Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 21371 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
>It'll take at least 30-50 years to get a more competent administration. That's how long is needed to get clueful people with a STEM background into the top jobs in government and politics
Just subcontract government to Singapore.
Ok so it has even less democracy than the UK, but the trains run on time and everyone gets a council house
>Whilst it's very easy to focus on Boris as the centre of the omnishambles,
Wasn't that his job?
He was put in by 'those that really run things' (*) to be a distraction and do something amusingly headline grabbingly stupid everytime some evil financial plan was being put in place/
(* I really hope that things are being run by a secret cabel of evil supervillians, the truth that everyone in power is simply incompetently stupid and venal is distressing)
It is a multi $M project, it's just that after everyone got a promotion and a new office, and then the defence contractors were paid and managed by the lobbyists, selected by the management consultants, and everyone went to Hawaii to see a computer installed there - there was only $100K left in the budget (and that was just because they didn't pay the interns)
>Why not run an open source OS and an open source database on your own hardware
Mainframe licenses are immensely lucrative, you want to drop DB2 and run your own software then the OS license fee doubles, or you don't want to upgrade to the new OS then the service cost doubles.
A datacenter where it can use opensource distributed database rather than paying DB2 licenses on top of the IBM OS licence.
A datacenter where it can buy extra capacity for the christmas rush without having to start pouring concrete in January to be ready for the December delivery of another mainframe.
And if they did their design correctly a datacenter where they can switch between Amazon.Microsoft/Goolge easily to get the best price rather than IBM looking at Fedex's profits and decided what next year's maintenance contract will be.
And they definitely shouldn't be decided by juries.
Software engineers from a world leading antivirus company and a world leading CS department disagree on whether algorithm A is a direct copy of algorithm B - and the question is decided by 12 random people in East Texas whose day job wasn't valuable enough for them to be excused
You need to get 1000W of heat out of a couple of square cm of CPU/GPU in the middle of a box other parts, while keeping the hot end below 80C.
Air doesn't have much heat capacity, a little bit of energy heats the air above the temperature of the chip, at which point no more heat flows. So you need to start with the air really-really cold and blow lots-and-lots of air passed the chip.
Getting lots-and-lots of really-really cold air and delivering it to the chip and removing it afterwards is bloody expensive.
In theory it's much easier to have a pipe with outside temperature water going in, and 80C water coming out, through a radiator and being cooled to the outside temperature again
Nurses, plural ?
What kind of fantasy world do you live in. There will be one nurse per hospital (requirement was one nurse per ward but we got a management consultant to classify the entire hospital as a single ward) but this will reduce auxiliary care provider assistants by 20% - unless it turns out that this machine is more expensive than an auxiliary care assistant unit
Authenticator does location detection, it uses your phone number and/or IP address by default but it can use the GPS - the requirement needs to be turned on by IT group policies
If IT demand GPS location you get a pop-up on the phone requesting permission. See common-questions-about-the-microsoft-authenticator-app
Dear Wall St. We're down 50% because nobody likes or cares about Facebook anymore, most of our customers are boomers sharing recipes or wondering why their grandchildren's pages haven't updated since they were 11.
So we're cutting staff to reduce costs - like any good traditional dinosaur industry.
But we're really a dynamic growth company that should be priced like a cool 2man startup.
See, you can tell we're still relevant cos we renamed ourselves to a meaningless short word
>and yet in the US the states with the most strict gun laws have the most violent crime rates
And hospitals with the most advanced cancer treatment units have the highest fatality rates.
Jobs that require the most protective equipment have the highest injury rates.
Plants with the strictest fire regulations have the highest fire risk
The rules don't apply to senior executives because they never get caught and if they do get caught they don't face any consequences.
It's why you get more of everything naughty, from sexual abuse to expense fiddling at the top.
See also prize winning economic studies on bagel honesty boxes
If the copyright of images used in training data translates into a copyright on the neural net
Self driving cars are going to have a problem, even if Telsa/Google/Whoever capture their own street images does the DoT own the copyright on the shape of the STOP sign?
Do the people whose faces were used for your iPhone camera's face detection have a copyright on the algorithm?
Can criminals register a trademark on their face and stop police using it in mugshots?
Was reading the story to my partner who works in local government.
"oh yes we do that" was the surprising reply.
They have a form, some pages of which must be on different coloured paper. But in today's advanced IT they at least have separate paper drawers and a clever printer setup to do this.
I suppose they could have gone one better and had a colour printer to do the background
>"anything under 120mm is a bit gay"
Nothing to do with sexuality, we are merely reclaiming the word 'gay' to describe the exuberant joie de vivre that has always been associated with the recreational use of heavy artillery.
>Achilles (sacker of cities, lover of Patroclus), Alexander the Great (defeated only once, but the sight of Hephaestion's thighs) and T E Lawrence
So another bunch of white western imperialist aristocratic elites then ?
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