Posts by John Smith 19 16330 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
In the Senate 52 of 100 Senators are Republican
In the Congress 239 of 435 are Republican. 3 seats vacant.
Granted 2 is a wafer thin majority in the Senate by UK standards but I think this is close to SOP and both parties have ways to manage this.
Even if the 3 vacant seats go Democrat that would still leave 196 seat majority.
This would seem more than enough to pass whatever legislation the Republicans want.
Yet they still give the impression of being in disarray.
Sounds a bit fishy to me.
US politics continues to baffle me.
On the one hand you have the "Everyone con-gressperson-for-themself" where it seems to be impossible to get consensus to (for want of a better phrase) "Just f**king get on with it" then you have absolute fault line along party lines of that completely blocks on other issues (taxes and healthcare?)
And the biggest one of all.
Trump is a Republican. The Republicans have majorities in both houses.
How can bills and even a budget still not get passed?
Which goes back to wheather people actually know what they are running and why, at least in terms of software.
These are such basic questions that no one in the 2nd decade of the 21st century who calls themselves a sysadmin should be having to do this manually (or keep it updated manually)
But I strongly suspect there are quite a lot who are. :-(
As Kernigham & Plauger put it in "Software Tools in Pascal" this is (the network equivalent) of literally "Red penciling" a program listing to find where a variable is used.
"Is it really difficult to see a repeat of the WinCry situation coming along Real Soon Now? "
Not at all. Given that in the UK 7 NHS trusts reported they had no budget item for "IT Security" it's looking like a near certainty (although it would be interesting to see how they coped, relative to others who did have such an item).
There are highly unlikely events that are very uncommon and difficult to guard against and hard to recover from. Fair enough. You do your best to plan for them and hope they won't happen, like an airliner crashing on the data center. Something I imagine AIG never gave a second thought to. How could you attack a data center half way up the World Trad Center?
But then there's predictable failure that is completely avoidable with minimal precautions, if some PHB had paid the slightest attention to the consequences of what they were being told.
My point exactly.
MS love to create "standards." If enough of them take off they continue to force people to stay on MS platforms. "Everyone will be using this in X years. You'd be a fool not to start coding for it" blah blah.
I'd love to find out what proportion do so, and what proportion go down the gurgler and are airbrushed out of the official history.
Quite a lot I suspect. I'm sure we can all think of a few that crashed and burned.
Bet that's not what they said when they introduced it.
Once again it comes down to a simple set of questions.
What does this (open) port do?
Why should this service be accessible?
Who should this service be available to?
Any sysadmin who cannot answer those questions for a network they are responsible for (or who lacks the tools to do so) is not even minimally in control of their network.
Not only would its scores improve with time but also the rate at which its scores improve should increase.
The first means it has learned what to do.
The second that it has learned what to do which is important.
This demos seems to show the first (gets better) but not that it's gotten better by "working out" what's important (because it's not adjusting it's own weighings. They've been hard coded in).
Now " AI through language processing," sounds quite interesting, depending on exactly what they mean by the phrase.
Actually trying to make sense of a sentence by y'know reading it (rather than running it against upteen million other sentences) has seen limited interest for some time now. Looking at again might prove useful.
Not so much for playing Pacman. Or even for Ms Pacman
Because putting your governments business on servers outside your jurisdiction would be stupid, even if the price was better.
Would people feel the USG was more clueful if they called it a "server consolidation" or better yet a "data centre consolidation" to a single data centre (with backup) offering (presumably) high security and high availability as (shared) services?
Same thing. Different language.
Remember though that in a bureaucracy
in house "data center" --> staff and budget --> increased responsibility --> increased power.
external data centre --> loss of staff & budget --> responsibility for migration--> loss of power at the end, since client departments won't have the power to hire and fire AWS.
True a modern phone is quite small, but when you have that many together...
OTOH the cards are quite small.
My instinct is someone has built custom racks with a lot of SIM slots in that time slice between a (relatively) small number of actual phones. Throughput then depends on how fast the phones can be made to swap cards in software.
Another option would be such a rack with GMS modules, essentially phones without displays, microphones or speakers, used by things like drinks machines to let the HO know they've run out of cans.
But SIM card swapping on this scale is going to be a real PITA.
Obviously some of them are providing access to (for example) specialist academic resources.
But who are the rest of them?
And what would happen if you logged in with a) No credentials b) "guest"
Who would still be using telenet to get remote access to systems to administer them in 2017?
The standard reference for old NASA space computers is
Computers In Spaceflight: The NASA Experience where you'll find out all sorts of quite detailed stuff about how NASA built and ran those missions, right back to the days when the state of the are was a "cam timer," essentially the device used in old washing machines.
Interesting points.
TTL has a rep for being power hungry, but it wasn't too bad if you kept the clock frequency down. The standard 16 and 18 pin packages used made the packing density quite good (for the time). Today we'd go surface mount and increase it 4x at a stroke.
Quite a few of these processors were bit serial, with "word length" set by width of registers (which might also be serial, being a string of ultrasound pulses in a delay line memory).
The availability of a 4 bit ALU (LS74181 and it's CMOS equivalent) made new processors easier, if you could take the clock speed limits and you can operate in chunks of 4 bits, which was OK for a lot of people.
When you control the hardware if it''s not fast enough not only can you hack the code, you can hack the instruction set as well. :-)
Then you hack the assembler to support the new instructions (no HLL, no YACC or Lex to write one)
From that era it seems only the RCA 1802 was available early enough and rugged enough for space use. It's sort of like the SPARC, a big register set and on chip DMA, DMA is very handy for space probes.
A very different world.
Today you hand BAe Systems $150K for a rad hard POWERPC board instead.
People say we will not see his like again but I think it says a lot at how hard it is to be truly innovative that we are still using many of the elements pioneered on the Alto, despite processors being 1000x faster and memory 64000x bigger than they were then.
Hardware hacking at a deep level has become a hell of a lot harder. People say look at FPGA's. Yes you can get a million gates on a chip but you won't get anywhere near x86 or AMD processor speeds in the GHz, not the 100s of MHz. There is no equivalent of the LS74181 ALU (that drove the Alto, PDP 11, and the Nova, and a bunch of other machines) at ECL clock speeds (although it's well within the techs clock and density range at less than 80 gates, and the design methods needs for such clock speeds are no longer in the realm of a "black art."
Nothing leverages the huge improvements we have seen in toolchains ability to re-host truly massive code bases, not just onto an upgraded version of a processor but onto a processor whose architecture did not even exist.
I'm not sure what the next step change will be but I expect that when it occurs there will be another Charles Thacker. In the meantime RIP.
It really is about "Find me 6 lines from an honest man and I'll find something with which to hang him."
This desire to know everything, about everyone. To store every aspect of peoples lives forever is a compulsive illness.
It is grossly disproportionate to the real threat. It is an obsession with no rational basis in logic.
Looks like most politicians would.
The UK figures bear repeating.
36 dead due to terrorist incidents since 7/7/05. IE 3 extra deaths a year over a 12 year period.
Equal to the number of people who died of smoking related illnesses in NHS hospitals over 4 hrs.
Or about the number of deaths on UK roads for about 7.6 days in 2015.
36 deaths is 0.0068% of all UK deaths in 2015
Sacrifice that much freedom and privacy for that little increase in safety. I think not.
Not at all.
They don't think you have any power and they are sure they can find anyone who could cause them trouble and lock them up on something or other.
Which actually translates as they have people who work for them who tell them that you can cause them no trouble and if you do they have other people who can deal with it.
The average politician has very little understanding of the technology they use or how vulnerable it is. Most of this agenda is being pushed by career spookocrats, not the front line officers who know what bul***it this is. The real life equivalent of Jon Voight's character in "Enemy of the State," made 3 years before 9/11/01.
What is most ironic is the very privacy they want to strip from everyone (in the name of "security") is the very thing that lets them keep their secrets.
The only effective object lesson for such people would be if this came into force and someone used it to publish all such dirty laundry, from all parties.
After all, if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear, right?
From anywhere and everywhere on the planet.
The black hats.
The ad slingers.
The bitcoin miners.
Those seeking to run covert web sites for anything and everything.
There really is no logical explanation to the politicians f**kwitted ignorance of this except
a) They cannot must the 5-10 whole minutes needed to understand why what they ask for is rubbish
b) They have that infantile faith that if they just keep asking for something long enough someone will supply it. Bit like kiddies nagging parents for latest toy.
They might be.
I'm not quite so sure about some of their clients.
I'd be prepared to bet they all came up with various questions their people could ask and their clients could choose which ones were used.
Which, along with the who you ask, can make a huge difference to the result.
I'll leave others to decide how much wish fulfillment was involved in some of the polls commissioned by some clients.
Do governments every do effective contingency planning?
All outlying outcomes (my favorite was the oil price rising 4x in the early 70's. I read somewhere 1 oil company had run a business game with this scenario but no one took it very seriously. They expected to just stick the results in a filling cabinet) will almost certainly never happen.
Until they do.
OMFG this could be a real story!
"IQ of British Electorate appears to be rising. 'We stopped wishing for Unicorns and started looking at what we could really get.' Full story at 10"
I'm feeling a little feint. I may have to lie down.
If you're a British voter it's the only real choice you have to effect change. If you just want to feel you supported a candidate you like then vote for them instead. The odds on bet is you won't make a difference but you'll feel better and you complain about the result. IMHO (as with all elections) anyone who didn't vote should STFU.
This might sound a bit like the US Presidential system where people voted Trump as "The lesser evil."
In which case you'd be right.
It's a fact that no place else in Europe uses this system. Even places that have had absolute dictatorships didn't think it was a better idea. So pretty much anywhere in the immediate vicinity of the UK would give you a greater chance to express your preferred choice than simply voting to keep someone else out.
But apparently the British people cannot cope with ranking their preference so they all they can have is the binary system.
There are 650 seats in the House of Commons.
If your party holds 326 of them you have an absolute (but wafer thin) majority, provided none of your MPs are Speaker or Deputy Speaker (who by convention abstain from votes).
Anything less is a minority.
The Conservatives hold 317 seats.
My guess is May tried to bail shortly after the results were known but (as Stieg Larsson observed) "An amateur is a gangster who can't take the consequences."
Yes she's "Going to fix this" alright, because they won't let her leave until she does, since she called this election in the first place.
After that her days are numbered.
There's no way she's going to last 5 years.
the only question is how long will the "Coalition of Chaos" (not TM) last?
IE their rampantly homophobic anti-abortion pro creationalism views.
But where things might get a bit sticky is how many DUP voters work for various bits of the NI government. IE subject to the public sector pay cap (don't call it a pay freeze, it's just not at or above the rate of inflation for the last 8 years. Which is a totally different thing). Arlene Foster may have a few suggestions on this for Mrs May. Basically there are 2 options.
a)Raise (or eliminate) the cap for all workers it applies to. This could get quite expensive given the 8 years of below inflation pay rises they have had.
b)Raise (or eliminate) the cap for all workers it applies to in Northern Ireland. Much cheaper.
Either May swallows a big increase in government spending (not exactly "fiscally responsible") or shows caters to the DUP supporters exclusively, showing she is solely concerned about remaining in power.
It's one of those "Still beating your wife?" questions that politicians dream of getting their opponents into a position where they have to answer.
Option a) would cause the most trouble to the Treasury but option b) is likely to cause the most trouble come the next election, as it would be a tacit admission that public sector workers are not being paid enough but they are not going to get more because they don't have the "special relationship" the DUP has with the government.
That would be unlikely to be forgotten before the next election comes round.
As there usually is.
IOW the Brexit vote for Leave and Remain were both in the tails of statistical noise.
This suggests any futures such polls should mandate a wider spread to ensure people know they have to work for it IE 6% should get a clear mandate.
True, but the young have been reminded that they can make a difference.
In the 60's 80% of both the young and the old turned out.
Now the old turn out and the parties polices (of all side) aim to keep them sweet.
The young? F**k em, they don't vote.
Now they have. The question is can they keep doing so? It's a habit they'd better acquire again if they don't want to be sidelined and generally ignored.
It was also completely uncosted.
Which she though was not a problem as "They will vote for me and the Grey vote is naturally Conservative. "
Successive govts have been generous to pensioners. Historically they were not well paid. Now that has changed a lot.
Community care is a problem for all governments and those of the UK have kept on ignoring it for decades. Who pays and how much are very difficult questions and it needs cross party support to avoid stop/go polices.
The elderly tend to need multiple medial specialists and social services support. Better communication between all of these would be a start but we're talking serious money.
Perhaps because they are not?
The variants have diverged so much from each other that apparently there is now about 20% commonality between them.
Which (probably) will cut down the logistics costs compared with supporting 3 wholly separate designs, if you operate multiple variants.
Will it be enough to justify the development budget to date?
Who can say?
Well......
Lockheed Martin said they couldn't get enough Ada programmers and could not deliver the software on time so they asked the DoD if they could use C/C++ and the DoD said yes.
AFAIK they still didn't deliver the software on time. But they did manage to add a whole bunch of bugs which IMHO the Ada compiler and design process would have caught.
This system is a)Embedded IE relatively tight resource limits. b)Has hard real time response constraints c)Does a shed load of stuff most other aircraft don't run on board the aircraft IE logistics and repair order generation.
You can throw extra processors at the RT limits but this combination will stress your development tools and chosen language pretty hard. For example the slightest memory leak will eventually have severe consequences. IIRC this project has a 200 page C++ coding guide. You have to wonder how much of this could be eliminated if they'd stayed with Ada.
"Self fragging" weaponry has been a specialty of the US since the "Sgt Yorke" anti aircraft done did a 180deg turn and attempted to open fire on the assembled top brass in the grand stand behind the gun.
During the attempted demonstration it successfully locked onto a small fast moving target and totally destroyed it.
Along with the latrine the small ventilator fan was fitted to.
It's reputedly the model for the "ED209" robot in the original Robo Cop.
"This aircraft is awesome. It's the best aircraft America has ever made. It's got yuuuuuge potential and it just keeps getting better. Our allies will be total losers if we offered it to them and they did not buy it. But we won't. It's that good we're keeping it for ourselves* "
*This is fake news. IRL the D has not been that impressed given how much cash has been spent.
That's rather my point. BTW the battery life of any device I've ever used greatly increases whenever I switch off its radio links. Needing to be connected to that website is not a necessity, it's a design decision of the company.
"The "dumb terminal" model should have died years ago. Unluckily Internet, Google and the cloud resurrected it, but it's ugly as a zombie."
I think you have the issue backwards.
The first web browsers (at CERN) along with their web servers, were developed to allow experimenters to view data from vastly different back end data sources.
Today your phone (probably) runs Android or iOS, your desktop probably Windows yet both have to look at the same website, since the idea of phone specific web sites died with WAP. And how many people's phones run on x86 processors?
The problem is still compatibility, but now it's joined by security.
Do you let every website you use drop a big binary on your phone? Do you leave it as just a link to their servers with (relatively) simple pages?
Web sites will no doubt point out that most of the time they aren't sending you data and you only pay for the data sent. So what happens when you choose a browsers "offline" option (assuming your browser has one)?
This technology is not exactly unknown.
The AS400 had a "Machine Interface Layer" that implemented in effect an object orientated instruction set. Compilers generated code for this machine, which was visibly documented.
During it's life the underlying processor went from a proprietary, completely undocumented hardware system, to a POWERPC processor (IE same as the AIX *nix boxes). Provided any custom software was compiled with the necessary options (basically readable symbol table) you could copy the object code to the new processor and on first running the machine would do the conversion the one and only time it needed to be done. That was in the mid 90's, when clock frequencies were an order or two slower than today.
It's not that you can't make efficient cross platform OS's.
It's that MS does not really want to. BTW IIRC Windows 95 had 21 layers of abstraction between a disk read and getting the data back to y our application.
And while it continues to maintain the psychotic Bromance relationship with Intel it never will.
Hard to say.
Either something in the curriculum inculcates an astonishing level of arrogance in their belief that they have near God like powers of prescience
Or
They select undergraduates who already think they such gifts to begin with.
1) Measure conformance of project against stated goals and baseline.
Baseline. 1/2 of all seats + 17 seats in House of Commons. Absolute majority.
Goal
1/2 of all seats + 80-100 seats in House of Commons. Absolute majority.
Project conclusion
1/2 of all seats - 8 seats in House of Commons. Minority.
Lessons learned.
"It is not a shambles (which is the mess left after a days work in a slaughter house). It is an internal matter for the Conservative party and does not show any change in the British peoples desire to leave the EU. They voted for a minority government. "
Thank you J. Rees-Mogg. Once again demonstrating
a) Denial is not just a river in Egypt and b) Understanding a word <> comprehension of sentence.
Not forgetting
c) Conservative MPs don't feel completely humiliated at having to depend on a party 1/32 their size in parliament to stay in power. No. Not at all. Not even a tiny bit. Perfectly OK with it. We have them right where we want them etc.
I might also point out that IRL a majority or minority party, and wheather it's big enough to form a government is an emergent property of the FPTP system.
IOW No one votes for a minority govt. They vote (in their constituency) to keep the existing MP in or (if they are smart) vote the runner up to get them out. Anything else is likely to be wasted.
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