Posts by breakfast

Re: Changing the requirements after coding complete...

Precisely the kind of thing an agile process is supposed to help with, but you can't say an agile project will hit "finished" by a specific deadline because you don't know, so a lot of more conservative organisations won't touch it. What they don't appreciate is that the difference with agile is that it's honest about the unpredictability, not that that other approaches are predictable. Real life organisations benefit more from being able to adapt software to their needs as they understand them than they do from having something that doesn't match what they need delivered before the end of the fiscal year, but try explaining that to a finance director.

Can't help but feel if they had employed a small dev team of their own- even if they were paying them very competitively- they'd have ended up with better results, under better control, sooner, for far less money.

Re: A Real Name

Also a famous knight, as I heard it.

The difference being that your bike (hopefully) travels on the road and is governed as road traffic, whereas scooters are on the pavement and fall more under pedestrian rules.

Re: Surely...

It may be quite hard to test for some of the conditions that show up in martian gravity, where presumably things fall in a somewhat different way.

Re: No comments

I think it is very telling that your cloud can be down and pretty much nobody notices. IBM's relentless journey into complete irrelevance continues.

Re: Trains and Planes

I would guess that few rail systems provide as many barrels of pork to US politicians and Boeing do.

From what I understand it takes a while for data to get back, but then they spend a lot of time going through and analysing that data to confirm exactly what it was doing- hence the article mentioning the last couple of flybys may have touched the Sun but they aren't certain yet.

It seems to me that alongside this, if you're using custom code along with your standard tools and that code is required for reproducibility, that absolutely should be open sourced and published alongside the paper.

And the Green Furry Humanoids of Diso were REAL Green Furry Humanoids.

That's not how any of this works

I get that it's a very confusing name, but it's not called a "vacuum cleaner" because you use it for cleaning up a vacuum.

Re: One word: DUH!

It worries me sometimes that there is still an attitude that we can create understanding if we just throw more statistics at it. Simply put, the questions of meaning and what constitutes it have been part of philosophy for a long time and they will not be solved by larger sets of language data (also why automatic translation of idiomatic language is likely to fail) because they rely on understanding.

Those big questions haven't changed and they have not been solved. My view is that we're not going to answer these questions without a GAI, which is a little further down the road than working fusion power, and once we have created one of those making chatbots slightly better will be the last of our concerns.

Re: Would love to jump ship, but...

I used Linux on the desktop for years and in the end I went back to Windows because I realised I was spending so much time trying to get things working (it's always hard, the tools for even quite common things like audio management or running laptop 3d accelerators are niche, awkward to configure and confusing, and the documentation is usually out of date or nonexistent) that it simply isn't worth it for me these days as a desktop OS.

The observation that Linux is only free if your time has no value remains painfully true.

Re: "Decline and...

We'll know we've reached the next stage of collapse when the government is replaced by a bunch of goths.

Re: The other way around

But Twitter is full of actual literal nazis. Like you can't criticise a racist for having racist opinions without having hundreds of nazi sockpuppet accounts pile on you and that is apparently fine by Twitter's security systems. Reporting them tends to get a "*shrug* What do you expect? It's just nazis" type response.

It's pretty clear by this point that it is by design and by this point Twitter is a site for nazis and the rest of us who use it are incidental to their core mission.

Re: Naphthalenetetracarboxylic

Of course, GUIDs are hard to pronounce, but it transpires practically they are no worse than 60% of the Welsh language.

Re: MF - EMF

EMF??? Unbelievable.

Re: Does this mean the NY DA has evidence of large scale identity theft?

It certainly looks that way, also a new and pernicious variety of identity theft which we can anticipate seeing happening much more in future.

Of course, in this specific case it may be that the emails would all track back to the correct ISP for that user and even to the correct endpoint. Given who the players are in this case it seems a little hazardous to trust anything short of physical letters or in-person meetings.

Re: another kind of SEO

This is a genuinely massive story - as far as I'm aware a totally new kind of identity crime. I'm surprised we haven't heard from El Reg on it yet, though I guess they are doing the research to be able to produce something more in-depth when they do a story on it.

Re: K.E.R.S

So we need to create a Wide Area Network of Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems? Got it.

Re: Axions were not axioms after all...

I mean, they certainly sounded logical.

A lot of these numbers ignore that even if we can afford these extra amounts of money post-Brexit it will be because £350 million will amount to about 4 euros by then.