Posts by martinusher

Re: One killer AI app

The driver interface to Windows is, well, a bit 'peculiar' and has a nasty habit of changing with Windows versions. Since you have to get the thing certified it makes supporting 'old' hardware uneconomic. But, seriously, there's not a whole lot you can do with drivers to make them obsolete -- unless that's the object of the exercise.

Because as anyone knows writing code isn't anything like as time consuming as testing it. The never ending changes promote a test deficit which leads to more unreliability, more updates and a sort of death spiral. Its a mess, the only positive thing to be said about it is that it provides good eatin' for a bunch of people who would otherwise find themselves unemployed.

Re: So, smart meter joy is continuing

Dynamic pricing is just another way of saying "we auction every kilowatt". It serves only one purpose and that's the financialization of utilities.

FWIW -- I had spinning wheel meters for decades. They never went wrong, never went "out of calibration" and were relatively easy to read. Even then the supplier didn't bother with reading them that often because a household's consumption pattern was predictable enough that they could easily estimate bills with a high degree of accuracy. We've had an electronic meter for some years now and it does roughly the same job but does allow the utility to fine tune their tariffs so they can screw the maximum out of everyone while supplying the minimum amount of energy.

Remember -- buying governments requires a lot less capital investment than building power plants or transmission systems.

Re: Warfare

>Turning all the traffic lights red?

That was apparently a successful hack at the beginning of Russia's "Special Military Operation". They rely a lot on railways over there and they hacked the Belarus signalling network which meant they had to use a lot of time consuming manual train management methods.

Re: reported net profit of $73.8 billion in calendar 2023, up from $59.96 billion in the prior year

The fundamental problem they face is that all that profit reflects in the company share price so in order to maintain growth they have to cut costs to boost profit even more. One of the ways to do this is to shift work overseas.

A decade or two ago I became an accidental Intel employee (I was 'acquired') and I got a ringside seat at the corporate games. This company was a mature startup that had plateaued somewhat. What you had was a clash of the two cultures -- startup and corporate. People who's been there for some time had trouble understanding the corporate mindset, the change was gradual at first as Intel milked the company for the technology it wanted but then the screws were turned firmly and work and personnel were transferred as the facility was shut down. (I passed it yesterday -- its still exactly as it was 20 years ago.....just empty....)

Googlers have to recognize that they're now working for something more like IBM than the company they once knew. The biggest difference will be that they're now 'work units'. This is a shock to any employee who thinks they're valued contributors, part of the XYZ 'family', but its something that you have to understand to survive.

Re: Value?

(She's turned up over here (US) trying to sell herself. I'm not sure what, exactly, she's selling but it involved "endorsing Trump" so draw your own conclusions.)

Re: Expensive

The practice of 'sharing technology' isn't confined to China. Forty years ago it was the same with Japan.

>Easy: exploiting millions of rural workers coming to town and skipping R&D budgets.

China is educating 35,000 engineers a year. I've worked with Chinese engineers and when they're good they're very, very, good indeed. (Just imagine how well you'd get on in the workplace if come next Monday morning all your communication had to be in Mandarin.)

>True, Russian speaking trolls will need to work on their putonghua as Russia falls into China's orbit.

I've also worked with Russians. Some of them look quite Chinese. Its because there's really no hard and fast boundary between "European" Slavs and "Chinese" easterners. In the border are you get Chinese Russians and Russian Chinese. Its how the world works -- assuming you don't spend your life on an island. (Russia's also got a border with Korea, BTW.)

Re: The broader context

Business schools seem to have more in common with a seminary than a pure educational institution. You don't get to join 'management' -- aka 'the brethren' -- unless you're a MBA graduate and you don't get your MBA unless you're a believer. So like any religion it can perpetuate any myth. Unfortunately unlike a religion there's real world consequences from its thought so if there's a problem with that thought then it will show up in 'reality'. The trick then would be to root out all heresy, to clear the corporation, the country or even the globe of dissenting ideas.

Re: Popcorn icon needed

Tesla might be thought of as an American company but they have much more manufacturing capability overseas now. Including in China. From a purely business perspective it would make sense to shed the US workforce.

This is how capitalism works, folks -- its all about RoI. Tesla is going to be just like every other automaker, producing cars where it makes the most financial and political sense (so they'll retain some capacity in the US, just like everybody else).

Whether or not this is the right way to run a society.....well, its been drilled into us since birth that There Is No Alternative, only capitalism can yield the best products at the lowest prices for consumers etc. etc. Its just that real life doesn't work like Econ101....

Re: Probably not exactly a bargain.

Missing here is both the narrative and the protectionism that grew out of 1980s Japan eating our industrial lunch, so as to speak. We forced Japan to deflate and effectively stagnate -- they were allowed to compete but only on our terms.

China is a whole different game. Partly because its a whole lot bigger and partly because its not interested in playing our financial games (unless there's something in it for them).

Remember, what we call "freedom and democracy" is really NewSpeak for "financialization sucks the life out of an economy".

Re: I guess it's a plan. Kinda. Sorta. If you squint.

It may have escaped your notice but we (the US) bankrupted ourselves at the same time. The difference between Russia and the US today is that we're now literally up to our eyeballs in debt and they're not. We've only been able to maintain that position because our currency is used for global commerce -- we can print it and others effectively pick up the tab. We then weaponized it, forcing others to find ways to avoid using it, a process that won't happen overnight but will demote our currency to 'just another piece of paper'.

Anyway, both Russia and China are quite good and launching stuff into space. The only edge we have is re-usability (thanks, SpaceX) and its only a matter of time before someone else figures it out. (My money's on China.....but I wouldn't count out the Russians just yet).

All sanctions did was mess with the build/buy tradeoff. Back before we started this trade war the Chinese were busy developing global businesses using global supply chains with companies buying what it didn't make business sense to build. Once we made it difficult for them to buy then it makes business sense to build. Its what we call in the US a "National Security" issue -- its a bit like our CHIPs legislation except they've got a whole lot more resources they can invest and mobilize than us.

Our hubris makes it difficult to conceive that they can achieve what they need to do. Of course they will. It might take a bit of time but, again, its a "National Security" issue, they have no alternative but to succeed. The danger for us that they're going to be producing next generation technology -- they know all the shortcomings and deficiencies of current processes, the sort of thing that creeps into any complex development, and will design them out.

Re: When did the change happen?

You used to have to prove there were no suitable applicants by advertising the job and collating the replies. Writing the job description so that no applications would be received was a bit of an art form but not too difficult for the sheer imbalance between qualifications and actual job requirements.

I wouldn't work for one of those outsourcing companies even if they did offer me a job because they're used to treating their employees like crap. But the mere fact you applied means that you have to be considered. Here you might run at a bit of a disadvantage since my parents -- who used to work on the subcontinenet -- were well up to speed with the idea of a free market in qualifications, i.e. "If CIS needs paperwork "x" then "x" can be obtained for a price". Some immigration departments are up to this -- the UK seems to be on top of dubious qualifications from even more dubious schools -- but its definitely a Whack-a-Mole job, you get one and a dozen more pop up.

BTW -- Coming to the US for work isn't what it used to be.

Re: A physical visit is a lot more reliable

Our house has more in common with a British garden shed than a British house. But its designed to survive earthquakes, a natural phenomena that's not at all common in the UK. (....it does happen, BTW).

The problem here is that developers don't build where its safe, they build where its most profitable, People then buy the houses and expect insurance companies and/or the government to pick up the tab when there's a natural disaster. Here the major risk factors are earthquakes, floods and fires. They don't cover quakes or floods -- quake insurance is through a state backed insurance fund, flood insurance through a federal insurance fund -- so this leaves wildfires. Here to avoid discrimination the state mandated that insurance premiums should be consistent between houses of similar type and size regardless of where they are. This has led to significant losses because people like to purchase property in sylvan surroundings which, around here, is like building in a bonfire. So they've started getting quite picky about who they'll cover and they're pulling out of states where they can't vary premium based on risk. (It also doesn't help that rebuilding costs have gone through the roof.)

Incidentally, earthquake coverage is not only quite expensive but has a very high deductable so a lot of people don't buy it.

Re: Why not have cloud.gov.uk ?

Yanis Varoufakis explains why you can't have a non-US major cloud company in his book "Technofeudalism" although his commentary is actually about Tiktoc. He's the first person to coherently articulate why the US government has gone after ByteDance, Huawei and other non-captive tech firms and ( surprise!) its nothing to do with "national security". Put simply, its all about the balance of payments; we need revenue inflows to counter the outflows due to our import inbalance and anything that threatens key companies gets hit.

This type of protectionism isn't new; what's novel is the revenue extraction model where the monopoly is in the tools needed for others to actually do the productive work. Its like sharecropping but in the cyber world.

Re: The good old days

Then as now the code's not monolithic so it shouldn't be treated as such. Or designed to operate as such.

As for the "wasn't invited back" this is a typical ham-fisted management response. Yes, the code is puerile but at least it demonstrates that he** understands command line switches. Anyway, interns usually grow up and part of this process involves someone who's a bit older and hopefully wiser telling them to "knock it off".

(**'Better than 99.99% chance its a 'he'!)

Re: >> BS that's served up by our "leaders"

Yes, I always vote. At the national level it may come down to the lesser of evils. At the state and local level it makes a difference.

I have also been an election worker since becoming a citizen. The system's now changed, being mostly vote by mail, but before that I used to be the Precinct Inspector, the person responsible for the operation of the polling place. You can't even begin to have a democracy unless people participate and all this "I never vote" BS is designed to suppress key demographics.

Re: shocked

>madcap marxist unelectability.

That's propaganda in action for you. Marx was a mid-19th century economist who accurately summed up the interaction of economic forces but never developed a political strategy around them apart from vague pronouncements like "Workers of the world unite (etc.)". What we know as communism was developed much later. However, the notion of "Marxist" this and that has been inculcated into people as a sort of "four legs good, two legs bad" mindset, I've seen it applied to all sorts of things (especially in the US where we're told that Marxism is behind gender fluidity, among other things!).

Anyway, the effect of all this TINA -- "There Is No Alternative" -- which thanks to a compliant media meant that anyone who dared to even raise the slightest possibility of an alternative was vilified (and occasionally jailed). The Labour party was split into the 'moderates' -- the "Social Democratic and Labour Party" and the so-called "extremists", the rump of traditional Labour. Trades unions were suppressed, violently and often in violation of the law (very flexible in the UK). The result was a toothless pseudo-Conservative party, what we could call "LINO" ("Labour in Name Only"). The practice continues even today -- witness what happened to Corbyn and the whole anti-semetic witch hunt thing (so the leadership of the Labour party got transferred back into safe hands once more).

This crap goes back a lot further than Thatcher. I'm only old enough to remember the Wilson administration (sorry, I left the UK for the US because of Thatcher so I'm going to switch languages) and the fallout from it trying to follow policies that were intended to favor the UK, its economy and particularly its industry.

Its printed on the card that "Its not valid for identification". Doesn't stop people from demanding to see it, for example when applying for a "real ID" endorsement to a driver's licence.

Re: Year of Lunix desktop

Yes, I know that its all about "everything being written for Windows" -- I've experienced this myself many times because there's always something important that's written for Windows etc. But if you keep upping the pain level eventually people will hit that tipping point that you're always hearing about. For me,personally, it happened a long time ago when updates to Windows gradually made my little desktop unusable. Linux fixed this for me, I just have to use Windows for "one or two things". And its a serious pain to do so -- nothing ever seems to quite work as it should, you're always being upgraded and now you've got the "Our Windows 10 Journey is Coming to an End" thing (and, needless to say, that hulking great i7 box with 16MByte RAM and graphics processor isn't good enough to "upgrade").

The writing's been on the wall for some time. I got into this game when the only game in town was IBM, they had over 80% of the world market for computers. They refused to acknowledge the obvious so look at them now. Everyone complains about Windows but as "There Is No Alternative" they just put up with it. Eventually things will crack -- if they haven't done already -- and no amount of Windows-centric ("free") IDEs and clever Truman show-esque marketing tricks will save them. Windows is not an operating environment, its a collection of hacks and its really showing its age.

Re: Am I glad I'm not that close to the metal

Its not that difficult, honest. Its just hardware engineering. One of the problems with hardware engineering is time -- its up there front and center with the actual logic, you can't have one without considering the other and, naturally, they usually work against each other. (If you're not used to this idea then just bear in mind a handful of things -- logic pulses are really not square, they take time to get from place to place and the things they feed don't just take a certain amount of time to operate, they take a range of times, for example.).

Anyway, I think I'll lay this one at the door of Marketing as usual. Engineers spend a lot of time trying to reconcile what's possible with what would be nice (the typically marketing pitch is "if you make something that does everything then we can sell lots" -- its rare that they truly understand tradeoffs). Human nature being what it is, though, you'll always find someone who will say "yes" to something best left alone, especially if they don't actually have to make it happen. Any engineering caveats will just get lost in the wash.

Re: "those that can't take time off still have a chance to vote"

Making it inconvenient to vote is a common tactic in jurisdictions where you've got a clear demographic that you don't want voting. The most exaggerated case are places where you get long lines of people forced to line up in the sun and where you make it a criminal offense to provide them with water.

Voting in US elections has always been local. You'd have polling places staffed by local volunteers who'd use a school hall, a church meeting room or even someone's garage for the purpose. The county election officers' job would be to supervise, train officers and provide the materials. Mail-in ballots were administered alongside in-person voting and over time more and more people opted to do this. With Covid came the change (locally at least) to all mail-in ballots. Some states like Oregon are literally all mail-in, others like California retain an in-person option but because there aren't as many people voting in person the number of polling places in a county was reduced while removing the requirement to vote at a particular polling place.

In our state (CA) at least every effort is made to ensure that eligible voters can vote. We haven't made election days holidays (yet) but people are allowed paid time off to go vote. However, neither employers nor trades unions are allowed to actively help with balloting so they can't actively collect ballots (but as they can collect envelopes for mailing collecting mail in ballots along with other mail is fine).

(BTW -- We always have a minimum of three workers at a polling place because the rule is that under no circumstances are ballots to be left with a single person.)

Re: Just one question

Transferring cocaine or opiates like fentanyl across national borders is also illegal (as is the laundering of the proceeds of selling it) but it doesn't seem to stop the trade So I daresay that transferring work to N. Korea and managing the proceeds is actually a lot easier since the crime, such as it is, is truly victimless. Its really an offense against national policy (or, many would suggest "US Hegemony") which for many these days is almost a matter of national pride. This is what happens when you overdo sanctions regimes. I'd guess that trade between China and N.Korea (for example) is now an open secret since we've decided to draw China into our web of sanctions.

A recent news article said that the US was investigating whether SMIC supplying Huawei with processors "was in violation of US law". Nobody who reported this stopped to ask why two Chinese companies trading between themselves would be subject to US law, much less wondered how the optics of this type of statement appeared to people in China. Given this climate trading with the DPRK is now almost a patriotic duty and I expect the sentiment is shared by innumerable other people around the world. This has nothing to do with the merits of particular sanctions regimes but merely that their ham-fisted application to blatantly serve national interests is likely to get peoples' backs up.

Re: I'[m just waiting for the claims of...

The machines that are used in many (US) states, the ones that were criticized in 2016, don't tabulate the vote. They just print ballot forms with the choices voters make filled out (and pre-checked for over/under votes etc.). Because we hold so many elections simultaneously in the US we end up with a lot of different ballot types, over 180 in our county alone. This was less important when most balloting was done in person at a specified polling place but with a lot of voting being done by mail now the polling places were centralized so it was just impossible to carry all the different forms needed.

The forms are counted at a central location. They're actually photographed first ad any questionable forms -- illegible, damaged etc -- forms are pulled out and handed to verifiers. These are small groups of people who include representatives of all the candidates who, if the all agree, can copy damaged ballots so they can be counted. (The number of these rejects is statistically insignificant, but 'its the right thing'.)

No one person is left in charge of ballots at any time so even if it was statistically feasible to stuff ballot boxes its actually impractical.

Voter ID is handled by signature verification, BTW. Every mailed in ballot form and every in-person voter has their signature checked before their vote is counted or cast.

So -- the conclusion is that if you're going to fiddle the election do it before the balloting, not after.....