I love the way my phone company (CenturyLink) gets to charge me $10 per month per line for caller ID... and yet is apparently under no obligation that the strings that show up on my caller ID display bear any relationship to reality. If that isn't a scam in and of itself, I don't know what is.
It's even worse than that (for me, at least). In the past week, google has bounced several of my perfectly ordinary e-mails to family members with gmail accounts. As far as I can tell, there is no way to tell the AI that it's an idiot. I can't even begin to guess what it thinks is spammy about the e-mails that it's blocked. They don't seem to have anything in common except that they came from me.
The bizarre thing is that (so far) if I re-send the exact same e-mail a few minutes later, it doesn't bounce.
You must be kidding right? Have you seen the top 10 best seller list? Hint: Harry Potter books were most of them. John Grisham. Pure junk.
I am a writer. It seems to me that Amazon, or anyone else, is welcome to generate as much junk as they like. I don't see that it's going to affect any writer who creates substantive, complex, original works. The two are aimed at quite different markets -- but both are real markets, and if people want to enjoy, and spend money on, let's call it "computer-generated drivel", then it's not obvious why Amazon or someone else shouldn't profitably cater to that market; I don't see why I would care whether some automated system is responsible for "creating" books for the people who enjoy the kind of material that appears on any "top 10 best seller list".
I haven't looked at the data for 2017, but in the 2016 CQ Worldwide CW contest -- a Morse-only contest held at the end of November annually -- about 2.4 million distinct contacts were made over the course of two days. That doesn't seem to be compatible with the quoted assertion. I also note that that number is roughly 400,000 higher than the number of contacts made over the equivalent weekend dedicated to voice operation.
The investors in Theranos were an example of people being extremely ignorant of technology.
I am too-often amazed at how so many VC firms don't really seem to understand the technologies at which they are throwing money.
One case in point (there are plenty of others I know of): a few years ago I watched a presentation of a cybersecurity company that had received a $40m investment from a VC firm. I happened to make a comment to a colleague after the presentation to the effect that the product was snake oil (which was the conclusion he had reached as well), and was immediately asked what I meant by someone who was listening... who was from the VC firm that had made the investment. A couple of weeks later, the VC firm flew me to talk to the company executives in their presence. The company shut down the next day. So the VC firm saved themselves from throwing away more money, but I never understood why they had given $40m to the company without bothering to get any independent input about the technology. It was hard to escape the conclusion that "cyber", "security" and a lot of waffling and some pretty slides were more important than getting answers to hard questions.
We all know by now, or at least strongly suspect, that the answer is likely "never", unless some catastrophe occurs to wake people up. I've given up trying to explain to otherwise-intelligent people what these companies (Facebook, of course, being only the most obvious example) are doing. No "ordinary" person seems to understand.
My personal "shake my head in wonder" issue is the attorneys who happily use gmail for their business. I am honestly surprised that it is legal for attorneys to use any e-mail "service" that is known to scan e-mails for any purported purpose whatsoever. But then, in my naïveté, I wonder why attorneys are not required by law to use encryption for all work-related e-mail anyway.
(Of course, add "health workers" and any other business that deals with confidential information to the above.)
I was a KDE lover back in the early 2000's. Until KDE 4.... Looking back fondly to KDE 3. How integrated everything seemed. But I just can't get over the inertia to even give it a try.
I have similar feelings, although I stuck with KDE4, even though some of its bugs infuriated me more often than was good for my blood pressure. Then debian stable switched to Plasma 5 recently, and after a few days I simply had to find an alternative. I have an old KDE3 machine, and every time I used it, it was like a breath of fresh air, so I switched to Trinity on my main desktop machine. I don't think I'll be switching to anything else for a long time. I do use a lot of the more recent versions of *applications* from the KDE team, as the versions that come with Trinity are a bit antiquated at this point, but the basic desktop operations I find to be vastly more reliable and usable under Trinity than under Plasma 5. YMMV, of course; but that's my experience.
I suggest that people who are really interested in understanding this subject read and understand the papers reprinted in "Maxwell's Demon: Entropy, Information, Computing" (first edition: ISBN: 978-0691605463; second edition: ISBN: 978-0750307598).
I downloaded the entire dataset folder and compressed into a two-part ZIP for easy download and/or archiving to DVD.
And also available as a single xz-compressed tarfile: http://drevans.blog.enginehous.... (This file is about 1.3 GB smaller than the sum of the two zip files.)
From the summary, you could be excused for thinking that the article it's talking about is rubbish. You'd be wrong. The subject of the mass density of space is a lot deeper than you might think if you're not a theoretical physicist. The article is actually remarkably good at laying out and discussing the problem. In fact, the subject is a bit like Feynman diagrams themselves: initially they look like simple cartoons (which they are) that can't have any deep meaning... but they can. Definitely worth a read if you have an interest in, and basic understanding of, the modern ideas regarding particles and fields.
The real puzzle to me is how easily VCs part with scads of money without, apparently, bothering to hire a couple of decent physicists (or mathematicians or security experts, as appropriate, in the case of security snake oil) beforehand. I have been hired in the past to point out the obvious "this can't work", but only when alarm bells have begun to ring -- after VCs had parted with ~$40m. Somehow, it seems that a dynamic CEO, expert in public relations and putting together cool Powerpoint, causes the parts of brains responsible for skepticism to shut down, to the point that spending a tiny fraction of the requested money on a professional independent opinion somehow seems like a silly idea.
How come it is considered acceptable to judge such cases at a local level and thus with wildly different standards depending on which court it is presented to?
Huh? Patent cases are heard by federal courts (usually; there are other venues, such as the US International Trade Commission). Judge Gilstrap is a Federal Judge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
And that so many people who are purportedly expert at evaluating technology got collectively duped/brainwashed into believing a whole bunch of fluff based on no more than a TED talk-level technology pitch.
I am frequently amazed at how willing VCs tend to be to provide money while at the same time being unwilling to express skepticism, even to themselves, about the claims of some of the companies they fund.
Some time ago, after a particular VC firm had dumped $40m into a "security" (for which read "snake-oil") company, the company suits happened to make a closed-door presentation which, unknown to them, a handful of people with practical security expertise had been invited to attend. A VC representative was also in attendance, although he did not speak. When we recommended, after the talk, that the listeners have nothing further to do with the company product, the VC representative sought one of us out (it happened to be me) and the end result was that I spent a day at the company facility, towards the end of which I had a short meeting with the VC representative and explained at an intelligent layman's level why the product could never work. The money pipe closed that day. But I remain puzzled as to how $40m could have been dumped into a scheme that was so obviously flawed.
Because that gives me access on Netflix to every movie ever made
Huh? On my "saved" queue I have dozens of movies that Netflix marks "unavailable" and can't actually ship, but using some warped logic the company seems to think that they still carry them. And there are dozens more that I want to put on my queue that Netflix doesn't even pretend to carry. And all of these DVDs are available for purchase on Amazon (and, I suppose, available via torrents).
With each of their mis-steps I get closer and closer to dumping Netflix and going back to buying movies.
The Netflix management never seems to have understood what has made them successful. As soon as they started producing "original content", I thought, "What is this? If they have the money to create a series, then why aren't they spending it enhancing their core business and making more movies available to their subscribers?" I've stopped wondering that, because I now realise that, amazingly, Netflix management simply doesn't get it. I think we are watching, in painful slow-motion, the early stages of what promises to be a long, drawn-out death if they don't come to their senses.
Even most physicists don't understand Feynman's point that QM is called "mechanics" for a reason: it's a set of mechanical rules for getting the right answer. It tells you nothing about how the universe operates behind the scenes so as to produce the same answer as QM. Feynman's little easy-to-understand book on QED should be read by everyone who thinks that QM is more than a tool for performing calculations. (And read Tegmark's book for an example of what happens when an intelligent person reads meaning into QM.)
Regarding the actual article: at first sight, this looks like a great experimental verification of something that no one (as far as I know) doubted; but it's always good to confirm another prediction of QM that appears bizarre to us.
Yes; as you say, in the 2002--2004 timeframe they were great. My experience was that it all started to fall apart when 64-bit machines came along. For a year or more Mandrake's 64-bit repositories were full of broken packages that simply would not install. I kept with them as long as I could, through the change to Mandriva, but nothing seemed to improve very much so I eventually switched the up-and-coming shininess that was *buntu. Which was great for a few years, before their quality control went the same way as Mandrake's had done:-(
I stopped shopping there long ago because they stopped stocking anything useful. I don't need a cellphone from them, I needed parts, which they no longer carry.
Some stores no longer carry parts, and some carry a reduced inventory. But some stores still carry a decent supply of components ans similar small, useful items. We have two Radio Shack stores in the closest city; one is essentially useless and simply directs me to the other store (but I frequently try it anyway, since it's the closer of the two). The other one isn't half bad, and almost always has what I need. I shall certainly miss it if it goes away.
Seriously, what's so broken about X? Is it just a pain in the ass for developers to work with?
I taught myself X from scratch last year. I didn't find it hard at all. In fact, I found it a whole lot easier than either of the fancy modern GUI toolkits that I looked at first and tried to use to implement the project I was working on.
Out of desperation born of lack of progress over an extended period, I thought I'd take a look at X. And suddenly it became easy to get the interface to behave *exactly* the way I wanted instead in somebody else's idea of what I should want.
And the documentation was complete, correct, and easy to follow. I didn't have to keep asking people for help (often, with no resolution). In a word, both the documentation and the code for X are mature. Which I submit beats bleeding edge every time if you're trying to build something robust.
I've been using ZFS on Linux for about a year. I can summarise my position on the experience with two words: it's magic.
It is still tricky to run one's root system off ZFS (at least on Debian). That, I think, is for those who are brave and have to time to deal with issues that might arise following updates. But for non-root filesystems, ZFS is, as I said, magic. It's fast, reliable, caches intelligently, adaptable to a large variety of mirror/striping/RAID configurations, snapshots with incredible efficiency, and simply works as advertised.
Someone once (before the port to other OSes) said that ZFS was Solaris' "killer app". Having used it in production for a year, I can understand why they said that.
Fixed what seem like fundamental GUI bugs?
on
KDE Releases Plasma 5
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Can someone who has tried this tell me whether two particular bugs that were present throughout the life of Plasma 4 have been fixed (OK, you may not think these are bugs, but I sure do: I can't imagine how they were ever allowed to persist, since to me they seem to violate pretty basic requirements of GUI behaviour):
1. If one has a menu present (for example, by pressing the K-Menu button), does an incoming notification still cause the menu to disappear, so you get the delightfully random experience of clicking on whatever happened to be under the item you were about to click on?
2. Can a single misbehaving plasmoid still cause the entire desktop to freeze? (This typically happens to me if the network connectivity is lost: poorly-written plasmoids that need network access can block and cause everything -- not just the plasmoid in question -- to freeze.)
Slashdot Mirror
I love the way my phone company (CenturyLink) gets to charge me $10 per month per line for caller ID... and yet is apparently under no obligation that the strings that show up on my caller ID display bear any relationship to reality. If that isn't a scam in and of itself, I don't know what is.
It's even worse than that (for me, at least). In the past week, google has bounced several of my perfectly ordinary e-mails to family members with gmail accounts. As far as I can tell, there is no way to tell the AI that it's an idiot. I can't even begin to guess what it thinks is spammy about the e-mails that it's blocked. They don't seem to have anything in common except that they came from me.
The bizarre thing is that (so far) if I re-send the exact same e-mail a few minutes later, it doesn't bounce.
You must be kidding right? Have you seen the top 10 best seller list? Hint: Harry Potter books were most of them. John Grisham. Pure junk.
I am a writer. It seems to me that Amazon, or anyone else, is welcome to generate as much junk as they like. I don't see that it's going to affect any writer who creates substantive, complex, original works. The two are aimed at quite different markets -- but both are real markets, and if people want to enjoy, and spend money on, let's call it "computer-generated drivel", then it's not obvious why Amazon or someone else shouldn't profitably cater to that market; I don't see why I would care whether some automated system is responsible for "creating" books for the people who enjoy the kind of material that appears on any "top 10 best seller list".
dashdotdot dotdashdot dot dashdot dashdotdash
Bzzzt. I hope that the company that makes it can spell better than that.
The truth is morse code was rarely used anymore.
I haven't looked at the data for 2017, but in the 2016 CQ Worldwide CW contest -- a Morse-only contest held at the end of November annually -- about 2.4 million distinct contacts were made over the course of two days. That doesn't seem to be compatible with the quoted assertion. I also note that that number is roughly 400,000 higher than the number of contacts made over the equivalent weekend dedicated to voice operation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.043...
https://www.igsoc.org/annals/1... has several interesting papers related to this subject.
The short summary is that we really don't have a good feel for the feasibility of this, so it seems like an experiment worth trying.
The investors in Theranos were an example of people being extremely ignorant of technology.
I am too-often amazed at how so many VC firms don't really seem to understand the technologies at which they are throwing money.
One case in point (there are plenty of others I know of): a few years ago I watched a presentation of a cybersecurity company that had received a $40m investment from a VC firm. I happened to make a comment to a colleague after the presentation to the effect that the product was snake oil (which was the conclusion he had reached as well), and was immediately asked what I meant by someone who was listening... who was from the VC firm that had made the investment. A couple of weeks later, the VC firm flew me to talk to the company executives in their presence. The company shut down the next day. So the VC firm saved themselves from throwing away more money, but I never understood why they had given $40m to the company without bothering to get any independent input about the technology. It was hard to escape the conclusion that "cyber", "security" and a lot of waffling and some pretty slides were more important than getting answers to hard questions.
When are people going to learn?
We all know by now, or at least strongly suspect, that the answer is likely "never", unless some catastrophe occurs to wake people up. I've given up trying to explain to otherwise-intelligent people what these companies (Facebook, of course, being only the most obvious example) are doing. No "ordinary" person seems to understand.
My personal "shake my head in wonder" issue is the attorneys who happily use gmail for their business. I am honestly surprised that it is legal for attorneys to use any e-mail "service" that is known to scan e-mails for any purported purpose whatsoever. But then, in my naïveté, I wonder why attorneys are not required by law to use encryption for all work-related e-mail anyway.
(Of course, add "health workers" and any other business that deals with confidential information to the above.)
I was a KDE lover back in the early 2000's. Until KDE 4. ... Looking back fondly to KDE 3. How integrated everything seemed. But I just can't get over the inertia to even give it a try.
I have similar feelings, although I stuck with KDE4, even though some of its bugs infuriated me more often than was good for my blood pressure. Then debian stable switched to Plasma 5 recently, and after a few days I simply had to find an alternative. I have an old KDE3 machine, and every time I used it, it was like a breath of fresh air, so I switched to Trinity on my main desktop machine. I don't think I'll be switching to anything else for a long time. I do use a lot of the more recent versions of *applications* from the KDE team, as the versions that come with Trinity are a bit antiquated at this point, but the basic desktop operations I find to be vastly more reliable and usable under Trinity than under Plasma 5. YMMV, of course; but that's my experience.
I suggest that people who are really interested in understanding this subject read and understand the papers reprinted in "Maxwell's Demon: Entropy, Information, Computing" (first edition: ISBN: 978-0691605463; second edition: ISBN: 978-0750307598).
I downloaded the entire dataset folder and compressed into a two-part ZIP for easy download and/or archiving to DVD.
And also available as a single xz-compressed tarfile: http://drevans.blog.enginehous.... (This file is about 1.3 GB smaller than the sum of the two zip files.)
Serious question, is there a latex-like tool for making presentations.
There are several of them. The most common is probably Beamer: https://bitbucket.org/rivanvx/...
A couple of others are mentioned on the Beamer Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Or is this only over Comcast's Internet service?
From TFA: "For now, Xfinity app will be available only in current markets".
From the summary, you could be excused for thinking that the article it's talking about is rubbish. You'd be wrong. The subject of the mass density of space is a lot deeper than you might think if you're not a theoretical physicist. The article is actually remarkably good at laying out and discussing the problem. In fact, the subject is a bit like Feynman diagrams themselves: initially they look like simple cartoons (which they are) that can't have any deep meaning ... but they can. Definitely worth a read if you have an interest in, and basic understanding of, the modern ideas regarding particles and fields.
The real puzzle to me is how easily VCs part with scads of money without, apparently, bothering to hire a couple of decent physicists (or mathematicians or security experts, as appropriate, in the case of security snake oil) beforehand. I have been hired in the past to point out the obvious "this can't work", but only when alarm bells have begun to ring -- after VCs had parted with ~$40m. Somehow, it seems that a dynamic CEO, expert in public relations and putting together cool Powerpoint, causes the parts of brains responsible for skepticism to shut down, to the point that spending a tiny fraction of the requested money on a professional independent opinion somehow seems like a silly idea.
>
How come it is considered acceptable to judge such cases at a local level and thus with wildly different standards depending on which court it is presented to?
Huh? Patent cases are heard by federal courts (usually; there are other venues, such as the US International Trade Commission). Judge Gilstrap is a Federal Judge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
And that so many people who are purportedly expert at evaluating technology got collectively duped/brainwashed into believing a whole bunch of fluff based on no more than a TED talk-level technology pitch.
I am frequently amazed at how willing VCs tend to be to provide money while at the same time being unwilling to express skepticism, even to themselves, about the claims of some of the companies they fund.
Some time ago, after a particular VC firm had dumped $40m into a "security" (for which read "snake-oil") company, the company suits happened to make a closed-door presentation which, unknown to them, a handful of people with practical security expertise had been invited to attend. A VC representative was also in attendance, although he did not speak. When we recommended, after the talk, that the listeners have nothing further to do with the company product, the VC representative sought one of us out (it happened to be me) and the end result was that I spent a day at the company facility, towards the end of which I had a short meeting with the VC representative and explained at an intelligent layman's level why the product could never work. The money pipe closed that day. But I remain puzzled as to how $40m could have been dumped into a scheme that was so obviously flawed.
Because that gives me access on Netflix to every movie ever made
Huh? On my "saved" queue I have dozens of movies that Netflix marks "unavailable" and can't actually ship, but using some warped logic the company seems to think that they still carry them. And there are dozens more that I want to put on my queue that Netflix doesn't even pretend to carry. And all of these DVDs are available for purchase on Amazon (and, I suppose, available via torrents).
With each of their mis-steps I get closer and closer to dumping Netflix and going back to buying movies.
The Netflix management never seems to have understood what has made them successful. As soon as they started producing "original content", I thought, "What is this? If they have the money to create a series, then why aren't they spending it enhancing their core business and making more movies available to their subscribers?" I've stopped wondering that, because I now realise that, amazingly, Netflix management simply doesn't get it. I think we are watching, in painful slow-motion, the early stages of what promises to be a long, drawn-out death if they don't come to their senses.
Even most physicists don't understand Feynman's point that QM is called "mechanics" for a reason: it's a set of mechanical rules for getting the right answer. It tells you nothing about how the universe operates behind the scenes so as to produce the same answer as QM. Feynman's little easy-to-understand book on QED should be read by everyone who thinks that QM is more than a tool for performing calculations. (And read Tegmark's book for an example of what happens when an intelligent person reads meaning into QM.)
Regarding the actual article: at first sight, this looks like a great experimental verification of something that no one (as far as I know) doubted; but it's always good to confirm another prediction of QM that appears bizarre to us.
Yes; as you say, in the 2002--2004 timeframe they were great. My experience was that it all started to fall apart when 64-bit machines came along. For a year or more Mandrake's 64-bit repositories were full of broken packages that simply would not install. I kept with them as long as I could, through the change to Mandriva, but nothing seemed to improve very much so I eventually switched the up-and-coming shininess that was *buntu. Which was great for a few years, before their quality control went the same way as Mandrake's had done :-(
I stopped shopping there long ago because they stopped stocking anything useful. I don't need a cellphone from them, I needed parts, which they no longer carry.
Some stores no longer carry parts, and some carry a reduced inventory. But some stores still carry a decent supply of components ans similar small, useful items. We have two Radio Shack stores in the closest city; one is essentially useless and simply directs me to the other store (but I frequently try it anyway, since it's the closer of the two). The other one isn't half bad, and almost always has what I need. I shall certainly miss it if it goes away.
Seriously, what's so broken about X? Is it just a pain in the ass for developers to work with?
I taught myself X from scratch last year. I didn't find it hard at all. In fact, I found it a whole lot easier than either of the fancy modern GUI toolkits that I looked at first and tried to use to implement the project I was working on.
Out of desperation born of lack of progress over an extended period, I thought I'd take a look at X. And suddenly it became easy to get the interface to behave *exactly* the way I wanted instead in somebody else's idea of what I should want.
And the documentation was complete, correct, and easy to follow. I didn't have to keep asking people for help (often, with no resolution). In a word, both the documentation and the code for X are mature. Which I submit beats bleeding edge every time if you're trying to build something robust.
I've been using ZFS on Linux for about a year. I can summarise my position on the experience with two words: it's magic.
It is still tricky to run one's root system off ZFS (at least on Debian). That, I think, is for those who are brave and have to time to deal with issues that might arise following updates. But for non-root filesystems, ZFS is, as I said, magic. It's fast, reliable, caches intelligently, adaptable to a large variety of mirror/striping/RAID configurations, snapshots with incredible efficiency, and simply works as advertised.
Someone once (before the port to other OSes) said that ZFS was Solaris' "killer app". Having used it in production for a year, I can understand why they said that.
Can someone who has tried this tell me whether two particular bugs that were present throughout the life of Plasma 4 have been fixed (OK, you may not think these are bugs, but I sure do: I can't imagine how they were ever allowed to persist, since to me they seem to violate pretty basic requirements of GUI behaviour):
1. If one has a menu present (for example, by pressing the K-Menu button), does an incoming notification still cause the menu to disappear, so you get the delightfully random experience of clicking on whatever happened to be under the item you were about to click on?
2. Can a single misbehaving plasmoid still cause the entire desktop to freeze? (This typically happens to me if the network connectivity is lost: poorly-written plasmoids that need network access can block and cause everything -- not just the plasmoid in question -- to freeze.)