Posts by Nick Ryan 3756 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
The data for credit agencies is specifically provided by other organisations - essentially, a cartel which goes along the lines of "you must provide all of this information otherwise we won't provide services for you"). In other words, demanding customer information.
The contact data hoover is individuals unwittingly or uncaringly providing information on others, essentially peers providing information on each other.
Yep, all you need is just one contact/friend who has the Facebook app on their phone and Facebook will have harvested all of their contact details, including yours. This will include your name and phone number, and any other information that is recorded against you - address, date of birth and so on. You are not in control of this data harvesting, it's someone else giving your details to Facebook and it only requires a single individual do to this - if there are multiple people with your contact details then it, of course, enhances the data validity.
So it's a hole with your name and contact details against it. It's rather creepy really, but very simple.
Yep, something that I picked up on years ago is the repeated lies and bullshit marketing from the tape pushers... These are 18TB tapes, and not 45TB as the marketing lies and bullshit claims.
If one happens to have data that is compressible then more data can be stored on the tape but that's effectively no different to backup software that compresses the data.
Other than really larger organisations, most organisations which have over 18TB of data to backup and aren't backing up all client systems will find that the bulk of their storage is taken up by media files... files which are often compressed. Will the magic marketing bullshit compress a video stream by 2.5 times? Will it compress a large archive of images, usually in JPEG form, by 2.5 times? No, it won't. Hell, it's unlikely to compress in any meaningful way Microsoft Office ".*x" format files because these are already compressed even though only in .zip form.
It's perfectly possible to "uninstall" most of these apps from the user profile. This does not require rooting the device and works really well to change an otherwise decent device from something that struggles under the burden of bloatware and Samsung's appalling versions of standard applications (e.g. mail, browser, etc). Once done you will have a device that feels like it operates twice as fast and the battery lasts all day with ease.
Actually the sun setting bit was the Spanish, under Philip IV. We just borrowed it to describe our own rapine behaviour when we set out to steal everything that the Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese missed the first time around.Not forgetting the things that the Spanish, Dutch and Portugese had taken first time around but had recklessly not nailed down well enough. Made complicated because they were also doing the same however when, for example, the Dutch fleet accidentally sunk and the Spanish fleet somehow caught fire in a harbour and various other accidents that had absolutely nothing to do with piracy, fleet battles and definitely not to do with primacy of the ocean...
All made harder by the half arsed, or half completed English reformation / standardisation. So half of English words make phonetic sense, the rest are exceptions to whatever rules can be dragged, kicking and screaming, out of this half.
Add in that there are generally two words for most historic objects, thanks to the last successful invaders of the country a thousand years ago using their words for courtly matters and trade and the locals (aka plebs) keeping their words.
In short, English is a result of a large number of cultures invading the British Isles and a little while later finding that they have somehow become English and some other bugger was invading. Add in the celtic peoples (crude generalisation) swapping places and invading each other and various times when the "English" ruled bits of the neighbouring continent and it's amazing that we have a common enough language to converse vaguely intelligibly.
Maybe I'm just too cynical, but a tenfold performance gain over Intel and AMD is a ridiculous claim unless they are trying to claim tenfold performance based on power consumption in which case I'd suspect that this outfit would claim their metric against the most power hungry Intel and AMD chips and not against their mobile offerings.
Not that another processor platform and competition is a bad thing, but this one comes across like yet another charlatan.
Does anyone else remember the awful feature in Microsoft Office where some utterly braindead "designer" vomited into the UI a feature that hid menu options that you didn't use very often? As in entirely missing the point of menus and that they are there for discoverability of functionality, not to damn well hide it.
If Microsoft introduced such a feature into Microsoft Office now it would be termed "AI" despite all it doing is little more involved than recording the last time that a particular menu item was selected and to hide those past a certain time threshold. That's pretty much still the cutting edge on AI UX. The "AI" component would probably be to decide how long this threshold period is. Genius.
But... the entire fit of a man's ("formal") shirt is based on neck size. Doesn't matter how long in the body, broad shoulders or chest or arm length... the entire sizing is based on neck size. It's just insane.
At least with trousers we have waist size and length which works most of the time, however the sizing metrics of other things is often just ridiculous.
I suspect it's more a reference to the fact that because they are so thin, the surface area compared to content volume is very high.
For example, a "typical" fry that is 4mm square in area profile and, for ease of maths, consists of 1mm thick "skin" (largely fried vegetable oil) which works out to around 12 square mm of "skin" with 4 square mm of potato in the middle. Compare this to a much more reasonable 15mm chip and making the same crude assumptions you get 56 square mm of "skin" with 169 square mm of potato on the middle. That's quite a difference: 12/4 for the fry and 56/169 for the chip.
While switching the chipset isn't ideal (for an imaged environment), Kingston should at least have used a different model identifier... i.e. /a, /b, or so on.
However that is different to what many SSD manufacturers are doing now which is nothing other than scumbag bait-and-switch - release a product, get good reviews, replace the product with something cheaper and inferior.
I get replacing chips and so on, after a product release, and particularly these days with the supply issues - but replacing chips and supplying a product that is inferior to the original is dishonest.
Some laptop manufacturers also keep the same model number while seemingly changing the components weekly.
I had a candidate's CV come in listing CCNA and a specific entry claiming knowledge of DNS. One of the (basic) test questions I asked was "what does DNS stand for and what does it do". He couldn't answer this question. I was quite blunt with the agency that sent this candidate through...
For example:
You previously worked in an office where almost everyone was in the office working together all the time. Because of your job role you are largely required to be in the office but others choose to work from home. You take several hours out of your day commuting and also pay, often a non-trivial amount to commute (think £4,000s a year, or £50-70 per day) and head to the office but your co-workers choose not to do this. This is entirely and utterly unfair, but is your organisation going to pay you more to cover your extra hours travel and commute costs compared to your co-workers?
Yep, the updated interface is such a retarded backward step in usability it's staggering that anyone still uses Firefox as a result. The *only* reason I do still is that I looked up and found how to undo the clusterfuck UI changes.
There's a very big difference between a browser running on a 4K display with a single fucking tab open (which is about the only way thing that new UI appears to have been designed for) and a regular user on a non-4K display with multiple tabs open.
Jumping on: the project was late, it didn't need to match a standardisation which didn't apply, but it did need to work, which the existing project code didn't and couldn't do. Job done, move on.Thanks - exactly this. It wasn't automotive in any way, and my original post didn't imply anything of the such (in fact, it's clear that it was industrial).
As further point safety circuits should be entirely independent of control systems and in general should be wired direct. For example, the ESTOP signal for a motor is a specific input wire and, for example, the big red stop button is directly wired to all of these.
This was in an industrial control environment, not sure how you got the impression otherwise.
Polling is incredibly inefficient, however it is a method of continuous assurance that a connected device is still responding. This requires a control application rather than building the network of CAN devices to operate indepedently.
For example, a CAN I/O module can be configured to send a specific message in response to an input transitioning from low to high (or the reverse). This message can be sent to a specific device or a broadcast. Think a simple example of an optical beam sensor that when something crosses its path sends a message to a motor to stop. This can easily be an expected input rather than an emergency situation. Attempting to perform the reverse using polling is beyond most motor devices as they'd have to maintain an internal state track of the current I/O input on the remote device and repeatedly poll the remote I/O device for the current state, compare this to the current recorded state and them execute a specific command. This is very inefficient and having multiple devices doing this on the same network quickly floods the network with polling requests and responses.
Most CAN messages are transactional, therefore a message is sent and as a result there are three states in response and these need to be tracked in a control application: OK (including response data), Error (including error reason) and no response (which needs to be escalated and handled appropriately). A control application that doesn't do this processing is useless and entirely not fit for purpose.
I forgot the other gem!
The on-site PLCs that a different organisation supplied and loudly stated worked one way and then it was proven that they worked different ways on different sites had a further problem. Rather than operate on a state machine basis with child states dependent on others, every single possible state was tracked "in parallel" regardless if many of them were impossible due to other states. The processing cycle of these PLCs, and many such PLCs, are often just an array of state machine handlers that the local processor runs through in sequence. This did not always work as expected because there is a finite amount of time for processing the array of state machines and if the execution loop time is exceeded then later state machines may not be processed.
That was a gem to track down. And, typically, have the manufacturer deny. :(
The server itself would/should continue fine - however the application in question would be halted waiting for the response from the debugger to proceed/step through, etc. Which is just what was reported in this application.
I don't know exactly how VB6 implemented the breakpoints however I'd assume that it used standard CPU level methods even if MSIL was used as an intermediary - nothing stopping MSIL code using standard methods.
Breakpoints are usually compiled into the application code and trigger a CPU level exception. This exception is handled by the OS and passed onto whatever application is registered as handling them. If no application is registered then code execution should continue as usual.
I got a crash course in CANBus (OpenCAN) communications.
The application that I inherited did not work. OK, it exhibited some activity however there were a few flaws in the implementation:
The CANBus interface code was implemented as if CANBus was a serial link from the USB CANBus node attached to the PC to whatever remote device was being communicated with at the time. CANBus is a broadcast network. Because communications with a CANBus device was not "reliable" due to treating it as a serial link device with only that device connected, every single damn command was sent three times to the device. Why? Because sometimes another device would send a broadcast packet and this would appear on the bus in between the command to the remote device and the remote device's response. Therefore it wasn't working and the command was just sent three times and assumed to work. Yep, assumed to work...
Because the CANBus interface code was implemented as if it was serial link to a specific device, multiple devices operating simultaneously was impossible. This kind of worked when there was a single module being controlled, however the intention of the project was to have up to four identical modules, each with their own set of motors and sensor modules, therefore it was impossible to scale it.
The diagnostic and test code for the connected devices used different interface code to that used in the operating environment. Getting something working and configured in the diagnostic and test interface did not mean anything would work in the operating environment.
I/O modules were treated as polled devices rather than devices that broadcast state change. As a result, sensor triggers were only responded to when the I/O module was specifically polled for the current I/O state. The I/O state was maintained as a copy in the application itself and therefore was inevitably out of step with whatever was happening on the I/O device itself. The I/O device was, of course, asked three times in a row for the state... For those that don't know, most CANBus I/O modules are asynchronous and while they can be polled, their normal operation is to send a broadcast, or direct message to another device, on state change of their I/O signals. As a result, when an input on the I/O module was triggered, this would be missed until the control application happened to poll the device for the current status. This did not help operational efficiency or accuracy at all...
After fighting the existing code I threw every single part of it away and started from scratch. The project was already late at this point, but it was the only way to proceed and there was absolutely nothing of use in the previous application. The replacement application was fully multi-threaded, the CANBus interface processed and dispatched all received CANBus messages to whatever internal handler was interested in it which allowed a responsive state machine to operate and for this to be scaled to multiple modules.
The CANBus devices were proven to be reliable, previously it was reported that these devices were not where the only problem was the utterly inappropriate attempt at communicating with them as they were a singly connected serial device.
The project did continue to struggle however that was due to the systems that we were interfacing with not adhering to the stated method of operation that they were very loudly stated to adhere to. This changed a little after I connected to the on-site PLCs, downloaded the code from them, effectively reverse engineered it and then demonstrated that different sites had different, and incompatible, modes of operation...
I have to wonder if carbon could be electrostatically deposited onto wafers as a diamond layer...From memory this has already been done - not sure about the method (electrostatically) but it was done. I think the challenge was getting the crystaline lattices to line up (diamond and silicon crystals are different sizes/shapes) and given that the silicon isn't pure as it's doped to improve efficiency, which essentially changes the atom alignment, this adds a further challenge to adding a cohesive layer of carbon on top - or any other element.
A human brain is not fast in serial throughput terms, however a human brain has about 100 billion cells. Emulating these using brute force while good for prototyping purposes isn't going to effectively emulate 100 billion parallel processes.
A fruit fly has about 200,000 brain cells. This isn't an impossible number to emulate but emulating them in parallel with anything approaching the efficiency of the fruit fly brain? That'll be a challenge. We are still experimenting on just how these cells link to each other, their trigger levels, the chemical side-signals and so much more. Nothing that can't be discovered but it's slow, hard work.
Also, while a fruit fly has about 200,000 brain cells there are many different types of this which have evolved for specific purposes and are not just 200,000 generic neurons dumped into a mass and expected to work.
The bullshit marketing that is current AI is nothing of the sort. While some "commercial" projects do use a few neurons, few would use anywhere near the number required to do anything particularly insightful. A few neurons for edge detection on images isn't AI. Most of what is markeiing AI is nothing more than carefully curated machine learning at best. This doesn't mean that it's not clever and isn't useful, but it's not AI.
Unfortunately, many of the common applications while they have some minor productivity enhancements compared to versions that were written 20 years ago, they run like an absolute dog unless on the latest hardware. Something has gone very wrong and while some of this will be excused by additional security checks, most of these should not be necessary in the first place.
Step through code down to the assembly level and it's immediately obvious that common practices such as treating every variable as if it's a variant are adding 100s of extra processor instructions for the simplest of tasks. Add in the x86 CPU instructions which often feels like most CPU instructions revolve around juggling registers and not doing anything overly useful and it's pretty evident why all the incredibly clever CPU hardware optimisations are necessary (and unfortunately why corners were often cut on the security side).
Utterly unregulated ads is the American Way. As American culture is law across the entire planet therefore everyone on the planet must learn to appreciate being fed a neverending stream of lies and bullshit in the guise of advertising.
Mobile game ads often advertise something entirely different to the pay-to-progress advert distribution platforms, "games", they are promoting. Complete lies such as "no adverts", "totally free" and yet if one checks the game being touted all the feedback comments relate to the number of adverts or the fact that after a short period a player effectively must pay.
Or the adverts showing entirely different before and after people for supposedly wonder drug slimming aids?
All fine in the land-of-the-lie but in more civilised parts of the planet such shameless lying is not permitted.
I did that rather a lot... even added custom command to CBM basic through that approach.
Later I just did everything in assembly but I was young and I was learning things step by step until the only basic I used was to load the assembler.
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