The NSA used to get by with being clever because it used to be that mathematically secure communications didn't exist, or if they did, they were extremely difficult to implement without a mathematician and only useful for small messages.
Now we have trivial access to computing power and well-understood encryption technologies that turns this on its head and communications can be trivially secured in ways that can only be broken by compromising them so they are internally flawed or by statutory means of denying access to the technology.
I think the logic for streaming would just be too complicated over multiple links. You might make it work if you had a proxy that knew about the links and had some way to choose paths, but you'd still have to work out the application layer bit to negotiate the paths with the streaming source so it could send them down multiple paths and then there would need to be some kind of ordering and link balancing on top of it.
I think the only way to make it work with a stream is something like you've outlined -- an MPPP session over the individual links to a remote MPPP server whose WAN side is is the IP initiating traffic. MPPP should be able to handle the link balancing and stream order.
I agree with this. The usual objections are outlined in the other replies to your comment -- can't know about new file types, potential performance/DoS from carefully crafted files, etc.
I mostly think the objections are bogus and/or apply to ANY file typing scheme, manual or automatic.
I would think that you could make a file(1) type system reasonably robust enough to avoid most performance issues, such as limiting typing operations to a specific amount of processing time, avoiding typing of excessively large files and/or sensing access time to avoid automatic typing against slow filesystems.
IIRC, Apple had a way to actually register creator codes and it doesn't seem impossible that Microsoft could do something similar for a file-type functionality's magic database, so it could know about already extant file types you didn't (yet) have the application for and provide a basic means of updating the magic over time to account for new files and even a means of collecting user-submitted magic for obscure files not already registered or enabling a local-only database. It's not like Windows Update couldn't keep this magic database updated.
Even if it wasn't part of the automated display of file types in Explorer (ie, real-time) it's not hard to see it as a standalone utility that could scan a filesystem looking for broken matches between extensions and magic-identified file types.
"Hipster" is just the nom de jure for a general type of douchebag we've had for years.
Usually associated with marketing, advertising and other sundry jobs which allow them to indulge their facile obsession with appearances and promote a bought-and-paid-for sense of aesthetic superiority and pseudo artistic sensibility.
I'm kind-of-sort-of willing to concede to the demands by that fuckstick hipster who works in marketing who thinks that aesthetically filename extensions make the product too technical for other fuckstick hipsters who are also wound up about appearances. I don't agree, but I'm tired of arguing about it, at least when it comes to the consumer desktop OS.
But WHY IN THE FUCKING FUCK does the server operating system have the same goddamn "hide everything that might be confusing to marketing types and the mentally retarded" settings out of the box? What shithead, or group of shitheads, made that decision and WHY? As far as I'm concerned this is a deeper, more profound and transcendental stupidity than making Win Server use the Win8 start menu.
I find it particularly ironic given the Microsoft push to capture mindshare from CLI propellerheads with PowerShell Everything.
I would imagine that a fair number of people may actually relate to it.
Many people have multiple email addresses.
Along with that comes the email address distribution question -- who has what address of mine and which one do they send email to? Can I change the "From" address when replying on whatever platform/client they're using? Do they have access to the "right" mailbox when they send an email out of the office, on remote devices, etc?
A lot of people are likely to be sympathetic, and see it not as a conspiracy to hide communications but one of those built-in clusterfucks of our modern age, and this may even include reasonably smart people who "should know better" and work in regulated industries.
My guess would just be that Hillary Clinton is just a lifelong political operative. She just thinks of whatever role she's in as something tangential and temporary relative to her lifelong "career" as a politician. Like a contractor on an assignment, she just didn't bother with the email account at her "assignment".
In theory, underwriters could have access to the history of kickstarters and could develop some risk models for projects.
A surety bond could be part of the overall projects funding (everybody pays) but becoming a beneficiary of the bond could require contributing at a higher level, encouraging higher investments.
Underwriters would probably apply some basic rules to the project (fraud mitigation) which might actually add some kind of discipline to projects which could improve outcomes.
You can't fit 14 million bodies in one place at one time.
Broadway Avenue in Yonkers is about 105 feet wide, so shoulder to shoulder you could fit 70 bodies across it. With only a 50% hit rate, a single M134 minigun could kill 21 ranks of zombies a minute, or a horde of 1500 about 45 feet deep.
If a zombie can move at human walking speed, they can advance at 270 feet per minute, so a battery of 18 miniguns, allowing for 6 firing concurrently, could kill the horde faster than they can advance. Probably fewer guns would be necessary as the dead bodies would slow the advance as they stacked up.
And that's just an example of a single type of gun. The Mk 19 grenade launcher's standard ammo has a kill radius of 5 meters. Call that an effective disablement (outright dead or unable to move even if alive) radius for zombies of 2 meters, and a single round can stop 50 zombies in a fairly dense pack. At 40 rpm sustained, that's nearly 2500 kills a minute.
This is easily firepower an infantry battalion is capable of unleashing on an unarmed, dumb enemy willing to merely advance into fire. It doesn't include the kinds of kills that could be added with artillery, high explosive bombs, etc.
A Mk 82 500 pound bomb has a kill radius of 100 feet and a single B-52 could carry 52 of them. An overlapping string could kill a horde a mile long, packed densely nearly 800,000 zombies. Carpet bombing by B52s squadrons could kill city-sized zombie hordes in minutes.
I don't know how an MVNO can be cheaper than a carrier except for cheapskates who want those weird, super low-end plans because they're always on wifi and only use their phone for emergency calls away from wifi. I can't see an MVNO ever able to buy airtime and sell it cheaper than carriers can directly without strange limits or associating with a sucky carrier with shitty coverage and slow data.
I'd like an MVNO that could associate with multiple carriers, let me rank those carriers by preference but override my preference if another carrier has a better signal by some threshold as well as provide VoIP service to my PC or any of the cheap SIP devices.
I just use the Gatling gun as an example, I think you're right that the.50 BMG round is probably superior for this purpose because of its energy and the benefits you'd get from overpenetration on massed horde as well as reduced ammunition consumption. There might be some technical benefit to the GAU-19 Gatling version of this gun with a cyclic rate reduced to M-2 levels just to limit barrel wear and heating.
But overall, there's just a whole arsenal of military weapons that could be devastating on massed crowds -- the Mk 19 belt-fed grenade launcher firing fragmentation grenades, a whole laundry list of light cannons like the 40mm Bofors guns firing ranged airbursts to much heavier weapons like cluster munitions or just plain carpet bombing with high explosives.
Skewed in favor of an unstoppable infection. Military weapons are posited as ineffective, even WW Z (the film) made it seem like walls of any height were ineffective (they were able to just dogpile against them until they had a ramp up).
I'd guess the story isn't any fun if at the end of chapter two it reads "...and then the AC-130 gunship decimated the field of zombies, the end."
I also wondered if "human intelligence" could work in the form of curved passages where zombies run in, but curves in the passages cause them to be steered away. Or sloped approaches where the slope angle gets extremely steep, causing them to fall back. Same with walls, walls that slope away, steeply, towards the top, causing them to fall back.
While I enjoy the genre, I find that the "rules" of zombie apocalypse seem designed to limit the ability to humans to fight back by imposing arbitrary limits on the effectiveness of weapons.
Brooks quickly discounts the effectiveness of military weapons like cluster munitions, Gatling guns and other kinds of weapons designed to put a large amount of shrapnel or projectiles into an area quickly. Even if it didn't result in killing of an entire horde, I would expect it to kill a large number and greatly reduce the threat of most of them by seriously degrading their mobility through damage to their ability to walk or move.
I'd like to see a Mythbusters episode where they take a 7.62mm Gatling gun and fire it into a simulated zombie horde at average head height to see what kind of damage it would do. It's probably beyond practicality to setup that many targets, but it would be an interesting simulation nonetheless.
I think the simplest way to deal with a horde would be a minor adaption of a machine designed to clear minefields -- the demining flail. These slightly resemble a combine bolted onto the front of a tank, with the "combine" being basically a bunch of steel weights on the ends of chains designed to beat on the ground to set off mines.
It's not hard to imagine a much lighter weight device (since zombies don't explode) spinning 5 pound weights in the air. It would completely pulverize zombies and turn clearing zombie hordes into something akin to mowing the grass.
The most sensible government broadband propsals seem to only involve the government in the layer 1/2 aspect of the network and any layer 3+ services are simply using the municipal network as a transport layer and are actually provided by third parties. Even management of the layer 2 side could be outsourced to a third party on some kind of basis where they just make it work for some kind of fixed margin for a period of time.
The metaphor that makes the most sense to me are municipal roads. The government is just tasked with building and maintaining the roads -- nobody expects the government to deliver pizzas or get you to the airport. A municpal network would just provide connectivity, it would be up to individuals to contract with an ISP or teleivision vendor to provide services over the network.
I would expect that there would be some attempt to provide a minimal service over a municpal network in the same way that the government is involved in public transportation, like maybe you could get access to city web sites without buying ISP service, but it hardly seems like these would squeeze out private ISPs from selling service on a municipal network anymore than the city bus system has put the auto industry or the hired car services out of business.
I think the only thing that matters here is the timing of the suit after the governor's resignation. Once the governor resigns, even if the allegations surrounding the resignation turn out to be true, the governor has a cloud over his head making it trivial to tie anything and everything to his "corruption" even if the actual allegations have nothing to do with ancillary claims made against him, such as Oracle's suit.
"Let's blame Oracle" also sounds like a lousy political strategy that would motivate few voters as well as leave the door open to questions about selection of Oracle as a vendor to begin with and quesitons about the competency of the vendor oversight. I doubt any politician would base much of their voter appeal on something like that lest it turn around and bite them.
How much CPU power is in HDD controllers and how big is the flash storage on the controller?
I'm mostly just curious, but I wonder how much "elbow room" there is to do something nefarious like blocking updates or protecting boot sectors without compromising drive performance significantly.
Is there a mechanism for running software on the drive controller -- passing input, getting output, etc?
There seems to be a widely accepted school of thought within music journalism/critcism that gives significant weight/credit to obscure artists having a disproportionate influence to trends in music. Groups like the Velvet Underground, Big Star, the Replacements never had major popularity in terms of record sales and radio airplay but are often cited by music critics and other musicians as having been influential on bands and genres that were popular later on, in some cases 20 years later on.
Tapping the Billboard 100 doesn't seem to take into account these "opinion leaders" influence, whether it was the music itself that was the inspiration or whether it was just the influence of music critics.
It's pretty debatable whether a specific artist, especially one who had little popularity in their years of recording and performing, actually has this kind of influence or whether it just becomes kind of an orthodoxy of opinion that they had that influence.
But often times it does seem that there can be breakthrough artists who manage to have outsize influence on artists who later go on to popularize a genre.
Yes, I realize that the sort of Occam's Razor kind of explanation is that it is a result of a bad picture that exposes some kind of color processing ambiguity and not a result of some kind of manipulation.
That being said, I think it's not unrealistic at all in era of clickbaiting and relentless social media trolling that someone would want to experiment with a scheme for manipulating social media memes or figuring out a way to amplify their views. As far as I know, money can still be made on web advertising, drive-by downloads, tracking, etc.
And as the AC poster who also replied said, there ARE organizations with a vested interest in manipulating socal media, whether its "merely" for advertising purposes or for more nefarious reasons.
I'd swear I saw completely different images of these dresses posted, at extremes of the color controversy and neither was at all ambigous as to what color it was.
I wonder what the likelihood is that two or more images were served to clients, either at random or by some algorithm, to further the controversy? I can see one single ambiguous image that could go either way, but most of the examples I saw looked to be tweaked for maximum color association.
If you served tweaked images to clients so that "everyone" saw a different image, including people who saw different images at different times muddying their memory of what they saw over time, you could really amplify the controversy since people would actually be seeing a different image.
I'm not sure that a bodyless brain solves many problems that either long-term hibernation or virtual reality would solve better.
I value human space exploration for reasons orthagonal to the hard science, but I think advancements in virtual reality are going to make it an even harder sell. I know that communications lag is something of a stumbling block for serious interactivity.
But maybe with enough sensors and data streamed back some of the interactivity could be generated locally but with remotely gathered information. Maybe using some of this you could "act out' what you wanted the rover to do in VR with preliminary and interpolated data. The rover could then actually execute this autonomously and then if you went back and re-do what you acted out, enough specific data would have been generated that it would give you an extremely lifelike VR experience.
I think of it sort of like the way Google Street View works now. You can drive up and down the street looking at houses, and you can zoom in and out and turn your head but nothing else. What if you could walk up to an item of interest in a yard in VR. With just the street view data, it would look bad (warped perspective, excessive zoom, etc). But if the system knew exactly what you were interested in, sent in a camera setup after to mirror your examantion of the yard item but in complete detail you could go back to that same street view scene and actually walk up to the item.
If this is a simulation, I'd like them to simulate some better drugs. All the ones in my simulation have too many unwanted side effects. Some are better than others, but a lot of them can be fatal, most don't mix well and don't get me started on the cost and legal complications.
I think you've hit the nail on the head, and it's true for more than just writing software.
IT projects usually have two basic parts to them:
1) The part we know how to do and have done before. Usually it revolves around a set of tasks we've done before and that have a consistent outcome and usually exist sort of in a vacuum -- install an operating system, configure a switch, install an application.
2) The part we know how to do, but doesn't always have a consistent outcome because the specific thing hasn't been done before even though similar things have been done before. Similar tasks have been done before, maybe even identical tasks, but they haven't been done in this specific environment. Often involves integration with other systems or involves a lot of dependecies that are too hard/complex/time consuming to have a complete a priori understanding or produces an outcome which has a predicted but not completely predictable outcome.
Problems in (1) are usually easy to overcome because the solutions tend to be more easily known. Problems resulting from part (2) tend to have open-ended timelines because you often don't know what the problems are and have to create solutions.
I think people who haven't done IT work long enough or only get close enough to "supervise" it confuse the two, and assume that because even though (2) works often enough it seems to be reliably predictable.
I started borrowing Donald Rumsfeld's Iraq war quote about "known unknowns and unknown unknowns" when dealing with customers and managers about phase 2 type tasks. He may have been widely criticized for making excuses about the war, but I think there's some insight to the quote because it seems to somehow capture something about the unpredictability of outcomes with depdendencies.
It seems to me that the constant "overhaul" of a GUI to change icons, menu structures, etc is bad design. Not because the final product is necessarily bad, but because whatever improvements the new design brings are dwarfed by the cost of throwing away of user knowledge about the old interface and the cost of re-learning a new interface and its symbols and structure.
There's probably even unconsidered effects. A lot of clients I've worked with have resisted upgrades (they own and have paid for) to Office because of the radical changes in look and feel. By running older versions with weaker security, they're now exposed to greater risk of compromise by malware. There may even be meaningful losses in productivity from missing new features or improved implementations of existing functionality. This can even be made even worse by resisting operating system updates.
I've always been puzzled that some of the best minds in user interface design get together and say "obviously, the best solution is to throw out everything the users have learned and give them something totally different."
Slashdot Mirror
Because they can find a handful of things in a sea of evidence and then construct a narrative of guilt around it.
The NSA used to get by with being clever because it used to be that mathematically secure communications didn't exist, or if they did, they were extremely difficult to implement without a mathematician and only useful for small messages.
Now we have trivial access to computing power and well-understood encryption technologies that turns this on its head and communications can be trivially secured in ways that can only be broken by compromising them so they are internally flawed or by statutory means of denying access to the technology.
I think the logic for streaming would just be too complicated over multiple links. You might make it work if you had a proxy that knew about the links and had some way to choose paths, but you'd still have to work out the application layer bit to negotiate the paths with the streaming source so it could send them down multiple paths and then there would need to be some kind of ordering and link balancing on top of it.
I think the only way to make it work with a stream is something like you've outlined -- an MPPP session over the individual links to a remote MPPP server whose WAN side is is the IP initiating traffic. MPPP should be able to handle the link balancing and stream order.
I agree with this. The usual objections are outlined in the other replies to your comment -- can't know about new file types, potential performance/DoS from carefully crafted files, etc.
I mostly think the objections are bogus and/or apply to ANY file typing scheme, manual or automatic.
I would think that you could make a file(1) type system reasonably robust enough to avoid most performance issues, such as limiting typing operations to a specific amount of processing time, avoiding typing of excessively large files and/or sensing access time to avoid automatic typing against slow filesystems.
IIRC, Apple had a way to actually register creator codes and it doesn't seem impossible that Microsoft could do something similar for a file-type functionality's magic database, so it could know about already extant file types you didn't (yet) have the application for and provide a basic means of updating the magic over time to account for new files and even a means of collecting user-submitted magic for obscure files not already registered or enabling a local-only database. It's not like Windows Update couldn't keep this magic database updated.
Even if it wasn't part of the automated display of file types in Explorer (ie, real-time) it's not hard to see it as a standalone utility that could scan a filesystem looking for broken matches between extensions and magic-identified file types.
"Hipster" is just the nom de jure for a general type of douchebag we've had for years.
Usually associated with marketing, advertising and other sundry jobs which allow them to indulge their facile obsession with appearances and promote a bought-and-paid-for sense of aesthetic superiority and pseudo artistic sensibility.
That always baffles me.
I'm kind-of-sort-of willing to concede to the demands by that fuckstick hipster who works in marketing who thinks that aesthetically filename extensions make the product too technical for other fuckstick hipsters who are also wound up about appearances. I don't agree, but I'm tired of arguing about it, at least when it comes to the consumer desktop OS.
But WHY IN THE FUCKING FUCK does the server operating system have the same goddamn "hide everything that might be confusing to marketing types and the mentally retarded" settings out of the box? What shithead, or group of shitheads, made that decision and WHY? As far as I'm concerned this is a deeper, more profound and transcendental stupidity than making Win Server use the Win8 start menu.
I find it particularly ironic given the Microsoft push to capture mindshare from CLI propellerheads with PowerShell Everything.
I would imagine that a fair number of people may actually relate to it.
Many people have multiple email addresses.
Along with that comes the email address distribution question -- who has what address of mine and which one do they send email to? Can I change the "From" address when replying on whatever platform/client they're using? Do they have access to the "right" mailbox when they send an email out of the office, on remote devices, etc?
A lot of people are likely to be sympathetic, and see it not as a conspiracy to hide communications but one of those built-in clusterfucks of our modern age, and this may even include reasonably smart people who "should know better" and work in regulated industries.
My guess would just be that Hillary Clinton is just a lifelong political operative. She just thinks of whatever role she's in as something tangential and temporary relative to her lifelong "career" as a politician. Like a contractor on an assignment, she just didn't bother with the email account at her "assignment".
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H. L. Mencken
This might be less complex than it sounds.
In theory, underwriters could have access to the history of kickstarters and could develop some risk models for projects.
A surety bond could be part of the overall projects funding (everybody pays) but becoming a beneficiary of the bond could require contributing at a higher level, encouraging higher investments.
Underwriters would probably apply some basic rules to the project (fraud mitigation) which might actually add some kind of discipline to projects which could improve outcomes.
You can't fit 14 million bodies in one place at one time.
Broadway Avenue in Yonkers is about 105 feet wide, so shoulder to shoulder you could fit 70 bodies across it. With only a 50% hit rate, a single M134 minigun could kill 21 ranks of zombies a minute, or a horde of 1500 about 45 feet deep.
If a zombie can move at human walking speed, they can advance at 270 feet per minute, so a battery of 18 miniguns, allowing for 6 firing concurrently, could kill the horde faster than they can advance. Probably fewer guns would be necessary as the dead bodies would slow the advance as they stacked up.
And that's just an example of a single type of gun. The Mk 19 grenade launcher's standard ammo has a kill radius of 5 meters. Call that an effective disablement (outright dead or unable to move even if alive) radius for zombies of 2 meters, and a single round can stop 50 zombies in a fairly dense pack. At 40 rpm sustained, that's nearly 2500 kills a minute.
This is easily firepower an infantry battalion is capable of unleashing on an unarmed, dumb enemy willing to merely advance into fire. It doesn't include the kinds of kills that could be added with artillery, high explosive bombs, etc.
A Mk 82 500 pound bomb has a kill radius of 100 feet and a single B-52 could carry 52 of them. An overlapping string could kill a horde a mile long, packed densely nearly 800,000 zombies. Carpet bombing by B52s squadrons could kill city-sized zombie hordes in minutes.
I don't know how an MVNO can be cheaper than a carrier except for cheapskates who want those weird, super low-end plans because they're always on wifi and only use their phone for emergency calls away from wifi. I can't see an MVNO ever able to buy airtime and sell it cheaper than carriers can directly without strange limits or associating with a sucky carrier with shitty coverage and slow data.
I'd like an MVNO that could associate with multiple carriers, let me rank those carriers by preference but override my preference if another carrier has a better signal by some threshold as well as provide VoIP service to my PC or any of the cheap SIP devices.
I just use the Gatling gun as an example, I think you're right that the .50 BMG round is probably superior for this purpose because of its energy and the benefits you'd get from overpenetration on massed horde as well as reduced ammunition consumption. There might be some technical benefit to the GAU-19 Gatling version of this gun with a cyclic rate reduced to M-2 levels just to limit barrel wear and heating.
But overall, there's just a whole arsenal of military weapons that could be devastating on massed crowds -- the Mk 19 belt-fed grenade launcher firing fragmentation grenades, a whole laundry list of light cannons like the 40mm Bofors guns firing ranged airbursts to much heavier weapons like cluster munitions or just plain carpet bombing with high explosives.
Skewed in favor of an unstoppable infection. Military weapons are posited as ineffective, even WW Z (the film) made it seem like walls of any height were ineffective (they were able to just dogpile against them until they had a ramp up).
I'd guess the story isn't any fun if at the end of chapter two it reads "...and then the AC-130 gunship decimated the field of zombies, the end."
I also wondered if "human intelligence" could work in the form of curved passages where zombies run in, but curves in the passages cause them to be steered away. Or sloped approaches where the slope angle gets extremely steep, causing them to fall back. Same with walls, walls that slope away, steeply, towards the top, causing them to fall back.
While I enjoy the genre, I find that the "rules" of zombie apocalypse seem designed to limit the ability to humans to fight back by imposing arbitrary limits on the effectiveness of weapons.
Brooks quickly discounts the effectiveness of military weapons like cluster munitions, Gatling guns and other kinds of weapons designed to put a large amount of shrapnel or projectiles into an area quickly. Even if it didn't result in killing of an entire horde, I would expect it to kill a large number and greatly reduce the threat of most of them by seriously degrading their mobility through damage to their ability to walk or move.
I'd like to see a Mythbusters episode where they take a 7.62mm Gatling gun and fire it into a simulated zombie horde at average head height to see what kind of damage it would do. It's probably beyond practicality to setup that many targets, but it would be an interesting simulation nonetheless.
I think the simplest way to deal with a horde would be a minor adaption of a machine designed to clear minefields -- the demining flail. These slightly resemble a combine bolted onto the front of a tank, with the "combine" being basically a bunch of steel weights on the ends of chains designed to beat on the ground to set off mines.
It's not hard to imagine a much lighter weight device (since zombies don't explode) spinning 5 pound weights in the air. It would completely pulverize zombies and turn clearing zombie hordes into something akin to mowing the grass.
That was fascinating, thanks for the link (and the lost 45 minutes reading about the guy's other genius hacks).
The most sensible government broadband propsals seem to only involve the government in the layer 1/2 aspect of the network and any layer 3+ services are simply using the municipal network as a transport layer and are actually provided by third parties. Even management of the layer 2 side could be outsourced to a third party on some kind of basis where they just make it work for some kind of fixed margin for a period of time.
The metaphor that makes the most sense to me are municipal roads. The government is just tasked with building and maintaining the roads -- nobody expects the government to deliver pizzas or get you to the airport. A municpal network would just provide connectivity, it would be up to individuals to contract with an ISP or teleivision vendor to provide services over the network.
I would expect that there would be some attempt to provide a minimal service over a municpal network in the same way that the government is involved in public transportation, like maybe you could get access to city web sites without buying ISP service, but it hardly seems like these would squeeze out private ISPs from selling service on a municipal network anymore than the city bus system has put the auto industry or the hired car services out of business.
I think the only thing that matters here is the timing of the suit after the governor's resignation. Once the governor resigns, even if the allegations surrounding the resignation turn out to be true, the governor has a cloud over his head making it trivial to tie anything and everything to his "corruption" even if the actual allegations have nothing to do with ancillary claims made against him, such as Oracle's suit.
"Let's blame Oracle" also sounds like a lousy political strategy that would motivate few voters as well as leave the door open to questions about selection of Oracle as a vendor to begin with and quesitons about the competency of the vendor oversight. I doubt any politician would base much of their voter appeal on something like that lest it turn around and bite them.
How much CPU power is in HDD controllers and how big is the flash storage on the controller?
I'm mostly just curious, but I wonder how much "elbow room" there is to do something nefarious like blocking updates or protecting boot sectors without compromising drive performance significantly.
Is there a mechanism for running software on the drive controller -- passing input, getting output, etc?
There seems to be a widely accepted school of thought within music journalism/critcism that gives significant weight/credit to obscure artists having a disproportionate influence to trends in music. Groups like the Velvet Underground, Big Star, the Replacements never had major popularity in terms of record sales and radio airplay but are often cited by music critics and other musicians as having been influential on bands and genres that were popular later on, in some cases 20 years later on.
Tapping the Billboard 100 doesn't seem to take into account these "opinion leaders" influence, whether it was the music itself that was the inspiration or whether it was just the influence of music critics.
It's pretty debatable whether a specific artist, especially one who had little popularity in their years of recording and performing, actually has this kind of influence or whether it just becomes kind of an orthodoxy of opinion that they had that influence.
But often times it does seem that there can be breakthrough artists who manage to have outsize influence on artists who later go on to popularize a genre.
Yes, I realize that the sort of Occam's Razor kind of explanation is that it is a result of a bad picture that exposes some kind of color processing ambiguity and not a result of some kind of manipulation.
That being said, I think it's not unrealistic at all in era of clickbaiting and relentless social media trolling that someone would want to experiment with a scheme for manipulating social media memes or figuring out a way to amplify their views. As far as I know, money can still be made on web advertising, drive-by downloads, tracking, etc.
And as the AC poster who also replied said, there ARE organizations with a vested interest in manipulating socal media, whether its "merely" for advertising purposes or for more nefarious reasons.
I'd swear I saw completely different images of these dresses posted, at extremes of the color controversy and neither was at all ambigous as to what color it was.
I wonder what the likelihood is that two or more images were served to clients, either at random or by some algorithm, to further the controversy? I can see one single ambiguous image that could go either way, but most of the examples I saw looked to be tweaked for maximum color association.
If you served tweaked images to clients so that "everyone" saw a different image, including people who saw different images at different times muddying their memory of what they saw over time, you could really amplify the controversy since people would actually be seeing a different image.
I'm not sure that a bodyless brain solves many problems that either long-term hibernation or virtual reality would solve better.
I value human space exploration for reasons orthagonal to the hard science, but I think advancements in virtual reality are going to make it an even harder sell. I know that communications lag is something of a stumbling block for serious interactivity.
But maybe with enough sensors and data streamed back some of the interactivity could be generated locally but with remotely gathered information. Maybe using some of this you could "act out' what you wanted the rover to do in VR with preliminary and interpolated data. The rover could then actually execute this autonomously and then if you went back and re-do what you acted out, enough specific data would have been generated that it would give you an extremely lifelike VR experience.
I think of it sort of like the way Google Street View works now. You can drive up and down the street looking at houses, and you can zoom in and out and turn your head but nothing else. What if you could walk up to an item of interest in a yard in VR. With just the street view data, it would look bad (warped perspective, excessive zoom, etc). But if the system knew exactly what you were interested in, sent in a camera setup after to mirror your examantion of the yard item but in complete detail you could go back to that same street view scene and actually walk up to the item.
If this is a simulation, I'd like them to simulate some better drugs. All the ones in my simulation have too many unwanted side effects. Some are better than others, but a lot of them can be fatal, most don't mix well and don't get me started on the cost and legal complications.
I think you've hit the nail on the head, and it's true for more than just writing software.
IT projects usually have two basic parts to them:
1) The part we know how to do and have done before. Usually it revolves around a set of tasks we've done before and that have a consistent outcome and usually exist sort of in a vacuum -- install an operating system, configure a switch, install an application.
2) The part we know how to do, but doesn't always have a consistent outcome because the specific thing hasn't been done before even though similar things have been done before. Similar tasks have been done before, maybe even identical tasks, but they haven't been done in this specific environment. Often involves integration with other systems or involves a lot of dependecies that are too hard/complex/time consuming to have a complete a priori understanding or produces an outcome which has a predicted but not completely predictable outcome.
Problems in (1) are usually easy to overcome because the solutions tend to be more easily known. Problems resulting from part (2) tend to have open-ended timelines because you often don't know what the problems are and have to create solutions.
I think people who haven't done IT work long enough or only get close enough to "supervise" it confuse the two, and assume that because even though (2) works often enough it seems to be reliably predictable.
I started borrowing Donald Rumsfeld's Iraq war quote about "known unknowns and unknown unknowns" when dealing with customers and managers about phase 2 type tasks. He may have been widely criticized for making excuses about the war, but I think there's some insight to the quote because it seems to somehow capture something about the unpredictability of outcomes with depdendencies.
It seems to me that the constant "overhaul" of a GUI to change icons, menu structures, etc is bad design. Not because the final product is necessarily bad, but because whatever improvements the new design brings are dwarfed by the cost of throwing away of user knowledge about the old interface and the cost of re-learning a new interface and its symbols and structure.
There's probably even unconsidered effects. A lot of clients I've worked with have resisted upgrades (they own and have paid for) to Office because of the radical changes in look and feel. By running older versions with weaker security, they're now exposed to greater risk of compromise by malware. There may even be meaningful losses in productivity from missing new features or improved implementations of existing functionality. This can even be made even worse by resisting operating system updates.
I've always been puzzled that some of the best minds in user interface design get together and say "obviously, the best solution is to throw out everything the users have learned and give them something totally different."