This is easy to say, but hard to actually get without putting ones self in some serious danger. It's far easier to get the $250K from MS, and then do speaker gigs around the world for $10k/time.
That said, telling Microsoft before telling anyone else seems like telling the wolf when Red Riding Hood is due home. It makes me wonder why Microsoft has/had so much to lose from such bugs...? Azure that bad, is it?
Nestle make water? Really? Is that like the 'McWater' of the bottled water industry?
As for Dasani - aren't they actually CocaCola company? Didn't they try to sell tap water in bottles? Oh yes, they did: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/...
I wonder if this means the 'premium' brands such as Evian, or Buxton Spring or whomever are actually okay?
I prefer it dark too - I claim to have 'thin eyelids'. I've come to this conclusion over many years, culminating in a holiday, where the curtains weren't thick enough to block the light of lightening some miles away. We'd just gone to bed and I'd know when the thunder crack was coming every time, whereas it made my wife 'jump' every single time.
I find that if I'm tired enough, I can sleep in bright sunshine, but not for long (just enough to get from super-tired to normal-tired). This is contrary to when I was a baby - I'm told that I used to cry constantly during sleep time in dark rooms, but was quite happy out in the garden in bright sunshine. Contrast to my wife who'll happily go to sleep with the bedside light on.
These days I also find that changes in light really wake me up too - so the nightlight in the hall doesn't bother me, but when the sunlight bounces off a couple of walls and lights it up out there in the morning it wakes me up. I'm also sensitive to habit. If for whatever reason I woke up at 4am last night, then I'll probably do it tonight but to a lesser extent. Tomorrow I'll probably sleep through.
All said and done though, I think I'm quite a good sleeper. Not as good as I was in my early 20s, and I'm definitely worse at it since having kids. Whatever goes on in humans to make us sleep and to keep us asleep, but wake us up when we need to - it sure is complicated.
And in fact, us IT folks spend a lot of our day automating out 'boring' tasks. I personally have looked after an estate far larger than all the computers on the site of my first job. There are more computers around now than there were back then, but automation has overtaken the difference in quantities.
Additionally, just (one of me) can do the work that (one of me + a couple of juniors) used to do. The requirement to swap tapes in drives is much less than it once was, likewise the frequency of (say) critical disk failures, for example, so the work for those juniors is much less than it once was.
So yes, even in the lofty heights of IT, automation (not really AI, but automation + comoditisation) has already removed a few of the jobs. If the automation could be improved by AI, we'd all be busy implementing it, and probably still be saying that AI won't take over *my* job;-)
If the government wants to regulate cryptocurrencies, then it sort of has to admit they're currency. And that's tricky, given you're buying strings of bytes.
My thinking here is that I could setup a cryptocurrency, let's call it CatCoin. I setup an exchange, which allows you to buy CatCoins for BitCoins and vice versa. At no point do I handle any "real" (aka. official government) currency. I make millions of BitCoins, so I trade them for dollars, pounds, euros or whatever at whatever exchange I decide is worth using. At that point the government gets in there and does whatever governments want to do.
This is essentially 'crypto derivatives' - far too confusing for any regulation to have any real effect on them - just like old-school derivatives.
When I was a teenager at college, the class had to bring a synchronous motor 'online' with the mains. There's a 'pony motor' which turns the synchronous one, you vary the speed of it until it's about right. You know it's 'about right' because there are three lamps connected to the mains and the synchronous motor. When they're 'dark', the synchronous motor is generating the exact same AC as the mains, and you can connect it. You connect it using a massive three-prong knife switch.
As a 17/18 year old kid, knowing that if you did this really wrong you could blow up the classroom made this a pretty cool day at college. It's not a skill I ever needed again, or most likely will ever need, but I'll never forget it.
Of course, these days, the three lamps wouldn't be allowed because they're (necessarily) incandescent, and the knife switch - well, you're not getting within 15 feet of that in case you touch one of the prongs or connectors - all of which carry mains voltage.
Now, back to the subject of altering the frequency... I'm a lot more hazy on this subject, but I seem to remember you can raise the frequency by providing more power to the grid (and lower it by reducing supply). I believe the physics of it are that an 'oversupply' of current means a higher line voltage, which means that you're turning the synchronous motors a little faster. Of course, those motors are actually generators, but if you're over voltage, then the smaller generators effectively become motors because they're not really 'pushing' any current to the network. As such, the larger power stations can still influence frequency, so long as there are enough of them all doing about the same thing at about the same time. As you point out though, nowadays there are less big, and many many more small ones, so presumably the 'big to small' ratio is much smaller, making their influence smaller too. That coupled with high demand means a drop in frequency that's hard to compensate for.
It's 'cloud' hosted, but thus far has been pretty well behaved: Todoist (https://todoist.com/). It has about a bajillion features I don't use (hell, I don't even put due dates on my tasks). It's a nice way to quickly take down items you need to remember and then tick off later though. I'm on the free version, which hasn't been 'nagware' at all, offers enough basic functionality to be useful and so far doesn't appear to be showing me "related ads" or any such thing.
So if 'self hosted' is an absolute requirement, I'd recommend checking them out so you know what you need to copy;-)
It's the difference between £30/month or £40/month - not the difference between £1000 and £300. For a kid who earns say £250/month, it's a small incremental cost from money for which they have nothing else of value to spend on.
(in the US it's probably more like the difference between $80 and $100/month, but that's because your mobile industry isn't regulated properly, but you get the idea)
This reminds me of the Jenkins (centos) RPM. It used to do all the package extract and then did a 'chown -R/var/lib/jenkins' - innocuous enough, given everything in there should be owned by Jenkins anyway. The trouble was, some of us had gigabytes of files and jobs in there (in my case, it got so big we had to put it on an NFS share), so the chown would literally take hours/days. It took 2 years to get the issue fixed: https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/...
OS packaging is actually pretty hard unless you know everything about everything. Keeping things simple (ie. not root owned) makes life considerably less risky.
I'd like to see all non-OS package managers just run as a user (not root). They can throw all the crap they want wherever they like in their own directories, but for all the root-owned stuff, use an OS package like everyone else.
Whilst I'm being a bit angry about this, I think it would actually lead to a far better (and safer) solution than we have today. The likes of NPM can run as the 'npm' user and can do nightly updates if they want, and I, the sysadmin will know that it's 'safe' in so much as it'll only ever mess up the Javascript stuff on the box. If I run "yum install" or whatever, then I'm taking the risk, so I'll be responsible for the outcomes.
I could see this being useful for Python PIP and Perl CPAN libraries too - it would mean that you could even have devs install system-wide language libraries if you wanted (all 'risk free' in the broader sense). It means the devs are responsible for the language stuff, and the sysadmins are responsible for the system.
I didn't RTFA, but the guest on Channel 4 News last night (Dr. someone or other) summarised the research as "anti-depressants don't work any better than placebo, at least within statistical relevance".
I hadn't heard that about curry though - I doubt that was taken into account in the research;-)
I don't think people 'strive to create value' at all - we just go to work to get paid, and while we're at work we basically do what we're told. If we're told "strive to create value", then we'll work like normal and call it "striving to create value". If the boss says "ensure not one of these shell casings can be used to make a bomb, but make sure we make enough of them to fulfil our orders" (a la Schindler), then we'll do that, and we'll still call it 'striving to create value' when the customers come around.
In my spare time I like to be 'productive' by getting tasks off my to-do list (eg. mow the lawn, fix the fence, paint the spare room, etc) - crucially none of these pay any money, although they do 'add value' to me. If I had more spare time, I probably wouldn't be so keen to get those jobs done because I could just put them off until tomorrow in a lot of cases. That's not an option because soon enough I have to go to work.
I don't think that anyone's yet worked out how to keep a certain sense of urgency in people's lives when there's nothing that can't wait until tomorrow, yet not pay them and still have a functioning society. With that in mind, TFA doesn't offer anything new that we haven't heard already.
I wonder how many of the slightly overweight, first-class food riddled rich of the world could actually survive the flight? It's quite a big deal getting to and from space - it requires a level of physical fitness and stamina.
That said, when I was single, I'd probably have thought about spending $50K to go into space for a day or two. Nowadays I've got other responsibilities, and by the time they're not so much of a concern I'll be too old and fragile to make the trip. Although maybe by then we'll have a space elevator or some equally gentile route up.
Can someone just come by and inspect the house while it's being constructed? If it's not good enough, order it to be repaired/rebuilt?
That way, if you want, you can build your house yourself, or employ some local homeless kids or whatever to do it - so long as the end result is safe, who cares how it got built?
Exactly - and in fact, a lot of the details can be worked out by providing standards which are optional to uphold (and maybe some minimum standards which are obligatory, such as laws provide).
For example, a locksmith could have ISO2742947648 which states "can fit locks that meet insurance requirements, and won't tell criminals about the security of your house". Thus, you can have a locksmith who doesn't conform to that standard, perfectly able to fit locks to your shed our outside shitter, but you wouldn't want them to fit one to your front door. Yes, you can argue the 'real' locksmith just missed out on two jobs there, but by missing out on those jobs, someone else got the opportunity, and who knows, maybe one day will have enough money to learn about and obtain the ISO certification.
By that logic, you're also on the fence for people such as:
- road sweepers - dog walkers - bird owners/breeders - cat owners/breeders - pretty much anyone who has a rodent pet - gun owners - delivery drivers (even small vehicles such as mopeds/bicycles) - any sort of entertainment venue (especially if kids of any age go there) - sysadmins - programmers
The list goes on - all these roles have some associated public risk if they chose to do the role badly/incorrectly/illegally. Should they all require a license to operate at all though? Wouldn't a single law addressing "doing harm to others" cover it all, and mean zillions of professions can operate without licenses?
I was vaguely interested in this - it's an app that's needed writing for years because writing a CV/resume is a tiresome activity at the best of times.
The thing I really don't want is frikkin' job ads in my word processor - who thought this was a good idea!? Most of us have perfectly good web browsers for such things (granted, Microsoft only have Edge, but still...). Why I'd want any of that functionality added to my word processor is a mystery.
Now... if they made Linkedin a bit better, that would be useful engineering. But adding even more code to Word seems like a foolish endeavour to me. Linkedin just needs an "export my profile to Word format" and all the useful bits of this story would be taken care of.
I did look at K9 but ended up with Maildroid (which I paid for after a bit of time on the free app). Likewise, it's way better than the built in crap that phones come with. Like K9 it's got it rough edges, but for the most part I find it pretty decent.
Either way, I'd really like to be able to remove the google apps from my phone - I'd keep maps, but pretty much everything else can go.
The moment the venture capitalists stop paying some percentage of my Uber trips is the moment the competitors kill them off.
Uber's competitors can't beat the price, so instead are ramping up other things, like quality of vehicles, security, invoicing, or whatever else. Those things might not be enough to lure the price conscious in, but once price stops being so far different, Uber loses it's edge altogether. It's a bit like a Ponzi scheme right now, so it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. No one can afford to lose billions per year for too long.
Roll on May 2018. The EU GDPR regulations kick in, and this shit means companies get shut down.
If this happens after May, Fedex companies in all European nations will be obligated to report themselves to their respective Information Commissioners Office. The ICO will then investigate and has the power to fine them €20 million, or 4% of the *global* turnover of the whole company (whichever is the greater). So for the likes of Fedex (with global revenue measured in billions), that could run into hundreds of millions of Euro. If Fedex wants to deliver (or receive) a parcel in Europe ever again, they'll pay up. Otherwise, they'll have to cease trading in Europe (and no, popping up as Fexde shortly afterwards as an attempt to evade the fine won't wash either).
Of course, we have no way to know how the ICO will react to things like this, so it may not be as bad as all that. Leaving stuff on a publicly accessible server is unlikely to go down well though. Passport picture pages seem like a pretty bad thing to lose too, so again, unlikely to go down well.
'round here, the menu you see in Deliveroo is different to the one in the restaurant (for smaller places it's usually a selection of the full menu and a bit more expensive than the roughly equivalent items in the restaurant, although the bigger franchises tend to have the same prices as eat-in). There's a minimum order value and you also pay a bit to the 'roo for delivery (£2.50, I think).
If restaurants can't make that work for them, then one wonders what on earth they need!?
Slashdot Mirror
This is easy to say, but hard to actually get without putting ones self in some serious danger. It's far easier to get the $250K from MS, and then do speaker gigs around the world for $10k/time.
That said, telling Microsoft before telling anyone else seems like telling the wolf when Red Riding Hood is due home. It makes me wonder why Microsoft has/had so much to lose from such bugs...? Azure that bad, is it?
Nestle make water? Really? Is that like the 'McWater' of the bottled water industry?
As for Dasani - aren't they actually CocaCola company? Didn't they try to sell tap water in bottles? Oh yes, they did: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/...
I wonder if this means the 'premium' brands such as Evian, or Buxton Spring or whomever are actually okay?
(see title)
I prefer it dark too - I claim to have 'thin eyelids'. I've come to this conclusion over many years, culminating in a holiday, where the curtains weren't thick enough to block the light of lightening some miles away. We'd just gone to bed and I'd know when the thunder crack was coming every time, whereas it made my wife 'jump' every single time.
I find that if I'm tired enough, I can sleep in bright sunshine, but not for long (just enough to get from super-tired to normal-tired). This is contrary to when I was a baby - I'm told that I used to cry constantly during sleep time in dark rooms, but was quite happy out in the garden in bright sunshine. Contrast to my wife who'll happily go to sleep with the bedside light on.
These days I also find that changes in light really wake me up too - so the nightlight in the hall doesn't bother me, but when the sunlight bounces off a couple of walls and lights it up out there in the morning it wakes me up. I'm also sensitive to habit. If for whatever reason I woke up at 4am last night, then I'll probably do it tonight but to a lesser extent. Tomorrow I'll probably sleep through.
All said and done though, I think I'm quite a good sleeper. Not as good as I was in my early 20s, and I'm definitely worse at it since having kids. Whatever goes on in humans to make us sleep and to keep us asleep, but wake us up when we need to - it sure is complicated.
And in fact, us IT folks spend a lot of our day automating out 'boring' tasks. I personally have looked after an estate far larger than all the computers on the site of my first job. There are more computers around now than there were back then, but automation has overtaken the difference in quantities.
Additionally, just (one of me) can do the work that (one of me + a couple of juniors) used to do. The requirement to swap tapes in drives is much less than it once was, likewise the frequency of (say) critical disk failures, for example, so the work for those juniors is much less than it once was.
So yes, even in the lofty heights of IT, automation (not really AI, but automation + comoditisation) has already removed a few of the jobs. If the automation could be improved by AI, we'd all be busy implementing it, and probably still be saying that AI won't take over *my* job ;-)
If the government wants to regulate cryptocurrencies, then it sort of has to admit they're currency. And that's tricky, given you're buying strings of bytes.
My thinking here is that I could setup a cryptocurrency, let's call it CatCoin. I setup an exchange, which allows you to buy CatCoins for BitCoins and vice versa. At no point do I handle any "real" (aka. official government) currency. I make millions of BitCoins, so I trade them for dollars, pounds, euros or whatever at whatever exchange I decide is worth using. At that point the government gets in there and does whatever governments want to do.
This is essentially 'crypto derivatives' - far too confusing for any regulation to have any real effect on them - just like old-school derivatives.
When I was a teenager at college, the class had to bring a synchronous motor 'online' with the mains. There's a 'pony motor' which turns the synchronous one, you vary the speed of it until it's about right. You know it's 'about right' because there are three lamps connected to the mains and the synchronous motor. When they're 'dark', the synchronous motor is generating the exact same AC as the mains, and you can connect it. You connect it using a massive three-prong knife switch.
As a 17/18 year old kid, knowing that if you did this really wrong you could blow up the classroom made this a pretty cool day at college. It's not a skill I ever needed again, or most likely will ever need, but I'll never forget it.
Of course, these days, the three lamps wouldn't be allowed because they're (necessarily) incandescent, and the knife switch - well, you're not getting within 15 feet of that in case you touch one of the prongs or connectors - all of which carry mains voltage.
Now, back to the subject of altering the frequency... I'm a lot more hazy on this subject, but I seem to remember you can raise the frequency by providing more power to the grid (and lower it by reducing supply). I believe the physics of it are that an 'oversupply' of current means a higher line voltage, which means that you're turning the synchronous motors a little faster. Of course, those motors are actually generators, but if you're over voltage, then the smaller generators effectively become motors because they're not really 'pushing' any current to the network. As such, the larger power stations can still influence frequency, so long as there are enough of them all doing about the same thing at about the same time. As you point out though, nowadays there are less big, and many many more small ones, so presumably the 'big to small' ratio is much smaller, making their influence smaller too. That coupled with high demand means a drop in frequency that's hard to compensate for.
The geeks were too slow, so we got our law makers on the case instead: https://www.eugdpr.org/
I wonder too...
It's 'cloud' hosted, but thus far has been pretty well behaved: Todoist (https://todoist.com/). It has about a bajillion features I don't use (hell, I don't even put due dates on my tasks). It's a nice way to quickly take down items you need to remember and then tick off later though. I'm on the free version, which hasn't been 'nagware' at all, offers enough basic functionality to be useful and so far doesn't appear to be showing me "related ads" or any such thing.
So if 'self hosted' is an absolute requirement, I'd recommend checking them out so you know what you need to copy ;-)
Page 0, sometimes called "i" to mcmxvii = PDF Reader EULA + copyright notices.
It's the difference between £30/month or £40/month - not the difference between £1000 and £300. For a kid who earns say £250/month, it's a small incremental cost from money for which they have nothing else of value to spend on.
(in the US it's probably more like the difference between $80 and $100/month, but that's because your mobile industry isn't regulated properly, but you get the idea)
This reminds me of the Jenkins (centos) RPM. It used to do all the package extract and then did a 'chown -R /var/lib/jenkins' - innocuous enough, given everything in there should be owned by Jenkins anyway. The trouble was, some of us had gigabytes of files and jobs in there (in my case, it got so big we had to put it on an NFS share), so the chown would literally take hours/days. It took 2 years to get the issue fixed: https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/...
OS packaging is actually pretty hard unless you know everything about everything. Keeping things simple (ie. not root owned) makes life considerably less risky.
I'd like to see all non-OS package managers just run as a user (not root). They can throw all the crap they want wherever they like in their own directories, but for all the root-owned stuff, use an OS package like everyone else.
Whilst I'm being a bit angry about this, I think it would actually lead to a far better (and safer) solution than we have today. The likes of NPM can run as the 'npm' user and can do nightly updates if they want, and I, the sysadmin will know that it's 'safe' in so much as it'll only ever mess up the Javascript stuff on the box. If I run "yum install" or whatever, then I'm taking the risk, so I'll be responsible for the outcomes.
I could see this being useful for Python PIP and Perl CPAN libraries too - it would mean that you could even have devs install system-wide language libraries if you wanted (all 'risk free' in the broader sense). It means the devs are responsible for the language stuff, and the sysadmins are responsible for the system.
I didn't RTFA, but the guest on Channel 4 News last night (Dr. someone or other) summarised the research as "anti-depressants don't work any better than placebo, at least within statistical relevance".
I hadn't heard that about curry though - I doubt that was taken into account in the research ;-)
I don't think people 'strive to create value' at all - we just go to work to get paid, and while we're at work we basically do what we're told. If we're told "strive to create value", then we'll work like normal and call it "striving to create value". If the boss says "ensure not one of these shell casings can be used to make a bomb, but make sure we make enough of them to fulfil our orders" (a la Schindler), then we'll do that, and we'll still call it 'striving to create value' when the customers come around.
In my spare time I like to be 'productive' by getting tasks off my to-do list (eg. mow the lawn, fix the fence, paint the spare room, etc) - crucially none of these pay any money, although they do 'add value' to me. If I had more spare time, I probably wouldn't be so keen to get those jobs done because I could just put them off until tomorrow in a lot of cases. That's not an option because soon enough I have to go to work.
I don't think that anyone's yet worked out how to keep a certain sense of urgency in people's lives when there's nothing that can't wait until tomorrow, yet not pay them and still have a functioning society. With that in mind, TFA doesn't offer anything new that we haven't heard already.
I wonder how many of the slightly overweight, first-class food riddled rich of the world could actually survive the flight? It's quite a big deal getting to and from space - it requires a level of physical fitness and stamina.
That said, when I was single, I'd probably have thought about spending $50K to go into space for a day or two. Nowadays I've got other responsibilities, and by the time they're not so much of a concern I'll be too old and fragile to make the trip. Although maybe by then we'll have a space elevator or some equally gentile route up.
Sounds like it's time for Apple to start using the Big List of Naughty Strings (https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings).
It's pretty new, what with it's first commit only being in 2015 (although the idea of it's been around a lot longer).
Can someone just come by and inspect the house while it's being constructed? If it's not good enough, order it to be repaired/rebuilt?
That way, if you want, you can build your house yourself, or employ some local homeless kids or whatever to do it - so long as the end result is safe, who cares how it got built?
Exactly - and in fact, a lot of the details can be worked out by providing standards which are optional to uphold (and maybe some minimum standards which are obligatory, such as laws provide).
For example, a locksmith could have ISO2742947648 which states "can fit locks that meet insurance requirements, and won't tell criminals about the security of your house". Thus, you can have a locksmith who doesn't conform to that standard, perfectly able to fit locks to your shed our outside shitter, but you wouldn't want them to fit one to your front door. Yes, you can argue the 'real' locksmith just missed out on two jobs there, but by missing out on those jobs, someone else got the opportunity, and who knows, maybe one day will have enough money to learn about and obtain the ISO certification.
By that logic, you're also on the fence for people such as:
- road sweepers
- dog walkers
- bird owners/breeders
- cat owners/breeders
- pretty much anyone who has a rodent pet
- gun owners
- delivery drivers (even small vehicles such as mopeds/bicycles)
- any sort of entertainment venue (especially if kids of any age go there)
- sysadmins
- programmers
The list goes on - all these roles have some associated public risk if they chose to do the role badly/incorrectly/illegally. Should they all require a license to operate at all though? Wouldn't a single law addressing "doing harm to others" cover it all, and mean zillions of professions can operate without licenses?
I was vaguely interested in this - it's an app that's needed writing for years because writing a CV/resume is a tiresome activity at the best of times.
The thing I really don't want is frikkin' job ads in my word processor - who thought this was a good idea!? Most of us have perfectly good web browsers for such things (granted, Microsoft only have Edge, but still...). Why I'd want any of that functionality added to my word processor is a mystery.
Now... if they made Linkedin a bit better, that would be useful engineering. But adding even more code to Word seems like a foolish endeavour to me. Linkedin just needs an "export my profile to Word format" and all the useful bits of this story would be taken care of.
I did look at K9 but ended up with Maildroid (which I paid for after a bit of time on the free app). Likewise, it's way better than the built in crap that phones come with. Like K9 it's got it rough edges, but for the most part I find it pretty decent.
Either way, I'd really like to be able to remove the google apps from my phone - I'd keep maps, but pretty much everything else can go.
The moment the venture capitalists stop paying some percentage of my Uber trips is the moment the competitors kill them off.
Uber's competitors can't beat the price, so instead are ramping up other things, like quality of vehicles, security, invoicing, or whatever else. Those things might not be enough to lure the price conscious in, but once price stops being so far different, Uber loses it's edge altogether. It's a bit like a Ponzi scheme right now, so it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. No one can afford to lose billions per year for too long.
Roll on May 2018. The EU GDPR regulations kick in, and this shit means companies get shut down.
If this happens after May, Fedex companies in all European nations will be obligated to report themselves to their respective Information Commissioners Office. The ICO will then investigate and has the power to fine them €20 million, or 4% of the *global* turnover of the whole company (whichever is the greater). So for the likes of Fedex (with global revenue measured in billions), that could run into hundreds of millions of Euro. If Fedex wants to deliver (or receive) a parcel in Europe ever again, they'll pay up. Otherwise, they'll have to cease trading in Europe (and no, popping up as Fexde shortly afterwards as an attempt to evade the fine won't wash either).
Of course, we have no way to know how the ICO will react to things like this, so it may not be as bad as all that. Leaving stuff on a publicly accessible server is unlikely to go down well though. Passport picture pages seem like a pretty bad thing to lose too, so again, unlikely to go down well.
'round here, the menu you see in Deliveroo is different to the one in the restaurant (for smaller places it's usually a selection of the full menu and a bit more expensive than the roughly equivalent items in the restaurant, although the bigger franchises tend to have the same prices as eat-in). There's a minimum order value and you also pay a bit to the 'roo for delivery (£2.50, I think).
If restaurants can't make that work for them, then one wonders what on earth they need!?