Re: Hmm
"Yeah I'm not letting one of those things anywhere near my hair!"
The risk is illustrated in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - https://youtu.be/3lgluqEiQow
5379 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
Yes, he was a criminally stupid idiot and everyone blames him, nobody asks why the company management were stupid enough to hire him in the first place. I've seen idiots like him and been required to work with them on occasions in the past. Reporting their idiotic and occasional criminal behavior to the upper management always got me into trouble, never them.
We're all running around jacking off about cars but wouldn't the world be a better and healthier place if we returned to the days of the railways to move around the country, with locals trains and buses to get the final mile or two done if we didn't want to walk or bike for some reason.
I wonder if we will see an announcement in a few years time that Alphabet is discontinuing Google because they will have developed a more efficient (profitable) advertising mechanism. The corporate policy seem to be to release an app (e.g. Google), figure out the best way to extract everyone's data and profit from it, before moving on a a more profitable theft.
It sounds like the complaints were ignored for a year and a half ... so the "NEWS" is that we found the problem now, not that they were ignored that long. It would be interesting to investigate why it took so long to send an engineer out.
Had El Reg talked about the weird Welsh village problems I expect that we'd have seen pages and pages of people saying the the problem was RFI caused by someone getting up in the morning and doing the same old thing every day (the icon is a joke).
This happens all the time, it's never a crime for the police to lie (or simply have no real clue) about the value for the "crime" - they just declare a value but nobody ever investigates it.
A super computer generated less than half a Btc, what was it doing, did he modify the screensaver?
Or maybe they'll drop the "titter" letters and rework the remaining letter into a shapely logo? It is a good deed to forget a poor joke - Brendan Behan.
But seriously, what does this sort or programmatic error tell us about the code writers? If women stood a better chance of getting a job as a programmer then would this stupidity vanish?
I was walking back home along the canal in Oxford with my buddy in the 70's and a begger came out of the bridge arch to ask for a shilling, my buddy told him we were just students and didn't have any money (that was true) and the guy stuck his hand into his pocket, gave us eight half crowns and wished us good luck.
The stocks are sailing back up again and we have an election in a few weeks. There are two possible winners, if Biden wins then I would expect that the markets will drop because the Democrats will be working on fixing the US mess and the Republicans will be fighting a Democrat presidential win as being undemocratic, but if Biden loses then the markets will rise again while the stock buyers all rush into the toilets to celebrate with a quickie. I suspect that a long term collapse will be on the horizon because the US is deeply in debt and keeps on spending money while attacking all its international customers. The future is uncertain - if the Republicans keep jerking off over the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg then regardless of who wins, it will be a mess and the markets will dive eventually.
I would vote for Brendan Behan, "The most important things to do in the world are to get something to eat, something to drink, and somebody to love you." ... the markets are irrelevant (icon).
I've worked for years with typists who never even look at the keyboards that they are typing on, all they look at is the screen - they never look down at all if they have a decent keyboard. Most of them started off just watching the little golf balls spinning around, I started watching the levers fly up and down.
I saw static problems occasionally but shielding the RS232 cables and grounding the shield fixed them about 90% of the time. My first "pc" used an 8080, my buddy at work helped me get it running, he was so impressed - it ran way better then his 4004 so he "upgraded to an 8080 too. Back in those days everyone would run into static issues, but once they understood the factors they were never a problem ever again.
The description of the problem in El Reg might have been static but the first thing I would have done was to reseat all the ribbon cables in the device, if that didn't fix it I'd have reseated all the chips in sockets next.
I started off with a component kit, resistors, capacitors, sensors and two transistors for Christmas when I was 12. Ten years later, after playing with S100 boards, I got a Z80 single board kit with a hex keypad , hooked up a couple of DACs and built a EKG simulator to create EKG signals to verify my companies commercial Holter Monitor Analyzer - I did written code assembly (in pencil) to write the code and entered it in hex, storing the code on a cassette tape every night.
So yes, this is an easy way for a few kids to learn and a lot of fun for everyone.
Old Engineers vs new engineers:
The Voyagers have been running for more than 40 years, meanwhile the phone I bought two years ago just got a software update and is now unusable, the battery was dying anyway, time to chuck it. I worked with a former NASA engineer who was involved with the Voyager project and the system that he designed for us in the 80's is still running fine too.
It obvious that none of them had every had ever done any work before we joined the EU that involved import/export paperwork or ensuring that goods met multiple standards. Any mention of these issues before the referendum was completely ignored, I don't think that most public schoolboys ever get jobs that actually involve real work.
One of my tasks back then was to check that all the line cords included with equipment shipped to the EU did not have a wall plug fitted and used the EU wire colours, not the UK wire colours. We're just going back to those days, there will be a nice little list of things to check for all exports and imports and, once the UK laws and the EU laws evolve, we'll have to start stocking EU legal items and UK legal items. Brexit is not causing complexities, we're just returning to the old days of complexities - I'm confident that was what the Brexiters were thinking when they said that Brexit would be easy.
When the west moved virtually all the production to China about 20 years ago it seems that nobody ever thought that China would be able to do the sort of things that No Such Agency is good at - there were discussions about this risk at the time, but the cheaper production costs were far more important than security - it's still that case, we see all these complaints but nobody ever suggests a solution, or is made responsible because they drove the stock prices up nicely.
We're blaming the Chinese for our stupidity in creating this environment.
So now we'll see all the stalkerware apps rewrite their terms and privacy agreements so that they can continue. The first page will say "We do not stalk non-consenting adults" and sixteen pages later it will start with "Except in circumstances defined on our website privacy exception page and by continuing to use the app you agree to ..."
"A few years ago, Friday, October 14 was World Standards Day. Or, at least, it was World Standards Day in *some* countries. However, in America, the celebrations were held on October 11th. In Finland, World Standards Day was marked on October 13th. Italy planned a separate conference on standards for October 18th." - ASR sig from years ago.
But you could play a cassette in the car which explains my box of cassettes in the cupboard, I still pull a few out and play them at home because some of the artists never went on to CD's. I love listening to a wide range of records and cassettes (Cream, Phranc, Prince, Simpsons etc) because all of the music is in a fixed order, an album - it sounds so much better then random songs.
I see AI all the time, one of my jobs is running the company mail server. We have a hurricane coming in next week so I will see a big rise in spam and malware deliveries - the hackers out there check the weather all the time and whenever we get storms through they boost the deliveries. It's not just us, local schools and businesses will get them too so I expect that we'll see a local increase in systems shut down and a boost in the bitcoin price. It's AI at work.
I updated my Pixel 3 to Android 11 yesterday, "Wonderful New Features and Enhanced Security" and now I have to enter my pin every time I want to do anything, some of the apps have had their database completely deleted by the upgrade and other features that I've used have vanished or work completely differently. I suspect I need to buy a new phone to get everything working again ... is that why they released a new version?
AI is killing the Internet, it's the same effect that we see in American gun laws. They were implemented in the days when it took a minute to reload a gun and tap the bullet over the powder, but now they "apply" when a magazine can fire 200 bullets a minute - making guns way more dangerous but everyone thinks that the original laws must be respected.
The Internet was a wonderful thing back in the days when you kept a little blue book with the addresses, but now you can send two million spam emails containing malware out in a minute.
I've been using haveibeenpwned for years (and donated to them) - it's a great source for honeypot email addresses too, discovering that the people selling these hacked databases are also stuffing them with fake email addresses. once someone's got your email address and password then they can create fake accounts for you everywhere to "demonstrate" that their database is valid...
I agree 100% Billy. I think that in the intervening years "marketing" has replaced "intelligence", after some discussion it was thought back then that AI would sound better than AM, so Artificial Marketing is now called AI and now we are living with AG - Artificial Government, is this progress?
Research is normally funded by grants or simply a result of educational investigations - so essentially the general taxpaying public is funding it. But the research is then published in journals, normally access restricted if you are not paying for a subscription - essentially stopping the general public from being able to read and get educated from the research that they have funded. This is capitalism in action, just an effort to make money - the science is irrelevant.
No point in worrying about this, the Tories have got Brexit done so what's going to happen is a complete mystery now, they have been promising that the UK will profit from Brexit and the economy will boom - oh wait, they U-Turn on all their promises don't they? They have not promised yet that industrial and vehicle pollution will drop tremendously yet - I expect that will be the next promise on January 1st.
I've never seen AI code do policy U-turns all the time, lie about where the code goes even if there are restrictions on data access (AI was just checking it's DLL insight, that's not illegal), or even saying that it will get the program done and then wipe out the entire code saying the "AI Got It Done"