Posts by Pete 2 3497 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
> If the [European] Commission lacks the necessary resources and in-house expertise to ensure compliance,
Just make sure that the fines which will (inevitably) be handed out are large enough to cover the cost of enforcement.
That would include staffing the relevant regulatory offices and paying for the in-house lawyers to create the "bite"
And if there is money left over, then just put that against all the unpaid taxes from those companies.
Maybe if Microsoft produced an operating system that provided users with functionality they wanted and could see an advantage in using?
Instead, it seems that every version (since W7) has been worse. Pointless rearrangements. Harder to use. Bloated with crap. More intrusive updates and becoming more of a platform for advertising than an environment to get things done.
> With Cosmo and the APE format, you can write a C program and compile it to a single file that will load and run on six totally different operating systems. Oh, and if that wasn't enough, the same binary can be booted directly from the PC BIOS, as well.
A truly impressive piece of work. Unfortunately, I can almost hear the virus-writers and spyware creators (including government establishments across the world) drooling over the possibilities this opens up.
Maybe it's just too powerful?
> After all, what’s faster than the speed of light?
It depends a lot on what material the light is traveling through.
However that is a distraction. The better question is how fast can the carrier (be it: light, RF, x-rays) be modulated. Because it is the speed of changes in whatever property of the carrier is used to transfer information , that is important.
What none of these "Star Trek" technologies consider is the physical interconnects at either end.
The hard lesson from USB, ethernet and all other pluggable, high-speed, connectors is that they are the weakest link - literally: the link. Anything that can eliminate the general crapness, cheapness, vulnerability to crud on the contact(s) and mechanical failings of these connections will get my vote.
> an active archive system capable of storing nearly four exabytes of data.
Crikey! Just under half a day's internet traffic in 2021.
I wonder how many years worth that is when you take out advertising, streaming and pr0n?
> Did they get consent?
Short answer: yes they did.
If you use Google services, this is what you agreed to
This license allows Google to:
host, reproduce, distribute, communicate, and use your content — for example, to save your content on our systems and make it accessible from anywhere you go
The simplest explanation is that this AI is doing a best match on what the author wrote, against its database of comments and then selecting the most popular or pertinent reply.
While one can argue that is what many people do, too, I would hesitate to call that intelligence. Including when people do it too.
What would be impressive is if the AI had hacked into the engineer's account and posted as him, that the AI had achieved sentience.
> So really our goal is to shift as many consumers as we can to the subscription model.
Whenever a corporation says this, you can be sure that it is in THEIR best interests, not those of its customers. For us, the best strategy is to go in the opposite direction.
And the best opposite direction is to use a different supplier.
> Criminals have weaponized technology ...
> our innovators and our tech pioneers – are among the future of law enforcement.
So which side will win? I reckon it will be whoever offers the best incentives. Although those incentives could include not going to jail. Something that might be more or less appealing depending on which country a person is in (or could be extradited from) and whether that country takes a cut of the profits.
> Healthcare organizations ... saw such attacks almost double ... are quite likely to pay ransoms
So apart from directly financing crimes (and maybe state-sponsored terrorism) they are attracting more attacks on themselves.
But never mind, they can just pass on the costs to their patients. So why worry?
> Chinese government for breaking a de-facto moratorium on anti-satellite weapons that had been in place since 1985
And before that the Outer Space Treaties which said that space should not be militarised and that no country should claim sovereignty to the "space" above it.
All well and good in the 1960s when no country had much of a capability to deploy space weapons, or to prevent satellite over-flights of its territory. In much the same way that territorial waters were limited by the range of cannons and their ability to enforce a 3-mile limit.
But times change. Both in the capability to knock out satellites and thus to enforce claims of sovereignty and also in the capability of satellites to "invade" another country's sovereignty. (Do we really want the entire world's internet to be routed through the USA? an thus be subject to USA-ians' laws?)
There might be ways to avoid a situation of mutual satellite destruction. However, it seems to me that as soon as any country develops the ability to hit ground targets from space, then all bets are off and it will be only a matter of time before a proxy war in space becomes a reality.
At that time, we should be grateful for all the international fibre optics.
> if you connect a device to the internet
... then you have lost control.
However, if you can run everything off a personal hub, without the need for "cloud" services then not only do you free yourself from the forced upgrades, programmed obsolescence and security requirements imposed by third parties, but your latency will be lower, broadband outages can be laughed at, price increases and changes to Ts & Cs ignored and your system becomes truly your own.
And when there is one that is designed properly and robustly it could stay operational for decades.
> military payloads to be disguised as Starlink machines and sent into orbit undetected.
This provides the obvious excuse for disabling satellites. Whether it is true or not, it could not be proved one way or another.
Though with SpaceX currently launching on pretty much a weekly basis I reckon the replacement rate for disabled satellites would be almost as high as the takedown rate.
(especially if many of those replacements were cheap and non-functioning decoys)
And then there is the question of "stealthing" satellites ...
> was first deployed ... in the US
> The same system is now apparently being rolled out to vehicles in the UK.
I do hope the camera developers realise that in the UK people drive on the left side of the road (well: usually)
So not only will the driver's seat always look empty, but there could be an awful lot of "reckless" driving on completely the wrong side of the road.
> I look forward to tspDB disrupting the gullibility market by not spouting bollocks.
But ... isn't the gullibility market based on the sound business model of telling people what they want to hear?
Much like the newspaper market, if you don't like one version of the news just find a different one.
> This being the Dev Channel, there is also every chance the test feature will never see the light of day.
Hopefully.
You can almost see the cogs in the developers' minds turning. Now let's think, what part of the screen is most likely to be covered by an app?
And in order to maximise user-annoyance, that's where to place a new interactive text input box.
Dilbert is supposed to be satire, not an example to follow
So, in summary it seems that the reason why all GUIs look much the same is because techies like it that way. They do not feel the need to address the obvious shortcomings, because they have learned to live with them and familiarity is more important than functionality.
As Henry Ford probably didn't say: if innovation was left to ordinary people, they would only want faster horses
It looks like we have reached that point with GUIs. And maybe operating systems, too!
If we are *still* using computer monitors, then the single worst part of UI design is to waste valuable vertical space with a title bar, menu, all the space below the user area. Design features from Windows 3. Maybe earlier, see below.
It also seems to be to be anachronistic to have a menu bar item labelled "Edit" which, with word processing apps does not let you edit the document. Although pretty much everything else in the menu bar is just as obsolete.
Next would be the silly notion of application names. I do not care what an app is called, I care about what it does! So I do not want something called LibreOffice - especially not with camel¹ case formatting - needless key presses for an idiotic (and inconsistent) way to show where words start, I want an icon that says: write stuff of something else, equally informative.
In fact, the whole idea of icons seems rather 1970s (from the 3 Rivers PERQ). All a UI should contain is a single question: what do you want to do? with a free-form field for the user to write (or say) their instruction. It should then be up to the smarts inside to decide how to fulfill that command.
It seems to me that the first steps to setting ourselves free of these out-dated ideas is to get rid of the limitations imposed by the traditional 2-button mouse and ASCII / 101-key keyboards.
[1] camel: a horse designed by committee. camelCase, just as dumb.
> "closer to Santander's aim of becoming the best open financial service platform."
Personally I would prefer whoever I bank with to be very, very, closed. Closed tight. Inaccessible to everyone who is not a customer - and then: only once they can prove they are who they claim to be.
As for spending €20billion on moving to AWS, I wonder how many multiples of that it will cost them to move away again?
> the UK entering the ERM at a politically chosen ludicrously high rate for the GBP
It is also plausible that the other ERM countries: in particular Germany, would not have allowed entry at a lower rate. As that would have had £-denominated exports undercutting german output.
When you look at how the GBP moved against the FFR during September 1992 the change on Black Wednesday wasn't really that much. 9.45FFR - 9.01.
ISTM the greater damage done was by the company cancelling all those contracts, losing the revenue from them and destroying the trust of tour operators, who would have gone elsewhere after that.
Also, by September the schools would all have gone back. The major earning would have already finished (from trips during the summer). It sounds more likely that the company was already on the rocks and that this was just the final straw.
> if he worked extra hard, came in extra early, and kept the in-tray clear, then his efforts would be both noticed and rewarded with promotion and a bump in pay.
Noticed, definitely. Rewarded? Why
In the real world t'management identify people like this and instantly know that they are far too valuable to promote away from their existing job function.
> But it doesn't happen at my home, why can't you make it like my connection at home?
A fair question and it seems to me to be an ideal sales opportunity rather than a technical issue
P.S. A super yacht owner who only has one home? Doesn't sound like the sort of small-fry to be worth expending effort on.
> eliminating passwords from the user authentication process reduces the damage from list-based attacks, and from a usability perspective, providing an authentication method that does not rely on remembering passwords
Well, yes. But only because there is an inevitable lag between someone introducing a new security feature and the baddies exposing its weaknesses. Although it seems to me that FIDO / SMS based authentication does little except make users even more dependent on technology and extends the length of the chain of events. So rather than having people contain their passwords in their own memory (brain) and then use their own fingers to enter it, there are now several electronic systems that the authentication data has to pass through, first. All of which have to be working, secure and kept up-to-date.
None of which are under the control of the user (which admittedly, might be a good thing!)
And that is presuming you don't lose your phone, go somewhere that cannot receive the messages, allow your battery to go flat or break it. ISTM all this does is trade one set of potential problems (hacks, forgotten passwords) for a different set.
> "Given San Jose's proximity to the San Andreas Fault, it was critical we ensured an earthquake wouldn't take Dropbox offline,"
It sounds like they are planning that if / when northern California collapses into the ocean, nobody outside the region should notice.
Although since their HQ is also in San Fransisco, that might be a little optimistic.
> watch how the data was used for audio ads (via Amazon Music, Spotify, and Pandora), on the web for display ads (personas using a browser logged into Amazon account
Just another reason for having multiple email addresses and browser profiles. Keep everything compartmentalised and isolate devices from "real life". That way none of the devices or apps need to know, nor can discover, what is revealed either intentionally or accidentally to other aspects of your life.
The car salesperson knows they are lying
It's a joke that goes back at least thirty years but is still true. That people believe many things that are either unproven or downright wrong. What is worse is if that person has credibility with the masses - say a celebrity or footballer, then many more people will believe what they say "'cos their [sic] famous, innit"!
> Some value purity over convenience
I wonder what the arguments: for / against "pure" O/S releases would look like if every user was given the same amount of publicity?
For example: each person who cared greatly about "purity" had as many tweets on the subject, articles published, opinions written as each person who frankly did not give a toss.
So for the FIIK how many million downloaders Debian or Ubuntu or whatever had, each person who objected to third-party blobs wrote the same number of opinion pieces as every other downloader did. Just what would the mass of user published feedback look like? Would there be a solid, identifiable, group of dissenters or would there be a small number of outliers whose presence simply got submerged in the overwhelming approval, or indifference?
This is just one aspect of global opinions being formed by a small number of outspoken activists. Individuals who speak loudly and frequently on a subject - disproportionately to their numbers. Thus giving the impression that there are a lot of people for, or against, any particular thing. Maybe even to the point where potential firmware developers think there is massive hostility against blobs, or no market for them, so they choose not to release them. Even though in reality it is nothing more than a small clique (or a horde of 'bots) making waves while everyone else gets on with not giving a damn about any higher principles or paranoia.
> PR hack to spread the bullshit?
By the time self-driving vehicles become truly autonomous, all the news, bullshit, PR and opinions will be written by GPT-3 or its kin.
We will be able to tell when this happens by the lack of spelling / punctuation / grammar mistakes and by the use of facts in the articles.
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