive idea. The amount of cost and effort needed when trying to control everything is not going to be small when you try and scale it up to billions of users.
So he was only arrested for the misdemeanor of using the watch without her consent, rather than actually threatening to kill her, a much more serious charge which could be quite plausibly believed when his dumb creepy attempt at tracking her was discovered................ surely that's the crime they should have been addressing, rather than the misuse of Apple hardware?
