Who wants to make their own chips?
Apple?
305 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Aug 2007
Presumably the large white splodge is the sun, vastly larger than it should be because its brightness is overwhelming the camera. The crescent to the left of it is the earth (which should really appear much larger than the sun). And the white blobs above and below the sun are camera artefacts.
Solar flares have both immediate and delayed effects on the earth. X-rays travel at the speed of light and can cause radio blackouts and also affect satellites in various ways. X-rays may remain at high levels for several hours - in this case the level was above M1 for about an hour and a half. Flares are often also accompanied by "coronal mass ejections" which can cause geomagnetic storms a couple of days later. There doesn't seem to have been a significant CME associated with this flare.
There's no reason to follow symbolic links in a program like this. If the symbolic link is to outside the relevant filesystem (or subtree), it shouldn't be followed. And if it's inside the filesystem, there's no need to follow it because you will look at the destination directory anyway.
This problem was encountered pretty much as soon as symbolic links were introduced in 4.2BSD. Each utility that traversed the filesystem (du, find, etc) had to have a flag added to indicate whether symbolic links should be followed. I remember a version of SunOS in the mid-1980s whose cron job to remove old files in /tmp followed symbolic links, with predictable results.
I think it would only take a handful of design flaws. For example, the printer could trust a length field at the start of the serial number, so a malicious chip - even just an EPROM with more than 32 bytes - could provoke a buffer overflow in the printer firmware.
(I have no reason to suppose that they have such a bug - it's just an example.)
I wonder what their ranking system does to keep SQLite off the top (it appears to be 11th)? It's run on more or less every phone and computer in the world.
SQLite isn't good for everything, but if it does what you need, it has the great advantage that you don't run a server - the database file is instead mapped into your program.
(This post was rejected - I think that must have been a mistake)
"color, center, aluminum and other new versions of old words"
That's an oversimplification. According to the OED, although "centre" was the form in which it came from Norman French, by Shakespeare's time "center" was prevalent in Britain, and was only replaced by "centre" as a result of Johnson's dictionary. "Aluminium" and "aluminum" were both common in the USA for much of the 19th century; the decline of "aluminium" was assured by a report by the American Chemical Society which recommended "aluminum" around 1890. It also recommended "sulfur"; but was less successful with "iodin".
I think I've mentioned this before - we had a PDP/11 with 32KW of core memory and the rest semiconductor. Some decorators pushed the big red button, and when we turned the power back on the system continued running, since the operating system was all in core, but the user processes died one by one as most of them were in semiconductor memory.
I don't think the way it's been sold is the problem at all. Most people probably don't even know that it can be used for anything other than mobile phones.
I have a 5G mobile phone, and generally get a good signal. The only "problem" is that it makes no difference at all - nothing I do benefits from the extra speed.
Without the moon, we would still have tides, caused by the sun. They would be smaller, and happen at the same time every day. You can see the tidal effect of the sun in the difference between spring tides (when the sun and moon are aligned) and neap tides (when they are at right angles). If I recall correctly solar tides would be about a quarter as big as lunar ones.
Wilson was not entirely wrong. The pound was devalued by 14% against the dollar, but that didn't mean that people could buy 14% less of the things they actually spent money on. Inflation at that time was well below 5%. Even if you wanted to buy dollars, the exchange controls dating from the second world war still limited what you could convert.
No-one, on the other hand, buys anything real with Bitcoin. If you actually want to buy something, you convert it to real money, so a 30% fall is really that.
Somewhat surprisingly, it turns out to be possibly to compute the Nth digit of pi much more cheaply than computing all the first N digits. This was used to verify the last few digits, making it very implausible that there was a bug in the calculation.
For more information google "Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe".
I worked at IBM (Warwick) during a summer vacation while I was at university. There were refrigerated vending machines which were meant to provide food and drinks. But for some reason this had been replaced with a system in which you obtained a token from the vending machine, then took it elsewhere to get the food. The vending machine was still refrigerated, and dispensed chilled tokens.