Posts by Notas Badoff 1061 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Oct 2009
The company cares so much about your ongoing experience with iPhone that it had to thoroughly test the new file system so that it would be trouble-free for all our customers.
(That the method chosen would be a bowel-loosening suggestion at any other company doesn't matter, their bowels are quite reinforced, shored up with Apple's bulging egos.)
" Astronomers will continue to check the results to see if other comets exhibit the same behavior."
They do. This article already said "... and that other comets also emitted similar emissions."
And another article at phys.org also mentions "To verify their results, they tested readings from three other comets, as well, and found similar results."
So comet poots raised a stink cuz they didn't know who dunnit. Now we'll be watching for those 'cropdusting' jokers.
"Next year, Boeing is planning to do some test flights with an autonomous airplane, albeit one loaded with pilots and engineers rather than passengers valuable people like executives."
"The industry is also facing a severe shortage of pilots people will to work for low pay under insane conditions, so Boeing every company is looking for a high-tech solution."
The above is a generic statement that fits *every* industry these days, yes?
At first, and from the description, I thought you shirely meant "Ur-Xenon". (I am of an age having read German science articles in, y'no, German)
But 'U-Xenon' appears to be something different again from article's description. U-Xenon aka U-Xe is the four isotopes that can be generated by fission of uranium. Pu-Xenon / Pu-Xe from plutonium.
What the paywalled article might have been talking about is the opportunity to derive the evolution of xenon isotope abundances, using to captured U-Xe/Pu-Xe in zircons of 4Gya, as opposed to later atmospheric proportions, and then back-tracking to see if posited original proportions match those primordial as supposedly preserved in the comet.
Or something like that... (sure wish science wasn't paywalled)
Edit: found another summary article at Phys.org. But why am I suspicious that author says 'silicon' when I'm thinking 'zircon'. Sure wish science wasn't unsurely interpreted....
@ma1010 "but a little quality detention time and a lot of forced community service..."
Naah, the emphasis must always be on dissuading the other stupid kiddoes. So...
"It is obvious to the court that you grievously lack the maturity expected at even your young age. Your delayed maturity being the problem, it is the court's determination that your age of maturity will be fixed at 30 years of age. Until then you may not have any of the privileges of adulthood, including auto licenses, ability to execute contracts, such as renting abodes, having an independent bank account, ability to purchase alcohol, or being without the daily supervision of adults as authorized by the court. Barring grant of petition to the court, you will remain residing at your parents abode until age 30."
No jail time at all, just jail them at home. Parents would become *very* interested in 'maturity', yes?
"... blaming the delays on "a higher than anticipated demand" from its newly combined customer base."
Really? So allasudden you're getting 3 or 5 times the number of transactions than you've ever seen before? Is there any possible reading of that statement that doesn't make people guffaw?
If PR people can't identify embarrassing phrases, what were they trained to do?
So if I've have one account for family, and a different one for work pursuits, and another for boring dev-related stuff, and a completely different one with a piquant and misleading username for boasting about my nefarious activities, I just give them the first three? That'll be helpful to them, right?
Actually, I'm thinking giving them the dev-related (nerdarious?) accounts should be required for all H-1B visas. Even if no guarantee they're good at dev, at least it's evidence they can successfully pretend to competence?
@lglethal re: silly argument
"Crop mimicry in weeds" pub 1983 in Economic Botany
Just because you don't know about the boogie weeds doesn't mean they don't exist.
Since you Simon zeroed in on that word again I think I'm thinking what you're thinking, that the absurdity would have been even more transparent if they'd said "... accelerate the benefits of cognitive rational technology services for our clients around the world."
Or intelligent, or beneficial. Actually any of the other words that managers might actually understand would serve also. As it is re: management 'cognitive' is a foreign word to them, almost best defined as "what you ain't."
Oh c'mon, get three font designers together with a hip-hop artist and they'll shred this argument to pieces with a catchy rap diss to boot. The only similarity I can see is the near match in color. And that just says it doesn't have to be the color green - blue is a color made for lawyers! (Apologies to those who remember the Samsung S3 launch)
@sorry, what? "@boltar, how do you get innovation but by iteration, speculation and plagiarism?"
Java did so spectacularly badly at this I reference them as a badly managed language.
"iteration, speculation" was thoroughly used for multiple versions as Sun said "let a hundred regexen bloom!" Wasn't it Java 5 or was it Java 6 that *finally* 'introduced' regex support? After half the population had bought one of hundreds of expensive badly implemented commercial packages, with the other half still laboriously hand-coding text parsing routines contributing to a large part of the early security flaws Java apps were(?) famous for.
"plagiarism" is a fabulously good thing when it improves your particular tool of choice. After hemming and hawing for years they finally ended up approving a basic PCRE engine. Frabjous fuck. It was a toy language until they recognized basic interfacing with the external world.
I'm remembering/thinking the community process was ideally started to identify problems outside Sun's myopia. Ah, regular expressions in JSR 59 in Java 1.4, the 5th Java release, and first under the community process.
The one comment echoing my own thoughts, and its already been downvoted. Sheesh,
Google narrowly defines the problem as "It's not the Internet, Stupid. It's the Stupids, Internet!" Um, yes, but where does that leave us?
(Someone asked me a while ago for another bit of less than disagreeable response to the present situation: "It will be educational for many". Seems it will happen, as even the president gets a missed education in how the courts can interfere in his latest great idea. It is called the Constitution. Those couple amendments some treasure highly were appended to much more that all should treasure.)
What do you think the "HR" in "HR 158" signifies? Maybe the import of the sentence "The changes that so concern Collison hail from rules implemented during the Obama administration." escapes you? Congress writes the laws that the administration then has the duty to 'implement'.
The "pass a law and I won't do it" stunts didn't have much chance before (perhaps) the current administration. Recently, around 85% of appointed executive branch positions still weren't filled. Maybe the tweeter will be able to plead 'inability' to implement laws he doesn't like? Is that a strategy?
The argument for fast cycling is well-served by example of the new CSS Grid feature. Even the industry was amazed that all the browsers ('cept Edge of course) implemented Grid support within one month of the specification becoming a recommendation. Instead of the usual uncertainty "when will we be able to use it?", support was turned on "in an instant" and was available last month! Poof! ('cept MS of course).
Apart from the other, visible missteps by the browser developers, supporting progress quickly on standards is very very nice.
BTW: I suspect the browser people laid appropriate emphasis on getting CSS Grid out there partly from embarrassment over how badly CSS Flexbox faired. Not all standards are equally useful. :-(
Enable the Javascript API only when the browser is active and the particular tab is active. Just like the browsers are now throttling Javascript execution within hidden tabs to save battery. APIs are implemented within the browsers, so the browsers must add on the needed security considerations.
Wanted to give you an up-vote as "velocity" vs. "speed" is exactly the sleight of hand that infuriates me. We do want eventual progress achieved, as in "distance towards goal in mind", right?
Unfortunately my reading the definitions and checking around leads me to think that you've got the words 'speed' and 'velocity' reversed above. Where's that nit-picker's icon....
Looked at PDF and that's the numbers! Huawei not terribly unhappy I think. Grasping IP company very unhappy I hope.
Please reassign this judge to family court. Mommy and Daddy want to argue over monetary sillys? Pittance for you and pittance for you and court ordered trust fund for kids education contributed to (heavily) by both combatants. No "scoring points" with this judge!
A question I have is how many flights from distant lands first land in USA before then allowing passengers to connect to flights to Canada, Mexico, South America, etc. If there is consistent heavy pressure against every furiner, even transiting ones, then there are only two avenues open for response. The Canadians could start requiring airlines to have direct flights to Canadian airports. Or the Canadian could bring action against the USA for imposing a blockade on air travel.
If you can't get to a country without going through another imposing onerous roadblocks, what do you do?
fix that component!
This is one of those functional results from having all processes documented that no one credits. First you have to have someone research/investigate and write it all down. At that point some quiet words might be had, resulting in an updated release. Else during the documentation review with at least one warm-brained tech in attendance there might be a burst of laughter, and a change order. Otherwise, when the code/mental defect is eventually found, the words aren't quiet and nobody is laughing.
Who's looking for the "apocryphal stories" in your company?
The Chinese bot creating 100s of articles undoubtedly was just massaging the masses of data about Olympic events, competitors, times, rankings, etc. into easily scannable tables and lists. Wu-hu bot!
Contrast that with economics numbers. Even more voluminous and impenetrable. You could format it for display however you like, but that isn't really going to help anyone read it except for some economists. You need analysis of complex interrelated data, and with respect to higher-level understanding of how all the relationships affect each other, before the meaning of developments becomes clear(er).
Simply spewing a larger quantity of data about car crashes, pistachio prices, murders and missing cats is not going to inform people. It is going to leave more confusion in its wake. Which is going to allow every motivated blogger and radio personality to fill the gap with their own self-serving analyses.
More real data without valid neutral interpretation at the source will expand fake news.
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... We're ... People who need people in the world (Send them your love)
For every stupid patent challenged as invalid and found so, the sponsor of the challenge gets to take away / invalidate / noop one other patent - their choice of which one.
Is some patent costing your company a gold ingot a year in licensing fees? Find another, indefensible patent from the predatory company, challenge and win, and you get to invalidate their pot of gold!
Now that would make a real patent war! Bwahaha!
Thing is, if nothing had been done, and then said cretin *had* done something, everybody would have been screaming for even *more* heads in government and police services.
"You should have done something about such an obvious threat!!" "How could you ignore those death threats?!!" "What does radicalised mean to you!??!"
If he does something, blame the police and judges. If he "did nothing", blame the police and judges.
Society has a "kick me" sign pinned on back.
There is a portion of people writing/guiding bots that are attracted to it for reasons that also should disqualify them from actually running them. Excessively precise and sure of themselves, they can easily maul texts and overrun anyone's ability to oversee exactly what they are doing.
In any collective exercise, the people who can not play well with others simply must be excused from having to do so. I've seen at least two obsessive bot drivers banned from WP in the last 2 years. In spite of all good they had done the project, they finally convinced everyone that they couldn't be trusted to listen to *anyone* else.
"never been backed up on tape due to capacity constraints and the potential impact of this was never communicated to the College, ..." (they said...)
Remember that summaries of hallway/meeting conversations should be emailed to relevant fellows and highers. When your worries are not translated into effective remedies - for *years* - people will not volunteer that ole Ned said this would all end in tears back when. And print out a copy if your email about storage mentioned "losing everything!"
An organization I belong to normally alternates conferences yearly between US and either Europe/Asia. Because of a great hosting proposal for last year, the last two years were non-US. Surprises abound, as suddenly this year's conference will now be in Spain. Spain as a better site for religious tolerance blows my mind, but fits the times.
I'm not sure this organization *can* ever again be hosted in the US. And I think the US might not notice, tolerance passé, more's the pity.
... same problem. Corporate says you can't look at other people's implementations lest we get sued. The self-confident say the standards docs are all I need to code this easy protocol. Only later do they look at other implementations and realize they didn't know the half of it.
If you are coding for you - only - go ahead and ignore the rest of the world's experiences. If you are coding for others, for correctness, or for the long-term, consult at least a few other implementations to find the corner cases you never would have thought of in a thousand years.
The last three times Apple has screwed up a date/time transition or computation proved that they never thought to check non-Apple sources. Almost anybody else's code would have opened their eyes.
Whether you find the language disagreeable or not, if you doubt the utility of checking the second oldest continually maintained network protocol libraries, on CPAN, you're being [[see title]].
Yes, but not as you thought of.
Consider that he might have had a booth there and was interviewing people for employment in his local business.
Now would the attendees of said careers fair want to be employed in an IT career anywhere near that locality? Really really great when the local Chamber of Commerce torpedoes future local commerce. *That* is the aspect that should be blown up in local newspapers!
Open Source is people. Hence the difficulties, and the victories.
Open Source is not about being fettered by corporate, rather it is about being self-harnessed and self-directed towards common goals together with others of like mind.
Think of a couple of open source projects you use - most likely the contributors have shifted around greatly over time, with others coming in to infuse new oomph and ideas every so often. This is a hidden strength of open source projects. I'm thinking of two where the original developers haven't been heard from for more than a decade, but the code is maintained and expanded by what is perhaps the 4th generation now. (And, yes, it's a small %age of new projects with lots of counter examples - no panaceas here)
Phil Gramm: Bankers are smart people. They know what they are doing.*
Bruce Schneier: We're going to have to have regulations because this is important.
One argued we didn't need to regulate because we should just trust the smart people. Then 2008. And we still don't regulate those actors.
The latter says the implications of trust without verification are unthinkable. Because of the dangers to society, etc.
Oh, I don't know. Let's roll the dice. What could go wrong?
* BTW: I can't find the original quote easily anymore. In this era of fake news it is very disturbing that real life can disappear.
Goals, goals, goals. But first, the most important goal:
"To get rich is glorious!" (致富光荣)
That is, before the goals you want, we must enrich the country by enriching the people. Once they have entrenched the yuan as the dominant world currency, then they can bestow beneficence on citizen and world alike.
(If you looked at world history, and with a long view, seeing the successes/failures and importantly the misdirected/mistimed efforts, in what order would you implement development, diplomacy, democracy, beneficence? And I think that is why the majority of Chinese aren't too vocal about direction - they are going along with "A rising tide floats all junks." I haven't seen too many missteps since Mao. Lots of face stomping, but not development missteps.)
Being able to stop one or two ICBMs from North Korea will definitely please a few constituencies, yes? Letting NK know that they are impotent and have no bargaining power except how many of their people they can starve this year ... is useful, and for everybody.
One can only imagine the polite language exchanged between China and US if in a fit of pique NK tries out their new stick. "Would you like to be the first through the door labelled 'Juche' or should we?" Somehow I think the closer bordering power would be pretty damned quick through that door.
How strange a situation: that China has fostered Kim's Bunion for all these years, forcing everyone to work towards relieving the induced anxiety, including work on interceptors, and now that same poxy stepchild is reason enough for *China* to need missile interceptors.
I had been mulling over something repeatedly read, about how some manufacturing or assembly is moving back to first-world countries because of shipping. Hadn't really understood this, until unloading the clothes washer this morning, with its proud "made in <homeland>" label.
When the size of a widget exceeds some factor of profit margin it will be much smarter to move the assembly, perhaps some of the manufacturing, of the widget closer to the market area. But if the size is 'small', go Laotian.
Cross-ocean shipping something that is 20,000 to a container can be justified even at low margins. A different widget at 200 to a container would need stunning margins.
So the wall-to-wall carpet will likely be manufactured locally. The furniture will be shipped knocked-down and assembled locally. The house will be mostly manufactured locally. Only the concrete driveway will be (proudly!) manufactured and assembled locally.
The electronics are from Asia. The artwork is from Italy. Only the paperwork and weather will forever be local. (sigh)
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