Posts by Pete 2

Easy question, trickier answer

> a legal right to demand at least 10Mbps download, and 1Mbps upload speeds from their ISPs ... package should cost no more than £45.

Which do you want: fast or cheap? (you can't have both)

Sitting on defence

> British ministers are stepping up their rhetoric on cyber warfare, with £22m to be splurged on embiggening an "offensive hacking" unit as Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt vowed to retaliate against Russian cyber-attacks.

If it is anything like other "defence" procurements, they will end up with ultra-expensive computers to hack-back with .... but no keyboards.

International identify theft?

> first and last names, their country of residence, postal codes and email addresses

Dang! Now we'll have to contend with martian hackers and phishers as well as terrestrial ones. I wonder if their English is any better?

Phones for the 0.1%

> truly lossless 10x photos

Yeah, great for selfies ..... of your nose hair.

But nobody except the photo aficionados will care about this. And those 1-in-a-thousand would never admit to using a phone camera for their version of perfectly framed, light-balanced and fully metered happy snaps

So this is neither fish nor fowl. It doesn't provide the vast majority with anything they would want or ever use. Neither does it fulfill the needs of those who would bore the balls off a buffalo with all the technical descriptions that (inevitably) accompany each proudly shown photo.

Better than hearing voices in your head

> after its dark passage through the human body.

and possibly the first documented case of someone actually talking out of their arse.

Peeks or perks?

> If you watch the XXX vids, which we did in the interests of investigative journalism and data science,

Yup. journalism's a dirty job. We should be thankful someone else does it on our behalf.

What does that make me?

> it’s your personality, not your skills, that define success in the workplace

So what type of personality spends all day filling in silly online questionnaires, instead of working?

Chinese whispers

> One of the other mothers explained that when they saw her hubbie doing the school run, it made it easier to get their own husbands to do the same.

What the other mothers said: "I saw Bill Gates dropping of his kids at school this morning"

What their husbands heard; "If you drop the kids off at school, there's a chance you'll meet Bill Gates"

Hello? Huey?

> Want to send teacher on a Zero-G flight

For a moment I thought the article was suggesting pushing them off a tall building.

Not what it appears

> I grew up on that street and this same thing happened every so often

Frequently enough to not be a black swan event, then?

Too late!

> A machine-learning software engineer has trained OpenAI’s too-dangerous-to-release language model on personal Facebook messages to show how easy it is to create a bot that can attempt to impersonate you.

I have a facebook account that I never use (in fact, I have several). Therefore even a 'bot that does nothing is already impersonating me.

Tell us about the support, not just the hardware

> It peaks at 472GFLOPS, we're told, and consumes about 5W to 10W.

Given the size of the heatsink on that puppy I'd say it's expecting to suck much more than 10 Watts.

And as with all these sorts of product, the success or failure will depend completely on the level of support (both from the manufacturer and user community) that it gets. The documentation, development tools, examples and ease of use are crucial. We saw this with the RPi: there are much better boards out there - cheaper ones, too. But the RPi dominates because of its community - not because of its technical capabilities.

disappointment?

> "but then at the weekend a letter came through the door signed from 'me' that said the curtains gave the image of a house of ill-repute"

Maybe the author was writing a complaint. That the w(h)ine bar wasn't living up to "what it said on the tin". One imagines there isn't much else going on in Lostwithiel

An _intelligent_ AI?

> One of the top complaints about TensorFlow is that it’s clunky and not easy to grasp

It sounds like the very first thing this AI framework needs is an AI to run it. Then all the problems with badly designed code, workflows and architecture could be made invisible to the user.

FAD ALERT - A modern day flip-top

> each has made a convincing argument that this apparent extravagance has practical value

I don't buy this. All the screen has to do is to display the content currently of interest.

But having to go to the faff of opening up the screen just to see that someone you don't care about has tweeted something you aren't interested in - and then having to fold the screen back down again to re-insert into said pocket? That all sounds like too much trouble.

Don't make friends and influence people

> Finally, the report found, the tried and true social engineering attack remains as effective as it has ever been.

Sounds like a good reason to employ anti-social computer staff

Once round the block

> Wayne Hale, ... pointing out the dangers of the harpoon approach

The most comical "danger" would be if the harpoon's tether broke and it missed its target.

Then continued in it's orbit until it arrived back at the place it started from and stuck its own host satellite.

The fourth e-state?

> Some of the information it generates is also just plain wrong. Jack Clark, policy director at OpenAI, said the content could potentially "generate misleading news articles or impersonate others online".

So, ideal for writing stories in almost every daily newspaper.

In a branch? Out on a limb!

> IBM Watson, which will be, er, put to work "enhancing branch advisors' expertise" and increasing productivity.

> That is one of the aims at least, assuming UK customers can actually find a branch,

Surely the point will be that an AI doesn't need a branch. It just inhabits the web. So potential customers will just see an avatar that doles out vague advice and then tells people to buy Santander products. Your financial adviser will just be an app on your phone.

Oooops, dropped

Having been in similar situations myself (having a "dotted line" via pre-sales, to customer support, even though I was a developer) I would occasionally get support calls put through. Whether by accident or design. While it is considered rude to cut a caller off while they are speaking, it does not occur to people that you would deliberately terminate the call while you were speaki

Baby steps

> Exports account for £5.5bn of that income

Although you'd think that with no domestic launch capability, All the product would be exported. Most of it in an upwards direction!

However, if the ultimate goal of BREXIT is to make trade deals, then the first and almost certainly the easiest would be with everything that isn't on Planet Earth. I mean, how hard would it be to get that one wrong? When all the negotiating team has to do is say "I'll take that silence as a 'yes', then".

This is not the report you are looking for

> Back in June, Gartner found that just 4 per cent of CIOs had invested in and deployed AI

Odd! I would fully expect that a major consultancy firm would have a report that backed up every point of view that their clients hold. Isn't that why people use consultancies? For validation and to add credibility to the decisions they have already made - or are wanting to make.

So for them to have just one report - one that clearly is bollocks (though one person's bollocks is another person's lunch) - seems a bit odd. Surely they would have a whole range of them, from Nobody will ever use AI right through to Everybody is adopting it NOW.

Level of engagement?

So older people share more. They also vote more.

Could this simply be two manifestations of the same thing? That older people are simply more politically active, they take more interest. Whereas the younger people simply can't be arsed - either to vote or to share stuff. Alternatively, maybe older people simply have more free time, or more polite "friends" who won't shout at them for sharing crap.

This study (also reported on /.) has too many uncontrolled variables to be considered robust.

Hello 1 - 2 - 3 - can you hear me at the back?

> Naturally, we took the thing for a spin (using Ubuntu) and found the whole experience to be reassuringly uneventful.

You mean .... someone might actually have tested it?

You need to get a bus for the last part of the journey

> The Kármán line, at 100km, has commonly been regarded as where space starts, but Virgin

> Galactic will point to discussions within the scientific community about revising this figure downwards

> to 80km.

It looks like Branson has learned something from RyanAir, which has contributed some "original" thinking regarding where the actual destination is!

It also makes you wonder if that will reduce the cost of the fare by 20% too? Or is this just a sneaky way of raising the price.

Something on TV wasn't real: shocker!

And presumably there were some credulous people back in 1977 when they saw R2D2 and C3P0 for the first time? Or others who think that Eastenders depicts "real life"?

Personally I am surprised they had to put someone inside. CGI / deepfake is so good at producing realistic stuff that a completely virtual robot (and probably the whole show) could be whipped up on a render farm.

Form an orderly queue

And how long before all the world's "security" services are on the phone with job offers, consultancy requests and causal enquiries regarding just what extra hardware they would need to, ahem, research this new vulnerability.

The publication does sound a lot like an advertisement. It's just that what ordinary citizens would consider a fault is seen as an opportunity by those charged with protecting our freedoms!

Henry VI, Part 2!

> Some in the legal world fear the real reason for the project has more to do with cutting costs

And that alone would be an excellent reason. Anything that stops legal firms charging the rates of their senior lawyers (£200/hour recently in the UK, for a straightforward probate) and then having all the work done by an office junior, would be welcome.

If we can get web-present AIs to handle all the basic stuff that makes up the majority of a lawyer's workload that would be fantastic. If that could interface directly to another AI handling the bulk of litigation, that would be even better.

The only problem then would be how to get the system to work in such a way that those AIs would take 6 months to finish a simple job, when it only actually took a few seconds of compute time?

As for the Shakespeare quote? See here, but should that be a SIGTERM or a SIGQUIT?

Now THAT'S a worthy cause

> The power, which NASA reckoned would be enough run a household blender, will drive the three main instruments carried by the lander.

Mars! will it blend?

We're from the IT dept. and we're here to help you ....

> access to digital services is the lowest priority for spending

Not surprising since almost all NHS computer systems are so badly designed and implemented that they end up making people's work environment, stress and efficiency worse.

Rather than allowing IT people to design stuff for the NHS - a group of people they generally know almost nothing about, I feel they should let the medical staff tell them what is needed. In most cases they would point to a non-computerised thing and say "make it do exactly what that does".

FAX machines spring to mind!

One for the fish!

> The spent first stage subsequently descended to the ever-crowdpleasing landing on a drone-ship stationed in the Atlantic

I am sure that all the marine life in the area was suitably impressed.

No place in the larder

We all know that it is wise to store the instant coffee a long way away from the gravy powder (some of us discover this the hard way - student days .... ahhh!). It now looks like Wombat owners should make sure that the OXO cubes are always kept in their foil wrappers.

the leader becomes the follower

So this looks like it is intended to compete with the Orange Pi Zero+

Originally the FriendlyArm and Orange Pi ranges were brought out as cheap alternatives to the RPi. Often with more features included in the lower price. However the cost saving never really made up for the lack of community support, software or Linux updates. Now we have a "proper" Pi board that will hopefully compete on price (though I have never heard of anyone complaining their computer had too much RAM.

One size does not fit all

> You’re a small or mid-sized business.

The problem is that the term SME is applied to all companies of 250 employees or fewer. That is a huge range. From a small accountancy outfit up to a decent-sized manufacturing operation. And the set of requirements changes accordingly.

Most of those at the smaller end (for example: a garage, or shop) won't even have a full-time IT person. Even for the "large" SMBs such as those listed here with turnover (not profit) of £10million a year, a full time expert is out of the question.

SMBs account for 99% of UK companies and employ about half the workforce. I would suggest that what they need is something far cheaper, more streamlined and integrated. Since most small businesses will have largely similar IT requirements: website, payroll, back office, sales, VAT, stock control / inventory - and largely similar hardware and software (either a cloud or server - PC, plus third-party software), there would be a ready market for something that simply "does" all their security for them. Whether that would fully automate the work or simply list out what the IT person/people should do, would depend.

But I doubt many of the 5 million SMEs would be looking for a professional.

Get a float, or sink.

> Oracle staffers were about a week away from not getting paid, founder Larry Ellison has said of the firm's early days.

Many years ago I worked for a large blue organisation. We heard stories there that a while earlier the UK operation had to be baled out by the parent so they could run the payroll. And that was not during their "early days".

Send it to the colonies

> an educational tool designed to improve an English* speaker's pronunciation

When this is on the Google Play store for 99¢ I'll tell some people I know about it.

Some of them claim to have "English" as their first language!

Same old same old.

> the obvious question is “what’s new?” The answer is… not a whole lot.

But this is true of almost every Linux [ and by "Linux" we all know that means the kernel and the suite of apps that make up a distribution ] - and has been for years.

The question that rarely gets asked and even less frequently gets a satisfactory answer is: what will I be able to do, with this release, that I could not do before?

And most times the answer is "nothing". For many years now, all new Linux releases have been merely rolling the version numbers on libraries and utilities (squashing bugs and fixing security problems), adding support for new hardware and fiddling with the UI.

The only real change that has arrived in recent years is systemd. But even that is 4 years old, is hated as much as it is adopted and makes no difference at all to the users and the list of functions they can use.

One could argue that stability is a major benefit. That being able to take a user from 20 years ago (i.e. me!) and plunk them down in front of a Linux desktop that they will instantly recognise and be able to use, is a good thing. Apart from some minor silliness, like moving the position of menus and toolbars it is totally familiar. This is very true. But it is not innovation, it is not "cutting edge" and it is not what developers want to spend their time doing.

Linux has grown fat and slow in middle age. It is no longer the inspirational "alternative" it once was. It no longer leads in terms of utility or design. Yet it contains all the old baggage that makes it a hostile environment for people to adopt. Just try adding a new package - download this, edit that, compile the other, add new libraries to satisfy installation criteria, fix conflicts and maybe - just maybe - after a full day of effort and Googling user forums that shiny new app will work.

We should be at the stage where all a user has to do is sit at a screen and say (or type) "I want to write a document" (or letter, email, flame, program, magazine review ... ) and everything just happens. And the same applies to hardware - especially stuff you can plug in like USB. None of these should be issues, but they are all insoluble due to group dynamics and office politics within the community.

So Linux will continue to increment version numbers. Giving the illusion of progress without change. And in 20 years time someone else will re-write this comment about Ubuntu 38.10. That is, if the Y2038 problem hasn't destroyed the world.

The silver lining

> However, Wu is convinced it'll be enough to save the city a fortune in electricity bills for street lighting.

What's the "plan B" for when it's cloudy? Which judging by the 10 day weather forecast happens quite a lot