Posts by Charles Manning

Re: A great thinker... RIP

AI was real soon now in the 1950s. There was a huge focus on making mechanical robotic dogs etc because the brain will soon be ready and we need a body to put it in.

The books on computers I read in the 1960s showed machines that would learn by being told they'd made mistakes. Complete with illustrations of men in white coats pushing the "goof" button when the computer made an error.

Ai was still real soon now when I did post grad AI courses in the early 1980s.... Just a tiny bit more computing power and we'll be there.

Thirty years later and the AI is still in the glovebox of my flying car.

re: I got bored...

depressed more like.....

I grew up in the 60s and 70s when people had a very up-beat view of the future. Flying cars before 2000 and all that.

And here we are 16 years AFTER 2000 and we're supposed to get excited because our toaster will tweet the washing machine via IoT.

This failure to deliver makes the F35 programme look like a huge success.

Inside job != inside job

There are inside jobs and inside jobs.... they are not the same and require different levels of authorisation and different levels of "hacking" to make it happen.

Nicking the petty cash out of the secretaries top drawer is vastly different to falsified accounts which is again different to directly manipulating bank transfers.

Your average engineer in most organisations can have responsibility for the design of a multi-million dollar project but can't authorise the purchase of a 50c pencil.

Re: NZ Rally

I too am from NZ You don't go rallying in a Daihatsu or your average family car which, indeed can be totalled by hitting a possum.

Most of those rally cars have re-enforced front ends and underside to help strengthen them as well as make them less prone to rocks being flicked up etc. That's why people can often roll the damn things, tip them back on their wheels and keep going.

Re: Wondering where the time went...

Well they have been yelling: "get of my goddamn lawn for a long time"....

and the Skype logo does look a bit like a Viagra pill....

Yup, makes sense.

Re: If Pluto is taken.

You could always GOSUB.

Re: Awful

"Why is NASA wasting money on this frivolity?" To be seen to be doing the "right thing".

To go back to Apollo-syle kit looks like a huge step backwards to the 1960s (even if it isn't). They'll struggle to get hundreds of billions of gravy for that.

Going with wings is at least seen (and can be pitched as) an evolutionary tweak on the space shuttle formula. We did the right thing with the shuttle, now we're doing it better.... To step away from that formula risks lots of egg on face.

Re: Jonas Savimbi

"The US (and in this case South Africa) are not renowned for supporting democracy when it gives the "wrong" (ie not right) result."

Democracy is a cute Western idea for the affluent. You can't eat it. You can't burn it. It does not keep the rain off your head..... But, hey you can vote and if someone finds out - or thinks - you voted for the wrong party you and your family will be hacked by machete.

Angolans were a lot better off when the Portugese were running the show. After 55 years of guerilla and civil warfare they might have the vote, but they're only now getting on their feet.

Re: Dev Ops Week?

This is a conspiracy to make you feel inadequate and go to some damn expensive DevOps seminar.

Hears: "Buzz, buzz... DevOps... mumble DevOps...."

Reads: "Sweden is doing DevOps. Why aren't you?"

Thinks: "WFT is this DevOps stuff? I better find out more before the boss asks me and I don't know.... Hmm that seminar at $LOCATION looks good. Nice pool they have!"

It's early in the year, still lots of training budget left.

Devops seminar giver: $PROFIT; Sucker's employer: $POORER

re:A solution in search of a problem has found one, apparently.

Not quite:

A solution in search of a problem couldn't find once, so caused one.

Re: Would you like another dimension with that, sir!

Well that would be another way to solve the problem.

The string theory people that the universe is already 11 dimensional. Why not just dimensions++ to hide the information there?

If you look at quantum theory from the outside it looks like a huge conspiracy to take the piss out of the rest of us mere mortals.

Something is in two places at the same time. Yes they really are. But if you look, then the mere act of looking makes it only in one place. Ok, got that?

Now look at the 3D world around you looks like it made out of different stuff. Well it's really made out of the same stuff, just bent in different ways. But you can't see the bends because they are in other dimensions.

etc etc

By now Startrek is sounding more than believable.

Re: Close your eyes and make a wish

Eradication has been successful on small islands in NZ, but only on very small islands up to a few square km.

There certainly are unintended consequences when eliminating various species because they've often become part of the new modified ecosystem. Removing them does not always mean the ecosystem reverts to what it was; it might get worse.

Re: Okay, so...

If it is a private computer and you live in a country with good consumer guarantees, you might be able to send it back.

Mainstream buzzwords and Gartner

Once Gartner starts talking about it, the PHBs will start asking for some of this DevOps stuff.

Serious money to be made if you lack scruples.....

FTC

FTC do not act on their own bat.

They only act when enough people complain to them.

If people send 250-odd complaints to FTC rather than posting 250-odd comments here, then something might happen.... in 2025 or so. Since FTC is a .gov and not motivated by free market forces, they don't have to act promptly. They can spend a year or three investigating the issue.

Re: Oversized Packaging

Yup

... and a pop-up window says you have to buy another one before it is even empty

... and you can't refill it

Re: Curious

"I'd have thought the much lower gravity would have allowed much steeper gradients to form"

Nope. It is the gravity that creates the forces that lock the particles together. More gravity means the particles lock together more strongly and thus less prone to landslides.

To an extent you can observe this by looking at sand in water where the buoyancy created by the water reduces the weight of the sand and allows it to flow more easily. Of course the water itself has lubricating properties too, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

re:Wearables come with inconvenience?

"Well my phone lives under layers of clothing at this time of year"

It's not a sex toy. Put it in your pocket.

re: Windows NT was also ruined by marketing

Many of the features were explicitly added as "bait and switch" features to lure people into NT.

Remember that in the beginning (before XP), NT was the server OS and Win 95 the desktop OS.

The competition for NT was the various *nix OSs out there including SCO. Thus, MS added various *nix-like features to NT to aid porting application code from *nix to NT. Examples of these are a POSIX layer and pushable streams module support.

But these were very badly implemented - on purpose. Once middleware vendors had drunk the Kool Aid and believed the promises and committed to making their products for NT there was no going back. The POSIX layer sucked (as did the pushable streams modules) so the middleware vendors had to rewrite using NT native calls.

Soon after that Microsoft killed the portability support because nobody used it.

A little bit of rational thought please

We're seeing a lot of polarised crap, including many of the posts here.

On the one side: the "I want all the free stuff I can get from the Intertubes" folks to whom Dotcom is a sort of hero no matter what he does.

On the other side: the "Dotcom is a rich fat bastard that has I dislike because he's made money when I haven't" folk to whom Dotcom is just a person to be kicked in the balls no matter how guilty/innocent he is.

If you really want to talk anything less than rubbish, then acquaint yourself with the case:

https://www.courtsofnz.govt.nz/cases/united-states-of-america-v-dotcom-and-ors/at_download/fileDecision

Not the back door, try the bathroom door!

Well she's knowledgeable on the subject having had a private secure-cough-cough server.

In her case the door would have been to the bathroom she had the server in.

re: piss at an angle

That's going to make for a new game of piss billiards. Sounds like fun. Even more lads will start pissing.

The law of unintended consequences strikes again!

Re: The biggest threat to IoT isn't hackers

The biggest threat to IoT is the lack of added value.

Oooh shiny! doesn't cut it any more.

We're seeing more and more people wanting to do Real Things: bake artisan bread etc.

We're seeing more and more people want to live a Real Life rather than live their own lives vicariously through their apps and devices.

re: Why replace an operating system that is stable and proves to work.

To keep it serviceable.

This is the flip side to COTS hardware - it is cheaper and easier to source, but also goes out of date.

One of my customers has a factory production system that (until recently) worked on an old 386 running DOS. It worked great and nobody was inclined to touch it.

Then one day it stopped working, and forced their hand.

* Can't find a replacement computer that ran slow enough to run the DOS-based software.

* Can't find a replacement that would accept the custom ISA bus card.

So... no production until they re-engineered the system! No bonuses that Christmas.

I also had a similar (though somewhat less dramatic) probelm with an EPROM programmer. It used a Centronics port and DOS software that worked Ok up to 486 speeds, but crapped out with a Pentium. USB->centronics could not get the timing right either. For me it was just a matter of buying a new programmer.

Re: Online sales are very misleading

Hey moron downvotard...

Down voting is a pathetic way of registering a negative emotional reaction to what was said.

If you think what I wrote was crap, then present a coherent argument. Unfortunately you can't, because the facts are facts:

Microsoft crowed about Zune (even the brown one) and Lumia being the hottest sale items on Amazon.com. I don't know how they achieved that when the real results were appalling.

They're so broke they can't even afford enough !s any more.

Marissa was a bullshit hire - window dressing for the invesduhs. A cute person from high up in Google... sounds impressive. Google were going great guns, so it sounded plausible.

But all she's really done is:

1) Micromanage marketing by coming up with the new "innovation" of lilting the !.

2) Getting rid of various perks and flexible working hours etc that developers appreciate. Nett result: the good ones leave, the bad ones who can't find new jobs stay.

3) Lots of parties (Marissa loves shopping for party dresses).

Unfortunately what Yahoo really needed was a tough person who understands business.

Ultimately no paper is really worth anything

All it does is gets you a foot in the door.

What really matters is whether you can actually do the job.

I've done a lot of hiring. I've seen excellent people who have only does a 6-week course in Visual Basic. I've seen useless people with doctorates. The one think I never look at are their degrees and grades.