USB type A to type C cables require a different pull-up resistor than the Type C to type C cables. Lots of vendors didn't do their due diligence and just put the USB-C spec'd pull up resistors in their A to C cables. As a result, devices try to draw too much power.
I bought one of the bad cables, and was wondering why my wall charger was flaking out. Went online, and saw the issue -- my phone was trying to pull too much juice, overloading the charger and putting it into brownout mode. Now, this is a 4-port wall charger, so my other 3 connected devices were sitting there going charging/not charging/not charging at sub 1 second intervals for the ten minutes that it took me to figure it out. After that, my charger was acting really finicky, and I didn't trust it anymore after that current overload so I junked it. So, yea. Not overblown. Actual problem.
Space has gotten cheap enough now that it's not incredibly uncommon for High Schools to build cube and micro sats as a project. Most Universities have quite a few cubesats sitting on the shelf that we built as a class project. Many of these will never see space, so if you get a chance to slap it on an experimental rocket, it's better to potentially go down in a blaze of glory than get tossed into the trash in two years to make space for the next class's cubesat build.
The Honeywell T-Hawk and then next generation numerous other hand-launched drones (useful when not in windy situations, need bigger ones for wind) have been doing this in Iraq and Afghanistan for a very long time. They are very effective -- troops love them, because they can continually scout around any corners. It turned a significant percentage of ambushes into actually ambushing the enemy. Same concept, and has been in use for quite a few years.
In Switzerland it is a crime to carry a loaded firearm in public, except at a shooting range, unless you work in a security job and have been issued a permit. No conceal carry, no loaded carry, etc. Similarly, you can't store a loaded weapon. The safety culture is very strong, and people will turn you in for carrying or storing a loaded weapon.
I do think that Apple allowing ad blockers in iOS really raised the visibility of this, and something is going to happen soon. I think that we'll either fade-away, or going to a consolidated subscription model. Google has a program where you pay something like $7/mo and ads on sites that participate are reduced/gone. The problem is that it doesn't stop any of the really annoying ads, because Google doesn't serve annoying ads.
My guess is that unobtrusive, text ads will become key again -- the thing that brought Google into existence as the behemoth it is. I've started blocking all of the annoying ads that frameroll, block sites, etc. But I leave Google ads on, because they're pretty unobtrusive. My guess is that this arms war will escalate and ad agencies will realize that they've been cutting their own throats by making things so annoying, virus-laden and plain breaking websites that many will fold, and sites will adopt a "clean" advertising policy.....I hope. The other alternatives aren't great.
I agree. Seems pretty simple. There will always be a bit of bickering or someone hogging the resource, but guess what: that's what happens when you deal with people. Not a tough problem to solve.
That said, the way that it will get fixed is autonomous driving/charging. We'd rather spend a ton of time making a system whereby you line the cars up in a first come, first served manner and get out. Then when the first car is done charging, it drives off into a parking spot and the next pull up. It would be like an automated gas station line. I guarantee that it's being worked on right now, if not already coming out with the next generation of EV's. Tesla already has automated driving, and has shown videos of an autonomous self-plugging in car charger.
The Nvidia Tegra X1 and other modern chips that came out late 2015 areo n par with most of the Celerons and even the i3's and i5's in some instances. It definitely might be the first year of true x86 peer laptops from ARM, but maybe another year or two until they nail everything and start taking significant market share (that's a big IF -- they have to nail everything, while Intel continues to miss a step or two).
Ah, the parental anecdote. It sounds like oyu have a tough time -- maybe try changing tact? I've found that parenting is an exercise in finding and leveraging soft power (versus hard power like them going to bed hungry, re-feeding them supper in the morning if they didn't eat it, etc). I'll match one.
I sit my kids down to eat before everything is on the table, and bring out of the kitchen and plate for them what I want them to eat -- whether it's something new, veggies, etc. Then in the 5-10 minutes where we get drinks, bring out the rest of the food and serve it, they've typically eaten 50+% of whatever I first served. They're somewhat hungry and haven't snacked and will naturally graze at what's in front of them to pass that time. Then, as you mention, because they've tried it and not found it horrible they'll usually eat the rest of it along with the rest of the food. Soft power in action -- nothing forced, but guiding the activities such that you preferentially select for the outcome that you want.
Not rocket science. Does it work every time? No. Did it work right away? No. But we formed a habit, and we're good now. It works the vast majority of the time, and they eat great elsewhere as a result. When we go out to eat or go to school, they're used to eating all of those things, so they do tend to eat a good chunk of their carrots, peas, etc. and if they don't then oh well -- they eat healthy at home, what's one meal? It's not worth fighting over in those instances since you've already won in the vast majority of the cases.
The point that he's making is that we have this discipline called "Engineering" whom can take a look at the catastrophic failure modes and design in ways to mitigate those failure modes within the system -- just like how we've designed systems that store more energy per unit volume for safety, which also tends to want to make a big kaboom (aka gasoline, liquid propane, etc).
I've had a number of $25 bluteooth keyboards for my tablets and they universally suck. I've probably tried 6-8. This one from Google, that latches strong enough that I can dangle the actual tablet by it, but also removes from the tablet pretty simply/quickly when I don't want it, and charges inductively rather than having to have another charging cable for it, is pretty nice. Maybe not $150 nice, but waaaaaay nicer than a $25 BT keyboard, and just slightly above that $25 price range, the BT keyboard market tops out still without implementing those other features.
Yup. Totally agree -- but most US households have two cars, one which gets much more use than the other since it's used on weekends, family trips, etc.
At some point, we'll likely swap out one of our cars for an EV. We'll keep the 4Runner for the towing, 4-wheeling, hunting, camping stuff and for the 5 mile commute in to work for me everyday. My wife will have the EV for her longer commute, and we'll solely use that for family trips that don't require 4-wheeling/towing and all weekend errands and driving. Probably cut our gas consumption by ~80% and save us money since at that point (~3 years from now), it'll likely be comparably priced in the market to similar gas-only cars.
To be fair, with respect to #1, that was an issue with the EVLA in the Atacama desert. It makes me chuckle to think about how seriously wired up that super remote chunk of the desert is getting.
It's not impossible. More complex, but not impossible. You take the input from that caused that (car's black box), see which parent and child neurons fired indicating the undesired action and then check those neurons against the training set to see what aspects of the training set conditioned that behavior (aka, made those neurons respond to that image). You know now what caused that. If you want, you can then modify the network. Or you can take the inputs that caused the incorrect response, make some small changes to it to so that it is representative of other similar situations to come up with a 1,000 item set, and then add it to your training data as a negative set (aka what not to do). Then re-verify after training that those neurons no longer fire in that situation and cause it to drive off of a cliff.
Actually, it's almost more intuitive than finding some threading issue, race condition, buffer overflow or multitude of other small, nasty bugs that you have to deal with on a normal basis. It just takes a lot longer to run the tools to see what the issue is and retrain the network.
What I've seen are two horizontal flywheels spinning in different directions. Theoretically nulls out the force -- there's always a bit left, but usually manageable and a mere fraction of just the one rotating.
Your advice made sense years ago; these days it does not. 2-5 year old cars with low mileage don't cost much less than brand-new models these days, unless it's some unpopular model (and they're unpopular for a good reason).
My wife's 2 year old Honda Pilot with low mileage cost ~$12k less than new. That's a hunk of change. Now, the payments were a bit higher since you don't get 0% and you don't get to stretch it out over 7 years or whatever crazy long term that they have for new cars now, but you do still save significant chunks of change buying used. If we had gone even a couple of years older, the savings to be had were over 50% versus new for cars that are reliable, popular and have >100,000 miles likely left in them.
Have you seen the Linux ATA/SATA and other code bases like Audio, Video, etc (likely AHCI also)? They're chock full of work arounds for various chipsets, drivers and firmwares. Acting like workarounds aren't effectively industry standard is a little silly. Linux has adapted to its fair share of odd hardware that doesn't work quite as expected.
What makes you think that? Samsung is one signature away (PIA -- Proprietary Information Agreement) from viewing the vendor's source code and advising them. It's pretty damn routine and uncontroversial. I don't understand why people think that just because something is not open source that no one outside of the company ever, ever, under any circumstances can see a hunk of the code. Just sign a PIA and over the code in a secure manner, or give them remote VPN access to the test box. Pretty damn simple and routine.
The services seem to use "energy" and "non-kinetic" somewhat interchangeably. So really they mean non-kinetic weapons. A bullet obviously delivers its effect in a kinetic manner, whereas a laser or microwave beam deliver energy to effect.
Exactly. This is pretty tripe. He admits up front that the bug bounty program says "No brute forcing of other users account" and then assumes that brute forcing is ok. There's also the possibility that they meant that brute forcing in general is not ok, so just tossed his submission when it arrived because it was a brute force attack. My guess is that they already knew it could be brute forced and were looking for other potential security issues to find and implement as a group before they push the next update -- that they were actually looking for a little more in depth security issues than that.
I have to say that I'm not honestly surprised that Bennett didn't think of that conclusion, because it would require more than a strict literal interpretation of something and navel gazing, which really are his two specialties.
Yup. But Google's point (not in this article, but in an interview I believe) is that right now there's only a certain number of minority software engineers. There's a finite quantity at this instant. ALL of the SV tech companies are fighting over them -- trading them back and forth essentially as the employee hops due to better job offers. So, Google's numbers may go up, but Facebook's may go down as a result. This is why Google, Facebook, et al all have huge programs supporting STEM for minority elementary, middle and high school students. That's the only way that it can be fixed, and why these reports are silly. The only report we really need is unemployment %'s in the industry by minority status. My totally uninformed guess is that that statistic looks pretty fair, if not in favor of minorities...
The error is that the mirror absorbs a photon and then emits one. That's how mirrors work -- they don't physically reflect photons, they absorb and emit new ones. Thus, the mirror would have to be capable of handling a 5kW instantaneous flux without degradation. That's hard to do on an external surface that's prone to getting a bit mucked up. I mean, the mirror helps, but there are practical considerations with respect to making one good enough to handle that level of incoming power flux.
If this is all true, how did Disney just pull what they did? How did lots of companies that displace their workers with H-1B's work around this? Genuinely curious.
They had a good idea that generated a ton of interest. They got a ton of money to do it. But the team that they put together just didn't have the right skillset mix to pull off something so ambitious. Some of their team posting in their forums and their official updates showed a pretty serious lack of knowledge in some crucial areas. Their original UI and framework was a train wreck (haven't checked back in a year). A number of people bought it to serve as a kind of media aggregator -- run Plex, XBMC, some emulators and original Indie or other content. Then they panicked that lots of people were so interested in getting XBMC/Plex onto it that let out some updates that borked the ability to do that, and really burnt a lot of people
I was ok with the media center parts of it being worthless. I understood that they had a vision for gaming and were focused on it (although executed it poorly), and so was begrudgingly ok with the fact that they were throwing up a walled garden focused on gaming, rather than nurturing a vibrant hacker community. They killed that community, which it turns out was a lot of their customers and things withered. They really could have been a Raspberry Pi with a controller. But their controller just absolutely sucked. Their kickstarted called it "a tribute to all classic controllers out there. This will be the best controller ever." or something to that effect, which was one of the key reasons I bought it. They made it sound like they had spent some very serious effort building an awesome controller. The controller was really, really bad. If you can't play games well with the system, then it's not going to succeed.
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USB type A to type C cables require a different pull-up resistor than the Type C to type C cables. Lots of vendors didn't do their due diligence and just put the USB-C spec'd pull up resistors in their A to C cables. As a result, devices try to draw too much power.
I bought one of the bad cables, and was wondering why my wall charger was flaking out. Went online, and saw the issue -- my phone was trying to pull too much juice, overloading the charger and putting it into brownout mode. Now, this is a 4-port wall charger, so my other 3 connected devices were sitting there going charging/not charging/not charging at sub 1 second intervals for the ten minutes that it took me to figure it out. After that, my charger was acting really finicky, and I didn't trust it anymore after that current overload so I junked it. So, yea. Not overblown. Actual problem.
Space has gotten cheap enough now that it's not incredibly uncommon for High Schools to build cube and micro sats as a project. Most Universities have quite a few cubesats sitting on the shelf that we built as a class project. Many of these will never see space, so if you get a chance to slap it on an experimental rocket, it's better to potentially go down in a blaze of glory than get tossed into the trash in two years to make space for the next class's cubesat build.
The Honeywell T-Hawk and then next generation numerous other hand-launched drones (useful when not in windy situations, need bigger ones for wind) have been doing this in Iraq and Afghanistan for a very long time. They are very effective -- troops love them, because they can continually scout around any corners. It turned a significant percentage of ambushes into actually ambushing the enemy. Same concept, and has been in use for quite a few years.
In Switzerland it is a crime to carry a loaded firearm in public, except at a shooting range, unless you work in a security job and have been issued a permit. No conceal carry, no loaded carry, etc. Similarly, you can't store a loaded weapon. The safety culture is very strong, and people will turn you in for carrying or storing a loaded weapon.
So is that what you are advocating for the US?
I do think that Apple allowing ad blockers in iOS really raised the visibility of this, and something is going to happen soon. I think that we'll either fade-away, or going to a consolidated subscription model. Google has a program where you pay something like $7/mo and ads on sites that participate are reduced/gone. The problem is that it doesn't stop any of the really annoying ads, because Google doesn't serve annoying ads.
My guess is that unobtrusive, text ads will become key again -- the thing that brought Google into existence as the behemoth it is. I've started blocking all of the annoying ads that frameroll, block sites, etc. But I leave Google ads on, because they're pretty unobtrusive. My guess is that this arms war will escalate and ad agencies will realize that they've been cutting their own throats by making things so annoying, virus-laden and plain breaking websites that many will fold, and sites will adopt a "clean" advertising policy.....I hope. The other alternatives aren't great.
I agree. Seems pretty simple. There will always be a bit of bickering or someone hogging the resource, but guess what: that's what happens when you deal with people. Not a tough problem to solve.
That said, the way that it will get fixed is autonomous driving/charging. We'd rather spend a ton of time making a system whereby you line the cars up in a first come, first served manner and get out. Then when the first car is done charging, it drives off into a parking spot and the next pull up. It would be like an automated gas station line. I guarantee that it's being worked on right now, if not already coming out with the next generation of EV's. Tesla already has automated driving, and has shown videos of an autonomous self-plugging in car charger.
The Nvidia Tegra X1 and other modern chips that came out late 2015 areo n par with most of the Celerons and even the i3's and i5's in some instances. It definitely might be the first year of true x86 peer laptops from ARM, but maybe another year or two until they nail everything and start taking significant market share (that's a big IF -- they have to nail everything, while Intel continues to miss a step or two).
Ah, the parental anecdote. It sounds like oyu have a tough time -- maybe try changing tact? I've found that parenting is an exercise in finding and leveraging soft power (versus hard power like them going to bed hungry, re-feeding them supper in the morning if they didn't eat it, etc). I'll match one.
I sit my kids down to eat before everything is on the table, and bring out of the kitchen and plate for them what I want them to eat -- whether it's something new, veggies, etc. Then in the 5-10 minutes where we get drinks, bring out the rest of the food and serve it, they've typically eaten 50+% of whatever I first served. They're somewhat hungry and haven't snacked and will naturally graze at what's in front of them to pass that time. Then, as you mention, because they've tried it and not found it horrible they'll usually eat the rest of it along with the rest of the food. Soft power in action -- nothing forced, but guiding the activities such that you preferentially select for the outcome that you want.
Not rocket science. Does it work every time? No. Did it work right away? No. But we formed a habit, and we're good now. It works the vast majority of the time, and they eat great elsewhere as a result. When we go out to eat or go to school, they're used to eating all of those things, so they do tend to eat a good chunk of their carrots, peas, etc. and if they don't then oh well -- they eat healthy at home, what's one meal? It's not worth fighting over in those instances since you've already won in the vast majority of the cases.
The point that he's making is that we have this discipline called "Engineering" whom can take a look at the catastrophic failure modes and design in ways to mitigate those failure modes within the system -- just like how we've designed systems that store more energy per unit volume for safety, which also tends to want to make a big kaboom (aka gasoline, liquid propane, etc).
I've had a number of $25 bluteooth keyboards for my tablets and they universally suck. I've probably tried 6-8. This one from Google, that latches strong enough that I can dangle the actual tablet by it, but also removes from the tablet pretty simply/quickly when I don't want it, and charges inductively rather than having to have another charging cable for it, is pretty nice. Maybe not $150 nice, but waaaaaay nicer than a $25 BT keyboard, and just slightly above that $25 price range, the BT keyboard market tops out still without implementing those other features.
Yup. Totally agree -- but most US households have two cars, one which gets much more use than the other since it's used on weekends, family trips, etc.
At some point, we'll likely swap out one of our cars for an EV. We'll keep the 4Runner for the towing, 4-wheeling, hunting, camping stuff and for the 5 mile commute in to work for me everyday. My wife will have the EV for her longer commute, and we'll solely use that for family trips that don't require 4-wheeling/towing and all weekend errands and driving. Probably cut our gas consumption by ~80% and save us money since at that point (~3 years from now), it'll likely be comparably priced in the market to similar gas-only cars.
To be fair, with respect to #1, that was an issue with the EVLA in the Atacama desert. It makes me chuckle to think about how seriously wired up that super remote chunk of the desert is getting.
It's not impossible. More complex, but not impossible. You take the input from that caused that (car's black box), see which parent and child neurons fired indicating the undesired action and then check those neurons against the training set to see what aspects of the training set conditioned that behavior (aka, made those neurons respond to that image). You know now what caused that. If you want, you can then modify the network. Or you can take the inputs that caused the incorrect response, make some small changes to it to so that it is representative of other similar situations to come up with a 1,000 item set, and then add it to your training data as a negative set (aka what not to do). Then re-verify after training that those neurons no longer fire in that situation and cause it to drive off of a cliff. Actually, it's almost more intuitive than finding some threading issue, race condition, buffer overflow or multitude of other small, nasty bugs that you have to deal with on a normal basis. It just takes a lot longer to run the tools to see what the issue is and retrain the network.
They had real time traffic long before the Waze acquisition. You do now see Waze-like markers in Google maps for accidents and similar now though.
What I've seen are two horizontal flywheels spinning in different directions. Theoretically nulls out the force -- there's always a bit left, but usually manageable and a mere fraction of just the one rotating.
Your advice made sense years ago; these days it does not. 2-5 year old cars with low mileage don't cost much less than brand-new models these days, unless it's some unpopular model (and they're unpopular for a good reason).
My wife's 2 year old Honda Pilot with low mileage cost ~$12k less than new. That's a hunk of change. Now, the payments were a bit higher since you don't get 0% and you don't get to stretch it out over 7 years or whatever crazy long term that they have for new cars now, but you do still save significant chunks of change buying used. If we had gone even a couple of years older, the savings to be had were over 50% versus new for cars that are reliable, popular and have >100,000 miles likely left in them.
Have you seen the Linux ATA/SATA and other code bases like Audio, Video, etc (likely AHCI also)? They're chock full of work arounds for various chipsets, drivers and firmwares. Acting like workarounds aren't effectively industry standard is a little silly. Linux has adapted to its fair share of odd hardware that doesn't work quite as expected.
What makes you think that? Samsung is one signature away (PIA -- Proprietary Information Agreement) from viewing the vendor's source code and advising them. It's pretty damn routine and uncontroversial. I don't understand why people think that just because something is not open source that no one outside of the company ever, ever, under any circumstances can see a hunk of the code. Just sign a PIA and over the code in a secure manner, or give them remote VPN access to the test box. Pretty damn simple and routine.
The services seem to use "energy" and "non-kinetic" somewhat interchangeably. So really they mean non-kinetic weapons. A bullet obviously delivers its effect in a kinetic manner, whereas a laser or microwave beam deliver energy to effect.
Exactly. This is pretty tripe. He admits up front that the bug bounty program says "No brute forcing of other users account" and then assumes that brute forcing is ok. There's also the possibility that they meant that brute forcing in general is not ok, so just tossed his submission when it arrived because it was a brute force attack. My guess is that they already knew it could be brute forced and were looking for other potential security issues to find and implement as a group before they push the next update -- that they were actually looking for a little more in depth security issues than that.
I have to say that I'm not honestly surprised that Bennett didn't think of that conclusion, because it would require more than a strict literal interpretation of something and navel gazing, which really are his two specialties.
Yup. But Google's point (not in this article, but in an interview I believe) is that right now there's only a certain number of minority software engineers. There's a finite quantity at this instant. ALL of the SV tech companies are fighting over them -- trading them back and forth essentially as the employee hops due to better job offers. So, Google's numbers may go up, but Facebook's may go down as a result. This is why Google, Facebook, et al all have huge programs supporting STEM for minority elementary, middle and high school students. That's the only way that it can be fixed, and why these reports are silly. The only report we really need is unemployment %'s in the industry by minority status. My totally uninformed guess is that that statistic looks pretty fair, if not in favor of minorities...
The error is that the mirror absorbs a photon and then emits one. That's how mirrors work -- they don't physically reflect photons, they absorb and emit new ones. Thus, the mirror would have to be capable of handling a 5kW instantaneous flux without degradation. That's hard to do on an external surface that's prone to getting a bit mucked up. I mean, the mirror helps, but there are practical considerations with respect to making one good enough to handle that level of incoming power flux.
If this is all true, how did Disney just pull what they did? How did lots of companies that displace their workers with H-1B's work around this? Genuinely curious.
tbh, using anything other than SameTime is probably a big upgrade....
They had a good idea that generated a ton of interest. They got a ton of money to do it. But the team that they put together just didn't have the right skillset mix to pull off something so ambitious. Some of their team posting in their forums and their official updates showed a pretty serious lack of knowledge in some crucial areas. Their original UI and framework was a train wreck (haven't checked back in a year). A number of people bought it to serve as a kind of media aggregator -- run Plex, XBMC, some emulators and original Indie or other content. Then they panicked that lots of people were so interested in getting XBMC/Plex onto it that let out some updates that borked the ability to do that, and really burnt a lot of people
I was ok with the media center parts of it being worthless. I understood that they had a vision for gaming and were focused on it (although executed it poorly), and so was begrudgingly ok with the fact that they were throwing up a walled garden focused on gaming, rather than nurturing a vibrant hacker community. They killed that community, which it turns out was a lot of their customers and things withered. They really could have been a Raspberry Pi with a controller. But their controller just absolutely sucked. Their kickstarted called it "a tribute to all classic controllers out there. This will be the best controller ever." or something to that effect, which was one of the key reasons I bought it. They made it sound like they had spent some very serious effort building an awesome controller. The controller was really, really bad. If you can't play games well with the system, then it's not going to succeed.