Posts by mittfh

Good luck gaining support...

Haven't Trump acolytes already migrated to Gab and Qcumbers to The Great Awakening?

They're having a laugh

If that report is anywhere near accurate, as well as the ridiculously high cost per hour of bug fixing, 2,000 hours to tweak a calculation?

They evidently view Arizona's State Government as a bottomless pit of money who'll willingly throw millions of dollars at them - possibly even billions if they're charging over a thousand dollars per hour and over a thousand hours of development time to fix each of tens of thousands of "unresolved issues" and "feature requests"...

Given its data source...

The program's database was filled with text scraped from the Internet. It likely has no clue about the context of that text, while previous examples have used a provided seed text to write a mock journalistic article.

However, given it is capable of churning out vaguely comprehensible English and can string several sentences together in a way that seems logical indicates that, if instead given a more refined database limited to a particular context, could produce something vaguely useable in that context.

For an initial stab at medical diagnoses, you'd probably first want software to search through medical literature and sift out lists of symptoms, diagnoses, further investigations needed (e.g. blood tests l and treatments, with the ability to ask the patient to clarify certain symptoms or ask if they had any others if the resulting list of potential diagnoses was too long and couldn't be reduced via a single type of investigation.

This reminds me...

... of Tom Scott's excellent Computerphile video "Why electronic voting is a bad idea."

Sure,a caucus isn't a traditional vote, and the app was designed to work very differently from conventional voting software (it sounds like a variation-on-a-theme of a database form), but the same basic issues (especially transparency) remain.

Of course, the US is the one country where almost all conventional voting is carried out using closed source electronic voting machines rather than the antiquated but far more secure pencil and paper with single sealed black box per polling station (pencil to mitigate against the possibility of pens being filled with disappearing ink)...

"Roller-coaster for getting back to earth quicker"

If only the ISS was in a geosynchronous orbit...

Although even then, assuming you could build several hundred miles of track and bolt them together, you've still got hundreds of other physics / engineering challenges to overcome (including protecting the track from space debris).

Cool idea for a Sci-fi flick though...

BIOS

I haven't seen many BSODs on my travels, but I have seen various boxes which fell over at the BIOS screen, failing to find either a disc or a network. Typically, the error will be displayed for several consecutive days running, which is probably indicative of the branch staff having to call out for an external engineer site visit.

An alternative approach...

Turn the BBC into a non-profit. It would therefore be freed of the requirement to bow to the Establishment (i.e. whichever party is in power at the time) for fear of being dealt a rough hand in the next Charter Renewal (so for example on the news front could move towards more balance with an aim of impartiality); while it would also be freed from the commercial pressure to produce "safe" programming that would attract oodles of people to watch adverts. By being non-profit, it would be responsible only to its viewers, and if the revenue department was a completely separate division from the programming department with minimal links between the two, it could produce programming for everyone, rather than the top donors. Alongside the change, severely cut back on management roles and replace the crust with fresh meat.

I think part of the problem with the current output of the BBC is that it tries to be everything to everyone, so understandably fails because different demographics have different preferences. Having said that, perhaps they could donate the formats for many BBC3 shows to Channel 4 and Channel 5, and have quality programming aimed at teenagers / young adults instead.

Heck, quality programming and high viewings aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, and needn't be lavish dramas that soak up bucketloads of cash. Even with game and quiz shows, there must be a middle ground between the mindless tat seen across many channels (including the BBC) and those perceived as 'highbrow' e.g. University Challenge, Mastermind. Perhaps take a leaf out of the concepts of Countdown and Millionaire - a challenge that sounds simple, but is deceptively complex. The more highbrow shows also don't need large pots of prize money to motivate the contestants - the experience alone, with possibly something relatively low value such as a mug, dictionary or small trophy as the ultimate prize.

Perhaps...

...one day, someone could design a browser with a more sneaky form of ad blocking. Since most people are on fairly high bandwidth connections nowadays, how about a browser that doesn't display the ads, but invisibly loads the scripts in a sandbox, follows the link to the target site, then closes that connection: the result being for a small performance hit and a bit of extra bandwidth, you don't see the ads, but the ad provider still thinks you've seen and clicked on them so the host site still gets paid...

Of course, that doesn't solve the problem of bundled software (I wonder what proportion of Windows machines running Java also have the Ask toolbar installed?) and it does nothing to persuade ad networks to vet the ad images used. Ideally, the download sites would be aware of the fake download buttons and users' annoyance with them, so would be more careful about the positioning of ads (i.e. making sure they're nowhere near genuine download buttons).

The joys of inkjets

I used to be a school IT technician. The main experiences I remember are:

a) a South-facing IT room, where the venetian blinds were (predictably) broken. Come in after a hot weekend to find the cartridges had spilled their contents all over the base of the printer and the table they were sitting on.

b) A3 business inkjets (used for D&T projects). Supposedly capable of 2ppm A3, in reality they were closer to 0.75ppm, so inevitably students sent multiple copies of their work to the printer. Eventually I persuaded the HoD to buy some printer management software, so [i] the printers could be fed off a single queue, and [ii] I could delete duplicates.

c) A3 business injects again. As the cartridges were quite expensive, the department decided to buy in clone cartridges. Half of which couldn't be used because the cartridges were chipped, so if the printer thought it hadn't got HP originals, it would refuse to use them. Admittedly we could return them for replacement, but it was a pain! The queue manager came in useful again here, so I could tell it to only point at a single printer if the other one had run out of ink (and there were no usable replacements in stock).

Oh, and mum had an inkjet she rarely used - almost inevitably when she did she'd have to buy a new cartridge as the old one had dried out, and no amount of priming could unblock the nozzles.

As for me...

I jumped to Xfce when rumours of Mandriva migrating to GNOME 3 came out and stuck with it when migrating to Mageia. However, while I really love the Xfce panel (particularly the Deskbar mode - a practical use for the extra horizontal pixels offered by the wide screens of today) I found Thunar and Xfdesktop a pain in the butt - give me Nautilus any day!

I've now migrated to Arch (Mageia 2 had too many issues / niggles for my liking), currently with MATE but I'll probably install Xfce as well, and try to get some form of hybrid working.

I imagine...

Win 8 will quickly gain traction in the casual user market, particularly among those using a touch screen device. It sounds as though your sample quickly got used to its quirks on a mouse-driven computer, but I'd imagine that over time they'd notice more hangups (especially as someone earlier in this thread noted, if they'd been using a 'real' installation and told to shut down the computer - hiding the relevant option is likely to lead to people using the hardware shutdown - i.e. pressing the physical power button...)

Given the 'traditional' desktop is relegated to an application rather than the default shell (which is apparently now called either "Windows 8 UI" or "Modern UI"), it seems as though Microsoft want to wean people off using it over time and increase the prominence of the new UI (which of course can only run applications pre-selected by Microsoft). The new UI version of IE is presumably intended to try and recoup some market share, even though they haven't improved it in line with rival browsers and it apparently won't support plug-ins or extensions (I wonder how well it will cope with HTML 5?).

So while they may gain some traction against iOS and Android, they seem to have ignored that both those OS' have different "big brothers" with different UIs for running on desktop machines: OS X in the case of the fruity company, Linux (in one of several dozen different flavours) in the case of more open environments.

I can't imagine many companies rushing out to buy Win 8 for their desktop machines - besides which, any company worth its salt would be waiting for SP1 anyway. So it's unlikely to be as big a disaster as ME, but may possibly be another Vista.

Oh, and incidentally, apparently the internal version number is Windows 6.2, indicating that there's still a lot of Vista (6.0) and Win 7 (6.1) code left....

Ho hum...

So a private sector company in receipt of public funds regards the Treasury as a blank cheque book and will do whatever it thinks it can get away with to scam the Treasury into giving them as much money as possible.

Isn't that business as usual for almost any private sector contractor? Just look at the fees charged by the late Building Schools for the Future scheme and numerous Public Private Partnerships / Private Finance Initiative schemes...

UK costs

It's worth bearing in mind that the costs in the US are subsidised by the carriers (mobile phone networks) - the price for an unlocked phone is apparently $649 (£400). However, the mobile phone networks soon recoup the costs - for the locked phone there's a choice of three carriers for a two year fixed contract - one's minimum price is $59 pcm (~£36.38), the other two offer a minimum price of $89 pcm (£54.72). Ouch.

Another thing that doesn't help...

Short of DMCA takedowns, when their content ID identifies content that the bots claim is owned by an anonymous collecting house, without giving any idea whatsoever of what that particular content may happen to be.

Ideally, the database would have a description field next to each content ID field, so that when something you upload is flagged, it tells you the details of the track it's found (perhaps your playing of a public domain song is too close to a copyrighted arrangement, or perhaps a copyrighted song borrows heavily from the melody of a public domain song, or perhaps it's the keyboard's auto-accompaniment...)

The silly lifetime of copyright doesn't help - nor does having companies putting their full legal weight behind songs that should in reality be in the public domain - although the melody was first published in 1893 and the birthday lyrics in 1924, the song was copyrighted by a publisher in 1935. In Europe, the copyright expires in 2016 (as Patty Hill died in 1946 - so life + 70 years), however in the US the copyright expires in 2030 (erm, copyright date + 95 years?)

Anyone noticed...

...that according to Flickr's extract of the EXIF data, the photos were actually taken in July 2011 (unless they set up the wrong date / time on their camera). Pit's photostream is rather sparse - four other non-crash photos, neither of which feature the TBS guy...