Posts by Merrill 54 posts • joined 11 Nov 2008
It sounds a lot like a pitch for more university and academic research funding.
Compared with the US, more Chinese basic research is probably done in government labs and in government controlled industrial labs with universities more dedicated to turning out the manpower and staff them. I'm sure that their academics would like funding to be more like the US, where we fund a myriad of small grants to a multitude of academic principle investigators who actually produce very little.
Once upon a time printers were one of MS's competitive advantages. In the early days of word processing, one of MS Word's few advantages was the length of the list of printers supported. The complexity of PC brands, interface boards, and peripheral makers and models eventually became a "competitive moat" for Microsoft.
There are a number of languages which moved down and right when flipping between the Q1 and Q3 graphs, i.e. they declined in Stack Overflow and increased in Github rank. So maybe rather than a story of no movement in overall rank, there is a story regarding Stack Overflow versus Github. Possibly these languages have other support communities which makes Stack Overflow less important to their users?
Good point. At these rates, it appears to be about equal to the taxes that would have been paid by the manufacturers if they had produced the laptops in the United States. So it obviates the tax advantages of manufacturing offshore.
Plus, it is paid on the value at the border, so it isn't actually 25% (or whatever) of the retail price as the MSM reporting would leave you to believe. Depending on the product and how it is distributed, it is more in the range of half that at retail, given the distribution, marketing, retailing, and general and administrative expenses loaded onto the price within the US.
It was US politicians that encouraged businesses to move production to China for geopolitical purposes to counter Russia and to nobble the Asian Tigers who had become too successful and uppity. Of course we had previously moved business to the Asian Tigers after the Japanese had become too successful and uppity. Now the geopolitical mandate is to move businesses to the rest of SE Asia and South Asia, since the Chinese are too successful and uppity.
Failures of these sorts are vital since they cause providers to exercise their recovery procedures and they cause users to exercise their mitigation, fallback and recovery procedures. Absent randomly occurring failures at some reasonable frequency society would build itself up for real catastrophic failures.
Back in the day of circuit switched digital telephony, the US used mu-Law non-linear Pulse Code Modulation and Europe used A-law non-linear PCM. I was told by a US member of the CCITT (now ITU) standards group that the US had offered to agree to and change to match the Europeans. He was told that regardless of what the US would agree to, Europe would be different.
Softbank owns 80% of Sprint, a US mobile carrier. Sprint is now the smallest, weakest and least profitable of the 4 major carriers, and is thought to be circling the drain. Softbank is attempting to get a merger with T-Mobile approved by the US Department of Justice in order to salvage its investment.
Softbank also owns ARM.
I would think that most females and slightly built Asians and East Africans should not pilot MAXs. Pilots should resemble NFL defensive linemen.
A backup system of mechanically operating the tail surfaces may have been OK on the early, small 737s, but that is a strategy that fails on later, bigger models unless you impose severe physical strength requirements on the pilots.
They have Kylin, a version of Linux, and they have COS for mobiles. These find application in the government and military for obvious reasons.
For widespread use, there needs to be a commercial reason to more widely deploy them. This move by the US may be the trigger that is needed.
Apps, essentially special purpose client software running on the phone, were needed with early generations of mobile data, since they could conserve bandwidth while providing a rich user experience.
With 5G, bandwidth would no longer seem to be a problem, and most functionality could be delivered with a modern mobile browser.
The other purpose of apps seems to be to nickle and dime the user for this and that. However, most useful services can be had for free.
Finally, how many apps does the average smartphone user need? Clearly not the hundreds of thousands that are available in the stores. The vast majority must be downloaded only by the creator, his family and friends. Probably the top thousand apps account for almost all of app usage.
See https://juliacomputing.com/ for Julia products including Julia BOX, an online environment for coding in a browser using Jupyter Notebooks, and Julia Pro, an environment for science and engineering on the desktop including many packages. Note that it is still at 6.4.1, presumably until the package ecosystem is upgraded to 1.0 and fully tested.
Julia BOX is free, and it is the best way to get a feel for the language, especially if you are already using Python Notbooks.
When my grandson watches youtube on a tablet or smartphone, he attends to it constantly.
When youtube is on the flatscreen, he plays with his toys, colors, talks, runs around like a madman, and generally behaves like a kid. He occasionally looks at the flatscreen.
Interesting. I wonder whether SPARC, MIPS, Loongson, Sunway, etc. are vulnerable to Spectre?
We keep forgetting that 1) all scripts and executables shall be executed without modification only from read-only storage, and 2) the read-only storage shall be modified only by a trusted configuration management process.
There are 3 known CVEs related to this issue in combination with Intel, AMD, and ARM architectures. Additional exploits for other architectures are also known to exist. These include IBM System Z, POWER8 (Big Endian and Little Endian), and POWER9 (Little Endian).
https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/speculativeexecution
Due to non-coincident busy hours, Europe to Far East cables via Eurasia are not needed. Instead, the Atlantic and Pacific cables are connected via North America taking advantage of the fact that the three continental pairs do not generate peak traffic at the same times.
(It also makes it easier for Five Eyes to keep tabs on things.)
If engineers/developers conduct IPR analysis, they open themselves up to willful infringement and treble damages.
It is best to ignore intellectual property and then have legal staff conduct a right to use study under client-lawyer confidentiality.
Or so I was told.
between:
- what the business needs to run
- what is installed
- what is running
- what operations is charging the organization to run
- what finance is charging the organization for depreciation
- what vendors are billing the organization for licensing
and now what various cloud vendors are billing the organization for.
These can be amazingly far apart in an corporation with a complex organizational structure and a few thousand developers.
Microsoft offers free Jupyter notebooks in the Azure Cloud at notebooks.azure.com for those interested in investigating Python notebooks. There are also two very basic Python courses from Microsoft on edX suitable for the rank beginner that use the notebooks.
There are free Jupyter notebooks for the Julia language at juliabox.com for those interested in Julia, and there is a Coursera course on Julia that assumes you know other languages.The objective of Julia is to provide the ease of use of Python, R, and Matlab while running as fast as C or Fortran. See juliacomputing.com
Nations have been concerned about ranswomware used by criminals and terrorists to collect funds from the victims. One way to counter this is to release ransomware that does not have the ability to decrypt the files after the ransom is paid. This makes victims unwilling to comply with demands in the future, and decreases the effectiveness of future ransomware attacks as an economic crime.
This appears to be the case with non-Petya. Releasing it in the Ukraine for geopolitical effect is just gravy.
The life of a desktop or notebook is determined by the life of the motherboard and the solid state electronics on it. The mechanical bits, such as fans, disc drives, connectors, and the power supply with short-lived capacitors are easily replaced.
The life of a motherboard is at least 15 years, so an operating system that is sold for 5 years should be supported with regard to security and safety defects for 20 years from first availability.
Too many vendors of proprietary software infrastructure charge full freight for deployments on the passive side of active/passive implementations. Even with active/active implementations, there are additional costs for underutilized licenses, and the design and operation is more complex.
Data centers have two big problems:
- clearances have to be allowed for humans to move about, and
- they have to be filled with air for the humans to breathe.
If you design the data center to be built out, maintained, and upgraded by robots, then the dimensions of packs, crates, racks, aisles, pods, floors, etc. can be done with an eye towards maximizing efficiency rather than designing for human access. Of course, this requires robotics compatible designs for cooling, power distribution, cabling, equipment mounting, etc. as well as servers and networking gear.
It may be possible to fill the data center with a liquid coolant instead of air. The advantages of doing so may be greater at the high densities of equipment enabled by using robots for all physical operations.
The design of the robots and the design of the data center would be done together to jointly optimize efficiency.
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