Posts by veti 4489 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
... Professional drivers against self driving cars...
... Actors opposed to deepfake animation...
... Spongebob hates the idea of automated burger flipping. ..
It's human nature to be opposed to an innovation that threatens your livelihood. And from that starting point, it's not hard to come up with arguments against it. That in itself doesn't tell us much about the merits of the technology.
Yep, Firefox axed (inbuilt) RSS support back in 2018.
I may be the only person in the world to hold this opinion, but IE11 was not a bad product. Most of the people railing loudest about it are airing complaints about IE6, almost 20 years out of date. Those faults were steadily corrected between versions 8 and 10, and by the time 11 came out it was a solid product that could hold its head up alongside Firefox and Opera.
Too late, though.
The shit, certainly according to the comments I see here, has been bombarding the a/c for at least five years now. In that time, how many former prime ministers - or, for that matter, lower ranking cabinet ministers - have "moved somewhere nice"?
Hard as it may be to swallow, most politicians - of most parties - do care at least as much about their country as you do. It's their home too.
I assume the stats quoted by Tesla are self-serving in several ways. For one, there is a lot of self selection in the sample of their drivers - they are heavily weighted towards certain demographics by income, age, and geography. For another, I assume most Tesla drivers have the wit to engage autopilot only when it is reasonably safe to do so, so of course the accident rate should be very low.
I would also speculate that if a terrified driver stamps on the brakes a half second before ploughing into the back of a truck, that would probably immediately disengage the autopilot, so that accident would be excluded from the autopilot stats on a technicality.
"Too small to notice" is exactly what our forebears used to say about all kinds of pollution when thinking at a planetary level.
Turns out, these things are cumulative.
The sun hits us with about 175,000 TW of power. China currently has something over 2 TW of generating capacity, and there is every likelihood that figure will double within about 30 years. If we assume that the processes of energy transport and conversion at the receiving end are likely to be less than perfectly efficient, then if China went over wholly to this tech, we could be looking at as much as 10-20 TW being added from China alone.
Okay, it beats generating the power from coal and gas. But it's not nothing.
Incorrect. Propaganda means influencing people through psychological manipulation. It doesn't necessarily involve falsehood or brainwashing. The most successful propaganda may involve nothing but absolute truth, but presented in a controlled context, manner and timing.
I remember years ago watching Riefenstahl's 'Triumph of the Will', one of the most famous works of Nazi propaganda. All it shows is footage of a political rally, nothing more. It's incontestably true, yet powerful all the same.
Photos (undoctored), firsthand first-person accounts of events, completely straightforward reporting - all can be and routinely are used for propaganda purposes. For instance, footage of a mother whale trying to nurse her dead calf - that's propaganda. A photo of a dead child. The firsthand account of a victim of Islamic State. Any media with a strong emotional impact qualifies.
Analytics - would make no difference to users, oonly to site owners, and even to them it's just a service, not essential.
TensorFlow - even less essential.
Android and Chrome would continue to work just fine, modulo some usability features. Development would presumably stop, but people would have plenty of time to fall back on alternatives.
Gmail is an email provider. Pretty sure there are more of those out there.
G Suite and Drive would certainly be a major inconvenience (and cost) for those who rely on them, but it's hardly a matter of losing the Internet.
Google is a service provider, nothing more. Of course its sudden loss would be felt by many people. is this some kind of architectural failure?
The whole Internet is one massive backdoor. That's how it was designed - by academics, not governments - and all attempts to secure it are like trying to make water run uphill, except that no-one is prepared to pay for the pumps.
As to Zinc Network, it's a weird but perfectly legit organisation. And I can't find any trace, either on Google News or Zinc's own website, of the story you reference. If the goal is to influence people, you'd think they'd want to publicise it - at least a bit?
Really? I think I understand it at least as well as you do. I know what you're getting at with the "Fourth Reich" comment, and it's not completely ridiculous to cast the EU as a successor to the Holy Roman Empire (the "First Reich") - but it is downright silly to compare it with the Second or Third Reichs.
I'm sorry to hear your (relatively recent) experience has been so poor. When I went through the English education system, almost 40 years ago now, a substantial part of history lessons over two years was spent learning about the development of the EEC, and much of the rest of the time about Europe in general.
(All this was under that bleeding-heart liberal europhile Thatcher, you understand.)
I had been torn on Facebook, on the basis that people should generally be allowed to say what they like to each other. But this decides me: I'm definitely against them.
My proposal, which they haven't even bothered to reject, was that every paid ad should be freely available to anyone who could type in the correct search (or targeting) terms to find it, together with basic info such as how many times it was served over what period. That's what I would call transparency without compromising privacy.
There aren't enough "talented employees" in the world, never mind in the country, for every employer to have its own software written bespoke from scratch.
And even if we tried it, what then? How many of the resultant systems would really be secure, and for how long?
The American declaration of independence talks about basic "unalienable" rights. This means, rights that cannot be forfeited under any circumstances.
Humane conditions in jail are one of the biggest issues we should be pressing for on every government, including our own. It's not clear how they are legally relevant to a court decision, though.
In other words, engineers are no longer writing public-facing documentation themselves.
Result, I'd say. Engineers in my experience hate doing that, and they suck at it anyway. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they sometimes put these little bombshells in on purpose to persuade their employers to give the job to someone else.
Politicians should be trained in anything but politics.
Learning politics teaches you how to gain and hold power. That's the last thing we want those bastards to be expert in. Better if they have some actual beliefs or ideals, then we can decide which of them we like the most.
The thing about sanitised HTML - at a casual glance, it's very hard to differentiate from common, iQuery-infested HTML.
What he says is true: even good devs with sound instincts find it very hard to resist the lure of "diagnostics" or "feedback". I've done it myself. PDF avoids temptation.
Well, yes. But in practice, that's what will happen most of the time. Especially if you employ minimum wage bouncers.
If the software says it's 97% sure, you'd have to be both pretty sure of your own perception and confident in your own authority to overrule it. I imagine people employed for this purpose are rarely either of those things.
"Agile" has become confused and conflated with "scrum". Scrum appeals to management precisely because it allows them to maintain the same illusion of control as waterfall, but in truth it's not particularly well suited to agile development.
Anytime you hear about "sprints" or "standups" as part of "agile" methodology, this confusion has happened. But the inconvenient fact is that scrum works best, and produced all its greatest success stories, when it was parachuted in as an emergency measure to fix a failing waterfall project. Trying to treat it as an independent methodology that can replace all other development methods - misses the point epically.
With such a small sample size, the question of how the sample was selected is very important.
I'm ppretty sure that, given the resources of a smallish consultancy, I could arrange for surveys to show any level of burnout you care to ask for, just by selecting the interview subjects correctly.
Oh, come on. When did certification ever solve - well, anything really? Are you trying to reinvent ISO9001?
Self certification is as good as its enforcement, which is to say, generally it takes complaints from suitably motivated agitators to make any improvement. How would you foster a climate in IT where whistleblowers are celebrated and welcomed by their next employer?
External certification means a whole framework of oversight board, advisors, auditors... Who would pay for all that, and why?
Basically, the big effect of either one is to favour the bigger established players who can put the appropriate effort into making sure the required boxes (and only those) are checked. Most startups and smaller players - including, most likely, the most genuinely exciting companies to work at - would be excluded because they've got more interesting things on their minds.
The Zero was an amazingly fast and agile opponent, and it's quite understandable that the US pilots in their big clunky Wildcats and Avengers and Buffaloes felt hopelessly outmanoeuvred by them.
But the Zero was agile because it had no armour, unlike the Americans. It's like the old saying, "You may be lucky fifty times, but I only need to get lucky once".
The way America won the Pacific war was a wonderful illustration of why military preparedness - doesn't actually matter that much, if you're as large as that. The USA was actually better off for not having a large pre-existing military establishment - it meant it could gear up its unmatched industry and produce the right equipment for the war it actually found itself in, rather than one some strategist had dreamed up twenty years earlier. Japan never had a hope in heck of overrunning the USA - a brief glance at any atlas would have told everyone concerned that much - and without doing that, there was no way of stopping them from eventually out-producing Japan.
Really, you'd need to do a very thorough inspection just before the test, to separate the test damage from the "gremlins" you speak of. Might be easiest to give it two six-month overhauls virtually back to back, with the test in between.
To an extent, just about every article you see on El Reg (and every other trade-related news outlet) is somebody trolling us. In this case, Veracode [who? - Ed] has done a study for its own purposes, and decided to release the findings in the hope of drumming up business for themselves.
The difference between open and closed source in this context is about your relationships. Closed source comes from an identifiable vendor, if they're shipping shit you can do something about it (complain privately, complain publicly, take legal action, shift vendors, stop paying them, whatever). Open source doesn't allow for any of those remedies, the only thing that "works" is to fix it yourself - at unknowable cost, and then you have a potentially difficult choice about whether to fix the source library (so that your competitors can also benefit from your hard work) or not (so that your version becomes forked, and you won't benefit from anyone else's fixes even if they do happen).
I've been saying for years that "maintenance" is by far the largest and most lucrative part of the software lifecycle. A company that neglects to maintain its own commercial products - is pissing away its best asset.
A lot of software engineers hate to admit this (because maintenance is both boring and hard, much harder than writing sexy new code), and I expect to attract the usual downvotes from those people. But it's true.
You absolutely should do all that, yes. But if you're sure of what you're doing, you've already made several changes without a hitch, you're anxious to get home early. .. It's possible to get sloppy.
And even if you don't, all it takes is to miss a line in the part of your query you highlight before pressing F5. Been there, done that.
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