Posts by fajensen 1362 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2008
“Chinese firms don’t invest in research and development. They’re not interested in innovation themselves,” he claimed.
Keep believing that - while the Chinese secures their monopoly on state-of-the-art rechargeable batteries and bio-tech. Probably more. Fighters that works - unlike the F35?
The idea that everything should be spewed forth to everyone instantaneously, and that one should have to mentally scroll back through a chat log and play it back in one's head to see what's been dealt with is not one of them.
It's a GREAT idea. Because, NOW you(r) business will urgently need an(other) intelligent tool to sort the deluge of crap into actionable information.
Don't think "stupid" or "broken", think "how can I USE this to bleed the bastards?".
.... and there's bugger all hope of ever getting a return on the investment.
Depends. Converting just 5% of 300 million USD of "Other Peoples Money into "My Money" would yield a pretty good R.O.I. For me at least.
I would bet that the venture vultures providing the funding charges about that in management fees. Going further into the Gray, one could also set up a side-channel providing in-sourced services like management consultancy. Maybe once could even buy Credit Default Swaps on the business's bonds (It requires that someone takes the other side of the bet - again with "Other People's MOney" - but - there is a 5-10% fee for someone to do exactly that also).
The world demands to be fooled, of course Capitalism and Markets will cater to that need.
When that day comes, then my "virtual secretary" will contact your "virtual secretary" and they'll sort out everything between them and let us know what they've decided we ought to do.
That day is already here.
It's just that it's not "my" or "your" "virtual secretary" it's The Man's secretary - or - rather - Taskmaster. The fulfilment centres behind Amazon & Co equips staff with trackers and runs them like robots using optimal-path algorithms. The so-called "knowledge work" is coming right up for modernisation next on the same principles (ambulance drivers, police, health care are "getting it" now).
Whenever we encounter "digitalisation", what it really means is the down-sourcing of stupid internal bureaucracy to users by making them do the job themselves in order to get any service. This frees internal resources to invent more bureaucracy, so the escalation is geometric.
This is why we can't have any nice things. It would give us time to think, sooner or later we would get ideas and then ... change would come. The "Sir Humpreys" almost lost control in the 1960's, it's taken them more than 50 years to unwind all of that, so of course "we" wouldn't want to risk another "reality excursion". So - busy, busy, busy ....
PS:
Even 1990's "dumb-AI" like SpamBayes can figure out with extremely good accuracy what I consider spam or not by learning. If I had several classifiers in parallel, I could teach them to auto-sort all of my email according to importance and subject. Each filter would need one complete classifier, but, my 2016 computer is probably 1500 x faster than my 1990's ditto - so - wouldn't even notice this load.
Hmm. Maybe one should try it.
So we really should be asking: WTF are we doing wrong? Why is our society unable to build stuff which does the job to the same extent as the Spitfire,
I'll take a guess: Structural Unemployment is what we are doing wrong.
We have at our disposal thousands of bright young things from the finest and most expensive universities ready and willing to work at any project. We have wonderful design tools, that really do work, can run on any recent computer (except Mac) and are affordable to a very modest budget.
However - there is not that much actual Work and what work there is, is quickly dispensed with, because, businesses these days are frighteningly efficient and the tools are really cheap and powerful.
So, what will we do? Usually, I see this a lot on the big projects I happen work with, the "solution" is to make everything very big and very complicated. Always use "big-iron" / "enterprise" tools, be very heavy with the "bondage & leather" processes A.K.A. project-, requirements- and change- management, and generally leave no stone unturned if it is suspected that a phd-thesis could be hidden underneath.
Maybe 10% of the resources allocated actually goes into the actual end-product that the project is supposed to deliver. But, thousands of engineers and con-slutt-ants earns big salaries and can take out mortgages, which creates moneys for the banks to waste. So, we don't have a recession.
I can, at my kitchen table, design and have manufactured electronics that only 10-15 years ago would require a team of engineers and some kind of factory. The web-2.0 douchebags can do even bigger feats in terms of money with a few developers in an attic office (The other side of web-2.0 are IS - which are now murdering quicker, faster and for less resources than PIRA did).
We are swimming in resources and capabilities, but we haven't solved the problem on how to change society to the new realities.
*) "enterprise" - A product that ejects warp-cores and who's crew generally spends entire episodes on barely getting out of self-created messes. Perfectly fitting.
I suspect that if web browsers started refusing to load images from third-party sites,
We get THIS ;-)
"""
Here’s The Thing With Ad Blockers
We get it: Ads aren’t what you’re here for. But ads help us keep the lights on.
So, add us to your ad blocker’s whitelist or pay $1 per week for an ad-free version of WIRED. Either way, you are supporting our journalism. We’d really appreciate it.
"""
They ought to focus on methods to better identify the needles in what they already have.
Remember Donald Rumsfeld?
As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
To which we could add:
There are known knowns, that we don't wanna know because once we know, we have to act.
Which is the governments Primary Directive when it comes to islamic terrorism!
Not saying this guy isn't crazy, but similar statements by a black man would never be reported,
... Mainly because Black Man is harder to interview, him carrying 3-5 Glock magazines worth of bullets inside his body, depending on how many cops showed up for the arrest (and subsequent paid vacation while the inquest clears them of any wrongdoing).
I had to add some extra functions to 4K of hand-assembled, hand-patched, 8085 code in EPROM's.
To do this properly I decided to disassemble the patch-work of code, using ".origin" directives to carefully insert each hand-crafted patch in the right place in the EPROM set until I could eventually re-assemble an exact 1:1 match of the existing EPROM's. Then get rid of the ".origin", rebuild, fix some timing constants because the code-loop was now 30% smaller and faster.
Then .... sometimes the parameters for the new functions didn't work properly.
Hmm. I had an expensive logic analyser, with a hardware debugger for the 8085, so I quickly found out that two memory locations in RAM changed, one of which was a local variable in my subroutines.
But ... the problem was HOW it changed! I could not find it!! No instruction referenced any of the locations in any way (the logic analyser could see all address pins), no DMA, no IRQ .... and it was not just that board - all of them behaved the same way.
After 3 weeks I finally gave up and simply defined two 8 bit variables placed over the offending locations so nothing would be placed there. The code still runs ....
... faults too difficult for a mechanic to diagnose or fix without computer assistance will not be fixable.
That's all faults today. The whole work flow in a garage runs around the diagnostic tools. Ff the wheels fall off the car, the mechanic will simply not be able to diagnose and fix the faults without going through the diagnostics!
- because - pressure sensors!
Well, it works like this: You have good QA, the process works, you have good people and very few recalls. The the bean-counters arrive. They quickly conclude that since there are very few recalls and other disasters, there is not an urgent need for QA so the budget is cut ... and cut ... and cut. Then there is a major recall and scores of consultants come in to set up a QA system ....
1) Security pays what? 6 - 7 quid an hour or thereabouts?
So, you are basically going to get either: Total monkeys "who like the uniform" or those people with other problems in their life (like being recently out of jail or supplementing their measly salary in ways that might land them in one). Neither character is going to be around for long, why train them? It's not like anything they do will come back to you (If it does, you can always sack them).
2) Twitter is a Business. It's not *our* business.
I presume you also support removing books you don't like from school libraries.
Heh, maybe I do, or maybe not:
I don't like creationism, and I am all for vigorous "discriminatory practices" being applied against that kind of brain-rot in general. I also believe that religion and religious ideas shall be made fun off, so, we of course need some reference material around for that.
... Windows is there to be mocked and ridiculed, I guess. But, if it becomes a mandatory part of curriculum due to some misguided application of "fairness" to nut bags and crazies - then - kill it with fire.
refusing to give way to cyclists.
In Denmark there is about 10-15 nasty fatalities every year with cyclist on the right side of bus or lorry going under the wheels when bus / lorry turns right.
Even though the cyclist are "in the right, legally", they should still stay the hell away from large vehicles!
The speculation is that women - who are the majority of the fatalities - simply trust more that others will follow the rules than men do.
On the other hand it leads to the situation ...
Come On -Those "Bright Young Things" need to have something to look forward to other than working minimum wage 80 hours a day for their entire "career" - which is the reality today.
The old fart shows that the company "cares", there is a career rack and that loyalty is rewarded (as if!). That's why he is paid.
For many colleagues "Retired" just means "Having officially declared the intention of not doing any useful work". Which is *still* better than ambitiously turning out impressive kilo-line numbers of garbage - which is also the stark reality today. Especially web-developers, they are never done until the site doesn't work any more. People should learn from the Pharaohs, I say!
Stupid enough to believe in sky-fairies and simultaneously not endowed with enough impulse control to stay with the original target schedule? I.O.W.. Very Stupid. Unstable too. If the TLA's were actually worth anything of what we pay for them, they would probably have seen a trail of aberrant behaviour a long way before.
I think that the happy couple were planning a little Paris-style atrocity, but before that the idiot loses his shit about some real or imagined offence at work, runs totally amok and shoot up work with wifey - thus destroying the original plan.
The movie "Brazil" nailed it: Sure, The Authorities are incompetent toss-pots relying on decrepit and crumbling infrastructure - but - they are still capable of hauling your ass in and torture you to death as required by Protocol (and even if they happen to get the wrong guy, and they know about this, it's just easier to go on with the torturing than to do the Non-Conformance Report ....)
Academics always have to prove how clever they are at whatever task attempted - and thus we get abominations such as: "NUMERICAL RECIPES IN C: THE ART OF SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING (ISBN 0-521-43108-5)" - where parentheses are banned from really hairy expressions because only a moron will be ignorant on the evaluation order of C operators.
.... and the lesser academics are copy-pasting the "FORTRAN in any language with C-quirks on top" code that they ripped from books all over the matrix.
b) tokamaks are the best current bet (stellerators may be coming up from behind but at the present tokamaks are where the clever money is);
Disagree. Tokamaks - especially ITER is where the dumb money goes to die. I.M.O. Tokamaks are a technological rat trap. They will always be an infinitesimal amount away from "break even", performing juust well enough to suck in money but never actually delivering. Back in the day, ITER was "the biz", the Germans disagreed and built Wendelstein (which I and many others believed would never work) and now Wendelstein has gone and lapped ITER.
To really move forward it is often necessary to take a step back in finances, performance, whatever - we see this in computing, the top-of-the-range, best performance per dollar kit, is ruined by the worse (on all parameters), yet more adaptable technologies that can be evolved.
d) Controlled fusion is really hard to do. Pouring money on it does not really change this (much) unless one goes "Full-On Apollo" on the problem - Which I do think that we should, actually, both for our own and for the planets sake. Every dollar spent on oil is a direct donation to terrorism and the destruction of the ecosystem.
An Apollo-style program, several alternative paths - because this is hard and therefore will take real time and effort - is what we should do.
We can still use ITER, but ITER should be just one of many bets made.
Truth is: It would take at the most 0.3 generations before there would be a Colossus cult with tens of millions of followers with priests, robes, rituals, holy books, verified miracles and merchandise.
Just look at scientology, north korea, televangelism, the moon cult, islamic state, hare chrishna and neo-liberalism, craziness designed and engineered by mere humans, yet, millions and millions of suckers are irresistibly attracted like wasps to a picnic. Most people *want* to be controlled, they *want* to have all choices made for them, they *want* to have a complete check-list with all the answers for any situation.
With Colossus, there is a God who actually listens, always sees everything, punishes transgressors and probably can perform real miracles too. I'd say that 30 - 80% of the population would like that (and, following tradition, would ritually murder the other fraction in the traditional way).
Sounds like the average (which indeed is *very* average) Java programmer left to play. I once worked in a place where one would easily get 50% on the base salary doing on-call support for 6 days every month.
They used MySQL+Java+"stringify eeverything into objects" so, in general SQL is disabled and Java does "select", "sort", whatever. MySQL per design doesn't give a shit about what goes into an INTEGER - et cetera - field, anything is OK, and MySQL will politely ignore any SQL it doesn't feel like doing that day - like DELETE CASCADE.
And Yet - sometimes - MySQL doesn't and pukes and someone like me got woken up at night to fix it.
This unique team of brainiacs also used "util.logging ... ALL" - into a MySQL database of strings(!!!) - as well as logging in various places unknown to logrotate ....
The developers couldn't be arsed to fix any of it, of course, and PHB's opinion was that every brain fart issued in Java was pure platinum dust.
This gooey mess runs a five-nines service used by a multitude of major telecoms globally. One must admit that it does looks really shiny and up-with-the-latest-trending-buzzwords too (as long as one does not peel at the loose paint).
Having been there, I don't trust anything web-based (or IoT'ish), it's all built on brown, smelly, "sand".
PS:
SQLite has a "dump" command. This will lock the database and dump the entire database as textual SQL statements into a file (or socket, I would use a file if possible to minimise the lock time), which can then be transferred by any convenient method and imported on the other end. If someone want to muck with the fields / schema - then the textual SQL representation would be a good place to start, IMO.
I'll get flamed for saying this, but OS X is how desktop Linux should look and work...
I will - once the Gnome and the Systemd work is done!
Then Linux will have:
a) Totally obscure xml-ish-but-not-quite start-up files for services,
b) Applications as binary blobs, a weird concoction of statically linked code, yet with files shat everywhere (like windows),
c) Un-Install apparently not required, Good Luck tracking all the files shat everywhere (Hint: Time-Machine is your dearest, closest, most precious friend).
d) Weird bugs and "kinks" like the Swedish USB keyboard disconnecting itself, the UK one never does - usually can reconnect by changing USB socket on the display, but not always (and will not reconnect by connection to computer). On boot, the login promt is shown on the Thunderbolt display, yet, the Macbook Pro keyboard is the only one active. Sometimes the Ethernet connection has a "self-assigned address" for a day or so - nothing helps.
e) Apple doesn't give a shit about your problems - Ah, Linux has that part already ;-)
f) A Linux that will give you all of that for about 1200 EUR and up ;-))
However, VMware Fusion really does work flawlessly which fixes the problem with running applications that one must run but are never available on Mac.
... attack vectors that AVs bring with them is the ability for an arbitrary bunch of folks to upload & run arbitrary code ...
Of course. Anti-virus software is certain to be an important part of the "Global War on Terror (and Everything Else, now we are at it)". That's why "we" need to have it.
Even if the junk-ware was honestly implemented and only checksummed files exactly as it sez on the tin, a database of those file signatures can be used to track the movement of information, what information is new, which is dynamic and which is static - so "They" can work out who to drone next.
.... absolutely not germain to terrorist or criminal activity ....
Oh. Lets ask the question: What are the threats and opportunities faced by the "intelligence" services?
Opportunities: Terrorism, organised crime, paedophiles .... politicians doing something they shouldn't
Threats: Politicians with real clout finding out that the "intelligence" services isn't actually very intelligent or competent and consistently have missed pretty much *every* major world-changing event(!) resulting in budget cuts and dismissals.
Solution: Spy on the politicians and the Civil Service, get some Dirt on Them before they do US.
Bonus: While "intelligence" are all busy doing that, the "Opportunities" will grow all on their own.
"They" actually wanted to engineer a pre-emptive attack on (at least) the Civil Service and Parliament, by pushing a back-doored "secure" communication protocol onto them disguised as "The most secure kit our boffins could come up with, Sir". Nice one.
1a) Eternal Suffering is *required* to placate the Many-Angled Ones.
1b) It pisses people off when, relieved from stupid colleagues, PHB-interference, commuting and meetings, the off-site people ends up being about twice as productive as their "managed" colleagues.
2) Of course. Perpetually expanding Brownian motion is 80% of the work in most large organisationg.
3) Yes. It's a Feature.
4) In order to game the numbers more effectively, management reorganise often so that no useful data is collected on the actual performance of said management. With no stability, there are no exceptions - or - rather, Everything is an Exception.
Must be some sort of fad or a sales blitz happened recently by one of these tracking companies.
It's happening because someone realised that, damn!, we should have robots slaves (and flying cars by now), but the tech jst isn't there because it's hard, it's expensive, and it sounds like it might take a while. What to do?
However, if we chip people and make sure they are controlled by a dumb AI (spreadsheet or workflow system) then we can have fleshy robots. Not quite the same, however, flesh-bots are much cheaper, available now, service & maintenance can be fobbed off on society, and - best of all - they all have little feelings and dreams & aspirations that can be crushed.
It's pointless trying to measure performance based on attendance.
Nope, it's useful:
Stage 1: If someone wants metrics, then we give them the metrics that are available. If we can't measure performance - well, we could, but it would be hard to make a link between the performance of a journalist to the sales of newspapers, therefore, it is not useful for management purposes.
Stage 2: Create Incentives, that is Bonuses related to the metrics that we do have.
Stage 3: Do whatever it takes to get the numbers - if it means journalists watching cat-videos to keep the Bum-on-Seal goal up, then, that is the goal of the organisation.
Stage 4: Ka-Chinngg
Would you trust your broker
Are you nuts? Nobody trusts their damn broker, where do you imagine that he/she gets the money for the lavish location, the chauffeur driven Bentley, the huge mansion and the many priapism-inducing interns in the office?? Not from the tax-payers, remember, they had to blow your money first to get bailed out!
I trust my broker to look after my money about in about the same way as I believe that my flat-coated retriever will protect a Sunday roast left within it's reach, that is for about as long as I can keep an eye cocked in her direction. If I blink, it's OVER.
And .... They have robot pets because something has ruined the environment so thoroughly that animals can't breed, apparently not even under controlled conditions (in captivity). Humans would have trouble breeding in a generally toxic environment also, therefore, "they" are padding the numbers with replicants and prototyping replicants without an expiry date (probably to keep the Asians from taking over after the 1%'ers fuck off to their space habitat).
.... and those who do know, don't care! A Circus needs a bunch of clowns!!
"BUGGER - Maybe the real state secret is that the spies aren't very good at their and don't know very much about the world"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460
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