"Those implants and associated hardware are keeping people alive, they can't just announce the end of support and wash their hands of the product."
That's not End Of Support, that's EOL.
1954 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Dec 2017
'I wrote a wee sed script to mangle "Letter" to "A4" on our print server. A lot of problems stopped after that.'
Perhaps to be replaced by other problems?
Dear Alan,
Thank you for the A4 you sent me yesterday. Though I am left wondering if it is following the spirit of the law, or the A4 of the law?
"What CMU's comp sci types have added is a sophisticated sound-labeling model trained on high-quality sound effects libraries, the sort used in Hollywood entertainment and electronic games."
I wonder if they realise that those sorts of sound libraries are often built with fake sounds? Look up what it is that foley artists actually do to to create sound effects. Some examples from Wikipedia -
* Corn starch in a leather pouch makes the sound of snow crunching.
* A heavy staple gun combined with other small metal sounds make good gun noises.
* Burning plastic garbage bags cut into strips makes a realistic sounding candle or soft non-crackling fire when the bag melts and drips to the ground.
That last one is fun. Is the device hearing you burning some candles for a romantic interlude, or is your kitchen garbage bin on fire? Having the fire brigade turning up at your tenth anniversary dinner might not be a good idea.
* Frozen romaine lettuce makes bone or head injury noises.
* Canned dog food can be used for alien pod embryo expulsions and monster vocalizations.
Soooo, is your home under alien attack, or are you feeding your dog?
"It has experienced wonderful successes in the last ten years now that neural networks have been renamed as deep learning.”
Ah, AI is a renaming problem. We just have to find the correct name for it and that will solve all the problems. I look forward to a newly expanded dictionary for playing Buzzword Bingo.
"Facebook is consistently losing users, particularly those who are under 30 -- so I think the general public is actually starting to become aware that Facebook is a bad deal and should be avoided."
I suspect that might be more "Argh, my parents are on Facebook now", it's no longer cool.
So now my girlfriend will have to use something else to send me photos of her latest drawings of goldfish, and videos of her daughters violin performances. We'll live. Though it will be good to not have to wade through random friends anti Trump posts on the way to view those photos and videos.
Bring back Google Wave, at least I got some use out of that.
"Wonder why they used an Arduino for the sonic screwdriver? Its clearly visible, in fact you can see the model number and chip version in freeze frame.
"Also is that a 555 timer?! Old school."
If you are talking about the new Doctor Who, she was building her new sonic screwdriver out of what ever random parts she found in that Earth workshop. A 555 might be old school, but it still does the job if that's all you can find. Likely something a little more powerful than an Arduino would be needed for the brains of the device, but the local super computers of the time are not particularly portable. When scavenging parts to build tech, you make do with what you find.
"Took 54 mins on my 4 year old SP3. Who cares?"
Took two hours on the laptop I was using this morning. I care, coz I wanted to boot the thing into Linux to get some work done, instead I was left staring into space and twiddling my thumbs.
This is another case where dual booting is preferred to running VMs. It's not my laptop, the people that own it expect it to boot into Windows, the Linux stuff I was doing this morning is rather memory intensive, and there's not that much memory on the laptop. So no room to run a VM.
"Micro" and "soft" are not words you want associated with your sex doll. Though you might want a couple of windows installed, for the eyes to peer through. The Blue Screen Of Detumescence is to be avoided, or you'll end up with SadNads.
On the other hand, using a pengiun based sex doll is just too kinky, even for me. Perhaps BSD should be installed, especially if you are into BDSM.
"It is extremely unlikely that power is available on any pads they are soldiered to."
There is this thing called phantom power. You use the data signal for power. I know this sort of thing was being done in the early '90s, the company I was working for did it for MIDI devices. Could suck enough juice from the MIDI signal lines to power the microcontroller and the rest of the circuitry, no need to plug in a wall wart.
"Doing micro-benchmark timing aggregation is a straightforward way to guarantee platform-agnosticism, making implementations for any purpose simple and auditable."
I look forward to your work hitting the Debian software repos. Currently I'm using haveged.
"Dont worry youngsters, you'll never have to worry about the wierd n wonderful stuff on old keyboards like "Refresh" :)"
We still have to wonder why modern keyboards have "Break", "Pause", and "SysRq". Maybe they are there so Microsoft have an excuse. "It's slow coz you accidentally hit the Pause key." "Whatever you do, never hit the Break key, coz then you get to keep both halves.".
Oh look, there's something old and crusty on my keyboard.
"several Linux distros installed and which all share a common /home because I apparently like to make life difficult for myself"
It's actually a recommended way of doing things by some distros, to the point they'll do that automatically if you don't tell it otherwise. Separate /home and /boot. The reason for /home is so you can share it between distros. The reason for /boot is that in the past you had to have that near the beginning of the drive, something that hasn't been true for a long time.
"that's as close to a logical reason I have for having multiple distros installed on one machine"
I have one machine with over two dozen different operating systems on it, mostly Linux. I have a micro SD card that I call "Magic Pixie Dust", with all those distros on it, so I have a variety of choice if I have to boot into something to fix some one else's computer, demonstrate something, or just offer them a choice of distro to install. I keep the master for that on the second hard drive of my test box, with the boxes usual WIndows / Linux on the first drive.
I don't share my /home, coz different distros, and different versions of distros, have different versions of applications, some of which change the way their config files work. In particular tmux which seems to change the names of options I use with each release.
I usually prefer the "one big partition" scheme. Otherwise you invariably run out of space on one, while having plenty of space on the others, then you need to juggle files and symlinks, or resize partitions to get things to fit once more.
You can always just not use the DNS server the router tells you to use. Which is exactly what I did after moving to a new place where the Internet is supplied by a shared WiFi / ADSL router that is controlled by the Evil Telstra. I miss my previous Fibre To The Bedroom in the old place.
"Be careful. I know for a fact some of those Street View pictures are old and things can change in the interim."
I was once using Street View to get textures for building a virtual copy of the building the local city councilor's office is in, a demo for making an entire virtual ward for the councilor. The Street View picture was so old, there was still a large photo of his predecessor on the side of the building.
"how to avoid 13"
Let the programmers take over the next mission, coz all programmers count from zero. That way the next one will be number 12, then we can switch to hexadecimal, and the one after will be number C, and finally NASA comes to it's senses, returning to the original numbering system, coz hexadecimal will eventually get to 13 again, and the 14th astronaut steps out.
Or if that isn't confusing enough use the Dr Who numbering system. Would be good to see a woman walk on the moon.