Posts by fidget

White goods giant fires legal threats to unplug open source plugin

Hoover's flight to Haier (via Candy)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_free_flights_promotion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hoover_Company

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy_(company)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haier

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

I want a window manager for a 40 inch monitor

My monitor is a 40 inch 4k TV. I'm still looking for a window manager that works well with this. Most seem to assume a laptop or 22 inch monitor.

By the way, sometimes I sit at my desk (as I am now). And sometimes I sit about 8 feet away (when I'm on a video call).

I run Ubuntu Linux, and will soon be using Wayland. This will I hope improve matters.

BOFH: What a beautiful classic car. Shame if anything were to happen to it

Hodge solution - that's big money

A solution to the briefly mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodge_conjecture is worth $1,000,000, as it's one of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems (along with P versus NP and five others). Well done to the PFY for knowing this.

What a bunch of bricks: Crooks knock hole in toyshop wall, flee with €35k Lego haul

Re: I was never into Lego

I remember seeing something like this at school. I've done a search and think it's Brickplayer (which is a nice word-play). Here's some links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brickplayer

https://web.archive.org/web/20150411143536/http://www.brickplayer.co.uk/history

https://www.meccanoindex.co.uk/Other/Brickplayer/index.php

https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/how-many-old-toys-display-1154397

https://www.google.com/search?q=Brickplayer&tbm=isch

In my own family we didn't have such toys. I think there were a bit special for most children.

Re: I was never into Lego

I remember seeing something like this at school. I've done a search and think it's Brickplayer (which is a nice word-play). Here's some links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brickplayer

https://web.archive.org/web/20150411143536/http://www.brickplayer.co.uk/history

https://www.meccanoindex.co.uk/Other/Brickplayer/index.php

https://www.google.com/search?q=Brickplayer&tbm=isch

In my own family we didn't have such toys. I think there were a bit special for most children.

Pi calculated to '62.8 trillion digits' with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space

The quadrillionth bit of Pi is '0'

The rather amazing Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe formula allows us to compute the hexadecimal digits of pi independently (i.e. without computing the earlier digits). Colin Percival use it to organise a distributed computing project to compute specific bits of pi. The project closed soon after the quadrillionth bit of pi was found.

It takes 1,000 trillions to create a quadrillion and so Percival's bit lies well beyond the 63 trillionon-th decimal digit of pi.

Here are some URLs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%93Plouffe_formula

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHex

http://wayback.cecm.sfu.ca/projects/pihex/announce1q.html

Photographer seeks $12m in copyright damages over claims Capcom ripped off her snaps in Resident Evil 4 art

The US Postal Service has been here before,, with US Statue of Liberty replica

This reminds me of the US Statue of Liberty Forever Stamp. In 2010 the US Post Office used a photo of a Las Vegas replica of the Statue of Liberty on a postage stamp. Ten and a half billion copies were produced. In 2013 the sculptor of the replica sued for copyright infringement. It went to trial, and $3.5 million was awarded.

The judgement wrote: The court is left to craft a remedy that best reflects what the fair market value of a nonexclusive license for plaintiff’s artwork would have been in 2010. Perhaps the lawyers and judge in this case will use the previously crafted remedy as a precedent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Liberty_Forever_stamp

https://ecf.cofc.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2013cv0942-136-0

By the way, it's a "Forever Stamp" showing a replica of the Statue of Liberty, not a "Statue of Liberty Forever" stamp.

Home Office slams PNC tech team: 'Inadequate testing' of new code contributed to loss of 413,000 records

You got there before me.

To quote the article (and also the top of this forum page): lack of reviews and affective testing

And to quote again: UK’s Police National Computer (PCN)

That said, PCN (or is it PNC) records should be held to a higher standard than Reg journalism posts.

Citibank accidentally wired $500m back to lenders in user-interface super-gaffe – and judge says it can't be undone

Double keying already used in some banking applications

Some years ago major publishers digitised journal back-issues for HTML publication. They did not use OCR. They used double keying. I found this definition of double keying on the web (emphasis added).

The process used by operators when they enter the information twice or when two separate operators enter the data at separate times. The two entries are then compared with each other to ensure that they match. This process is used in military and BANKING APPLICATIONS to detect intended falsification of information.

https://www.yourdictionary.com/double-entry-or-double-keying

See also https://journals.openedition.org/jtei/739, from a Text Encoding Conference.

Unprotected quantum 'puters may hit 4ms brick wall, thanks to background radiation slashing qubit lifespans

Re: Quantum fluctuations

Thank you for that explanation. My understanding of what you say amounts to this: the disturbance of a qbit due to quantum fluctuations will be of the same order of magnitude as the Casimir effect. And so much smaller than the 4ms brick wall the original article talks about.

For the Casimir effect I've found

Electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations, Casimir and Van der Waals forces

Cyriaque Genet, Francesco Intravaia, Astrid Lambrecht, Serge Reynaud

https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0302072

Quantum fluctuations

My understanding is that it's not possible to shield against quantum fluctuations. It would be nice to know what limit that provides. My inexpert eye saw nothing about this on the paper on which the story is based.

By the way, the preprint for the paper is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.09190

Watch an oblivious Tesla Model 3 smash into an overturned truck on a highway 'while under Autopilot'

Re: Didn't notice a person either

I noticed the person, and saw him get out of the way. It was probably the truck driver, doing their civic duty.

Hyphens of mass destruction: When a clumsy finger meant the end for hundreds of jobs

In many languages, --1 == +1

With Python (and probably quite a few other languages, '--' means '+':

$ python3

>>> 1 -- 1

2

$ tex \\relax

This is TeX, Version 3.14159265 (TeX Live 2019) (preloaded format=tex)

*\count0 = --1

*\showthe\count0

> 1.

Rockstar dev debate reopens: Hero programmers do exist, do all the work, do chat a lot – and do need love and attention from project leaders

Plato's harmonious division into parts

Perhaps the findings result from the division of software into projects. Really important in architecture (I saw this in a book by Christopher Alexander) is the breaking of the whole into parts. Wikipedia expresses it as: temperance is the state of the whole where each part does not attempt to interfere in the functions of the others.

Perhaps a part which conforms to the 80/20 rule has internal cohesion, without massive external dependencies. Unix pipelines allows people to write small useful programs that fit together. Such as ls, sort, uniq, find and so forth.

Doesn't it make sense that small useful tools fit the 80/20 rule. And that there developers be "local heroes". Perhaps every developer should be a local hero, for a suitable definition of local.

Disclaimer: I've not read the articles linked to, from the Register's article. But I might soon.

Biz forked out $115k to tout 'Time AI' crypto at Black Hat. Now it sues organizers because hackers heckled it

They didn't use TeX / LaTeX

I've had a look at the arxiv article. Its PDF says it's written in Microsoft Word.

According to "Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong", the first sign is "The authors don't use TeX", with few false positives. However, I know much more about TeX than I know about security, so perhaps I'm wrong.

Laminate this: Inside Argos' ongoing online (r)evolution

Buy a house, mail order!

In the USA, the mail order company Sears, Roebuck and Co used to sell kit houses (full size) by mail order. To avoid the obvious problems with the delivery address (no home for someone to be in at) the kit homes were delivered by railroad box car. I don't think Argos can top that. For more details see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home

Talking of topping, in 1973 the world's tallest building (Empire State, of course, in New York) was beaten by Sears Tower in Chicago.