I wish someone would turn Neuromancer into a film, it would be far better than a lot of the garbage we get at the cinema these days.
It would bomb miserably at the box office, because most of the audience would perceive it as a rip-off of "The Matrix", "Tron", and dozens of other films that have used Gibson's tropes. Most people under the age of 40 have never heard of "Neuromancer" and would never be able to fit the movie into their preconceptions of a story that was written 30+ years ago.
On top of that, much of what is in "Neuromancer" would seem incredibly dated by modern standards, given how technology has evolved. Much of the source material would have to be massively edited, to the point where it wouldn't even be "Neuromancer" any more. The window of opportunity for filming the novel has long since closed.
It's the same reason why "Blade Runner 2049" hasn't done well at the box office. The original "Blade Runner" means nothing to the younger audience segment, so the new movie doesn't resonate with them.
Before Nadella breaks a rib patting himself on the back, it should be noted that Microsoft abolished stack ranking of employees just before he took over as CEO. If you want to know why Microsoft employees were at each others' throats, and why morale was so low, you need look no further than Ballmer's favorite process for "improving" employee performance.
Microsoft could have hired a tree sloth to replace Ballmer, and employee morale would still have improved. It had nowhere to go but up after years of stack ranking.
Some people live in low-lying areas and can't get a signal
In my case, the "low-lying area" is right in the middle of midtown Nashville. There's a hill to the north of my house, blocking reliable reception of two of the main network stations. One of the other stations can only be picked up reliably in the fall and winter, after the leaves fall from the trees surrounding my house. I suppose I could get around these problems by putting up a 40-foot tower, but my wife and my neighbors would probably not be pleased (cost and legalities aside).
Digital broadcast TV is a wonderful thing if you live in Phoenix like my in-laws, and can just stick up an indoor antenna to pick up 30 broadcast channels. In flat terrain with all the local towers on the nearby mountain, it's great. For me, it's nearly useless, and I'm in the middle of a fairly big urban area. I can only imagine how much worse it is for people in the suburbs.
So yes, Comcast is making you pay for "free" TV, but what they're also doing is providing a reliable signal. For the price, it may be worth it to some.
I wondered if Equifax intended to circle the wagons, hold on to upper management, and then try to buy, bribe, or schmooze their way out of this mess via political channels. For a lesser P.R. disaster than this recent exploit, such a strategy might have worked.
But abruptly canning the CSO and CIO says three things to me:
(1) Equifax's internal auditing shows that this mess is considerably worse than what has been publicly revealed so far.
(2) The CEO has now shifted to "I have to save my own job" mode. The CSO and CIO have been thrown under the bus, and more will probably follow.
(3) Equifax is going to take it on the chin, financially speaking. Canning the CSO and CIO is a clear admission that Equifax was negligent. The lawsuits are going to increase exponentially from this point. But worse than that is the overwhelming demand by millions of consumers to freeze their credit reports. Equifax (along with Experian and Transunion) makes a lot of money selling credit information to banks so that they can offer credit cards to you. Credit freezes prevent that. Every new credit freeze is another hit on the annual bottom line. Equifax is bleeding from millions of tiny cuts, and it will only get worse.
Frankly, it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of guys.
Plenty of times people who are not prepared can make a situation worse.
Amateur radio operators provide life-saving emergency communications (EMCOMM) during a natural disaster. But the first rule that is emphasized to hams who participate in EMCOMM is this:
"Don't become part of the problem. You are there to assist, not become a victim or act as a first responder."
Today I tried calling the new Equifax help line (set up because of the data breach) and asked the woman I spoke to if Equifax intended to issue new PIN numbers to the people who already had credit freezes.
Long pause. "Sir, have you been to our web site?"
Me: "Yes, I have. According to your own site, my data is at risk. My wife and I froze our credit a couple of years ago, and you issued us 10-number PINs for unfreezing our credit online. Since the hackers now have everything they need to log into your web site with our credentials, I want to know if those PIN numbers were part of the compromised information, and if Equifax intends to issue new PIN numbers."
Another very long pause. "Sir, I don't have that information at this time, but I will log this request."
Me: "Yeah, Equifax doesn't have much information about anything, does it? Have a nice day."
Talk about incompetence compounded. So now it turns out that the PIN is nothing but a timestamp, and Equifax has given up all the information needed for a criminal to unfreeze my credit using their website. Anyone want to bet if that timestamp can be deduced from the information already stolen in the breach?
The idea of any blockchain-verified cryptocurrency being widely used as money never made sense, and never will. What, if I buy lunch for $10, I have to wait several hours or days for a bunch of server farms in China to verify my transaction while burning enough energy to light every house in my neighborhood? Either that, or pay $2 or $3 to get it "expedited" in 15 minutes?
It's insane. The world economy is far too large and complex to be funneled through 1 MB or 2 MB or 4 MB chunks of data verified one at a time, and even the people pushing BTC realize that now. When was the last time you heard BitPay brag about how many new merchants were using their service? The idea of BTC as money has all kind of faded away. It simply won't scale, regardless of the supposed "solution" of SegWit.
Now it's all about the speculative frenzy, and the different factions within the Bitcoin ecosystem fighting for control of the blockchain with hard forks. BTC is useful for moving large sums of currency across borders without government control (many wealthy Chinese like that), but as far as being used as "money", that ship has long sailed.
This scam is hardly new to cryptocurrency. Criminal gangs have been doing it for years. It happened to my mother a few months back, who was a perfect target: excellent credit history, no online accounts with her bank or her credit card companies (the criminals very obligingly created some for her), a cell phone that she rarely turned on, and her home phone number as the only listed means of contact.
What they did was go to a Verizon store and get her home phone number transferred over to a mobile phone. After that, they went on a buying spree at several stores across the state, and even got into her personal savings account. When the credit card companies tried to call my Mom, all they got was the voicemail for the scammer at my Mom's number. She thought there was a problem with her phone service; she had no idea what was happening until three days later.
Fortunately my Mom had a credit freeze in place with the credit reporting agencies, so the gang was unable to open new lines of credit in her name. That limited the damage, and she was ultimately made whole by the bank and credit card companies.
To this day my brothers and I are convinced that some insider at a bank or credit agency must have sold her information to the gang, or else the information was stolen and never revealed. They hit her bank account and ALL her credit cards in parallel, created a whole set of fake online accounts in her name, and even tried to reopen a credit card account she closed years ago. It was too well coordinated, and they knew too much about her.
So some lessons for everyone:
(1) Activate online accounts for your banks and your credit cards, and then secure them with 2-factor authentication. If you don't do it, the criminals will do it for you.
(2) Activate a credit freeze with the credit reporting agencies. If you have elderly parents, sit down with them and do it for them. If my wife and I hadn't persuaded my Mom to activate a credit freeze two years ago, the damage would have been far worse.
The "success" of Bitcoin Cash has shown the way, as it is currently worth > $300 without impacting the price of BTC. Free money, right? So it will be seen as a no-brainer to keep doing hard forks, as long as different parties in the BTC ecosystem see some advantage to it.
But at some point, all of these hard forks will make it abundantly clear to everyone that there is nothing special about any cryptocurrency. They're all made up out of the ether. They may provide some marginal utility for currency transfer across borders, but as investment vehicles (which is what is driving the current price spikes), putting your money in a cryptocurrency is like getting involved in a bidding war for a patch of tulips sitting in the middle of a infinite field of them.
BTC is "special", because there are only 21 million of them, right? Except maybe if there are 210 million, or 21 billion, or 21 trillion, because hey, here comes another hard fork of the blockchain by some group that wants to get rich quick. At some point the whole cryptocurrency mania collapses as everyone realizes just how limitless they really are. That is something that the people pushing BTC do not want to happen, but it is inevitable.
There are interesting times ahead for cryptocurrencies.
On our college campus, Uber and Lyft have had a significant effect on the parking situation on campus. Ten years ago, almost every undergraduate student who was allowed to brought a car to campus, and parking spaces were hard to come by. But with Uber and Lyft just minutes away any time of the day or night, more and more students are leaving the car at home. You can always find a parking space.
I also do a straw poll in one of my classes when discussing Moore's Law, just to find out who does and does not have a driver's license during discussions on autonomous transportation. Each year, more and more students admit to not having one. Those without one don't seem at all self-conscious about admitting it; they don't consider it a big deal in any way.
China's investment in surveillance tech means that you can buy some really amazing weatherproof high-resolution varifocal cameras from Chinese manufacturers (e.g. Dahua) for a fraction of what such cameras cost ten years ago.
It's revolutionizing home and business surveillance in the U.S.A.
I must be missing something. I assume everyone involved is working toward strengthening the currency as a whole and not trying to undermine it's success.
My experience is that most people involved in BTC are doing it because they see it as a way of getting rich quick. There is very little idealism left in the BTC ecosystem. It's mainly a bunch of people scheming to become the next set of digital gold rush billionaires.
BTC is clearly the inferior of the two coins, so why does it get to win? Still have HOURS-long confirmation times, tiny block size, etc.. makes it useless for F2F transactions, merchant payments, etc.
BTC "wins" because some Chinese mining pools are making money hand over fist from transaction fees. Obviously they don't want that to end. It also "wins" because many people holding BTC don't want the supply to effectively double with a hard fork, as that devalues their "investment".
The ultimate problem with Bitcoin is that it involves multiple parties who are strongly motivated to operate at cross-purposes for their own personal gain. Bitcoin Cash won't be the last hard fork.
If an infection with "a few hundred" cases is the best example of Mac malware that Malwarebytes can provide, it is hardly a ringing endorsement for putting their product on my machine.
With so few examples in the wild, my guess is that FruitFly piggybacked onto one of those fake Flash installers that you run into on some of the sketchier websites, or else was installed by a "Mac support specialist" at some Indian call center (yes, there are also websites that target Mac users with the same bogus "Your computer has a virus! Call this number for help!" messages).
Given that some Mac anti-virus vendors have flagged open source software such as wacaw and Platypus as "malware", I'm skeptical in the extreme about hysterical claims concerning evil malware infections running rampant in the MacOS ecosystem. Run a good ad-blocker instead, and you'll eliminate the attack vector for 99.99% of this crap.
It would't hurt to take CS as a major and business as a minor. Never know when you will find yourself in a startup and taking on a management role.
I would flip that recommendation around a bit. I think that many students who are considering computer science as a major would be far better served taking it as a minor, and just getting a basic exposure to the fundamental concepts. As a major, it is a poor choice unless you have a passion and an aptitude for the material. Students without passion and aptitude will have a very short and unspectacular career in the field.
At my university, we've been watching the explosion of CS majors for the past few years and wondering when the enrollment curve is going to flatten out. So far it shows no signs, with CS already being the largest major in the engineering school.
We are scrambling to find instructors for the new sections that we need to open, and rooms in which to teach them. We're hardly alone - all of our peer institutions are reporting similar trends.
One thing that does concern my colleagues is that a significant portion of the students now entering CS show little aptitude or interest in programming concepts. Students who have failed or dropped the freshman "Introduction to Programming" two or three times in a row absolutely refuse to switch majors. They want that six-figure starting salary, and they will do whatever it takes to get the degree. I am guessing the same thing is happening at every other school that isn't taking some measure to push unqualified students out of CS.
Employers should be prepared to ask a lot of "FizzBuzz" interview questions over the next few years, because quite a few under-qualified CS graduates from prestigious schools are going to be hitting the job market.
These development platforms (the vehicle for having their IoT processors into product makers' hands) being now discontinued most likely means the sales were disappointing and that these groups probably are no more and there won't be any follow up.
I don't think there was ever any serious commitment to the Galileo platform at Intel.
I was contacted by Intel in Dec. 2014 and asked if I wanted some free Galileo boards + Grove sensor kits to evaluate for academic use. It took them six months to ship the boards to me. Three times I emailed them, and each time a different person responded, because the previous contact had transferred to another group. After many apologies, I finally got the boards in June, but Intel had missed the window of opportunity for us to incorporate them into the 2015-16 labs, nor was there anything compelling enough in their specs to make any faculty want to try them out in place of Arduinos or BeagleBoards.
Last August, I gave one of the Intel kits to my teaching assistant to evaluate for use in our electronics lab. His report to me was that the Galileo boards were unsuitable, as their slow I/O made them unusable for the D/A conversion experiments that we needed them for. My TA then checked and found out that Intel had dropped their academic program entirely, so he built a board using a standard Atmel processor instead.
Given the huge amount of churn in Intel personnel working on Galileo, it was painfully obvious that their academic IoT push was doomed from the get-go. Intel still wants to sell $400 processors, not $2 IoT chips, and that is clearly where the internal prestige and employee rewards are being directly within the company.
As soon as everyone realizes that fact that most Uber drivers actually LOSE MONEY when you figure in the low rates they pay people combined with the total cost of driving for them (insurance, gas, auto maintenance, etc) most honest figures come up with either less than minimum wages or you are actually losing money on the deal.
I've been reading variations on this theme for years with respect to Uber, yet in looking at the Uber app during lunchtime on a Monday, I see nine vehicles within five minutes of my location.
How is it that such a supposed money-losing proposition finds so many willing drivers? And why is it that every Uber driver who I have asked about his or her income has told me that the money is decent? It is a clearly a popular first or second job, with many using that money to meet their monthly expenses. You'd think that if everyone lost money in the first month as a driver, the word would quickly get out and no one would be driving for Uber. And yet they do.
Let's just say I'm skeptical in the extreme about the Uber-hatred that permeates the tech press. I use Uber (and Lyft) all the time, and it is always a pleasant, efficient experience that appears to benefit both the drivers and the riders. Because if it wasn't, it would have gone out of business long ago.
And consider this: even if Uber does not survive, ride-sharing is here to stay. After multiple bad experiences with taxis in cities all over the country, I will always choose a ride-sharing service over a traditional taxi. Crush Uber if you can, but more companies just like it will spring up to replace them, and they will have many willing customers ready to use them.
That's assuming that the movie is linearly mapped to the data in the file. If the entire file were inputs to a massive equation, it would still be just as ridiculous - but it would leave far more than 256 possibilities for that 1 second (2^8192).
That reminds me of a short story I read many years ago, where a group of super-intelligent humans sent into space transmit back a massive data dump in the form of a mathematical expression, with the intent that it be evaluated and the answer converted into binary form, and the information read from the binary patterns. The protagonists realize there isn't enough computer storage space on the entire planet to hold the answer in binary form, and embark on a crash program to build a computing complex large enough to evaluate the expression.
If your "compressed" file ceases to represent actual video data, and instead becomes an identifier for a particular dictionary entry, then naturally all bets are off. If you had the video equivalent of the Library of Babel as your encoder / decoder, you could "encode" 1.8E308 movies into a 1 kB file. Of course, you'd require many orders of magnitude more atoms than exist in the entire universe to construct your codec, and a supercluster-sized black hole to power it, but think of the great movie nights you could have with your friends.:-)
You may be thinking of OWS, the "fractal compression program". The "compressed" file was nothing more than a list of blocks on the disk that the original file occupied. You could test it by compressing a file, deleting the original, then decompressing (=undeleting) it.
But if you copied it to a floppy and took it to your friends house, it mysteriously failed...
You're right, I was thinking of OWS. Thanks for filling in the gaps in my memory.
I recall that it actually got some press in the local newspaper back in the day before being debunked. No doubt the guy who wrote the program had a great laugh about it.
Sloot was nothing more than another of a long line of scam artists (or delusional inventors) who claimed to have created a "magic" compression scheme. In his case, he said he could compress an entire movie down to 8 kilobytes.
Simple mathematics show why such schemes don't work. 8 kilobytes = 8192 bytes = 65536 bits. Assuming you have a two hour movie, then each second of the movie must be mapped into about one byte, which can have only 2^8 = 256 possible values to represent any conceivable second of video. It's mathematically impossible.
Engineers and mathematicians have been debunking these claims for decades, but they still occasionally pop up. I remember one scheme that got some press about 30 years ago. A guy claimed to have a compression program that could take any data file and compress it down to about 1 kilobyte. And it seemed to work, according to several people who tried it. As it turned out, the "compressed" file was nothing more an alias pointing to the original file, which was hidden from directory view by the program. When you "uncompressed" the file, the original file was unhidden. But it was a neat trick as long as you didn't try to copy the "compressed" file to another disk.
Sloot's program was "lost" because it never existed, just like the magic 300 mpg carburetors where the plans were "lost".
* iMac Pro -- at $4,999 isn't this just another Mac Pro ?
It's worse than that - it's a betrayal of everything that Apple claims to believe in.
Have you looked at photos of it? It has legacy ports, including an SDXC port, four USB 3 ports, an Ethernet port, and a headphone jack. What where the Apple engineers thinking? The iMac Pro should have nothing except USB-C ports, with lots of optional dongles, just like the MacBook Pro.
The iMac Pro is doomed from the start. It's like putting propellors on a space shuttle. I can't imagine anyone paying good money to have their pristine new iMac Pro marred by those disgusting outdated openings on the back.
In my classes, the students are expected to complete the assignments using the techniques covered to date. That is because what we learn in the next class often relies on understanding what we covered in the previous when. So when they use a solution that is beyond what they have already learned, they are putting themselves even further behind the curve.
And unfortunately for them, once they start down that path it is nearly impossible to turn things around. Every semester, I warn students not to copy homework answers from a downloaded textbook solutions manual. Inevitably I wind up giving failing grades to several students with excellent homework grades who have miserably failed every exam.
Some students start out with the best of intentions, then get behind and copy an assignment while promising themselves they'll catch up later. Of course, it never happens. Every assignment is simply more incomprehensible than the one before it. A month later, they're hopelessly lost.
Slashdot Mirror
It would bomb miserably at the box office, because most of the audience would perceive it as a rip-off of "The Matrix", "Tron", and dozens of other films that have used Gibson's tropes. Most people under the age of 40 have never heard of "Neuromancer" and would never be able to fit the movie into their preconceptions of a story that was written 30+ years ago.
On top of that, much of what is in "Neuromancer" would seem incredibly dated by modern standards, given how technology has evolved. Much of the source material would have to be massively edited, to the point where it wouldn't even be "Neuromancer" any more. The window of opportunity for filming the novel has long since closed.
It's the same reason why "Blade Runner 2049" hasn't done well at the box office. The original "Blade Runner" means nothing to the younger audience segment, so the new movie doesn't resonate with them.
Before Nadella breaks a rib patting himself on the back, it should be noted that Microsoft abolished stack ranking of employees just before he took over as CEO. If you want to know why Microsoft employees were at each others' throats, and why morale was so low, you need look no further than Ballmer's favorite process for "improving" employee performance.
Microsoft could have hired a tree sloth to replace Ballmer, and employee morale would still have improved. It had nowhere to go but up after years of stack ranking.
In my case, the "low-lying area" is right in the middle of midtown Nashville. There's a hill to the north of my house, blocking reliable reception of two of the main network stations. One of the other stations can only be picked up reliably in the fall and winter, after the leaves fall from the trees surrounding my house. I suppose I could get around these problems by putting up a 40-foot tower, but my wife and my neighbors would probably not be pleased (cost and legalities aside).
Digital broadcast TV is a wonderful thing if you live in Phoenix like my in-laws, and can just stick up an indoor antenna to pick up 30 broadcast channels. In flat terrain with all the local towers on the nearby mountain, it's great. For me, it's nearly useless, and I'm in the middle of a fairly big urban area. I can only imagine how much worse it is for people in the suburbs.
So yes, Comcast is making you pay for "free" TV, but what they're also doing is providing a reliable signal. For the price, it may be worth it to some.
I wondered if Equifax intended to circle the wagons, hold on to upper management, and then try to buy, bribe, or schmooze their way out of this mess via political channels. For a lesser P.R. disaster than this recent exploit, such a strategy might have worked.
But abruptly canning the CSO and CIO says three things to me:
(1) Equifax's internal auditing shows that this mess is considerably worse than what has been publicly revealed so far.
(2) The CEO has now shifted to "I have to save my own job" mode. The CSO and CIO have been thrown under the bus, and more will probably follow.
(3) Equifax is going to take it on the chin, financially speaking. Canning the CSO and CIO is a clear admission that Equifax was negligent. The lawsuits are going to increase exponentially from this point. But worse than that is the overwhelming demand by millions of consumers to freeze their credit reports. Equifax (along with Experian and Transunion) makes a lot of money selling credit information to banks so that they can offer credit cards to you. Credit freezes prevent that. Every new credit freeze is another hit on the annual bottom line. Equifax is bleeding from millions of tiny cuts, and it will only get worse.
Frankly, it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of guys.
So how many hits did it take for some creative "genius" to come up with the Juicero?
Amateur radio operators provide life-saving emergency communications (EMCOMM) during a natural disaster. But the first rule that is emphasized to hams who participate in EMCOMM is this:
"Don't become part of the problem. You are there to assist, not become a victim or act as a first responder."
Today I tried calling the new Equifax help line (set up because of the data breach) and asked the woman I spoke to if Equifax intended to issue new PIN numbers to the people who already had credit freezes.
Long pause. "Sir, have you been to our web site?"
Me: "Yes, I have. According to your own site, my data is at risk. My wife and I froze our credit a couple of years ago, and you issued us 10-number PINs for unfreezing our credit online. Since the hackers now have everything they need to log into your web site with our credentials, I want to know if those PIN numbers were part of the compromised information, and if Equifax intends to issue new PIN numbers."
Another very long pause. "Sir, I don't have that information at this time, but I will log this request."
Me: "Yeah, Equifax doesn't have much information about anything, does it? Have a nice day."
Talk about incompetence compounded. So now it turns out that the PIN is nothing but a timestamp, and Equifax has given up all the information needed for a criminal to unfreeze my credit using their website. Anyone want to bet if that timestamp can be deduced from the information already stolen in the breach?
The idea of any blockchain-verified cryptocurrency being widely used as money never made sense, and never will. What, if I buy lunch for $10, I have to wait several hours or days for a bunch of server farms in China to verify my transaction while burning enough energy to light every house in my neighborhood? Either that, or pay $2 or $3 to get it "expedited" in 15 minutes?
It's insane. The world economy is far too large and complex to be funneled through 1 MB or 2 MB or 4 MB chunks of data verified one at a time, and even the people pushing BTC realize that now. When was the last time you heard BitPay brag about how many new merchants were using their service? The idea of BTC as money has all kind of faded away. It simply won't scale, regardless of the supposed "solution" of SegWit.
Now it's all about the speculative frenzy, and the different factions within the Bitcoin ecosystem fighting for control of the blockchain with hard forks. BTC is useful for moving large sums of currency across borders without government control (many wealthy Chinese like that), but as far as being used as "money", that ship has long sailed.
This scam is hardly new to cryptocurrency. Criminal gangs have been doing it for years. It happened to my mother a few months back, who was a perfect target: excellent credit history, no online accounts with her bank or her credit card companies (the criminals very obligingly created some for her), a cell phone that she rarely turned on, and her home phone number as the only listed means of contact.
What they did was go to a Verizon store and get her home phone number transferred over to a mobile phone. After that, they went on a buying spree at several stores across the state, and even got into her personal savings account. When the credit card companies tried to call my Mom, all they got was the voicemail for the scammer at my Mom's number. She thought there was a problem with her phone service; she had no idea what was happening until three days later.
Fortunately my Mom had a credit freeze in place with the credit reporting agencies, so the gang was unable to open new lines of credit in her name. That limited the damage, and she was ultimately made whole by the bank and credit card companies.
To this day my brothers and I are convinced that some insider at a bank or credit agency must have sold her information to the gang, or else the information was stolen and never revealed. They hit her bank account and ALL her credit cards in parallel, created a whole set of fake online accounts in her name, and even tried to reopen a credit card account she closed years ago. It was too well coordinated, and they knew too much about her.
So some lessons for everyone:
(1) Activate online accounts for your banks and your credit cards, and then secure them with 2-factor authentication. If you don't do it, the criminals will do it for you.
(2) Activate a credit freeze with the credit reporting agencies. If you have elderly parents, sit down with them and do it for them. If my wife and I hadn't persuaded my Mom to activate a credit freeze two years ago, the damage would have been far worse.
The "success" of Bitcoin Cash has shown the way, as it is currently worth > $300 without impacting the price of BTC. Free money, right? So it will be seen as a no-brainer to keep doing hard forks, as long as different parties in the BTC ecosystem see some advantage to it.
But at some point, all of these hard forks will make it abundantly clear to everyone that there is nothing special about any cryptocurrency. They're all made up out of the ether. They may provide some marginal utility for currency transfer across borders, but as investment vehicles (which is what is driving the current price spikes), putting your money in a cryptocurrency is like getting involved in a bidding war for a patch of tulips sitting in the middle of a infinite field of them.
BTC is "special", because there are only 21 million of them, right? Except maybe if there are 210 million, or 21 billion, or 21 trillion, because hey, here comes another hard fork of the blockchain by some group that wants to get rich quick. At some point the whole cryptocurrency mania collapses as everyone realizes just how limitless they really are. That is something that the people pushing BTC do not want to happen, but it is inevitable.
There are interesting times ahead for cryptocurrencies.
On our college campus, Uber and Lyft have had a significant effect on the parking situation on campus. Ten years ago, almost every undergraduate student who was allowed to brought a car to campus, and parking spaces were hard to come by. But with Uber and Lyft just minutes away any time of the day or night, more and more students are leaving the car at home. You can always find a parking space.
I also do a straw poll in one of my classes when discussing Moore's Law, just to find out who does and does not have a driver's license during discussions on autonomous transportation. Each year, more and more students admit to not having one. Those without one don't seem at all self-conscious about admitting it; they don't consider it a big deal in any way.
China's investment in surveillance tech means that you can buy some really amazing weatherproof high-resolution varifocal cameras from Chinese manufacturers (e.g. Dahua) for a fraction of what such cameras cost ten years ago.
It's revolutionizing home and business surveillance in the U.S.A.
My experience is that most people involved in BTC are doing it because they see it as a way of getting rich quick. There is very little idealism left in the BTC ecosystem. It's mainly a bunch of people scheming to become the next set of digital gold rush billionaires.
BTC "wins" because some Chinese mining pools are making money hand over fist from transaction fees. Obviously they don't want that to end. It also "wins" because many people holding BTC don't want the supply to effectively double with a hard fork, as that devalues their "investment".
The ultimate problem with Bitcoin is that it involves multiple parties who are strongly motivated to operate at cross-purposes for their own personal gain. Bitcoin Cash won't be the last hard fork.
If an infection with "a few hundred" cases is the best example of Mac malware that Malwarebytes can provide, it is hardly a ringing endorsement for putting their product on my machine.
With so few examples in the wild, my guess is that FruitFly piggybacked onto one of those fake Flash installers that you run into on some of the sketchier websites, or else was installed by a "Mac support specialist" at some Indian call center (yes, there are also websites that target Mac users with the same bogus "Your computer has a virus! Call this number for help!" messages).
Given that some Mac anti-virus vendors have flagged open source software such as wacaw and Platypus as "malware", I'm skeptical in the extreme about hysterical claims concerning evil malware infections running rampant in the MacOS ecosystem. Run a good ad-blocker instead, and you'll eliminate the attack vector for 99.99% of this crap.
I must admit that I've heard that from a lot of my friends in industry over the years.
So let me put it this way: as bad as it might have been the last 20 years, the next 10 years will be even worse .
I would flip that recommendation around a bit. I think that many students who are considering computer science as a major would be far better served taking it as a minor, and just getting a basic exposure to the fundamental concepts. As a major, it is a poor choice unless you have a passion and an aptitude for the material. Students without passion and aptitude will have a very short and unspectacular career in the field.
At my university, we've been watching the explosion of CS majors for the past few years and wondering when the enrollment curve is going to flatten out. So far it shows no signs, with CS already being the largest major in the engineering school.
We are scrambling to find instructors for the new sections that we need to open, and rooms in which to teach them. We're hardly alone - all of our peer institutions are reporting similar trends.
One thing that does concern my colleagues is that a significant portion of the students now entering CS show little aptitude or interest in programming concepts. Students who have failed or dropped the freshman "Introduction to Programming" two or three times in a row absolutely refuse to switch majors. They want that six-figure starting salary, and they will do whatever it takes to get the degree. I am guessing the same thing is happening at every other school that isn't taking some measure to push unqualified students out of CS.
Employers should be prepared to ask a lot of "FizzBuzz" interview questions over the next few years, because quite a few under-qualified CS graduates from prestigious schools are going to be hitting the job market.
I don't think there was ever any serious commitment to the Galileo platform at Intel.
I was contacted by Intel in Dec. 2014 and asked if I wanted some free Galileo boards + Grove sensor kits to evaluate for academic use. It took them six months to ship the boards to me. Three times I emailed them, and each time a different person responded, because the previous contact had transferred to another group. After many apologies, I finally got the boards in June, but Intel had missed the window of opportunity for us to incorporate them into the 2015-16 labs, nor was there anything compelling enough in their specs to make any faculty want to try them out in place of Arduinos or BeagleBoards.
Last August, I gave one of the Intel kits to my teaching assistant to evaluate for use in our electronics lab. His report to me was that the Galileo boards were unsuitable, as their slow I/O made them unusable for the D/A conversion experiments that we needed them for. My TA then checked and found out that Intel had dropped their academic program entirely, so he built a board using a standard Atmel processor instead.
Given the huge amount of churn in Intel personnel working on Galileo, it was painfully obvious that their academic IoT push was doomed from the get-go. Intel still wants to sell $400 processors, not $2 IoT chips, and that is clearly where the internal prestige and employee rewards are being directly within the company.
I've been reading variations on this theme for years with respect to Uber, yet in looking at the Uber app during lunchtime on a Monday, I see nine vehicles within five minutes of my location.
How is it that such a supposed money-losing proposition finds so many willing drivers? And why is it that every Uber driver who I have asked about his or her income has told me that the money is decent? It is a clearly a popular first or second job, with many using that money to meet their monthly expenses. You'd think that if everyone lost money in the first month as a driver, the word would quickly get out and no one would be driving for Uber. And yet they do.
In the meantime you can read about how Boston cab drivers rent cabs for their daily jobs and have to pay up for the car loan at the end of each work day (a form of worker exploitation that pales in comparison to anything that Uber or Lyft does), and no one bats an eye, because hey, it's a taxi company, and they "obey the law".
Let's just say I'm skeptical in the extreme about the Uber-hatred that permeates the tech press. I use Uber (and Lyft) all the time, and it is always a pleasant, efficient experience that appears to benefit both the drivers and the riders. Because if it wasn't, it would have gone out of business long ago.
And consider this: even if Uber does not survive, ride-sharing is here to stay. After multiple bad experiences with taxis in cities all over the country, I will always choose a ride-sharing service over a traditional taxi. Crush Uber if you can, but more companies just like it will spring up to replace them, and they will have many willing customers ready to use them.
That reminds me of a short story I read many years ago, where a group of super-intelligent humans sent into space transmit back a massive data dump in the form of a mathematical expression, with the intent that it be evaluated and the answer converted into binary form, and the information read from the binary patterns. The protagonists realize there isn't enough computer storage space on the entire planet to hold the answer in binary form, and embark on a crash program to build a computing complex large enough to evaluate the expression.
If your "compressed" file ceases to represent actual video data, and instead becomes an identifier for a particular dictionary entry, then naturally all bets are off. If you had the video equivalent of the Library of Babel as your encoder / decoder, you could "encode" 1.8E308 movies into a 1 kB file. Of course, you'd require many orders of magnitude more atoms than exist in the entire universe to construct your codec, and a supercluster-sized black hole to power it, but think of the great movie nights you could have with your friends. :-)
You're right, I was thinking of OWS. Thanks for filling in the gaps in my memory.
I recall that it actually got some press in the local newspaper back in the day before being debunked. No doubt the guy who wrote the program had a great laugh about it.
Sloot was nothing more than another of a long line of scam artists (or delusional inventors) who claimed to have created a "magic" compression scheme. In his case, he said he could compress an entire movie down to 8 kilobytes.
Simple mathematics show why such schemes don't work. 8 kilobytes = 8192 bytes = 65536 bits. Assuming you have a two hour movie, then each second of the movie must be mapped into about one byte, which can have only 2^8 = 256 possible values to represent any conceivable second of video. It's mathematically impossible.
Engineers and mathematicians have been debunking these claims for decades, but they still occasionally pop up. I remember one scheme that got some press about 30 years ago. A guy claimed to have a compression program that could take any data file and compress it down to about 1 kilobyte. And it seemed to work, according to several people who tried it. As it turned out, the "compressed" file was nothing more an alias pointing to the original file, which was hidden from directory view by the program. When you "uncompressed" the file, the original file was unhidden. But it was a neat trick as long as you didn't try to copy the "compressed" file to another disk.
Sloot's program was "lost" because it never existed, just like the magic 300 mpg carburetors where the plans were "lost".
It's worse than that - it's a betrayal of everything that Apple claims to believe in.
Have you looked at photos of it? It has legacy ports, including an SDXC port, four USB 3 ports, an Ethernet port, and a headphone jack. What where the Apple engineers thinking? The iMac Pro should have nothing except USB-C ports, with lots of optional dongles, just like the MacBook Pro.
The iMac Pro is doomed from the start. It's like putting propellors on a space shuttle. I can't imagine anyone paying good money to have their pristine new iMac Pro marred by those disgusting outdated openings on the back.
And unfortunately for them, once they start down that path it is nearly impossible to turn things around. Every semester, I warn students not to copy homework answers from a downloaded textbook solutions manual. Inevitably I wind up giving failing grades to several students with excellent homework grades who have miserably failed every exam.
Some students start out with the best of intentions, then get behind and copy an assignment while promising themselves they'll catch up later. Of course, it never happens. Every assignment is simply more incomprehensible than the one before it. A month later, they're hopelessly lost.