* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

For one night only: Net neutrality punch-up between Big Cable, Big Web this September

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

What will an oligopoly feel like with the end of net neutrality.

I don't know.

But the US is going to find out.

On the internet (being) big business is always better than being small and being biggest is best of all.

iRobot just banked a fat profit. And it knows how to make more: Sharing maps of your homes

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Joke

I have a proposal for a new business model (which I generously won't patent)

1) Make stuff people like to buy.

2)Don't have it collect personal data on them or their belongings

3)Don't send it to a remote server farm

4)Don't sell it to WTF pays you the most.

I like to think of it as the (none of your f**king) business model.

Crap gift card security helps crims spend your birthday pressie cash

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Got to onder how much has been stolen in the 2 years it took the company to get its act together

OTOH that still leave the other 50% of the industry that seems to have done jack s**t.

SK Telecom makes light of random numbers for IoT applications

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Cheaper than the cheapest QRNG sounds like a lot of wiggle room.

Less than several $1000US ?

OTOH LEDs are quite complex to fabricate and yet mass production has brought their prices down hugely.

Like the idea.

Hate the application.

Amazing new algorithm makes fusion power slightly less incredibly inefficient

John Smith 19 Gold badge
IT Angle

From the abstract: "a stochastic perturbation method combined with human choice. "

I'm guessing that means a) There's a lot of parameters to twiddle (Not < 10, 100s or 1000s). b) "Success" criteria are complex (it's one of those n-dimensional optimization problems).

c)Prioritizing them is a massive PITA d) This algo (and its UI) implement a "Method of Experiments" process to identify what parameters would give the biggest data take from a shot and e) Then use human judgement to evaluate the result so the operator decides which is "better."

It would seem that building hardware that can run on an 8 min turnaround cycle is at least as important to this as the SW.

A few notes on other fusion systems and fission reactors.

PWR don't run at 1000F they run at around 593F. They run at about 200Atm to stop the water boiling until then. Their efficiency is around 25-30%. Modern high pressure coal/gas/oil boilers can hit 932F, about 35%+. PWR's are only dominant because the USN paid essentially all the development costs for Westinghouse. As power plants they make great submarine drives.

The USN did fund a fusion project directed by the late Dr Bussard (he of interstellar ramjet fame). It was progressing well. His lectures on youtube are interesting for why people don't think tokamaks are very good. I think they are still in business and still making slow progress, more due to lack of funding and the need to improve their modelling SW (their design is not exactly off the shelf).

Both MIT with ARC and a British company text of link plan to use High Temperature Superconductor tapes of Rare Earth Barium Copper at around 20K (which is high temperature to people who are used to liquid He at 4K) with innovative engineering of the tokamak to deliver a net power generating fusion system costing less than $300m to develop. Both plan much higher magnetic fields than ITER, and hence can be much much smaller.

Yes physicists have thought about getting the heat out. Current plans call for a blanket of molten Lithium to absorb the neutrons from the Deuterium Tritium fusion reaction to breed more Tritium without a fission reactor and the run it through an HX to drive a steam turbine at the same conditions as a conventional fired power plant. The wall materials are difficult as they have to take space ship reentry temperature and high radiation fluxes and be repairable/replaceable by remote control. Something like the nose of the space Shuttle (RCC) seems to be a candidate.

And as for a free idea....

Laser fusion systems turn the laser energy into "Extreme Ultra Violet," or (as everyone who isn't trying to sell a wafer fab exposure tool calls it) soft X-rays.in the 250eV range. The EUV tools use 20Kw lasers to hit a liquid metal target to get < 100W of actual exposure energy (IIRC more like 10W), which is not much when you're trying to expose a 300mm dia wafer.

A more direct route would be to use a "Smith Purcell" generator. This uses electrons launched across a diffraction grating of alternating conducting and insulating ridges. There appear to be conflicting theories of how the process works at the quantum level (so plenty of opportunity to optimize it), the grating frequency would be in the nanometre range and the electron beam (ideally a wide wave front) needs to be as close to the grating (roughly) as the grating frequency, IE about 6-7nm period for emissions at right angles to the grating, which needs a near atomically smooth plane. Coupling improves exponentially with distance, so closer is better, without hitting the grating.

The upside is that electron emission is a very efficient process and can be quite fine tuned to a specific emission energy, making acceleration to the level needed to drive the grating quite efficient also, if you can form a layer

I'm guessing there's 2-3 PhD's and a shed load of degrees to be earned building a machine that could make this work.

ALIS in Blunderland: Lockheed says F-35 Block 3F software to be done by year's end

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

that could cause death, severe injury or illness. Isn't that a plus for a warplane?

Not when it's the pilots it isn't.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coffee/keyboard

"F-35 software development will be finished by the end of this year, "

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Final task description, maybe.

Now this.

"Meanwhile, the Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation told a US Congress committee earlier this year that the aircraft won't be ready before 2019, mentioning 158 "Category 1" software flaws that could cause death, severe injury or illness unless fixed."

158 Cat 1. IE It fails people and planes start falling out the sky (assuming none of them are in the software controlling takeoff of course).

It's true what they say C/C++ lets you make errors faster (even with a 158 page style guide).

Alexa, why aren't you working? No – I didn't say twerking. I, oh God...

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"on Twitter (it's free, just ask) you'll know that #F_AI_L is quite a popular thing."

I did not know this.

But then I haven't used Twitter.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

"So the convenient labour saving gadget was fine - you were just clapping wrong?

Exactly.

Just as the next time you complain you're feet hurt in those shoes its the fact that your feet are the wrong size for your shoes.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

" Putting the AI in FAIL "

Nice.

So simple yet so obvious. I can't believe no one's spotted this before.

Intel loves the maker community so much it just axed its Arduino, Curie hardware. Ouch

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Group that came up with it is history

So is their products.

Intel don't waste much time airbrushing people (and things) out of the corporate history.

Something to keep in mind for all developers.

If it's not very close to the Intel mainstream how long will it last?

Python autocomplete-in-the-cloud tool Kite pushes into projects, gets stabbed with a fork

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"stop.. calling it "cloud" and started calling it "somebody else's computer"?

Well to be completely accurate you should call it "anonymous server farms in unknown jurisdictions"

Because that's what they are.

Might be in the US, might not be.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Dubious business practices well predates Microsoft.

Quite true.

But how many people here even knew that National Cash Register predated IBM, or that their business practices were the reason Thomas Watson Snr did some time for anti trust violation?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

BTW It's a Python devs tool written in Javascript?

IIRC Python has pretty good facilities for adding packages to the language already.

As for sending your IP to "anonymous server farms in unknown jurisdictions" the cloud that gets latency and security issues for free.

No doubt something that sounds a great idea at the end of a 25mbs pipe in SF, but less attractive elsewhere.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Good to know the old Microsoft play book of dubious business practices is still alive & well

All that is old is new again.

The Reg chats to Ordnance Survey's chief data wrangler

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Now let's see if all the people who can dig up a piece of road can talk to each other.

I think the UKG tried this about 20 years ago.

Who knows, maybe it will work this time.

Fat-fingered G Suite admins spill internal biz beans onto public 'net

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Or just don't host your apps on a clod?

But I suspect what others have said. That Google have (quietly) changed the default to what it should have been all along.

Science sugar daddy extends data-sharing policy to software

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

"Matthew Woollard, director of the UK Data Archive and the UK Data Service, "

Who has ever heard of this guy, and this organization?

Quad goals: Western Digital clambers aboard the 4bits/cell wagon

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

We've come a long way since Intel's first 1024bit RAM in 1970

About 764 billion times bigger in fact.

It's also enormously faster and probably not far off the power consumption of that single chip.

Is there any other field that's progressed that much in that short a time span (even aircraft flight speed)?

IBM's X-Force to slip digits into IoT networks and connected cars

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Odd name.

I thought they'd just call them "The Black Team."

Southern awarded yet another 'most moaned about rail firm' gong

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

People who've used Southern Trains

Know hos s**t they are.

I've had to use them a fer times on business in the UK and I've never found a buffet service. Ever.

Devs shun smartwatch work, gaze longingly at web-only apps again

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Holmes

"Hybrid framework developer says hybrid development more popular than it was."

Who saw that conclusion coming?

Taxi app investor SoftBank said to be driving at multibillion-dollar stake in Uber

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

"described this as the biggest investment in a taxi firm in Southeast Asia."

FTFY.

Creepy tech tycoons Zuck and Musk clash over AI doomsday

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

Re: When Zuck talks about AI. He's talking about reducing staffing costs.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

If he can get his sticky little mitts on more of your data than creepy Eric Schmidt that's a bonus for him.

He's as much a data fetishist as any member of the Home Office cabal, hence icon.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"letting algorithms decide the fate of people's lives in the fields of healthcare "

You're a few decades too late.

Google. Ryadah Intensive Program.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"the personal assistants.. two decades of advancement..as frustrating as Microsoft Clippy. ...."

This is not AI, it's data whoring sh*t.

True.

But your timeline is off. People called Lotus Agenda a PIM, in the 80's.

Although it was written with input from people on the AI side at Stanford I don't think they specifically called it AI.

Icon because I always thought there should have been an option to turn "Clippy" into "Gimpy."

Commvault shifts slowly uphill as it gears into hyperconverged drive

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

These guys seem to have been around forever

I'm thinking you need to have trended them for more like a decade to see the big picture.

Hey, hipsters. Amazon has 'space' for 450 new R&D roles in Shoreditch

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"the count of permanent employees to 24,000."

and the number of temps in their fulfillment warehouses to about 100 000?

Kid found a way to travel for free in Budapest. He filed a bug report. And was promptly arrested

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

OMG CEO performs major CMA dance to deflect blame on IT cockup

Is that what they mean by "Hungarian" coding?

systemd'oh! DNS lib underscore bug bites everyone's favorite init tool, blanks Netflix

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

the issue.. needing to resolve DNS on boot..if..you want to mount shared drives..using a host name,

OK that's a use case.

So to need this functionality at boot time you need...

(Remote drive) X (only known by host name, not IP address) X (Must be available to apps by the time server is booted).

And basically if you can get the IP address any other way, or you can delay starting up the apps that need that drive to mount it through a script this use case disappears.

So much for DevOps

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Hmmm. Looks like there's a fair bit of fail to around

The software appears tom implement the letter of the RFC (so do other DNS resolvers not, or do they special case the NefFlix IP address?) while NetFlix does their own thing.

Just weird.

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"Systemd doesn't do either and should never have been allowed to gain the prestige "

I wasn't sure where you were going with this till this sentence, when you got the upvote.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Not a *nix admin so is having to resolve a DNS name during bootup a common issue?

The only use case I can come up with is

Boot problem --> need to Google something --> have no other PC/server/laptop/tablet/phone with internet connectivity with which to do this.

But I don't know. Do you often have to look up a bunch of domain names to get their IP addresses to stock some data file or other?

If you don't it just seems very odd.

Boffin supercharges FPGAs with timing signal tweak

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"VHDL...each manufacturer's compilation tool doing voodoo magic to program the chip."

Which, judging by the improvements this guy has managed to get, are not very good.

Hopefully this research is picked up and those tools improve a bit now.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Abstract is not clear what is being changed.

It seems to work as

Map algorithm to --> generic FPGA architecture

Re map algorithm --> specifics of FPGA architecture.

I guess the problem getting it published would be "Why don't the FPGA mfgs do this already in their SW?"

The honest answer is probably "Because they want to sell chips. As long as the design algorithms good enough, and fast enough for their products they don't really care about optimal routing, and of course everyone knows if you really need the last iota of speed you go to ASICs anyway."

Turning the conceptual logical building blocks of the algorithm into the HW building blocks on the chips is often called "compilation." It seems FPGA vendors will re-discover the "optimize" stage, where the system takes more time to generate a more efficient result. This will no doubt be announced as a massive leap forward.

As for changing cable lengths in a mainframe. This was mentioned in ref to Multics, but because the GE645 didn't have a central clock, it was all asynchronous. Lots of "timing" signals but not a central "clock" signal as such. Something did something once a pulse got to it down a piece of specif length coax. Needs more time? Stick in a longer cable. Speeding up would have been more difficult, as you'd probably need to shorten multiple cables to get the result.

What I can't get about FPGA is individual transistor toggle speeds have continued to climb over the yeas. They've got to be over 10GHz by now.

So WTF can't you get an FPGA that can routinely map algorithms that run at > 1GHz?

If it's because they are all using the same poor mapping algorithms we might be in for quite a performance boost in the next few years.

Kill something, then hire cleaners to mop up the blood if you want to build a digital business

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

TL;DR Re-train in house staff and change is a process, not an event.

Hard to believe intelligent people don't know this already, but they probably don't feel it in their bones.

Now try and get the PHB's to actually spend money doing them.

And the biggest piece of BS.

"IT change drives business change."

Wrong. You want to change your business. You need to change IT to do that.

But that requires senior management to understand their business well enough to realize they need to change in the first place.

DeepMind says it's given AI an imagination. Let's take a closer look at that

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

So basically everything starts as noise in the neural net, which may develop to an idea

That can be tested.

If I'm reading Imagination Engines text heavy web site clearly. FWIW it's a notion I agree with.

In principle all human knowledge can be processed by a set of very complex neural networks, since that's what a human brain is.

But IRL humans cannot program this system directly (and did not know it existed till the invention of the microscope)

That level is only dealt with directly when we learn to do manual tasks like walk, or learning a language solely by matching sounds in one language against sounds (and their meanings) in another. Even this assumes we know a language already (What if the person was deaf since birth?)

For everything else we operate with higher level abstractions. Words on paper --> language conventions --> concepts --> restructure thinking --> change weights within the NNs.

Would multilayer neural nets deep learning be easier if we acknowledged that?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

When humans do it without numbers it's imagaintion, when computers do it...

It's simulation.

Or search through a "solution space."

And guess what, as the game rules get more complex the solution space gets much bigger, so the ability to "imagine" consequences X moves ahead becomes much more valuable .

A fact first learned when people decided to try to get computers to play chess.

So what makes this such a big deal other than the current hype for all things AI & "deep learning" in particular?

Q. What's today's top language? A. Python... no, wait, Java... no, C

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: "A friend of mine made a very good living doing M[1] just after leaving University."

Ooops.

MUMPS was not Forth based, as it preceded Forth by about 5 years (1966 Vs 1971).

Although its terseness and design of breaking code into 2KB blocks is very Forth like.

OTOH variables <==> files <==> b-trees mean anything can be made persistent across all instances (IE a file) just by putting "^" in front of the name is not very Forth like.

And then there is the command abbreviation, combined with number of spaces between some of them being significant. That could make for a complete mindf**k when reading through old code, to the point of writing a tool to expand such abbreviations to make the whole thing more readable.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"I got the data collection, preparation and transmission down..over 4 hours to under 20 minutes!"

Which suggests just how much cruft this code had accumulated, and how badly the task had been implemented.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"A friend of mine made a very good living doing M[1] just after leaving University."

"She's an undertaker now..."

That's sort of my point.

IIRC it was Forth based and allows abbreviations of commands. IOW it's for those who find C a bit too verbose.

I think it can legitimately be said that after you've used it you won't want to use another programming language.

Because you won't want to do programming ever again.

Gone daddy gone: GoDaddy offloads its cloud businesses

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

A business where buying something for 1.6Bn and selling it for less than 400m is good

So the takeaway is

"We are GoDaddy.

We are not as s**t as our competitors at loosing investors money."

Which is true. They had to roll out in 53 countries to lose that kind of money. HPE could do that in just one.

Be interesting to see what that did to their stock price.

Repairable-by-design Fairphone runs out of spare parts

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Say, going for a known supported generic model, instead of rolling your own."

That was pretty much what FP 1 did.

Then the support got pulled by the suppliers of the "binary blobs"

End of story.

He who controls the closed source embedded software controls the hardware.

Always. Ask Intel.

UK.gov watchdog didn't red flag any IT projects. And that alone should be a red flag to everyone

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Focus your requirements..build something that does one thing well, instead of everything never."

A noble idea, but seriously difficult to do in a government system like (for example) Universal Credit.

The problem is the fear (not the reality, the fear) of the number of interfaces between each of those "systems that does one thing well".

It doesn't help that the people who really understand how the existing systems work together (because the UK civil service is a "mature" environment IE it's got a very complex ecosystem already) are buried deep in the bureaucracy and have taken years to learn this.

And this will continue until those writing these spec realize fear is not real.

US Homeland Sec boss has snazzy new laptop bomb scanning tech – but admits he doesn't know what it's called

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

""undetectable bomb could be made for laptops, a remote trigger could not".'

This statement has to be parsed with a lot of care.

Are they talking about a remote trigger whose signal is undetectable? Probably not. Except what good would that do you? What you want is the hold to be RF shielded to stop it doing anything if someone sends it.

Are they talking about a remote trigger that would not show up on current sensors? That sounds more likely. Dodgy circuit board on Xray machine monitor? Time for a deeper probe.

Note. Modern laptop batteries are not passive devices. They contain embedded electronics as well.So on balance just about true, and IRL likely to be so for decades to come.

But how does our ransomware make you feel?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Joke

A new business opportunity

Top ransomware author reveals secrets of writing more effective splash screens!

Shorten payment times and get bigger payments

Tells you which payment schemes are best for not getting caught!

Click on attached link to deposit payment and join the webinar.

Andy Rubin's overhyped and underdelivered Essential phone out 'in a few weeks'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Didn't think I'd heard of this, then the clip 360deg camera attachment reminded me.

So no, not getting impatient to see this alleged masterpiece either.

Fan of FBI cosplay? Enjoy freaking out your neighbors? Have we got the eBay auction for you

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

Officer, I can explain everything.

I just need a little time to compose my thoughts.

That windbreaker with "FBI" on the back in big letters? Nothing whatsoever to do with me.

Intel is upset that Qualcomm is treating it like Intel treated AMD for years and years

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Demonstrates the default "business personality" is still sociopath

And as we know sociopaths will do whatever they can get away with.

"It's just business" as Don Corleone pointed out.

Film goers will recall what happens to people who fail to show the proper respect to the Don.