Posts by Notas Badoff

At those prices...

For those prices there has got to be a market for "eternal repose" for billionaires. What a hook!

"Look down on everyone, for eternity, for only $62 million."

And for only $90 million, "You *can* take it with you."

Govt publishes unpublic public documents! Details at <random> o'clock.

Someone said "Give me a script I can run to upload the latest PDF to the site." Script says here you go, the next consecutive number was '1242'. What, you demand complicated interactions with public servants and 32 hex digit UUIDs? Hahaha.

The core point here is, when is a document *published* ? If I stick a magazine on the shelf at the corner drug store, is it not published and available to all comers?

Crap, now I'm nervous I downloaded all those IETF RFCs in sequence.

Illuminating or not?

"Uber fiercely denied it had any of Wamyo's LIDAR technology in its self-driving cars ..."

Oh I think we can see that.

I love Science best when there's one person saying ...

"Hey, have you guys seen anything like this before?", and more and more people get roped in saying ???!?!?!!! The simple question "how do you explain this?" is actually the nicest gift you can give to your colleagues.

Like Hanny's Voorwerp. "Hey, guys, what's that green cloud thingy just hanging out in space, 700 million light years away?" (tee hee)

Um, nope

"And not just any funguses, but some species capable of producing amino acids that are usually considered to be extra-terrestrial when found in meteorites."

Not stated.

"The presence of fungi in NASA curation facilities is particularly interesting since some fungal species are able to produce amino acids like Aib (α-aminoisobutryic acid) and Iva (Isovaline) that are often considered to be extra-terrestrial when identified in meteorites."

That is, there are fungal species on earth that can produce weird amino acids normally thought only produced extra-terrestrially. A very general statement.

"Most of the identified fungal isolates belonged to the genus Penecillium. At least one member of this genus has been able to produce Aib in the lab."

I've seen people dressed in purple do really weird things, and you're wearing purple, so...

"The fungi cultivated from the laminar flow bench in this study are currently being analyzed for the presence and enantiomeric ratios of a broad suite of amino acids commonly found in meteorites, including Aib and Iva, to determine whether they could be possible sources of these compounds."

In other words, we have not yet seen extra-terrestrial-like amino acids from the fungi found. They may find such, and that is correctly disturbing and worth consideration if never imagined possible by previous researchers.

This was a "hey, look at this!" first note paper. Consider this indication of hurriedness:

<quote>

"Half of the sample was set aside to determine free amino acids content, whereas the other have was acid vapor hydrolyzed (6N HCl) for 3 hours at 150 °C to measure total amino acids (free and protein-bound)."

</quote>

To have and half not, right?

Oh well, count down to "Extra-terrestrial fungi from meteorites hidden in NASA labs for 20 years!" 5, 4, 3, ...

Collocated data

I like your previous article's quotes from Seagate:

"Half the drive's recording heads will operate together as a unit, while the other half will operate independently as a separate unit,",

and

"The host computer can treat a single Dual Actuator drive as if it were two separate drives,"

And so what you've got is one disk enclosure, and one interface, but effectively two independently operated drives. Not two independent read/write arms accessing the same entire disk. To access a particular set of data, you are still waiting on the queue of commands for a single arm. Ho hum.

We've got to look for something like the additional word 'parallel' to get the nirvana of "times N" access to one set of data. Though duplication of data using RAID may help? Oh, that's reads only.

But it's symbols all the way down! (in code)

At what point do the 'words' - the keywords - just become symbols? Quite early. If you want to use 'kung_hindi' instead of 'else', okay with me. But then, leaving as-is, and as is most commercially valuable, is better.

Now variable naming and commentary is very language-specific, and depends greatly on your target audience. Decoding variable names in German Fortran was 'fun', but speed developed. The comments were very hard, as compressed <any>language becomes elliptical and telegraphic. (What are the 3 most important words out of a full sentence description?)

And that's where the problem will be hardest. You can already find code/projects on Github where the comments are largely in <local>language, even if the variable names are 'conventional' Latin script. Nicht wahr? Shi zhen de!

Dreadful balkanisation if local language ports become popular, with some success in small markets. But converging on the best/worst case 'globish' is a fairly high bar for many. What language do you want to use to sell yourself in comments is key here.

I took affright

'scarifying' : "I do not think it means what you think it means."

I _have_ been scarified by saddles, and am scared of ideas, but I think you simply want to be terrifically >>terrifying<<.

They smiled at you and and won your heart...

and, similarly to Bush meeting with Putin, you looked into their souls but you saw mere veniality. Which is what you expected. Shallow techies, everywhere!

Remember the genesis of the US tech industry? The military needed better, smaller, faster, and sooner, and was willing to pay for it. (ex. article) The Cold War then add-on Space Race superheated science, technology and precision manufacturing in the US. There was a tremendous push for working products at high specifications. (and alas, not benign ones)

You are pointing to the lack of *Walkmans* as certain evidence that the Chinese tech industry is not really doing anything advanced, nor is capable of doing so. But how long did it take for the advances fostered by the Western military to diffuse out to the public arena? You are benchmarking by widgets visible now. That is certainly short-sighted.

The fear does not come from worry about 7-day battery life or 7G invented and owned by Chinese companies. The fear comes from the longevity and determination of the CPC, and their Putin-like concentration only on what benefits China, powered by a soon-to-be better than US-level economy.

Oh, and those millions of STEM graduates. Given a big enough number, even a very small percentage of real movers comes to more than the US and EU combined, yearly, and increasing.

The Chinese government does not care about consumer products. Those just naturally fall out of the process as by-products of centrally commanded technological advances. And those will keep the masses happy and content.

It is the other products of the military industrial complex "with Chinese characteristics" that you should be looking for, fearfully. (and alas, not benign ones)

It's 80 years later and Beijing is the new center of gravity for the future 大东亚共荣圈

Some can, most can't

I thought about it the other day and started counting how many different reasons disqualify me going up into the black. I get above seven different physical/medical reasons.

Even if free and easy transport were suddenly available, I'd have to stay and volunteer to neaten up and turn out the lights. Or... maybe like Pierson's Puppeteers we could just move the planet? All hail Larry Niven!

Are you in or are you out?

I wonder if the senior management of Kaspersky have strongly caught the fitness craze and are now taking frequent random walks through city parks and trails, just chatting together, y'kno?

Surely that bug hunting security firm has a bug out plan for their own security!

The power to cloud men's minds

Some people are just more susceptible.

There was a SF short story about a nebula that just happens to drift into the Solar System, and the composition of the cloud just happens to dramatically lower human intelligence. As the lights begin to go out, the last few bright sparks try to determine just how big is the cloud, thus how long the dark ages will be. They fail...

Not "The Black Cloud". And not "The Shadow". I just don't know why I can't bring the title to mind... er...

Three-legged stool, and then more chopping?

Can we start a meme of theorising how many legs these companies are sitting on? It seems several start out with five or six legs under their stools, then get into a habit of whittling away and then chopping legs out from under themselves. Then they are surprised when dropping that unneeded third leg and they fall over.

How many legs for IBM? How many for HPE?

So we're talking...

humba's to neaten up the fields?

You don't want to see us again

Had a manual phone long ago with some kind of "shoulder rest" plastic thingy attached to handset. It rather unbalanced the phone in its cradle. That base unit also had an emergency services dial button. Jiggle base, handset falls over, and easily hitting 'emergency' button.

'bout the third time the police came out for a look-see around the whole flat, they indicated they didn't want to see that phone again. Call to action? "You don't want to see us again, do you?"

Maybe just park a few several police cars and a swat unit around the repair center for days as needed for "quick response" to every incident logged? Getting shut down for a while each time will cause intense cooperation quickly.

FTFY

You had put the comma in the wrong place.

"Given that 70 per cent of features are not delivering any actual value to their organisation by using AI, businesses can ..."

Worst case

The same Supreme Court that came up with Citizens United (corporations are people) will decide that lawyers are people, and so give the money to that suffering class.

ElReg: so educational

"White-anting is an Australian term for the process of internal erosion of a foundation. It is often used in reference to groups such as political parties or organisations where information from group insiders is 'leaked' or used to undermine the goals of the group. The Macquarie Dictionary says the verb "to white-ant" means "to subvert or undermine from within".

"Reverse merger"

Flash! Florida to buy out Spain in a reverse merger. Says future much brighter in Florida, coastlines much better, and the water is really something! Rumors of long-life product lines that will bring global interest to Florida abound. Chairman Miguel Delgato quotes CTO de León as guaranteeing performance will last forever and UPS is unneeded!

Revealing state secrets

Well now, that's going to restrict their movements, what with some countries jailing people for mentioning even commonly-known facts, as "revealing state secrets". Hotel California, anyone?

There's gold in them thar budgets

"GOLD scans the entirety of the Earth’s disk every half hour."

Limb, as in looks at the edge of Earth's atmosphere?

I'm imagining that some data resolves more sharply seen edge-on but other data is from tracking changes across wide areas.

And, of course, projects get funded and championed much more if they have sexy names. I mean, the Arecibo dish would get lots more money if it was called 'Marilyn'.

We repeat ourselves

A long time ago in a machine room far, far away as the codger walks, there was a four (!) CPU mainframe wondrous fast. It made seismic reflection squiggles shimmy so pretty the geophysicists danced. Migrations moved them to tears. All was happiness.

Back then patches and/or "local code" required the whole OS be recompiled. Hundreds of large files of assembly massaged, then 'linked' into binaries. Long jobs taking much time away from happy-making production, thus much frowning.

Occasionally the 'link' step would die horribly and mysteriously, losing the entire rebuild job. Then occasionally seemed to be more frequently, and always very very mysterious. This shouldn't happen became over time "this can't happen!". And that was the techs, not the customer mangers, for indeed there was nothing wrong in the linker code or the data or the OS.

One bright spark wasting time over the rising stacks of dump listings, happened to notice that each dumped failure was running exactly the same section of tight code in the linker. Catching scent in verifying that, they then happened to notice it was always the same CPU. Same code, same CPU, every time.

A feature of these machines was that the processors could retain up to four (!) instructions in a on-CPU cache. And if you could architect a loop in four or less instructions, wicked fast. Great for array and string processing.

And the linker had such a four instruction loop, and for what the code was doing there, it was very very clever (and fast). But sometimes died mysteriously, on that one CPU, of hundreds of those world-wide.

Cue more "shouldn't happen" and "can't happen", 'cept back at Engineering Central. We got to see a half-dozen luminaries - stars! - come to see us in the field, arriving from on high. (Minnesota)

Much muttering and magic made as they tracked the bug down. Awed murmuring from us, watching hands flying over the engineering "front panel" 6 feet by 7 feet tall with hundreds of blinkin's and switches and rollers to access the dozens of internal registers. Awed tittering from us, as instructions were toggled into memory to replicate the bug on barest possible metal.

Pure awe as they lifted "that one" card from the wall of 6" by 8" cards, from one of the four CPUs. Replacing it, they carefully packed the card away for interrogation later back at Engineering.

We're repeating ourselves, without thinking things out. The circuits are ever so shrunk, but the instances are ever so multiplied. Shrunk by 6 magnitudes but multiplied by 8+ magnitudes?

Anyway, after seeing that, when Aunt Edith complains that that one file in her collection of Fabio pictures crashes her tablet, I just smile and ask "have you tried using a different program?" I'm good, but I "can't handle the truth!"

BTW: ECL keeps you warm on a cold day! I miss it just now...

It's 2018 and… wow, you're still using ...

clickbait headlines?

Hey, I know how to do this!

Blacklist: "Is it an even number?"

Whitelist: "Is it not divisible by something other than one?"

One of these is a mental shortcut, yet terrible at identifying prime numbers.

Hells and Hails

"We are eternally grateful to have such a vigilant and informed community, ..."

Can we at least mix into the shower of "hell!"s a few 'hail's that (for whatever reason) they recognize that the relationship with customers can be of benefit to them, however much it might look antagonistic? Every company ought to have a "Tips and Corrections"-like response mechanism.

When the clock is running out on your reputation, you want to know bad stuff soonest!

"Mr. Cunnilingus, in the network, with a soldering iron" is not your common-place solution in Clue. Please, let the BOFH not take notice.

Risk analysis

Hmm, this bit here looks wrong. What would happen if we disable it?

A) production goes down

B) payroll goes down (and it's end-of-month)

C) muzak goes down

Presumably NPMinc has tracking statistics where they could ask the question: how many people/downloads per day for this project?

Hey, you want to invalid $1000 dollar bills? Nobody will notice. $20 dollar bills? Revolution.

Self-sufficiency

Draw up a list of everything essential and necessary to China's military. If they can't already source each domestically it is a priority for them to develop the manufacturing base to do so. In doing that, most everything essential to domestic civilian consumption follows also, and keeps the public quiet.

Whatever else it may resemble, this is a command economy directed to become independent of all international entanglements. Then, no one will be able to interfere in future developments as there will be no levers to use against them. This is economic strategy motivated by strict nationalism.

If you want to sell them ivory or teak or bulk refined ores, fine. Everything else is a negative for them.

Oh, that's why

I have wondered what the hay was the problem. A news site page will peg out CPU usage at 60-75%, sometimes for minutes (in amazement I tried that many times). You see flash after flash of network activity as the various evil burrowing gnomes desperately load/reload/re-reload/re-re-re-re-really? I've killed tabs and watched as activity on the process continued for up to a minute! Stupidly starting "too many" tabs I've repeatedly had to kill FF entirely to grab my system back from the 'net.

"The feature won't behave perfectly in every case – but that, Bambas wrote, is because some pages are simply badly written. An ill-designed page that uses Google's Page-Hiding Snippet, for example, might load as blank for a few seconds, and if a developer is sufficiently inept to refer an API of an async tracking script from a sync script, a race condition is set up."

Hunh, we're talking about advertisers here, right? Do they *care* if their code is badly written? What protection does Firefox give us against that?