* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Search history can calculate better credit ratings than pay slips, says International Monetary Fund

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Fintech’s potential to reach out to over a billion unbanked people around the world,"

Because they don't want to?

Because they haven't got a pot to p**s in?

In the UK the banking industry has persistently cut branches (in places they don't make enough profit) while telling the relevant HoC that relaxing rules on credit unions (that have tighter joining rules than banks) are a Bad Thing.

The best thing that could happen is to treat banks like any other business. They f**k up, they go bankrupt. I'm sick and tired of their "But we're speeeeeeeecial" schtick.

US Treasury, Dept of Commerce hacks linked to SolarWinds IT monitoring software supply-chain attack

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

So basically a "Watering hole" attack on the supplier then?

Not a very good reflection on your ability to manage your own network, is it?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Vote rigging in the US is legal if you do it by simple stopping your opponents from voting."

Preferred tactic of Republicans since at least Jeb Bush in Florida IIRC.

They were the party of Lincoln.

A looooong time ago.

Rogue ex-Cisco employee who crippled WebEx conferences and cost Cisco millions gets two years in US prison

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

"Five months later he used access credentials to get back into Cisco's systems "

Icon says it all.

FBI confirms Zodiac Killer's 340 cipher solved by trio of amateur math and software codebreakers

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

Semi brute forced by three amateurs

Impressive.

Something to keep in mind for anyone who thinks they've built a better mouse trap of a crypto system.

Sadly still says nothing much about the s**k f**k and where to find them.

Could still be alive though.

Maybe.

UK MoD bungs Boeing £500m to plug gap left by a system it should have provided under £800m contract from 2010

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

But this is not *any* plain old logistics system.

Nosireeee.

This is extra-special super-duper complex MoD used-by-absoluetly-no-one-else-on-the-planet logistics system.

Because y'know those 23 000 civil servants in MoD procurement have to show they do something all f**king day long.

Delay upgrading the UK's legacy border systems has added £336m to taxpayers' bill

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

" Why not have a look at who built the system for the French, or the Danes, or the Italians,

or the Irish? "

I would. But I suspect the HO has a similar attitude to the MoD to such systems.

That "What we do is sooooo special no OTS system (even one built for the task and used by [i]several[/i] other countries) could [i]possibly[/i] do what we need it to."

I sometimes suspect this is because the senior nappy put in charge of getting the new system has no actual idea [i]what[/i] the current system does (starting with what other systemes it has to talk to for it to work at all) and hopes the con-sultants and con-tractors will just "make it so" to coin a phrase.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Down

"That damn bus. Is there a Godwin's Law specifically for Brexit?"

No.

Because a lot of the fools who voted for this bu***hit believed what they thought was promised on the side of the bus (It was only a "what if," so not a total lie. Cummins is quite bright like that).

Let's see the govt actually deliver on it.

So far they've delivers about 6 weeks of EU payments.

Where's the other 46 "Boris"?

It's not 'Door to Heaven', it's 'Stargate': DataStax reaches out to front-end devs with support for GraphQL

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

"Ed Anuff, DataStax chief product officer,"

For real?

Megabucks in funding, 28 years of research, and Boston Dynamics is to be 'sold to Hyundai' for 1/40th of an Arm

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Joke

And here are some of BD's finest creations once they acquire true AI

here and here

Marine archaeologists catch a break on the bottom of the Baltic Sea: A 75-year-old Enigma Machine

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Apparently they had different Enigmas on u-boats"

They did.

As anyone who has seen the film "Enigma" will know it was called "Shark" (Sharq?) and had an extra rotor because they felt 5 didn't make the challenge hard enough.

I don't know if the British ever saw one until after WWII. IOW it was entirely broken by analyzing its product.

Trumpian politics continue as senators advance controversial Republican FCC commissioner nominee

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

"hahahah DRUMPF is so burnt he's turned orange!!!"

Nice.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

"Not a BAD thing, as a consolation prize."

Spoken like a true support of Big Baby Little Hands himself.

Let me see if I can raise the level of your debate.

Your loser candidate is a loser and lost.

Get over it.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Censorship is what happens when the government prevents citizens from saying something."

And that's the key word here.

Government.

Not a private company. Not Trumps next neigbour.

Government.

Trumps government (such as it still is) has never stopped him spouting whatever load of s**t his brain come up with.

Salesforce to buy Slack for $28bn in cash, shares – and vows to make it the new face of Customer 360

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

" Anonymous Coward "All your data are belong to us""

Exactly.

Welcome to the future.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Salesforce must have an appropriate use case for *someone*

Sadly I don't know who.

AWS has just shown its new hybrid cloud ambitions make it an even broader threat

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

Who owns your back end owns *you*

'Nuff said.

Arm at 30: From Cambridge to the world, one plucky British startup changed everything

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Anyway - this makes for an excellent afternoon read:

Indeed it did.

Just astonishing. 2 processors and a Java style event execution model (in hardware) in the late 70's. You've impressed me.

Nothing to do with Arm though.

So bye-bye, Mr Ajit Pai. You drove our policy into the levee and we still wonder why

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

No real change then.

Was Big Telco's b**ch before he was appointed to the Commission

Was Big Telco's b**ch when at the Commission

Will be Big Telco's b**ch when he becomes a lobbyist / "media commentator" / mouth-for-hire when he leaves.

Perhaps he can take the Head of the Justice Dept and the GSA with him as well?

SpaceX blows away cobwebs at dormant California pad with satellite launch as a Falcon 9 makes touchdown number 7

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

Impressive numbers.

Can SX do 10 launches by Jan 1st 2021 on a single booster?

Probably not.

8 yes, 9?

Physicists wrap neutrino detector in cosy blanket to shed light on the Sun's secondary fusion cycle

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Pint

"Then solar neutrinos scatter off electrons in a large vat of liquid scintillator "

Is liquid. Can scintilate under the right circumstances.

It may date back to 1994 but there's no end in sight for the UK's Chief customs system as Brexit rules beckon

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Boffin

"What's this old system written in? "

It's a 70's 4GL that ran on several machines of the time tuned to run on ICL hardware. Can't recall it's name.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"This, ironically, is nothing to do with leaving the EU per se,"

An argument that could be made of all the reasons the quitters had.

So 17 million fools prioritized an industry of 12 000 people (fishing) over over the car industry (38 000 people) which generates an income 1/2 that of the f**king game shooting industry? It's less than the profit of Tesco.

How stupid would people be to do that?

Dumb enough to vote Leave obviously.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

"Not quite true. "

Oh really, Mr (or Ms) AC?

I didn't think it would be long before quitters would want to step away from being associated with being a quitter.

You demonstrate my view quite well.

You can't "Take Back Control" (as you chanted with the frenzy of a brainwashed cultist) if you never lost control in the first place.

You've been conned. Get over it.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Still. The Farage Garage will be open for business on time.

Or Kent as we like to think of it.

Remember quitters this is what you voted for.

Study: While text-generating AI can write like humans, it lacks common sense

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

But "bu****it" is 8 letters.

So true.

One the most impressive small projects I ever saw was done out of the U of Edinburgh English Language Research Unit in the late 60's. It used a deliberately limited dictionary of functional words and a small group of verbs. The grammar was quite simple and the parse built what looked like a trie with all paths in parallel until most of them had been terminated. It ran on the KDF9 with 96KB of core.

The point was it could cope with any sentence. Unrecognized words were simply listed as o/c for open class. Naturally it went nowhere in the UK.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

And of course both things can be true, even in the same individual.

Yes I can definitely believe that. :-( .

The thing is humans produce new nouns, adjectives and verbs daily, just as old ones fall into disuse (who has used "fax" in a sentence this week who's not involved with the legal profession?)

Any true NLU system has to cope with 2 problems. Understanding what it is being told and adding to that understanding over time.

Because humans can do both. I think the second may be trickier.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"they can speak, but they have nothing to say,"

Indeed.

Although to be fair I've met enough people who spend a great deal of time saying nothing worth listening to so it's not just a criticism that can be leveled at AI projects.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"I believe that one day we can see AI agents such as Samantha in the movie Her "

Wow.

And the MIT Automated Assistant project (from the late 70's and early 80's) gets re-born

Yet again.

These people really do have zero history of their supposed "science," that's more than about 5YO. It's like dealing with a goldfish with a PhD.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Then she starts putting concepts together and learning grammatical rules; "

That alone requires a very large internal database (which she's been building since the day she was born).

I think the word you're looking for is "Intentionality" The desire to do (or learn, or say) something.

I think a lot of AI types spend so long on their little corner they forget that language actually evolved to do update other peoples internal database.

The early success that linguistics gave to compiler writers gave them an undeserved sense of achievement. COBOL has about 230 "rules of grammar." English more than 15 000 (incomplete and therefor ambiguous). Writing a COBOL compiler (C has about 30) without modern tools is a formidable task. But once you're written your English compiler, what does it do?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

rules-of-grammar + random number generator + dictionary search API -->

Grammatically accurate bu***hit generator.

Who would have suspected that result?

Fun fact. <300 words cover > 50% of the entire English language web content.

Most of them are a)Less than 4 characters b)Functional words ignored by large corpus analysis programs.

Any plan that begins "First we we will build a dictionary of every word in <insert live written human language>" is basically f**ked by definition.

The GIMP turns 25 and promises to carry on being the FOSS not-Photoshop

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

Can you really get a version that says "Bringing on........

Never got round to using it.

However congratulations and I think the fact it's still being maintained and extended suggests that there is a real need out there that is being served.

We see what you did there: First-stage booster from Rocket Lab's Return to Sender mission floats back to Earth

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

For what is a a fairly small company this is an amazing achievement.

And yes Part II is when they recover a stage, refurb it and relaunch it.

We'll see how long that takes.

SX took about a year but Electron is quite a bit smaller.

Trump fires cybersecurity boss Chris Krebs for doing his job: Securing the election and telling the truth about it

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

"Have improvements in cybersecurity and the like improved so hugely "

Hello comrade.

How's life in the cubeville troll farm?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Big baby little hands will behave like the whiny little b**ch he is till the end.

He does not know the meaning of the word "defeat".

Or of grace, honour, charm, humility or actual leadership.

The line of Sir Alan Sugars in the UK Apprentice springs to mind with Trump.

"I don't like schmoozers." Trump does nothing else but schmooze. Preferably with dictators. Bullies only have (grudging) respect for other bullies and Trump is a bully. an amazing collection of human character weaknesses and personality disorders. You have to wonder who was the man his mother f**ked to produce him.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

I think a lot of people would like to see Trumpe end

like this

Micro Focus shares up almost 30% as revenue decline less than expected in fiscal 2020

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Take a moment. A multi Billion $ UK based software company.

Not a phrase you see very often.

Microsoft brings Trusted Platform Module functionality directly to CPUs under securo-silicon architecture Pluton

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

Yup. "Trusted Computing" Means....

Trusted by the Rights Holders to control your ability to execute their software and view your documents.

IOW Its DRM.

Again.

And on chip silicon with un audited software and total control of your system.

Yeay.

Panic in the mailroom: The perils of an operating system too smart for its own good

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

"Something similar happened in the late '60s or early '70s in Palo Alto."

Were they running a Burroughs 6700 at the time?

It's not impossible this story could be about that city.

UK-led telescope to gaze at exoplanets, plus Jupiter 's 'glow-in-the-dark' moon

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

Once no one knew exoplanets existed. Now we know of a 1000

Any chance of putting some numbers on the Drake Equation yet?

Exciting times. A British observatory in space, Rocket Lab to attempt their first booster recovery (with maybe a mid air recovery after that before the new year?)

They’ve only gone and bloody done it – yawn – again! NASA, SpaceX send four to ISS

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

*despite* the best efforts of some at NASA

Who believed (and continue to do so) that only a vehicle designed, owned and used only by NASA can do this job.

Assisted by the best efforts of some members of Congress to force a down select to one supplier (and by "one supplier" they meant Boeing).

Well done to all in the CCiCAP programme and at SX for proving them wrong.

China compromised F-35 subcontractor and forced expensive software system rewrite, academic tells MPs

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Until you run out of heap, walk off the end of an array, call a non-static method..

..belonging to an object that hasn't been instantiated "

But good news.

BAE have a coding standard for C++ in the F35.

So of course none of their devs will do such things........

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

"How come its software is so weak?"

Because it's software is not written by Klingons?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Letting BAe develope the radar code in C++ rather than Ada

Cause the developers are cheaper.

Genius plan.

Another win from Billions Above Estimate.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

Wasn't that how STUXNET was infected into the Iranian centrifuge programme?

Turns out the US and Israel don't have a monopoly on such tactics.

Better swords should suggest you need better shields.

New lawsuit: Why do Android phones mysteriously exchange 260MB a month with Google via cellular data when they're not even in use?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"it is a seriously crazy amount of idle chatter"

It's not idle chatter.

It's a global data fetishist harvesting more and more information about the people they farm out to their advertising customers.

You are not customers.

You are product.

Swiss spies knew about Crypto AG compromise – and kept it from govt overseers for nearly 30 years

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"if the crypto is weakened then you have to assume your communications are no longer secure.""

Words to live by.

Sadly.

One more reason for Apple to dump Intel processors: Another SGX, kernel data-leak flaw unearthed by experts

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Mo' interfaces. Mo' problems

<sigh>

Again.

US-EU project to bring Mars samples back to Earth needs two more years, extra $4bn, watchdog warns

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

A shed load of money. OTOH...

1) This will be the first sample return since Stardust (which made the fastest ever re-entry to earths atmosphere of a man made object)

2)Prior to that the only substantial samples deliberately sent to earth (all meteorites are samples from off earth) were from Apollo or the Soviet Lunokhod.

3) Each mars launch window is 670 days apart (about 26 months) so if you miss one by a week or a month makes no practical difference.

What's really disappointing is that the concept of small positive displacement pumps were developed (in part) specifically for this mission but I'm guessing that despite this budget (or at least this request for a budget increase) they cannot afford to try that technology.

Former Microsoft tester sent down for 9 years after $10m gift card fraud

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Want to build a secure system?

Think like a criminal.

Unfortunately this wasn't built by such people.

You can't deny he really "tested" the system though.