zgramana

The real takeaway is that researchers may have found a potential test for string theory.

Its presumed lack of falsifiability has been one of its drawbacks and has been the source of some of the controversy around it.

Finding a potential test that could be conducted with telescopes instead of high energy particle accelerators would be a big moment in modern physics.

You may be surprised to learn that your face is your least identifying trait online. You network of friends/followers/likes identifies you far more readily—even if you use a random username.[1]

Managing your privacy is a lot like CPU side channel attacks. It forces you to re-evaluate your fundamental assumptions about what information can be exploited.

[1] http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol7/p377-korula.pdf

Surprised to see the author suggest that the C64 keyboard did not include the graphics glyphs on the keys.

Both the VIC-20 and the C64 both had them, albeit printed on the front vertical face instead of the horizontal face like the PET.

Moreover, the VIC-20 and the C64 keys include the box glyphs as well so you could see what character you’d get via CTRL and the ‘C=‘ (“Commodore”) key.

The Wikipedia page* states PETSCII includes 192 characters, but the author seems to suggest it’s at most a 7-bit charset. I was a little surprised to find that out after reading the article.

Fun walk down memory lane.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PETSCII

Given than Mono-the first open source C# implementation-was used to build banshee going back 15+ years, C# on *nix deserves more credit than is given here.

There’s been a lot of promising work done on IEC by a startup called EMC2. Their reactor/fusor design is called Polywell.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

For a mature, non-Google open source _and_ open hardware option: https://solokeys.com/

Software: https://github.com/solokeys/solo

Hardware: https://github.com/solokeys/solo-hw

The Community Edition is open source, though the Enterprise Edition has some proprietary extensions.

It’s admittedly not at all obvious from the repo name, but the following is the top level repo for Couchbase Server (which uses Google’s `repo` tool): https://github.com/couchbase/manifest

My first touchscreen Garmin unit, circa 2007, definitely suffered from reliability issues in FL summer heat. Just keeping it on the dash in direct sunlight while driving was enough to affect its operation.

I’m guessing it didn’t effect their brand much because other companies like Tom Tom were aggressively targeting the entry-level market segment, and then the iPhone came out the same year.

The number people who had these higher-end units in hot southern states was likely just too small to significantly tarnish Garmin’s brand goodwill.

Soon enough most people switched to using their phone once the software was good enough (circa 2009 IIRC).

Xamarin and Microsoft alum Bryan Costanich got some friends together to rescue Netduino and “reboot” it.

They wanted to maintain that same sense of delight for .NET devs, but also modernize the aging hardware platform and replace the restricted .NET Micro Framework with full .NET Standard support on the software side.

Several friends from the old Xamarin docs team worked their magic on the Wilderness docs site—which is why it’s so good.

Love this! I just wish the Bill of Rights had been a pull request that was merged once the 11 ratifying states approved it.

JyNI* was created to bridge Jython to Numpy. I don’t have any personal experience with it, but one need not wait for a GraalVM solution.

* https://www.jyni.org/

If you haven’t checked it out already, you should take a look at Jython. As the name suggests, it’s a Java implementation of Python.

https://www.jython.org/

This sort of self-dealing has been going on since the 1940’s, and was just the kind of problem that President Eisenhower alerted us to in his prophetic speech* warning the country about the military-industrial complex:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

*https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp

I think the essay would have been better served getting to what appears to be the point much more directly:

- The VW scandal was so shocking because executives and engineers exploited a societal taboo against lying

- Was sustained for so long by exploiting another taboo against placing personal advantage over honesty

- Signs of fraud were dismissed because people assumed successful executives would never violate these taboos, leading them to accept misleading explanations and discounting the possibility of a cover-up.

I’m more than a little surprised nobody has chimed in advocating Openfire, which is Apache 2.0, standards based (XMPP et. al.), extensible, and also has some pretty nice browser clients out there (e.g. conversejs).

When I read this I thought it was sarcastically “proving the point” of the root comment.

MSNBC’s programming in the US evenings is largely opinion/political talk, and isn’t presented as news but as editorial. One can object to opinions, but it is unfair to criticize journalists for op/ed content—just like with newspapers. Very often the journalists personally disagree with opinion/editorial page content, but everyone understands that content isn’t bound by journalism’s standards.

The problem with that map is that the annual average obscures the wide seasonal variation, which was the main thrust of my comment. The high winds come during the dry season, then die down during the bulk of the wet season.

If you live on the East Coast then you take the wind for granted. On the Pacific Coast, the winds blow fast and furious, especially as you go up in altitude. Its very hard to control a burn here on most days, especially given the water cycle here. There is vastly more fuel in October and November than earlier in the year as the last rains are about 6 months past.

Controlled burns are probably done best during a short 1-2 month window when ground cover is dry enough, but those are also typically high wind months. To have any control of a burn here you need to be lucky (low winds for a few days), it needs to be a very small prescribed area, and probably needs to be at less than peak fuel.

This all amounts to a very small window for doing a prescribed burn. Given how big many of the forests are, and how much of the state is covered with them, I don’t see how you can have much of any control over a prescribed fire started there.

Certainly not without the heroic effort it takes to put out wildfires. I don’t know how we can ask firefighters to risk their life for a prescribed burn.

Microsoft skeptics fail to realize that most of the mid- and upper-level executives increasingly spent their entire career using, creating, and contributing to F/OSS software. Many of them were involved with early MSFT OSS efforts back in 2008-2010, and many came from deep Linux/OSS community via acquisition (Nat Friedman). Hell, the creator of GNOME, Miguel de Icaza, someone who bears the scars of the Microsoft War on OSS, now resides happily at Microsoft now.

For whatever faults MSFT has today, any sort of antipathy or guile towards OSS or Linux is not one among them. Credit where credit is due. Too many are stuck reliving past glories.

If you want an actual OSS bogeyman, you need only direct your attention to Oracle. Too many transferred their goodwill towards Sun to a company has, among other things, tried to claim Java’s APIs as their own intellectual property. That’s a company that still merits this kind of hand-wringing.

You can explain Apple’s problems with a much simpler albeit banal reason: its sheer size. It has grown massive.

They took over the old Sun campus in Sunnyvale while the UFO was under construction, and shortly thereafter the word was that those teams would be remaining there long term as the HQ was already overbooked. Apple also bought up a lot of space in San Jose a couple of years ago.

Apple pioneered small and fast teams of veterans. But it doesn’t scale well to this size. It’s a challenge to effectively coordinate hundreds (thousands?) of teams building various integrated hardware, software, and service components.

Ironically, it’s the daily activities such as flying glorious ocean fish on aircraft which dump huge amounts of CO2 and water vapor into the stratosphere, or trucking them in refrigerated trucks all across the country, that led to this problem.

I know you were /s here, but I point this out because there is a huge amount of personal responsibility implied by climate change. Even if one doesn’t believe humans are driving it, climate change is happening and humans have to deal with it. From a mitigation perspective, individual consumer choices have a large bearing in his successful we will ultimately be.

People don’t like the implications, though, and either most people don’t connect the dots or are in denial that their choices count. Sadly, this trend is worse among climate change believers.[1]

Kidding aside, ordering less fresh ocean fish during winter is a meaningful personal start.

[1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/7/climate-skep...

Authoritarianism is antithetical to rule of law. It “forces people to act against their own self-interest because The Authority says so.” This is why the US has long described itself as a “nation of laws”: to set itself apart from (non-constitutional) monarchies, oligarchies, and dictatorships.

I haven’t seen any journalists confuse the two, but of course people offering an opinion are free to confuse them.

Cite your sources. The whole concept of a legal system is predicated on that very idea.

That's a fair concern, and one they now will now have to adequately address in order to keep users content.

But unless you are AWS or Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft isn't competing with you. They may have similar products/services out there at some level, but these days, if it's not driving a lot of Azure adoption/retention then it's not something Microsoft is really going to compete against. That even goes for Windows. Microsoft is putting increasing amounts of money into the Linux ecosystem these days as well.

It works great on macOS. ;)

Support for a tertiary platform (in terms of addressable market share) like Linux desktops comes much later in this kind of product’s maturation.

Teams needs to first gain wider enterprise adoption on Windows and macOS first before they will look at allocating resources to additional platforms. Better off sticking with Slack on Linux until then.

SMH. I used to work for Nat at Xamarin before it was acquired by MSFT. GitHub and Xamarin have had a long and deep relationship going back to at least 2012 (that I’m aware of anyway).

Xamarin was run on GitHub. We never used any other version control system. GitHub used Xamarin extensively as well. There were a lot of overlapping social graphs between the engineers of both as well.

Miguel and Nat both helped to make F/OSS and Linux what it is today—thank them if you like GNOME. Nat represents MSFT in this deal, and that’s great news for F/OSS enthusiasts everywhere.

Nat and Scott Guthrie aren’t responsible for the “sins of their fathers.” Time to move on from the Microsoft hating. That era has been over for a while.

Thanks for that clarification. I wish the popular literature on the topic took similar pains to point this out. I can’t help but wonder if this is the root of much of the misguided interest in epigenetics.

Regarding mechanisms, I was under the impression that DNA methylation was widely accepted as a primary mechanism for epigenetic inheritance. Not so much, or is that one of those artificial scenarios you referenced?

From a hardware perspective, it’s an easy problem to solve. This is a wetware problem, however.

Back when ME’s were discrete, you would inevitably have some with, some without. Someone would order a bunch of machines without them to “save money” or they bought a model that just didn’t have an ME add on offered by the OEM.

That meant that occasionally you had to actually have the machine in your presence to service it. You end up designing two processes/procedures based on whether you are remote or not. Lack of ME’s actually increased labor costs by reducing the number of machines a tech could manage (on average).

Having an CPU fuse essentially winds the clock back to the discrete ME days. Someone will place an order order for SKU ENCH-81-U instead of EMCH-81-U and you end up with 500 machines with the ME fuse blown. Inevitably there will be a big enough restock fee that someone in accounting will say “just use them.”

(The same applies to things like having/not having a TPM module, etc.)