Posts by Jim 59 2047 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009
Any AI system will have to be bootstrapped, developed, upgraded, fixed fed and watered by humans. In a word: engineered. You will always have a job, even in the distant future. It's just a question of what you will be doing.
In the meantime, a good engineer armed with Google & Wikipedia (and feeding those engines as well as eating them) will be very tough to beat, even for a god-like AI monster.
Despite being a Unix grey beard who has never touched IPV6, I just configured a Windows server for ipv6 after 45 minutes on Wikipedia. Having a deep background makes it easier for you to swallow new stuff, not harder.
My dad learnt to fly in Tiger Moths.
Mine too. The RAF used Tiger Moths to train pilots in WW2. My Dad joined up and was shipped out to Rhodesia (via Sierra Leone and S. Africa), where the RAF had a large training camp on the outskirts of Bulawayo. There he attended maths and engineering lectures as well as learning to fly. His recollections of the Tiger Moth did sound a bit 'seat of the pants'. He mentioned looping-the-loop and, when upside down, being held/suspended in place by the belts only. There was also a crash into a hillside at some point, but no injuries resulting.
Hillside Training Camp, Bulawayo is now an agricultural show ground. I visited as a tourist in the late 90s and the area was very pleasant, much as Dad had described. I still have his flying log book and engineering notes.
Disagree with Alister's conclusion.
The vast majority of the population Do Not Care about their personal data.
That is a bit like looking at the UK population and their widespread obesity, and concluding that most people do not care about their own health or future. Not quite true.
The majority of Facebook users are too young to know that "personal data" is a thing. Their older siblings have some idea it is a thing but have not formed a view. Their parents know it is a real thing and some act on it, while others assume it can't be helped and so exclude it from consideration.
A bit like junk food. Infants don't know it is bad. Older children do. Parents know and may act on it (feed their kids wholemeal bread) while others don't bother (fizzy pop). Like over-sharing, a diet of junk food has consequences for you and your future, and understanding that requires a degree of maturity and learning that many of the users have not yet attained.
Seems a little expensive for a range extender with the added novelty of app integration. A cheaper alternative might be to repurpose an old router to give your home a second AP. (Link points to my own article).
Getting the mesh talked about would require several Eeros, the ones further away from the wired master presumably getting a doubly repeated/attenuated signal. The Eero site doesn't go into details of how it is all managed, just saying it is "enterprise technology". Sounds nice, needs to be a bit cheaper ?
Eben Upton said: "I think it's a usable PC now. It was always the case that you could use a Raspberry Pi 1 as a PC...
More to the point though, the Pi 2 seems to have passed the (fairly modest) threshold of speed required of an internet server. Those 4 cores should dispatch Owncloud and Wordpress with relative ease. My sheevaplug runs both with acceptable speed, but this thing should be substantially faster. And a quarter of the price. The old Pi B could run Wordpress but too slowly for a realistically responsive web site.
Go on... cancel your GoDaddy VMs. Stop using blogger.com. Shove it on a Pi 2 and do it yourself. You know you want to.
Not much point in putting gigabit on here, the CPU wouldn't have the power to leverage it, even with quad core hows-your-father. It might *just* max out 100Mb/s, will be interesting to see test results though. Even if it just maxes out Fast Ethernet, (say 12 Mbyte/s), that's not bad. According to my measurements, the Pi B (not overclocked) achieved about 7 Mbyte/s acting as a NAS.
Maybe phones have reached the point that midrange is now good enough. Nobody really cares about 8 megapixel vs. 12 megapixel, because 8 is more than enough. Similarly, marginal improvements to dpi is not going to get anyone excited. DPI is not an issue.
The manufacturers release a new top model every 8 months. It should be more like 3 years. A 2 year old Samsung S3 is virtually identical to an new S5, in appearance and utility.
In the UK, we seem to pass buzzword laws to tackle crimes that would already seem to be plainly illegal enough under existing laws. One suspects the motivation is partly political - from the government, and partly driven by the legal profession - who are over-represented in the government and the Lords. The legal profession has a clear motivation to expand the statute book at every opportunity. For them, a new law means new business (sorry lawyers!).
For example, internet trolling would already seem to come under laws around threatening and abusive behaviour. If I swear at you in the street - that is technically illegal, as is hectoring, harassing or stalking other citizens. So if I do the same on the internet, just use the law from the street. Posting nudies ? Couldn't that be prosecuted under the laws around slander, deformation, or even obscenity ? If a magazine or newspaper published such images, such laws would operate.
Bots have become a constant background drone on the internet. My internet server sees a few hundred password guesses per day, ramping up to tens of thousands in a few days when a bot decides to get serious and do a proper dictionary attack. When the guesses exceed a certain rate it even affect CPU resource, so I moved some scripts around and now they get 404 instead. Sending a 404 is quicker than authenticating a wrong password.
Google should never have been allowed to buy YouTube and the other internet giants it bought in the early 2000s. It now lacks competitors in many areas and the internet has stagtated from Google and the loss of a free market.
This Youtube debacle reminds me of Tesco fleecing milk farmers here in the UK. Like Google, Tesco generates no "content" but acts as a gatekeeper. It deals with suppliers sharply, and milk prices are forced so low many farmers go bankrupt or worse. The way Tesco talks to suppliers is similar to that conversation between Keating and Google (according to Panarama). We are happy to by the cheap milk. We won't be so happy when Farmer Giles sells out to a householder who will promptly put 1000 new "starter" homes on our doorstep.
If you like to look at the cows out of your window, you have to pay for the milk. Maybe we are the ones bending the market, with our impossible expectations of free stuff.
Even kits with hundredths of CPUs are running multiple Linux instances (each one with own kernel etc) as partitioned environment.
However many instances there are, the OS of choice is Linux, not anything else. It is strange that Linux dominates the very biggest (top 500) and the very smallest (eg. Pi). Perhaps due to licensing issues as much as anything.
As a contacting Unix admin, I know at least one large Sun customer who is abandoning Solaris due solely to Oracle's spiraling support costs, poor (support) performance and don't-care attitude. They like Solaris and would like to keep it, but when refresh time comes, Solaris is always replaced with Linux. Sad.
I like Solaris. Although it never made the administrators job easy, that was mainly because it is so cutting edge. It torches pretty much every other OS.
Linux is good for small servers, but you have never found Linux on large servers
This magazine runs an annual article highlighting the world's top 500 supercomputers, many of which run Linux. As of Nov 2014, the world's top ten supercomputers are all Linux based.
Oh not to mention the allotments by the church - an allotment for Pete's sake - has a large cam on a big pole, covering you should have the cheek to walk by the river.
I read 1984 at the age of 14 or so. Winston Smith is afraid to walk in the country and talk to his girlfriend because the hedgerows contain microphones (he knows this being a Party member IIRC). At the time I thought this was far fetched - where would the mics get power, how could they have enough people listening and so on...
When your closest police response is 30 minutes away the camera is a good deterrent for that Coop and Pub not getting knocked off.
Ever heard of hoodies? Modern crims routinely cover their faces, making CCTV completely useless.
And I didn't say the cam was operated by the Coop, I just said it was outside the Coop. Cams aren't labelled, they are completely anonymous and keep you guessing - a important element of oppression.
On a related note, CCTV cameras are out of control now in the UK. There is some chap whose job it is to "monitor" CCTV, and he wrote in one of the papers a few days ago, saying people from other European countries are shocked at the number of cameras in the UK.
In my own sleepy village a big pole recently appeared outside the Coop with 3 or 4 large cams. All the pubs have cams, some of the roads leading to the village have cams, the shops have cams of course. And there are random cams in the street apparently for no reason - they are not obvious, just small round domes on walls about 8 feet up. I walked up a quiet alley way to avoid the cams, only to see a cam pointing straight at me from the far end. No car park, nook, crannie, pathway, garden. hedgerow is free of them, like an infestation of insects. I blame 18 years of socialist government. Torch all cams I say.
it's just a different kind of crap that you happen to prefer.
Well, yeeeees kinda. But not quite. Most Linux users have used Windows, or still do use Windows (at work). Although some of them are annoyingly zealous converts, they have all used Windows and so their preference for Linux has some basis.
Also Linux is free.
I have a laptop that runs mint, the overhead in learning what bits do what things makes using it a pain in the arse.
You don't say if your difficulties are with the user interface (UI) or other stuff. Mint with the Mate desktop is extremely simple. It looks and feels rather like Windows XP. The backend is obviously Linux. If you have never used Linux before there will be pain, but to compensate, some things are easier eg. no viruses or confusing popups.
Not everybody's compute requirements are the same. You or I might be happy using Google docs to draw up a flyer for the local garden fete. That does not mean Nissan will be putting the code control system for their automotive firmware on it. ARM won't be doing their logic simulations on Google docs. Natwest won't... statutory accounts... sharded database... hardware accellerated.. etc etc.
IMO public cloud's biggest customer base is domestic users doing homey stuff. Potentially a very big market.
and all the heavy lifting is done server-side on monster server farms
You mean like it was in the 1940s ?
...my Chromebook...
It's a dumb terminal.
Having everything local for you to lose/mess up is now mostly a thing of the past.
Unless you want to do something serious.
Most businesses could move their entire organisation to the cloud storage and web apps, and get themselves some proper security
Companies don't want to lose control of the data necessary for their survival.
Unfortunately Ubuntu has similar problems, packing a tricksy, "converged" UI that loathed by many. Ubuntu wants to use the same UI on all desktop and mobile devices. A bit like MS and Windows 8.
Buy strange coincidence, the number one Linux distribution is Mint, which is just Ubuntu with a normal desktop interface. Funny, that.
*We assume that most of our keen readers will not be using anything so basic as a stone-age telly without digital storage. We presume it'll be more along the lines of custom media servers with a fistful of tuner cards, top-end DVRs, iPlayer run on a variety of exotic platforms, that sort of thing.
Rediffusion. No remote.
To be fair, Call Me Dave has not said TLS is to be banned, merely that the government will break into it on occasion when the home secretary has given personal permission. He says this was always legal with snail-mail, and he sort of has a point there. I am not agreeing with his policy though.
A much better weapon against ISIS, boko-haram et al would be to simply stop reporting their murders in such a massive way. This is exactly what they want. Instead of showing their dismal snuff movies in page 1, just put a small story on page 4 - "Man Murdered", in the same way a normal murder would be reported. By amplifying the terrorist actions, the media are in a way enabling the terrorism and rewarding those who indulge in it.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
