Posts by Richocet

Re: A job well done

The uncertainty fear, and paranoia would cause the crims to explore a number of theories about why they keep getting busted. They wouldn't trust each other and it would really slow down their activities. So I don't know why it was revealed how they did it, unless there is another goal by doing so.

Re: you could simply not put the creepy things in your home

Dragon naturally speaking has been around for more than a decade and does exactly that. Listens to your voice and turns it into text accurately.

Naunce, the company that developed this product has since made big money selling this technology to Google etc to run their speech recognition and digital assistants on large scale servers.

I find it suspicious that speech recognition isn't implemented on the devices with some specialised hardware and send the transcript to servers. Plus it is unnecessary use of your internet connection to basically stream audio to a server. There must be a whole lot more valuable data that can be obtained by anaylsing the raw audio.

Re: Politics is a virus.

Most companies donate to political parties these days to buy influence. I don't think it's practical for any of them to stop doing that. Then the questions of who they are donating to inevitably come up, so beings the politics debate in the workplace.

Re: Cloud services

Add to reasons for not having a cloud

5) The cost of having people procuring the hardware

6) Maintaining a data center, and patching the servers.

7) The one-off costs of upgrading old hardware can be much harder to get approved than a higher steady cost of renting capacity. I've seen plenty of examples of production systems running on obsolete unsupported hardware and OS because it was never cost effective to upgrade it.

Re: Cult and control

UI is not subjective. It is contentious.

It is possible to quantify how well a UI performs:

How fast can a user perform the key tasks?

How long does it take a new user to figure out and perform the key tasks?

How many mistakes or wrong turns does a new user take when performing a key task for the first time?

They can also be surveyed subjectively on how frustrated they got, and how well this preformed compared to other software they have used.

A bad UI will score low all of the above. 0% subjective.

What usually happens is that nobody bothers to do the above because of cost, time, don't know how, don't value it. In the absence of data, UIs are subjective, everyone has an opinion, and most people's guesses of UI quality are way off-base.

The exception is that experienced designers accurately predict software usability. However I have seen people argue with them until the above tests provide the concrete evidence, and even after the tests are done that they were 'rigged' LOL. It's a wasted opportunity to get an experienced designer in and then argue with them and accuse them of falsifying data.

Best case scenario is: Experienced designer. No expensive testing. Key design recommendations. Implement all except the most costly. Better product from the user perspective.

I agree with Terry's point on this topic.

Re: I'd challenge the Director Cost

Charging management and supervisors time to any employee is unreasonable.

If that employee was not a trainee or intern, they would still be supervised and managed.

So management is not a benefit to the employee it is a necessary and normal component of business operation.

Everybody makes mistakes, so it is not appropriate to financially penalise employees for making mistakes. If you want to have a bonus scheme that rewards employees for not making mistakes, that would be fine.

Mentoring is usually not paid, so that situation should have been made clear to the employee before providing it and incurring a debt to the employee. I don't know whether it was or not.

Re: Good

No. Always go after the finance people or both.

It's important for all the finance businesses to have integrity and consistent rules to prevent money laundering and deny criminals and terrorists access to banking services. This makes them work hard to try and get around it, and slows them down. It only takes one or two weak links to compromise all the protections, so prompt and harsh action is necessary when someone doesn't play ball.

Re: More to this than meets the eye

The United States of America rampantly copied European products, designs and technologies after independence, viewing the European system of copyrights and patents as unfairly onerous. It doesn't mean that copying is fine, but this illustrates that perspectives are different.

Re: Certainly not blameless

LOL. Is this still true?

Re: Forced arbitration should be illegal

Undue process?

Re: The problem

This is nitpicking, but lawyers are almost certain to get disbarred for lying in court and/or to judges, so I think this is why they were reluctant to bring election fraud cases to trial, and struggled to substantiate those claims in court.

I agree that there is a double standard - people are quick to sling insults such as 'communist' and 'libtard', or falsely accuse pedophilia or terrorism which is swept under the carpet, whereas calling people who are members of neo-nazi groups or carry nazi flags nazis and people who are open racist bigots is censorship, outrageous and unacceptable.

Re: Inconsistent decision is concerning

@Doctor Syntax . If you change "and" to "or" then I agree.

I don't think that both decisions are wrong - in which case there would be some third outcome which which is better for both cases somehow.

Re: This will cause more pain in the long term

The Chinese are actually pretty crap at high tech - they are good at copying and mass production.

Their ethics of product substitution, pollution, forced labour and race to the bottom for low quality are a substantial part of the problem and are not easily changed. I'm not sure how much this is due to the government lying, mismanagement and corruption, but the government is not going to change any time soon.

Japan and Taiwan have some sort of motivation to produce higher quality products and eventually succeed. Korea has too (surprisingly). But I not confident that China will succeed.

Re: not very good at bridges in Australia

I did it for you. Yes, that is a fine looking bridge.

Re: We strongly support the rights our employees have in the workplace

I think you got all of those downvotes because you don't understand how academic research works.

At the start the researcher, the funders of the research and the hosting institution agree the topic of research and commit the funds. The research progresses and a paper is written containing the findings.

The researchers have a very high quality bar to reach - verifiable evidence, apply numerous of error management techniques e.g. 'double blind', no opinions. The paper is peer reviewed by other researchers who are experts in that field. Any patents etc are registered if applicable. The funders and the hosting institution get to review the paper and ask questions. They don't get to bury the paper if they don't like it, they don't get to demand changes, or edit it. Firing one the researchers is outrageous. The worst thing any stakeholder can do (and should be allowed to do) is find flaws in their research or methods or data - which is tough if the researcher is competent.

Re: Strange terminology

You round the numbers

The latest excuse is that COVID-19 makes it impossible to respond to support enquiries. Totally disingenuous unless the workforce is actually infected or dead, and even then there are no shortage of people available to replace them.

I graduated as an electrical engineer in 1995 as one of hundreds. At least 80% of my class were very good. We were one of the last years where there were good employment opportunities.

Since then, the practice of bringing in cheaper labor from another country has filled much of the demand for technical skills. Local STEM graduates now have difficulty finding work when they graduate, even though there are fewer graduates these days. So in Western countries few students enrol to study STEM because it is hard, expensive and has much more limited career prospects than it used to.

I have hired and managed cheaper labor foreign contractors and local IT graduates. I am still amazed at how good the local graduates are and am more than happy to give them that first opportunity to get into the job market. The technical education levels of Indian Universities is noticeably lower in my experience.

Until you have unreliable internet. Then your computer and becomes an unusable brick because all your software is locked behind online logins and license checks .

If this are so great at preventing software piracy, why is software more expensive now?

It creates an ongoing incentive for pirates to hack software to get around protections that have a big impact on users of the software.

For example I have watched pirated DVDs when I own the legitimate version, just so I am not forced to watch the company logo and copyright message.

Re: Am I the only one still sane?

But can you write faster than you can speak? Most people can't, and that's why text and email is usually inefficient.

Re: Insufficient

The punishments have to be in proportion to the crime. As an example to consider, the alleged activities of Prince Andrew.

Re: IT skills are fungible

China uses forced labor on a mass scale - mostly from people selected on ideological, religious, or ethnic grounds. Nobody should be expected to compete with that to be more attractive financially as an employee.

The accuracy is a function of the machine capabilities and the wear on the cutting blade. The most common reason for low quality in cheap CNC'd parts is that the manufacturer will keep working with a worn cutting blade instead of replacing it more frequently. This saves money, but definitely affects precision.

Script kiddies could do much of the hacking, but writing reports is not their strong point.

Re: Is this like triple-A mortgages

I used to work in that industry. The trick is to make the thing gratuitously more complex until the legal system and then the regulators can't keep up with it.

The evidence is that when people are taken to court over fraud etc. that the cases get thrown out (because the judge doesn't want to look silly), or it is too hard to convince a jury that deliberate crime was committed because the complexity, and they empathise that the perpetrator accidentally made a mistake.

The sales technique is the usual one that the complexity is why it is better, why relies on magical / alchemy thinking. Other examples of this sales technique are crypto currencies, and radium cure-alls.

In Steviebucks example of the wrapping, it's derivatives of derivatives of financial instruments.