"I would think "non-binary" would be tri-state memory, right?"
I opened the article expecting to find some fairly major leap in RAM technology and all I got a was some non-standard RAM packages :-(
25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"Personally I'd argue that Usenet fits the bill perfectly, but you're right."
Even Usenet has sorta been borged into a few very large providers. Few, if any, ISPs run a news server these days, something they pretty much all used to do. Many ISPs don't even offer email nowadays, and if they do it's often a branded gmail or similar. Likewise, webspace. ISPs aren't real;y "service" providers any more. The are ICPs or Internet Connection Providers.
"If releasing a piece of software to the bad guys would make the situation worse for someone, then that could be weighed against the benefit to the good guys before a decision is taken about releasing source code."
Not enough "experts in the field" to do that, so it will be politicians and civil servants wielding the rubber stamps, so most likely it will inconvenience honest and "good" people while the "bad" people will still obtain what they need one way or another.
I have memories of certain encryption methods on the banned from export listed as "munitions" from the USA. They were, of course, easy to get a hold of and s/w which had optional dependencies on it simply asked you if you were allowed to use it and, naturally, happily compiled and ran with the "banned" encryption included, no matter where in the world you lived.
"So having the power generation at the point of demand, with any extra being fed into the grid does seem like a serious option."
I wonder what the security costs of having an SMR on site would be compared to putting multiple ones on a single site and upgrading, where required, the local power lines and having only one security problem and one set of Nimbys to deal with? In an over populated country like the UK, I'd imagine it might be better to simply add them to existing nuclear sites already secured by Civil Nuclear Constabulary
"50 Try Amazon Prime free for X days."
My wife does that every 3-4 months or so. She (and sometimes me) binge-watch anything new and interesting that might have shown up since the last one and she has a carefully curated calendar/reminder set up to cancel before any payments are taken. She also saves up her shopping basket to get the free/next day delivery options while the free Prime trial runs. She's very good and now well practised at cancelling it. It's a just learned skill like with any other problem. She says it's a bit like playing an adventure game :-)
"A simple security fix should not slow a phone down."
Unless it's "fixing" predictive branching, rowhammer or whatever hardware CPU vulns have been discovered over the last few years that apply to ARM etc. Other than that, yes, those "slow down security fixes" do seem to coincide with when the OEM decides it's time for us to upgrade.
In some cases, parts cost is already silly. You can buy all the "spares" required to repair anything on a particular brand of laptop. So many part that you can actully buy everything you need to build an entirely new laptop. The total cost of all those spares, bearing in mind it's now a self-assemble device with pretty much no warranty, is about 60% to 100% than just buying a new laptop.
Back in the day, I was given a broken Commodore Vic 20. I then bought a "spare part" replacement '64 system board for about 1/10th the price a Commodore 64 full system. It made upgrading a Vic20 to '64 highly economic at the time. Yes, the PSU, case and keyboard was fully compatible between the Vic20 and '64 :-) Nowadays, spares are an income stream and often unique to model,
Actually, no. The only two items I remember failing during a warranty period are a bread maker about 10 years ago and a filter/espresso coffee machine about 5 years ago. Both were no longer available from the retailer and I got a full refund in both cases, no questions asked, well within the two warranty period. Neither,, of course, were IT related or even electronics as such. The heating element failed in the coffee machine and the drive mechanism for the mixing paddles in the bread maker. All actual IT or electronics equipment I've bought in the last 10 years or so is either still working or replaced because I needed something better.
Oh, just remembered. My Rasberry Pi 4 died on me. It still seems to boot, but keeps corrupting the filesystem. And no, it's the microSD card. I tried a couple of others. I'm currently running Kodi on an ancient laptop plugged into the TV via VGA and it's sort of limping along, dropping video frames 'cos it can't quite keep up. Better under Linux than Windows, I tried both. Most likely because the CPU/GPU can't quite cope of X265.
Not really, because future changes in standards is already embedded in the EU mandate on USB-C charging. It's actually one of the better examples of a good standard with future proofing and poor example of the "slow bureaucracy" so often exhibited by government of all types.
Um...wot? I must admit to never having really thought about it, and it's common for these big far eastern conglomerates to have their fingers in all sorts of pies, but I can, with hand on heart, say I've never associated the brand Kyocera with anything other than printers.
IIRC, there was a big hoo-hah over Google scanning stuff and making it or excerpts available that was in copyright. I very much doubt they deleted everything. They will have complied with the law in public, but what they are doing behind closed door is possibly another matter with regard to using datasets for training.
"Lack of learning: Using AI to generate essays does not allow students to develop their own skills and knowledge. Instead, it promotes a reliance on technology and shortcuts, rather than encouraging students to think critically and engage with the material."
Yes, that was my thought too. It's all well and good saying students can learn to write better essays by revising and editing an AI generated one, but will they really learn the subject better if they don;t write the original before reaching the revising and editing stage? Most subjects are not actually about the writing unless they are studying the language or literature or the "arts" in general in the first place. The act of planning it out and actually writing/typing it out helps set the facts and other information in the brain and allows for processing the information at a lower rate, revising and editing internally as you go along. Being a good communicator is, of course, part of most subjects where essays or presentations are required, but that is subsidiary to the actual course content.
There was also a point made in the article about spelling. It's not taught so much because people have spell checkers. Yeah, that's blindingly obvious from many writings on the internet in general and "social media" in particular where people either don't have a spell checker or don't bother to take the time to use one.
I think he's referring to the "rope/chaser light" or "Knight Rider" style indicators where instead of a light flashing on/off its a bar-like arrangement that lights in sequence from inside to outside to indicate which direction the car is turning. Pointless bling of course, because the location of the flashing light is legally mandated such that it already indicates the direction of turn. They are probably also hugely expensive to replace with OEM only parts too.
"there is zero chance I'd ever be using FSD in a tunnel. "
Yeah, that struck me as odd too. Also the suggestion the Tesla made one or more "unsafe" lane changes, which I'd not expect a Tesla on FSD to do (although I have no experience with the system). Part of Teslas automation includes GPS, which tends not work in tunnels and AIUI, this was a big, long tunnel.
"The highway code is not the law."
Sort of true. It's a plain English interpretation of the law and generally accepted as "the law". If you have a dispute over it, you can go to the statute books for the definitive definition and if necessary, get lawyers and a judge involved if you feel really strongly about it. But odds are that a judge will point to The Highway Code and suggest you go read it again.
"Many of the rules in The Highway Code are legal requirements, and if you disobey these rules you are committing a criminal offence. You may be fined, given penalty points on your licence or be disqualified from driving. In the most serious cases you may be sent to prison. Such rules are identified by the use of the words ‘MUST/MUST NOT’. In addition, the rule includes an abbreviated reference to the legislation which creates the offence.
Although failure to comply with the other rules of The Highway Code will not, in itself, cause a person to be prosecuted, The Highway Code may be used in evidence in any court proceedings under the Traffic Acts to establish liability. This includes rules which use advisory wording such as ‘should/should not’ or ‘do/do not’.
"is the blame really solely assigned to the car in the back in the UK?"
Absent any other evidence or offences, generally yes. Although if it's a no injury bump, odds are the Police will take no further action and write it up as "insurance companies to deal with it".
While I fully agree that this method is not likely to be the solution to cheap fusion power, taking the analogy to the extreme, we've just reached the stage of the first artillery cannon, ie a controlled explosion in a cylinder, a long way from the 1000's per minute needed to make a car work, let alone the fuel feed methods and chemical energy translation into motion :-)
On the other hand, other methods are being tried and there's a lot more money and brain power going into this research :-)
"What everybody seems to have ignored about that gain of about enough energy to boil 3 kettles is the single use fuel capsules are hand made in gold and cost about $10,000 each."
True, but then the early internal combustion engines were hand made, didn't work all that well and only the very, very rich could afford to build a car around them. Fusion isn't even at that stage yet, but cars are affordable for many, many people these days. If and/or when sustained fusion reactions become possible, the infrastructure for making the fuel pellets or whatever method is used then will become a mass production problem, not a hand crafted, one at a time operation.
"the drip of subscriptions,"
The funniest one is when marketing uses phrases like "less than the price of a cup of coffee per day" to equate to cheap. But they mean the price of a Starbucks "coffee" at £2+ per day. Well, no. My coffee costs a lot less than that because i make my own coffee. I take a flask of hot water and some instant for on the road. That's a saving to me in the order of £300 per year for each of those "less than the price of a coffee per day" deals. £60 per year for each of "less than the price of a coffee per week" subscriptions too. The steady drip of "low cost" subscriptions very quickly add up to a significant amount of money per year.
Yes, it's all well and good saying that Google are operating 1.8B gmail accounts, but I wonder what proportion are actual used accounts? I have a gmail account because I have to have one on my phone. It's a work phone and the gmail account is only there because it's "essential" to the operation of Android and the play store. I don't think I ever use it as an actual email account, I've certainly never given it out as a point of contact to anyone. I'd have to go into the account settings just find out what the email address is, never mind what the password is. It may be written down in the little black book in the attic/computer room/man-cave :-) That's probably the same for a significant number of users.
The most recent one I remember is "disable the WiFi system", which could mean about five different things but could not mean what they wanted to say, which was "disconnect this USB-C cable which connects to a dock which has an ethernet cable connected to it"
"Users" seem to be regressing in their understanding of technical terms. "WiFi" means any and all forms of network connection to so many these days, be that Ethernet, actual WiFi or a mobile phone data connection on 3/4/5G :-/
"What? Really? I know there isn't a universal definition of what love is, but I don't think anything to do with bureaucracy can be described with that concept."
Sale and Marketing have, for many, many years bastardised the meaning of "loved". How often have you seen sales or marketing literature telling you how much you are going to "love" their product? Feedback forms asking on a scale of 1 to 5 how much you "love" some product or website? Personally, I'm always 100% honest on those sorts of things. I don't "love" anything inanimate. Hopefully it screws with their metrics.
in this instance, the sensitive data, ie the usernames/passwords, are only centralised if you choose that option. Otherwise that data is scattered across all the websites you use them on :-)
Except they are also centralised in your head/notebook/whatever :-)
"Very few of the outsourced HR sites are tied to your corporate login, for the excellent reason that they're legally obliged to give you access to your electronic payslips and the like for several years after you've left the company."
Are they? We changed providers for payroll a while back and were all sent repeated emails reminding us to download all our payslips and P60's etc before the switch as we'd no longer have access afterwards. I doubt anyone who had left the company in the meantime were told of that.
Agreed, you don't need to fully understand how a tool works to use it. But having a least a basic understanding of the principles the tool is based on goes a long way to understanding how to use the tool properly and look after it. Like knowing the basics of clutch plates helps understand how not to burn out the clutch. Or how an LCD panel is made of layers and so realising just how delicate they can be, resulting in fewer broken laptop screens :-)
I also did O level Computer Studies within a year or two of it first appearing as an official O level and the exam was a lot more than "colour in the the picture of the minicomputer". Maybe it was different exam boards, but what we did was proper Computer Studies with actual logic gate type questions and other real computer related stuff so long ago I don't remember now, a programming element completed as part of the course work in advance of the actual exam. Likewise the A level I did afterwards, the first year out school/exam board offered it. And that was hard too.