Posts by Pascal Monett

"Dual-screen support is coming soon"

It is extremely telling that such a phrase seems totally normal these days.

Dual screens. We've spent over four decades using IT stuff more and more because prices have, globally, always been falling. For what seems like forever I've only used one screen per computer, like everybody else. But, since between five and ten years, I've been seeing more and more developers use two screens at work, and I've personally been on two screens at home for nine years now. About a third of my career.

I know some people who have three screens. My graphics card has four ports for connecting screens. It is currently managing exactly 10 512 000 pixels.

Technology is awesome.

You solved the problem, goodbye

Stress and panic may explain why the guy didn't find his spreadsheet, but that does not explain why he didn't try and learn from the situation.

When you find yourself in a bind and someone comes along to dig you out, you're supposed to gain experience and learn how not to get yourself in such a situation again.

I guess that, since apparently he didn't call back the next day, he at least learned to pay attention to the recent file list, but most probably he just went back to his habit of clicking on the first thing in the list. Oh well, maybe after a decade he finally learned how files work.

"the rest of the 81 were purely academic"

In other words, pie-in-the-sky, Ai-is-wonderful, please-continue-funding-me papers that apparently have a diametrically opposite view from papers based on actual data.

Why am I not surprised ?

These are the kinds of papers that proclaim that facial recognition works almost perfectly, when actual trials come back with a success rate of less than 13%.

Look, I understand that theoretical physics is just as important as actual physics, but the difference is that theoretical physicists do not try to pass their musings as actual science. They ask science engineers to create the experiments that justify or invalidate their theories. Once a result is obtained, they review their theories and progress in their musings.

It seems that, as far as "AI" is concerned, there are no such updates. That means that actual AI is nowhere near being created because the pie-in-the-sky musing are not bothering to ground themselves in reality.

Oh well, it's for the better I guess. The longer we take to build an actual Skynet, the better.

"the ability to create customer photo filters"

Shouldn't that be "custom" photo filters ?

I know we're all in confinement, but editors need to pay a bit more attention. The amount of errors in articles since the beginning of the week has been on the rise by an order of magnitude.

I cannot bring myself to feel sorry for the guy

The one going to jail, of course. I do feel sorry for the person who was just walking around, minding their own business, and found themselves before the pearly gates.

Accidents do happen, of course, and I understand that this was not a case of cold-blooded murder or a joyride that ended badly. But still, someone died. A price must be paid.

And, when he gets out in 18 months, he can remember that the other person is not getting out of their grave.

Sadness all around.

Well _this_ is news

A Pi has crashed. In a standalone game thingy. I'm supposing it doesn't get updates, so it doesn't change. What can possibly have brought it to its knees ?

Given that each CPU failed to launch (apparently it has two), the problem shouldn't have anything to do with associated hardware (like spinning rust that failed to respond). Looking at the messages, each CPU has a stack exception, and then fails to complete startup.

So the question is : what threw a stack exception ?

"the woman police officer was 71 years old"

And she was still working ?

What kind of barbaric country requires people to work when they should be retired ?

And nobody thought that sending her home in these times would be a good thing to do ?

Barbarians.

Wait a minute

I may not be the brightest bulb in the bunch, but 23rd of March plus 3 weeks does not add up to 1st of June, however you count it.

Seems to me that they're pushing things a bit.

"costing his chums £93,500 as he did so"

And that, in a nutshell, is Assange.

A parasite.

Keep him in jail.

For his own safety, of course.

Sorry

The words "Microsoft" and "Edge" do not incite any interest, much less excitement, in my mind.

As far as I'm concerned, anything Edge that Microsoft does is best avoided.

"the little HTTPS padlock shows up in the browser address bar"

That is going to be an interesting explanation, when Tupperware gets down to it.

That's one point of view

Another possibility is that companies are going to want that project completed double-time, since they've had to wait for it to get done.

I'm not convinced project cancellations are going to be all that legion. Sure, there will undoubtedly be some, but I think there will be more that will request urgent finishing, or undertaking.

We'll see.

"filters were in place"

Well, they're working very well, are they ?

At the same time, this is Ebay we're talking about. I think it's a bit unfair to single out the guy who posted an offer at 0.01 and the offer reached 210. It's not the sellers' fault if people are nuts, even if it is rather obvious that he fully intended to take advantage of the nuts.

"contracts carrying penalties"

It seems obvious to me that, given the period, a judge will not rule in favor of a client complaining that the job wasn't done on time.

It should be useless to even try. Nobody is going to be on time for a few months at least. This lockdown is going to throw plenty of schedules into the shredder.

I have the whole collection

Book by book, I collected them over about two decades. There are a few I had to buy again, because they were worn out.

I will now read them again, with him in mind.

iTunes is still a thing ?

But, we were told that Apple was replacing it and banishing it from its OS.

I guess it's still good enough for Windows users, though.

So EUV chips can be made faster, are more dense and they consume less

Sounds like paradise. And, made faster and easier means making more with the same resources means each unit costs less, so it's a win-win-win.

Except that they're going to want to recoup the costs of putting it in place, so we're not going to see price drops any time soon. And the gaming crowd won't care because it'd DDR5, man, look at those framerates !

First of all, recenter the project goal

This should not be considered a COVID-19 response app, but a pandemic response app. The next time a pandemic occurs, the app should be quite capable of handling the info for that pandemic, no need to reinvent the wheel.

Of course, the timeframe for a response app to be actually useful for this round is limited, so consider that whatever you can cobble together is basically a trial run. Limit the functionalities to the bare minimum. Right now there is a perfectly functional website. People can go there, so it's not like we have no information to go on.

By all means, make an app if there's any chance that it can help get the right information out to people, but take the long view. COVID-19 is not the first pandemic to hit us, and it certainly won't be the last.

"a miscreant can include a malformed multi-master font in a document"

That means that the miscreant is sending me a mail with a document attached and expecting me to open it because COVID-19 or my bank or whatever.

I have a very fine bullshit detector and I can assure you that your mail will be filed in SPAM faster than you can blink and your document will not be opened or previewed in any way.

That settles that problem.

Now, I've checked my Win 7 installation and it has, in perfect Microsoft form, no less than 12 copies on disk. Two that are in Windows\System32 and \SysWOW64, and ten copies in \winsxs\ followed by a slew of characters that would take way too much time for me to type here and nobody cares about reading that anyway.

Then there are two more copies in \winsxs\Backup, in which the file names start by "amd64_microsoft_windows_gdi_" and another slew of characters etc etc.

Which ones can I get rid of, anybody know ?

'try our solution for COVID-19'

A big red flag indeed. It likely means they weren't there before, but cobbled something together in a hurry to profit from the situation.

There are no products "for COVID-19". There are videoconferencing products, there are networking products and there are calendar and planning products and all of them have existed before this pandemic. Analyze one of those for suitability and steer clear from the ones who have just popped up now.

Finally, a proper description of what the media dubs "AI" actually is

Sophisticated pattern matching. Sounds about right. When I did the Google Beginners Course in AI, I followed a dozen lectures in statistics. There wasn't a hint of AI, it was just how to define a slice of dataset to get the desired result.

Now a head of company has finally called it. Good. I'm not expecting that to actually change the media's mind, but I'm glad that somebody is putting "AI" back into its place.

"create new revenue opportunities"

I have a new revenue opportunity for you : make Thorium reactors work.

Nuclear is not going to go away, not when we all have at least one smartphone, not when electric or hybrid cars are being sold at the rate of half a million a year, going up.

We are continually pushing the grid to do more and more things. Once, it was just the lights, now its lights, heating, kitchen appliances, computers, handhelds, washing machines, water purifiers, and soon electric cars everywhere.

We need nuclear, and we need safe nuclear. Thorium is safe. Let's get that running.

"it is a reminder that - hey"

- you're doing Microsoft's Quality Assurance.

"They reckon it’ll only get faster over time"

How does that work ?

Unless I missed something in science class, in space you need some form of propulsion to go faster. This quasar tsunami (as awesome as it is named) is just gas and particles hurtling across a galaxy and encountering other gas and particles.

Those are not conditions that are favorable to acceleration.