Posts by Mike Moyle

Re: So, Hu...

Shouldn't this article have appeared under the Register's "Hu, me?" category?

I assumed it was designed to provide boobs and muffs and not dicks.

Re: Huawei

"They also call themselves APT 10. Does that mean they live in Apartment #10, or that they have something to do with apartments?"

Actually, unless they've taken it up as an ironic badge of honor, THEY probably don't call themselves that. APT 10 is, I believe, U.S. gov-speak for Advanced Persistent Threat (Number) 10.

So, your snark could be considered misplaced.

Are you mad?!!?

Ignoring for the moment the fact that it can't be easily quantified by standardized testing bean-counters so isn't likely to make it into "teach-to-the-test" systems where school funding is based on test performance, do you have any idea how many business/religious/political organizations would jump nutty on any school system that included "critical thinking" in their curriculum?

Re: Why. Just why?

Because 5 is bigger than 4, duh!

It should be obvious that , if we have 5 then we're better than everyone who only has 4. Besides, since 5 is 20% bigger than 4, the phone companies can charge 30% MORE for it.

...and, after all, isn't that what REALLY matters?

Re: advance its goal "to develop embodied AI systems..."

"They announced a subsidiary for this project, it is called Skynet."

They're not quite ready to go directly to Skynet™, yet. There are still some technical hurdles that will need an intermediate stage to overcome. The current roadmap is:

Python -> PyRobot -> PyRoTechnics -> Skynet

So, the aliens are music? Interesting.

Re: When did the study take place ?

The way that I read it was that they used filmed/taped interviews from however many years ago -- for which they already knew who had developed psychoses and who hadn't. Thirty of the subjects were used for training. They used the last ten to test whether the system would correctly identify which of them had developed psychoses and which hadn't. It apparently was correct in nine out of the ten cases. So, it wasn't a case of "run the software then wait ten years to see how it did"; they could check the system's conclusions against data that they already had.

At least, that's how I read it.

Re: putting a lander on Jupiter

...and to guarantee that the mission will succeed, we're building him a good, American coal-fired rocket ship!

<Valerie>"Have fun storming da moon!"</Valerie>

Re: So many storage questions

"... traditional desktop tower, dressed up in modern design and fitted for modularity," implies to me that there will be swappable drive bays á la the previous brushed aluminum Pro, whose design the new appears to be harkening back to.

Could be wrong, I suppose, but that's how I'm reading it, at the moment.

"Enemy launch a dirty nuke (doesn't need to be big), the EMP burst fries the skullcaps. Soldiers left with their M15 to fight with but haven't been trained to use old, manual technology. Whoops...."

Probably not in the immediate future, at least. Last I recall hearing, "Starship Troopers" was still on the required reading list @ U.S military academies, in which a good chunk of chapter 5 is taken up with a discussion on why the armored Mobile Infantry troops train with knives, sticks, rifles and other "obsolete" weapons.

Re: Thank you for advertising your opinion.

@ Doctor Syntax -- So, are you advocating for a fully subscription-based... well... everything? All of your news, all of your entertainment, all of your online activities...? (To say nothing of the "real world" services that are at least partially subsidized by advertising!) Are you prepared for the prices of all of those services to go up precipitously and are you committing to subscribe to those services in perpetuity to keep them coming?

Or are you just expecting people to keep you informed, entertained, and connected for "EXPOSURE!"? Do YOU work for free...?

Re: I'm not sure I see how they get to profitability

"Once their self-driving vehicles are perfected, there goes the labor cost as the drivers are dumped, but then they have to buy, fuel and maintain all the Johnny-cabs and delivery trucks themselves, which is currently handled by their drivers/serfs. So suddenly they become a capital-intensive high fixed cost business, probably still pricing very aggressively."

I'm not completely sure that that's the final plan. Basically, as we have seen elsewhere, Uber uses the "drivers are independent workers" argument to try to shield themselves from any liabilities of being a taxi company. Why would they want to take on the liabilities of owning and operating a fleet of robocars?

I'm wondering whether the plan isn't to lease/sell the cars and license the routing service. They get the lease/sale money up front and a percentage of the delivery fees charged for the routing service, while the owner/lessee gets the bulk of the delivery fees in exchange for, essentially, opening the gate to let them out in the morning and plugging them in at night. The o/o is liable for damages, etc., because they're the owner of record. And, in this sort of a scenario, the most likely owner/operators are taxi/delivery companies who've laid off their fleshy drivers in favor of the new system. They're used to running fleets of vehicles and taking the bulk of the profits, so this just shifts who's getting the smaller cut from a bunch of drivers to one company.

Uber maintains their "we're not responsible for anything; we just want the money," business model, the currently existing taxi/delivery companies keep THEIR business model, and the only ones getting screwed are the drivers (and customers).

Re: My pun meter had a melt down

If you thought that they stank, go talk to the pun gent over there.

"I would have thought that the IRS would have noticed 2 tax returns from the same individual in a given year!"

You have three years from the date of the original tax return to file an amended return. I'm not an accountant, so I have no idea what sort of circumstances would permit/require that outside of "Oops! I goofed on line 37!" but the procedure to amend is, presumably, there for a reason.

Re: But... But... But...

"Anyway trolleys don't come equipped with brakes. "

Not true. Not intended for slowing running children, but as theft prevention. Some stores in urban areas have shopping carts with brakes/locks in one or more wheels that get activated if taken off of store property, using a system similar to an "invisible dog fence". Around here, some people will take them to carry their groceries home and either abandon them or take them to the nearest bit of water and dump them in, so investing in the systems makes sense.

Well, now that you know that their roadmap apparently involves dropping support for older tech, your solution should probably be to not upgrade that version on that hardware and keep it as a "time machine" for that yet-older tech while getting a new box and new version of the program to run more-recent --> future tech. Then, when something in THAT version is, inevitably, broken in the next update, save THAT configuration as TimeMachine-02 and keep doing so as long as you actually NEED the aged tech.

Alternatively, can the OLD version run on a VM emulated under the NEW version? ("It's VMs all the way down!")

Re: Defense against the Darknet

" 'in certain countries, programmers have to make do without a readily available # key,'

"The ones where Apple sells computers, yes. Amazingly programmers seem to prefer Apple devices despite the poor keyboard for the activity."

Odd... "#" appears to be "Shift-3" on the Apple wireless keyboard in front of me AND on the HP keyboard to my right. And, while I couldn't swear to it, I'm pretty sure that my old 1960s-vintage Royal portable had the same setup.

Do Brit keyboards have a separate, single-purpose "#" key, or are you just trolling?

Oh... AC... Never mind. Puzzle solved.

"If a companies (sic) warehouse was burgled, even as an inside job by disgruntled employees, that could force them out of business. They have insurance for that. Why not to cover against claims from the loss of data? Or should the employees have to cover the losses themselves?"

I'm sure that, before they issued insurance against such threats, the insurance companies would insist on examining the company's IT security precautions, maybe bringing in an IT auditor to...

Oh. Wait.

Hmmmm... Tricky...

Re: What a fucking idiot

"Well dear idiot will likely have a felony conviction when this is done. While not a total black mark, it will make getting a decent job much harder as a convicted felon."

Well, there's always "Republican Congressman"; felony convictions don't seem to be much of an impediment there.

Oh, wait... You said "a decent job"...

Never mind. Yeah; he's screwed.

Re: And yet....

"... laying the blame for the closure of the station firmly at the door of the agency and its decision to turn off the cash taps, and 'move a substantial part of its service from Scotland to Plymouth'."

TBH, this line DID have me wondering... Didn't a majority of Scottish voters go for "remain"? could the initial government funding decision have had any "We want to keep this in our hands if that lot up north decide to split" component to it?

"So what are you supposed to do?"

Keep a police whistle by the phone.

...Or a compressed-air horn.

Re: file system access

"Not a single one of your examples is a computer user. All are interface users."

Really...? Honestly, this sounds like a Humpty Dumpty “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less,” sort of definition. In 40 years in and around the computer industry, I have never heard anyone else use that distinction.

But sure; whatever.

So, just so we're clear on definitions: Since you don't design, build, or professionally service automobiles, you are not an automobile user? Because that appears to be the definition that you are claiming is the only valid one for "computer users"; that you MUST be working on computer (programming) internals to be a "computer user".

On the other hand, if we're using your narrow definition, then that should mean that the iOS users usingg BASH, COBOL, Pascal, Python and various flavors of C IDEs, among others -- or writing in vi, if you're old school -- on their iPads ARE "computer users", right?

Re: благодарю вас, Товарищ Пу́тин

"Does this mean no more Internet Research Agency..."

No, but I have to assume that it probably will make it harder for any attempts to reverse-hack into IRA, or any new iterations of the same sort of operation.

Re: On the other hand

"Mind you, if I owed people 1 million quid for skipping bail I'd be demanding to be put in a prison cell...."

Although, wouldn't that rather depend on just which sort of people you owed the million to?

Re: Why so coy?..

"Probably should have used the Paris icon, but perhaps that would too much innuendo."

Is that as in: "When money comes in your door, love comes innuendo"?

Re: All you need to know about Arkansas

While it's not too big a shock that this took place in Arkansas, it *IS* somewhat surprising that they got around to it before Florida Man did.

Re: Unlikely to change anytime soon

As I think I posted when the subject came up after another article on security; I think the secret is to bar corporations from claiming damages if they are vulnerable to a known exploit, and make it easier for their customers to do so. We've all seen the stories where some yutz is caught and charged with some eye-watering amount of "damage" to the victim's computer systems with civil penalties to recover the "lost" money. Meanwhile, the company "generously" pays out pennies-worth of account monitoring and the like.

Making it so that the company is on the hook for all damages from both sides might go a ways to "concentrate (their) mind(s) wonderfully," as Mr. Johnson might have said.

(Oh, and documentation showing that: "I asked for 'X' resources to mitigate 'Y' security issues, which were refused by 'Z'," should be an automatic "get out of jail free" card for any IT personnel with responsibility for security. The penalty should be on the higher-ups, not on the workers in the trenches who are given responsibility without authority.)