Posts by Nick Ryan 3756 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
However, Hollywood loves fingerprint, iris and face recognition for authentication purposes in films therefore idiots have to try and implement this in reality.
Replacing the secret and changeable component of authentication with something that is neither secret nor changeable is only ever going to reduce security.
Precisely, combine it with this sentence from the article:
Figma has four million users, including a little under 1,000 paying customers. The vector-based graphic editor and prototyping toolmaker was founded in 2016 and has taken in around $330 million funding to date.and we have a service that so far has cost $330 million on 1,000 paying customers - or $330,000 per paying customer. That's an insanely poor ratio and while loss leading is a standard approach for finding VC funding, this really demonstrates the ridiculous extent of this practice. It's all about persuading the VCs that "there will be big money sometime in the future, and it's will definitely, absolutely, be much higher than the ~10% (whatever) you'd make elsewhere." Then Adobe come along and validate this approach by offering $20m per paying customer...
Yep, keeping vaguely up to date with whatever nonsense happens in the land of Microsoft's PowerShell commands is all about that...
January: Here's the new revision of the PowerShell library you now need to use. It's 50/50 as to whether or not it's entirely compatible with the previous version, sometimes just doing a search/replace on the command names is all that is required (why inflict this?) other times more disruptive changes have been applied.
September: We've deprecated this new PowerShell library and now you need to use Microsoft Graph instead. By the way, not all the functionality that was in the previous PowerShell libraries are in this new version yet.
October: We've updated that Microsoft Graph and it is now no longer available, use this new Microsoft Graph interface instead. Some functionality has been moved into one library, some into another library. Some has just disappeared entirely. Also we still haven't bothered to update the documentation and command have a 50/50 chance of either being auto-doc generated nonsense or referring to a different command entirely...
...and then if continues the same the following year.
Great. So this is the fiftieth attempt at some nonsense unification application to turn everything separate into one thing.
We already have this. It's called a bloody Operating System where we can pick and choose the appropriate and available tool for what we want to do and use our choice (rapidly diminishing) of web browser to access whatever hosted services we want to.
It's Microsoft Bob level stupidity all over again, just a different generation or marketing-tards.
Unfortunately the hosted services are often different to what we want, or only hosted when we'd rather have actual control.
Good point. Regular fuel has high energy density without having to worry about maintaining a very low temperature and/or high pressure. By comparison it's a pretty damn stable liquid that can just be poured in where it's needed. Hydrogen, on the other hand, is a pathological escape artist by way of containment and that's before temperature and pressure are considered.
Hydrogen is no solution to everything but niche applications do have value. While commercial airlines aren't exactly niche, they are highly regulated and controlled which given hydrogen is probably what is required.
It'd be interesting to learn how the efficiencies pan out between hydrogen fuel cells generating electricity to power motors compared to just directly burning hydrogen.
While I think hydrogen fuel cells are great/cool technology, the downsides of them including providing a clean enough oxygen supply, what they are made of and their waste heat are some challenges to overcome, particularly compared to the relatively very well understood process of "exploding stuff for movement" (internal combustion engine) and how the modifications to use hydrogen are relatively minor to do this. I suspect that once going the heat generated through either process would be used to warm up the cryogenically stored hydrogen so it's not going to be entirely wasted.
Seeing as "6" is the number of the beast and the word for "6" has three letters in it, this makes the expansion of it 666G. We all know that that means don't we? It's simple, sheeples, G is the 7th letter of the alphabet meaning that the real plan will be executed with the turn on of global/flerfal 7G technology. 6G is our last chance. All poles having HD 6G wires attached to them must be immediately burnt down. Especially if these poles are attached to each other in any way, forming a network of control and manipulation.
An increase in population over decades is not any reason whatsoever for you to excuse for genocide.
The increase in population is also due to land grabs, as in subsuming more land, not just rampant population growth as you appear to be indirectly referring to.
You mention hate a lot, it is currently coming across that you blindly hate Palestinians with the same passion that some of the Israeli politicians are on the record have - of dehumanising them, calling them animals and so on, no matter what it takes to deflect from their actions and to try to play down their actions. These are humans too,.
As for your outrageous statement about "alleged oppression" - there is evidence of it all the time. Evidence changes it from "somebody said" to "here is the clear photographic testimony of what happened".
/sigh.
People who accuse Israel of genocide just can't stop lying to justify their hatred of Jews having equal human rights to others
It's not accusation, it's observation of the actions of the nation state of Israel both in what it has been pursuing for a while and is now openly pursuing.
Calling out the racist, apartheid and genocidal actions of the nation state of Israel is not in any way anti-Jew or anti-semetic. It is calling out the evil actions of a nation state, empowered by what-about-isms and enablers.
None of this means that the actions of the Hamas terrorist group in murdering Israeli people was in any way correct or acceptable. It's kind of understandable to see how "someone" snapped after so many years of oppression, and it should never have happened. However, the should also be responsibility for the background scenario behind this - the intentional international ignorance of the actions of the nation state of Israel over many years - this empowered and allowed them to continue pursuing this. Similar to how the international community didn't react in any meaningful way to the Russian annexation of Crimea which empowered and enabled Putin to decide on a subsequent invasion of the rest of Ukraine.
In an previous office we had cleaners who regularly plugged their vacuum cleaners into the desktop power sockets - which have a 2A fuse in them. The damn cleaner just went around the office blowing fuses until the found a socket that randomly didn't blow, as such is the variability of fuses). Similar was a member of staff that decided they were too important to use the kettle in the kitchen and brought their own kettle into the office to use on the same desktop power sockets with the inevitable fuse blowing results. Naturally, they tried hiding that they had done this...
Yep, there's a difference between work that I'm happy to undertake at home compared to in the office.
Not that I'm going to compromise safety at home in any way (likely the opposite compared to many electricians) just that I'm not covered for such commercial works and the regulations are different.
What it does mean is that I have a better understanding of what needs to be done, the annoying gotchas that are typically inflicted, and also to identify when shoddy work has been done. Such as:
Probably because even the utterly racist Braverman couldn't find a way to blame the (legal) small boats for this one. Therefor it becomes a "think of the children" excuse instead, while carefully ignoring that almost all child abuse happens in the home, or by individuals who are very close to family.
There definitely is, however it's still not always possible to see what is going on due to lighting conditions, the cramped or congested spaces where the actual issue is visible from. Sometimes just strapping a camera using cable ties was all that was required, although routing power and video signal was the next problem to solve.
A later generation of the same system did have a camera designed into the system to allow for better visibility. It wasn't perfect, but just being able to observe 60-70% of the issues by camera was a lot better than not being able to.
Yes, it did depend on the motor as to what was implemented. The cheaper/simpler the motor tend to just have the power pulled, stepper motors tended to use the "QuickStop" or equivalent.
For those aren't aware industrial control motors tend to have control circuit power input as well as a separate motor power input, cutting the motor input would stop the robot but momentum would continue motion and depending on the axis, gravity assisted movement could continue. Many motors also had a dedicated stop input "QuickStop" which stopped the motor movement as fast as possible, including applying brakes, reversing current, whatever it took and held the motor in place. Software control of such stop signals was an absolute no-no, these had to be hard wired into the safety circuitry.
Some of the scariest things I worked with were conveyor lifts. Just a straight up/down movement of a bucket in a chute. With a very strong motor, a lot of speed and a nice sharp edge to get a limb trapped against when they operated. Nobody sane was going to work with those without personally ensuring that the power to the motor had been removed. Checking their operation was something done from a distance, which at least being simple was easy to do. The real hazard came when something was stuck in them and the temptation was to just simply reach in and take it out. When removing the power was not a practical route, stuffing the hole of the chute with hammers, wrenches and whatever else large and solid was at hand and then grabbing what was stuck in the chute was the practical alternative. Grabbing sticks were a suitable tool to use too, should they be available.
I've worked with robotic systems, including ones that could accelerate at frankly lunatic speeds in a closed environment where there was just nowhere to dodge out of the way.
We had hand held wired dead-man kill switches for a reason and these were REQUIRED to be tied directly into the power circuit. No crappy software that could go wrong, no further checks, nothing other than us removing our finger from the trigger to stop the thing in its tracks. Momentum could still have been dangerous but nothing like the thing hitting one under power. The noise these things made when either their position sensors went astray or an operator accidentally had them manually move to the wrong spot/direction and they slammed into the end of their run and shook the entire assembly was rather loud. Some poor quality developers wanted these kill switches to be software interactive so their software could handle the shutdown in an orderly fashion: nope, not happening, never. Their crappy code had to handle the scenario gracefully, which deeply upset these poor developers who were unable to grasp the simplest elements of error handling and graceful failure. The control system was still operating, but the drive power to the motors was disabled and the kill switch trigger was easy to respond to. As long as the developer had a clue about concurrent processes, interrupts and so on (some just weren't capable of this).
Quite often we had to run the robots with some of the interlocks off, for example so we could open the door and see just what the damn thing was doing compared to what it was meant to be doing. That was a bit scary at times, and when trying to diagnose a single axis of movement we had to retain power to the entire robot. On those occasions we fitted g-cramps/clamps to the drive train as these should stop the robot accelerating, cause a positioning error and have the robot stop itself. Later we got proper shims for this but we still used the g-cramps/clamps as we liked the additional safety and level of control as we could attach these much closer to the robot itself. We also disconnected the robot from external control so we were the only ones able to make it move unexpectedly, and when on the odd occasion someone restored external control getting very narky was quite acceptable.
Essentially, in this case, there should have been a dead-man's switch wired in and in use. I do understand how using these is annoying as sometimes two hands are required, but this case demonstrates the importance of safety in the rare event that they are required. So many such operations will be undertaken without the safety in place or with it disabled because it's so much easier and faster and I've been there, done that myself. In this case not enough precautions were taken and this is the result.
That's true. Good point about the devaluing of all advertising space - even the fabled Superbowl TV advert spots. The race to the bottom that has been successfully executed and it's now a case of scraping the barrel to see if there's anywhere lower to go.
Advertisers often forget that personal recommendation is the most powerful tool they have - therefore they faked these too.
Half the advantage of my media centre is that I have ripped the damn DVDs to it and as a result I don't have sit through the red-book breaking non-skippable adverts (typically Disney) and the lies about copyright violation being theft. It's not - it's copyright violation and cannot ever be theft (this doesn't mean that it's right, just that calling it "theft" is lying). The 20 minutes of adverts before the film one wanted to watch on VHS were bad enough, but abusing the DVD standard to make the damn things non-skippable is just taking it far too far.
When I want to watch a movie it starts pretty much instantly. That's the aim really. I don't start a movie to watch 20 minutes of adverts before it starts.
I used to enjoy watching F1. Then I found that what really happened was that I watched the start to how many cars stacked it into each other on the first corner and then I stopped paying any attention at all until the final couple of laps. Yeah, sometimes stuff happened somewhere in-between but not a lot really and I really found it hard to get excited by fuelling strategies and type change timings.
This doesn't stop the cars being amazing examples of engineering, just that the spectacle of the race itself just wasn't there.
Content related advertising? Just who do you think you are, heretic. That would require effort and effort costs money. It's much cheaper to just throw lots of rubbish and hope some of it sticks - the difference between a 0.00001% click through rate and a 0.000001% click through rate isn't that much anyway. Today you will now be burned as a witch because that is what our profiling has categorised you as. Would you like legal advice or a new fat slimming pill? Get them while stocks are limited, they'll be delivered in 28 days.
Most local news sites, as in the online presence for local newspapers hit the ad death spiral years ago.
They used to be funded by print adverts, which is fine and we learned to ignore anything that we didn't care about. Which was usually most of them but occasionally such local papers had adverts in them for useful local services. It also worked for brand awareness, as one glimpsed the name of a company providing a service and while not wanting the service at the time, should one want the service that brand name would spring mind.
Therefore it was obvious to these local news sites that they needed advertising on their websites. At first, this brought in income but then the income reduced. Therefore they added more adverts. This brought in a little more income but then it reduced. Therefore they added more adverts. Being idiots they repeated this until their websites were 99.9% bullshit/scam adverts that made the content near impossible to look at or read with adverts following the reader down the page forcing page layout changes, popup content all over the content, doom scrolling and everything else bad about online advertising.
The fix is quality adverts, curated adverts. However that costs money and it's much easier just spaff as much rubbish as much as possible in the hope that some revenue happens to slide out of it. YouTube has gone this way such that without ad blockers it is nearly unusable to the level that local news sites are, just in video form. Vapid adverts that lie about whatever rubbish the are trying to sell, online game adverts for amazing games which are the same old pay-to-win crap and nothing whatsoever related to the advert, products that are plain dangerous or illegal with bogus medical claims, and so on. These play suddenly in the middle of words even, blare out at full volume and many are unskippable. Then they wonder why we use ad blockers.
Oh dear. Next somebody will tell me that I really should be testing small spaces which are described as "not enough space to spin a cat around in" using actual cats. I admit it's not easy, as cats are not the most cooperative creatures in the first place, and one sometimes to retire worn out cats, and cats come in different sizes, but one has to do one's best.
From observation, (of an ex-friend), the secret is to repeat the lie over and over and over again until the victim has no choice other than to accept it. Add in manipulation, psychological control over many years and whenever caught lying claim "I was only joking" and distract further. For brownie points steal money from a shared bank account for 10 years too, and lie about this and then lie about being happy that it's in the open now.
The other option is to just tell a more outrageous lie and repeat this process until the victim, or country/voter pool, is distracted by this and has forgotten about the first lie.
I'm still waiting on AI rather than marketing branding nonsense.
What we currently have is LLM technologies that are essentially very cleverly put together instances of predictive text. Obviously rather more sophisticated than predictive text, but there is absolutely no intelligence anywhere to be had. There is no domain of knowledges being formed with propositions, tests and experimentation, just the munging together of scraped content from elsewhere which may, or may not, be accurate and is likely rather biased too. These tools are useful, but they are not and never can be "AI".
Ah well that's where the mess of Microsoft comes in.
Skype as an amazingly useful product, peer-to-peer and provided great connectivity for millions around the world. Especially when people lived in different countries.
Microsoft bought Skype and decided to centralise it, so everything went through Microsoft's servers instead. This provided more opportunity for revenue and advertising but much worse performance for many users. At this point in time "skype" was pretty much a verb, as in you would "skype someone".
Microsoft also had the shit-show that was Lync, Microsoft's take on telephony. It was an indescribably awful product, prone to random failures, utterly annoying to try and manage and best avoided at all costs. It also the Lync client which was yet another of Microsoft's instant messaging applications (does anybody even remember MSN/M Messager now?). To ensure confusion, Microsoft renamed the Lync client Skype for Business which was lovely except for some utterly odd reason, users were confused as to why Skype and Skype for Business were not interoperable (can't think why). Through various botched updates to both, Microsoft implemented a little compatibility between the two Skypes but it was also half-arsed and almost never worked.
Then a quick hack project came up called "Teams" and Microsoft decided that rather than continue the existing strong brand of Skype that they'd call this "Teams" and use it for business use. Oh, and then decide later to foist it on non-business users which really is plumbing the depths of crap branding. One does not "teams" one's mother. Not in the civilised world, anyway. This limited hack project then had more crap added to it, hence the appalling inconsistent and very unintuitive user interface and that it took so long for it to, sort of, support more than one account.
Now we have Teams Classic, Teams Basic, Teams Professional, Teams New, Teams, Teams (embedded into Windows 11) and doubtless a few other naming horrors in the shit show that is Microsoft marketing and development. It's becoming more and more annoying to interact with external parties through Teams as when it fails, and it does, we just don't know what version they might happen to be using. Hell, ensuring a consistent version internally within an organisation is near impossible.
So with previous form, Microsoft have bought an established product/name and murdered it. Another notable one was Hotmail which at one point was quite popular, but is now "Outlook" - except when it's "office" of course!
But we still get the abject idiots that believe that magically, these "smart" meters can somehow tell us which devices in our homes are using the most electricity. I've even had some muppet tell me that I had no idea what I was talking about because of course they can do that, as that's why they are sold.
No, they are sold to prevent the need for a person to have to read a meter in person and to provide remote disconnect functionality. They do nothing for the consumer at all other than an almost totally unusable interface that half shows some incorrect prices and some usage figures which don't mean anything at all.
Have our utility bills gone down as a result of having a smart meter installed? No.
In the meantime I've had a year of a supplier requesting a meter reading, which is near impossible to take because the physical device's interface was designed by an abject moron as well as trying to have as few buttons as possible requiring each of the few buttons to have many and varied, and utterly inconsistent, actions. The initial reading was taken using their remote reader, but somehow they forgot that I had one and started using estimated bills rather than use what they had already used.
There are some competent ones but far too many seem to just be there to answer as many questions as possible even if during doing so the demonstrate that they neither read the question nor delivered a remotely useful answer.
For example, ask why a particular component of server setup went wrong, and how you carefully followed all the steps as documented and you'll get a link to the document that you already followed and have the bloody question marked as answered and ignored from then on.
around here, modern point of sale retail is almost entirely tablets running android.That's the front of house. Absolutely everywhere else you will see laptops and/or desktop PCs in use. Do you think for a second that the head office stock ordering and store management is undertaken by staff wandering around the office with android tablets?
That's just retail. Most other office based businesses operate using laptops and/or desktop PCs too.
I was also thinking about the robots they had in the film Flight of Navigator.
The line around crashing when looking at daisies is quite quotable, and if anyone is interested, there are YouTube channels looking into how clever for the time the special effects were in this movie.
It was always obvious when a complete amateur was responsible for the design:
At that time, within the context of an application the only non maskable key combination was Ctrl-Alt-Delete. There was nothing stopping an application from using the Alt, Ctrl or Alt-Gr keys in a specific manner, it would just be inconsistent with other applications.
Themes in Windows XP were an incredible bodge job of Microsoftian proportions:
1) Draw the window using the standard chrome
2) Draw over the top of this using the Windows XP theme.
It's also very important to ensure that as much as possible it's harder and harder to tell where one window stops and another starts
Now we have the abject stupidity of a new feature called "dark mode" which is another layer of dumb on top of the operating system. The same operating system that a few versions ago allowed users to change the damn system colours, including providing pre-packaged themed colours. Well behaved applications, respected these colours and rendered their interface appropriately. All the OS needed adding was a "user has picked a specific theme" to aid applications in swapping images out and that was it. OK, a "per application" dark mode would be very useful too. Instead we have yet another botched mess of applications doing things whatever way they feel like it and Microsoft partly implementing the same being touted as a massive new feature.
Largely, although I would guess that a CPU running faster, particularly with voltage control, will be running less efficiently with more electrons going to generate heat than switching circuits therefore running the CPU at a lower speed should, overall, use less energy for a given task.
Probably not a lot in it for a fixed voltage CPU but I suspect more identifiable for a variable voltage CPU, probably depends on the task and so on...
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