Wasn't Gmail a 20% project? If so, wouldn't that mean that most likely she didn't design it?
I don't think Google had the official 20% policy back then; GMail went closed beta back in early 2004. Apparently it was a fully supported internal project - they asked a Google Groups developer to work on it, fleshed it out with a better UI and more features, used it internally for a while, and then went beta. (I realise Wikipedia isn't always a reliable source, but the text cites two references that seem reputable.)
And I've never heard anyone mention Mayer's involvement in it before.
Stupid slashdot moderation drop-down, accidentally choose the wrong option and it's immediately applied with no way to undo it except to post on the story and also undo all other mods already made.
But they never tested anything like an exploding iPad or laptop. They were specifically testing shooting holes in a plane with a gun.
In fact they also tested blowing up a window with explosives, and then blowing out the side of the plane with a very large explosive. They still concluded that modern planes are very structurally sound and that it would suck for the person sitting next to the explosives, but everyone else will just get a bunch of air rushing past. Also covered in the more extreme scenario of a spacecraft decompressing in zero atmosphere by Kyle Hill of Because Science.
providing a rules compendium, character builder, digital character sheets, and more
I'm hoping it will have a free tier, at least for players (I would be OK with only the DM having to pay, but only a very small fee.) If it's too expensive, we'll all just go back to the free options floating around. PCGen for charater sheets and overlays, d20 SRD for the rules, classes, monsters and items, and our imaginations for the rest.
Facebook Live has "masks" now (think Snapchat's Lenses).
More like Skype, Windows Live Messenger, and a half dozen other video chat clients I can think of? Snapchat didn't do it first (or even best.)
Instagram has geostickers (like Snapchat's location-aware stickers.)
More like the stickers available in every photo editor since the 90s? (Why is location-aware a feature - you're telling me it's a good thing that I can't use a sticker if I'm not in a specific physical location?)
WhatsApp has "Status" (think Snapchat Stories). Instagram has "Stories" (think... Snapchat stories).
You mean like a Twitter feed, or heck even Facebook's Timeline view?
The latest fruit of Facebook's labours is Messenger Day -- "a way for you to share these photos and videos -- as they happen -- by adding to your Messenger Day, where many of your friends can view and reply to them". It's Snapchat Stories. Again.
More like your Facebook Timeline, but from Messenger.
Seriously, Snapchat is not the originator of these ideas, their only differentiator is that their stuff is auto-deleted after a given time. In fact you could easily argue the reverse, that Snapchat stories last 24 hours because they're trying to copy Twitter feeds, FB timelines, LinkedIn, etc.
I can't believe I'm the first one to post a reference to Mutineers' Moon. Clearly this is Anu's stronghold, and we need to invade it before he finds a way to take over the ship that replaced our moon.
And anyway, due to civil service rules they can't be fired.
I mean, what is the DoE afraid of?
They wouldn't need to fire those employees and contractors, just assign them to different research. The new team wants to find out who has conducted research that agrees with Climate Change, and move them out so they won't generate any more results supporting that position. Then they'll assign the funding to researchers seeking to disprove Climate Change models so the department produces results and reports supporting the new team's position on that topic.
These gauges, located at more than a dozen sites across the Northern Hemisphere
That doesn't sound right, surely they can use the data from more stations than that? Canada has 125+ years worth of tide and water level data from thousands of stations, maybe NASA should talk to them? It's free to download per water level station, or you can submit a request for the full dataset. (Disclosure: I worked for a time with the team that processes incoming marine data and digitizes historical log books.)
The rocket, named after the first American to reach orbit, is bigger than Elon Musk's Falcon Heavy rocket... Combined, the BE-4s should provide 3.85 million pounds of thrust, according to Bezos. That's... slightly less than the 5 million pounds SpaceX's Falcon Heavy can pull off.
Wait, so the rocket will be bigger, with less thrust? That doesn't sound like an improvement to me. Or do they just mean taller (there are diagrams in the article), but it will somehow manage to have lower mass and so get a better thrust to weight ratio?
The summary isn't great, it seems to contradict itself a couple of times. If the site "erased all digital records of attacks that customers launched between Sept. 2012... and the end of March 2016", then how do you have data for "the past two years"? I skimmed the whole article and didn't find an answer to that one, my best guess is that they meant the attack data itself was erased, but the service requests, chat logs, etc that Krebs references were not erased.
Regarding the "operating for decades" vs "Sept. 2012 (when the service first came online)", it's because Krebs is writing about the aggregate amount of time wasted by the DDoS. He calls it "DDoS seconds" which he then rolls up to years. He is not suggesting the service has been operating for decades, but rather that in the past 5 years the service has caused the equivalent of decades worth of service disruption. (So if 30 hosts are disrupted for 2 hour, that's 60 hours of downtime total, or "DDoS 2.5 days", even though the DDoS attacks only lasted 2 hours and ran in parallel.)
The most interesting part of the article is that subscribing to the DDoS service was only $30/month. That sounds cheaper than paying for DDoS protection/mitigation services, and makes me wonder if vDOS will change their service into a protection racket (pay us to be on our "protected" list so other members can't DDoS you.)
Because people keep demanding that it gets cheaper so that tape gets sent off to India where it's transcribed by someone that barely speaks english.
Not true. Medical transcriptionists need to have a vast understanding of medical terminology, have to turn around transcriptions usually same day, and their transcriptions are reviewed by the doctors. Any outsourced contract that didn't provide above 90% accuracy would be cancelled by the hospital.
My sister in law and her mother are both medical transcriptionists for a company based out of Toronto (Canada). The pay isn't great, but the hours are somewhat flexible and they work from home. They're able to work from home because the recordings are all digital these days. The recordings go on to the server, tagged with the doctor's name and a session id of some sort. The transcriptionists pick it up from the queue, and type it in as they listen to it. They have an SLA with a minimum turn around time for transcriptions, based on the type of recording and duration (eg: transcriptions from a podiatrist might be fairly short and straightforward, while those from doctors in emerge or ICU might vary wildly in length and complexity.)
FYI - it's not easy work at all. Many doctors have different accents or don't dictate clearly, use different terminology or abbreviations, etc, and there are often many names for each drug (eg: acetaminophen is the generic drug, also called paracetamol, which might have 200 trade name variants such as Tylenol.) Hospitals have to pay licensing fees to companies that maintain drug information databases for them, such as Vigilance. Transcriptionists often run over the same recording multiple times to figure out exactly what was said, and have an open voice chat to each other to discuss anything they're unsure of. As a last resort they can send it back to the doctor to re-dictate, but you can see how that would be frowned upon.
this new tool requires a developer to integrate up to a couple hundred lines of code to give players the ability to pause their game, move around the environment
Developers won't do that integration work because it will enable cheating in many games.
- Playing a FPS and unsure what's around that corner? Pause and move over there to see what's lurking.
- Playing a puzzler and want to get a different perspective on the puzzle? Pause and move around it until to get a different perspective.
- Playing a dungeon crawler and not sure where to go next? Pause and move around so you can find the traps, baddies, dead ends or loot.
How do you install and iPhone App on an iPad? I guess i need to download it somewhere and fiddle with iTunes.
On you iPad, visit the App Store. Search for "Line". In the search results window look at the top, there are various filters. The first one is for supported hardware, and defaults to "iPad only". Depending on your iOS version, that will either have an "iPhone and iPad" option, or an "iPhone only" option. If it has the first, choose that. If it has the second, then leave it at "iPad only" as that should show any app that supports the iPad. Look for the app called just "Line", not the "Line for iPad". Notice in compatibility that it says iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Install that one. It requires iOS 7.
You can create a Line account without a phone number. You have to install the iPhone version of the "Line" app on your iPad to create an account (which does not require you to enter a phone number.) Then install the "Line for iPad" app and it should connect automatically to your account (if it doesn't, just log in.) You could also install the PC version and create an account that you can use on your iPad. I never even bothered getting the iPad version, I just kept the iPhone version (it's HD, the resolution on it is fine.)
I don't actually like Line that much, since it encourages the use of tons of images and big emoticons - the chat ends up looking like a five-year-old was let loose with a book full of stickers. It is useful for game chats though, as you can easily post screenshots and videos in chat rooms.
Without logarithms, how would anyone describe logarithmic processes (e.g. human hearing)?
This. How can we expect people to understand that a magnitude 7 earthquake is 10 times more powerful than a magnitude 6 earthquake, if they don't at least know the basics of logarithms? Similarly for decibels. These are units that are routinely used in both the news and normal conversation, yet they think it'll be fine if an entire generation thinks the difference between 10 decibels and 20 is the same as the difference between 110 and 120 db?
Only because you arbitrarily assign one half to be the ciphertext and the other the key, you could swap them and the result would be the same.
No. Then you would be sending your message in the clear and encrypting the pad. The point of OTP is that you can pre-share the pad, then later use it to exchange messages without the message being read by intercepting parties.
For the most part it's just as difficult to send both halves as one whole
You don't send them as a whole. You pre-share the pad (eg: tell your friend to use the prime-numbered pages of a specific edition of the bible), then you can freely send messages you've encrypted using that pad, up until the point when you've used up the pad.
As someone pointed out already, OTP is not really an encryption, but a way to split the information in half.
No, OTP is symmetric encryption where the pad is the key. You take your plaintext, transform it with the pad, and that becomes your ciphertext. Then you apply the same transformation with the same pad to the ciphertext, and the result is the original plaintext. The information to be sent should not be used for any part of the pad.
Are we supposed to believe that nobody raised an eyebrow when the revision N+1 engines suddenly started turning in far better NOx numbers than the revision N ones
I expect they were trying to keep the numbers from getting worse, not improve on previous values. Revision N is churning out emissions that exceed acceptable levels, so they "optimize" the software to reduce emissions during the conditions in which the excess was observed. Though as you say, it was likely done under the direction of someone high up, with wink-wink, nudge-nudge approval from the rest of management.
If I were evil, I would have set it up so I could blame it on a junior engineer and still have us both come across as innocent. I would give him/her a set of inputs and say "The emissions are too high under these inputs, we need to reduce emissions for this edge case." The engineer adds a condition to handle that edge case, without ever knowing that one of the inputs is a flag indicating the engine is under test. End result? Plausible deniability - the engineer thought he/she did the right thing, and the manager "didn't realize" that one of the inputs was the value of the under_test flag.
they do not think that the position should have full access to the environment. It is an "architecture" position and not a "sysadmin" position is how they explained it to me.
That seems reasonable for a moderately sized company with the infrastructure you describe. Your analogy of drawing a map without being able to visit the area is a very good indicator of the miscommunication occurring here - you need to be able to see all the infrastructure, but you're asking for full access. To use an imperfect car analogy (this is Slashdot after all), you need to be able to lift the hood and see the engine. That's reasonable. You're asking for full access to change all parts of the car. That's overkill, actually implementing changes is outside the scope of your responsibilities.
A requirement of any senior role is the ability to delegate responsibilities and trust the input from your team and other managers. I suggest that as an architect you should be asking the IT core team for the network maps, system configuration lists, etc that you need as inputs for your design decisions. You can then respond with changes that are needed to their systems. In your new role you would have the authority that your changes are requirements not suggestions. However the responsibility to make those changes still rests with the IT core team - you don't need and should not have access to make those changes yourself.
I like to think of architect roles as consultants with authority. You give them the best documentation you have, and maybe read access to the systems. They come back with recommendations for changes, while architects have the authority to state them as requirements instead of just recommendations. But just like you wouldn't give an external consultant full admin to your systems (eg: domain controllers or databases), you wouldn't give it to an architect.
It's all well and good to enforce radio silence in the array's general area, but I hope they employ common sense as well. It took one batch of aussie radio astronomers 17 years to figure out that their dodgy microwave oven was causing intermittent interference; hopefully these guys aren't so clueless as to use unshielded electronics in any proximity to the array. Shielding your data centre is great, but it'll be the guy who forgets to turn off his cell phone that messes up your signal.
I have three little kids, the youngest not yet one year, so I'm unable to get all the sleep I'd like. I make do with about 8 hours a night, sometimes only 6 or 7. But on the very rare occasion that I'm away from the kids, I naturally sleep between 9 and 10 hours (and feel much more awake in the morning.)
Of interest might be my kids' sleep times: 9 hours for the six year old, 10 hours for the four year old, and 7 hours plus multiple naps for the infant.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't Gmail a 20% project? If so, wouldn't that mean that most likely she didn't design it?
I don't think Google had the official 20% policy back then; GMail went closed beta back in early 2004. Apparently it was a fully supported internal project - they asked a Google Groups developer to work on it, fleshed it out with a better UI and more features, used it internally for a while, and then went beta. (I realise Wikipedia isn't always a reliable source, but the text cites two references that seem reputable.)
And I've never heard anyone mention Mayer's involvement in it before.
Quick, hook up a generator to him! Free energy!
Dresden Codak's Dark Science webcomic for the win!
Stupid slashdot moderation drop-down, accidentally choose the wrong option and it's immediately applied with no way to undo it except to post on the story and also undo all other mods already made.
But they never tested anything like an exploding iPad or laptop. They were specifically testing shooting holes in a plane with a gun.
In fact they also tested blowing up a window with explosives, and then blowing out the side of the plane with a very large explosive. They still concluded that modern planes are very structurally sound and that it would suck for the person sitting next to the explosives, but everyone else will just get a bunch of air rushing past. Also covered in the more extreme scenario of a spacecraft decompressing in zero atmosphere by Kyle Hill of Because Science.
providing a rules compendium, character builder, digital character sheets, and more
I'm hoping it will have a free tier, at least for players (I would be OK with only the DM having to pay, but only a very small fee.) If it's too expensive, we'll all just go back to the free options floating around. PCGen for charater sheets and overlays, d20 SRD for the rules, classes, monsters and items, and our imaginations for the rest.
Facebook Live has "masks" now (think Snapchat's Lenses).
More like Skype, Windows Live Messenger, and a half dozen other video chat clients I can think of? Snapchat didn't do it first (or even best.)
Instagram has geostickers (like Snapchat's location-aware stickers.)
More like the stickers available in every photo editor since the 90s? (Why is location-aware a feature - you're telling me it's a good thing that I can't use a sticker if I'm not in a specific physical location?)
WhatsApp has "Status" (think Snapchat Stories). Instagram has "Stories" (think ... Snapchat stories).
You mean like a Twitter feed, or heck even Facebook's Timeline view?
The latest fruit of Facebook's labours is Messenger Day -- "a way for you to share these photos and videos -- as they happen -- by adding to your Messenger Day, where many of your friends can view and reply to them". It's Snapchat Stories. Again.
More like your Facebook Timeline, but from Messenger.
Seriously, Snapchat is not the originator of these ideas, their only differentiator is that their stuff is auto-deleted after a given time. In fact you could easily argue the reverse, that Snapchat stories last 24 hours because they're trying to copy Twitter feeds, FB timelines, LinkedIn, etc.
Every version control system provides atomic commits.
Except CVS, VSS, ... I think what you meant to say was that every new, sane version control system provides atomic commits.
I can't believe I'm the first one to post a reference to Mutineers' Moon. Clearly this is Anu's stronghold, and we need to invade it before he finds a way to take over the ship that replaced our moon.
David Weber for the win!
And anyway, due to civil service rules they can't be fired.
I mean, what is the DoE afraid of?
They wouldn't need to fire those employees and contractors, just assign them to different research. The new team wants to find out who has conducted research that agrees with Climate Change, and move them out so they won't generate any more results supporting that position. Then they'll assign the funding to researchers seeking to disprove Climate Change models so the department produces results and reports supporting the new team's position on that topic.
These gauges, located at more than a dozen sites across the Northern Hemisphere
That doesn't sound right, surely they can use the data from more stations than that? Canada has 125+ years worth of tide and water level data from thousands of stations, maybe NASA should talk to them? It's free to download per water level station, or you can submit a request for the full dataset. (Disclosure: I worked for a time with the team that processes incoming marine data and digitizes historical log books.)
The rocket, named after the first American to reach orbit, is bigger than Elon Musk's Falcon Heavy rocket ... Combined, the BE-4s should provide 3.85 million pounds of thrust, according to Bezos. That's ... slightly less than the 5 million pounds SpaceX's Falcon Heavy can pull off.
Wait, so the rocket will be bigger, with less thrust? That doesn't sound like an improvement to me. Or do they just mean taller (there are diagrams in the article), but it will somehow manage to have lower mass and so get a better thrust to weight ratio?
The summary isn't great, it seems to contradict itself a couple of times. If the site "erased all digital records of attacks that customers launched between Sept. 2012 ... and the end of March 2016", then how do you have data for "the past two years"? I skimmed the whole article and didn't find an answer to that one, my best guess is that they meant the attack data itself was erased, but the service requests, chat logs, etc that Krebs references were not erased.
Regarding the "operating for decades" vs "Sept. 2012 (when the service first came online)", it's because Krebs is writing about the aggregate amount of time wasted by the DDoS. He calls it "DDoS seconds" which he then rolls up to years. He is not suggesting the service has been operating for decades, but rather that in the past 5 years the service has caused the equivalent of decades worth of service disruption. (So if 30 hosts are disrupted for 2 hour, that's 60 hours of downtime total, or "DDoS 2.5 days", even though the DDoS attacks only lasted 2 hours and ran in parallel.)
The most interesting part of the article is that subscribing to the DDoS service was only $30/month. That sounds cheaper than paying for DDoS protection/mitigation services, and makes me wonder if vDOS will change their service into a protection racket (pay us to be on our "protected" list so other members can't DDoS you.)
Because people keep demanding that it gets cheaper so that tape gets sent off to India where it's transcribed by someone that barely speaks english.
Not true. Medical transcriptionists need to have a vast understanding of medical terminology, have to turn around transcriptions usually same day, and their transcriptions are reviewed by the doctors. Any outsourced contract that didn't provide above 90% accuracy would be cancelled by the hospital.
My sister in law and her mother are both medical transcriptionists for a company based out of Toronto (Canada). The pay isn't great, but the hours are somewhat flexible and they work from home. They're able to work from home because the recordings are all digital these days. The recordings go on to the server, tagged with the doctor's name and a session id of some sort. The transcriptionists pick it up from the queue, and type it in as they listen to it. They have an SLA with a minimum turn around time for transcriptions, based on the type of recording and duration (eg: transcriptions from a podiatrist might be fairly short and straightforward, while those from doctors in emerge or ICU might vary wildly in length and complexity.)
FYI - it's not easy work at all. Many doctors have different accents or don't dictate clearly, use different terminology or abbreviations, etc, and there are often many names for each drug (eg: acetaminophen is the generic drug, also called paracetamol, which might have 200 trade name variants such as Tylenol.) Hospitals have to pay licensing fees to companies that maintain drug information databases for them, such as Vigilance. Transcriptionists often run over the same recording multiple times to figure out exactly what was said, and have an open voice chat to each other to discuss anything they're unsure of. As a last resort they can send it back to the doctor to re-dictate, but you can see how that would be frowned upon.
this new tool requires a developer to integrate up to a couple hundred lines of code to give players the ability to pause their game, move around the environment
Developers won't do that integration work because it will enable cheating in many games.
LNAWKI what is that supposed to mean? The only "useful" cough cough google results are two /. posts.
LAWKI = Life As We Know It
LNAWKI = Life NOT As We Know It
Oh, that sounds funny.
How do you install and iPhone App on an iPad? I guess i need to download it somewhere and fiddle with iTunes.
On you iPad, visit the App Store. Search for "Line". In the search results window look at the top, there are various filters. The first one is for supported hardware, and defaults to "iPad only". Depending on your iOS version, that will either have an "iPhone and iPad" option, or an "iPhone only" option. If it has the first, choose that. If it has the second, then leave it at "iPad only" as that should show any app that supports the iPad. Look for the app called just "Line", not the "Line for iPad". Notice in compatibility that it says iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Install that one. It requires iOS 7.
I don't actually like Line that much, since it encourages the use of tons of images and big emoticons - the chat ends up looking like a five-year-old was let loose with a book full of stickers. It is useful for game chats though, as you can easily post screenshots and videos in chat rooms.
Wow, this much hubris and you don't understand confidence intervals worth shit.
Without logarithms, how would anyone describe logarithmic processes (e.g. human hearing)?
This. How can we expect people to understand that a magnitude 7 earthquake is 10 times more powerful than a magnitude 6 earthquake, if they don't at least know the basics of logarithms? Similarly for decibels. These are units that are routinely used in both the news and normal conversation, yet they think it'll be fine if an entire generation thinks the difference between 10 decibels and 20 is the same as the difference between 110 and 120 db?
Only because you arbitrarily assign one half to be the ciphertext and the other the key, you could swap them and the result would be the same.
No. Then you would be sending your message in the clear and encrypting the pad. The point of OTP is that you can pre-share the pad, then later use it to exchange messages without the message being read by intercepting parties.
For the most part it's just as difficult to send both halves as one whole
You don't send them as a whole. You pre-share the pad (eg: tell your friend to use the prime-numbered pages of a specific edition of the bible), then you can freely send messages you've encrypted using that pad, up until the point when you've used up the pad.
As someone pointed out already, OTP is not really an encryption, but a way to split the information in half.
No, OTP is symmetric encryption where the pad is the key. You take your plaintext, transform it with the pad, and that becomes your ciphertext. Then you apply the same transformation with the same pad to the ciphertext, and the result is the original plaintext. The information to be sent should not be used for any part of the pad.
Are we supposed to believe that nobody raised an eyebrow when the revision N+1 engines suddenly started turning in far better NOx numbers than the revision N ones
I expect they were trying to keep the numbers from getting worse, not improve on previous values. Revision N is churning out emissions that exceed acceptable levels, so they "optimize" the software to reduce emissions during the conditions in which the excess was observed. Though as you say, it was likely done under the direction of someone high up, with wink-wink, nudge-nudge approval from the rest of management.
If I were evil, I would have set it up so I could blame it on a junior engineer and still have us both come across as innocent. I would give him/her a set of inputs and say "The emissions are too high under these inputs, we need to reduce emissions for this edge case." The engineer adds a condition to handle that edge case, without ever knowing that one of the inputs is a flag indicating the engine is under test. End result? Plausible deniability - the engineer thought he/she did the right thing, and the manager "didn't realize" that one of the inputs was the value of the under_test flag.
they do not think that the position should have full access to the environment. It is an "architecture" position and not a "sysadmin" position is how they explained it to me.
That seems reasonable for a moderately sized company with the infrastructure you describe. Your analogy of drawing a map without being able to visit the area is a very good indicator of the miscommunication occurring here - you need to be able to see all the infrastructure, but you're asking for full access. To use an imperfect car analogy (this is Slashdot after all), you need to be able to lift the hood and see the engine. That's reasonable. You're asking for full access to change all parts of the car. That's overkill, actually implementing changes is outside the scope of your responsibilities.
A requirement of any senior role is the ability to delegate responsibilities and trust the input from your team and other managers. I suggest that as an architect you should be asking the IT core team for the network maps, system configuration lists, etc that you need as inputs for your design decisions. You can then respond with changes that are needed to their systems. In your new role you would have the authority that your changes are requirements not suggestions. However the responsibility to make those changes still rests with the IT core team - you don't need and should not have access to make those changes yourself.
I like to think of architect roles as consultants with authority. You give them the best documentation you have, and maybe read access to the systems. They come back with recommendations for changes, while architects have the authority to state them as requirements instead of just recommendations. But just like you wouldn't give an external consultant full admin to your systems (eg: domain controllers or databases), you wouldn't give it to an architect.
It's all well and good to enforce radio silence in the array's general area, but I hope they employ common sense as well. It took one batch of aussie radio astronomers 17 years to figure out that their dodgy microwave oven was causing intermittent interference; hopefully these guys aren't so clueless as to use unshielded electronics in any proximity to the array. Shielding your data centre is great, but it'll be the guy who forgets to turn off his cell phone that messes up your signal.
I have three little kids, the youngest not yet one year, so I'm unable to get all the sleep I'd like. I make do with about 8 hours a night, sometimes only 6 or 7. But on the very rare occasion that I'm away from the kids, I naturally sleep between 9 and 10 hours (and feel much more awake in the morning.)
Of interest might be my kids' sleep times: 9 hours for the six year old, 10 hours for the four year old, and 7 hours plus multiple naps for the infant.