Posts by DButch

Re: What exactly is the edge?

When I was working at DEC, we were supplying systems that could, I guess, be considered a very early "edge" device in the 1980s. They were intended to collect data from a local store, do some aggregation and compression, and send the compressed data to HQ. The stores were not designed for computer installation - so any storage space with electrical power and reasonable air-flow would do. At least one of our computers was installed in a cabinet over the toilet in the (unisex) bathroom. Service required closing the bathroom and the tech standing on the toilet seat to work on the computer. There were some embarrassing incidents if a too, um, burly tech was sent to that job.

At DECUS (DEC User Symposium) conferences there was usually a midnight session where all the good stories were discussed. It was very hilarious and well worth staying up till near dawn.

Re: Har Har

Our Nissan Leaf+ (212 miles EPA range rating, 250+ mines actual, and over 280 miles on ECO mode) allows us to set the charge start and end time. We usually start it around 11 PM (Washington State - near Puget Sound - things have usually started cooling down by then). Fully charged by about 6 AM. In serious emergencies I set the start time later and cut-off time for the charge well before things start to heat up, then do a minor charge the next night. Since a full charge for a Leaf + gives us close to two weeks normal driving in our county we have a lot of leeway on timing, and we use it. We can also do a round trip from near the Canadian border to Seattle Center on a single charge, with range to spare for almost a week of normal errand driving.

We use the Leaf for over 99% of our driving these days. Our 2011 Prius is brought out a couple of times a month to charge the secondary battery and for the very few really long trips that actually require gas assist. On the highway we still get over 55 mpg from the Prius. Once the Prius gets creaky (no sign of that so far) we'll have a decision to make - do we get a Prius Prime to tide us over to 2035 so we can use that for small local runs without gas, or do I hope for an Aptera with 1000 mile range goal. Which is WAY farther than our old asses can handle these days in a single run - that's the major range limiter for us.

Re: The biodiesel had 'gone-off' ...

A variant from the 1965 US East Coast blackout - lots of businesses, hospitals, etc. had emergency generators with plenty of good fuel. And electric starter motors wired to mains power... When I got to college I worked in a Power Systems Engineering lab - we were still conducting post-mortems of the blackout 5 years afterwards. (And stirring up new (oh) shit stuff...)

Re: Autonomous driving is months, years, or decades away

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached a major milestone on the way to FSD vehicles. We've reached FAD - Fully Assholish Driving - a necessary step on the journey. It will have to be customized for local driving characteristics, of course. For example, in France, all sensors on the left and front of the car will be ignored, since the only known rule is "yield to the right". We're doubling our R&D team just to handle Boston because no one knows HOW they do it there. Stay tuned for local updates from your nearest dealer.

Re: China the bully...

US companies, including two major high tech companies I have worked for, have no concept of goodwill and friendship. They went very willingly to China to take advantage of the much lower cost of manufacturing there. They willingly accepted China's quid pro quo of - "put some engineering R&D in China if you want to actually sell your goods in China" as part of the deal. As someone at another blog said: "China didn't steal US jobs. US companies lined up to give the jobs to China." Now, China is an aggressive actor. But the US is not in a really good position to criticize given our own actions of the past few decades.

ed - bit of punctuation cleanup

Re: I suspect this won't end well

Carbonite backup just fired up on my PC as a result of them buying out Mozy a while back. In 24 hours it's backed up just over 1% of my PC. I figure it'll be sometime in May before Carbonite is done. I like that they are being respectful of my resources, but I'd be happy to see it use at least some of my network bandwidth for actual, you know, backing things up a BIT faster.

Re: Water cooling?

Maybe because of the little incident I describe at Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-70s? In fact, the pipes were running along an outside wall of the computer center. How the forklift operator managed to punch through a cooling pipe and presumably through the wall of the computer center in a way that very precisely funneled the water in under the raised floor is unknown. I'd have assumed it would take some very precise engineering and construction to achieve that result.

Re: Rare Events One And All

Many years ago the US company I worked for replaced their sales processing system after years of study and development (apparently very little actual testing though). It promptly and very quietly collapsed, which no one realized for almost an entire quarter. We almost had our stock delisted.

The reason for the collapse? The old sales system had stopped working properly years before, and only appeared to work because a small army of people were hand carrying sales orders around the non-working parts of the old system. Nobody involved in creating the replacement system had, apparently, ever thought to track an order step by step through the old system or asked: "What are all those people carrying sales orders around actually doing?"

Re: Elastic band RAM retention

Shades of Digital Equipment's Rainbow 100 microcomputer - an attempt to get in on the budding small office and home computer market in the early days of "PC Wars". The engineers designing the circuit board also didn't want to add clips to hold in the memory or add-on cards. They just made the slots really tight. They probably should have talked more with the people designing the memory and add-on cards. THEY were very slightly tapered to make it easier to insert them in their slots. If you jostled the system even slightly, it would spit cards randomly out of the slots. When you tried to turn the computer on its side to put it in the upright stand, you were very likely to find every single memory and add-on card in a pile at the bottom of the case.

Re: Testing?

When conducting a dangerous experiment always make a backup copy of yourself.

Re: An "AI powered cooking assistant"?

I have a recipe application that runs on Windows. It's actually pretty well done. You can point it to a recipe on a web site and it will load it, you can scan a recipe in from a newspaper or magazine, it'll scale a recipe, etc. It'll generate a shopping list for a recipe if you want. When I actually cook I have it dump the recipes I'm using to HTML files and push them over to an ancient (by now) Surface RT. I don't care if I spill sauce on it... And it doesn't talk to me or try to make helpful suggestions.

Now ask Alexa: "Alexa, are you part of Skynet?"

Re: Growth?

The Maginot line worked fine, it was France' neglect of the taxicab fleet that doomed them.

Re: Does he remember Monica Lewinsky scandal?

No, he came nowhere near losing his job OR going to prison. He was impeached, and the trial in the Senate collapsed because he had NOT lied in court by the definitions the prosecution agreed to use, they couldn't find anything else to accuse him of, and a fair number of Republicans turned out to be having their own affairs.

This really drove the Republican Party insane because he proved that:

1) He was a lot smarter than them and their lawyers and

2) Republicans don't get much sex - and certainly no oral

Even if he'd been convicted, removal from office would have been the only penalty.

Re: Hmmm

The trucks and weaponry are probably all paid for by the US' Security Assistance Program, and the Treasury department feigns dismay when they wind up being immediately transferred to the "bad guys" (who might well have been the good guys just the other day).

According to an article in The Telegraph the base software was implemented by Bosch for test use only and they warned VW in 2007 that use in "the real world" would be illegal. That means the basics of the "defeat mode" were already there and the VW engineers just had to figure out when to turn it off (when detecting that a test was underway) and back on (normal driving conditions detected).

Re: As good as this ruling may be .....

If you follow the link to the ruling (from the article) and scroll down to the legal reasoning, there's specifics for why the commission decided that the plaintiff was acting as an employee, and several precedents (among them a case against Yellow Cab from 1991). Part of the reasoning is a list of some of the criteria for considering someone an employee rather than an independent contractor - worth the read.

Re: Multiple competing sewer systems

Pity about your city - the city I live in does an excellent job handling our infrastructure with a combination of direct employees and contracted services.

Re: My extensive knowledge of nuclear weapons

"My doomsday bomb will contain only red wires."

Re: Standardised connector... like, err, Micro USB

You can get connectors that only implement the charging part. Problem is, you always wind up with one of them when you actually want to connect to your computer...

Re: Not just Ballmer

I remember listening to a presentation on Microsoft back in '95. Microsoft had clearly missed the first Internet wave but was already regaining ground. The analyst's comment was along the lines of "Microsoft doesn't gain ground because they make good decisions, they gain ground because their rivals make worse decisions. If this was a boxing match I'd swear that Microsoft's opponents had been paid to take a dive."

A religion is a cult that has had some of the nasty bits worn off. Takes a few hundred years.