Posts by stephanh

please check my math

ω : angular velocity (in rad/s)

r : radius (in m)

a : acceleration (in m/s²)

r = 200 m (= half of 400m)

ω = 1 rotation per 7.3 hours = 2.39-04 rad/s

a = rω² = 1.14e-05 m/s² = 1.17e-6 G

Micro-gravity indeed.

Some points I'd like to make

1. There was never an SS rank Übersturmbahnführer, with or without umlauts. It's all Ober-whatever, "Ober" meaning "Senior" in this context.

2. If that was an intended part of the joke, I obviously didn't get it.

3. There was, however, a book on the topic of the "Übermensch", namely "Also sprach Zarathustra".

4. It was popular in some Nazi circles.

5. Although actually *reading* it was a bit too much for the average Nazi thug.

6. The book is mostly not about taxi driving.

7. Although there is some stuff about camels in there.

Re: Hacking the processor

I think it is great. If you favorite hat color is black.

Think about the possibilities.

1. Malicious website uses social engineering tricks to let user grant it WebUSB access.

2. Using said access, it hacks into a piece of hardware which communicates over USB protocol but which may even be a physical part of your computer (e.g. laptop keyboard or touchpad). So nice try that you filled your USB ports with epoxy but it didn't help.

3. From the compromised device it now hacks back into your computer using the IME vulnerability.

It doesn't even matter anymore if you run Windows, macOs or Linux!

Re: Doh !

You are delighted that Microsoft is apparently unable to whitelist their own apps?

Would it not rather suggest that the whitelisting criteria are sufficiently difficult to get right that the number of false positives will be huge, which in turn will cause the vast majority of users to disable this feature?

Re: Everybody's ethical

Alt-left is what Mac users call option-left, and what Emacs users call meta-left.

Re: I am Appalled and Outraged!

It's about 7 hundred thousand trillion trillion NorrisLinguines.

Re: British Army should do the same

The Dutch police have a similar ghost town for riot control exercises. Apparently you can volunteer to be a rioter and then get to legally hit policemen. OTOH they legally get to hit you back...

Re: Oh well, Every failure is a dress rehersal for success. *

"Could it be that P≠NP is unprovable."

That would be possible. From a practical point of view, the consequences would be not so different from a proof that P≠NP. It would still mean that you cannot have an actual polynomial-time algorithm to solve, say, the traveling salesman problem (because any such algorithm would immediately be a proof that P=NP).

However, it would mean that *assuming* that such an algorithm exists (even though you don't know it) cannot lead you to a logical contradiction.

"and if so, could someone prove this to be the case?"

I take this as a question if proving this would be possible, and not as a request to provide the proof. If so, then yes, provided it is actually true ;-)

By the way, it would be really tantalizing if somebody would prove P=NP but in a non-constructive way, i.e. proving that all NP problems can be solved in polynomial time but providing absolutely no clue about *how* to achieve this...

It depends on what development environment was used to produce the original apps. There are a number of cross-platform environments: PhoneGap, Qt, Xamarin, probably others. Of course, even in that best-case scenario, it is not simply hitting the "Compile for Android" button, they would still need to do all the testing for the new platform.

If they used the "native" development environment, then porting them to another platform would essentially amount to a rewrite. If they used C# originally they might be able to re-use some back-end code by going to Xamarin, but the GUI would need to be rewritten.

Re: Doesn't exist.. my ass..

You don't need to root your device to block ads, just use e.g. Firefox as your browser.

Re: Extended life expectancy for mobes

At a guess, electromigration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration

"Capacitor rot" would be a good alternative name for it.

George's Star? Your ass!

I kinda suspect that our German friend Bode (who proposed the name "Uranus") was fully aware of its English pronunciation and associated alternative meaning, and intended it as a "take that" against Herschel for calling it "Georgium Sidus" while in brown-nose mode.

Re: Well put

AI research has definitely produced results;unfortunately it has been the victim of a constant hype/disappointment cycle. Recall the "AI winter" of the later 80's. Now we are again in the "hype" phase.

AI research has produced stuff like A* path-finding and linear programming (LP) solvers. However, these things are now so well understood that we don't consider them "AI" anymore.

AI has also produced a few "generic optimization" algorithms , such as neural networks, simulated annealing, and genetic algorithms. My prof used to joke that if you had no understanding of your problem and you had absolutely no clue what to do, you would choose one of those. They "work" but are slow and not guaranteed to give something approaching the global optimum.

It seems every generation has to learn again that these "AI" methods are not a panacea and inferior to specialized approaches which leverage the structure of the underlying problem.

Xenix was not just a shell, it was a true UNIX™ port. Obviously it required a much heftier machine than DOS, but it was itself the most-widely-used UNIX for a while.

Note that in MS DOS 2.0, Microsoft introduced a lot of UNIX compatibility features (directories, file descriptors, a primitive form of redirection). At the time MS saw Xenix as the long-term successor of DOS.

Later they changed that to OS/2, and ultimately they decided to go for it alone with Windows NT.

Re: Really?

Yes. Firefox has a similar feature as described, so you can send the link from Firefox/Android to Firefox/macos.

Re: "benefitting from something that you argue for ..."

Then they are both scumbags. This is in fact the usual situation, and probably the default assumption from which to proceed.

Re: Aren't all the flash based psychological studies invalid anyway?

"They exclude everyone with a clue about security from the sample."

That's such a vanishingly small portion of the population that it does not make the studies invalid. They are invalid for completely different reasons.

Re: Not trying to shoot anything down

The OnePlus was excellent value-for-money, at least based on the specs. This phone is essentially comparable in price and specs to a HTC U11, except from a noname vendor.

Re: Fixed it!

Why stop there?

sudo apt-get purge gnome-desktop-environment

The Register had an interview with an actual banker last year.

https://m.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/01/ing_mainframe_strategy/

Quote:

“You won’t find a bank without a mainframe, unless recently established.”

But, he continued, “We are extremely aggressively moving away from them.”

To be precise, Red Hat has made systemd a hard dependency of Gnome (another fine RH project).

Attempts by others (in particular, Canonical), to create an alternative init system by "shimming" the initd protocols somehow got consistently broken since these protocols changed all the time (fancy that). In the end, the Ubuntu folks gave up and went with initd.

Re: Just stop

Special mention for "Samsung Kies".

habitability of tidally-locked planets

Newer climate models seem to suggest that tidally-locked planets around red dwarfs could have liquid surface water and are thus potentially habitable:

http://newatlas.com/tidally-locked-exoplanets-potentially-habitable/39407/

Re: What about static typing!

Who needs static typing?

http://sixty-north.com/blog/top-four-javazone-2013-talk-the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-dynamic-typing

Re: Awe

The ++ refers to its electric charge, which is twice the elementary charge. ( i.e. charge of a proton)