Posts by Mage

Voting Machines

Ireland bought voting machines and eventually scrapped them. Paper and pencil isn't perfect, the STV PR isn't perfect. But voting machines, the US Electoral College, Israeli list for entire country PR and UK FPTP are all worse.

Even though we can't currently form a government. That's not to do with PR, but Civil War politics and one party being far better at Social Media and traditional media PR. Belgium didn't come to a halt because it took ages to form a government.

The USA State (Washington) having online smart phone votes is mad. A signature on a low resolution touch screen? Making a paper print out of it isn't an audit trail.

The ancient Athenian idea of voting for a pool of candidates (on paper of course) and then randomly by lot selecting the final officials (to avoid corruption) has some merit. Perhaps combine that with the PR STV larger constituencies.

Re: But!

It wasn't comprehensive and I hadn't had coffee.

Re: To summarize

No, it just means the product or service is poor. The Marketing ensures that it's ages before people notice.

The Watson "winning" Jeopardy is almost a party trick. The "Medical" Watson sold by IBM to a major US hospital wasn't actually the same software at all. Also it didn't work.

Windows 3.1 / 95 architecture

Which was garbage compared to NT 3.1 in 1993, never mind NT3.5x, NT 4.0, Win2K/WinXP (NT 5.x) on ANY CPU. The NTVDM and WOW was only used on NT to avoid switching to 16bit mode (Which Pentium Pro didn't really have) and for 16 bit x86 on Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC etc.

Win10 (32 bit OR 64bit OS on x86-64 compatible CPU) ought to be able to run any Win32 SW for any version of x86 NT based Windows ever. I quite accept needing a VM for Win9x/ME, not for properly written Win2K, XP, 2003, Vista, Win7.

MS needs to forget any other CPU platform for Windows. That sank with the Itanium and again with the death of Win 7 / 8 / 10 on ARM, because ARM is madness for most corporate & legacy Windows programs (the reason people buy windows) almost all of which is native x86-32 Intel or x86-64 AMD. There is very little important stuff that runs properly on a non-x86 VM.

Re: Wacom drivers on Windows

On Win7 the wrong driver would load. On Linux it just works. Same with external USB Soundblaster.

Three of us with different Wacom models now moved from Windows to Linux Mint with Mate. Does that mean we can't complain or does the Linux driver do this? :D

Re: it's legally very difficult to give someone authority to commit a crime

But see GCHQ, MI5 etc.

CIA Rendition.

USA wiretapping of USA citizens.

And much more.

Re: related to Farage or Johnson?

No, Dominic "Wormtongue" Cummings. Who is unelected and not even a Tory Party member.

Has this guy imbibed all the worst ideas of NT, such as roaming profiles that meant it took minutes to login and also would erase your own files if it went wrong, so much so that on NT 4.0 and XP we created a SEPARATE per user share for files and a separate directory on the local PC for documents as "My Documents" could get wiped?

This is a truly stupid idea on so many levels. You could write a small book with a chapter on each stupid aspect of this.

re: people are still leaving Ireland?

Not like 1850s to 1970s.

Actually a lot came back early 2000s.

Now Polish not Irish is 2nd Language.

An Irish passport for people not yet living in Ireland is getting popular.

Re: Paste special HTML

Also possible with a keyboard (Shift-Ctl-Alt-V) which you can change and pick unformatted via Paste Special via right click

Thunderbird is Shift-Ctl-V for unformatted, Ctl-V for Formatted.

I agree, I'd like Ctrl-V to be unformated if from external app, but to be formated if clipboard was Copied from the same document.

So it's not simple.

The only things that annoy me about Writer:

1) Search & Replace can grab focus on autosave.

2) Save As & later open of Doc or DOCX can do strange things to paper breaks or change levels to body text. Save in ODT, SAVEAS in DOCX but don't reopen the DOCX in Writer.

3) It forgets any floating toolbars you have next time you open, even opening a second document.

4) Each document is a full set of windows. I like KATE and Notepad++ sessions with each open doc on a tab.

However after 16 years of Word For Windows, I now only use Writer. I used it on Windows for a while before moving entirely to Linux due to Win10 and even evil updates on Win7.

I used Linux for servers from 1999, but had no incentive to replace NT4.0 and then from April 2002, XP with Desktop Linux. On Desktop Linux only now for laptop and Netbook for 2+ years.

Re: AI could easily spot things we miss

"trying to block every possible Avenue of investigation is just wrong"

No-one is. It's just yet another example of Garbage In - Garbage Out. AI doesn't exist, what we have are essentially a special kind of database "primed" by human curated data. Then that is used to match (not recognise) unknown input data.

Certainly if the model is really good and the human curated so called "training" is perfectly good then such systems marketed as AI can save a lot of human time. They won't spot something the trainers didn't think of, but humans might. They'll be fooled more easily by noise than humans. Every study shows that AI accuracy can fall off a cliff with a different viewing angle, different lighting, different ethnic profile of face. Or a bicycle being wheeled across the road instead of being ridden.

Spectroscopic analysis using the James Webb or other big space telescopes are probably the best tool to spot things like industrial pollution and biological processes. No doubt computer programs will help sort the data. What's called AI is only a computer program and a database created by humans selecting data and labelling it.

Re: They just own the buildings?

Actually mostly they own the franchise and dictate where the ingredients are bought and what you do with them.

The whole point of a Franchise is that the local manager actually puts up the capital and is a supervisor following a script. The advantage is the known product which is mostly identical everywhere and the corporate advertising.

They might own the buildings in some places.

Also may mean the "Manager" is self employed and employing the staff in some places, reducing McD liabilities and costs.

Re: Spaceway-1

It was recently given a clean bill of health and an extension to 2025

https://fcc.report/IBFS/SES-STA-INTR2020-00116

Is it going UP to a graveyard orbit or being unusually de-orbited into the atmosphere?

Often the limiting factor on satellite life is station keeping fuel, not solar panels or batteries. There have been other satellites with battery failures that stayed in orbit but at reduced or no transmission power when in the dark, which oddly isn't every night.

Re: Splendid Isolation

Visitors used to wonder what the funny noise in the bathroom was. Server used to have 5 x 15,000 RPM Ultra Fast & Wide SCSI. It's in the attic. Now it has one SATA drive and there is also now a wall extractor wired to the light switch.

Perceptron

It's not real AI, also Neural Networks are nothing to do with how real brains work, it's really nothing more than a misleading label.

May contain nuts