Posts by John Brown (no body) 25376 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
Can you cope with me choosing my own wake word phrase for you? You seem to have an enormous amount of computing power and storage so this should be a really simple function to implement.
I'm not an American college kid and don't actually know ANYONE who starts a greeting with "Hey! $name". In my culture that's both rude and childish.
What is an "impersonator"? Surely you can't create a Twitter account using an already taken name. So how can someone "be" Elon Musk without having some other, different letters or numbers in the name? Will every John Brown on Twiiter who is not the original John Brown now get kicked off? John Brown1, John Brown2 etc?
Or does this ban on "impersonators" only apply to "famous" names? I bet there are corporate accounts that could be seen as "impersonators" because they have a similar or even the same company name in a different country or even just a different town to a similarly named company.
This is the sort of thing that quick and rash decisions causes. And Musk seem to be running Twitter based on quick and rash decisions now.
I've made that very same suggestion in comments on one of the many other El Reg Twitter articles. But on reflection, some of his investors such as the Saudi Wealth Fund and Qatar may be the types to take such losses personally, and both have form for "disappearing" people they don't like. Does he think he's "too big to disappear" or have that much trust in his personal security?
These appear to bog standard enterprise grade SSDs. The Optane branding seems mis-leading considering all the previous Optane marketing has been for a sort of permanent RAM" thingy. Has this Intel Optane business previously been selling stuff not directly associated with the Optane RAM product? Why is not just marketed as an Intel SSD? The article certainly doesn't appear to question this or explain it in any way. Have I missed something here?
"buying stuff for a local authority team,"
Isn't there a legal requirement to buy from the cheapest supplier? Without some creative purchasing skills, that could mean buying from someone trying to undercut the bigger fish and making pennies per unit on the sale, relying on volume and no further warranty costs.
Speaking to one local authority customer, he confided that they will sometimes purchase a "base" device without any optional extras, then separately purchase the "extras" which are actually required, so as buy from a supplier they know they can trust and not from one they know they will have a poor experience with and will actually cost more in the long term.
Probably for one of two reasons. The CEO's PA does all the CEOs email and so the CEO never saw it anyway. And even if the CEO did see it, I very much doubt the CEO would be informed of new starters at the now merged business unless they were C-Suite level anyway.
I used to go up to Glasgow quite often for various call-outs. I never, ever had an issue dealing with people in the various companies I dealt with, at all levels. One year, my wife and I went on a holiday up by Loch Lomand. Trying to have a chat with a broad Glaswegian in the bar (yes, he'd had a few) was entirely fruitless!! And I thought I was "tuned in" on the Glaswegian accent. Clearly I'd only ever met "posh" Glaswegians up to that point :-)
"It’s a trust that is only potential until a problem crops up, at which point the trust is affirmed or lost."
That's something I've always "known", felt in my bones, so to speak. When a customer has a problem, as I often say to them, the problem isn't the issue, it's how it's dealt with that matters. So I always try to deal with it in the best way possible. After all, if they choose to go with a different supplier, odds are they will have the same or similar problems somewhere down the line and may or may not get those problems resolved promptly and/or correctly.
"All the ones I see on TV / Internet are just news readers."
Most of them aren't even that. They "read" 60 seconds of news then spend the rest of the "show" being opinionated twats ranting about one aspect of it with their like0minded "guests". There are very few actual sources of news that don't bury it in strongly biased opinions.
I wonder if he's bothered to read all their employment contracts? How many of those staff are hourly paid and entitled to overtime rates after 40 hours? Or, this being Silly-Con Valley, is that not a normal contract of employment? I'd be surprised if any of the EU or UK staff are on unlimited hours contracts without overtime rates, except maybe executive level people.
I wonder why he thought he could just state that he wanted a blue tick subscription service and say "Make it so!" and it would be so without allocating time to design a system that worked, including verification?" That sort of system needs people to carry out, at the very least, random checking of automated verification. And you can't just knock up an automated verification system in a few days. It takes people and time and he gave little to no time and took away half of the people. Why does he think developing new ideas, products and systems at Twitter will be instant when it clearly isn't at SpaceX or Tesla?
It's only a marginal variation on "computer made mistake" that has been around almost since the computer was invented :-)
So-called AI just means it's working on steroids now and far more difficult to blame on a specific programmer since much of the "training" results is "black box" that no one claims to understand.
"but the immediate thought is: how about one that looks for code that is suspiciously close to your copyright material appearing elsewhere, as though it had been spat out by Copilot?"
There;s already software out there designed to look for plagiarism in exams and academic papers that could probably be fairly easily repurposed for the task. Depending on how it works, eg simply looking for matching strings of a certain minimum length, it might well work as is.
That would certainly find out if Copilot is taking existing chunks of code and regurgitating them. On the other hand, it may well show large chunks of code being reused in other FOSS without acknowledgement and maybe against licensing terms.
"I suspect this couple will spend no more than five years in prison."
Considering the FBI had enough to arrest/charge/go to court with the evidence passed to them from Brazil right at the start, I wonder what the sentence would have been then, rather than spending probably $millions on a two year honeypot sting getting the offenders in deeper and deeper?
It almost sounds as if instead of some minor FBI official getting a couple of brownie points, a higher up saw an expensive way of grabbing many brownie points for him/her self.
How many spaceports does Virginia have that this one needs such a specific and distinctive name?
Or is that there are a number of "regional" spaceports such as North Atlantic and South Atlantic, possibly also in Virginia, with which we may get confused?
And why "Mid-Atlantic"? Why not West Atlantic? After all, they can't have an East Atlantic space port. That would be in Ireland, the UK, Spain, Portugal, France etc.
"On the other hand, I haven't heard much from/about him lately,"
I think he spends much of his time at his EU based holiday home dealing with his EU business interests.
I do wonder if some of the high profile Brexiteers didn't want Brexit to improve the UK, but secretly thought the EU would be better off after Brexit as many of them seem to have significant EU business interests.
"Losses are greater if it's in GEO,"
Assuming the power is beamed tightly enough to keep it focussed on the receiving station such that it doesn't cook the people and wildlife outside the area, how much extra loss is there between LEO and GEO? Loss is normally defined as the inverse square law, but isn't that based on a point source with an ever expanding "zone of reception"? I'd think most of the loss would the the final leg of the journey through the atmosphere. Am I completely off base here?
Yeahbut, those hedgerows are ecosystems vital to the survival of $something!!!! You can't save the planet by killing stuff, oh nooooo!
On a slightly more serious note, any field used only for sheep grazing should be good for solar panels even using the standard mounting systems used now. I doubt the sheep would care. They might even be grateful for the extra shade in summer or, more commonly, somewhere to shelter from the rain :-) Cows, not so much. They'd probably knock them over using them as scratching posts, even of they were built taller to allow the cows to move around more freely.
And then there's fields of solar panels mounted vertically, south facing which apparently only reduces capacity by a small amount but still allows the machinery to get in and plant/maintain/harvest crops. between the rows of panels.
"The US has never been a democracy. It is, and has always been, a constitutional republic."
Considering that, so far, 124 people have been elected to power that have publicly stated that Donald Trump "really won" the 2020 Presidential election, it may not even be that for much longer.
1. People have short attention spans
2. All publicity is good publicity.
If a name or brand is in the news, people quickly forget why, but still remember the name.
Here in the UK, a major ISP, Talk Talk, got hacked TWICE, losing large amount of customer information, and people are STILL signing up to them.
On another note, I see Chase Bank are coming to the UK.
It's surprising how much you really need to pack in and live a life of relative luxury in foreign climes. Most people severly underestimate how much they need to start how hard they need to keep "working" with their money and investments to keep that standard.
I remember naively thinking back when I bought my first house that if the mortgage was paid off and I had about £60,000 in the bank, I could live comfortably off the interest alone. Savings account interest was in double digits back then, as were mortgage interest rates. I was earning about £7k PA back then. Not a huge amount, but enough to be comfortable so with no mortgage, a 10% interest on £60k seemed adequate. Obviously I didn't really think it through or understand long term inflation and the decades of very low interest rates ahead :-)
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