Re: Shock
Yes, since it's impossible for a firm to obtain a second domain name, that will definitely do the trick.
12357 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2007
They could move elsewhere
Many of them have, or never located in high-rent areas in the first place. Any list of high-tech growth areas for IT in the US will show that there are plenty of other areas with high concentrations of IT and other high-tech firms.
the glamor isn't there
From surveys I've seen, this appears to be largely irrelevant to many firms and most of their employees.
Sure, Silicon Valley still has a cultural presence, and that draws some firms, the ones who hope to find success by basking in the glow of the FANG companies or want to be close to the venture capitalists so they can con them in person. But not everyone is so easily led.
you actually can't hear what people are saying if there's other loud stuff on the soundtrack, because the speakers are so bass and treble heavy and knacker the mid-tones
IME, this is at least as much due to stupid, ubiquitous Dolby 5.1, and sound engineers insisting on mixing the dialog on the center channel - which is largely lost if all you have is a pair of stereo speakers.
We've had to get (cheap) "soundbar" speaker sets for the TVs in our houses (just one each, fortunately) in order to reliably make out dialog without having background music and SFX too loud. My wife is deaf on one side, so audio separation is meaningless to her, and I don't care about it a whit; but we need at least three channels just to hear the programs.
TV sets used to come with an option to force sound to mono, which would be just fine with me, but I haven't seen that feature in years.
A pox on all their houses.
Extracting impacted molars is better done by a proper dental surgeon, not a run-of-the-mill DDS. All credit to my dentist, whom I quite like; but that's a specialty procedure. Which is why she referred me to a dental surgeon to have my impacted supernumaries1 removed.
And a good thing, too; one of them was bent in a full 180-degree arc. Took some work getting it out. The surgeon said it was one for the trophy case, but alas it turned out he was just kidding, and didn't have a trophy case.
1Extra molars behind the "wisdom" (third) set. I still have my third molars, but the fourths had to come out.
I think of "deep fry everything" as a cultural touchstone of Midwest and Plains state fairs, not the Northeast.
In NYC I'd expect a deep-fried Creme Egg to be rejected for being gauche and insufficiently "ethnic". In New England it would likely be considered sinful. In Indianapolis or Lincoln, though, you could probably sell them all day long.
(That said, I've been to the Nebraska State Fair, and deep-fried sugar would be an improvement. The county fair I go to in Michigan is bigger and more entertaining.)
This is not a loss for Free Software fundamentalism, it's a testament to the influence it's had on the world of software, transforming the landscape into a world that's now orders of magnitude more open.
I'm dubious about this narrative. Shipping source was the rule, not the exception, in first couple decades of commercial digital computing. The move to closed-source software was arguably driven by a couple of factors: the rise of commercial pure-software companies, and the IBM consent agreement which led to "unbundling" and the forced conversion of its mainframe software into a profit center.
Even prior to the rise of the free/open software movements, source code was still exchanged widely, at both small scale (the txtfile community, for example) and large (AT&T UNIX). When Stallman founded the FSF, I don't recall it being greeted as a surprising concept; the controversy was around the ideology, not the notion of open source, or even open-source commercial software.
Personally, I suspect we'd have a significant open-source presence even if the FSF and the free-software movement (and its variants) had never happened. Certainly the FSF and GPL had a tremendous effect on the evolution of FOSS and its current state, and almost certainly on the volume of FOSS and the success of FOSS-based commercial firms such as Red Had. But I think it would have been significant even without them.
There are plenty of grammarians and linguists who would consider both "gonna" and "Wasm" contractions. There's no generally-agreed definition of contraction in English, either in general use or as a term of art, which would exclude either of those words.
If you want a more-specific description of what sort of elision "Wasm" represents, it could be considered a portmanteau, since it's an elided noun phrase used to describe a (notionally) new concept.
Indeed. I'm sure mileage varies, but for all my USB-charging devices1 I've always just had a couple of those kits that have a cable and a set of adapters for various USB sizes, and the assortment of USB chargers I've accumulated over the years. Phones, tablet, Kindle, that old MP3 player I sometimes dig out for when I'm working on the house - they all charge just fine with whatever cable and charger I use.
I keep a couple of chargers in my computer bag and have various ones scattered around the houses. (The latter stay plugged in; they dissipate negligible heat, which means they're using negligible power.) I've never had any reason to look to see what they're rated for.
1Refusing to use Apple products has solved the Lightning problem nicely.
I suppose some of his most gullible followers might believe that's a quote manufactured by the deep-state LIEberal elite MSM news, but not enough of them to get him re-elected.
As far as I can tell, for the vast majority of his supporters, it doesn't matter what he may have said. Positions don't matter; policies don't matter; performance doesn't matter.
I've read numerous interviews with Trump supporters over the past few months. These are middle-class and upper-middle-class people, likely voters, likely financial supporters. They're educated, articulate, not perceptibly stupid or ill-informed or insane. And what they say, consistently, is that they'll vote to re-elect the man. Sometimes they'll mention specific achievements (the tax-code changes he signed into law, the stock market, etc); Trump doesn't really deserve much credit for those, but they don't dwell on them anyway. They're excuses. Then they'll use descriptions like "the best president since Reagan" or in some cases "the best president ever".
The real warrant to their arguments, readily apparent, is that they support Trump because he's their team and they want to win the game. US politicians have successfully pushed most of the electorate into treating politics as a sport, and most voters will put up with pretty much anything to support their team. People mocked (and continue to mock) Trump and his supporters since he first entered the 2016 race; and those supporters will be damned before they back down.
And so will the rest of us.
Under a number of models, the European countries and Japan are both part of the continent of Eurasia. Regarding Europe is a continent unto itself has a long history but is by no means uncontroversial. Certainly, those who consider the Americas to be a single continent - a convention widely observed in a number of countries - don't have much justification for calling Europe a separate continent.
Yes, privacy is a major concern, as are attacks on group behavior. An argument can be made that crowd anonymity is a fundamental human right. I'm reminded of Poe's "The Man of the Crowd".1
1I've always wondered if this story is the origin of the term "gumshoe" for a detective. A quick search didn't turn up an earlier use. I'd check the OED but I'm feeling lazy.
"Sufficient training data" is necessary (by definition), but not sufficient. Simply throwing more data at a model will often lead to over-fitting or other anomalies.
There's a vast and rapidly-growing amount of research on this problem area, and forum posts from non-practitioners will not capture it in any useful fashion.
Given unlimited resources - including time and expertise - it's possible to asymptotically approach perfect facial recognition. But resources are obviously not unlimited, and the practical limit on facial recognition for economically-viable use cases in the near future may remain mostly quite poor. Certainly in some problem domains, including the notorious job-applicant one, it appears to be little more than algorithmic dowsing.
90% of the userbase is incapable of wrapping their tiny collective hive mind around the concept of security
Of course. For any topic X of at least moderate complexity, it's likely true that for a sufficiently large population, at least 90% don't understand X - regardless of its relevance to their lives or jobs.
Security researchers have made the point, over and over, that blaming users is unproductive; and that training users, while it can have some benefit, is limited and rarely or never a satisfactory solution in itself.
None of that contradicts what you wrote, of course. It's just to point out that while we have mechanisms for encouraging greater investment (regulation in various forms, possibly with some contribution from market forces, e.g. by coupling security measures to insurance premiums), the human element remains an intractable problem. It can likely only be successfully addressed with a complex of human and technical measures that's customized for different use cases.
Browser-based apps can only be astonishing if you're easily astonished. FTFY.
I've never seen a browser-based application that I'd consider anywhere close to "astonishing". I might allow "mildly impressive". And, yes, I've used Google Docs.
Personally, I never used any Chrome Apps, because I had no interest in seeing what the fuss was about. (Actually, I never noticed any fuss, even among developers.)
And I wouldn't have touched NaCl with a 10-foot pole.
WebAssembly is somewhat better, or at least less bad. The formal model it's based on eliminates a number of fundamental error sources. For example, it has no low-level branching, just loop op-codes, so it's impossible to create a verifiable WebAssembly program that branches to an invalid address (e.g. into the middle of an instruction). And it doesn't have threading, which is a big plus. This is a good paper.
That said, I don't foresee any reason why I'd ever want to enable WebAssembly in the browsers on my personal machines, and I'll only do it on my work machines if it's required for my job. And even then I'll do it in a segregated browser instance.
IBM Data Explorer/6000, which began life as IBM Scientific Visualization System, is another example, from circa 1991. It provided a dataflow programming system for data visualization where the user added processing modules to a directed graph. Users could also write their own modules (in the language of their choice), but drag & drop was the main paradigm.
It's an approach that works well in specific domains. I'm much happier seeing scientific visualization done that way than in Excel, for example.
But, yes, for general business application development, this approach is often oversold, and the market seems to already be well-served. Tableau seems to be reasonably successful, for example.
The almighty buck has for a long time dominated decision-making
So what's your solution? Running a university is expensive. US universities rely heavily on non-tenured faculty (fixed-term and part-time) and high-tuition students (foreign and legacy) because they have to pay the bills and state support has plummeted over the past couple of decades. Students who aren't wealthy rely on loans they already can't afford, so they oppose tuition increases.
Nobody really wants to learn - they only want the diploma; nobody really teaches - they just cram folks for exams; exams are increasingly multiple choice, which just tests parrot memory, not understanding.
Sigh. It's easy to lob generalizations. I've been an academic (including a number of stints teaching) and many of my friends and family members are in academia, and I'm calling bullshit on this. Most of the professors and instructors I've known take teaching very seriously indeed, and a majority of the students - undergraduate and graduate - are sincere about learning, for the most part.
Multiple-choice exams may be common in some areas, particularly for recitation classes; it's not feasible to grade several hundred essays in a couple of days. But I can only remember seeing a couple of them while studying for my three degrees (or the fourth that I never finished).
I don't know about that. I've known other CEOs who left in a cloud of disgrace and found a new sinecure pretty damn quickly. The old-boys network protects its own, and the public's memory of company officers tends to be very short.
At the very least he'll likely have some cushy board positions.
Agreed. And on some airlines those "entertainment" systems now bombard you with advertisements before and after the main part of the flight, and can't be switched off during those periods. In fact, the last time I flew, the controls on my unit were broken and the damned thing showed ads the whole time. I had to jam a piece of paper behind the bezel.
I've always brought my own entertainment when I fly, using a cunning portable device called a "book".
As far as I'm concerned, there's been one significant improvement in air-travel comfort in my lifetime: banning smoking.
would it not be sensible to reduce the amount of times we fly in airplanes, at least a bit?
That seems highly subjective. Some people can justify flying relatively frequently, for jobs they find rewarding or family visits or what have you.
Personally, I am happy to be flying much less frequently these days, even though it means I do several long-distance (18-24 hours of driving each way) car trips every year. And yes, those car trips are significantly more dangerous than flying - though in the best case I'd still have significant driving even if I did fly, and unless I spent several hundred dollars more for each trip to fly in and out of tiny regional airports, it would be hundreds of miles of driving, as there are no hub airports near my origin or destination, and public transportation in the US remains laughably inadequate.
If I never fly again, I wouldn't miss it.
flimsy flying tubes of aluminium
Agree about passengers being squeezed in, but I can't think of a practical design for passenger aircraft that's not a "flimsy flying tube of aluminum".1 Should we go back to wood? Anything other than thin-walled aluminum is going to be significantly less fuel-efficient, unless it's made out of prohibitively expensive materials.
Structural integrity of airliners has sometimes been a cause of fatalities, but usually (AFAIR) due to incorrect maintenance, as with Japan Airlines 123.
1The "aluminum" spelling was Davy's official nomination and etymologically justified; IUPAC now accepts both spellings. See Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales, or the Wikipedia article on the element, which actually has a decent discussion of the matter.
The opinion of the Solicitor General is no stronger than any other informed opinion. Plenty of people think an API is trivial, as far as copyright is concerned. And the Solicitor General has some incentive to side with CAFC regardless of legal subtleties.
Also, the SG's opinion is not necessarily the opinion of the DoJ as a whole. It's officially the position of the Federal government for cases before SCOTUS and amicus briefs filed by the DoJ; but the SG is not the only lawyer in the DoJ, or even in charge of the department.
And the appeal to Microsoft's actions is irrelevant, even if your summary of the case and assumption of their motives are correct. They might simply have decided it was more cost-effective to pay Sun.
Yes. This is sometimes known as an "exploit pool collision". There's a good (long) report from RAND from a couple of years ago on 0-days which discusses government 0-day hoarding at length, including disclosure strategies.
The value of an unpublished 0-day drops as more hoarders discover it (or learn about it through leaks, purchase it on the exploit market, etc). Eventually there's more value in getting it fixed.
I never had a problem with Vista, personally. But then I was running high-spec development machines, and the first thing I do with a new Windows installation is tweak the hell out of it (Security Policy, Group Policy, UI settings, etc), so I was never bothered by the default settings. I like UAC in maximally-secure mode (prompt for credentials on the secure desktop), for the same reasons that I like sudo on my Linux and UNIX dev machines.
"nagware" long pre-dates the Win10 fiasco. It might even pre-date Windows.
Yes to the former; I'm dubious about the latter. The earliest use of it I could find in that sense was in an 1991 Computerworld article, which found it necessary to slap scare quotes around it and provide a source and definition. So it looks like "nagware" wasn't in widespread use before the '90s.
On the other hand, "shareware" was used in the '80s, and it's not a great leap from "shareware" to "nagware". So it probably enjoyed some use in enthusiast cant for at least the later years of that decade.
Then again, circa 1991 an outfit named NAG was publishing software (e.g. a Fortran compiler) under the NAGWare brand, which they might have been reluctant to do if that word were recognized as a term of opprobrium.
any of them that use crypto32.dll
If you're referring to CVE-2020-0601, that's crypt32.dll (no "o"), and it only applies to Windows 10, Windows Server 2016, and Windows Server 2019. At least as far as all the published information goes, it's not relevant to Win7 or earlier.
Also, it only applies to ECC signatures. While ECDSA certificates are becoming more common, RSA is still widely used. So while this is an important vulnerability, it's not universal.
it turned out that SCO really dodnt have standing to litigate over alleged SCO violations as they didnt have full copyright licensed to them by Novell
The question was actually whether Novell had sold the UNIX copyrights to Caldera, later renamed SCO Group.
In 2007, the court issued a summary judgement saying Novell retained the copyrights. In 2010, the appeals court reversed, stating that "Agreement 2" between Novell and Caldera did not clearly reserve the copyrights to Novell. Later that year, a jury ruled Novell did in fact retain the copyrights.
Subsequently The Attachmate Group bought Novell. They sold a bunch of Novell IP to a holding company controlled by Microsoft, but retained the UNIX copyrights.
Then in 2016 Micro Focus bought Attachmate (well, it was one of those complicated reverse-trust merger whatchacallit things, but to a first approximation...). Currently, according to the latest information I can find, the copyrights are still assigned to Novell, as a division of Micro Focus. Woo!
Of course the UNIX trademark was long ago transferred to The Open Group.
Posting about Fred's expunged criminal record or that Karen was a prostitute 30 years ago being two obvious examples upheld in UK and USA courts
Citation for a US action, please.
Here's a source - and an actual lawyer, at that - who explicitly disagrees with you. "The truth is an absolute defense against a defamation action." He's writing about US law.
Exactly. Teams will record all of this, run speech-to-text (as it does for e.g. conference calls over Teams), and index all of it. Then if you're trying to, say, ask a question in a Teams channel, it will prompt you with rubbish dragged up out of random voice messages.
I can guarantee this is something which will never go on any device I own. And if it ends up on any of my company-owned equipment, I suspect it will routinely fail to work.