Posts by EveryTime 486 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2016
You just don't understand the system. It would be a security vulnerability if Apple allowed non-Apple wheels to be installed, or even genuine-but-used parts to be installed as repair parts. The transponder in each wheel might seem like pointless complexity, but it's really for your own security that the system refuses to boot if the wheels are removed or different wheels are substituted.
This is quite an old concept.
Almost 30 years ago I worked on a compiler for dbC (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/279474). A key feature of this language variation was arbitrary length variables. The initial motivation was SIMD, then quickly FPGAs.
Since the hardware structure has no inherent word size, a language that allowed exactly the desired precision resulted in code that was smaller and faster. And for a certain class of problem that used modulus, it resulted in significantly clearly code.
The problem was that for all other types of problems, allowing arbitrary precision was a huge distraction. Programmers micro-optimized the range, and then were bitten by bugs or unexpected behavior. A 32 bit variable is a huge waste when you are typically iterating to 100, and still a huge waste when you change that to 500, but you don't have to worry about a u_int8 (or the equivalent of a u_int7) biting you in the ass when the change is made.
Back then it wasn't a stupid idea. It was a research project that happened to product a negative confirmation. Today...
No doubt they have a large team of community marketing professionals to monitor and interact with the community.
The open question is if those marketing professionals know that they the technical side of the company.
- The marketing department couldn't convince someone from the technical side to participate, and didn't have the political pull to force someone to do it. That would be some combination of inept internal marketing, internal power wars, and active indifference by the technical team. Some combinations would leave marketing blameless.
- Some marketing hack wanted "control" of the conversation and didn't trust the technical people to properly lie about plans, schedules, features and bugs.
- Some marketing hack thought that they would actually answer the questions. Which is absurd. Dunning-Kruger absurd. Some of these customers spend their who working days dealing with the minutia of the products. They are the experts from the end-user side. They aren't going to be asking a question that could be answered by skimming a manual or using the application for a few minutes.
WeWork's problem wasn't that it had long term leases and short-term customers.
Plenty of businesses do very, very well with that model.
Part of their problem was that the founder was self-dealing, having WeWork signing lucrative long-term leases on buildings that he owned. Another part of the problem was spending wildly on making WeWork a lifestyle/workstyle brand, when that wasn't where the market is. People were happy for the extras when they were subsidized by VC money, but most individual workspace users are trying to establish a business and aren't willing to pay too much extra for a luxuries.
Laser systems aren't a magic kill against missiles. Most rely on melting a small spot on the missile skin and have aerodynamic forces tear it apart or start it tumbling. The simple approach of spinning the missile nearly defeats this, although it takes a more sophisticated or much simpler (e.g. the original sidewinder, which was awesomely clever) control system to do this.
Thanks for adding the details.
Presumably the straps were tensioned for the ejection, which would change them from tight to extremely tight. And the pilot would have felt the explosion under his seat. Once he figured out that a single ejection happened, he must have realized that he no longer had the option of ejecting himself.
As for blaming the pilot for any part of the badly-done prep, I don't see that. Presumably the pilot was already strapped into place and had no ability to check the passenger. He was relying on the ground crew for that.
Stupid idea?
Not for Carl Icahn, which would have (as usual) made a huge amount of money.
For everyone, yes, there would have been tears. But the important thing was that Carl and the executives would have made money.
I do wonder if he hasn't figured out a way to have HP buy back his stock and still come out ahead -- that is the way a 'failure' to acquire has ended in the past, with Icahn still making money at the expense of the regular shareholders.
They claim that they are offering a royalty-free license for (only) covid-19 use.
That is a PR move, and almost certainly a trap. The terms very likely include an explicit agreement that that the patent is valid, an agreement not to attempt to invalidate the patent, an agreement not to design a work-around the patent, an agreement to pay a royalty for every work-around used, etc.
$10M for 'community projects' is a barely-masked bribe. We don't know who it is to, but we can be pretty certain that a part of it is already secretly ear-marked.
If they are as experienced as those making political deals, the ear-marked funds will be only a fraction of a fraction, so that it's not quite so obvious how the support was bought.
I expect that this ruling will be narrowly applied.
The unique circumstances were that employees were required to wear uniforms at work, and prohibited from wearing them away from work. Thus carrying bags to work was a normal part of the employment.
Few companies will have exactly the same rules. Those that do will change them minimally e.g. specify that employees may change out of their uniforms at home, but must cover them up when not working in the store. (Where do you keep the coat to cover up with? That's not their problem, but the situation is different. Now get back in line and wait to be searched.)
> Actually the ford Mustang shipped to NZ has 2 star crash ratings because the murderous the c*nts at ford decided to save a few bucks (and because such cars can still allowed here after successful lobbying by car importers and shameful back down by the govt).
That didn't sound right, so I looked up the details.
You wrote it as if the "Ford Mustang shipped to NZ" was different from the car sold elsewhere. It isn't. They didn't omit any parts, or cheapen the structure.
The two star rating was in 2017 with a newly established rating system. The same car with a different branding (as a Falcon) got a four star rating when introduced under the 2013 version of the tests. Like almost every recently designed car, it probably would have gotten a 5 star rating with older tests.
The Mustang increased to a 3 star rating in 2018, so saying "has" is somewhere between misleading and wrong.
I'm not defending Ford here. Their older design seems to have not considered the safety of the (token?) rear seat. But your claim is neither correct nor supports your point.
This does seem to be self-dealing, and it's extreme.
The secretly negotiated insider deal is over $1.1B. The net value is certainly much more, perhaps $5B. That is a huge amount of value to transfer from the public into private pockets.
Even if the deal doesn't happen, there should be a criminal investigation.
The usual comment is that this case is about "private property rights being trampled by the government".
But this is like an easement for sidewalks or power lines that the government enforces. In many places you own the land that the sidewalk is on. You paid for it and it is 'private' property. But you have no right to block it, you must allow the public to pass, and you must pay to repair it as needed. You might even be obligated to expeditiously clear it of snow and ice.
It's all part of the bargain of living in a society that has sidewalks.
Here he bought property that has the sole land access to a public beach, in a state where the public has affirmative access to those beaches. He knew that when he bought it. Yes, his property might be worth not quite as much because of it. But that easement was built into the purchase price, just as the cost and benefits of a sidewalk are part of the value of a regular non-$30M home.
My view is that he has effectively stolen a public beach for a decade. What is the value of that? I think it's pretty high, much higher than the $30M he paid for the property he legitimately bought. I believe that the fines should reflect that.
I have a 20 year old car with a cellular modem and the right hardware interconnection to (painfully) do a firmware update. There isn't anything special about an EV or even a "modern" car.
Luckily none of the car companies would risk the consumer or legal backlash from disabling a too-old car because it wasn't continuing to make them money.
BTW, what does a "sustainability officer" do if they aren't fighting against this type of waste?
Ah, a quick search reveals the answer: "https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/senior-director-global-communications-sustainability-at-sonos-inc-1323739877" It's a completely fake title for the director of communication AKA the press flack.
"Printer accounts don't need remote logon or admin access."
They shouldn't, but do you know for certain that they don't? For all brands of printers, with all types of "value-add" bogosity that manufacturers stuff in the software?
It often comes down to who gets the blame if you shut off that access and something critical stops working. In an environment where money is immediately lost if part of the infrastructure stops working, it's easy to understand why that configuration wouldn't be changed.
A wall wart type power supply can well over 90% efficient, with a few at 96%. Older ones tend to be in the 70% range with substantial idle power.
On a abstract philosophical level I'm opposed to government intervention in the marketplace beyond basic regulations, but here is where reality runs into dogmatism. A big chunk of credit goes to Energy Star (and the similar requirements from other governments). Those regulations made a huge difference in the world. Few retail customers buy on the basis of power supply efficiency or idle power, or even think about it. But, thanks to those regulations, we are in a virtuous cycle of increasing power density and a need for increasingly efficient power supply designs to support that density.
My favorite easy-to-explain design improvement is that power supplies used to have a discharge resistor to quickly drain the high voltage from internal capacitors when the power was switched off. This resistor constantly wasted power, but only provided the safety benefit for a few seconds each time the device was powered off. Efficiency regulations motivated the development of a chip (really a chip feature) that only discharges the capacitor when the pulses of the AC line are missing for a few seconds. This chip costs much more than the simple resistor, but saves far more than that in electricity over its lifetime.
Bringing it back on topic, we put all of that effort into efficient power supplies but wireless charging is typically only 50-70% efficient. It's going to be overwhelmingly the largest waste of power in running small electronics.
Wireless charging is sub-par, but hardly " fledgling".
A quick review of my purchases shows that I bought an add-on Qi pad and charging coil for my Samsung S5 in 2015 for under $3 each -- they had already hit the commodity clone end of the aftermarket.
The technology still faces the fundamental problem they had back then -- efficiency and power density is bad. You need a big coil and/or heavy magnetics. If you want better efficiency and faster charging, the size and weight goes up from there.
I don't see a fundamental problem with power banks simply including the charging pad into the case, but that's going to add a bit to the price in a highly competitive market. You occasionally see public wireless charging, but if anything they seem to be less common than a few years ago.
Bottom line: it's going to take a lot of "courage" to degrade the user experience that much. You certainly don't want to do it when your are using up your "courage" with another mis-feature.
With $1B+ and some time they can easily put a few shell companies between the source of the payoff and ones that will receive it. It will be very difficult to prove that some future venture of theirs was bought for $100M just because they set up this deal.
Transparency and fair dealing rules get in the way of legitimate organizations. Even so, it's important to remember that they exist for good reason.
From what I've read here, there was substantial misrepresentation.
*And* HP was willfully blind, negligent and incompetent.
The latter doesn't excuse the former. The misrepresentation was actionable, perhaps even criminal. Incompetence is not. Even though it seems that it should be when demonstrated to this extreme by highly paid executives pursuing multi-billion-dollar deals.
> "The amusing thing is that the American War of Independence started as the Colonies' refusal to pay for their own defence."
That's a signification mis-statement of the motivation. I understand that you are drawing an analogy, but it doesn't work with the historical facts.
As one example of a significant motivation for the American revolution, consider the group that became known as the Green Mountain Boys. They bought land and built houses and farms in what was the New Hampshire Grants. Someone in English convinced the King to shift control of that land to New York, which then sold their land or granted it to people as political favors. The Green Mountain Boys refused to give up their homes. They started out as loyalists that didn't intend to join a revolution, but they were forced into being rebels.
For this and many of the other grievances it was probably the case that the King was manipulated without understanding the implications of what he did. Which was exactly what the rebellion was about -- the colonies had no influence on far-away corrupt administration.
If you can't tell the difference between
- looking at the calendars of co-workers so that you set up a meeting on a work project that everyone has an interest in
and
- setting up alerts so that you can track what people you don't like are doing
then you shouldn't be allowed to continue in a position of responsibility.
I find the fired employees defense of 'internal openness' to be disingenuous to point of being offensive.
Google employees are going to be using Google Calendar for work, which means that they almost certainly be using it for their private calendar events as well. It may be that other Google employees with access to their work calendars incidentally get access their private events as well. Even if they don't, the ability to get alerts about changes to the calendar mean that the appointments that incidentally get added as work events, but are immediately changed to private/personal events, end up not being private.
If those employees were stalking others at the company by having calendar event change alerts, that's exactly the behavior that Google should be firing people over. You are always counting on your employees to be ethical and responsible. Even if you can implement technical limits, and often you can't, there are always holes. The lack of technical restrictions on what they were doing isn't relevant, it's the behavior that is at issue.
> Personally I'd struggle to conceive a deal which would convince me to travel thousands of miles to take up a job...
Then you don't have the temperament to be a successful consultant.
A classmate of mine was a very successful (in income terms) consultant. He wouldn't hesitate to leave a gig when there was a better offer. Or a girlfriend, in the middle of a date. One in particular was a weekend New Years Eve party, in different city, where he left an hour before midnight with someone he had just met, and returned for breakfast the next day. I was impressed with his commitment to the pure consultant lifestyle. If you can't do that, and have the original girlfriend take you back, you don't have what it takes.
Interest rates are low to encourage companies to make investments that will improve efficiency and productivity.
But investing and innovation is risky and takes time. Instead upper management see cheap borrowing as a way to buy other companies. The buying management gets more power, immediate bonuses and higher pay. The bought management gets golden parachutes. The workers see rounds of internal competition and layouts.
> "You do realise that home solar voltages have to be higher than the mains voltage if you are selling your output back to the grid"
No, the voltage doesn't have to be higher. That's not how the AC power grid works.
You don't feed power into the system by trying to raise the voltage. You feed power into the system by trying to increase the frequency at the same voltage.
More accurately, you are advancing the phase which is roughly trying to increase the frequency and failing. The main system operators are detecting the very slight frequency increase and use that info to supply very slightly less power.
Wait... you are defending a storage system that was "fragile" and "required constant maintenance"?
And the phrase "network issues could propagate into the database" sounds like the techno-babble from some clueless TV show, not a real-life experience.
Here is a quick rule: A version control system is the same as a file system. Don't use it for anything that matters until it has been around for a few years with no screw-ups and no major changes. Normal events, like a power failure or slow network, should only result in a tightly-bounded loss of recent changes.
You are missing several options
The witness is a slippery eel that has had years to refine non-responsive testimony.
The lawsuit revolves around subtleties such as the fine line between exaggeration vs fraud, and ego vs incompetence.
If I were the judge, I'm pretty sure I would rule against the last side to testify. "No, I have no idea why we incorporated the next company in (insert tax haven here)." "No, I don't know enough about the business to understand why that categorization of revenue was misleading or fraudulent" "No, it's completely normal to have email about a billion dollar deal never logged and immediately deleted".
This pretty much confirms that the company wasn't adequately capitalized. The investors set things up so that the company would be funded incrementally. They only had enough money to start a lawsuit, but wouldn't have any money if things didn't look promising.
I might be more understanding in other circumstances, especially with a self-funded startup that had a case. But this company marketed their Murdoch backing when it was to their advantage, and filed a lawsuit for leverage rather than for justice.
LORAN sucked. Big time. While a few might hold fond memories, most former users don't miss it in the least.
Big wavelengths meant big antennas, poor resolution, and quirky propagation. Ground based stations multiplied the opportunities for reflected signals. Pretty much every use required the operator to have some understanding of propagation variations. Sometimes even a sophisticated education. Accuracy was poor, but repeatability was good. While the system could be used without maps, accurate use required charts with grid lines that corrected for the fixed component of errors.
As proof that the system wasn't especially loved, most government service cannot be killed. Especially ones where the users have major equipment investments. LORAN died with barely a complaint.
Tubes do (did) have an advantage for high power applications. It's easy and barely more expensive to make a giant tube. The materials are all fairly inexpensive (especially the vacuum), easy to fabricate, and the scaling works out nicely for cooling.
Tubes are tremendously disadvantaged for high frequency use. Their physical size results in high capacitance and inductance. There are clever work-arounds for some of the design challenges, but the horrible early transistors quickly displaced the best tubes for high frequency designs.
It likely had a highly directional ("high gain") antenna. It could well have been focused enough to trigger a flash cube or flash bulb even with very modest power on the other side of the attenuator.
As for the difference between an attenuator and a dummy load, a 70 dB attenuator with a cap on the output would make for a quite good dummy load. So it was likely that one device was used for both purposes.
I wasn't able to find a reference for the field strength necessary to trigger a flash bulb. Presumably some sailors had discovered the effect accidentally, and passed down the knowledge for just this type of opportunity.
That's the big challenge with waterproof electronics, especially sailing instruments.
The electronics are heat soaked in the sun for hours, then hit with a slam of cold water from a thunderstorm or wave. The seals that meet specs when the room temperature device is gently lowered into room temperature water fail. And they fail just at splash point, with the pressure drop sucking in water drops. Even without immersion, and sometimes when the most of the surface is dry.
Of course cell phones have the additional tell-tale moisture stickers so that the manufacturer can deny warranty service for water damage. They all turn pink with age, faster in a pocket but it happens even in a dry purse.
It's obvious why this specific contract is sole-source.
It's to provide a leading-edge cloud service, not develop technology or standards, or figure out what is the lowest-common-denominator service.
If they had multiple suppliers, there would have to be compatibility. That means any one of the winners could halt cloud deployments until they had something compatible and working. A technology-trailing contract winner could effective make the service pointless. Sure, they wouldn't make money, but if your goal is preserving your very profitable legacy services through other contracts, undermining this contract would be an easy call.
> (Look no further than the sanctions, which kill people just as effectively as bombs - if more deniably).
I completely disagree with that claimed equivalence.
You are effectively claiming that doing anything to dissuade rogue nations is equivalent to war. Should we just go straight to a shooting war, or should we ignore everything that happens until it's our turn to be invaded?
Sanctions aren't as quick or effective as dropping bombs, and there certain a valid debate about how effective they are and how they are best implemented, but most people prefer them to a combat-focused conflict.
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