Posts by Notas Badoff

Live! from your keyboard - your reputation

Um, wow. When the BDFL (retired) is minded to point to the code of conduct and also remind everyone that maillists are public information...? It has obviously been rough riding herd on a federation of (some) foul tempers?

Two things to note here.

No misogyny, misandry, racism, classism, or other -isms were employed in the making of this debacle. Just people being much much less than ideal. Thus this is a good (?) example to point to, that there are way too many people out there who simply don't know how to play well together. Quit trying to out-Godwin each other, everybody loses.

From the nature of the interactions, you have the chance to be a much *nicer*, more *intelligent* person in print than in real life. When you forget one person's name in real life you've lost one future friend. When you forget your humanity on the web, you've lost your career.

Really small systems

But are they 'real'? When I'm running Ubuntu it's in a VM and for development. So by default it has one CPU, one monitor (in a window), only a portion of the whole memory, and a newly created virtual disk. In production I might go 'dark' and not report in to mother. Though hopefully the Ubuntu reporting can notice it is really running on a VM and so not influence the final numbers?

Never safe from Microsoft

"Do try to get them done at a convenient time, people, because the download is at least four gigabytes and Windows installs usually take at least 30 minutes and require multiple reboots! "

A convenient time? People get to pick a convenient time? fvck that! I walk away for a bite to eat and the sneaky bastards say now's a good time... and after it's finished I get to reconstruct my working environment over much longer than 30 minutes... Oh the hatred!

Trumpium War

Good grief. Do you know how this will be played to/by the Chinese internally? Read those second/third paragraphs again.

Every PRC kid has drilled into them how the country was raped by the UK/et.al. _only_ 180 years ago. That war (along with the Second Opium War, the Sino-Japanese War (first and second), the Western crushing response to the Boxer Rebellion (8 nations!) and all the other atrocities) is the primary justification for all the bad behaviour they are trying today. *Anything* can be rationalized as payback when you have been so humiliated. (they say, anyway)

It would have been so much better to have simply closed down ZTE and taken the domestic damage, rather than in any way appear to replay the Rape of China by the West. This could not have been done in a worse way!

Russia will always have its Tsars, China its Emperors, and America its yokels.

Hidden wisdom

Long time ago I captured a comment from Usenet I thought useful:

"There's no winners here, just the sad trolling the bad trolling the mad. I call Cripple Fight on this."

Rocket sighings

“… all activities necessary to safely intergrate, accomodate, transport, and operate NASA Payloads using contractor provide assets, including launch vehicles, lunar lander spacecraft, lunar surface systems”

intergrate

accomodate

provide

Perhaps they will use measurements in killomeeters?

Upgrade, but not right now?

Did I miss a reference in article or comments to this strange note:

Upgrading from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or 17.10

Upgrades from 17.10 will not be enabled until a few days after 18.04's release. Upgrades from 16.04 LTS will not be enabled until a few days after the 18.04.1 release expected in late July.

There are no offline upgrade options for Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server.

To be or not to be - let Google decide?

"If you happen to notice a suspicious email, we encourage you to report it as spam." ? ! ?

I'm supposed to report myself as a spammer? But you'll not _really_ mark me as a spammer? Bayes won't _really_ drop my future emails into the gutter? That's a *lot* of trust they're asking for in their hour of need.

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 ..."