Posts by Voland's right hand

Of course the liberal screeching autistic left will use anything to try and score points against him

If anybody is ADHD, it is the Orange Baboon. It is possible to nudge a economy in a particular direction by applying tariffs. It, however requires a combination of stick (tariffs), carrot (manufacturing subsidies) which are specifically formulated so that they do not violate the law.

It is not difficult. All that was needed was to specifically target types of panels known for their timed obsolescence and do it on environmental grounds. Do not even frame that as tariff - make it "environmental protection tax" - for recycling purposes.

Unfortunately, this kind of stuff requires non-toddler levels of thought and does not fit into an immediate gratification mindset. So rather unsurprisingly we do not see it.

If only we had a Prime Minister - You mean our our own immediate gratification Kipling reciting hair disorganized dolt of Turkish immigrant origin. No thanks. Him becoming prime minister? Most of us are not keen on the country being run like "We Got Old News For You". It gets unfunny after a while.

Re: Why are the patches so late?

What have they being doing for 6 months?

Managerial "performance degrading fix" tennis. Very popular game in high tech companies.

The engineering team serves a fix, but instead of it being an ace and reflected on the scoreboard straight away, it is skilfully returned by management for further work because it clusterfucks performance so bad that the company is bound to be sued.

This game usually starts slowly with the ball leisurely passing from one half of the court into the other. It gains frenetic pace towards the end when it starts to look more like Nadal vs Federer with the final point being scored as a result of an ERROR by one of the players. With the corresponding quality level in the released fix.

We see that all the time - software, hardware, even automotive. The fix which ends up being released should have never left the building.

their own central Asian republics (think Chechnya).

Their "own" central asian republics are independent and have been for a very long time. They have very little need to "watch" over them.

You are also missing the primary "conflict" problem. It is not directly facing Russia in a "last war". It is running into it or into one of its proxies elsewhere. In that case Ireland, Norway or Germany will be of very little help.

Re: Ain't American Politics Great?!

Especially when the Demorats

Was this what you were saying when the GOP was using the same tactics to try to prevent most of USA having some form of Health Coverage in order to ingratiate themselves with their sponsors from the health care biz. Guess not...

Re: Is there any evidence...

It is twitter. Do you expect any intelligence to dwell there?

Re: Fix it in-browser

So if you want to browse in English, Russian and Hebrew simultaneously, you'd need three separate windows. Why not?

Probably an overkill. However, highlighting characters which do not belong in a page according to the page declared language and encoding is not a bad idea. If nothing is declared, anything non-Latin ASCii should be highlighted in blinking red :)

Re: 8 YEARS OF BUSHBAMA UBERSTATE ORGASM

Forgot you dried frog pills Bursar?

Re: Idiots the lot of them

"IBM conceded that the pickup in its software revenues was on the mainframe platform,

So THE OLD IBM model of hardware driving software and services worked, works and will probably still work. The NEW IBM model of fairy Jinnie dust continues to underwhelm.

This quarter is no different from anything in the recent past and the stock market concurs.

@ledswinger - completely with you on the subject.

However, do we like it or not, building death tools LOCALLY creates jobs. One of the Indian most impressive achievements is that they have managed to successfully insist that they build nearly everything locally with the corresponding job creation.

Not BAE building it for them in USA.

As far as sanitation, etc - it will take decades if not centuries to get the country to a modern footing. It is a BIG country with large chunks of it in a really backwater state. Ditto for insurgencies. Corruption - no comment.

Re: Ambulance chasers

Perhaps they should sue someone driving past them as they could have had an accident and been injured.

Do you realize you are giving them ideas? They read the register - the Intel complaint was quoting El reg verbatim.

Re: Good luck

This looks like a distinctly tier2 effort.

Re: Shameful

No, just business as usual.

You need to watch the first season of Yes Minister where Humphrey explains the actual functions of a minister, civil servant and the department as well as the NHS episode.

Anything which will REDUCE the cost of IT will reduce the departmental budget which simply is not going to happen. It is against nature.

This simply the civil servant ensuring that his sprog can attend the same college in Oxford as he has attended. Nothing personal, just business.

Re: Insects...

Locust flour is as old as the world.

Stuff made out of it tastes quite nice (according to people who tried it)

They will also eat stuff nothing else will eat.

The only question is who is footing the bill in case of the rather inevitable incident when they escape from a farm.

Spectral Melted Down Clusterfuck.

Data

I have some vague recollections on specific legislative regime on medical data in most USA states. It will be interesting if the local prosecutor agrees with their assessment

Re: I'm failing to see how this is Just Eat's fault

unless JE literally handles all the SMS stuff themselves and bans the restaurant from direct contact with the customer except the delivery itself.

That's what it should do. Ebay, Amazon, Booking.com all do that and THIS is what they charge for.

If Just Eat is not doing it, I do not quite see how they are going to sustain their business. It is a can of worms which once opened cannot be closed - DPA, GDPR, spammers, stalkers, restaurants bypassing you, etc.

And strange that the democrats

60:38

These numbers speak volumes.

Re: 380b?

What they need is an A380 NEO.

Lost in the report is the culprit: 78 A350 WXBs

This is what is eating the 380's lunch. Unless 380 is improved, the 350 will devour its bigger sibling (especially once the "ridiculously long range" 350 option BA and friends are negotiating for starts shipping).

Re: As she is 14 years old

Or was that #FakeNews?

No. It was real. There is more than one case of it, all of them USA though. The prosecution in other countries tends to demonstrate more sanity on the subject.

Re: industrial control systems

I believe StuxNet proved that approach insufficient.

In any case, the number of wobbles shows just how shoddy a lot of the software in this area is. It was either going around OS protection mechanics or had some ultra-optimistic (not to say delusional) ideas on how long would a particular syscall take.

Re: Sex?

Reminds me of the old joke:

A guy comes into a librariy and asks? Do you have the new bestseller: "The sexual exploits of the nerd?". The librarian after looking over her glasses Tommy Lee Jones style: "Science fiction and fantasy are on the second floor".

Re: Technical details

Early bandit capitalism at its best. Reminds me of the invention of the first phone switch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strowger_switch

Re: PowerShell?

Powershell is far superior to Bash

At the point you are demonstrating the syntax is abominable so while you can wing all 15 use cases after quad espresso and an amphetamine chaser, doing so in a business environment should be a sackable offense.

If you want to use it for something THAT level of complexity neither bash, nor powershell do the job. You need to use a proper language, have test cases, unit testing and possibly integration testing. Sure, you can cook it in bash or ps instead of let's say python, but that means that you need to find someone capable of consuming the same speed flavored quad espressos to maintain it.

Both PS and Bash have lost the plot - they now allow what is effectively software development while having a readability compared to which badly written Perl reads like Shakespeare sonnets. No thanks, if someone starts building production code using either, sacking is the right thing to do.

Re: pascal

Took the words out of my mouth.

Made feel so young and forget about my beard being 50% white nowdays.

Now, back to carefully tabulating everything to the correct tab mark (or actually having VIM do it for me).

Re: Why?

Money is like Manure, you need to spread it to make new things grow.

There is a sh***load of non-project associated university Supers in the USA and China. Most of them got a large chunk of state funding. Someone finally noticed.

If the new 4 supers are at existing Unis this is not a bad idea. They will recoup themselves once you take 2nd and 3rd order effects into account (educational use, research projects that would otherwise not get compute time, etc).

Re: meh

Does this account for any potential partnership with the US or China

USA, China? Funding UK Science? Dude, share what you are smoking(*). Smoking cool stuff is not a crime. Not sharing is.

The report paid specific attention to two areas which will be hit most in the case of hard Brexit.

1. Life Sciences.

2. Financial Industry.

IMHO it underestimated the hit to both because there will be a feedback loop in either case.

(*)_{I initially studied life sciences and chemistry before going to the dark side of IT. Some of the people I studied with who spent decades in USA and have green cards or even US passports are back in Eu now. Because there is MORE MONEY HERE. In addition to it being more pleasant place to work}

Re: They will never work in an urban environment.

Concur.

The other example which comes to mind is Netherlands. All city centre and a lot of housing estates are "pedestrianized the dutch way". What does that mean? In those areas there is one overlord - the pedestrian. The next one in the pecking order is the cyclist which is NOT prohibited from cycling there. They have to give the pedestrians right of way (which they sometimes do, depends on their Dutch grit abrasiveness value). The last in line is the car. It is also allowed (again - none of the restrictive idiocies UK enforces, there is simply not enough space for that). But it has to give EVERYONE a right of way.

I do not see ANY automated system driving in that environment. Ever. At the same time this is exactly the environment I would like to see on my street and in my city. #

So IMHO, we should cut this stupid AI crap and start investing into motorway and A road instrumentation so that you can join the road and leave it to the road management computer until the junction where you are supposed to leave. The problem here is not technological either - it is simply total lack of political will to do so.

Re: Other uses

I find that statement confusing. A helicopter has only one lifting point,

You are correct. If the software immediately throttles down to nearly zero the opposite propeller and if the quadcopter can land with only two operational it should be survivable. You have a load hanging under you, the center of gravity is WAY UNDER the propeller plane. Even if it is down to two it will not become unstable. You will, however lose the ability to steer except along the line of the two remaining propellers. You may get some steering from the propeller opposing the dead one IF you are carrying sufficient load to be able to use it at reasonable revs (I do not want to be the person writing the flight software for that use case though).

It does however need to be able to land safely with only two operating and reasonable load.

Re: Isn't it a small minority

Isn't it a small minority

While some of the minority is in the wrong, I bet there is a grain of truth here too. If you start doing anything not based on merit, you dissatisfy BOTH sides.The real way of getting more women into STEM is not any "make equal plans", but fixing STEM in general:

1. Reducing the antisocial content. Frankly, the level of arsehole behavior which is tolerated from some "talented individuals" especially in software engineering is not acceptable in any other workplace.

2. Providing full career length development paths which are STEM only. There is a only a handful of companies that do it. One of the reasons why Cisco got where it got in its glory days was exactly that - you could get all the way to a DE which is a VP level salary while remaining technical. Try that in a UK company - there is NONE that has that. You have to BECOME first. If there is no career path people will fight for their right to be closer to the emergency exit and it will always be ugly.

3. Applying positive gender correction to numbers, etc EARLY. VERY EARLY. The latest point where it can and should be applied is University. If there is a STEM slant at school level (f.e. my older attends one) it needs to do that too. Otherwise the antisocial side of nerd society shows its ugly head straight away. Taking my older one as an example I have had to go as far as allow his younger sister "full manners control" including "Alice fist of death" deployment to ensure he does not imprint that for years to come.

From there on things are better left to their own devices, otherwise you will end up with everyone being unhappy about the way they are. That as a side effect will sort out some of the antisocial aspects. They are unfortunately a natural consequence when you collect a 90% male teenager population in a university dorm setting without the appropriate counterbalance and some people never manage to shake it off after that.

Sorry

So am I. I swear I have seen something very similar somewhere once upon a time in Eastern Europe. I just cannot dig out of my brain the exact reference of what it is.

I do not think the bomb part is a DIY - I am pretty sure I have seen it somewhere. It looks waaay too familiar. Just cannot remember :(

Re: Bollocks

Post Compromise Security?

Post Compromise Security is useless if you do not know that a member has been compromised and it is the adversary listening to the chat instead. That is one lesson from the Turkish putch analysis - governments actually LOVE group chats instead of various person-to-person relay methods. All it takes is one application of a rubber hose for them to get in and sit and listen for a sufficient amount of time to pick up everyone.

Nothing new in this too - no insurgency or resistance with "large distribution" channels has ever succeeded. There is a reason why WW2 resistance always used the principle of cells and deliberate fragmentation. It is easier to detect compromise and cut-off a compromised branch than in a flat large distribution group.