Posts by Pete 2 3500 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
> Get rolling again, and streaming content will continue in audio-only form.
> It makes sense; one would not want drivers jabbing away at the touchscreen while their vehicle thunders down the highway.
Unless they are randomly jabbing away trying to get the video back. Something that mysteriously disappeared as soon as the driver should have started paying attention to the view in front, rather than on their screen.
> But the supply chain challenges have also worsened for Raspberry Pi 4 models in the last month
Not what you want to announce if you are planning an IPO in 2022
> "We have no guidance about what we need to do, so how do we do it?"
Perhaps if they took some of their lawyers off making up specious excuses and put them to work on reading the EU law, they could work out what needed to be done. As every other company that manages to operate without breaking that particular law, does.
They would probably get to the solution even quicker if the daily penalty was increased,
> But what if you don't edit code and don't need syntax highlighting and all that jazz?
Use Libreoffice
> What if you just need to occasionally tweak a config file?
Then it doesn't matter - since it is only occasional use. The secret is to learn the most common ONE, that is available on every platform. If that is vi or nano, so be it.
While all those "arcane" editors have many features, it is not obligatory or sensible to use them all. The only features an average user needs to know are how to open a file, navigate to the correct place (line), alter text and save the results.
> ASRAAM missile to destroy the "small hostile drone." ... estimated to cost around £200,000 per unit
Not to mention the cost of the aircraft required to launch it from.
However, I recall a line from the film Charlie Wilson's War about the US involvement in countering the russian invasion of Afghanistan. The idea was that the USA-ians supplied the insurgents with "cheap" missiles to shoot down expensive russian aircraft. Something along the lines of "If they can shoot down a $10 million helicopter with a $100,000 missile the russians will lose"
The line may well be apocryphal, but tactically it has a ring of truth to it.
> the strong light from a tablet
Not being familiar with Apple products I admit to speaking from a position of ignorance.
However, I would expect any decently designed tablet to have a night-time mode or app, that altered both the brilliance of the screen and maybe even its colour.
> more than half of UK employees would quit if their company pulled hybrid working options
Although I reckon that is about the norm, with or without any particular benefit being the subject of the survey.
The point being that there is a large proportion of employees who spend all their time grumbling about how bad their employer / boss / working conditions are
And how they are (always) thinking of leaving.
But none of them ever do (more's the pity for those they would leave behind). Partly because they are all talk and no trousers, but mostly because no other company would employ a morose git who would spend their entire time at their new company complaining about how bad things there were.
> Although everything had been planned. Nothing could go wrong. Right?
... is a failure of the planning process.
After all, if it was admitted that the planning process could fail, then the knock-on is that nothing could be trusted. Although that degree of paranoia realism is probably the secret of successful planning.
And if the planning process is considered open to fault, the conclusion can only be that it is impossible to plan for that. Since that plan would also involve the (faulty) planning process.
> Oxidiser improves the burn efficiency of the hydrazine fuel
I have a sneaking suspicion that the NTO does a little more than "improve" the hydrazine. Without it, the telescope would just be squirting N2H4 out of its thrusters.
P.S. for a very readable book on the subject, try Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants available from a south american river. Ideal for the christmas period when there's bugger-all on TV.
> Do we really need the “freedom” to choose whatever you want on your desktop, or laptop, or indeed, your data center?
Yes.
Not to be free to choose (that can be done on a cloud based operation, anyway). But the freedom to decide when to change supplier, when to find a better price and when to re-architect stuff as the business changes.
As for capex / opex, those arguments are bogus. It is quite easy to get external finance for capital purchases. Thus replacing the monthly cloud costs with monthly loan repayments.
> breaking things in obscure ways
Oh yes.
Even when that "start job" is an nfs mount request to a system that has been turned off (i.e.the box being booted has had no changes applied to it since the last successful boot) AND that the mount options in fstab include bg to background the mount.
Bitter? Me? Yes please, I'll have a pint.
> "I still wonder if it is still being used..."
Many years ago the company that paid me to sit at a desk bought a proprietary system from an american company. It ran (IIRC) Solaris 2.6 and was the epitome of a "black box" solution. Data went in and something useful came out.
The machine was locked up tight. Nobody in the company had access to it. No-one knew the root password. It never received any software updates whatsoever and it kept running.
It seems to me that provided the o/s and the apps are stable and that adequate security is implemented, there is never any need to perform updates - or introduce new bugs as the skeptic might describe the process.
Is it still running today? Doubtful, since external environments change and boxen that do not change with them become obsolete. However that little box was the "perfect" computer. it never needed maintenance. it never crashed. It just quietly got on with its job.
I suspect that if it had been allowed to, it would continue running indefinitely. Much like that Linux box that gets stuck on boot-up with "a start job is running ... no limit" report on the (text) console. That is, if the user knows how to get to the text console.
> "Server Error 500."
ISTM there are two issues here.
The first is to appease irate users who have made the basic error of relying on technology that still needs another 5 minutes under the grill before it will be ready for everyday use by everyday users.
The second is that the function of an error message is to communicate state in an accurate (top priority) and concise form. Such that those in the position and with the ability to resolve it receive the information they require.
In the second case short numerical error messages do the job very well. Provided the error codes are unique and well enough defined that a single code points to a single cause of failure (and from there, hopefully a well defined fix). Their nature also makes it easy for a non-techy to report the exact message to those who need to know. Often without too much prompting.
However, they also provide a perfect platform for tech-haters to criticise systems for "gobbledygook" as their meaning is obscure to the average person. However, would a longer message, along the lines of "I'm so sorry but the computer is completely buggered up at the moment. We will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal" be any more helpful than "Oooops, sorriy", or just :( ?
> preparing to attach the telescope to the launch vehicle adapter, a "sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band"
So basically, they dropped it.
However, I suspect that the JWST will be subject to a great deal more vibration¹ during launch, so is this incident playing down the event?
[1] especially if this is still an issue:
the August 2020 launch and the previous Ariane launch in February 2020, the separation of the faring induced vibrations into the payload stack well above acceptable limits
I used to do a lot of capacity planning. The actual hardest part was persuading t' management that:
a) I knew what I was talking about
b) that they would have to spend money
However, the traditional process as described in ITIL and ISO9000 has largely become obsolete. What seems to happen more is that systems become vulnerable to unpredicted and often unknown behaviours due to crappy software design and architectures. Oh .... and networks.
Things that cannot be solved simply by running down to PC World for all the SIMMs they have in stock, or invoking the magic of capacity on demand.
> the first Artemis crewed mission to the moon until 2025
Yet a few months ago SpaceX said they would be ready to send people to the Moon "before 2024".
Even given SpaceX's rather optimstic and frequently missed projections AND combine that with NASA's dates slipping in almost real-time, there is a pretty good chance than a musky rocket will make it there before a NASA manned mission.
At which point, there will be a lot of american politicians asking what would be the point of a NASA mission?
A question that would have few answers that did not include the word (or implication) "pork".
The "pressure" to replace perfectly working and usable consumer kit with this year's model is due to advertising - Sales and Marketing. That is what creates the demand. Cut that back and the demand drops a lot. Just look at the cigarette industry.
But when you do that, sales drop and income drops too. And as a company's income drops, so does the amount it can spend on R&D. Although this might be recouped by the savings from not pushing advertisements to disinterested punters.
However, with old computers there is another consideration. As with polluting old cars, sometimes they should be taken out of service and replaced with better alterntives that do the same job but use far less electricity to get there.
I had a 486 computer many years ago that apart from its function as providing blue light from its screen (yes, it ran Windows 3.1) it also acted as a room heater. Sometimes it would run programs. Now, something like a Raspberry Pi has far greater computing power and uses just a small percentage of the electricity.. Though that does mean I need a room heater.
Is this a common trait among operating systems, these days?
That all they amount to is either bug fixes / support for new hardware or attempts to monetise their victims users even more?
If OS's were evaluated on the basis of what a new release would allow users to do, that they could not do in the previous release, would we find any real improvement over the past 5 years? Or 10 ... 20, possibly?
> NASA has set a date for the test of the technologies it hopes will see it return to the Moon and explore Mars: February 2022.
> .... it would be no surprise if the February date slipped.
And as Douglas Adams said: I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
That could be the only fly-by that this mission achieves.
One problem is that this coating is not 100% effective. It was written elsewhere that it "only" kills 99.9% of microbes.
We have to assume, therefore, that the 0.1% that survive will be the strongest, most potent and therefore most dangerous ones.
While the wimpiest ones might give people an easily fought-off dose of whatever (thereby priming their immune system), leaving behind only the "schwarzenegger" variants, anything that a person does catch from an unhygienic keyboard (or telephone handset) will be worse for them.
> And for the record, we tried on numerous occasions to cause the so-called corruption
I sometimes dismantle old, dead, HDDs for the magnets. I have several of them stuck on the side of my PC as I write this. They have never caused any pr0q2w38iv dzzzzz that I have seen.
> the expectation to make money off said content
Until computer makers are willing to provide hardware for free, all the electricity used comes at zero cost and software support people will donate their time for nothing, there will always be costs associated with running a website.
It is not always about making a profit - which I'd guess only applies to 1 in 10,000 websites.
> These three ideas are: legibility, agency and negotiation.
What it needs before any of this is usability. However this is implemented it must not get in the way of the user.
So no popups, no having to click on anything. In fact no requirement for the user to think at all.
Without that it is just another annoying impediment, along the lines of "your privacy is important to us".
And if this system can produce some completely random user "data" to feed to the websites, so much the better.
> the flyers ranging from the microscale, below 1mm, to the macroscale, above 1 mm
No mention of how these things would be powered (more toxic metals). At 1mm and needing the abillty to transmit their sensor information from wherever the wind blows them back to base are we talking about hours, minutes or seconds before they become just more inert junk?
> embracing the chaos of choices in the Linux world and using it to build something that's well-designed and user-friendly.
When I can simply plug in a printer and it just works, then I will know that Linux is getting there.
When I can install any new package with just one click and maybe the occasional "OK", it will have arrived.
I've been using Linux almost daily since the beginning and to be blunt it started off as a test of hacking¹ skills and hasn't progressed much past that.
[1] when being a hacker was a good thing (at least, within the hacker community)
> The email then laid out multiple conditions Rohrer would have to meet if he wanted to continue using the language model's API
It seems odd that a company which specialises in AI requires people to police its products and how other people use them.
Supervising the use of GPT-3 instances and ensuring that they conform to the acceptable use policies would be a perfect job ... for an AI.
A conversation I earwigged, not being involved personally. But due to the nature of the issue I could not help but overhear.,
The on-call support person on a particular friday night was someone who "knew their rights" and worked to the letter of their job description.
At the time THE PHONE rang, they had just sat down to a romantic dinner at a local establishment. This was a time when any sort of mobile phone was quite a novelty, before the era of smartphones and laptops. It was not recorded whether that "romance" involved anyone else, but I digress.
It turned out that the support person knew that the conditions of being on call required them to respond within 45 minutes. So 40 minutes after the phone rang (and apparently rang several more times) they called to find out what was interrupting their carefully planned, to coincide with being on call, night out.
The details of the emergency were not part of the post-mortem, but downtime of the main server was said to be in the order of £5-figures per hour. What was apparent was the difference in interpretation of what "respond to a call" meant.
It was explained to the support person that responding meant presenting themselves in body and mind at the premises to perform whatever was necessary to resolve the problem. This explanation was made loudly and in words that left no room for misunderstanding. And that when the on call phone rang, they were pretty damn well expected to answer it instantly.
Production issues of this nature were quite rare, so the depth of the support person's understanding was never tested.
> it does not know "when or even if" a quantum computer will exist to "exploit" public key cryptography.
I wonder what the response would be if that question was asked of the chinese?
China emerges as quantum tech leader while Biden vows to catch up (says the chinese!)
> multidirectional, distributed currents on conductive surfaces built into the walls.
So lining the walls with conductive material.
It just means that reason your phone won't work is due to the lack of signal inside what is effectively a screened room. Or walk-in microwave oven.
Though it will stay fully charged - just so long as the batteries don't explode.
> outline strict yet vague measures on how and when data is collected and managed, individuals' rights, and who ultimately owns data.
It seems odd that supposedly progressive countries have to look to authoritarian governments to set the standard for citizens rights.
Still I suppose when you aren't inconvenienced by having to ask permission, setting such standards is a much easier task.
Yes. Any half-decent AI would be able to detect when a user was trying it on and would respond accordingly. Something along the lines of "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that".
That they are too dumb to differentiate honest intent from mischief, the only conclusion is that they are much more "A" than "I".
> Unfortunately true.
Quite possibly.
Although everyone knows thanks to Yes Minister that the public attitude depends completely on the questions asked.
Do you want the NHS to release selected anonymised health data to research institutes so they can develop better drugs and treatments?
Do you want the NHS to sell your private health information to commercial companies to make a profit from?
Disagreeing with or disliking the idea that people simply don't care does not invalidate it as a possible reason. Reality is not a popularity contest or a democratic choice. Nor does nature recognise what is good or fair.
> Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – have agreed to share some satellite sensing data.
So another version of the five spies
(Though I suspect that in reality each group has at least 10 eyes)
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