Re: The Spanish Inquisition
Our three methods are fear, surprise, being mercurial. Oh and an almost fanatical devotion to IEEE 754 Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic!
Damn! Among our methods are fear...
5636 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2007
GNUradio is not a good example as a project as the code base and build system seems to be made up as they go along by folks with little in common, and often will not build from source! WTF are they doing?
As soon as you see a project that has made its own build-tool instead of a common utility you can see there is crap coming...
The engineering cost is a key factor, but if your business has those folks for other reasons then getting them to spend a small amount of their time on the feeding and watering of your servers makes sense.
But as you say, for small non-tech businesses, or non-core stuff, it can be well worth the cost for a managed service (e.g. non-classified email, accounting package, etc).
I have been to India once and it is a nice place to visit.
But they have as obnoxious and self-opinionated politicians as they come and with a back story of racial/religious tensions and piss-poor handling of the pandemic in recent months you can see them trying to fight public opinion by attacking the media.
A big factor in this terrible wave of death in India was the resumption of public rallies for the elections. Hubris.
Comparing vulnerabilities is useful, but ultimately not that important. The real down-side of Windows are (a) its popularity, and (b) the fact that well-managed / secure was never its default configuration, so you depend more on competent sysadmins to use group policies, etc, sensibly to make it so.
You can find examples of Linux systems with default user/password that makes their security a joke, so the underlying OS details are only significant if you really have eliminated the other factors.
For Linux if you want higher user security you simply mount the user-writeable areas (typically /tmp and /home) on partitions as 'noexec' and then they can only use programs installed via the package manager. Which obviously they cannot use as you have not given them any administrative rights...
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/end-user-device-security/platform-specific-guidance/ubuntu-18-04-lts
The satellites themselves will be much the same size, orbit around the moon probably a little lower but we shall see what they come up with. I suspect not *that* low as they won't want the same sort of constellations size that you see for Earth (~24 active satellites) navigation simply for the cost of putting it up there, and might be willing to accept areas of poor navigation coverage, etc.
You can say the same about Chrome now.
Some sites only work properly with it as the idiot designers don't test anything else, and it comes with Google's prying eyes screwing privacy as well. Not to mention Google using its near-monopoly ability to push through changes that no one really needs beyond Google's own agenda (idiot-brain things like activeX USB and native file system access, for example).
Meet the new bossbrowser, same as the old bossbrowser...
Is anyone actually able to explain why corporate networks and critical systems coexist on a network - beyond 'stupidity?
Money. Trying to save the cost of duplicated air-gapped/firewalled networks, or the time to manually check/reconcile things.
Stupidity and greed cover the vast majority of disasters.
The problem is the "average" driver includes a lot of serious asshattery by a few which greatly skews the results. If you as a responsible sober adult is going to swap control for a computer then you want it to be better than yourself by some measurable amount.
Think of how dumb the average voter is. Now remember half of them a dumber...
Sad but understandable. We have good memories of the Sun SPARC machines of the day, well built and reliable compared to the cheap (and not so cheap) x86 boxes we had. But in time they became too expensive for the performance offered and Linux became pretty good.
Then Oracle took over and it was clear fairly quickly that no more SunOracle kit would be bought or used.
Yes, and who is doing the re-writing and bug-testing?
That is the problem with many bits of software, they are not terribly well written but attempts to re-invent them often introduce far more problems than fixing the old ones.
For some things you do have better, more secure, alternatives already in existence. But if you have a stable working system you are again facing the trade-off of fixing issues in a working arrangement and starting fresh with newer package(s), configuring them, testing that, fixing that, checking client compatibility, etc, etc.
For typical PC code I use a version of the NR vector() function that calls calloc() AND checks the return, forcing a ext if it fails after logging that numbers that triggered the failure. That way my code is neater than lots of in-line tests, etc.
I know there are cases when you want to continue and try a different value, but in most cases if you run out of allocatable memory it is game over for your original planned execution anyway.
Other languages have ways to trap stuff that don't relay on a function wrapper, but equally mine can have a brutal #define vector calloc used if I want simplified code for embedded stuff.
Generally I use calloc() so mistakes fail faster and more dependably, as the overhead of zeroing the allocated memory is not usually high compared to what I am going to use it for and I don't go in for over-provisioning (i.e. asking for loads more than I need and allowing the OS to deal with the fall-out if I and others do need it).
But once again we have code not doing sanity checking, sadly in the key C library. But I suspect the same sort of bugs apply in many other languages, just that C is most common for embedded stuff.
Don't forget they are piloted as necessary by highly trained individual who go though hours of simulator time to handle the cases when the autopilot hands back control. It does not always work out well (AF447) but it is one hell of a better that road users get.
Also said aircraft are professionally maintained and all actions and parts traceable, with any accidents or near misses being independently investigated. Will we see that for each "self driving" car prang?
It could be said and it is true.
But if you have put in a fibre run that can take, say, 12 fibre pairs, each of which can easily do 10Gb or more (depending on length, use of WDM, etc) you have one hell of a greater bandwidth than a GHz or so of RF spectrum will allow.
Delivering not just kilowrists of speciality video, but hitting that mythical megawrist barrier.
Sadly the west's appetite for cheap tat and out-sourcing to give bigger bonuses to the management says otherwise. How many companies or countries actually do anything against the Chinese government's increasingly authoritarian stance?
I rather suspect the UK will suck up to them again when Boso needs some trade deal or someone to fund new power stations, etc.
Not to mention the fishermen who thought it would be no-quotas AND the same EU market to sell to.
Of course the whole of the fishing industry contributes less to the UK's GDP that the (pre covid) west end theaters of London, and in the late 60s my grandfather (who was a fisherman then) was already telling folk that the seas would soon be emptied by the industrial-scale trawlers that were coming on the scene, so this particular tragedy of the commons was not unexpected
Indeed there have been some remarkable two-stroke diesel engines developed, such as this beast:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Deltic
In their day an astonishing power to weight ratio, but reliability not on par with modern expectations.
What would happen if a self-driving car is trained on a dataset with frequent label errors that mislabel a three-way intersection as a four-way intersection? The answer: it might learn to drive off the road when it encounters three-way intersections.
Clearly that is not intelligence at all. You have faulty software because you did not have a complete grasp of the programming of it. Some might even say a negligent approach as you assumed the Mechanical Turks provided valid data, and you did not verify it yourself.