Posts by gnasher729 2112 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Oct 2014
Sure, an algorithm is just some software running without the ability of being racist or nor (currently).
However, if trusting biased results of an algorithm has the exact same effect as being racist, then any non-racist person would want a very, very, very big warning sight attached to the algorithm. For example: “Warning: Racist algorithm”..
Infosys is the 137th largest company in the world. They donated a million dollars. So what did the 136 other companies do?
But what do you think happens when say McDonald's pulls out of Russia? They can't just leave. There are restaurants that they have to lock down, cancel rent contracts, do their taxes, fire employees, and so on. They can stop selling burgers instantly, but they can't just leave. So what kind of company would you hire to look after that stuff? Some Russian company, or someone like Infosys?
There's all this nonsense about a green card. If the USA doesn't want you to work in the USA, they can just take away your green card.
Or stupid stories about his wife giving a loan without interest payment to a company that went bankrupt and of which she owned less than five - that's perfectly fine as long as you report the actual facts to the HMRC, and they can tell you "you should have charged interest, so we assume you charged X in interest" if they don't like it. And as it is, the company went bankrupt, and she lost the loan, and would have lost any interest anyway.
The same stupidity here apparently.
So she is rich. Her father started Infosys, which is about 25 times the size of Marks and Spencer. That’s how she is rich. I’d say deal with it. Complain to your dad that he didn’t start a successful company.
Infosys paid out $1.2 billion in dividends last year. So she made some money. Deal with it.
I could have stayed non-domiciled when I moved to England. Didn’t seem worth it to me. If I had huge income from India I’d have thought about it. Don’t like it? Change the laws. But everyone is free to arrange their taxes in the most efficient legal way. As all contractors reading this site will appreciate. So guys, deal with it.
She had no influence on Infosys’ business. They have 290,000 employees, 100 in Russia, so that’s about $400,000 profit from Russia. Her portion of that would be $3,500. But this war is less than 2 months old, so one sixth is $600. Yes, that’s positively evil.
I have a very very old one. I was still at school, about 15 , and we had this one teacher who was really into computers. That is microprocessors. That is naked microprocessors, a bit before the Apple II computer. And he did computer courses where among other things he explained binary numbers.
One day one of the guys doing the course comes in and says "You saved my company thousands". It turns out he worked in a sawmill. And they had this machine that could cut would into planks exactly for example 275 centimetre long. And when they wanted 300 centimetre planks, they had to call someone from the company who charged lots of money to make some magic changes to some switches and it would do 300 centimetre planks.
This young man then noticed that there was a set of ten switches. And the switches were set to the board length, in binary. So they tried it, changed one particular switch and the length changed by 64 centimetres. Changed it back and everything fine. From that day on they didn't call the manufacturer anymore and could cut any length of planks within two minutes.
BND (German Bundesnachrichtendienst) has Recording of Russian soldiers being ordered to kill civilians. Well, it’s not reasonable to believe that Ukrainians killed themselves or killed hundreds of their people to create false reports of war crimes. But there is actual evidence that makes Russians crimes clear beyond reasonable doubt.
What happened: Epic submitted an application for review to Apple; Apple accepted it and put it on the App Store. Epic then changed the behaviour of programs that users had already downloaded; the change had not been seen by Apple to the review, and Apple would have 99% refused to accept it. If Apple had just refused to accept it, that would then by some normal conflict between the companies.
However, submitting an app that behaves differently during review than the same app installed on a user's device is absolutely against Apple's guidelines and for very good reason, because it makes a farce out of every review. So the app was blocked, Epic was told, and Epic filed a court case against Apple hours later. So clearly this had been planned that way by Epic all along.
Now I think it is quite normal that Apple doesn't want to do any business whatsoever with a company behaving like that, and they will never put any apps by Epic on their store. I think it will be very hard to argue against this, because it has nothing to do with competition, but with what is and what is not acceptable behaviour when you do business, and whether Apple can be forced to do business with a company like that.
I thought the principle would be that you don’t check the password, but that the password is used to decrypt some key.
For example, on an iPhone a 256 bit number inside the processor, a 256 bit number stored on your drive, and your passcode are hashed to gather and then used to decrypt a master key. So no matter what security you break, it’s impossible to break in without the passcode. There is additional security that can be broken, but you need the passcode to unlock.
Seen that in action. Anyone with ancient Mac programming experience has written something like
#define appleMenu 1
#define fileMenu 2
#define editMenu 3
And now imagine a tool that drops special characters, digits and line endings and complains about a lot of nudity! (It destroyed some files before we figured out what happened).
Germany has a nicer method for this. The insurance company will send you a friendly reminder letter (your third party insurance is still valid), then an unfriendly reminder letter (your third party insurance is still valid), then one very unfriendly letter to you, with a copy to the police, who will turn up and tell you to make the sure the car cannot be driven. But no chance that you do something illegal without knowing. You'll know :-)
I remember a bug like that where the software played up on the first day of the month, from midnight local time to midnight UTC. Only customers in Australia noticed when they started work 8am which was before midnight UTC.
QA had no chance to find this. Half a year it just worked in the UK, half the year if failed one day a month from midnight to 1am when no testing was done.
Just assume that if men outnumber women 6 to 1, then maybe the top 60% of men and the top 10% of women try to get in. Don't know how they would compare if you took the top 10% of men, but as it is, the women will be better on average.
And sometimes women are socially better adapted, and adding one woman to a team of man can improve overall performance.
Probably over 30 years ago, Apple sold Macs with various 40 Megabyte hard drives. The actual capacities were between 39.5MB and 41MB, but they all came formatted as 39.5MB, so if one broke down, you could replace it and the replacement would work.
Until some people got smart and formatted their 41MB drives as 41MB, and when they broke down they couldn't replaced with most 40MB drives...
When apple started getting serious about auto save, I had to test it. Waited for an OS update. Created three new TextEdit documents and typed in some text without changing. Then I installed the new oS which involved a reboot. After the reboot, TextEdit opened with thee untitled documents and all the text there.
Just the usual snarky comments, as should be expected. Anyone noticed that _nobody_ is building a device like this right now?
I just got a new monitor with USB-C, I could plug in this keyboard and a mouse and be done. Perfect for shared workspaces, just unplug it when you leave then plug in where you sit the next morning. Seems a good idea. Downside: No battery. Unplug the USB-C cable and you have a brutal shutdown.
But really I’d want to be able to get a keyboard, mouse and monitor of my choice. I’d shrink the macmini as far as possible, add something so I can attach it to the back of my monitor with the shortest possible cable, and add a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Monitor from £120 to £500, and you save a good amount compared to an iMac.
"But it puts an onus on the authorities to discard and not use that juicy information".
Don't think "whistle blower" with no money in their pockets. Whistle blowers didn't pay thousands per year. Think multi-millionaire wanting to talk to his divorce lawyer without anyone listening in. That kind of information, if the police leak it, they have a very rich person with a very good lawyer _who has not done anything wrong_ to answer to.
First, sending a message is not a thought crime. Second, end-to-end encryption means it is not encrypted where it starts and where it ends. So if the receiver of your message thinks that sending it was a crime, then you are in trouble. That's quite natural, isn't it?
If you think that Apple received a design patent for "rounded corners" then you are very confused. First, design patents are not patents. Second, you can't get a design patent for rounded corners. You get a design patent for a complete design, of which rounded corners can be one part. Interestingly, Samsung also had design patents for devices with rounded corners at exactly the same time. But for whatever reasons, Samsung then built devices that matched Apple's design patents, instead of building devices that matched their own device patents.
And then Samsung brought a lawyer to court who was shown an Apple tablet and a Samsung tablet and couldn't pick out which one was which... Which actually didn't mean much except it demonstrated they hired a lawyer who went to court embarrassingly badly unprepared.
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