-FlightAware, a global aviation data services company, reminds CBS that even a 100 mph increase in the jet stream can shorten a flight by an hour.-
Lets take this apart. FilghtAware 'reminds' CBS. This denotatively means that CBS previously knew this. Can you even remind corporate knowledge? 'even a 100 mph increase in the jet stream' really downplays the significance of what sounds to me to be a pretty significant number. In the article they say it hit a max recorded speed of 231 mph, how can 44% of the highest speed ever recorded rate an 'even'? That is like saying "driving 'just' 20 miles an hour faster can cut out an hour from your trip" Even on an interstate 20 miles an hour faster than normal is pretty significant, especially to the guy with flashy lights on his car. 'can shorten a flight by an hour' Oh really? How about taking an hour out of my Pittsburgh to Newark flight? This last sentence just jumped out me as so useless that I actually looked at TFA. I found to my immense relief that the original was actually informative: -"A 100 mph increase in the jet stream above typical can add or remove about an hour from a five to six hour flight," according to a spokesperson from FlightAware, a global aviation software and data services company based in Houston.- Apparently journalism isn't quite dead, but critical reading skills among/. submitters sometimes seem to be in short supply. It is kind of amazing how much the connotative meaning changed in that small excerpt.
I have been a space exploration fan since I was a little kid. Don't quite remember the moon landing, since I was only a couple months old. The Spirit/Opportunity pair truly represent the pinnacle of what a dedicated group of creative, well funded scientists and engineers can accomplish. The extreme resilience and flexibility of the platform, the brilliant schemes the team devised to cope with aging subsystems, and the sheer amount of scientific exploration accomplished on a system with such a small and conservative mission plan. Definitely my personal favorite technical project of all time. There are milestones in every scientific genre, and this was truly a milestone. The team redefined with very definition of remote mechanical exploration and every rover mankind has sent since has built on the foundation of these two. I don't mean in any way to diminish the accomplishments of stationary exploration landers like the Vikings, or to demean the early rovers like the Russina Lunokhod rovers (which were truly envelope pushing machines) but the Mars Exploration Rovers demonstrated functional autonomy and extreme robust mechanical miniaturization that really made them the first of their kind.
So, they buy Flickr, then intentionally take away what they themselves say was attracting new users. Somehow I don't think you can successfully monetize an internet platform by taking away people's reason for using it. I will admit I have no idea how to monetize a big pile of everybodies photos, but I would definitely be brainstorming ways to convince people to pay to do cool stuff on the platform with all those photos rather than scrapping the thing that got them in the door.
Way back when HTML was invented they specified an input type that browsers aren't even supposed to show on screen. The web wasn't secure, and a password input field didn't make anything safe, but it at least recognized the over the shoulder attack. Since then web site operators have been doing things to attempt to make your communication with them more secure, various Javascript handlers and encrypted connections, etc. Of course these things range from well implemented to actually less secure, but at least the security or lack thereof was between you and the web site. Now Google is actually releasing an official extension that is scraping those password fields on every website and handing off to a backend processor. I imagine that Google is passing hashes around, via an encrypted channel, but the fact is that at least on your computer that password exists in plain text in a browser extension that automatically processes every page you load. They obviously can't put the database in the extension, so it has to pass identifiable information back to Google. Sure, it is encrypted information. Sure, it is probably some hash, not a clear text username and password, but it is a unique pair of tokens that have to remain unique going to a monstrous company along with a few billion other peoples unique identifiable tokens. Your password is no longer between you and the website, it is between you and the website and google. I can't even find words. There is now an attack surface which includes all of your web passwords. An efficient password harverter no longer has to look for vulnerabilities in Drupal, and WordPress, and PHPBB, and your favorite JS framework of the week, they have a single target to rule them all. Geez, why don't we just issue goveernment assigned passwords with social security numbers at birth, It would be more convenient for everyone. If Google wants to utilize this big dictionary of exploited passwords they should build a proper website where a person can go and type in their username and password, with clearly worded information explaining exactly what people are submitting and what will be done with it, and people can choose if they want to check their user/pass combinations. I suppose the next thing they wil do with this extension is build a database of the most common actual passwords in use, stripped of usernames of course, so they can publish the authoritative list of passwords not to pick.
Yeah, I will admin, I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole....
Minecraft bred a lot of script kiddies, and attracted a few java programmers. Unfortunately Notch never released his API for the modders, nor did he follow through and release his code open source like he promised. The original cadre of modders mostly left. Microsoft is doing the normal things with it, a bunch of marketing to the educationmarket. Still no modding API, just some kind of scripting interface using Javascript!? Let's really confuse the potential programmers, make a Javascript scripting interface for a Java based game. Anyway I don't know the status of Java in the world at large, but don't count on Minecraft to save the day.
So Window Update doesn't check the size of the update and make sure there is enough space before downloading and installing it, so instead of fixing Windows Update we will just reserve 7G (SEVEN Gig!?!?! I had a full OS, and all of Microsoft Office, and my other software on a 105MB hard drive back in the day - but I digress) which will only be used when there is a major update instead of JUST FIXING WINDOWS UPDATE.
It is simple math. I realize with dynamic updates you probaby can't make an exact prediction of the space needed for the rollback repository etc., but you can know the actual update file sizes, and you can make a conservative guess on the in-process size, just check, if there isn't enough space don't even do the download. Nag the user about it all you want, just don't actualy start the process until you have room.
And if they actually need 7G now, what happens next year when the updates are bigger?
It's funny, I am sick of MacOS as they continue to de-Unix and get in my way with every update, so I am switching, but for some reason I never even considered switching to Windows.
Turbo buttons had a purpose, they were so you could slow your PC down to 4 or 8 MHz (depending on generation) so software using CPU clock cycles for timing instead of real time would run like they did on the IBM they were written for. Yeah, real time clocks were optional on the first PCs. There was a little helicopter in a tunnel game called Stryker written for CGA graphics on the IBM XT I think (It was a few weeks ago) and on our Tandy 1000 TX it was unplayably fast unless you un-turboed the PC. Also worked at a place that sold PCs, and we had an early generic Pentium 60 machine, I think it was a Quantex if anybody remembers them, and the turbo button on that actually slowed it down to 8MHz. Since turbo buttons change clockspeed on the fly, it was kinda fun to play with that one.
Thank you. There is someone else who has trouble reading past this type of blatant error. That is like someone saying something is "3 yards long, that's 10 feet"
In proper news speak, isn't 120 AU actually "OMG! OVER 100 TIMES FARTHER FROM THE SUN THAN EARTH!!!"
Or possibly just use "further" insted of "farther", then the whole thing will fall into an etymological debate and the actual definition of AU will be overlooked.
I am glad that line jumped out at more than just me. Totally disregarding the actual content in the article, here I am reading "news" and all the sudden there is this drum beating editorial line that has no basis in the article. It was very discordant, and felt to me like something that may have been stuck in after the article was written by an editor with an axe to grind. Gettin back to the actual content, 'rational' and 'make Americans...' very seldom belong in the same sentence, in fact one of the founding tennets of a free America is supposedly that making people decide things in their private life isn't allowed. I don't have a problem with Facebook requiring their employees to use particular company provided phones for work, for any reason they want, security or paid product promotion, or because they like the color. I do have problems when people in positions of power throw juvenile temper tantrums because somebody said something that hurt their feelings. Unfortunately that seems to be the methodolgy of power these days, whether it is entertainment celebrities, politicians of all persuasions, or corporate CEOs.
-On the other hand, QC may make mining bitcoins much more economical.-
Isn't the expense of mining the only intrinsic value bitcoin has? If mining cryptocurrencies is economical then inflation in those currencies will make them valuless.
>The curious robots didn't know how to handle the situation but wanted to go check it out.
Is this not an egregious case of anthropomorphism?
Amazons little screwjack robots are not curious, and I am pretty sure the system does not send robots to go rubbernecking when there is a problem in the system.
Apparently the editors at Technology Review are neither technologically savvy, nor good reviewers.
This entire series of questions is predicated on me accepting the fact that a self aware piece of software is actually imminent. This is still entirely in the realm of science fiction authors, unfortunately there seems to be a dearth of scifi authors who are willing to explore sociological questions like this right now.
If I were to ask questions about a self aware AI I would be asking things like "Since software is always improved through iterative testing, is this self aware AI going to have memory persistence accross it's test runs?" or "Will the developer team be running their tests using a single data pool, and will the AI be aware that it exists both discontinouosly and in multiple instances simultaneously?"
Or from the sociological side, since we are as a species still arguing over when human life starts, at what point of development does shutting down a self aware AI become murder?
Asking questions that seem to be more about the personality of an assumed superintelligent AI in the near future is like reading celebrity interviews to learn about human nature, both pointless and very misleading.
Am I the only one that misses Asimov and Bradbury and Heinlein for their ability to phrase these kinds of questions in the form of a story?
Wow, I have seen loose interpretations of the term "hacker" but I expected better on \.. What exactly is he supposed to have hacked? This is a guy who saw an opportunity and made money, just another crooked entrepeneur. Really no different than Facebook or Google, except he took data from large corporations, while the latter take data from normal civilians.
>> by Anonymous Coward on 19:13 7th November, 2017 (#55510563)
>>>> Now, I am not really a drink the cool-aid from the benevolent overlords kind of guy, [...]
>>Well, your user name is "kamakazi" [sic]...:-)/fleeing battleship
Umm, Is '[sic]' even a valid comment for a name? Unless, of course, you know how the name is actually spelled. Would you say "Kari" [sic] because somewhere else you had seen it written "Carrie"?
"Kamikaze" is an anglicization of a word that kinda sounded like that to some English guy who transliterated it incorrectly into English, the kamakazi user name is one that I chose many years ago (note the 5 digit UID) because I liked the way it looked when I wrote it, and it has a pleasing rhythm with 2 alliterative syllables. Since I don't speak Japanese I am quite sure I don't grasp the true denotative or connotative meaning of the word kamikaze. In fact, from a recent report that made a news site I frequent, even the Japanese are having a small cultural crisis over their historical view of the pilots who were called kamikaze. Interestingly according to Wikipedia the word kamikaze is actually from the name given to a 13th century storm that took out an invding Mongol fleet, sounds kinda like what happened to the Spanish armada off the coast of Britain.
We have a couple facts here, and a whole bunch of conclusions. The facts are that there is a general purpose OS running a microkernel in a management layer on unspecified Intel CPUs. This general purpose OS provides at least network accessible management interfaces. The conclusions are this general purpose OS is infinitely exploitable to steal all your top secret information and redirect all you web requests to the mind control platform of the month. This Minnich character (I enjoyed that similarity, Minnich/Minix) then jumps to a call to neuter everything below the user installed OS including UEFI. He then juts off on a side tangent and says trust me (He is a Google engineer) to always install good safe firmware on your Chromebook. That was a nice subtle bit of astroturfing there. He also blames Minix for slow boot time on an Open Compute server, not sure where minix plays into that or what axe he is grinding.
Let's look at it a little more objectively. Why do these processor companies keep putting general purpose OSs at a level which was traditionally all hardware/firmware, and why do systems makers use an accesible programming layer to configure hardware like UEFI? Well, whe we were running 386s and 486s we really were running microprocessors. Hardware was relatively static, device support was locked at time of manufacture, processors did processing (with maybe a coprocessor for math) and accessory cards did a single function each. In that time frame supers, like the first Crays, couldn't even boot themselves. They used a completely separate computer to boot and for time scheduling and such. Now today, we have computers which are powerful on the level of the early supers. Our processing no longer all happens on the CPU, but also in the GPU(s) and other pieces in the system. We no longer have external memory and bus controllers, they are built into the processor or the mandatory northbridge, and are much more capable and adaptive. There are hosts of sensors built into modern processors. All of these pieces need to be managed. There is an absolute necessity for a relatively capable computer in there to manage all these pieces. It used to be done with static logic arrays, controlled by registers, and we called it BIOS, and it had a little interface that could usurp the monitor output and keybpoard and chirp the speaker, later got so fancy it could hijack a mouse on some systems. It was very limited, in fact, on the earliest PCs it didn't have a UI at all, it had dip switches or jumpers on the system board.
Now with the advent of negotiated buses (even memory buses, back in the day I never would have conceived of a CPU being able to ask a memory module what capabilities it possessed and automatically configure timing parameters to best talk to it) the management processor has a lot to do. On high end machines they even do this negotiation on the fly with the advent of hot plug PCI buses and on the fly memory error compensation. By the nature of the beast this management engine has to be able to see all the data buses, otherwise every single connection interface would need an out of band management channel.
I suppose you could make this management engine like a FPGA, configure it once and burn your bridges, no further interraction possible, but then what happens when you need to add or change something?
Likewise it often doesn't need a network interface, but if it doesn't have one then we have to do wake on LAN with yet another baby management computer. How about physical intrusion detection? again, not often needed, but sometimes...
Basically what a general purpose OS in the management layer does is give nearly infinite flexibility. This technology is a big part of the reason so much of our stuff just works.
Now, I am not really a drink the cool-aid from the benevolent overlords kind of guy, I am not at all in favor of secret OSs underpinning our hardware without our knowledge, but let's not throw out the baby too. That capability is in most cases useful
This discussion of breaking extensions that hook into Firefox and replacing them with a "good" extensions API is familiar. I seem to remember some guy named Notch telling us all that "everything will be better after the API comes out" so all the Minecraft modders quit updating their mods and waited. and waited. and waited. And went and did something else. A little further back there was a huge population of devs that were told "We are gonna break all the "hacks" that let you hook into PalmOS 3, but don't worry, we will soon have a new shiny OS with a good API for all the stuff you want to do" so the devs waited. and waited. and waited. And went and did something else. I hope Mozilla pays attention to history. In both the forementioned cases an extremely active and creative developer base was destroyed, and both products suffered greatly because of it. When a product actually depends on part of it's user base to improve that part of the user base is crucial to the products continued success, so anything that alienates the people who develop plugins or tools or additions to your software, whether that be just being stupid and greedy like Oracle with Open Office, or by attempting to define the vision of independent developers, or by breaking their tools turns your vibrant community into a desert with tumbleweeds and eerie noises.
RG59 is marginal for even digital cable, CATV has been using RG6, generally quad shield, for a couple decades now. Oh, and CAT6e doesn't even exist as a standard, so we know that part of the question was there just to make the OP sound like they knew enough to ask the question. If old wire of any type is pulled into residential stud walls you can't just pull it out, and if it is stapled to the baseboard then it can be easily replaced with the appropriate wire for the task at hand. If the question is actually looking for a use for the old wire, then the answer is "if you have to ask then no". If you had the skills and hobbies to repurpose it you would know before you asked. I know I am an old retrogrouch, but these faux techie questions really make me miss the days when hackers used soldering irons and nobody tried to establish their geek bona fides by asking questions on an internet forum. I realize this is reactionary and harsh, but I am tired and surrounded by incompetence and politics, and this is a day old so nobody will read my response anyway.
Need to be built as carefully as real experiments. This isn't one. If the computer is infinitely fast then the computer language can be structured to process non ambiguous natural language, we don't need computer languages, just people trained to be unambiguous.
That is totally ignoring the fact that our society runs on the premise that computation is expensive, and an infinitely fast computer would destroy all concepts of security based on expensive computation, and society would collapse and there would be no companies left to build these infintitely fast computers.
I am sorry, I don't know Tim Sweeney, but that question brings up one of my own. How have we as a technical society managed to produce people with the implied logical skills that programming requires (and his wikipedia bio does indicate he is a competent programmer, even a good innovative one) but who can't think a simple fallacious question through before tweeting it, or at least can't communicate the real question he wants to ask behind this ridiculous tweet? This is really a very fundamental logic flaw here. it is the equivalent of asking "if price were no object..." Given any infinite resource just do it how ever you want, it's not like you are going to run out.
Actually, it isn't a retarded measure, you just need to understand what it is sayig. Basically it says that our advances in internal combustion technology have made a negligible difference in the amount of carbon emitted while burning petroleum products, or in application terms, technology woun't make petroleum based ICEs much cleaner.
In contrast the electrical generation industry has been changing fuels over the same period of time, and has indeed made carbon production improvements.
The take away is that to make a dent in carbon pollution from cars and trucks they need to burn different fuels, not keep tweaking the long tail of internal combustion efficiency.
I would be interested in seeing the same sort of measure of the other pollutants out our tailpipes, I think the reductions of evaporative loses and the requirement of catalytic convertors has probably made significant reductions of some other pollutants per unit of fuel used.
"The first feature is that the Kaspersky OS is based on microkernel architecture, which basically means using the minimum amount of ingredients to bake your own operating system. The OS can be custom-designed as per requirements by using different modification blocks. This is similar to what Cyanogen Inc. has implemented in the module-based form of Cyanogen Modular OS for smartphones."
Unless I have missed something Cyanogen's OS is still using a normal monolithic kernel. Actually this guys description would pretty well include normal module loading and unloading in the linux OS. Why do people who don't understand things try to explain them by comparing them to other things they probably also don't understand?
But then I read Fossbytes 'about us' page and realized that they are just another aggregator running out of Delhi, and their biggest claim to fame is 300,000 followers on social media. Can't we at least get a link to the horse's mouth like https://eugene.kaspersky.com/2... instead of re-aggregating an poorly written per-aggregated mention of the news?
Umm, sure 5 buttons, one of them being a fingerprint reader. Oh, and 3 axis accelerometer, multiple thermometers, a magnetometer, a microphone, a multitouch touch screen, a couple software defined radios, a lightning port that does a more than just USB, whatever else I forgot. All capable of being inputs which can control things in the phone. I think maybe Mr. Gruber was fooled by the sleek exterior and thought he knew the hardware. The hardware is so unknowable that there are forum discussions about other stuff that might be in there but not enabled, like FM radios and barometers.
Anyone that refers to modern proprietary hardware as completely knowable simply proves they don't.
Of course the border between hardware and software, the "firmware" layer if you will, has gotten very flexible. Without the software the hardware is a brick. Without the hardware the software, well, isn't.
This whole debate is completely academic and useless. Every time an app crashes we have proof that software needs improvement. Every time a Note 7 bursts into flames or an iPhone gets the touch flu we know hardware needs improvement.
Talk about a waste of time, why do we pay attention to these experts?
Slashdot Mirror
No, they have to be spoken in fake Latin.
-FlightAware, a global aviation data services company, reminds CBS that even a 100 mph increase in the jet stream can shorten a flight by an hour.-
Lets take this apart. /. submitters sometimes seem to be in short supply. It is kind of amazing how much the connotative meaning changed in that small excerpt.
FilghtAware 'reminds' CBS. This denotatively means that CBS previously knew this. Can you even remind corporate knowledge?
'even a 100 mph increase in the jet stream' really downplays the significance of what sounds to me to be a pretty significant number. In the article they say it hit a max recorded speed of 231 mph, how can 44% of the highest speed ever recorded rate an 'even'? That is like saying "driving 'just' 20 miles an hour faster can cut out an hour from your trip" Even on an interstate 20 miles an hour faster than normal is pretty significant, especially to the guy with flashy lights on his car.
'can shorten a flight by an hour' Oh really? How about taking an hour out of my Pittsburgh to Newark flight?
This last sentence just jumped out me as so useless that I actually looked at TFA. I found to my immense relief that the original was actually informative:
-"A 100 mph increase in the jet stream above typical can add or remove about an hour from a five to six hour flight," according to a spokesperson from FlightAware, a global aviation software and data services company based in Houston.-
Apparently journalism isn't quite dead, but critical reading skills among
I have been a space exploration fan since I was a little kid. Don't quite remember the moon landing, since I was only a couple months old. The Spirit/Opportunity pair truly represent the pinnacle of what a dedicated group of creative, well funded scientists and engineers can accomplish.
The extreme resilience and flexibility of the platform, the brilliant schemes the team devised to cope with aging subsystems, and the sheer amount of scientific exploration accomplished on a system with such a small and conservative mission plan.
Definitely my personal favorite technical project of all time. There are milestones in every scientific genre, and this was truly a milestone. The team redefined with very definition of remote mechanical exploration and every rover mankind has sent since has built on the foundation of these two.
I don't mean in any way to diminish the accomplishments of stationary exploration landers like the Vikings, or to demean the early rovers like the Russina Lunokhod rovers (which were truly envelope pushing machines) but the Mars Exploration Rovers demonstrated functional autonomy and extreme robust mechanical miniaturization that really made them the first of their kind.
So, they buy Flickr, then intentionally take away what they themselves say was attracting new users.
Somehow I don't think you can successfully monetize an internet platform by taking away people's reason for using it. I will admit I have no idea how to monetize a big pile of everybodies photos, but I would definitely be brainstorming ways to convince people to pay to do cool stuff on the platform with all those photos rather than scrapping the thing that got them in the door.
Way back when HTML was invented they specified an input type that browsers aren't even supposed to show on screen. The web wasn't secure, and a password input field didn't make anything safe, but it at least recognized the over the shoulder attack.
Since then web site operators have been doing things to attempt to make your communication with them more secure, various Javascript handlers and encrypted connections, etc. Of course these things range from well implemented to actually less secure, but at least the security or lack thereof was between you and the web site.
Now Google is actually releasing an official extension that is scraping those password fields on every website and handing off to a backend processor. I imagine that Google is passing hashes around, via an encrypted channel, but the fact is that at least on your computer that password exists in plain text in a browser extension that automatically processes every page you load.
They obviously can't put the database in the extension, so it has to pass identifiable information back to Google. Sure, it is encrypted information. Sure, it is probably some hash, not a clear text username and password, but it is a unique pair of tokens that have to remain unique going to a monstrous company along with a few billion other peoples unique identifiable tokens. Your password is no longer between you and the website, it is between you and the website and google.
I can't even find words.
There is now an attack surface which includes all of your web passwords. An efficient password harverter no longer has to look for vulnerabilities in Drupal, and WordPress, and PHPBB, and your favorite JS framework of the week, they have a single target to rule them all.
Geez, why don't we just issue goveernment assigned passwords with social security numbers at birth, It would be more convenient for everyone.
If Google wants to utilize this big dictionary of exploited passwords they should build a proper website where a person can go and type in their username and password, with clearly worded information explaining exactly what people are submitting and what will be done with it, and people can choose if they want to check their user/pass combinations.
I suppose the next thing they wil do with this extension is build a database of the most common actual passwords in use, stripped of usernames of course, so they can publish the authoritative list of passwords not to pick.
Yeah, I will admin, I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole....
Minecraft bred a lot of script kiddies, and attracted a few java programmers. Unfortunately Notch never released his API for the modders, nor did he follow through and release his code open source like he promised. The original cadre of modders mostly left.
Microsoft is doing the normal things with it, a bunch of marketing to the educationmarket. Still no modding API, just some kind of scripting interface using Javascript!? Let's really confuse the potential programmers, make a Javascript scripting interface for a Java based game.
Anyway I don't know the status of Java in the world at large, but don't count on Minecraft to save the day.
Why is it that the companies mining it keep their practices so deep in the shadows?
So Window Update doesn't check the size of the update and make sure there is enough space before downloading and installing it, so instead of fixing Windows Update we will just reserve 7G (SEVEN Gig!?!?! I had a full OS, and all of Microsoft Office, and my other software on a 105MB hard drive back in the day - but I digress) which will only be used when there is a major update instead of JUST FIXING WINDOWS UPDATE.
It is simple math. I realize with dynamic updates you probaby can't make an exact prediction of the space needed for the rollback repository etc., but you can know the actual update file sizes, and you can make a conservative guess on the in-process size, just check, if there isn't enough space don't even do the download. Nag the user about it all you want, just don't actualy start the process until you have room.
And if they actually need 7G now, what happens next year when the updates are bigger?
It's funny, I am sick of MacOS as they continue to de-Unix and get in my way with every update, so I am switching, but for some reason I never even considered switching to Windows.
Turbo buttons had a purpose, they were so you could slow your PC down to 4 or 8 MHz (depending on generation) so software using CPU clock cycles for timing instead of real time would run like they did on the IBM they were written for. Yeah, real time clocks were optional on the first PCs.
There was a little helicopter in a tunnel game called Stryker written for CGA graphics on the IBM XT I think (It was a few weeks ago) and on our Tandy 1000 TX it was unplayably fast unless you un-turboed the PC.
Also worked at a place that sold PCs, and we had an early generic Pentium 60 machine, I think it was a Quantex if anybody remembers them, and the turbo button on that actually slowed it down to 8MHz. Since turbo buttons change clockspeed on the fly, it was kinda fun to play with that one.
Thank you. There is someone else who has trouble reading past this type of blatant error. That is like someone saying something is "3 yards long, that's 10 feet"
In proper news speak, isn't 120 AU actually "OMG! OVER 100 TIMES FARTHER FROM THE SUN THAN EARTH!!!"
Or possibly just use "further" insted of "farther", then the whole thing will fall into an etymological debate and the actual definition of AU will be overlooked.
I am glad that line jumped out at more than just me. Totally disregarding the actual content in the article, here I am reading "news" and all the sudden there is this drum beating editorial line that has no basis in the article. It was very discordant, and felt to me like something that may have been stuck in after the article was written by an editor with an axe to grind. ...' very seldom belong in the same sentence, in fact one of the founding tennets of a free America is supposedly that making people decide things in their private life isn't allowed.
Gettin back to the actual content, 'rational' and 'make Americans
I don't have a problem with Facebook requiring their employees to use particular company provided phones for work, for any reason they want, security or paid product promotion, or because they like the color.
I do have problems when people in positions of power throw juvenile temper tantrums because somebody said something that hurt their feelings. Unfortunately that seems to be the methodolgy of power these days, whether it is entertainment celebrities, politicians of all persuasions, or corporate CEOs.
-On the other hand, QC may make mining bitcoins much more economical.-
Isn't the expense of mining the only intrinsic value bitcoin has? If mining cryptocurrencies is economical then inflation in those currencies will make them valuless.
>The curious robots didn't know how to handle the situation but wanted to go check it out.
Is this not an egregious case of anthropomorphism?
Amazons little screwjack robots are not curious, and I am pretty sure the system does not send robots to go rubbernecking when there is a problem in the system.
Apparently the editors at Technology Review are neither technologically savvy, nor good reviewers.
This entire series of questions is predicated on me accepting the fact that a self aware piece of software is actually imminent. This is still entirely in the realm of science fiction authors, unfortunately there seems to be a dearth of scifi authors who are willing to explore sociological questions like this right now.
If I were to ask questions about a self aware AI I would be asking things like "Since software is always improved through iterative testing, is this self aware AI going to have memory persistence accross it's test runs?" or "Will the developer team be running their tests using a single data pool, and will the AI be aware that it exists both discontinouosly and in multiple instances simultaneously?"
Or from the sociological side, since we are as a species still arguing over when human life starts, at what point of development does shutting down a self aware AI become murder?
Asking questions that seem to be more about the personality of an assumed superintelligent AI in the near future is like reading celebrity interviews to learn about human nature, both pointless and very misleading.
Am I the only one that misses Asimov and Bradbury and Heinlein for their ability to phrase these kinds of questions in the form of a story?
Wow, I have seen loose interpretations of the term "hacker" but I expected better on \.. What exactly is he supposed to have hacked?
This is a guy who saw an opportunity and made money, just another crooked entrepeneur. Really no different than Facebook or Google, except he took data from large corporations, while the latter take data from normal civilians.
Normally you would use a golem for that.
If we can send a book faster by using the clacks or on horseback.
x-clacks-overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett
>> by Anonymous Coward on 19:13 7th November, 2017 (#55510563)
>>>> Now, I am not really a drink the cool-aid from the benevolent overlords kind of guy, [...]
>>Well, your user name is "kamakazi" [sic]... :-) /fleeing battleship
Umm, Is '[sic]' even a valid comment for a name? Unless, of course, you know how the name is actually spelled. Would you say "Kari" [sic] because somewhere else you had seen it written "Carrie"?
"Kamikaze" is an anglicization of a word that kinda sounded like that to some English guy who transliterated it incorrectly into English, the kamakazi user name is one that I chose many years ago (note the 5 digit UID) because I liked the way it looked when I wrote it, and it has a pleasing rhythm with 2 alliterative syllables. Since I don't speak Japanese I am quite sure I don't grasp the true denotative or connotative meaning of the word kamikaze. In fact, from a recent report that made a news site I frequent, even the Japanese are having a small cultural crisis over their historical view of the pilots who were called kamikaze.
Interestingly according to Wikipedia the word kamikaze is actually from the name given to a 13th century storm that took out an invding Mongol fleet, sounds kinda like what happened to the Spanish armada off the coast of Britain.
So what were you doing on a battleship anyway? :)
We have a couple facts here, and a whole bunch of conclusions.
The facts are that there is a general purpose OS running a microkernel in a management layer on unspecified Intel CPUs. This general purpose OS provides at least network accessible management interfaces.
The conclusions are this general purpose OS is infinitely exploitable to steal all your top secret information and redirect all you web requests to the mind control platform of the month.
This Minnich character (I enjoyed that similarity, Minnich/Minix) then jumps to a call to neuter everything below the user installed OS including UEFI. He then juts off on a side tangent and says trust me (He is a Google engineer) to always install good safe firmware on your Chromebook. That was a nice subtle bit of astroturfing there. He also blames Minix for slow boot time on an Open Compute server, not sure where minix plays into that or what axe he is grinding.
Let's look at it a little more objectively. Why do these processor companies keep putting general purpose OSs at a level which was traditionally all hardware/firmware, and why do systems makers use an accesible programming layer to configure hardware like UEFI? Well, whe we were running 386s and 486s we really were running microprocessors. Hardware was relatively static, device support was locked at time of manufacture, processors did processing (with maybe a coprocessor for math) and accessory cards did a single function each. In that time frame supers, like the first Crays, couldn't even boot themselves. They used a completely separate computer to boot and for time scheduling and such. Now today, we have computers which are powerful on the level of the early supers. Our processing no longer all happens on the CPU, but also in the GPU(s) and other pieces in the system. We no longer have external memory and bus controllers, they are built into the processor or the mandatory northbridge, and are much more capable and adaptive. There are hosts of sensors built into modern processors. All of these pieces need to be managed. There is an absolute necessity for a relatively capable computer in there to manage all these pieces.
It used to be done with static logic arrays, controlled by registers, and we called it BIOS, and it had a little interface that could usurp the monitor output and keybpoard and chirp the speaker, later got so fancy it could hijack a mouse on some systems. It was very limited, in fact, on the earliest PCs it didn't have a UI at all, it had dip switches or jumpers on the system board.
Now with the advent of negotiated buses (even memory buses, back in the day I never would have conceived of a CPU being able to ask a memory module what capabilities it possessed and automatically configure timing parameters to best talk to it) the management processor has a lot to do. On high end machines they even do this negotiation on the fly with the advent of hot plug PCI buses and on the fly memory error compensation. By the nature of the beast this management engine has to be able to see all the data buses, otherwise every single connection interface would need an out of band management channel.
I suppose you could make this management engine like a FPGA, configure it once and burn your bridges, no further interraction possible, but then what happens when you need to add or change something?
Likewise it often doesn't need a network interface, but if it doesn't have one then we have to do wake on LAN with yet another baby management computer. How about physical intrusion detection? again, not often needed, but sometimes...
Basically what a general purpose OS in the management layer does is give nearly infinite flexibility. This technology is a big part of the reason so much of our stuff just works.
Now, I am not really a drink the cool-aid from the benevolent overlords kind of guy, I am not at all in favor of secret OSs underpinning our hardware without our knowledge, but let's not throw out the baby too. That capability is in most cases useful
This discussion of breaking extensions that hook into Firefox and replacing them with a "good" extensions API is familiar.
I seem to remember some guy named Notch telling us all that "everything will be better after the API comes out" so all the Minecraft modders quit updating their mods and waited. and waited. and waited. And went and did something else.
A little further back there was a huge population of devs that were told "We are gonna break all the "hacks" that let you hook into PalmOS 3, but don't worry, we will soon have a new shiny OS with a good API for all the stuff you want to do" so the devs waited. and waited. and waited. And went and did something else.
I hope Mozilla pays attention to history. In both the forementioned cases an extremely active and creative developer base was destroyed, and both products suffered greatly because of it.
When a product actually depends on part of it's user base to improve that part of the user base is crucial to the products continued success, so anything that alienates the people who develop plugins or tools or additions to your software, whether that be just being stupid and greedy like Oracle with Open Office, or by attempting to define the vision of independent developers, or by breaking their tools turns your vibrant community into a desert with tumbleweeds and eerie noises.
RG59 is marginal for even digital cable, CATV has been using RG6, generally quad shield, for a couple decades now. Oh, and CAT6e doesn't even exist as a standard, so we know that part of the question was there just to make the OP sound like they knew enough to ask the question.
If old wire of any type is pulled into residential stud walls you can't just pull it out, and if it is stapled to the baseboard then it can be easily replaced with the appropriate wire for the task at hand.
If the question is actually looking for a use for the old wire, then the answer is "if you have to ask then no". If you had the skills and hobbies to repurpose it you would know before you asked.
I know I am an old retrogrouch, but these faux techie questions really make me miss the days when hackers used soldering irons and nobody tried to establish their geek bona fides by asking questions on an internet forum.
I realize this is reactionary and harsh, but I am tired and surrounded by incompetence and politics, and this is a day old so nobody will read my response anyway.
Need to be built as carefully as real experiments. This isn't one. If the computer is infinitely fast then the computer language can be structured to process non ambiguous natural language, we don't need computer languages, just people trained to be unambiguous.
That is totally ignoring the fact that our society runs on the premise that computation is expensive, and an infinitely fast computer would destroy all concepts of security based on expensive computation, and society would collapse and there would be no companies left to build these infintitely fast computers.
I am sorry, I don't know Tim Sweeney, but that question brings up one of my own. How have we as a technical society managed to produce people with the implied logical skills that programming requires (and his wikipedia bio does indicate he is a competent programmer, even a good innovative one)
but who can't think a simple fallacious question through before tweeting it, or at least can't communicate the real question he wants to ask behind this ridiculous tweet? This is really a very fundamental logic flaw here. it is the equivalent of asking "if price were no object..." Given any infinite resource just do it how ever you want, it's not like you are going to run out.
Actually, it isn't a retarded measure, you just need to understand what it is sayig. Basically it says that our advances in internal combustion technology have made a negligible difference in the amount of carbon emitted while burning petroleum products, or in application terms, technology woun't make petroleum based ICEs much cleaner.
In contrast the electrical generation industry has been changing fuels over the same period of time, and has indeed made carbon production improvements.
The take away is that to make a dent in carbon pollution from cars and trucks they need to burn different fuels, not keep tweaking the long tail of internal combustion efficiency.
I would be interested in seeing the same sort of measure of the other pollutants out our tailpipes, I think the reductions of evaporative loses and the requirement of catalytic convertors has probably made significant reductions of some other pollutants per unit of fuel used.
If you read TFA this guys says:
"The first feature is that the Kaspersky OS is based on microkernel architecture, which basically means using the minimum amount of ingredients to bake your own operating system. The OS can be custom-designed as per requirements by using different modification blocks. This is similar to what Cyanogen Inc. has implemented in the module-based form of Cyanogen Modular OS for smartphones."
Unless I have missed something Cyanogen's OS is still using a normal monolithic kernel. Actually this guys description would pretty well include normal module loading and unloading in the linux OS. Why do people who don't understand things try to explain them by comparing them to other things they probably also don't understand?
But then I read Fossbytes 'about us' page and realized that they are just another aggregator running out of Delhi, and their biggest claim to fame is 300,000 followers on social media. Can't we at least get a link to the horse's mouth like
https://eugene.kaspersky.com/2...
instead of re-aggregating an poorly written per-aggregated mention of the news?
Umm, sure 5 buttons, one of them being a fingerprint reader. Oh, and 3 axis accelerometer, multiple thermometers, a magnetometer, a microphone, a multitouch touch screen, a couple software defined radios, a lightning port that does a more than just USB, whatever else I forgot. All capable of being inputs which can control things in the phone. I think maybe Mr. Gruber was fooled by the sleek exterior and thought he knew the hardware. The hardware is so unknowable that there are forum discussions about other stuff that might be in there but not enabled, like FM radios and barometers.
Anyone that refers to modern proprietary hardware as completely knowable simply proves they don't.
Of course the border between hardware and software, the "firmware" layer if you will, has gotten very flexible. Without the software the hardware is a brick. Without the hardware the software, well, isn't.
This whole debate is completely academic and useless. Every time an app crashes we have proof that software needs improvement. Every time a Note 7 bursts into flames or an iPhone gets the touch flu we know hardware needs improvement.
Talk about a waste of time, why do we pay attention to these experts?