Posts by GrumpyOldBloke 460 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2011
Australia proudly has an abomination of a voting system. If you vote it is very difficult not to have your vote counted towards the established duopoly. However, according to the AEC site: Informal votes are not counted towards any candidate but are set aside.
Doesn't cover the cost of their education.
Why teach kids science when you can just steal the secrets behind the stuff the science is supposed to be about. The money to teach science and technology is now in the hands of our security and policing agencies as part of the governments increased spending on industrial espionage. Go Team Australia! Of course the US will steal if from us before we have even had a chance to give it to them but for a moment there we will be on the ladder.
Fear not James, it will be fixed. After the underpant bomber was escorted through security at Amsterdam airport our erstwhile political elite announced that we would be purchasing the full body male sterilisation machines from the same MI complex that had just failed in the Netherlands. Recently when a terrorist, or at least someone of the same skin tone as one, passed through Sydney airport on his brother's passport our current political elite announced BIO Id to be deployed in airports. Now that this fiendishly clever young man who is not of Middle Eastern appearance and does not look up to trigger the facial recognition scanners has revealed a hitherto unthought of attack vector - wander through an unlocked door - we can expect our chicken hawk PM to come down on us with some serious inconvenience to once again cover for the ineptitude of the public sector in this country and the lies which comprise the official narrative of the resource wars.
At Mage, the market is tiny at the moment because there isn't really a compelling use case for the devices and because they have been marketed at the more technically orientated in our society. The watches don't do voice control and most people don't need biometric checks. However, as AC pointed out there is a potentially huge market of non-technical people who have their hands full and are looking for a new kind of tool. Just as Apple advanced many of the ideas behind the smart phone (advanced not invented) they may also be the ones to bring wearable computing to the masses. Perhaps not with this model but once they see what ordinary people want from a wristputer and how it ties into the Apple ecosystem then they could be onto something. But Samsung, Sony and LG are already there - yeah about their software. What about Google - I am an android user myself but we have to admit that Google is about evolution not revolution. If I want a half finished product on my wrist that is more about tracking and advertising than assisting me then Google is my first choice. Pebble - technical people only. Sorry but that leaves Apple to bring the product to the masses.
That is not the fun bit. Living as an all female community (most of the time) their cycles may have synced. You wouldn't want to be the token male within weapons range that week! Such a community might even need to advertise for males from time to time in order to replace the poor souls who didn't make it.
In addition to RealFred's points: the motivation to learn comes from some future perspective or an unmet need. A barrier to participation in IT is that kids now have few unmet technology needs. Can't be bothered even breaking wind; there's an app for that. Have a great idea for a game; organising or shooting? Robotics; cost versus benefit and industrial robotics already do it better and faster. All this before we get to the 457's and the patent trolls. Gone are the days when 10 Print "Hello World", 20 GOTO 10 was the leading edge. This was the mistake the Raspberry Pi team made. Teaching more kids programming / IT was not about accessibility, it was about needs.
To get kids doing IT you either make them do it (a need to pass a test) which will kill any future interest or you find a genuine unmet need and encourage the kids to solve it before every man and his dog writes an app and patents the idea or governments decide it is a threat to mass surveillance and control. To make it accessible to the many the need must be able to be constructed lego block like - ie at a high enough level of abstraction that you are back to teaching applications, configurations and themes not programming per se and it must be on a relevant device, their smart phone. The completion of the need must also convey a sense of ownership and empowerment therefore you are talking open source, possibly client and private server (role for the Raspberry Pi?) and definitely networking, encryption, certificates, revocation and stenography.
Perhaps coming up with engaging lesson plans and the research of unmet technology needs in teens is an area where the CSIRO could spend its time and money. Though I suspect that the organisation has become so politicised and politically correct after a decade of global warming theology that it would struggle with this task.
The distinction between data and metadata is quite clear. The confusion stems from who is talking about it.
metadata = what the puppets think they can get away with today without loosing too much skin.
metadata = what the puppet masters really want and what they will attain once they can get their foot in the door. Also referred to as data.
We are still in the early part of pass the parcel. The tech titans in Canberra who represent us are still trying to define metadata as a publicly acceptable entity rather than a technical concept. Like being strip searched and sterilised at airports or touching a print scanner along with thousands of your fellow travelers now that Ebola is spreading and transmissible through secretions. Under no circumstances should they be assisted in this pursuit. Let them enjoy their moral and intellectual superiority without turncoats - I am looking at you Malcolm - assisting them by offering mechanisms or excuses to climb in yet another window.
Per the recent CIA revelations I think it is fair to say that that is exactly what is happening. Granting of massive powers that exist without any further parliamentary or judicial oversight must call into question any future acts of parliament or claims by politicians. 5+1 eyes and the mass collection of local data that is then forwarded to foreign jurisdictions makes any thought of a member parliament actually representing its nation farcical. On the positive side we now know National Security == Government acting illegally.
Lets not forget the classification scam the government runs in order to keep us all safe and thinking good thoughts. While big content has many problems universal and timely access is not as simple as Turnbull would have us believe. Like so many other problems in Australia, federal government ticket clippers are right there in the middle of it.
When the parents got home and raised the possibility of filtering I bet their kids gave them a good talking to hence the lack of follow through. This optional phase is temporary anyway in order to work out the bugs and soften up the electorate. Pretty soon we will begin to hear of 'demands' to make filtering mandatory, perhaps underscored by an expert or some otherwise avoidable crime but all the 'authorities' were on leave that day. Then some brave MP will stand up for the bankers and the war mongers (== ?) and make Britain great again. 2 minutes later the Australian public service will try and get it implemented here.
You are being a little unfair. Think of poor Mr Irvine's embarrassment! With all the powers granted to police and intelligence officers since 9/11 they forgot to consider the case of potentially angry people or people with alternate viewpoints entering the country. [Citing the fear that jihadists returning to Australia from Syria pose a threat to the country, Irvine said “it is a significant issue” and citing that threat as part of his case for data retention]. I would remind Mr Irvine of Benjamin Franklin's quote: those who give up essential libraries to effectuate a little insecurity observe neither.
Basic principles of security are that you do not rely on obfuscation. Basic principles of democracy were once similar if my memory serves me correctly. If I am helping to foot the bill for our governments endless stupidity (esp at the federal level) then I want to be sure that the government we have is actually the government we voted for. The concept of odious debt suggests that the money lenders should share similar concerns. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right!
Yup pretty much sums it up. I guess if a threat is imminent and seemingly unavoidable then all the security to date is exposed as the theater it really is. Perhaps the spooks could start doing their jobs with the extensive powers they have already stolen from us or at least publicly admit that terrorism is low level warfare waged by sovereign states - like our friends across the pacific - for economic gain. Not quite as scary as bearded devils who hate us for our freedoms but admitting you have a problem is the first step in solving it.
Increasingly opaque public service demands ever greater transparency from the serfs. The Snowden revelations mentioned instructions from the US to its sycophants to view their citizens as the enemy. Do our public servants loose face before other public servants if they can't sell out their own populations or demonstrate their influence over the elected fools and cowards?
Perhaps the AG's department could occupy themselves, while waiting for the Australian public to see things their way, by following up on those WMD's that we went to war for. A million dead Iraqis. Who knew it was all lies and when? Another good one might be why the legislation governing the full body scanners at the Oz international airports mentions nothing about the need for the devices to be effective or safe. What or who was the real driver behind the rollout of these devices, why don't they need to be safe and whose decision was that. Is it a criminal matter?
Maybe ask ASIO why the spying on East Timor seemed to be more about corporate advantage than national security. Could it be the same story when we used a warship to intimidate the Solomon Islands and accused their leader of child porn/abuse offences? Does Bougainville have our sticky fingerprints on it as well?
There is a whole bunch of useful things the AG's office could be doing in their own backyard before straying even further into ours. That is of course if the law means anything to them other than as a tool of empire. Though whose empire might be another interesting question if they have a moment.
there's no benefit to anyone ... especially since it's been so widely adopted.
There is huge benefit to politicians allowing problems to fester until such time as the aggrieved party is prepared to pony up the dollars to get it fixed. Public comments by politicians that reflect a strong position but no actual action are a guide to said party that the donations are heading in the right direction but just a little bit more is required to get it over the line.
An article published in the register not so long mentioned new Javascript engines that run code about as fast as C# engines so we can conclude that the runtime inefficiencies are not so great. Direct indexing of memory; with just about everything living on the heap and being accessed through indirection there is probably not much difference between the C#/Java versus Javascript approaches anymore. So we are left with arguments about type as a code management issue and not a compute issue. My question is - is type the best way to solve code management issues. Counter intuitively strongly typed languages may actually be better in smaller projects. In larger projects the proliferation of types to keep the compiler happy creates a significant code design and code management overhead. We will see how the future pans out, with age comes dementia but also the recognition that many things that were once held dear pass their best by date. Abandoning strongly typed languages opens up a much more natural expression of interconnectedness in code and does away with a lot of the abstraction demanded by types. Does this require new ways to manage code - absolutely. Is a reversion to types the answer - I don't think so.
Because people have forgotten that types largely existed in the old days to solve a compute problem.They cling to typed languages today in an attempt to solve a management problem. Unfortunately types are not great at this role despite an oft quoted belief that typed languages afford scale and banish bugs, ignoring the myriad number of types and bugs that appear in any large project and the often haphazard way they are brought into existence. Management problems need to be solved with management tools. Types in modern managed code are now little more than a feel good overhead. Prayer beads would probably work as well.
Not really an election issue. Standard procedure is to accidentally release a violent crim and oh-no the resultant carnage could have been avoided by solution looking for a problem product X. The petting zoo will knee jerk to avoid ministerial embarrassment and presto - new police powers! Next thing that will happen is VIC will introduce the policy to bring it into line with SA. From there it will spread to the other disease centres in the country and another civil liberty bites the dust for the greater good.
Things are never that strongly typed anymore. Interfaces, abstract functions, virtual functions, void pointers and unions (good old days) mean that we mostly don't really care what type something is. If the purpose of type is just to keep the IDE happy so you can have intellisense or to save a few clock cycles by allowing early binding then good riddance. Once we abandon strong types then we start to free ourselves of rigid class hierarchies and refactoring and regression problems when trying to describe completely new stories.
For example LegoBlock does not implement iFood but instances can be swallowed. Where should the new ChokingException be thrown from? It is only at run time that we find that this item does not support the EatMe method. While you could claim that this is an argument for strong types known at compile time that is not the way the new story played out. If you subsequently attempted to model this scenario you would have to refactor existing objects to implement iChewable or abandon type and pass Object references – either way it is ugly and it gets worse as new stories are created over time. Do we later need an iKissable or do we modify iChewable with a bite force or boolean sevearble attribute?
While there are currently program and programmer management issues associated with loosely typed languages like Javascript there are also huge advantages in abandoning a rigid type system and treating objects as a blob with discoverable properties and methods – just like every living thing does in everyday life. It will change the way software is written just like OO did before it.
By giving people what they WANT.
Not so simple. MS office is one of the planets biggest time wasters. Familiar OS paradigms are already feeling clunky as the accessibility of stuff is falling well behind its quantity. Sharepoint is not a great solution to corporate information overload. UI designers are struggling to give form to the next great leap forward. If MS give people what they want now by looking back it is doomed. The danger (hope) is that it will become irrelevant before any intelligent and creative forms survive its political sewer and its outsourced battery farms. Metro is obviously the wrong path, we evolved to recognise signposts by their contextual and spatial relationships - a bunch of disembodied tiles and a god awful ribbon isn't it. So what are they to do, they are no Google?
No, wont fly because this is not about monetizing todays content it is about future control of all content. By seeing pirates everywhere you can get stupid, stupid, stupid public servants and our dim witted representatives to pass legislation offering draconian penalties for trivial infractions of work that was done up to ~120 years ago. Armed with this the RIAA, MPAA and other bastions of godly virtue will shake down any new content producer or distributor. There is bound to be something in new work that is derivative from something created over the last 120 years - just let us scan your stuff against our archive, shouldn't take a minute. Even if there isn't there is no penalty for claiming there is and getting it taken down. This is why you can never settle with these parasites, never propose a sensible alternative, never reach consensus. It is not about protecting the world from Adam Sandler and Lady Gaga. It is about protecting established monopolies from Joe down the road who comes up with the next South Park and wants to sell it himself over the internet.
false means false!
true is an uncertain state, conditional on the forward performance of worker threads.
Exception reports are persistent and are distributed in resource pits across all data and executable stores. Throw, or share, statements are mandatory in all IO. There are no catch or finally statements. Liberal use of share statements is required to avoid process locks. Branching is performed using goto statements and is terminated with or else clauses. Code is verbose and bloat is considered beautiful. References to fuzzy logic are only appropriate where this=2x.
Plus the singing / dancing routine every couple of minutes as they deliver an advert - that could be fun for scaring pets and small children. Of course we all know where this is heading and I for one will be lining up to buy shares in the Sailor Moon robot company though I would not necessarily want to work in tech support for same.
Divide and conquer – a mainstay of the British establishment since your kingdom was lost to foreign invaders. Sorry, that government merely exercises the will of the people is popular fiction – how is that EU referendum going or windmill farms or mass immigration? There are agenda's at play and the man in the street has little control over the apparatus of government and almost zero influence on the decision making processes. There is an enemy, it is within but it is not us.
> it has become an undesirable social activity by being forced outside
But by standing around outside you have gone back to the bike sheds / cool approach. It is almost impossible to walk down a street in any commercial district here without incurring second hand cigarette smoke. This of course also applies to school kids trying to walk to and from school. The stupidity of the standing around outside laws rather than internal air quality rules ensures that the next generation of smokers is still reachable by the cigarette companies - and we see this in smoking statistics for young people. The cigarette companies now need to focus on the attractiveness of the cancer stick rather than the packet it came in knowing that their undead customers are their greatest asset in reaching their future customers.
>several Google-developed open-source tools, such as crankd, Cauliflower Vest, and CanHazImage.
Do American universities not teach their computer programmers to use sensible names for objects? "Cauliflower Vest is an end-to-end Mac OS X FileVault 2 recovery key escrow solution." Yup, first thing that comes to mind. It would be nice if we could assemble a tool set without having to remember the pop culture and in-jokes of a bunch of 30 something nerds.
Ah yes, Microsoft Logistics Edition. I remember it well! The home version only allowed for one pig and a cart that could carry one item but the professional version was more useful. The reason few remember it was probably because per pig licensing costs inhibited adoption amongst smaller players and the cart access licences for cart loaders and carry items became confusing and expensive if not managed properly. Being an open carry cart the security model wasn't too good but there were a lot of third party addons to try and rectify the situation. There was one major problem, once a pig was hitched then corrosion in the fittings made it almost impossible to remove. Rather than fixing this Microsoft touted it as a feature and gave preferential licensing to original equipment manufacturers that shipped carts and pigs as a single product.
Of course there were open source carts whose design didn't have to be licensed but it was difficult to get SLA's. There were also Apple carts but there were always people attempting to upset them and Apple typically responded with the courts. No, Microsoft had a good operating environment back then. The capacity of the cart was only constrained by what you could pay – businesses were comfortable with that concept.
Piracy eventually killed the Logistics Edition, pigs were just too damn tasty.
The politicians have long since abdicated their role as watchers. Someone is watching the bottom feeders might be more correct. It is quite obvious that in the free West no one is watching the watchers, they are unfettered and unaccountable. Sort of makes you wonder who they are actually working for.
It would be interesting to know what drove this change. It is hard to believe the leadership team that has done so much for the company over the last decade has had an epipheny. Similarily for labour, there must be many unemployed in the US/India who have lost all shame and who would be prepared to put Microsoft on their resume. Dig deaper please el Reg, what couldn't they do or who couldn't they get under the stack rank system? Who in senior management happened across a Google tech talk or is recovering from head trauma?
I am not sure that emigration will save them. The West lost manufacturing to the global labour cloud and (some) moved up a layer of abstraction to services. We are now loosing services to global labour and technology clouds and some will have to move up another layer of abstraction to process, content and intelligence. We require new skill sets that allow us to mine value from these clouds, to create and charge for scarcity in a world of abundance. We already see the beginnings of this brave new world in the various collaborative platforms available on the internet and their ability to coordinate talent on a global scale. Open source was an early harbinger of this process. The biggest challenge such innovators will face will be collaborative approaches to IP and capital, free from the sticky fingers of the parasitic public sector and their corporate dinosaur lobbyists.
Because that is not the way government departments work. There has to be a chain of accountability that each drone can point to in order to avoid the possibility of being held responsible - especially if something goes wrong. Open source is a cancer of initiative, enthusiasm and achievement in a torrid soup of shared ideals. Such a system has no place in public life where compulsion, theft and self aggrandisement is more the norm.
Another misguided industry effort. From an employee standpoint the kids need to work for Chinese wages, be as vulnerable as Indian's on 457 visas, have all the knowledge of the state trained East Europeans and preferably be female. From a government standpoint the kids need to be entrepreneurs, pay for their own training preferably with debt and be prepared to front load their tax obligations. From and educationalist standpoint; just shut up and take your ADHD medication while I work out what colour skirt matches my shoes.
Breaking the speed limit is a very easy thing to do in Oz. If the guy walking in front of your vehicle waving a red flag and ringing a bell decides to start jogging then you are done for. As advances in solar technology have already exceeded the petty tolerances of the various state and territory governments in Oz then how long can the solar challenge continue to be held there. They may as well perform the challenge on a race track in Malaysia.
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