Re: Why the cloud?
Actually, that’s a good point. How is this EVER going to work without some AI in it??? It’s a crazy idea - not a hope in hell
980 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009
I'm not sure I agree - filtering can only go so far. If the likes of DDG are filtering on results already provided by Googlies and Boing (which they are) then that doesn't fix the issue that almost all of the most useful results have already been filtered out, or (at best) relegated to page 100 of the results that are returned.
Oh for the good ol' days of Alta-Vista. It may not have been perfect but it was orders of magnitude more useful than Googlies of today.
I once ran a retail website for some time. It was based on open source code which I modified extensively to fix stuff and make it work the way i wanted.
During the inevitable visits to help forums and contacting various authors of this web stuff directly taught me that nobody gives a shit about security. If it’s there already then yea, why not use it? But if it’s not, most devs seem more interested in being able to change the colour of a button or track their customers then actually bothering to address the problem.
Incidentally, the same goes for the banks regarding credit card fraud. I contact my bank - The Bank of Scotland - to tell them about some dodgy credit card use I’d found in the logs. I had some useful details. They didn’t give a shit either.
Apart from the protagonists in this silly spat, does anyone give a monkeys what the faults are called or what number you assign to them?
This very much reminds me of those terminally dull meetings where people discuss at mind-melting length what to call a jira ticket and how many points to assign to it, and whether it's a "story" or an "epic" or a "ten volume encyclopedia" (ridiculous names for a ridiculous discussion - jeeeez - where did I put those razor blades?)
Some years ago, I had a server housed in a "real" server house. The amount of noise on the network from windows boxes was ludicrous, and my guess would be that many of the owners of those machines had no idea! The rest just didn't care (what other excuse can there be?)
Thank you for the clarification. I get it now - much appreciated.
One thought - the last bit “ 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor”, doesn’t that mean GPL 3 is not open source as it contains the clause regarding patents and the thing about encrypted code? It’s a rhetorical question - I’m not looking for an answer
“ The GPL requires you to distribute your modifications to the software under the same terms”
But that misses my point. Yes, the GPL requires you to distribute your modifications. And I don’t have much of an issue with that. BUT the GPL does more than that - it makes a land grab for all your code that uses (links to) a piece of GPL code with no regard for how significant or insignificant the original GPL is; in theory, linking 1 line of GPL code into a billion gigabytes of non-GPL code makes that billion gigabytes GPL too. This is no different to SSPL except the latter widens the scope.
So, I say again, why the controversy over SSPL when so many people seem to think the GPL is ok?
“officially the OSI is the official guardian of whether particular licences are considered OSS”
You get my vote - the OSI is a self-appointed organisation that has no authority whatsoever over anything at all. I don’t know why anyone refers to them as “proof” of the status of any software licence
To me the SSPL sounds no different to GPL. Yes, it has wider scope but the principle is the same, and MANY people have no issue with GPL at all. Personally, I despise the GPL; I think it’s the one thing I ever agreed with MS on when they called it viral - I have no issue with stating you can’t keep the code to yourself but I draw the line when the licence tries to make a land grab for something it has no business with. But that’s just my personal opinion and lots of people think it’s fine. So, back to where I came in, I don’t understand the issue with SSPL beyond the same arguments one may put against GPL
“Buy vPro laptops this year and they will be AI PCs; buy vPro desktops and they won't”
In practical terms, apart from the obvious fact that one is a desktop and one a laptop, there is no difference! The “AI” hardware will be redundant anyway and if you have a machine cursed with such hype then the best course of action would be to find out how to switch it off to reduce power drain
Unfortunately, in the medium term at least, the “AI” elements will just be a tax on an artificially inflated new PC price tag
I’m sure there will be a good selection of fun and exciting projects spring up to do something useful with that lovely “AI” hardware that we’re all going to be paying a tax on very soon.
Of course, none of these projects will be “AI” - hopefully they will be much more useful than that
Where I work, we have recently moved over to using Bitbucket. I asked what the plan was if/when it all goes pear-shaped. One person on the Teams call laughed and said “well that will never happen”
Yea. Right
…and no - I’m still not at all confident that there is any real plan in place. But that’s not my problem :-)
I agree. It never occurred to me that anyone finds installation an issue. As for partitioning confusing people, don’t almost all Linuxes have a “use default” option which would suffice for the vast majority of people that would consider selecting it?
I have heard and read a lot of things over the years about why Linux is a problem to use (and I’m not saying any of them are right or wrong) but I thought installation was done and dusted
You get my vote. I’m being forced to use agile at work after having largely avoided it up to now.
Agile is the king’s new clothes. If it was civil engineering rather than software engineering, it would go something like;-
- let’s build a bridge!
- ok, here’s some rubble
- What? No - we don’t have enough points to develop any cement. Stick it together with glue
- it’s not quite bridge-shaped yet but let’s put it over this motorway. We’ll call it an “alpha” and see what feedback we get
- It fell down and crushed a load of cars, eh? Hey - that’s cool. It’s a learning process isn’t it?
- let’s replace some of the rubble with cheese. Why cheese? Because we can’t make any bricks in the time allowed by the sprint. We’ll revisit it in another sprint and throw away everything we’re doing now and replace it with something else. Maybe bricks. We don’t know yet
- oh and stick some flags on it!! Because that’s a quick win
- ok, try that - alpha 2
- ah. That killed how many? Well that’s ok because it’s not production quality yet
- let’s replace all those flags with different coloured ones
- etc etc etc
I have yet to be convinced that “agile” isn’t absolute and utter bollocks.
As for XP, and “paired programming”, which wanker came up with those ridiculous notions?
Some of the software today is bloated beyond any comprehension. Two that spring to mind (and I’m really not wanting to focus on MS here - everyone is equally blameworthy) are Word and Excel. I don’t know the actual numbers now but their code bases are insanely huge. Why the hell you need hundreds of megabytes (or whatever it is) to do a bit of word processing is beyond me and is utterly bonkers. Compare this to Word (or word perfect, or ….) from years ago that would fit on one or two floppy disks. And for 99% off use-cases the functionally is basically the same (except the newer version is demonstrably much worse)
[see title]
There are a couple of aspects to this.
Firstly, who makes memory access errors like this in their code? I use C and C++ every day (mostly C, which seems to get slammed at every oportunity for being "unsafe" and the work of the devil) and I literally cannot remember the last time I created a memory access fault of the types Rust protects against. If you are writing these sorts of bugs then, quite frankly, you are either inexperienced (no fault of yours, but you need to get up to speed, and quickly) or you are incompetent (in which case you need to go back to school or find another line of work), or there is a serious failure in the program structure (likely, poor division of responsibility/ownership) in which case the program architect needs to go back to school.
It's similar to the argument about 'Garbage Collection' and the fact the C++ doesn't have this "feature". The thing is, GC **ONLY** cleans up dead memory. Nothing else. It doesn't clean up dead file handles, dead socket handles, dead driver handles, etc etc etc. In contrast, C++'s destructor model can handle ALL these things. Yes, C++ is horribly HORRIBLY complicated, but in this aspect, it got it right. GC works. But only for very limited cases.
I don't know if it's of any use to anyone, but I wrote a program that generates Reed Solomon error correction data for any file, plus the means of using that data to recover a corrupted file.
I have used this for several years now and apply it to almost everything I back up to my NAS system
You can find it here - http://knockknock.org.uk/stoprot.tar.bz2
"Microsoft and other cloud vendors promised the cloud would help reduce IT costs, not just in terms of on-premises hardware and software, but also in terms of IT headcount. It now seems that the cloud is the cause of significant new costs."
If I remember correctly, this particular scenario is called "lying"
noun: the telling of lies, or false statements; untruthfulness
adjective: telling or containing lies; deliberately untruthful; deceitful; false
Well not all of it anyway.
When I tap a search term into Google and it returns complete crap, it’s usually got NOTHING to do with SEO or spam. Firstly, Google seems to completely ignore what I have actually type. If I type in “-amazon” (ie, I don’t want any results that include “Amazon”) then guess what results I get. That’s not SEO manipulation, that’s Google completely ignoring what In type. I searched the other day for some git man page or something - I can’t remember now - and the first result was “Buy git man page at wherever”. That’s not because of some spam, that’s because Google are generating some useless advertising with my term echoed back at me.
And I second a comment made above with bells on regarding Google just returning the same half dozen or so usual suspects. Why does EVERY search have to return results from Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, Every, Github, Quora, and Reddit? Are these the only web sites out there??
I’m sure SEO and spam are an issue but I’m more sure that most of the problem is that Google (and all the others) is just plain crap.