Posts by TeeCee 9436 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
Win 3.11 ran on top of DOS on a FAT filesystem.
Habitually turning it off and on again was guaranteed to get the Disk Corruption Fairies[1] to sit up and take notice.
[1] As in: "Did you turn it off with the power switch again?".
"No I didn't!"
"Right. Must have been the Disk Corruption Fairies at work then."
Yet another blockchain implementation that you can buy for <insert reason here>.
Or, as your board members would understand it from the tech pages of the FT: Iz must hav block chain nowz.
Or, as we would understand it: A load of implementation work we don't need to produce something that does something we already do, only more slowly and in a more complicated manner.
You're training an AI algorithm to recognise pr0n pics. You show it a load of pr0n pics.
END OF BLOODY STORY.
Where those pr0n pics came from is of no interest and nor should it be. You must have a wide selection of realistic and genuine data for training. Some how "cleaning" the data according to some holier-than-thou ruling merely serves to bias the dataset with inevitable undesirable effects on the resulting algorithm.
You may not like the original source of the data, but it already exists to be used. If you want your AI algorithm to recognise that sort of picture, it has to be trained on it.
A consultant I worked with told me this one.
The company he was with at the time supported a stock control, ordering and billing system and one of their larger customers was in medical supplies. In meetings, one little problem that always came up was the ability to key any number into the order quantity field. This was exacerbated by the fact that they had one employee who had a habit of banging the date into said field which, being numeric, the system would happily accept.
The discussions on this always went the same way. Due to the nature of the business, the only viable fix was to add a max OQ value at product level. A Big Change and the customer wouldn't spend the money. In theory they could add a horrible bit of validation that would scream if the OQ validated as a date, but numerous examples existed of said employee not keying the date into the wrong field correctly (if you see what I mean).
One day, at the regular support meeting, their senior Sales and Credit types produced a piece of paper:
"Look at this! Six million fucking quid! We'd have been in deep shit if this hadn't been spotted."
"Well, you know the fix and what it will cost. We've been round this one many times."
"We have to do something....."
"Anyway, what did you do to correct the account balance?".
"Oh that. We just raised a matching Credit Note."
"You only have the Invoice here, what happened to the Credit Note?"
They got stuck in the door trying to get out. Too late. Already printed and mailed to the customer....
I would suggest that if you are the sort of target where it's worth some organisation's time, effort and resources to aquire your user information, password and bypass MFA then yes, you really mustn't have on-line access.
For the vast majority, there's no need to be quite that paranoid.
...a physical graphics accelerator and SSD in the G-cloud...
Sort of missing the point of the whole "cloud" concept[1] completely then?
Still, it's not like anyone's going to let something like the whole bloody idea in the first place stand in the way of making a load of extra cash, no matter how much it may compromise the key benefits (scalability, portability and reliability).
HINT: What you have there is an outsourced data centre, not a cloud.
On this aging system there was no such thing as transaction control, so a user's screen dropping or hanging in certain applications meant shutting the system, checking the ledgers and unpicking any partial transactions. A right, royal pain.
One day, a user's screen dropped in Credit Control. Ohshit, hands to the pumps, etc.
The next day the same user's screen dropped. Ohshit, WTF?, hands to the pumps, etc.
The next day, the same user's screen dropped. Ohshit, WT.........HANG ON A BLOODY MINUTE!
On arriving at the user's desk, there was a screen, a tray rack to one side and a folding umbrella in the top tray pointed right at the power button, with the handle sticking out where it might easily be knocked were one to grab something from a tray. It wasn't a gun and it didn't smoke, but...
The user really didn't want to move their tray stack, until it was explained how much cost was incurred every time this happened and how much cheaper it would be to just sack them if it kept happening.
...nearly three times the energy density of petrol...
The slight snag is that a kilo of hydrogen occupies eleven cubic metres while three kilos of petrol doesn't get to a quarter on the fuel gauge.
So it has to be compressed, a lot.
Now, the other significant snag with hydrogen is it's the very devil itself to get to stay inside a fuel system so the firey bit of the process stays where it belongs. Putting it under massive levels of pressure only serves to make the inevitable kaboom larger.
Vivo tries to make up for this by instilling the phone with a relatively generous amount of RAM.
Except the Nord also comes with 8Gb in it's base version, or 12Gb in the pricier one. Ok, only 128Gb of storage on the base object but, if that's not enough, you could buy a large memory card to pad the Nord out (hey, expandable storage!) and still have enough left in the kitty for a meal and drinks for four at a decent restaurant.
Like Companies House, the various national registration bodies for racehorses also ensure that nothing naughty is allowed.
Occasionally one slips through, like the Aussie nag "Hoof Hearted". Innocently horsey enough, until you shout it rapidly and repeatedly like, for example, a commentator as it approaches the line in first place...
Funny one the other day. As I approached a junction, it transpired that an e-scooter rider on the pavement was planning to go straight across(!), left-to-right(!!), on the pavement(!!!), flat out(!!!!) and without looking(!!!!!). The sudden appearance[1] of the side of a vehicle dead in front of him caused an urgent rethink of his plans.
Turns out these things lack anything resembling a braking system adequate for their speed too. I laughed long and hard when he went base over apex and faceplanted a drain in the gutter.
[1] Icing on the cake, tall building right on the corner.
...relies on the printer manufacturers implementing the protocol correctly.
Ah, right. Implementing cross-platform print support is on the too hard pile so the cunning approach is to palm the hard bit off onto someone else.
That always works...
It's also not driverless. You've just moved the driver to the printer and rebadged it as "firmware"...where it's very unlikely to ever be updated.
I don't suppose George also owns a company based in the channel islands that begins with M by any chance?
The only bit of this cheesy old conbusiness model he seems to have omitted is where you "find" that the contractually agreed lease payments aren't making you a fat enough profit and alter the contract to screw more out of the tenant.
OPPO's 65W fast charging is a welcome feat.
Hence the lack of wireless. The OPPO / OnePlus charge system is the best around and plugging in to charge fully in minutes kicks the crap out of sitting around waiting for it to sloooowwwlllyyyy absorb power wirelessly.
Also, as I have pointed out before, plugging in can be slightly annoying once a day (or even twice in extreme use) but the extra thickness and weight provided by the wireless induction coils is annoying every time I pick up a phone so equipped.
Back in the eighties, I did once rewrite from scratch a G/L reporting system. My version:
a) Ran in 45 minutes rather than over four days.
b) Only bothered printing the title page, report headers and totals page for each section if there were actually transactions in the account range for that section, saving a tree on each run.
c) Didn't match the original version at all, but was verifiably correct.
The inconvenient bit was (c), as that shone a glaring light onto the fact that we'd been overreporting revenue to the tune of about £1m a month since Jesus was a lad. We didn't have a big enough carpet to hide that under.
Anyone can read "news" for free online.
The toxic fallout from that little feature is that the real news media has to compete with free to survive. This forces them to cut costs to the bone, meaning that they now get their "public opinion" from, er, social media.
The effect is that with a mere few thousand likeminded crazies of your preferred stripe you can pwn the news. The US alt-right loonies figured this out a while ago and the raving marxist wankhammers here have followed suit.
The next problem is that democratic politicians are conditioned to scream "Yessir. How high." when a couple of hundred thousand people say "Jump". What they haven't worked out yet is that, in a globally connected world, 200k signatures to a cause is still a pitifully insignificant minority...
They used to do a "Winprinter" (direct GDI to page) device that matched that description. I once kitted out an entire office with those. This produced blissful silence from the, usually whingeing, users and made my life much more pleasant.
If it was one of those, you probably ditched it when XP showed up (or 2k if you're a masochist) and it stopped working.
Latest reliability by sector results from the automotive world show hybrids to be more reliable than pure electrics, despite being more complex.
Why?
Digging into the figures shows that Tesla singlehandedly do for electric statistics what Land Rover do for SUVs (which actually aren't the most horribly unreliable POSs once you take Land Rover out of the figures)
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