Posts by Denarius 2180 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2009
In Oz these are a yeah right item outside of cities.
SA to WA 2000 km of SFA, especially grid for recharging even if the roads are mostly straight and flat.
Down the Hume between Sydney and Melbourne they might make it. Pity Victoria will be cold and dark as they switch off the coal fired power stations...
Jake, define values for large. Mass spreading of delusions goes back a long way. Electronics has just sped up the speed of lies. Lets see, have a browse of Suetonius for myths about Jewish worship. Josephus has some horror stories about group beliefs held against reason and rational self interest. Later various authors record assorted mad monks thru post Roman Mediteranean areas followed by witchhunt madness and insane beliefs in experts and kings. All of these were about gaining power, mostly by creating a "problem", generating fear or worse, snobbery about secret knowledge, then offering a "fix" for the self generated problem while avoiding real problems. The 19th and 20th centuries only seem different because mechanisation has allowed damaged areas to be larger.
In short, old process but due the loss of history in the common cultural consciousness, old tricks by the power hungry can get used as if they are new.
eating our local birds ? John, there is a local saying about that. To cook a parrot, drop a rock and parrot into a pot of water. Boil until rock is soft, eat it and throw bird away. In the NT the local story was wrapping cockatoo in foil or mud and baking in hot coals for two hours would do. Never tried it as barra were available.
Oz wildlife, deadly and tough in both sense of the word. PS first brown snake of summer around yesterday. Regrettably, much of our local wild bird populations are reducing, except sulfur crested cokatoos. Many juvenile magpies are hit by 4WDs at speed on narrow lanes locally.
indeed. I briefly thought that poms had the same problem in summer as the denizens of Oz. Disposing of the flying insects from bug zappers, fly paper, swept off floor after mass spraying or low level air pollution devices had done their thing.
Same issue with council and greenie idiots here. Love putting up costs while feeling virtuously superior. The ratepayers pay rates and still get hit with disposal costs of household rubbish. This in a society where a kitchen chainsaw is needed to unpack some veges and minor purchases.
indeed. For bigger corps (or is that now corpse ?) wasn't SAP going to automate all the backend processes and cut staff, costs and speed business ? And that worked how well ?
Yah, now SMBs can have the same experience.
On the more cynical side, I have heard so many security horror stories where the PHB class are the reason so many miscreants have an easy entry to an organisation. The spooks are going to love this. And the Russians, Chinese, Brits and even the Merkin TLAs. Deckchair, check. Popcorn, check. Double shot latte, check. Now for the show
turn on deduplication and watch the RAM get sucked away. Not that I dislike ZFS, one just has to ensure adequate resources are on hardware.. Given how RAM prices are good from 10 years ago it is not physically improbable but I agree with my esteemed commentard above. The lawyers will make it poisonous to do. Back to the BSD migrations off Linux then...
Query, whats happening to Reiser FS these days ? It did seem better for OLT with lots of small frequent transactions.
Ah yes, COBOL meant the PHB class and users write their own code, then SQL meant management could directly query business data followed by the great white hopes of VB and Delphi. At least the last two were not seen or sold AFAIK as anyone can code business solutions.
Now we have a cultural elite and PHB class that despise technical knowledge and experience in the real messy world. This explains why wasting education time on coding instead of history, pure logic, maths and written communications has become an obsession with advisors.
Andrew also touched on the biggest flaw in all of the machine learning lego style work. Who _knows_ what flaws the libraries contain that may cause ML and AI fails ? Was there a recent ElReg article on a comparison of two parallel coding libraries that gave different results ? Lastly, hardware vs software speeds; spot on. I remember 486DX with 16 Mb RAM and Win95C or early RedHat running faster than the 8 core 8Gb machine running the Abomination or Debian I use at moment doing the same tasks. If software gets much slower SteamPunks building Babbage Machines will be doing spaceflight calculations better.
So one is communicating with another person. So why would you need assistance ? Why not just hang up or not contact at all ? Unless M$ have come up with a great way to automate time wasting responses to scammers and those cold call center callers. Imagine, an automated 419 scammers Olympics !
I used to to think that "universe is a simulation" theories were stupid speculation. After this piece of "news" I suspect it might be true. A situation comedy universe simulation for a stupid civilisation. The one hope is the above commentards humour. The reality is that the inanities of unsocial media will just be automated
Actually the 19th century abandoned town south of Cape York tip would be ideal. Alternatively Albany Island just off east coast of said townsite. Lots of empty water to east where things may drop into deep water. There was a brief flurry of suggestions a decade or two ago that a site there could be leased to a joint project with Russians but friends do not let friends/lackies mix with those sort of people. </sarcasm>
Situation: Areas remote from reliable roads and usually anything else
Energy efficiency hence range. , Airship: Good; Vertical axis rotor: Utterly crap ;STOL aircraft of any kind: Pretty good and faster than airship ; Helicopter : Pretty good and faster than airship, needs less landing area
Safety: Airship filled with helium: excellent; vertical axis Drone; maybe if big enough to carry ADSB transponder ; STOL fixed wing : good ; Helicopter ; Good
Cost: Airship: so few hard to guess ; Drone: cheap but low capacity ; STOL: Affordable if long life ; Helicopter: expensive to acquire, maintain and operate
Summary: Automated STOL or robotic helicopter in extreme cases. Drones: Are you insane ? Time to get an updated Caribou or four. Perhaps a variation on Honda Jet optimized for STOL strips rather than regional airstrips.
given its background of an intrusive manipulative State that was the brainchild of a Protector ? Somewhat prescient.
I admired the way JP and LN pulled together a web of story strands into the Known Space series that lead to the RingWorld series. The Future History stories were an interesting digression.
He will be missed. There is so little hard SF now. Most books I can find are dreary swords and sorcery/psi nonsense. Even the Martian and Enders Game altho good do not have the depth and cast of characters let alone an imaginative story line that wends a long way into the future.
Vale Jerry
See Reflections on Trusting Trust Proceedings of ACM. Also explains why the Chinese were correct in their assumptions that western hardware was intrinsically insecure and created their own silicon.
However it is known that their consumer phones also have interesting additions if run inside the Middle kingdom. Such as full remote control
Now where was that 486 motherboard ?
Petrea, probably because, as you expect, it was seen as low status, boring and not as important as wearing a suit. Mind you, being able to code well in hex/machine code was always impressive to me. One could also point out much of the wiring done in the Apollo space craft was done by women because they handled the monotony better than males and were more meticulous as a result. ( quoting something I read in Scientific Merkin decades ago) We should all remember Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. The essential question still remains, why was she one of the few exceptions ?
Good female role model. Hmm,
Spelling probably wrong, but two spring to mind. Last Dowager Empress of China, Cixxii and Liz Mk1. Liz Mk1 was very economic rationalist so maybe not such a good example. The female pharoh maybe but insufficient information on her performance as a manager available. Any Egyptologists among us ?
As for current businesses, Yeah, um, um. However I have noted over the decades that many husbands and wives have very successful businesses as a team where wife is effective manager, husband more the blue collar skilled worker. Is much of this discussion a reflection on the a reflection on the obscene individualism rampant in western cultures, especially MerkinLand ?
Uh Warm, the article is about mandating change to what may be an arbitrary "balance" by brute bureaucracy and censorship. What has your comment got to do with article or comments then ? I also suggest even comments are from mostly white males then this supports male preferences toward things like computers.
Aside from that, the only females I knew working in system admining were hostile to special treatment. Incidently, same attitude was expressed in some of Oz gummints departments specialising in assisting racial minorities. The staff wanted to be selected on competence alone. BTW, perhaps anecdotal evidence is more popular than usual is because no-one trusts experts any more.
Citation absent in memory, Probably from New Scientist or BBC so apply preferred salt levels. Article suggested that the brain cell "pruning" that takes place during adolescence does reduce decision making competence as you hypothesize. Consequences assessment goes from bad to crap for 5 years or more. I do note from personal experience that tribal societies _increase_ rules and restrictions on their children approaching and during adolescence which anecdotally supports this theory.
that a couple of open source media players already play flush files aside from gnash. For those who want to use those files of course. Now if the c****n* who insist on using Flush as part of their government associated sites could just be flushed down sewers also I would be slightly mollified.
UWIN with its limitations. However it could share files as it wrote into the Windows file system. Pity it's vanished. Was nice to have a decent shell immediately availble when I wanted to code some data munging without transferring to a nearby RealOS box nearby. BTW, what happened to the MKS toolkit M$ borged a decade or two ago ?
>> Nobody has ever tested an EMP weapon. Nobody knows how, or even if, it would work.
Designed as such in an exo-atmospheric test, maybe. By accident done long ago in South Pacific. H Bomb blew burglar alarms in Hawaii in early 1960s or was it 1958 ?. Also caused auroras over southern hemisphere. Story goes that no-one knew at time that lithium in the lithium hydride broke down to tritium and made H bomb way more powerful than intended.
Personally, I would suggest NK exists to needle merkins for the Chinese and even the NK generals know that any attack on USA soil would result in new lovely round glass bottom lakes north of Seoul. One wonders what would happen if there was an organised mockery of the fat boy mk3 instead of breathless political punditory and panic. One also wonders how much NK economy can produce in missiles Building a series of prototypes is one thing, building 20 reliable ones to wave around is another..
and a purchasing officer, Audit would have rightly criticized this waste of time as not value for money. For once the credit card replacement for petty cash was the right way to go. You Poms really have a public Service devoted to mocking the small business sector, don't you. Don't let the clever fools running the Oz PS into the ground know, they will want to copy it.
Why would anyone blame pilots ? It was carrying a batch of lithium batteries in front hold AFAIK.The data mungers deserve credit for refining their data and predictions to reduce search area. They may even be right Fuselage might not be very distinguishable, but two large turbines should be and parts of tail structure. Aircraft tails seem to survive most impacts.
I would not be surprised if cockpit voice recorder tapes were mostly blank after connections to pointy end were destroyed before plane went down.
when the craven colonial brown nosing creeps comprising the senior pubic(sic) service and the spin doctors for the oligopolists that own all 4 major parties admire a similar pommie disaster instead of an adult in charge asking the First Question. "What problem are you trying to solve?" Second question should be "Why is your solution better than existing process ? Verifiable figures only accepted"
What passes for Oz cabinet may have high IQs but I see no evidence that any of them have any wisdom. Their hired advisors seem to be in thrall to techno-utopians of the gullible or authoritarian kind.
OffTopic: What happened to FOTW ?
oligarchs feeding from public purse unfettered by a professional public service. No doubt no-one was so crass to mention minor details about paying for the silicon snake oil* by getting some of the funds held offshore from a Double Irish Sandwich by these same companies. Thought not.
Am I alone in wondering how a technophobic management coupled with said snake oil merchants would achive anything other than another string of IT stuffups ? The problem is a political/economic/PHB class who do not understand (a) humans, (b) limits of technology, (c) management, (d) fear competency that is unafraid to address reality, (e) the dangers of techno-utopianism.
Perhaps a Founders Level of discussion in all Western style democracies as to limits of government is even more overdue. No, not a Tea Party rant. eg, Net neutrality or demanding simpler financial structures in companies for instance of where government intervention in a market failure case might be good for society. At least ensuring there is a general understanding that some problems are people based, not technology.
* Nod to Clifford Stoll whose 2 decade old book is IMHO, very relevant.
AFAIRC, didn't Defence just outsource to IBM ? That worries me more given other stories around. As for not trusting Chinese companies, who trusts BAE, Lockheed Martin et al ? Governments don't even have to be discussed. Odd fear when considering bigger Oz Defence situation really. Our new subs and helicopter carriers cant leave port, our new fighters are still release 0.02 and our tanks cook the grunts they are supposed to assist. Dont even get started on new "new" subs the French are redesigning completely as a one off because the magik (sic) of nuclear energy must not blight Oz soil, not to mention mission scope. FFS, just buy a known working solution just once !! The Germans might even teach the local PHB class something about letting engineers make design decisions.
So far grunts guns still work, though some beancounter* is probably fixing that, and the Hornets and C17s still doing a good job.
* note, rumour a few decades ago that Defence actively did try to reduce effectiveness of common grunts weapon.
AC, precisely the same problem as autonomous vehicles will have. How do you trust the sensors ? Pilots who fly by rules instead of evaluating all inputs tend to have more problems. In this case QANTAS pilots who had the same problems months before assessed the instruments as " Power normal cruise, angle of attack indicator normal, no engine anomalies therefore the airspeed must be wrong." and avoided trying to fix a non-existent problem. The less experienced AF aircrew in command seem to have believed one instrument, the airspeed and deep stalled the plane into the Atlantic. For these edge cases, increasing redundant information sources such as GPS would allow invalid inputs to be detected and cut out of control loops. Given how most airlines are entirely computer driven these days aviation automation still has outstanding safety record because unlike individual humans, the aviation industry has for decades had a learning and improvement culture that is still relatively new to consumer technology. The discussion then becomes whether it is computationally and sensor developmentally possible to improve vehicle situational evaluation. Given how the mobile phone industry has developed very light, cheap and accurate sensors I would hesitate to say it cannot be dome for vehicles. Whether enough development has been done is another story.
Sorry about polysyllabic words sounding like market droiding. Currently feeling crook.
Meph, indeed. However how will the clever car handle the willfully dangerous ? Think of drunks, druggies and the inevitable clown in a BMW/Merc/light truck with a severe ego problem ? IMHO, skepticism of the merchants is warranted. The best way to sell driving automation is already slowly happening by implementing driver assistance. Cruise control, automatic collision detection and lane drift prevention. As these become standard and extended to, for instance, something that prevents compulsive tailgaters, user acceptance will rise as well as vehicle manufacturers and their coders getting improved edge case management. Incremental improvements over a decade or two may also allow laws to be adapted appropriately insteady of panic driven. No pun in 10d. In long term a mostly self driving car is a great goal. Whether it is currently practical I believe debatable.
Comparison with aviation autopilots in cars is a category confusion. Airfields have the same design, (mostly flat) and fixed wing aircraft have similar characteristics to control for. Also as some-one else has commented, civilian aircraft rarely come close by design and the only ones that do, gliders, have pilots trained in this type of aviation and are not transport vehicles in built up areas. Vehicles are the opposite, close together and often very different speeds.
In Oz petrol rockets two weeks before holidays and drops, maybe, 4 weeks after. In bigger cities a price cycle can be detected but rural areas have no discernible pattern what so ever. AI would go nuts here. I also wonder just how much this sort of price gouging would eventually result in enough political will to return to regulated pricing.
Currently seeded with dino porn ? Original. Seed the AI with CEO babble and we get ? Mostly sales weasel pitches for cloud ? Reminds me of a SciFi story of Mozart (?) being "resurrected" into a modern human body. Discovered he was good at rehashes but the original spark of creativity was dead.
But the pair also declared that “the biggest opportunity is changing how people think and react”. The PHB class think ? All I ever saw was a reflex action to protect bonuses.
Not sure how much the hypergasm about outsourcery and cloud is dying, but it does seem that big organisations not in death throws may want to keep everything, including staff on their premises given all the caveats.
can't rebuild Saturn V. Factories were sent to China and the blueprints ordered to be shredded so the worst possible design that would actually work could fly. This is why USA bought a lot of USSR 1950s developed rocket engines. The world of bean counters as PHBs {S}
In case one doubts engineering assessment of shuttle, ask why the Russians launched their Buran once.
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