Posts by Charles 9

Re: Modular was always a silly idea

"Agreed, it ain't easy to get them to cooperate. In countries where Apple has a large market share though, the Android vendors have scope for growing their shared pie. A vibrant ecosystem of pop-on batteries, ports, cameras, keyboards, speakers etc would give the customer another reason not to buy Apple. So even if the consumer has gone with your rival Samsung this time, they might consider your phone next time because it will work with their modules."

But that means no lock-in. Apple wins because of lock-in and "The Midas Touch". If people can buy your brand and NOT buy your brand next, you lose long-term because there's no brand loyalty, and brand loyalty is what they want and, frankly, what they NEED to compete with Apple.

Re: Modular was always a silly idea

"Android phone vendors getting together and agreeing on a standard connector that serves power, data and means of securing the module to the phone / tablet"

Will never happen for both practical and "political" reasons:

Practical reason #1: Dimensions differ too much. The ONLY reason you consistenly see iPhone accessories is because only ONE company makes them and makes them to a limited number of sizes, so aftermarket people have a manageable number of targets. You won't get that with Android device makers since they NEED to differentiate themselves to make their brands stand out. Not to mention you can have phones ranging in size from a compact 3.5" to the big 6+" phablets (I own a Note 4 myself). The size range is just too varied.

"Political" reason #1: Because the brands are competing with each other, they feel they need to be the next Apple and be in control of the walled garden. In such a cutthroat environment, cooperation is eyed suspiciously as an attempt to stab in the back, leaving you with the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Fair enough. I had been thinking about seL4 at the time and knew its formal proof was on the precondition that there was no direct memory access (a common and useful efficiency booster), but I had to wonder if it was possible for a formal proof to be able to cover all cases, but the above shows there's always a way in for Murphy.

But also consider this rebuttal: "Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling" by David Wheeler.

Re: how far?

"consider that in Sweden in the 1950's the (forerunner to) Försvarets radioanstalt had wired up a surprisingly large percentage of homes to a centralised morse code click detection system. They were looking for HF transmissions, heading eastwards. This was sort-of a great RF Firewall. Nowadays achieved by a few SDRs e.g. http://hackgreensdr.org:8901/"

And what's that got to do with the price of tea in...ahem, China, given steganography is meant to disguise one type of traffic as less suspicious traffic?

Just to toss the other side of the coin, just how far could one get with a steganographed VPN before they caught on?

Re: @Charles 9

"After a number of refills, the re-manufactured HP cartridges will stop working because the print head is quite fragile. I would expect properly maintained Epson printers to still be running as long as you can buy ink to refill the cartridges."

But it's easy enough for me to obtain more cartridges. Remanufactured ones are easy enough to find online and have likely only been refilled once, so I keep getting relatively fresh heads when I need it, which I cannot say for the PictureMates, which I've consistently been told are not the realm of amateurs to delouse.

Re: Um...so Lexmark's long term plan...

"Given the cost of a set of ink cartridges frequently being more than a new printer, that's debatable."

That's only in the consumer market where they loss-lead. Commercial devices are a whole other league.

Re: major cause of landfill

"Cost per page is minimal and as you say, the small number of photos needing printing are best done on a commercial grade system."

Unless, of course, you don't have access to one when you need it, which is the reason you have it in the first place...

Re: "Epson ecotanks. That's the approach all manufactures should be taking."

"The nice thing about Epson print heads is that they're very well made, and can be manually dismantled and flushed with a syringe if you really need to."

You've never had to deal with a PictureMate, have you? Most go to the secondhand stores because their heads clog beyond hope of cleaning. It's one reason I switched back to HP photo printers. At least when you change the cart, you change the head, too, and with infrequently-used inkjets like photo printers, head clogs and ink shortages are about even in terms of reasons you can't print when you need it.

Re: Um...so Lexmark's long term plan...

They're figuring on lock-in and sunk costs. As bad as cartridge prices are, they're nothing compared to dumping everything for another brand.

Re: "Epson ecotanks. That's the approach all manufactures should be taking."

But what happened to the HEADS over time?

BUY? I thought they only LEASED.

Re: OK, let me get this straight..

"The problem is that people think Wine means you can just run all Windows software, and that is just too much to ask. Windows can't do that either. There was an interesting project a few years ago, Wine on Windows, as Wine is better for running old Windows software than Windows, but it seams abandoned now.

But ideally, yes, you don't need Wine."

Wine on Windows was abandoned when x86 CPUs got proper virtualization support. Now it's just so much easier to run older Windows stuff on a VM or (if we're walking Win3 stuff) with DOSBox.

As for Wine, that depends. The main reason I'm still with Windows is that it's still the best OS for games PC-wise. The lineups can't even compare, especially at the top end where not even Valve can convince the headliners to go multi-OS, in spite of a plethora of multi-OS-supporting toolkits. Consider that.

Re: Over the years people have done AI projects in software development.

Let me add to the argument here. Going to your chess example, I would suspect a complete novice would not even realize they are losing until their opponent makes the final move and declares checkmate, and usually not even then unless the other player points out why the king is cornered. I know it happens to many a novice. Heck, it happens a lot to novices of Connect Four and Pente, and these are much simpler games.

What allows humans to improvise is a knowledge base taken from firsthand experience. This is something only time can give to AI systems, just as it takes time for humans to figure out the coordination of legs, hips, arm, and wrist needed to make a very good throw (and because this is different for each person due to body types, it's something that can only be hinted, not necessarily taught; you're on your own for the fine-tuning).

After all, the batsman who came to the pitch with that bat probably didn't cook the idea up whole cloth. He probably watched a tennis game and made the connection (perhaps subconsciously). Just as the guys at St. Louis University who first tried gridiron's forward pass probably thought back to games like baseball and thought, "Why not?" Or the high jumper who thought perhaps an arcing movement of the body can allow some extra inches. Bursts of creativity usually don't just spring out of nowhere. AI needs the knowledge base first, and we're only now getting to that part.

Re: Over the years people have done AI projects in software development.

"But the biggest problem - machines STILL DO NOT LEARN. Even in the most impressive of demos and achievements (Google's AlphaGo is unbelievably amazing - I know, I studied Maths and Computer Science under a professor who studied machine-algorithms for winning Go for his entire life... you have no idea of the leaps AlphaGo has made. But it's STILL DOES NOT LEARN)."

For clarification, specify what you mean by "learn" and perhaps give a specific example.

"As soon as the given AI can drive at least as safely as an average human, it should be ok to use it in a self-driving car."

But there's a catch. AIs don't learn the same way we do, and in fact we don't always understand HOW we as humans ourselves learn. For example, there's the concept of intuition: the stuff we learn SUBconsciously, like the very subtle difference between a normal person and a suspicious one, between a car likely to stop and one likely to run the red light, the tells that a huge tree branch is going to fall in my path and I need to get out of the way BEFORE it actually falls (or it'll be too late), or perhaps the hints that the jerk in the corner is just trolling with the self-driving car that can't afford to risk hitting a pedestrian given half the chance. Since we don't know how ourselves we pick up on these subconscious hints, we have no way to teach them to an AI, so it doesn't learn those subtle things that can help prevent accidents without our even thinking about them. If you look up "self-driving cars intuition" you should probably find a few articles that wonder the same thing.

Re: Unverifiability: Welcome to the Real World, where things are more complex than they seem.

Only thing is, statistics are even less truthful than damned lies...

Re: right ..

"all of what you described can be easily configured using the level-based init scripts"

Scripts that can be subtly MISWRITTEN. I speak from experience. Like I said, do one thing sounds nice until it does the one thing WRONG. Think of the term command chain. And chains tend to have weak links; problem is, it's usually tough to find which link is the weak one until it's too late.

Re: Nuclear Internet of Things

Well, either that or because the environment is enclosed, meaning stray deposits are confined in a potentially dangerous area.

Re: Whilst it's a nice idea...

"And honestly, if you're gonna play do-gooder like Mozilla, maybe you shouldn't be part of this insanity? People are actually getting killed, tortured and imprisoned as a result of computers getting compromised via browser vulnerabilities. This is not some theoretical scenario - it's very much ongoing.

How many human lives is WebGL or a higher benchmark score worth?"

Oh? Specifics, please, because what you say is the kind of thing that could put the government on them...criminally.

Re: Whilst it's a nice idea...

Even if that's what the public wants? Don't forget we're in the distinct minority here.

Re: Whilst it's a nice idea...

So you want a license to use something people use in the privacy of their own homes? Not even driver's licenses go that far (a car driven on private property doesn't require a license).

What we need is some kind of HARDWARE lock such that anything potentially stupid requires getting up and pushing an actual button or even inserting and turning a key to engage. The trick would be to actually make it enforceable and nigh impossible to bypass.

Re: Back to the future

Because that's what Joe Stupid wants: turnkey simplicity, and Stupid outvotes you: both in numbers and in money. Which means we need another plan.

Re: GET OFF MY LAWN!

I don't know. All the sheep would do is graze it and leave fertilizer. Meanwhile, rugby players wear cleats. Things get ugly, they can probably tear any lawn to shreds.

"What we are trying to avoid is a situation where it is so easy and cheap for almost anyone to rifle through your personal life, that they can do it en masse and for almost nothing per person."

And what I'm saying is that I don't think they did enough to raise that cost. For example, there's a point of trust in this new system. All the plods would have to do is subvert or duplicate this starting point, then they have ways to trace you and then just do highly-targeted attacks as needed.

As for the $5 xkcd solution, I've always said it doesn't work against two types of people: wimps (who keep fainting at the mere sight) and masochists (who are turned on by the wrench and ask you to hit harder).

Re: Properties of a Parking/Emergency Brake

"And that some place the hazard light button in the stupidest places (which idiot puts it on the column behind the wheel?!)"

Someone who doesn't want the driver's hands to drift too far away from the steering wheel in the event you DO need those hazard blinkers, especially if you have to do it by feel because it's night and your interior lights are gone for some reason.

Re: Properties of a Parking/Emergency Brake

They could be like air brakes: engaged on power-down instead of on power-up creating a failsafe. And I don't know if push-starting a Bolt is a good idea. They work most consistently with sticks because of the way the wheels connect to the engine (I HAVE started stick cars a couple times in the past by carefully engaging first gear while the car was coasting). Most autos I know you can't push start because the Torque Converter gets in the way. Anyway, you can't push-start a car with a flat battery (no way to bootstrap the alternator to kick off the charging cycle).

Re: Be careful what you wish for.

"Security is usually expensive. Long term support is ALWAYS expensive."

And users are CHEAP. Solve for secure users such that the Internet doesn't break.

So what do you do when (1) you have a device you use everyday but has a security hole big enough to drive a Mac truck through, (2) the only update available will defeat the very reason you use the thing, (3) your other hardware and the device's use case prevents you from segregating it, and (4) you don't have any money to replace the device?

"A bit of end-user education would go a long way here."

Except as a comedian said, "You can't fix Stupid." So how do you fix the problem when you have hopeless users?