Posts by John Brown (no body) 25434 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
They might be better off reducing the range of products. Most of of them are not especially special, just a little different. Maybe follow the fast food industry and have three CPUs, Medium (or Regular), Large and Extra Large. No Small, that won't sell according to Marketing). And when the cooling system fails, you can have fries with it too.
You can't trademark a common word. You CAN trademark a common word in specific style/colour/logo design though. On the other hand, successful trademarks can become diluted in common usage, eg Sellotape, Biro, Hoover, Sharpie etc such that they become almost useless in marketing. Intel may have just come up with the shortest ever useful life of a marketing name-brand.
It would need a significant optimisation to increase the carrying capacity and range to make it useful. On the other hand, the early[*] EV cars had a range of barely 40 miles, not a great deal further than this flying bike. On the other hand, what needs optimising is power generation/storage and electric motor efficiency and this bike is already using the very latest improvements that now give EV cars a 200+ mile range. No regenerative braking or other optimisation suitable for road vehicles.
There's probably a learning curve. You don't let some over-excited motoring journalist loose on your brand new flying prototype. It's not in his/her skill-set :-)
Having said that, it is just a prototype and doesn't seem to have anything new or innovative in it.
"Proclaiming your science-derived guesses as absolute, indisputable fact that may not be challenged changes it from science to religion."
Luckily, most science isn't like that and the published papers can be read, showing that. How the press spin the stories, or worse, how the PR from the company or Government sponsoring it might spin it is what leads to the "absolutist science" we keep seeing in the media.
"The cost of the medallions was pretty substantial, but market forces set the price."
That's actually a major part of the problem IMHO. Why should "market forces" determine the price? It's effectively a social service provided and managed by the city, hopefully to an optimum level. Surely it would be better to sell the medallions to applicants at a reasonable rate based on fitness for the job, aptitude and whatever other relevant qualifications are deemed necessary. Not the people with the deepest pockets. If the medallions weren't sold at extortionate rates, maybe the drivers could make a living while charging lower rates to passengers and truly be independents.
I do like your more correct description of a "disrupter" though. :-)
Uber are incredibly lucky it wasn't someone with more evil intent. By the sounds of it, they could have pretty much wiped out Uber if they had cared enough to do so. A $$multi-billion business, everything online, cloudy stuff they can't properly protect. I wonder if they could have recovered from someone wiping all those systems where access was gained? Is *everything* backed up? Offline backups? Tested offline backups?
Our company does a "disaster recovery" exercise every year. The official start of the process is someone quite senior pulling the breaker switch on a Friday evening. The guys have until 8am Monday to be 100% back up and running on the original kit. It normally takes about 12 hours to recover fully while everything ticks over on the backup systems so hopefully no actual downtime.
"If the policy says "don't share your password" it shouldn't make any difference who asks for it - you just don't share it."
We get "pen tested" every now and then by an outside company. It's usually, from a users point view, some "important" email with a link to follow where we need to log in. The link is long that's nigh on impossible to check where it's really going from the browser address bar. It's looks very much like the common sort of stupidly long links our system use. I usually follow the link, find a realistic looking login page, enter my username (my publically available email address", then enter "password" for the password. A page open telling me all about what just happened, why I shouldn't follow "unknown" links and auto-subscribes me to a 10 minute security "training" course, which I complete. After the 3rd or 4th occasion, I get a phone call from my manager, sounding a bit upset. So I tell him I was testing out the quality of the phishing attempt because it was abnormally good but wasn;t stupid enough to use my real password and if the pen testers were doing their job properly instead of using automated scripts, they'd have know that I'd not fallen for it.
He asked me not to do it again as it was raising red flags but copied me in on the email back to "security" explaining how poor the pen testing was and was it really worth the money :-)
It's his job. As with science, nothing is impossible, so he has to talk up the possible attack vectors so that he can show he looked at them, tried to get funding to protect against them and set plans in place for if or when that funding materialises.
Looking at it from the other side of the coin, maybe the Chinese are experimenting with ways to clean up orbital space junk. Somewhere in the middle, China has military leaders in the same position. They see the US satellite as a threat and must, as part of their jobs, identify and attempt to get funding to combat that threat if necessary. Space junk clean-up methods are also ideal for disabling "enemy" satellites. It's all very sad, but it's the way of the world.
Possibly. It's been rumbling on for years though, so maybe a small share will be doled out if the UK had some involvement in the gathering of useful evidence while sill in the EU. At best, it might be a tiny reduction in the ongoing monies still being paid to the EU for various schemes we were involved in, especially the pensions.
Interesting story in the press recently. It should be of interest no matter where on the spectrum of the diversity debate one stands.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-62826983
Now, there is probably more to that story than this one report shows. But it looks, from that report, that the primary arguments against this person being given the job is entirely because he's a man. There doesn't seem to be anyone questioning the line up of candidates or their qualifications. It'll be an interesting one to follow as local councils are usually sticklers for following all the rules in this sort of matter and in particular like to be shown as being fair and diverse.
Well, all these $BigCorp have to put their huge profits somewhere. It earns nothing sitting in a bank, might even depreciate, while the bank makes profits lending it out. Can't give it away as bonuses or dividends, that attracts taxes. So why not just become their own bank instead? Win Win for $BigCorp. And they are all run by bean counters anyway. They always need more beans to count.
"the simplicity and reliability of the Volkswagen Beetle."
Have you seen the current incarnation of the VW Beetle? Few people buy cheap, basic, easily maintainable cars these days. They are more likely to lease something flashy. Cars as a Service has already arrived.
"It's worked for fertilizer producers, seed vendors, grain intermediaries, shipping companies. And it looks like it's going to work for John Deere."
And not forgetting biotech with their GM crops that either don't reproduce or are licenced in a way that you MUST buy seed from them, no holding back some the crop for next years planting. And the sue balls fired at adjoining farmers because their crops now contain some identifiable propriety GM seed from wind-blow.
I once worked in a public building with a similar floor, full of marble chips. Being the main entrance, it got very dirty over time with many hard to remove stains. So one of the cleaners decided one night to pour the neat cleaning fluid across the floor then use the normal rotary floor scrubber on it. If fizzed in reaction to meeting the marble and left small impossible to clean indentations across almost the entire floor. It never recovered and was never replaced or repaired. The Council simply could not afford it. Eventually the entire building was demolished to make way for new houses.
"Who upon entering said room pulled out his vacuum cleaner and blew about 10 years of dust all around our multiple VAXes."
That was silly. Vacuum cleaners are supposed to suck when in normal operation. Blow is on option on some. And any service tech who knows what they are doing never uses the blow option because they really, really don't want a cloud of dust of unknown provenance forced into a cloud around their head waiting to be breathed in!
I think the point is that it's not done when politicians of other countries are mentioned in these august pages. eg UK MPs are sometimes credited with which party they are from, but not always, and we rarely get told which constituency they represent. So why is it important for US politicians but not others? All or none would make more sense.
On the other hand, when Walmart rolls into Hicksville and opens its doors....
China are just doing it on a bigger scale. I'm not defending China here, just saying they learned the practice from somewhere. They didn't invent it. Most supermarkets will have "loss leaders" on the basics and essentials to get customers through the door. China have gone a step further and promote everything as loss leaders.
The EU is not only far too bureaucratic to actually do what you describe, but because it's so bureaucratic there would be whistle blowers galore if they tried that, And anyway, there are governments around the world, the US leading the way, which require commercial source code be submitted to them under various circumstances either for QA or "safekeeping". What's being proposed by the EU isn't new, other than being more specific on what it wants.
And don't ever forget, processes which you accuse the EU of are waaaay harder to implement there than in the US. Shout "patriotism" in the 50 States of the US, there are two parties, REP and DEM will often come to agreement quite quickly on a national issue. Try that in the EU and you've got 27 national governments each with AT LEAST two main parties, often many more, all trying to come to their own internal decisions before they even think about agreeing with all or most of the 26 others. And if a new EU "law" is introduced, it's then up to each nation to implement as they see fit. Usually more or less all the same, but often with variations.
"TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW""
"UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW"
Licences and contracts cannot override national law, which the quoted licence makes clear. The concern is how that new EU law might affect the licence terms above, ie the applicable law. It's also the reason you almost NEVER hear about some products T&Cs being disputed in a Court of Law, rather the supplier/manufacturer will settle out of court.
Maybe "AI" should be treated as an "employee" in terms of how it "represents" the company, ie it produces "work" for the company like any other employee therefore the employer is 100% reposonsible for it's actions and what it produces during it's employee time. In other words, there are processes in place to make sure the employee is producing valid work up to spec. It doesn't matter what the "thought processes" are inside the employees head, what comes out as a result of those thought processes are what counts and what needs to be up to spec.
Yes, this already has existing similarities in existing case law. The recent case of a woman who died eating a "vegan" product from Pret which it turns out was "contaminated" with milk product triggering her dairy allergen reaction. The company producing the ingredient claimed the product was dairy-free. Pret had no evidence that they had checked those claims and then went on to repeat the claims on their end product. Both made claims and so both are on the hook for it. If either had NOT made that claim, the one or both of them would probably not be on the hook.
If open source AI models and/or code is used, they have to be careful with what they claim and anyone using it commercially has to equally make sure any pre-existing claims are valid and that any changes they make in the code, the model, the data or how it's deployed also meet any claims they may make.
"That may suit a lab project but would obviously invite a trademark lawsuit from a similarly named social media company were commercialization ever considered."
Why? It's very, very different from any form of social media application. Otherwise the estate of L. Frank Baum would be suing the social media video app first. Tik Tok was a very sociable mechanical man, a robot of sorts, and much closer to being a social network than this system.
A few staff, yeah. Marketing and Sales. No one else. Of course, by definition, that makes it a huge success because "everyone"[*] loves it and uses it all the time.
We've had a few various "social media-like" things at our workplace over the years. In almost every case there were specific "channels" set up and only the sales and marketing ones saw much use. I remember the first one they tried and those same marketing and sales people seemed to think it was their personal Facebook account, posting the same sort of drivel they put on there. It took a couple of months for someone senior to finally stamp on that and point out it was meant for business use. At which point it turned into a wasteland :-)
On the other hand, now we have a better system where individual teams have their own channels, created as needed, and it does get used properly and relatively frequently. This is because anyone from team leader and up can create channels rather than top-down defined channels made be people who see the "big picture" but have no idea what individual staff need, want or do. The company wide channels and/or anything at division level are barely used.
[*] ie, of those polled by Marketing and Sales, ie only those who actually thought it was "exciting" stuff and joined in.
"But you can still get your fix at his site - https://autosaveisforwimps.substack.com/ "
And having been over there a couple weeks back, it looked like there may be a post every few weeks or even months. But since he's no longer submitting to El Reg, he seems to be doing exactly the same style on a weekly basis now. Actually more so in terms of style. The double entendres are back, which seemed to be lacking ion recent El Reg submissions.
He also explains in the comments on this weeks article why and what went on with El Reg, ie not much.
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