Posts by Isn't it obvious?

Just don't talk to the 'droids

Many - oh so many - years ago I was at a conference. All the developers from our company had to take turns at the booth answering actual technical questions from other developers, and in turn we took the opportunity to talk to their devs.

I happened to strike up a conversation with a guy at the booth of a company we were trying to build some interoperability with. I was at that time struggling with exporting valid files for their software to consume, and I mentioned it. He told me to drop by the next day, whereupon he handed me a disk containing a complete debug build of their program!

With that, our problems turned to be relatively trivial to fix; saved us weeks. More than justified the entire cost of flying me down there, and that's just one chance encounter.

That's only going to work if the software (like your DB) loads the file read-only and doesn't crap all over it when it fails to load properly. Otherwise you'd better - like the article says - back up before running the decryptor.

Plus you'd need some automated way to iterate over (an average of) 128 possible final bytes for _each_ encrypted file, validating against the controlling program and marking "correct" ones as good. Oh, and hoping that there's only one possible missing byte that tests as valid.

So yeah, except for that it's easy.

Re: I'm sure humans wouldn't be that much better

It hadn't occurred to me until you mentioned it, but how representative are their sample images anyway? Even the pump soap dispenser in the sample image is nicely isolated on the sink instead of crammed in between the toothbrush holder and a bottle of lotion.

Do they have images tagged "sink" that include towels/rags hanging on the edge? "Faucet" images that have dishrags hanging off of them? "Towel" images where 3 hand towels of different colours and sizes are crammed together on a small rail?

Even if you somehow provide enough incentive for people to submit "real world" example images for your training set, how much do you want to bet they tidy up a bit beforehand? And if they're scraping their samples from the web, well, nobody is posting anything remotely realistic there...

You're not answering the question. The question was what percentage of _claims_ must be fraudulent to get a 99% accurate (symmetrically) system returning the correct result on 99% of flagged claims.

And the answer is 50% fraud rate. Consider 200 claims; 100 honest, 100 fraudulent. At 99% accuracy, 1 honest claim will be incorrectly flagged, and 99 of the 100 fraudulent claims will be correctly flagged, giving you a 99% chance that a flagged claim will actually be fraudulent.

Re: What a load of a fucking bollocks

Not to mention they could at least have trained it to a minimal level where people wouldn't laugh at the code. There isn't even a "finally" block, and the Readers are never closed! If you're going to offer to write code for people, at least make sure it's better than the crap they'd write themselves.

And maybe train it on modern code too. That code would never pass peer-review here; it should be using try-with-resources.

Re: "Activist Investor" ?

I think this is more on-point. (Any better suggestions I have probably would fail a language filter.)

Could El Reg perhaps stop regurgitating this kind of mealy-mouthed self-justifying euphemism? AFAICT there is no such actual thing as an "activist investor." Nobody rich enough to buy a sizable percentage of ${evil megacorp} is going to spend their fortune trying to make it behave like an ethical, responsible entity.

People/companies who try to hide behind the "activist investor" label are, to a one, unpleasant selfish greedy asswipes who want money _now_ regardless of how much damage it does to their targets as going concerns.

Re: Devil's advocate says...

I think we're far more likely to see ubiquitous RFID tags on everything that has a sell-by or use-by date. In 5-10 years (thinking the average expected lifespan of in-service fridges) I can easily imagine RFID tags being cheap enough to stick on anything from a carton of eggs to a container of yogurt. And if they're cheap enough for that, then they _will_ be on everything, because of the stock-keeping hassles it will reduce for wholesalers/retailers.

So then it's just a matter of your fridge inventorying everything that goes in with an RFID tag. _That_ technology is already cheap enough. Obviously it won't be able to keep track of your fresh vegies, but it can track anything packaged. And assuming you don't put empty packages/containers back in, it can tell you (for instance) you're out of butter. (It won't tell you that there's only enough left for one slice of toast tomorrow morning - at least not at first.)

And who knows, maybe someone bright can figure out a way to use resonance or path timing or who knows what other emergent phenomenon to get a liquid level off a container with an externally-applied RFID tag at a known position. There's loads of people way smarter than I am; I'd be daft to say it can't be done.

How are you supposed to wall-mount one of these?

Short of building them _into_ the wall, that is.

We have 3 TVs - all wall-mounted - and in none of the cases would a curved screen be suitable. They'd just create hazards.

Re: Stunning photo

Hundreds of G? I don't think so. A simple 1G acceleration will get them there in their lifetimes. (Note that in the Earth's reference frame they're already going nearly c in just a year, and from then on it's just a matter of increasing the time dilation factor.)

Re: Register Red of course!

The BRG one is the only scheme shown that doesn't look like something cheap and Chinese-made that you'd find in a clear plastic clamshell on a rack in a crappy toy store.

Except for the orange-and-blue one. That one looks like it should have "Rabobank" written across it.

Not even fantasy - they are very real parasites

It's not like the bots are manufacturing money, or creating any real wealth. The only way for them to accumulate real money (and what else are they for?) is to insert themselves as the middleman in any genuine transaction and steal money from one or both of the ends of the desired transaction.

They need to be fast to get in ahead of any transactions representing actual interested parties.

The solution is both very simple, and utterly doomed: Require a nominal, but real, fee for every bid or ask submitted to the market. Say $0.001 for the sake of argument. A real person trying to sell a block of shares may need to ask 10 times - cost $0.01 - to get a matching bid. Even on a discount brokerage fee, $0.01 isn't worth worrying about. But one of these bots trying to game the market will make tens of thousands of bids (or asks) a second. That would then cost real money, on the order of millions of dollars per trading day per bot.

Boom, no more bots.

Re: The fact is CD needs a lot of resources - and not everybody has them

And if you work on a core piece of an application that has 20+ downstream consumers in the build tree, and some of those pieces are maintained in different time zones, then even with advance warning and pre-agreement, you're going to go at least 2 days without a successful full integration build if you need to make certain changes. The core piece works correctly as committed, but each downstream piece (in stages, if the build tree is more than 2 levels deep) is going to have to write unit tests against the code changes and then commit their own updates; and so on.

And worse, if they discover bugs (e.g. performance/scaling problems with more nodes than they ever let on they were creating, or when they try to add 150 000 rows atomically into a table) then it'll have to feed back to the core team, who will need to replicate, debug and fix - all the while the deliverable isn't. Of course when core team gets the fix in, it's Thursday afternoon, and the downstream guys have gone home for the weekend...

I guess what I'm saying is that this might work for a group that produces a single piece of software, in probably less than 20 build stages, with a team that's not scattered across 8+ time zones. Like so much else, though, I don't see it as a panacea.

Obligatory Crystal Spheres reference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Spheres

Re: WORN

I thought that was mounted at /dev/null.

I put the JBoss logs there, and anything else that wants to write megabytes of garbage I'm never going to look at.

Re: Overly complicated

Well, you hardly want to be trying to drive around having to tote your descent stage with you. (Though sitting on your descent engine is fine for stationary landers like Viking.) So you either have to drive off of it (a la Spirit/Opportunity), which is a problem for a lander as large as Curiosity, or you need to arrive on the ground without it.

Actually, it's quite an elegant proposal; I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes. It's just too bad we'll never get to see the video the Martians take of it landing...

Radial velocity will also only catch an exoplanet candidate if Earth is roughly in line with its orbital plane. The gravitational microlensing approach is not as sensitive to the relative geometry, but it will also miss most exoplanets because of the time sensitivity (the exoplanet has to pass nearly between us and the distant star while the near star is transiting the distant one).

It's all statistical; you can make assumptions about the distribution of the angles of rotation of nearby stars, and hence their ecliptic, and you adjust your estimated population of planets based on the maximum number it would be possible to detect with each method.