Posts by Pu02

Re: I vote for "well and truly lost"

AI creating Art is just logic processing copies of everything already done, just as humans have been doing all along. But where is the value?

With humans, good Art filters through people's tastes, interests and the various mechanisms we use in human communities, to be recognised and valued.

With bots, there is infinite processing logic, and infinite distribution channels, with only humans to filter it out using outdated methods and hopelessly overloaded resources, mostly at the end points. It's a train wreck in process.

So don't taint your work by using AI to generate voices, even if they are to represent AI. It will just break the system that isn't yet able to manage the tidal wave coming.

Just use a device to process computer generated voices, instead. Or if in a pinch, a human, some of them on the telly sound more like bots every day so you must be able to find some good ones!

Re: I wish them luck

Once the data is in the lake, its there for all time.

Using it does not require complex sifting through enormous amounts of cruft. They just write a query or three, or three million. And/or employ the latest AI.

Then act on anything that presents high enough relative risk.

The only way to stay under the radar is to make sure what you do does not present an impact, or a risk they might want to act on.

... Ever. So no, it is not good odds!

Re: I bought an OLED TV from them 2 years ago

Don't forget to keep WebOS up to date for all the latest targeting and ad-features!

The AI can watch you and decipher your preferences from each ad it spaffs, A-B testing in real time.

All the while making the perfect propaganda tool. Where had we heard this before?

* You can cover up the cameras with electrical tape (a tip from a fellow Tinfoil Mad-hatter). Everyone else is mad, not us!

They aren't such a bad concept if you (perhaps rightly) see the future as a barren Blade-Runner-Mad-Maxesque landscape where robots and homeless outlaws battle it out against corporate AI over the last scraps of energy and food.

Cybertruck's semi-bulletproof, stainless structure, can ride high over dead bodies and other detritus. You can collect assets and ammo in the back, take any necessary kit with you. Plus mount self-targeting armaments of your choice to keep you safe from flying objects with hostile intentions, at least until you can't find a charging station.

Clearly ideal for use on Mars, too! Why wouldn't we all want one?

It all seemed a great use case, for someone obsessed with 1980s computer games and Sci-fi. Unsurprisingly there wasn't a soul at Tesla that could stop it.

Elon might be brilliant at doing what humans have collectively failed at doing for decades, but he needs to understand the root cause of the blunders he has made to transcend. His plan to reach the next interstellar level is doomed to fail otherwise. It seems he may end up celebrating his 3000th birthday heading into an unnamed sun in another universe, just off some yet to be finished, interstellar highway whilst a Vogon Captain laughs at his MayDay messages in real-time via his employer's X-verse-Premium account.

what about your relatives?

Once your data is used to cross reference you to others, an extraordinarily wide range data points can be related, and used to target anyone that is now connected to the data collated across the whole group of individuals. Esp. with 2nd and third degree data like contact lists, device and account fingerprints, commercial connections, etc.

Only those skilled in 'The Arts' can assess the risk you think you've calculated (to be negligible enough for your own comfort)

Musk, and even SpaceX, are not in the business of pleasing spectators.

It is however Musk's to manage Investors and other 'stakeholders'. What we, and even many scientists skilled 'in the space' think, matters relatively nought.

Your comments appear to be about PR and public opinion about one of the testing programs in which he only seems to be involved- but actually involves spin doctors.

Plenty of madness in the space to poke fun at of course. Criticism of Musk relating to his job would probably be received a little better however, even here on El Reg.

Re: Sad to see the queen of the sky’s go but won’t be flying in a 737 Max

One of the other major criticisms was the way in which the electronic avionics, and the software logic in particular, was 'engineered' (e.g. designed, integrated, tested, checked, produced, verified/approved/authorised). Apparently a lot was done by the various suppliers, to a cost, using different methodologies, tools and other aspects that make it hard to manage during the lifecycle of the Max and an spouse/sibling versions, and the tech it spawned into Boeing that might be reused on other models.

Clearly ownership of the implemented logic remains a problem, as they continue to demonstrate the challenge they have been having handling blame, both inside and outside the company.

How can Linux or BSD compete?

They require a lot of support. Mac server was dead easy to maintain.

Configuration was far simpler too.

And the hardware was most reliable too, so the outlay was cheap vs HP/IBM who gave little added value.

Re: They had to buy the copper

No, it was about a lot more than availability- it was about scrapping the copper networks, it was about putting in place a scalable broadband network for the nation that didn't require 240v and racks of vulnerable equipment exposed to the elements on street corners... not just connecting people with little or no connectivity.

They only had to buy the copper networks to get access to the pits to replace the old copper, whether it be FttP or MTM/FttN+HFC. They sure as hell didn't want to use the old copper, as Tony and Malcolm required. You could argue that if Telstra was doing its job over the last decade it would already have replaced a lot of the copper with the best option going at the time, in which case a MTM might have been viable.

Anyhow, regardless of what the bought and why, they sure didn't need to buy thousands of new km of new copper wire and set about repairing/replacing any existing wiring. Any numbnut could tell them it should all have been fibre, whether the decision be made on day one, mid way, or now.

Re: HFC

@matthew42;

"Adequate broadband according to Labor NBNCo Corporate Plan was 50% connected at 12Mbps and <1% at 1Gbps in 2026" Perhaps you forget how price conscious a lot of people have to be to get by. For anyone on 20kbps in the bush, 12Mbps is a big step up, and may be all they need for sometime if they are watching the pennies. Many of our parents would be happy with 12Mbps (if it worked). It'd certainly work for me at a pinch, even now.

Besides, the projections of what speeds people would want/buy etc. when they finally could place an order were just guesses, made a long time ago. Nothing more. And certainly nothing to do with what was technically possible using FttH. If they had guessed more, Abbott may have been able to destroy the idea altogether.

Now, years later, people need better connectivity, so they order faster speeds than what was projected by Labor all those years ago. But you seem to be suggesting it's to do with what the MTM fiasco is delivering. But we know you are not talking about what people are getting. just what they are ordering in the hope they will get something workable, as fast as their old connection, or at the very least, fit for use.

Perhaps the question is better put as: At the point much later that the MTM was conceived, let alone agreed/authorised/enacted, why were better guesses not made about what people would take up? A bucket of sawdust and two planks of wood would told you back then that people would want more bandwidth.

But instead, to please Rupert, Malcolm and Tony bastardised it without doing their homework. All that counted was keeping those beloved Foxtel subscribers online and preventing labor putting their name on a badly needed piece of infrastructure. Cost/reliablility/suitability/replacing the old copper network; all out the window with bathwater, babies and the kitchen sink.

If they had done anything near the right thing, nbn subscribers would have the option of ordering multiple fibre connections to their properties, and no-one would be maintaining copper pairs, let alone HFC: Lots of badly needed jobs for our unemployed youth would have been generated to form the crews needed to do the trenching and roll-out. Instead Malcolm did what Tony wanted; gave the money to lawyers and project teams instead of our youth. Put expensive to maintain equipment out in the open, where it will never be enough and will fail, used HFC where it wouldn't work, etc and gave the bush laggy, over-subscribed and expensive satellite services(!).

By now nbn could have been working and generating revenue- not a burgeoning debt for an massively expensive to maintain white elephant. If it was so bad they should have scrapped it. Given what we needed, they should have completed the plan as it was, or better upgraded it.

Sack the data scientists & feed global big-data; abuse has no political consequence

Ministers are sold on storing data. But in doing so, they are picking IT winners. They do because it is so easy to bamboozle everyone when things go wrong or decisions get questioned.

Using (querying, maintaining, normalising, curating) data to ensure its accuracy and relevance attracts no investment, even though this is where the value is. It is the only way to uncover what is actually happening in society and support planning.

It is no coincidence that ministers will not buy into using the data however as they don't care about having quality information. All they care about is justifying their agenda. For that, all they need to claim is that they have the largest dataset as what anyone makes of it is never questioned.

Transparency and democracy is now so degraded that things like correct or appropriate statistics are considered 'academic', of no value or worse, 'alternately factual'. Obviously this is better left to the Borg, it's influencers and maven advertisers...

Not that the ABS knew the first thing about how to own, manage, secure or use data in the information age. Anything at all. But then again, neither does the government... <expletive deleted>

Just setup an autp-reply to their autoreply spam, ie spam their spam!

.... your autoreply could say you followed their directions to 'put the spam in the can', but that they keep on sending more and that maybe they should do something about it since they own the spam problem, not you?

Then in Outlook setup another auto delete rule for the avalanche of auto-replies. See who wins, your workstation, or their spam-server. At a minimum you will need to compact your Outlook's .pst file once a day and keep an eye on anything else that might use disk space.

Perhaps someone should black-list all Insultants from business, as well as IT.

Re: Now we know..

And then prevent any internal clients from talking to Google's DNS.

Which breaks media boxes, televisions, all manner of IOT devices and software apps, practically all media streaming apps that enforce DRM, eg. Netflix, etc.

Blocking these hosts effectively without causing failures (perhaps I should say, to prevent an impact) is not trivial even if you have the infrastructure in place to do this across your network.

And even then, they'll be watching your samrtphone, which if it has a third party app installed or is an android might be behaving most promiscuously with many of the Google inquisition's global public (if not private) nodes.

The point is security now

That is about all there is left: Security and non-abuse of personal information. A browser for the people, by the people, as they say. It is THE most important thing for a lot of users today, though still, not many browser devs. Something apparent by the number of browsers available today that do not abuse (or somehow threaten to abuse) the user.

A cross-platform, stable and safe, yet configurable browser, I would suggest is second. This means mobile and because of the porous nature of Android and fragility of iOS, also means FirefoxOS was a damn good idea simply form the point of view that a secure browser, by def'n, requires a secure OS.

Apart from that, everything in your post about the aims and current state of 'the Firefox effort' are about right. What is evident is that Moz.Corp desperately need to re-focus the effort to return the configurability/customisability of Fx to cater for the user base, speed up performance, get new blood involved and prevent any further outcomes of this mutiny that allowed ta bunch of Hipsters parading as Pirates to take over the codebase.

Or maybe they just need some of the old veteran coders to fork the code, re-write the worst of it and restore the faith of the user-base.

Maybe either.

Given that they evicted Thunderbird, an effort core to everything Moz, a move that could have been careful prep for a bad bang, an effort to prevent a major split or a chance to set FX free to fly as high as a browser could go. 51 is certainly better than <50, but where is the evidence it's even got off the ground?

Clearly something big is using resources at Moz,Corp, they ended Fx support for MacOSX 10.11. I had to move to the ESR, and apparently that will get killed soon too.

Just my 2c: a few (hopefully not too ignorant) musings of an 'old Phoenix' user...

Re: At what watt does wifi become harmful?

It is not just power, the frequency of the EMR is crucial.

Low frequencies can heat/burn cells. Higher frequencies mess do this too, but also mess with DNA can cause cancers. The questions is more how much is safe, and when. How many young children are allowed to play with the old phone, and might be exposed at some very crucial point of their development?