Re: There's nothing the Corsair does
The ones printed in Octarine?
4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010
I admit that I still use EMACS occasionally, usually when I need psychotherapy or to play tetris or anything else that obviously belongs in a text editor that is lacking in vi.
:)
As they used to say, EMACS would be a great operating system, if only it had a decent text editor...
okay with being in a concentration camp by the middle of the century and awakened by the sound of Chinese jackboots in the middle of the night
What utter and complete bollocks. You really think the Chinese are going to invade Europe or the US?
I've never heard such crap. Stop trying to spread such stupid fearmongering.
Prioritised communication and 'push to talk' were part of the original tender
They may well have been. The fact is that neither of those things were available at the time of the original tender, and still aren't now, properly.
I would like to know what is taking so long.
Tyring to build in functionality which doesn't exist takes time.
They could have added "must be powered by Unicorns and protected by Dragons" to the tender as well.
We had what we thought was a robust process of visually checking the backups had run every day, by looking at the filename (which contained a timestamp) and the size of the file. We also did test restores every week, of a random three out of about 100 databases.
However, when the inevitable shit happened, and the database server crashed due to a power outage, we found that one of the databases which hadn't been written to for ages, was running entirely from the cached copy in memory, and the actual file on disk was corrupt. Our backups had been dutifully backing up the corrupted copy for over a month, with no outward sign.
But I don't understand how you can use one to make predictions in this way - how do you verify the results?
I suppose it is analogous to the intuitive leaps that the human brain is capable of, and therefore the only way to verify the results is rugged testing of any prediction.
This is very much why Artificial Intelligence is so much sought after - getting a computer to have the ability to extrapolate from too little data - but it does make me wonder whether humans will question and verify what a computer comes up with in the same way they would a human, or whether we will be inclined - as we do now - to just say "well the computer said so" and not question it.
I agree that at the moment, our use of high powered radio transmission is being supplanted by low powered localised alternatives, however, if / when regular commercial spaceflight gets going, then at present the only way for craft moving between bodies in the solar system to communicate will be by radio signals transmitted at a higher power than most localised terrestrial signals are, so the solar system will be more noticeable as a source of EM radiation.
Not that I condone this or agree with it in any way, but the big point is the move from Capital expenditure to Operational expenditure. To buy and run your own hardware is a big hit of Capex, which re-occurs every three to five years as you refresh.
Beancounters don't like Capex.
Moving stuff to the cloud is an ongoing Opex which makes the beancounters feel all fuzzy and warm.
The fact that the total Opex expressed over a number of years is way more than the equivalent re-occuring Capex doesn't seem to bother them...
It’s easy to see parallels between this situation and that of Edward Snowden,
However, the difference is, that Snowden knew that in America there was no truly independant oversight within government, and had to take the step of releasing information publicly to journalists to get anything to happen.
In the Land of the Free, if he had contacted the Intelligence Oversight Committee, he would have been quietly disappeared, and his information not acted on.