Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: SAMBA?

Samba has supported "server signing = required" for yonks so I doubt much will break.

Re: Who would have seen that coming?

On the evidence of this case, they will do the bare minimum to prevent a repeat of *exactly* what just happened, rather than stepping back and asking themselves how they ought to be handling this. I'm not sure what the legal definition of negligence is, but this certainly fits my definition.

(The case file had several incidents, over several years.)

That would be about par for the course. The current standard model seems to have more or less settled into its current form in the mid-70s, so it's about 50 years old. Before that, there was a period of about 70 years of experimenters delivering endless "what the fuck" moments to the theoreticians, starting with things like the photo-electric effect. About 40 years prior to that, Maxwell's electromagnetism and a recognisable formulation of classical thermodynamics were "new" in the 1860s or so. Electricity itself was taking shape in labs around the beginning of that century. Go back much before 1770 and I think we were still knocking classical mechanics into some kind of analytical shape. And of course Newton's Principia is not much further back again (1689).

So even if the Standard Model is toast by the end of this year, I'd say it has done about as well as any of its predecessors.

Re: iAPX-432

Surely IA-64 was the last gasp of the ultra-cisc?

I remember more than one commentator at the time remarking how IA-64 was not Intel's first attempt to sink x86 and also to do it with a chip so complicated that no-one else would be able to make it.

That would probably depend on whether you platform anonymised the users. If one of your customers has a complaint against another, but is able to identify the other and sue them instead, I'd expect section 230 to get you off the hook no matter how small you are.

The hard issues here, which section 230 is intended to resolve -- legally at least, are firstly that they might have to sue "Anon42" rather than a real person (and the provider probably doesn't have much clue who that is) and secondly that Anon42 might turn out to be in a different country and so much harder for normal people to sue.

Section 230's attitude to these problems appears to be "not my problem" and "not my problem", which is probably why Big Tech likes it so much.

Re: Pulling up the ladder

It does rather sound as though they know the bubble is about to burst. That is, they know they can't match the last 6 months in terms of apparent (to Joe Public) progress so they want an externally imposed reason to act as a fig leaf. That way the VC money will keep flowing despite the slowdown.

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

"need us to bail you out"

Oh, and that went so splendidly a few weeks ago, didn't it?

"Ubuntu could be described as a stable release of Debian Unstable…"

...as could, er, Debian Stable. Indeed, if you are going to customise it as much as this, it might have been better to start there.

Re: Acronym-Ignorant

"No, scratch that, withdrawing my post will delete an entire thread, so instead I'll just suffer the downvotes."

An old dog of principle! You don't see so many of them nowadays. (Upvoted.)

Re: Ideas..

You have nothing to fear from the current UK government. They *could* organise a piss-up in a brewery, except during Covid lockdown, when they had to have it in Downing Street instead, but apart from that they are utterly incapable.

Re: "ChatGPT looks to be losing another race"

They won't ask themselves that because the pricing will be arranged so that all the things MS want you to have are free (and "integral") with all the things that you wanted.

It's leveraging a monopoly in one area to acquire a monopoly in another area. It's illegal, but they have always got away with it in the past.

Surely the instruction sheet *is* the computer?

Re: Probably time to have another look at Opera

I think the OP is aware of that, hence the reference to "Presto Opera".

Re: I’m switching to Proxmox

Is Proxmox the brand name for some psychdelic drug?

What's this crap about "If HTTP becomes too commercialized I’ll just switch to something else, I don’t care."?

Nothing stopping them from doing that. They can put the patents in their own name.

Using https for your website is an opt-in. There's been quite a lot of take-up even by folks with nothing to hide. In fact, take-up surged after Mr Snowden revealed just how much stuff that didn't need to be hidden was just being hoovered up "because they could".

It's almost like people value privacy on principle.

Re: Operating competently, Interacting appropriately, Behaving ethically and morally

True, and relevant, but let's not hold AI to a higher standard than NI. I wouldn't trust most humans to build a bridge, but I don't deny their intelligence.

DARPA's criteria are for a useful AI, not just an AI, and it is fair to point out that all the hype this year has been about AI that is demonstrably not useful. 'Tis a pity that this point is not more widely appreciated in the media.

Re: In the good old US of A

Not understanding the law is how Musk ended up owning Twitter.

Re: Ideal for stealthy military drones

That would be "yes" and "probably no-one's". There is a lot of battery research being done in the open and I'm sure the Chinese have as much expertise as anyone else in turning a lab result into a production line.

Probably more, in fact, since they appear to be the world's production line. :(

Re: Help! I'm confused.

The politicians have fucked up the country really badly this time, even by their standards, so the need to rally their core vote by any and all means possible. Blaming someone else (foreign techies) for everything and promising an easy fix is an example of such means. Other examples include "stopping the boats" and "stopping the votes". The children don't come into it. They don't vote, so no-one gives a stuff about them.

But you knew all that.

Re: If you feed the trolls ...

Good luck tracking down the perpetrators when their anonymity is protected ny the platform and both they and the platform are in a different jurisdiction from you.

Also note that attempts to "solve" this problem by making anonymity impossible will face a backlash from precisely the minorities you are trying to protect. In fact, it's the kind of approach favoured by Pooh bear and Putin.

It's a hard problem.

Re: The group ...

You would have thought so, but the evidence is that mis-targetted internet ads have been a thing for at least 20 years and the advertisers continue to throw good money after bad. These days it is pretty much a cliché that they are randomly distributed. Private Eye has had a running gag about it for years now and the brainlessness of Amazon's "I see you bought a wahing machine, would you like to buy ten more?" is also widely mocked. *Everyone* knows that the system doesn't work. The web giants are not deceiving the advertisers, the advertisers are not deceiving the companies who place ads, and the population don't believe that the ad is aimed at them.

There is no fraud here. Just a huge waste of time and money by people who have realised that they can inflate the price of absolutely everything by a tiny amount and then cream that off to pay their salary.

I think a giant white circle would be a "cloud". A balloon might be no more than a white pixel or two.

Re: 1 in 6000?

Is that an improvement on the false positive rate of a real person doing stop-n-search?

Re: War reparations

I guess it would be an entertaining way of killing them all off, if that's your bag, but I doubt your reluctant mine clearers would actually do a very good job, so you'll need to send the professionals in afrerwards anyway.

Re: Only three types of people...

More likely is that retired person might actually know enough shit and care little enough about their career that they actually do the job properly. You know, flagging up bad practice, making recommendations, and generally being a pain in the butt for their managers.

I dunno, but imagine how kewl it would be to be able to embed an ActiveX control in a URL.

I expect that's part of it. :(

Re: GitHub licensing terms allow code hosted on GitHub to be reused by Copilot without attribution

If someone forked to a private GH repo, with their own non-GH repo in between, it would probably be impossible for the original owners to know that their code had been slurped.

So I dare say one could add such a licence condition, but it would be pretty pointless.

Maybe some future version of the AI could read the licence and adhere to it.

If you remove the references to the Graun, the point is valid. I don't mind reading AI-generated material if it is good. I do mind reading human-generated material if it is crap.

They should feed it the whole code and ask it to find as many contradictions as it can. Then we feed the output to the politicians and tell them to stop prattling on with ideological battles and start fixing the shit that they've foisted upon us.

Repeat for all tax codes and the respective politicians, obviously.

Re: Xerox and foolishness

That suggests that Xerox management gave away the future twice, first by not making it themselves and second by giving away the proceeds after they sold it.

Re: I don't think future space stations will be "international" ....

I doubt it. Russia is broke and China probably doesn't need the 50-year-old IP.

Re: Crap Software R Us

It has. You can disable NTLM across your network with a couple of policy settings. This came in pre-pandemic. If you haven't done it yet, presumably you have some third-party apps that depend on it, still, 3 or more years after you should have started looking for an alternative.

Re: I am outraged by this. On the other hand

What were you planning to do with the photo of your mother-in-law that a photo of Scarlett Johansson was better suited for?

Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

But that would be quite an attractive proposition to the kind of people who vote for these clowns. A branch of your bank in the High Street, shopping done with actual cash, none of the electronic mularkey...