Posts by martinusher 3640 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Feb 2015
Although the compiler/interpreter is quite happy parsing that expression without the spaces humans are not.
Being a bit Old School I tend to put parentheses around things even if they're not, strictly speaking, needed. But then I don't like tracking down obscure faults with a debugger, its way easier to not give the system a chance to get it wrong in the first place.
The alternative in the closed Windows or Mac environments is essentially "Throw away your equipment and buy new stuff". Yes, its a pain to have to build stuff, especially when people keep changing versions of things like compilers for no particular reason at all apart from always wanting to be on "the latest", but its either build or recycle. There is no middle ground.
I am always wary of user friendly gizmos because often all they do is wrap a dialog box around a command line utility. This works provided your workflow matches exactly what the designers had in mind but if it doesn't you're facing a confusing set of (often out of date) help information (assuming its there in the first place), an often misleading wiki (assuming you can access it) and eventually the prototype command (assuming you can find it). I always marvel at the way that Apple, for example, can take a simple concept and turn it into a convoluted nightmare designed with only one purpose in mind -- feeding money into the company. (Windows isn't much better -- its always grated on me that they used the backslash for path separators, are stuck with drive letters and call directories 'folders', little meaningless things that are designed to differentiate their offerings but invariably end up causing problems.)
>You don't need multiple antennae to monitor the weather.
You will need something to communicate measurements back to the base station. A typical mobile phone has several antennas in it; I'd guess that this unit used similar frequency bands so it would also have 'several antennas'.
We're assuming that its some kind of top secret surveillance device but its not really that secret if you can see it with the naked eye.
The generic TV news program has one or two people sitting at a desk in front of a green screen reading from a teleprompter. The image displayed to the viewer is almost entirely fake so I could see the temptation to try to replace the humans (and their salaries) by software, making the entire studio redundant.
The content suggests that its a Chinese company trying to develop this -- they'll take a couple of generic news items (Chinese generic news items) and use them to generate convincing looking news programs. Obviously from a modern Western perspective its Nefarious Propaganda coming from the State Machine but this is missing the point -- propaganda is just perspective and there's essentially no difference between 'their' propaganda and 'our' propaganda, its just selling impressions and ideas. (So it pays to be skeptical.)
I actually prefer to read my material because TV news is essentially 'content free' -- a story is told in a few seconds using easily manipulated imagery and selective quotes to tell a predetermined story. The only problem with it is that far too much material comes from anonymous spokespersons - PR plants, in other words - and a surprising amount is downright inaccurate. (Science education has been lagging for some years so we appear to be feeling the consequences!)
(As for 'meddling', this is one of the biggest canards sold to the US public (at least). US politics is dominated by Big Money -- a local race (Los Angeles Mayor) had the losing candidate spending something north of $100 million on their campaign, for example. Much of the money in politics is funneled from 'dark' sources -- attempts to pass laws forcing disclosure have been repeatedly stymied by legislators and courts -- and the sums involved are astounding. It would be difficult for a nation state to be heard without investing vast sums of money. Meanwhile our own State Department directly and indirectly spends a lot of taxpayer funds on 'promoting democracy' -- i.e. meddling -- in elections all over the world to ensure the correct result -- and Heaven Help anyone who chooses the wrong candidate!)
Typical modern techbro -- reinvents The Wheel, claims its all modern and wonderful (except that it appears to be square with an offset axle "to improve the user experience").
Of course we use telemetry in our prototype code. We've been doing it for decades. We just don't need to tell Big Brother all about it -- and we remove it before we make production versions.
I plowed through the 'sentencing memorandum' to try and find out exactly what was involved. Its important because you never know quite when law enforcement will come knocking (in the US it typically just kicks the door in and points a gun at you)(no, I'm not joking, its become quite the cliche)(and sometimes they get the address wrong). They're not very explicit -- "power supplies and storage devices" could be a couple of computer PSUs and disks, for example. "Enterprise software development licenses" sound like Microsoft development toolsets, who knows?
What is obvious is that there's a bit of a disconnect between the DoJ and Real Life In Iran. The DoJ maintains that the place is hermetically sealed off with only a few items leaking through due to determined smugglers. Real Life appears in the form of regular youTube videos made by a couple of people walking around Tehran. What the videos show us are pretty normal looking places, nothing like you'd expect from reading our media or listening to our government, and what's notable (apart from the number of women in normal clothing) is just how prevalent technology is there. I suppose sanctions must have hit hard somewhere but you'd never notice it (they seem to have a better choice of phones than we have in the US)(including 'the latest' models). The overall impression is our DoJ is living in some weird Beltway Bubble which actually makes it dangerous to us common folk.
The impression given by SpaceX is that there's a global mesh network but the reality (looking at the maps showing the location of satellites and their coverage area) is that there tends to be a chain over a particular service area. This chain works with a ground station. The location of the satellites and the ground stations are well known.
Its probably not 'Musk' drawing the line but rather SpaceX's legal department. While these terminals are being used for humanitarian or even defensive purposes then they're effectively shielded from any liability arising from their use. The moment they're used to guide offensive munitions then SpaceX becomes a party to whatever damage is done and could be sued over and death and damage caused. This is a rather fine point, the sort of thing that's easily missed by someone from the UK, but I reckon SpaceX could be exposed enough to where it could cause them significant problems. So, again keeping with the legal theme, there's probably something in the T&Cs that restricts how the terminals are used and gives SpaceX the right to withdraw service to any terminals not used under those T&Cs. I'd guess that SpaceX was initially OK with this because of the "Don't ask, don't tell" concept -- they wouldn't go looking for violations unless some idiot started boasting about them at which point they're forced to act.
The same reasoning could be behind the US (and other countries') reluctance to send Ukraine offensive weapons. (This doesn't mean "weapons that can't be used offensively", though.)
(For those wondering why the same logic doesn't apply to the entire firearms industry in the US -- you'd think that after your weapon was used to off a dozen schoolkids or so that there's be a liability issue. The industry is specifically indemnified by an Act of Congress -- i.e. Law -- so we'll continue to pump the place full of more and more weapons (400 million, give or take, at this time) and just wring our collective hands and act surprised when another dozen or so people get offed by 'a lone gunman' having A Very Bad Day.)
RISC-V comes from the same family as MIPS processors. Anyone who's worked with MIPS will know that they're rather fast. The fundamental architecture isn't that much different from ARM's so expect RISC-V to be able to do anything that an ARM can but just a bit better. (The original ARM was conceived as a low power/ low performance / minimal resources service processor; its been extended since then, obviously, but like the x86 its a lower performance architecture that's been extended and optimized.)
Its normal to have swap space on a filesystem where virtual memory can be paged to, extending the process space. On an 'ix' system it uses a dedicated disk partition, on Windows it seems to be a hulking great file in the main filesystem. All normal stuff. If the system has too many processes for the amount of RAM then its going to spend a lot of time paging memory in and out which makes the system crawl.The 'fix' would be to rationalize what's running at any one time but in this world of cheap hardware and multicore processors the temptation is to just keep adding to the hardware resources.
This explains why my humble computer runs Linux perfectly but tends to be a bit anemic running Win10. Its not 'the user experience', its that Windows is running far too much unnecessary crap and everything is is such a tangle that its easier to just say "it need x Gigabytes to run" than to sort this pile of spaghetti out. (Performance hits are also likely because of the continual network traffic which being web based is likely to include a lot of either busy/wait loops or frequent process swaps.)(Hence multicores -- the ideal solution to running sloppy code fast!)
Google is just selling/renting a service, a service that allows a customer to target adverts to a particular demographic in specified marke4ts. It could be cosmetics, it could be pizza, its all the same. This particular product is ethically dubious but then the only requirement for the company is to obey the letter of the law.
The NOTAMs that get issued most often are notifying people of TFAs -- areas there you can't fly because of something or another. That 'something or another' is invariably a VIP movement so it needs to close down all general aviation (and R/C model) aviation inside a 35 nautical mile radius. National Security is at stake and nothing, absolutely nothing, is as important as clearing the airspace for our politicians (and the occasional NFL game).
This is what was galling about the recent outage. Natural disasters like volcanoes erupting that might be a danger to aviation don't happen that often and when they do they tend to make the national news. So the loss of the NOTAM system for 12-24 hours won't cause too much of a problem. When it comes to National Security -- or, specifically, the security of anyone in government important enough to be able to cause one to be issued -- then there's nothing more important. The rest of us plebs can just sit around and wait.
(I'm pretty sure that groups.io could do the job of distributing these notices and do it far cheaper and more reliably than some home-made system.)(Especially as it doesn't require reliable delivery. Its your responsibility to make sure that you're aware of all current NOTAMS --- not receiving one is not an allowable excuse for violating whatever you violated.)
Well, they (the US government) did say they were going to use social media information to 'track down terrorists' post 2001. You'd be very naive to think otherwise.
There's a fine print thing in the US, though. If the government indulged directly in collecting (and collating) information then they'd run into a legal minefield. There's all sorts of laws that prevent them from doing so. However, if they buy the information from a corporate provider then that's perfectly OK. So its a win -- they get anything they want, the corporations make money. Perfect symbiosis.
I watched a video recently which contrasted the domains accessed by a brand new Windows 11 laptop and a fresh Windows XP install just ater restart. The video is titled "Has Windows Become Spyware?" and is at https://youtu.be/IT4vDfA_4NI .
The answer is a resounding 'yes'. WinXP just contacts Microsoft's update site. Win11 goes off on a lengthy conversation with too many tracking sites to conveniently list.
I'm not excusing Chinese phones. They're all at it and its time we collectively put our foot down and told them to knock it off. Companies might feel they need the revenue but I think their entire brokered information / advertising model is broken but nobody dare say so because it would cause a huge part of the 'technology' industry to implode. I also object to this sort of invasiveness because its written so crudely that its all just busy/wait loops waiting on sockets -- the very worst type of code imaginable -- which has fed the need for multi-core processors, a Death Spiral of lousy programming practice consuming ever more computing (and network) resources that we've somehow convinced ourselves is leading edge software.
Once you replace "the Chinese" by "a Chinese company" then everything makes more sense. There are a lot of entrepreneurs in China all looking for an angle, some secret sauce to sell. Just like in California, a place which has become synonymous with startup culture, among the really good ideas there will be a whole bunch of humdrum ones and some serious lemons.
Its difficult to get a sense of scale but I was told that the Chinese middle classes outnumbers the entire population of the US.. Startups tend to follow the money and currently 'the country with the most loose capital waiting to be deployed is China (especially as more traditional places to park it -- the US, for example -- are proving problematical).
Apple used to make things in CA but they moved it offshore to increase profits, if I recall correctly it turned a gross profit on an iPhone/iPod from 46c on the dollar to 71c.
The problem that Apple's got is that the Chinese can not only assemble things like phones, they can also design them. Anyone who's been following the Huawei saga closely will know that Huawei phones were not only better than iPhones in value for money terms but also better quality -- they were the largest selling brand in the world before the US government blacklist. Since Huawei also make the infrastructure equipment and had a large lead in modern technologies such as 5G the only way that traditional companies like Apple could compete would be to try to shut the competition down. This might work in the short term but ultimately its a losing strategy so while companies like Apple might have a lot of cash on hand (where is it parked?) it doesn't have that much of a future outside any walled garden it can control.
...not to mention that if the courts had awarded the $15 billion that the plaintiffs were asking for the result would have been catastrophic for business because suddenly every investor will expect to be compensated for every dip in stock price, regardless of the cause.
The fault is with people (and their bots) who just surge around markets looking for a quick killing, blindly following every rumor and generally causing instability. If they lost a bundle because they couldn't evaluate a one line message properly then its their (financial) funeral. They're a menace to both financial markets and to society as a whole. (...and Musk is right in regretting ever going near capital markets -- the predatory, destructive and incapable of seeing beyond a quarter or two.)
Markets tend to be cyclical at the best of times but adding political manipulation into the mix is likely to make them even more unpredictable. China is both a major supplier and a huge market for semiconductors so disrupting that market is going to make things more unstable -- its like a 20% sales drop for some companies. Since "the market" -- the financial markets -- punish severely a company's failure to meet its expected financial targets papering over the cracks caused by the missing sales revenue is going to be impossible.
This was developed from an accidental flyaway of a barrage balloon that trailed its steel cable after it. Caused all sorts of damage to the electrical distribution system on the Continent (due to the fault detection systems being designed to detect phase to ground faults, not phase to phase).
I was going to post a remark about quantum computers being used to crack encryption but I thought that was just about the only application that they're being developed for at the moment (its not called that in most articles, its all about factoring into primes and so on.....same thing).
But then I thought "Reg, you really need to get your act together when reporting on China". Its yet another article implying -- if not directly stating -- that Chinese people are intellectually inferior hive mind types who work for starvation wages, live in a state of fear and so on. The usual cliches. When you think that the UK, a country that practically invented computing, can't actually make a computer because it abandoned its industrial base decades ago then it might be time for a bit of introspection.
As for Chinese nationalism -- you attack a country with your dumb hybrid wars what do you expect? I know that if I was, for example, a Huawei employee I'd be working around to clock to stick it to the West. (The company's employee owned as well -- a bit of extra incentive.) Multiply that over a nation the size of Europe with a third of the world's population and we've just made ourselves a heap of (unnecessary) trouble.
Just being in an area is not usually probable cause (unless its something like a January 6th riot). So its really knowing that such and such a device was in this area, was used by so and so and combined with other evidence makes a case. Just because you're a random piece in a evidence puzzle doesn't mean that you're relevant to an investigation -- investigators discard numerous apparent leads before they hit on the right one. (Things only go wrong when they start with a suspect, a piece of flimsy or non existent evidence and then work back from there. But then you don't need technology to fit someone up, in fact its a positive impediment should it prove your fit wasn't involved in the crime.)
I now only run Windows at home when I absolutely have to and so enjoy a worry free, quiet, life.
The problem is that the IT cabal in a typical workplace is part of the same Administrative group that includes HR, Legal and the like. It communicates with, influences and takes orders directly from the executives. Due to the training such people have they only know Windows -- everything else is alien and threatening -- so Windows gets mandated whether its an appropriate choice or not. If Linux has to be used on some systems then its treated like an infectious disease. Engineering is never consulted about any IT policies, we just have to live with them even if they negatively impact our work.
The reason why I refer to the IT "Cabal" is that their training is less engineering and more 'how to drive certain vendor's boxes' -- like a lot of business education it has more in common with seminary training than education proper, its a process that teaches the lore and weeds out any of wavering faith. Training in this field is directed towards vendor specific certification and (based on first had knowledge and interactions with such people) often falls well short of the standard of understanding I'd assume was minimal for this job. (But then we actually design the stuff so what do we know?)(I've had many an interesting conversation with these techs who seem to think that all engineers are just incarnations of Christopher LLoyd in one of his more maniac roles.)
Government police in the UK was squarely behind financialization, the primacy of 'services' over 'manufacturing'. Government doesn't need to own or subsidize industries to have an industrial policy, it starts with educational policies, continues with tax policies and the provision or guarantee of credit. Instead of a sensible industrial policy you got the "Big Bang", the total liberalization of financial markets. If an industry could grow and thrive under this regime, then that's OK because its all grist to the financial mill. Anything else -- and I mean anything else (expect any industries needed for defence and maintaining civil order) that's not making the right level of profit can just go to the wall.
China's had a bit of recent problem with colonialism but this is all behind them now. The actual society -- country if you will -- dates back some 5000 years so leads to a rather different perspective on long term policy goals.
I'd be extremely surprised if Huawei and everyone else in China including the government didn't see this coming. The conclusion that they'll draw is that if you're successful and in danger of beating the US at what it thinks is its rightful game then you're going to be in trouble. It doesn't matter if the product's airliners (Brazil and Canada have fallen foul of that and Airbus has learned to tread very carefully) or semiconductors or whatever. Win the race and we'll come after you with everything we've got.
(That especially applies to selling oil in local currencies rather than petrodollars. Wars have been started because countries started trading oil in local currencies rather than our fiat.)
You might recall that when the UK found itself in possession of oil reserves there was much talk in the government of using the bonanza to revitalize industry. This was in the latter half of the 1970s. The government changed and all that nonsense was put in its proper place (the trash). In fact things went the other way with an orgy of privatization which did do a lot to release money for the economy but eventually led to a bit of an economic hangover.
>t isn't cheaper when you factor in training, migrations from current systems and support + support contracts (with the latter often being a significant cost even if the only perceivable benefit is having someone to escalate to/shout at).
That's a very convincing argument -- up to a point. From a "Developer who's not developing applications for the Microsoft's platform" perspective Windows is an unmitigated pain in the butt that consumes immense amounts of effort coping with its quirks and deficiencies. You cope because you have to, not because you want to, and the complaints about the negative impact on development schedules is just shrugged off as noise from the lower orders.
Meanwhile management uses tools like Excel for purposes it was never intended for -- managing projects, for example. The final straw for me was forcing us to use OneDrive for common file storage. It showed just plain arrogant tone deafness by management -- they've had more then their money's worth out of me and I don't need to spend any more time knocking my head against artificial brick walls.
There are signs that MSFT has recognized there's a world outside Office which is why it made the land grab for Git and started incorporating foreign environments into its product line. But those of us who are aware of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" are rightly wary of such things.
It doesn't matter what it is -- chips not from China, tanks to Ukraine, you name it and the implicit assumption is that 'they' -- the other -- is inherently inferior to us so we only need to mention that we're doing something and the opposition rolls over and plays dead.
The idea gets especially ludicrous when you see the sheer number of Chinese people working in the US. Obviously they're all naturalized, loyal Americans (and many are nth generation) but the one thing you can say about China is that "there's plenty more where they came from". So assuming that Chinese people here are roughly the same as Chinese people there -- you don't get a sudden boost in intelligence when you get that naturalization certificate (its just a piece of paper.....) -- then there's a lot of grounds for thinking we're doomed.
But then its only $50 million. Just a few schools or a bridge or two.
You get ChatGPT to read what it produces, of course.
Conceptually, the system should disappear up its own rear with a 'pop'.
Seriously, its like any other technology. It could be useful but you just know that 90%+ of its output is going to be the press release equivalent of cat videos. But considering what exudes from the typical marketing department is mostly worthless pap anyway nobody will notice. Or care.
(Note how Tesla disbanded its marketing / communications departments and seems to be doing just fine. Currently reports are that something over 18% of new car sales in California are electric cars with the bulk being Teslas.)
My run in with the DMV happened about 10 years ago. I got a threatening letter from the DMV claiming the check I'd used to pay the registration on my old Jeep some six months before had bounced and IU had to send them money and stuff "OR ELSE". Since I'm on quite good terms with my bank I doubted that they'd have bounced a check for $72 without telling me and this was indeed the case. They helpfully dug around in their records and came up with the facsimile of the cancelled check. Should be no problem -- I sent all this stuff off to the DMV.....
...and got back another threatening letter. This saga continued for ages (every time you pinned down someone in Sacramento they'd be replaced by another an the whole process restarted). Eventually I rather suspect my bank paid them out of some slush fund to shut them up. Because, in one F2F conversation in a local bank branch -- coincidentally one near the DMV -- it turned out that mistakes in titles were quite common and impossible to fix unless you 'knew' someone. Vehicles with liens on them due to loans have this recorded on the title paperwork -- the "pink slip" -- and getting this title cleared requires everything on all paperwork to match exactly. If it doesn't ..... well, without knowing someone that can do you a favor you're screwed. (Leading to me suspecting that the sole reason for this particular bank branch was its proximity to a DMV field office).
I like paper titles. Think of them as a distributed backup for the database. If the computer screws up I've got the paper. If the paper gets lost then there's the computer record. Follows all the backup rules, being offsite, different technologies and so on.
The flaw in blockchain as currency is that it changes hands too often. This churning is time consuming and wasteful (expensive) so people then come up with ways to simplify transactions, often by imitating a bank. This opens the door to wide scale fraud -- the possibilities are only limited by your imagination.
All blockchain implies for a vehicle database is that each database record has a check field which is easy to verify but impossible (i.e. very expensive) to spoof. The database is journalling -- all records are kept as distinct records rather than updates and a link to a previous record is held in the next record. Nothing particularly new here. I doubt that Sacramento would encourage the public to maintain copies and manage updates.
The DMV is just like the UK's DVLC. Anyone with any experience of Swansea will know that once something goes wrong then its basically not fixable unless you happen to know someone. Swansea 'lost' my UK license years ago (fortunately I have a CA one) because there's no way to contact or otherwise interact with that organization. Sacramento is the same but at least has field offices; our local one has pleasant staff, is easy to access but it won't do you a whole lot of good a lot of the time because 'the system' just makes them all into jobsworths.
(Incidentally, anyone here remember logbooks and the practice of getting them stamped at the Post Office when it was time to renew the tax disc? Now that's a distributed database!)
....was probably due to significant price cuts.
It may be a function of where I live but there are more and more of these things about. Its one of the more common makes of new cars in our area. I don't know why except that everyone I know who owns one seems to really like it.
At least they should be but knowing the sort of people who'd find it essential to build appliances with 'connectivity' its probably exchanging a lot more information -- and using more bandwidth.
I am not afraid of Russia or China knowing what I'm cooking for dinner. I am afraid of global connectivity that serves no useful purpose. I'm really afraid of things starting to not work because some site has gone down or some subscription has expired.
I've spent a fair bit of my working life connecting all sorts of random bits and pieces of industrial equipment to networks. If I thought for a moment that my microwave or kettle or whatever needed global connectivity I could have added it literally decades ago. I haven't, and its not because I don't know how to or never thought of it, its because I thought it was a fun gimmick of limited utility that exposes the machinery to endless abuse (although if I had done it there wouldn't be any room for hackers and other 'security issues' -- frankly, I don't trust typical IoT programmers to know how to build secure code.)
Huawei's cardinal sin was owning about two thirds of the patents needed to implement a standards based 5G. In the normal course of things this wouldn't be a big deal since the standards process uses a patent pool so that the playing field is level for all participants and royalties are capped at reasonable, predictable and stable levels and shared equitably among the participants. It was was messed up by government action -- when the US took action against Huawei it was at least two years ahead of other players and ready to ship both network and subscriber equipment.
The position that Huawei was is wasn't unusual. I believe that Qualcomm had the same position with 4G. Anyway, the result for us in the US is that we don't have 5G, we have a mismash of incomplete, vendor specific solutions that are more a product of the marketing department than the engineers. This is why customers report disappointing service with 5G, it rarely, if ever, improves performance over 4G. So having held Huawei back we congratulate ourselves on winning the battle. But the war is well and truly lost.
C is a systems programming language, its what you write other languages and language support libraries in. Apart from assembler its the closest you'll get to the metal and like assembler you really have to know what you're doing to use it properly. So just as you can screw up royally writing in assembler you can easily screw up using C. Its not a problem with the language, its just that the wrong programmers are using it for the wrong purposes.
A language like Rust is (to my untutored, ignorant) eye just a wrapper around C that prevents careless programming errors.. In that sense its a good thing, the latest in a long string of attempts to protect computers from programmers. But ultimately Rust has to be written in something and will produce assembler, just like any other language**. Its main strength is replacing numerous library modules, some of great vintage and perhaps dubious quality, by a small set of properly tested components. But especially if it has a C API -- or when it makes system calls -- its just another language wrapper, not something totally new and improved and Earth shattering.
(**You could make 'Rusty hardware" but this is where you get into the notion of microcode and who writes it. Its all layers, after all!)
This is all a consequence of the "Hose the mud at the barn wall and see what sticks" school of applications development. Otherwise known as "Rapid Application Development". Developers have to always use "the latest", testing time is restricted and the need to keep changing stuff to justify your jobs is paramount.
Ongoing attempts to push this mindset into the embedded space haven't been too successful (IoT is the primary pain point here). To proper software engineers embedded programmers are just a bunch of hacks stuck in obsolete technologies, continually behind the times and so on (....ask me how I know....). But the fact of life is that embedded products have to work and when they don't the consequences can be a lot more dire than just freezing a menu or not responding to a command. The simple fact of life is that software just doesn't wear out -- interfaces may be subject to attack by criminals, vandals or the merely curious but overall if a system is doing something then it will continue to do it until the hardware falls apart. Applications, on the other hand, are expected to fail, its thought that restarting them or their system is just the price you pay for all those new features (that nobody uses).
>Please specify and cite your claims.
Actually, not just Porishenko but also Macron and Merkel are on record as saying recently that "The Minsk agreements were just a tool for buying time while the Ukraine's military was built up". Back in 2014, after the coup/pivot to the West (depends on your point of view) Russia was much stronger militarily than Ukraine and could have invaded at will. It didn't because there wasn't a need -- UA wasn't a threat. Crimea was an oddity because it includes a significant number of Russian naval facilities (which, incidentally, were never part of Ukraine, then or now -- they were "Russian federal areas") so it was unlikely that the Russians would just walk away and hand NATO the keys. After 2014 there was a nasty little civil war in the East, a war that has solid historical foundations, hence the proposal for federation that would have fixed it once and for all. (Donbass are Russians but they're also "Fiercely Independent Russians" so being part of a UA federation would have suited everyone.) This civil war went on for yeas, killing 14000 people, displacing a couple of million and getting nowhere. There was a 'final offensive' planned for last year that might have factored into Russian planning (I'm not Russian so I don't know what their thinking is). Historically, though, this area is handy for access to the oil rich regions on the Caspian and also controlling Russian trade routes through the Caspian (see the video series "WW2 In Real Time" to get a feel for how this all works) which means coming under NATO control would be utterly unacceptable to Russia.
Its all out there. You just have to read it.
Actually, when it comes to the whole "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" thing the Chinese are on the whole doing a lot better job of for their "Average Person" than our government is. That's our fundamental problem at the moment and we only keep ourselves afloat by continually telling everyone how free they are compared to 'them' and how wonderful our life is compared to 'them'. This is currently causing us problems because for a lot of people what they're continually told and what they experience are disconnected so life gets a dystopian "1984" like feel.
If you take the average British person's experience with government over the last decade or two and compare what was told to them with what actually was real you can see a serious disconnect. Brexit is an obvious one -- apparently instead of some nice round figure of millions of extra cash for the NHS you're faced with a dysfunctional organization rife with managerial bloat that's held together by sheer willpower (which despite heroic efforts by the workforce is falling apart). Then there's trade. And, of course, the UK is definitely a democracy, majority rule, "the will of the people" and so on ("Pull the other one"). Anyway despite the obvious people keep repeating what the media tells them, I suppose its a matter of belief because once that's gone you've got......well.....nothing.
TI make secvo controller chips. Missiles have servos so they're a leading candidate for such parts, especially in older designs. Cypress, Xilinx and Altera are all FPGA manufacturers.
The problem you have is that -- literally -- the parts used to operate missile controls aren't significantly different from the parts used to control washing machine motors. Motor controls are a huge market now so while TI might have had the field more or less to itself its now got innumerable competitors.
FPGAs are a bit more tricky but once again the parts needed for weapons systems aren't the absolutely latest and greatest and are so not the parts that can be easily restricted.
Fear not, though -- as sanctions develop you're going to find a lot more 'foreign' chips in weapons systems simply because they'll be made locally. (Its a huge mistake to think that 'they' lack the capability to make parts -- 'they' would have learned their lessons from the 1960s and 70s.)
The biggest danger we face are ignorant lawmakers that pick up on media stories ("Look, they've got American parts!") who fail to understand supply chains and life cycles. They go stamping all over things, making a whole lot of noise and achieving nothing -- or worse. (Incidentally, TI parts and development tools are covered by ITAR.)
Can anyone explain to me why a company like Twitter needs pricey digs in the center of London? Or any other big city?
I know the reason is "attracting the best and brightest" but that tends to be an exercise in self-reference. Experience with the pandemic has shown that people don't like commuting -- actually, we've all know that for decades but like a lot of things that business does its a custom that nobody questions because "we've always done it this way". Realistically, whatever Twitter's doing could be done just as well, or even better, from a nondescript building in an industrial park somewhere.
The technology industry -- the bit that produces the Twitters of this world, at least **-- is rife with inefficiency and waste. Its continued like this for years because of he fear of change, nobody wants to be first, but once the first crack appears in the dam the flood -- mass layoffs -- is inevitable. I'm not a great fan of bean counters but a business has to make a profit and it doesn't do so by wasting money on vanity projects (in fact the bean counters tend to be their most obnoxious when the company's wasted all their resources on lavish overheads and excess salaries and is now rummaging around in the sofa for loose change).
(**The big that parasites on the telecommunications infrastructure and my phone by forever trying to appropriate more and more of it under the guise of a 'service'.)
Tucson is an outlier -- the freeway to the MX border is signed in Kilometers (and there are signs telling you this!). I live north west of Los Angeles. We've got a fair bit of science and technology around here so lots of people are used to metric units. The problem is that the 'merkans will push back -- often violently -- against anything they perceive as foreign (even as they brandish their NATO spec weaponry; its metric, of course, like everything else in the US military).
Its one of these 'American Exceptionalism' things where open attempts to introduce metric measurements have met with push back. In real life, though, you're hard pressed to find a product that's not metric these days. We fight it all the way, of course -- we insist that a circuit board is sized as 4.724" square and that component pin spacing is some awarkward number of thousands of an inch but its here -- if you want to work on a vehicle then its a metric set of sockets and wrenches, for example.
The British units are still used (that's what they're called here) but at least we've finally purged them from our science textbooks.
Near where I live, half hidden by a bush, is a relic from the 1970s, a freeway distance sign that's in both miles and kilometers. I think its survived all these years because the metric bit isn't that easy to see.
The problem I've had is that you don't bring enough for the locusts. If the stuff's any good then it will disappear in seconds.
But this isn't about the article. The article is telling us that feeding treats to our colleagues is unhealthy, its killing them. We should just spend 8 hours a day in our cubes eating health food in limited quantities, or something like that. After all, 40 hours a week sitting hunched over a computer, that's not unhealthy, is it?
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