A big code fragment was copied, but later no changes were made.
Or perhaps during debugging, it was copied, experimental changes were made on one execution path (perhaps just a debug statement), then it was decided the changes weren't all that helpful, and the changes were deleted again, leaving both blocks identical (considered mostly harmless, but ought to have a comment if deliberately left that way).
These benchmarks are sensitive to extremely subtle differences in how each file system interpret safety semantics, which unfortunately none of these "benchmark" utilities actually check.
By "subtle" I mean just a scattered handful of sunflower seeds, which may (or may notâ"don't look at the light!) attract the attention of the Black Swan of Extreme Face Melt.
One thing I read a while back explained how rigorous NFS semantics were pretty much guaranteed to cut your benchmark results in half, compared to how these semantics are traditionally implemented on just about any Linux system.
Is that bridge safe? The pragmatic answer is this: a million people have driven over it so far, and no-one has died yet.
To the kind of person who gets a secret thrill from "First post!" the logic of this probably seems impeccable.
Subject: First post!
I don't want a pickle, I just want to r-i-i-ide my motor sickle.
But price per gig is not quite there yet. However, I suspect it is coming!
Mostly because you don't read much. Flash has particularly severe scaling limits and we're already up against it.
We might break through by surprise, or we might not. Bear in mind that we already had a 3.8 GHz Prescott back in 2004. It actually sucked shit, but that's another matter. There are several developments in the spinning rust pipeline that will likely keep it well ahead on the $/GB axis. Most of these developments will make spinning rust suck more than ever (shingles, anyone?) but in all likelihood it will maintain raw $/GB supremacy for some time yet.
It might even suck so bad that no-one gives a shit about $/GB any longer, for 95% of all applications. Perhaps, minus all those cat pictures, we're almost there already.
So did a lot of cultures that left us mountains of written text.
No culture has ever left us a "mountain" of text that we aren't able to at least partially decipher, unless we're talking a writing system measured in words/kilogram.
You're so clueless about this matter, it's almost shocking.
Leibniz would have recognized a digital archive of Wikipedia (say the size of the English Wikipedia, but in any human language) as a linguistic record at the drop of pin (I grant him a few weeks to crack UTF-8.) Every conceivable statistical measure would point to this. Perhaps a sentient dolphin—if our wildest theories about the nature of the dolphin mind play out—would have trouble dialing this in without the use of a calculating machine. One doesn't need to understand a single word in order to extract the semantic graph. From there, deep learning would practically spew out coloured buckets like a rainbow farting unicorn.
You don't think with hundreds of thousands of pages where the bold subject is immediately followed by "(1646-1716)" that this wouldn't quickly be recognized as ordered pairs of positive integers? With a bell curve on the interval distribution? And a sudden flat top at 2016? But only if you ignore the ones containing BC or BCE, which thin out tremendously the further back you go?
I wonder, could this axis be a physical dimension, or perhaps the infamous fourth dimension? We are talking a cognitive mode which has discovered planetary motion, are we not?
If you don't think any of that, well then, you have such a spectacularly low opinion of human or human-successor intelligence, I don't even think we can communicate.
Can't help but feel for all the people who read Backblaze's previous report and decided Seagate was junk and bought WD instead.
Why feel for them? By your own inefficient market hypothesis, every course of action is a crap shoot. The report was great for me, because we actually had one or two of those highly suspect drives in service.
But in the larger scheme, you're absolutely right. Every vendor has manufactured a few duds. IBM, Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital. Every company has made some poor models. Not every company has a "click of death" drive to remember them by, but still you take your chances.
The difference with the 3 GB Seagate is that based on manufacturing conditions, I have a strong feeling Seagate knew about their excessive vice well before they sold them. (Bad Seagate!) In some other cases, the failure rate came as a shock from the field, such as the one I vaguely recall that was later attributed to tin whisker growth sensitive to environmental factors.
You think this is easy? You try to design one. And no, you're not allowed patch Tuesday, unless Tuesday falls on a palindrome.
We'll start at the beginning with the low-hanging fruit, and build from there.
This moment calls for public discussion...
From Apple this translates as follows: "we didn't get what we wanted prowling in the dark corridors".
... the contents of your iPhone are none of our business...
Assume the Tor position! All your child porn R not belong to us!
We were shocked and outraged...
Translation: Shit happens. Because human nature. [long sigh]
Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone's physical possession.
Where for the love of God is the adamant denial that they can actually build such a thing for the device in question? If the only barrier to accessing this device's data is a long night of hammering out source code, then I think this backdoor already exists, like a door that opens onto the back side of the second floor which is sealed from active use because no exterior stairwell has so far been erected.
"But we'd have to drain the moat and relocate the alligators to set the foundation! It would take weeks." Doesn't matter. If that's your last and most severe impediment, the door in my opinion already exists.
Some would argue that building a backdoor for just one iPhone is a simple, clean-cut solution.
Others would argue that the mere possibility of providing a backdoor after the fact calls the competence and unbending will of your organization into a harsh light.
In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks — from restaurants and banks to stores and homes. No reasonable person would find that acceptable.
Pfffffft. What reasonably people find acceptable concerning their physical security in practice seems to have almost no bearing on how people behave with respect to their digital assets. Perhaps eventually as a society—in another generation or two—we'll get there.
Here's one simple distinction. Criminals who break into your house can be shot with a gun. Things you can shoot with a gun go to a different (more vivid) mental lobe in the human brain. Cyberfilth is almost impossible to shoot with a gun. Bleach might be a better option, but you're going to need to bring Dow Chemical Company onside with your plan, just for starters.
William Gibson: Reasonable behaviour is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.
To avoid flattery, it's probably best to frame this sentiment as "no reasonable person's future progeny would find that acceptable", because I've seen the "reasonable" people now living and breathing among us, and let me tell you, it isn't pretty.
Rhetorically, Apple is in a bit of a rush here to close this one gap sooner rather than later, out of thousands of similar gaps.
The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe.
You see "irony" here? Wow. Just wow.
News flash for Tom Cook. The "same people" who authored the American constitution granting powers to the American state also engineered its limitations. It's a human process sometimes called "striking a balance".
Furthermore, allow me to hazard a guess: the same people who toiled cea
When the U.S. president says "millions of dollars" you just know he's not discussing foreign policy. He probably shouldn't be allowed to wield that word at all.
Sorry, Mr President, "billions" is as low as you're allowed to go for dollars; you'll have to save that for talking about "ounces"—even if "this grand initiative will save America $0.3 billion annually" doesn't make it sound like we're paying off the last war any time soon.
Come to think of it, if the president was confined to "trillions" (for the sake of uniformity) that wouldn't be a bad thing, either—even if the average America loses count when first hearing "this grand initiative will save America $0.0003 trillion annually." Obama in eight years has presided over something like $30 trillion in total state expenditure. For his substantive purposes, trillions are a perfectly good unit every day of the week, and all speechifying occasions.
It's just as likely to be 1800's era adventurers/tomb raiders digging up anything shiny to show off and making wild ass assumptions to attract rich patrons.
Congratulations. Your world view has succumbed to charismatic picaroon survivorship bias.
A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended — worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know. It's as nasty and unwholesome a characteristic as can be imagined.
An old friend of his might have commended him thusly: @Fry sinister bullshit bullseye
He goes on to say, "Our removal serves as an excellent example of why the law should be changed to prevent repeated extensions of copyright terms."
Make that retroactive, pretty please, so as to retroactively revoke the ridiculous retroactive extensions.
The whole thing flies in the face of even libertarian notions of contract: that you only get what you shake for, in the first instance.
Douglas Adams used to quip "I love deadlines. I love the sound they make as they whoosh past." Market capitalists love markets. They love the sound the rigging makes as it twangs in the salty sea air. "Arrrr, r-r-r-r-retroactively extended copyright. First we shakes, then we takes."
Sarcasm and satire have only superficially similar.
The thing with satire is to create incongruity between the package and its contents.
Some dishevelled fellow shows up, claims he's a world-class chef from Syria, and offers to cook you a five-star dinner in exchange for his own meal. He doesn't look especially Syrian. And you can't make out his accent.
So you say, "well, I'm not sure whether to believe you. I made this pate yesterday, and I'd like your opinion. Just one second." Then you duck around the corner, dip a knife into the kitty litter box, smoosh the fresh excavation onto a nice Wheat Thin that Jr. left uneaten on his plate after dropping it on the garage floor (use the dishwasher, people!), which you then—in a flash of inspiration—decorate with two fish eyes from the fish carcass in the fridge that is now mired in cold gelatin and really should have been turned into fish stock three days ago. Oh, what the heck—let's do this right!—so you add a tablespoon slab of the aging fish gelatin.
At this point, it looks like fancy French cooking (looks can be deceiving). It really looks like French cooking when you extend it with the utmost graciousness on your whitest French serving cloth.
"Syrian chef" picks it up, opens his mouth, slides it trustingly under his nostrils, and is about to bite down, then freezes in an eyebrow-raising display of alarm and disgust.
"Don't be angry! I had to make sure. Do you still want to cook dinner? Oh well, better luck next time. "
"Sheesh. I think he called me a racist bastard in some foreign gibberish. Did he really mean it? Surely he could see my predicament and my efficient solution. Hmmm. I suppose it did look a lot like I was serving him shit on a cracker, Gallic style, from his point of view."
Sarcasm is exactly the same thing, except you can't be bothered with the cracker, the fish eyes, the extra slab of fish gelatin, or the white napkin. You just hold up a dry cat turd with your bare fingers and call it a cheesy, because you really wouldn't want to have to eat a fancy dinner prepared by the colour blind, not even if he really was a great chef in his own land.
Somewhere buried in all of this was an opportunity for Netcraft to finally be right about something. Maybe that story has yet to surface, and will appear all in due course in tomorrow's feed bag.
You're getting your annual check up and your GP suddenly launches into an unprovoked tirade:
These people are showing up and spreading their grubby, contagious micro-organisms all over my scattered nose bag of Cosmo and Golf Digest magazines, why is it wrong for me to use their personal medical data however I like?
Tell me, how would you answer your GP? With your jaw hanging open, wondered why the question even needs to be answered?
In a local community, it's not considered good neighbourly etiquette to broadcast to all and sundry every tidbit of information you glean—right down to the license plate numbers—about who you see coming and going on your street during the quiet hours of the day and night.
But then given the same information at the scale of big city strangers passing in the street, suddenly the attitude is "fuck yeah, what's now mine is mine, let's link!" Cause, you know, if they were willing to bump shoulders with you on the crowded sidewalk in the first place, trading a few jacket fibers in the process, that's all the permission you need to go all CSI on the acquired residue.
In fact, your local dry cleaner gives you a 10% discount if you sign over all data collection rights, and what crazy person would even begin to think that's not self-evidently good business sense?
Lost in all of this is that people who run software ad blockers probably also run mental ad blockers (in my case, this can not be uninstalled), so our response to the advertising—even if they manage to shove it down our throats—is not going to generate any significant net cash outflow.
For a while, Wired can monetize the increasing number of eyeballs, but then the advertisers will normalize to the newly deflated advertising conversion rate (down 20%? who would have guessed?) and Wired will eventually end up getting exactly the same money as before.
Nice business model you've got there. Shame if anyone connected all the dots.
Barker: Hey, I'd like to interest you in a new business model!
Banker: How does it work?
Barker: You plant a suggestion, then people buy your shit.
Banker: A suggestion?
Barker: A Loud, Noisy, Flashy, Wheezy, Spinning, Popping, Sliding suggestion.
Banker: I think you missed a dwarf. Somebody steal your March?
Barker: Him, too.
Banker: But—the suggestion isn't actually binding on the bumpkin, and surely you must give them something in return just to get their attention in the first place?
Barker: Cheaper than you think.
Banker: But—I'm still having trouble with the fundamentally non-binding nature of the transaction.
Barker: A new day, a new dawn! We'll make this Silverado shitstorm so ubiquitous, it'll soon become regarded as a moral crime to respond to our everlasting fusillade of suggestive schlock as anything less than simply irresistible.
Banker: You certainly have big plans.
Barker: And you certainly have big bucks.
Banker: I won't have to actually drive a Silverado, will I?
Barker: Oh, no. You can drive a Bentley.
Banker: Funny you say that. I was looking at one just the other day.
Barker: A red one?
Banker: Just how would you know that?
Short, conspiratorial silence.
Barker: [whispers] Pull up a chair, here's where it gets real interesting...
My father taught me binary in the early seventies when I was still in elementary school, with black marbles and a grey egg carton. I got it right away. Numbers were one thing, representations of numbers was another thing, and these could be whatever you found convenient, so long as you obeyed certain rules (I wasn't so accelerated that I immediately started banging out Euclid's Elements on the piano).
Then I thought really hard one Saturday afternoon about fractions (on the unit interval, which I thought of as positive integers with the numerator greater than the denominator), and discovered that even though there are a lot of them, it is possible to enumerate them exhaustively, though not by the traditional "counting up" procedure, which got me hooked into the problem of the common divisor thing.
The next project I recall was to exhaustive write out the Tic Tac Toe game tree. Since I was a lazy bastard (always have been) this involving thinking very hard about something somewhat like symmetry groups.
Over the annual summer visit to my grandparents—small town prairie Badlands without the cool geography, though often we managed a trip to see the hoodoos—I played a lot of solitaire on the golden-green shag carpet which Puss Puss—the duodecarian house cat who lived in the shadows under my grandparent's bed (the short duration of our visits was probably for her sake)—sometimes preferred in her dotage over asking out into the Canadian winter. Quite undeterred by the sticky and/or stinky patches, I managed to clearly formulate the concept of a "decision procedure" and that such a thing could be unambiguously specified; furthermore, I worked out (at first empirically) that the greedy algorithm was provably not optimal for Klondike (for me at that time, all Solitaire was just "Solitaire", though I knew several).
At age ten, the boundary between empiricism and proof is still a fuzzy one.
In grade five, I spent a lot of time (by myself) trying to puzzle out the rate-limiting step in long-hand square root. I had by then also discovered E=IR and P=IE. Pretty soon I had determined that this generates 4 choose 1 times 4 choose 2 simple algebraic forms. But for an entire painful week, some kind of thick cloud entered my brain and I couldn't reliably write all the forms down without a lot of mucking around; this I knew to be completely bogus, and a permanent blot on my record. By the time the cloud passed, I was pretty good at substitution and gathering. Later, when I first encountered a matrix (don't recall), I immediately went to myself "oh, that's just algebra, better organized". At least something stuck.
Now, during this entire period of my life, I was in a constant state of deeply repressed rage about this thing called "school", with all the inherent stimulation of Puss Puss waiting out the daily bedtime / ultimate final departure of the grandchildren (geriatric cat yay!) from the furthest dark remove under the master bed.
Grade six came as a shock. For the first time I experienced a math teacher who believed in letting kids learn at their own natural rate. He quickly put four of us a private work program. We could go as fast as we wanted, but the rule was we had to do all of the tedious exercises at the end of every chapter. Many of these exercises were heavy on the pencil work, so I only made it through grades six, seven, eight, and nine. My fingers put in about 90% of the work (this is not actually a bad thing), and my brain put in the other 10% (this being 100 times more than 0.1%). Awesome!
So I was armed, locked, and loaded for bear when I showed up at the beginning of grade seven. I figured I could knock off ten, eleven, twelve by Easter, and still have a month left over for real math at long last.
Problem: my grade seven teacher thought my purpose in life was to sit enthralled by his boring lectures. Shields up! I don't recall a single thing he wrote on the board
what I read about their diversity and social impact team would certainly be enough to make me run, screaming
It's fundamentally driven by the desire of the VCs to establish a broader and ultimately cheaper labour pool, so they've hired themselves an SJJ (social justice jihadist)—white males not allowed to participate—to advance the backroom bigbucks cause of white-male sticker shock under the false flag of her own sincere yet progressive-at-any-cost value system.
At this point power consumption matters a heck of a lot more for ubiquity than pure performance gains.
I'm sure the fire-breathing dragster edition of current silicon technology (with a pin count to match) will continue to exist at an upscale price for those willing to pay for it.
That uncomfortable rush in your stomach? It's from clinging to yesterday.
The stupid thing is that C++ name mangling would already catch this problem at link time, and every modern C/C++ compiler already has code to support this, except that it's only activated for the much loved/unloved function overloading.
If GCC/clang in C mode generated mangled names into object files when compiling C programs (as purely informative records), the linker could diagnose this kind of problem as optional linkage errors—mighty darn useful, optional linkage errors.
This is a violation of the type system pure and simple, but one that doesn't compromise any specific compilation unit. That leaves the linker as the next line of defense, but like to keep our C linkers in dark boxes full of trust-me horse shit.
Yes, but the energy/time (power) goes up closer to the cube, because the delta_t smunch (for a head-on collision, or large solid object) also diminishes with impact velocity (though, like a memristor, you can work up counterexamples).
Like the modern-day paleolithic societies that can only count "one, two, many" it goes "linear, quadratic, exponential" in the vocabulary of most STEM fugitives.
The little statistical nodule in my brain that filters credible claims instantly exploded at first glance. Went off to fetch the long-handled mop so I could clean the ceiling, and for that reason I didn't even notice the three half-cap prepositions (does that almost count as shouting?)
First line of story (smaller font):
According to new research from the CDC, 9.8% of deaths in working-age adults (22-64 years old) in the U.S. from 2006 to 2010 were "attributable to excessive drinking." [my emph.]
If you've read anything about the average person's powers of mental discernment, you would know the the patently absurd title does a lot of subconscious damage. It's too freaking late to correct this a sentence later.
Now a few dud stories will probably make it through the firehose no matter what, but we really need some kind of moderation on the stories themselves once posted so that they can be down-voted to "-5 patently absurd" such as this particular submission warranted.
Another thing I would like is to have the subject line character limit increased by another ten characters or so. I've had many perfect subject lines ruined by the current parsimonious limit—and it's always by less than ten characters.
Oh, yes, and the hot pink "cat got your tongue?" dunning should actually show the preview which I might perhaps be using to look over what I've just written to find out whether any subject matter materialized out of my verbal fog, or not.
When words cease to mean what they were intended or traditionally understood to mean, people with working brains find a new lexicon. We have a name for language that continues to circulate at the hands of the disengaged: cliche.
If the minds of the disengaged have any taste (lazy though it be, to be sure) they stock their cliche pantry with Shakespearean cliche. What the hell is a "salad day" anyway? Doesn't matter. The Bard didn't become the Bard by coining phrases that later flip tits up and float to the top of the scum pond, there to rot in the hot afternoon sun.
"Market share" is a phrase created by bean counters, subtype "venal" and is in fact principally circulated by the venal beancounter's venal beancounter: advertising men.
For example, my household is probably numbed among the vbvb as a "cable cutter", this though I have not resided anywhere with a working cable service for nearly thirty years, and that was an entire four month term at university, before which my family used this contraption called an "antenna", the kind you could see from the other side of the valley. A large, rusty pipe wrench lived full time at the bottom of the pole, seeing as, weather permitting, we could sometimes pick up Bellingham, and thereby upgrade in a scandalous moment from The Beachcombers to The Love Boat. David Suzuki on The Nature of Things would soon wrench us back to our senses, such being the paucity of science coverage in those times, good bad or ugly (Suzuki being a uneven trail mix I tended to score as "all of the above").
By this point in my young life I had passed judgement on television as mode of knowing shit about anything, hence the my thirty years in the un-television wilderness (and counting).
Nevertheless, to a moral certainty, I am surely categorized as a "cable cutter" (hey, we didn't say when).
Yes, those fucking vbvbs. We all know the drill.
Microsoft 10's "market share" is a fresh, tender patty of the same basic construction, whose turbid run off is additionally clouded by the chocolate-flavoured Ex-Lax served up by Windows Update.
Secondly, there is a key point to understand about how vbvbs do basic arithmetic.
Those least able to shuffle off the mortal coil of an undesired Windows 10 upgrade are the most important people to count. Your value in this pendant statistic is inversely proportional to your capacity to successfully wipe your own ass. These people are everything you want in a community of unwitting Guinea pigs to beta test suspect patches you are withholding from enterprise (tetchy, uptight people who actually know the difference and who, like Gandalf, only lose their shit precisely when and where they mean to).
Which brings us to "caveat emptor", the original market creed, and durable cliche of the highest Imperial coinage.
Let's suppose in Roman times you buy a pig in a poke. You take it home, release it from the bag—no surprise to you, since you checked carefully, it really is a baby piglet of sound mind & body—and you feed it the many different kinds of root vegetables that were not yet regarded as fit for human consumption, until the bacon is practically hanging in folds from its oversized rump. Then one dark and rainy night, a woman next door with more than the socially acceptable number of facial warts and moles twitches her nose and your domestic pig metamorphs inside your dwelling into a 600-lb toadstool (one with no prominent swollen bulboe labelled "drink me" to reserve the spell).
I am a great deal more than pretty much certain—one does not bet upon the Roman character lightly—that to the Roman mind, this scenario goes a great deal past caveat emptor, and well into lynch mob territory.
A "market" is a human institution where the receiver of the goods makes a dangerous but informed decision and then
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody at Microsoft ever got fired for erring on the side of hemorrhagic fever.
The mere contemplation of insufficient virulence, however, causes Microsoft employees to suffer a nervous, liquid fly incident.
They can't help it. It's simply in their DNA.
(For all the budding screen-writers out there, that clip is an expo-dump done right.)
Or perhaps during debugging, it was copied, experimental changes were made on one execution path (perhaps just a debug statement), then it was decided the changes weren't all that helpful, and the changes were deleted again, leaving both blocks identical (considered mostly harmless, but ought to have a comment if deliberately left that way).
These benchmarks are sensitive to extremely subtle differences in how each file system interpret safety semantics, which unfortunately none of these "benchmark" utilities actually check.
By "subtle" I mean just a scattered handful of sunflower seeds, which may (or may notâ"don't look at the light!) attract the attention of the Black Swan of Extreme Face Melt.
One thing I read a while back explained how rigorous NFS semantics were pretty much guaranteed to cut your benchmark results in half, compared to how these semantics are traditionally implemented on just about any Linux system.
Is that bridge safe? The pragmatic answer is this: a million people have driven over it so far, and no-one has died yet.
To the kind of person who gets a secret thrill from "First post!" the logic of this probably seems impeccable.
Subject: First post!
I don't want a pickle,
I just want to r-i-i-ide my motor sickle.
cya ... I love you so much!
snookie—don't cry
Mostly because you don't read much. Flash has particularly severe scaling limits and we're already up against it.
We might break through by surprise, or we might not. Bear in mind that we already had a 3.8 GHz Prescott back in 2004. It actually sucked shit, but that's another matter. There are several developments in the spinning rust pipeline that will likely keep it well ahead on the $/GB axis. Most of these developments will make spinning rust suck more than ever (shingles, anyone?) but in all likelihood it will maintain raw $/GB supremacy for some time yet.
It might even suck so bad that no-one gives a shit about $/GB any longer, for 95% of all applications. Perhaps, minus all those cat pictures, we're almost there already.
No culture has ever left us a "mountain" of text that we aren't able to at least partially decipher, unless we're talking a writing system measured in words/kilogram.
You're so clueless about this matter, it's almost shocking.
Leibniz would have recognized a digital archive of Wikipedia (say the size of the English Wikipedia, but in any human language) as a linguistic record at the drop of pin (I grant him a few weeks to crack UTF-8.) Every conceivable statistical measure would point to this. Perhaps a sentient dolphin—if our wildest theories about the nature of the dolphin mind play out—would have trouble dialing this in without the use of a calculating machine. One doesn't need to understand a single word in order to extract the semantic graph. From there, deep learning would practically spew out coloured buckets like a rainbow farting unicorn.
You don't think with hundreds of thousands of pages where the bold subject is immediately followed by "(1646-1716)" that this wouldn't quickly be recognized as ordered pairs of positive integers? With a bell curve on the interval distribution? And a sudden flat top at 2016? But only if you ignore the ones containing BC or BCE, which thin out tremendously the further back you go?
I wonder, could this axis be a physical dimension, or perhaps the infamous fourth dimension? We are talking a cognitive mode which has discovered planetary motion, are we not?
If you don't think any of that, well then, you have such a spectacularly low opinion of human or human-successor intelligence, I don't even think we can communicate.
Why feel for them? By your own inefficient market hypothesis, every course of action is a crap shoot. The report was great for me, because we actually had one or two of those highly suspect drives in service.
But in the larger scheme, you're absolutely right. Every vendor has manufactured a few duds. IBM, Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital. Every company has made some poor models. Not every company has a "click of death" drive to remember them by, but still you take your chances.
The difference with the 3 GB Seagate is that based on manufacturing conditions, I have a strong feeling Seagate knew about their excessive vice well before they sold them. (Bad Seagate!) In some other cases, the failure rate came as a shock from the field, such as the one I vaguely recall that was later attributed to tin whisker growth sensitive to environmental factors.
You think this is easy? You try to design one. And no, you're not allowed patch Tuesday, unless Tuesday falls on a palindrome.
We'll start at the beginning with the low-hanging fruit, and build from there.
From Apple this translates as follows: "we didn't get what we wanted prowling in the dark corridors".
Assume the Tor position! All your child porn R not belong to us!
Translation: Shit happens. Because human nature. [long sigh]
Where for the love of God is the adamant denial that they can actually build such a thing for the device in question? If the only barrier to accessing this device's data is a long night of hammering out source code, then I think this backdoor already exists, like a door that opens onto the back side of the second floor which is sealed from active use because no exterior stairwell has so far been erected.
"But we'd have to drain the moat and relocate the alligators to set the foundation! It would take weeks." Doesn't matter. If that's your last and most severe impediment, the door in my opinion already exists.
Others would argue that the mere possibility of providing a backdoor after the fact calls the competence and unbending will of your organization into a harsh light.
Pfffffft. What reasonably people find acceptable concerning their physical security in practice seems to have almost no bearing on how people behave with respect to their digital assets. Perhaps eventually as a society—in another generation or two—we'll get there.
Here's one simple distinction. Criminals who break into your house can be shot with a gun. Things you can shoot with a gun go to a different (more vivid) mental lobe in the human brain. Cyberfilth is almost impossible to shoot with a gun. Bleach might be a better option, but you're going to need to bring Dow Chemical Company onside with your plan, just for starters.
William Gibson: Reasonable behaviour is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.
To avoid flattery, it's probably best to frame this sentiment as "no reasonable person's future progeny would find that acceptable", because I've seen the "reasonable" people now living and breathing among us, and let me tell you, it isn't pretty.
Rhetorically, Apple is in a bit of a rush here to close this one gap sooner rather than later, out of thousands of similar gaps.
You see "irony" here? Wow. Just wow.
News flash for Tom Cook. The "same people" who authored the American constitution granting powers to the American state also engineered its limitations. It's a human process sometimes called "striking a balance".
Furthermore, allow me to hazard a guess: the same people who toiled cea
When the U.S. president says "millions of dollars" you just know he's not discussing foreign policy. He probably shouldn't be allowed to wield that word at all.
Sorry, Mr President, "billions" is as low as you're allowed to go for dollars; you'll have to save that for talking about "ounces"—even if "this grand initiative will save America $0.3 billion annually" doesn't make it sound like we're paying off the last war any time soon.
Come to think of it, if the president was confined to "trillions" (for the sake of uniformity) that wouldn't be a bad thing, either—even if the average America loses count when first hearing "this grand initiative will save America $0.0003 trillion annually." Obama in eight years has presided over something like $30 trillion in total state expenditure. For his substantive purposes, trillions are a perfectly good unit every day of the week, and all speechifying occasions.
Congratulations. Your world view has succumbed to charismatic picaroon survivorship bias.
From his blog post:
An old friend of his might have commended him thusly: @Fry sinister bullshit bullseye
Make that retroactive, pretty please, so as to retroactively revoke the ridiculous retroactive extensions.
The whole thing flies in the face of even libertarian notions of contract: that you only get what you shake for, in the first instance.
Douglas Adams used to quip "I love deadlines. I love the sound they make as they whoosh past." Market capitalists love markets. They love the sound the rigging makes as it twangs in the salty sea air. "Arrrr, r-r-r-r-retroactively extended copyright. First we shakes, then we takes."
Sarcasm and satire have only superficially similar.
The thing with satire is to create incongruity between the package and its contents.
Some dishevelled fellow shows up, claims he's a world-class chef from Syria, and offers to cook you a five-star dinner in exchange for his own meal. He doesn't look especially Syrian. And you can't make out his accent.
So you say, "well, I'm not sure whether to believe you. I made this pate yesterday, and I'd like your opinion. Just one second." Then you duck around the corner, dip a knife into the kitty litter box, smoosh the fresh excavation onto a nice Wheat Thin that Jr. left uneaten on his plate after dropping it on the garage floor (use the dishwasher, people!), which you then—in a flash of inspiration—decorate with two fish eyes from the fish carcass in the fridge that is now mired in cold gelatin and really should have been turned into fish stock three days ago. Oh, what the heck—let's do this right!—so you add a tablespoon slab of the aging fish gelatin.
At this point, it looks like fancy French cooking (looks can be deceiving). It really looks like French cooking when you extend it with the utmost graciousness on your whitest French serving cloth.
"Syrian chef" picks it up, opens his mouth, slides it trustingly under his nostrils, and is about to bite down, then freezes in an eyebrow-raising display of alarm and disgust.
"Don't be angry! I had to make sure. Do you still want to cook dinner? Oh well, better luck next time. "
"Sheesh. I think he called me a racist bastard in some foreign gibberish. Did he really mean it? Surely he could see my predicament and my efficient solution. Hmmm. I suppose it did look a lot like I was serving him shit on a cracker, Gallic style, from his point of view."
Sarcasm is exactly the same thing, except you can't be bothered with the cracker, the fish eyes, the extra slab of fish gelatin, or the white napkin. You just hold up a dry cat turd with your bare fingers and call it a cheesy, because you really wouldn't want to have to eat a fancy dinner prepared by the colour blind, not even if he really was a great chef in his own land.
Password entropy rule of thumb: 40 + log2($dollars)
Yes, I know, for some of you it really sucks to have to come up with 70 bits. But, hey, there's always charity.
Somewhere buried in all of this was an opportunity for Netcraft to finally be right about something. Maybe that story has yet to surface, and will appear all in due course in tomorrow's feed bag.
You're getting your annual check up and your GP suddenly launches into an unprovoked tirade:
Tell me, how would you answer your GP? With your jaw hanging open, wondered why the question even needs to be answered?
In a local community, it's not considered good neighbourly etiquette to broadcast to all and sundry every tidbit of information you glean—right down to the license plate numbers—about who you see coming and going on your street during the quiet hours of the day and night.
But then given the same information at the scale of big city strangers passing in the street, suddenly the attitude is "fuck yeah, what's now mine is mine, let's link!" Cause, you know, if they were willing to bump shoulders with you on the crowded sidewalk in the first place, trading a few jacket fibers in the process, that's all the permission you need to go all CSI on the acquired residue.
In fact, your local dry cleaner gives you a 10% discount if you sign over all data collection rights, and what crazy person would even begin to think that's not self-evidently good business sense?
Lost in all of this is that people who run software ad blockers probably also run mental ad blockers (in my case, this can not be uninstalled), so our response to the advertising—even if they manage to shove it down our throats—is not going to generate any significant net cash outflow.
For a while, Wired can monetize the increasing number of eyeballs, but then the advertisers will normalize to the newly deflated advertising conversion rate (down 20%? who would have guessed?) and Wired will eventually end up getting exactly the same money as before.
Nice business model you've got there. Shame if anyone connected all the dots.
Barker: Hey, I'd like to interest you in a new business model!
Banker: How does it work?
Barker: You plant a suggestion, then people buy your shit.
Banker: A suggestion?
Barker: A Loud, Noisy, Flashy, Wheezy, Spinning, Popping, Sliding suggestion.
Banker: I think you missed a dwarf. Somebody steal your March?
Barker: Him, too.
Banker: But—the suggestion isn't actually binding on the bumpkin, and surely you must give them something in return just to get their attention in the first place?
Barker: Cheaper than you think.
Banker: But—I'm still having trouble with the fundamentally non-binding nature of the transaction.
Barker: A new day, a new dawn! We'll make this Silverado shitstorm so ubiquitous, it'll soon become regarded as a moral crime to respond to our everlasting fusillade of suggestive schlock as anything less than simply irresistible.
Banker: You certainly have big plans.
Barker: And you certainly have big bucks.
Banker: I won't have to actually drive a Silverado, will I?
Barker: Oh, no. You can drive a Bentley.
Banker: Funny you say that. I was looking at one just the other day.
Barker: A red one?
Banker: Just how would you know that?
Short, conspiratorial silence.
Barker: [whispers] Pull up a chair, here's where it gets real interesting ...
Whoops. Four choose one times three choose two. My fingers sometimes get the best of me.
My father taught me binary in the early seventies when I was still in elementary school, with black marbles and a grey egg carton. I got it right away. Numbers were one thing, representations of numbers was another thing, and these could be whatever you found convenient, so long as you obeyed certain rules (I wasn't so accelerated that I immediately started banging out Euclid's Elements on the piano).
Then I thought really hard one Saturday afternoon about fractions (on the unit interval, which I thought of as positive integers with the numerator greater than the denominator), and discovered that even though there are a lot of them, it is possible to enumerate them exhaustively, though not by the traditional "counting up" procedure, which got me hooked into the problem of the common divisor thing.
The next project I recall was to exhaustive write out the Tic Tac Toe game tree. Since I was a lazy bastard (always have been) this involving thinking very hard about something somewhat like symmetry groups.
Over the annual summer visit to my grandparents—small town prairie Badlands without the cool geography, though often we managed a trip to see the hoodoos—I played a lot of solitaire on the golden-green shag carpet which Puss Puss—the duodecarian house cat who lived in the shadows under my grandparent's bed (the short duration of our visits was probably for her sake)—sometimes preferred in her dotage over asking out into the Canadian winter. Quite undeterred by the sticky and/or stinky patches, I managed to clearly formulate the concept of a "decision procedure" and that such a thing could be unambiguously specified; furthermore, I worked out (at first empirically) that the greedy algorithm was provably not optimal for Klondike (for me at that time, all Solitaire was just "Solitaire", though I knew several).
At age ten, the boundary between empiricism and proof is still a fuzzy one.
In grade five, I spent a lot of time (by myself) trying to puzzle out the rate-limiting step in long-hand square root. I had by then also discovered E=IR and P=IE. Pretty soon I had determined that this generates 4 choose 1 times 4 choose 2 simple algebraic forms. But for an entire painful week, some kind of thick cloud entered my brain and I couldn't reliably write all the forms down without a lot of mucking around; this I knew to be completely bogus, and a permanent blot on my record. By the time the cloud passed, I was pretty good at substitution and gathering. Later, when I first encountered a matrix (don't recall), I immediately went to myself "oh, that's just algebra, better organized". At least something stuck.
Now, during this entire period of my life, I was in a constant state of deeply repressed rage about this thing called "school", with all the inherent stimulation of Puss Puss waiting out the daily bedtime / ultimate final departure of the grandchildren (geriatric cat yay!) from the furthest dark remove under the master bed.
Grade six came as a shock. For the first time I experienced a math teacher who believed in letting kids learn at their own natural rate. He quickly put four of us a private work program. We could go as fast as we wanted, but the rule was we had to do all of the tedious exercises at the end of every chapter. Many of these exercises were heavy on the pencil work, so I only made it through grades six, seven, eight, and nine. My fingers put in about 90% of the work (this is not actually a bad thing), and my brain put in the other 10% (this being 100 times more than 0.1%). Awesome!
So I was armed, locked, and loaded for bear when I showed up at the beginning of grade seven. I figured I could knock off ten, eleven, twelve by Easter, and still have a month left over for real math at long last.
Problem: my grade seven teacher thought my purpose in life was to sit enthralled by his boring lectures. Shields up! I don't recall a single thing he wrote on the board
It's fundamentally driven by the desire of the VCs to establish a broader and ultimately cheaper labour pool, so they've hired themselves an SJJ (social justice jihadist)—white males not allowed to participate—to advance the backroom bigbucks cause of white-male sticker shock under the false flag of her own sincere yet progressive-at-any-cost value system.
At this point power consumption matters a heck of a lot more for ubiquity than pure performance gains.
I'm sure the fire-breathing dragster edition of current silicon technology (with a pin count to match) will continue to exist at an upscale price for those willing to pay for it.
That uncomfortable rush in your stomach? It's from clinging to yesterday.
Yes, the "average" bimodal distribution averaged has one hump.
Also, "peak X" has exactly one hump—subtype lumpy—for any proposed commodity X.
The stupid thing is that C++ name mangling would already catch this problem at link time, and every modern C/C++ compiler already has code to support this, except that it's only activated for the much loved/unloved function overloading.
If GCC/clang in C mode generated mangled names into object files when compiling C programs (as purely informative records), the linker could diagnose this kind of problem as optional linkage errors—mighty darn useful, optional linkage errors.
This is a violation of the type system pure and simple, but one that doesn't compromise any specific compilation unit. That leaves the linker as the next line of defense, but like to keep our C linkers in dark boxes full of trust-me horse shit.
Yes, but the energy/time (power) goes up closer to the cube, because the delta_t smunch (for a head-on collision, or large solid object) also diminishes with impact velocity (though, like a memristor, you can work up counterexamples).
Like the modern-day paleolithic societies that can only count "one, two, many" it goes "linear, quadratic, exponential" in the vocabulary of most STEM fugitives.
Story title (large font):
CDC: 1 In 10 Adult Deaths In US Caused By Excessive Drinking
The little statistical nodule in my brain that filters credible claims instantly exploded at first glance. Went off to fetch the long-handled mop so I could clean the ceiling, and for that reason I didn't even notice the three half-cap prepositions (does that almost count as shouting?)
First line of story (smaller font):
If you've read anything about the average person's powers of mental discernment, you would know the the patently absurd title does a lot of subconscious damage. It's too freaking late to correct this a sentence later.
Now a few dud stories will probably make it through the firehose no matter what, but we really need some kind of moderation on the stories themselves once posted so that they can be down-voted to "-5 patently absurd" such as this particular submission warranted.
Another thing I would like is to have the subject line character limit increased by another ten characters or so. I've had many perfect subject lines ruined by the current parsimonious limit—and it's always by less than ten characters.
Oh, yes, and the hot pink "cat got your tongue?" dunning should actually show the preview which I might perhaps be using to look over what I've just written to find out whether any subject matter materialized out of my verbal fog, or not.
No.
When words cease to mean what they were intended or traditionally understood to mean, people with working brains find a new lexicon. We have a name for language that continues to circulate at the hands of the disengaged: cliche.
If the minds of the disengaged have any taste (lazy though it be, to be sure) they stock their cliche pantry with Shakespearean cliche. What the hell is a "salad day" anyway? Doesn't matter. The Bard didn't become the Bard by coining phrases that later flip tits up and float to the top of the scum pond, there to rot in the hot afternoon sun.
"Market share" is a phrase created by bean counters, subtype "venal" and is in fact principally circulated by the venal beancounter's venal beancounter: advertising men.
For example, my household is probably numbed among the vbvb as a "cable cutter", this though I have not resided anywhere with a working cable service for nearly thirty years, and that was an entire four month term at university, before which my family used this contraption called an "antenna", the kind you could see from the other side of the valley. A large, rusty pipe wrench lived full time at the bottom of the pole, seeing as, weather permitting, we could sometimes pick up Bellingham, and thereby upgrade in a scandalous moment from The Beachcombers to The Love Boat. David Suzuki on The Nature of Things would soon wrench us back to our senses, such being the paucity of science coverage in those times, good bad or ugly (Suzuki being a uneven trail mix I tended to score as "all of the above").
By this point in my young life I had passed judgement on television as mode of knowing shit about anything, hence the my thirty years in the un-television wilderness (and counting).
Nevertheless, to a moral certainty, I am surely categorized as a "cable cutter" (hey, we didn't say when).
Yes, those fucking vbvbs. We all know the drill.
Microsoft 10's "market share" is a fresh, tender patty of the same basic construction, whose turbid run off is additionally clouded by the chocolate-flavoured Ex-Lax served up by Windows Update.
Secondly, there is a key point to understand about how vbvbs do basic arithmetic.
Those least able to shuffle off the mortal coil of an undesired Windows 10 upgrade are the most important people to count. Your value in this pendant statistic is inversely proportional to your capacity to successfully wipe your own ass. These people are everything you want in a community of unwitting Guinea pigs to beta test suspect patches you are withholding from enterprise (tetchy, uptight people who actually know the difference and who, like Gandalf, only lose their shit precisely when and where they mean to).
Which brings us to "caveat emptor", the original market creed, and durable cliche of the highest Imperial coinage.
Let's suppose in Roman times you buy a pig in a poke. You take it home, release it from the bag—no surprise to you, since you checked carefully, it really is a baby piglet of sound mind & body—and you feed it the many different kinds of root vegetables that were not yet regarded as fit for human consumption, until the bacon is practically hanging in folds from its oversized rump. Then one dark and rainy night, a woman next door with more than the socially acceptable number of facial warts and moles twitches her nose and your domestic pig metamorphs inside your dwelling into a 600-lb toadstool (one with no prominent swollen bulboe labelled "drink me" to reserve the spell).
I am a great deal more than pretty much certain—one does not bet upon the Roman character lightly—that to the Roman mind, this scenario goes a great deal past caveat emptor, and well into lynch mob territory.
A "market" is a human institution where the receiver of the goods makes a dangerous but informed decision and then