Posts by Merrill

Re: "But then, you get to, like, 10 million training examples, it becomes incredible"

>>and stops driving itself into the back of stopped fire engines and such at speed.

These would seem to be the very negative examples needed to train the AI what not to do...

10 million crash records are what is likely needed in order to avoid crashes, not 10 million examples of uneventful trips.

Re: Step it up!

Japan learned quality control processes from W. Edwards Deming in the late '40s, early '50s. He is revered in Japan. Not so much in the US, although he tried there as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Japan

"A distributed system...

"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."

Leslie Lamport

Re: Blame the Computer

I wonder whether Southwest, with their point-to-point route structure, depends more on the spare capacity of the other hub and spoke airlines to move their crews from home to base and base to flight? In the widespread storm conditions, the other airlines have no spare seats for Southwest crews traveling on standby.

Re: Yay, we have finally reinvented the terminal

Had IBM not been forced by DoJ to divest itself of Service Bureau Corporation, and had not the FCC in Computer Inquiry I & II forced the Bell System not to provide integrated data processing services, computing would have always been done by dumbish terminals connected to time-sharing servers, and the detour through on-premises computing would have been avoided.

Re: Cliffnotes

It sounds a lot like a pitch for more university and academic research funding.

Compared with the US, more Chinese basic research is probably done in government labs and in government controlled industrial labs with universities more dedicated to turning out the manpower and staff them. I'm sure that their academics would like funding to be more like the US, where we fund a myriad of small grants to a multitude of academic principle investigators who actually produce very little.

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

The two party system allows the smallest number of people to control an elected government.

You only need 26% to win the primary elections of the party in control. Or even less if candidates are selected by caucuses or other intraparty mechanisms.

Re: Printers are the bain of MS's world

Once upon a time printers were one of MS's competitive advantages. In the early days of word processing, one of MS Word's few advantages was the length of the list of printers supported. The complexity of PC brands, interface boards, and peripheral makers and models eventually became a "competitive moat" for Microsoft.

Re: Deadly platform

The Lockheed Starfighter was the F-104. The F-101 was the McDonnell Voodoo.

Re: Xerox mainframe

The SDS were more like minicomputers than mainframes. I think of mainframes as designs that began as discrete transistor logic (including through IBM SLT), while minicomputers used early integrated circuit logic (TTL through bit-slice).

Re: becoming more and more like the old USSR

Around 1990, the US could have tried to become Greece and bequeath its culture and values to the world.

Instead, it went for becoming Rome.

Re: you never know when your SSD might be used in a time machine.

The IBM System 360 Model 20 in the story about the recent move could only do 16-bit integer add, subtract and compares, but it could do the full set of arithmetic instructions on packed decimal of up to 31 digits plus sign.

The were discontinued for System 370 and replaced by the System 3s. The /20 was sometimes used to drive card readers, card punches and line printers so as not to tie up the bigger models which could then do their I/O with tape and disk.

Re: I'll bet this happens a lot

Most likely they were not a prime contractor, but a subcontractor to a prime that needed them to fulfill their obligation to throw a percentage of the contract to a "woman or minority owned business". I wonder who they were actually supplying the equipment to.

Re: About 10 years ago...

But of course columns 73-80 contain a sequence number so you can resort your card deck after you drop it.

Re: Aren't you forgetting...

Good point. At these rates, it appears to be about equal to the taxes that would have been paid by the manufacturers if they had produced the laptops in the United States. So it obviates the tax advantages of manufacturing offshore.

Plus, it is paid on the value at the border, so it isn't actually 25% (or whatever) of the retail price as the MSM reporting would leave you to believe. Depending on the product and how it is distributed, it is more in the range of half that at retail, given the distribution, marketing, retailing, and general and administrative expenses loaded onto the price within the US.

It was US politicians that encouraged businesses to move production to China for geopolitical purposes to counter Russia and to nobble the Asian Tigers who had become too successful and uppity. Of course we had previously moved business to the Asian Tigers after the Japanese had become too successful and uppity. Now the geopolitical mandate is to move businesses to the rest of SE Asia and South Asia, since the Chinese are too successful and uppity.

Failures of these sorts are vital since they cause providers to exercise their recovery procedures and they cause users to exercise their mitigation, fallback and recovery procedures. Absent randomly occurring failures at some reasonable frequency society would build itself up for real catastrophic failures.

Re: Work out required

I would think that most females and slightly built Asians and East Africans should not pilot MAXs. Pilots should resemble NFL defensive linemen.

A backup system of mechanically operating the tail surfaces may have been OK on the early, small 737s, but that is a strategy that fails on later, bigger models unless you impose severe physical strength requirements on the pilots.

Re: Over Due

They have Kylin, a version of Linux, and they have COS for mobiles. These find application in the government and military for obvious reasons.

For widespread use, there needs to be a commercial reason to more widely deploy them. This move by the US may be the trigger that is needed.

I don't see Long island City being attractive for employees

I've been to the building where Citi Corp is giving up 1 million square feet that Amazon will move into.

I guess it is part of the attempt to redevelop the Queens and Brooklyn bank of the East River.

Re: Nothing new

If not for the IBM Service Bureau Consent Decree and the FCC Computer Inquiry II, we would have been doing cloud computing all along.

However, government distortion of technical rationality doesn't last forever.

Re: Be careful what you wish for...

This seems to be a Qualcomm Snapdragon Windows and not compatible with other ARM processors.

The chance that it isn't dependent on a Qualcomm patent somehow is essentially zero.

Re: Other CPU architectures affected by Spectre...

Interesting. I wonder whether SPARC, MIPS, Loongson, Sunway, etc. are vulnerable to Spectre?

We keep forgetting that 1) all scripts and executables shall be executed without modification only from read-only storage, and 2) the read-only storage shall be modified only by a trusted configuration management process.

Europe - Far East communications transit North America

Due to non-coincident busy hours, Europe to Far East cables via Eurasia are not needed. Instead, the Atlantic and Pacific cables are connected via North America taking advantage of the fact that the three continental pairs do not generate peak traffic at the same times.

(It also makes it easier for Five Eyes to keep tabs on things.)

Re: re: "We were told to ignore intellectual property rights when designing the modem."

If engineers/developers conduct IPR analysis, they open themselves up to willful infringement and treble damages.

It is best to ignore intellectual property and then have legal staff conduct a right to use study under client-lawyer confidentiality.

Or so I was told.