electronics food forums gamedev games news opinion programming tech
The UK's central government procurement agency is chumming the waters around the market's swimmers, hoping to tempt suppliers into providing a range of computer network services and kit with a £5bn tender. The buying spree, which will officially begin when a framework agreement starts in fiscal 2023, involves a large spread of hardware, software and services around IT networks. Included are categories such as networking, internet and intranet software packages, network interfaces, network operating system software development services and so on. Crown Commercial Service, the cross-government buying organisation that sits within the Cabinet Office, has launched what is known as a "prior information notice" to start talking to suppliers before it forms the official competition to be on the framework: a group of contracted suppliers from which a huge number of public sector bodies can buy. These might include central government departments, local authorities, health, police, fire and rescue, education and devolved administrations. Although the government cannot dictate the use of the framework, the procurement notice said: "It is intended that this commercial agreement will be the recommended vehicle for all Core Network access and infrastructure requirements, including all aspects of Communications services." Crown Commercial Service, which takes a 1 per cent fee on all business transacted via the frameworks it organises, is holding a pre-market engagement workshop in November with industry experts and suppliers interested in potentially bidding for the resulting framework contracts. The government buying body will decide the structure of the competition and the division of lots after that date. The new arrangement, called Network Services 3, is set to replace – you guessed it – Network Services 2, which comes to an end in August 2022, except this time it will not include mobile voice and data services. Hitting underground pipes and cables costs the UK £2.4bn a year. We need a data platform for that, says government Surrey County Council faces £700k additional SAP support fees as £30m Unit4 ERP set to miss go-liv
(read more)
This project is a proof of concept that any website can identify and track you, even if you are using private browsing or incognito mode in your web browser. Many people think that they can hide their identity if they are using private browsing or incognito mode. This project will prove that they are wrong. How to use the website Visit http://www.nothingprivate.ml and enter your name Click the "See the magic" button Visit the same website in Private browsing / Incognito mode See the magic ⭐ Don't scroll down and ruin the fun... Just follow the steps above... 😄 Hey! How? Hope you are surprised! 😄 Yes, the website can remember your name even if you had visited it via private browsing or incognito mode. Yes, nothing is private in this world anymore! This is what the big companies are doing with your identity. You think that going into private mode will wipe out all the traces? Absolutely not! In reality, using private browsing or incognito mode will just help
(read more)
Foreword # This article is intended to serve as an introductory technical analysis of the Yamaha DX7, detailing some of the known information about the synthesiser’s engineering. This article does not intend to be an exhaustive repository of such information, or as reference material for technical means. Instead it intends to provide an informative introduction to the subject. The intended audience for this article is people with a computer science or similar engineering background who are interested in the technical aspects of synthesisers. Acknowledgements # The debt of gratitude this article owes to the hard work of others is so great that I would be remiss to even risk taking undue credit for their hard work. This article would not have been possible without the work of Acreil, Raph Levien, the Dexed team, and Steffen Ohrendorf. I would also like to thank MadFame for his fantastic research into the DX7’s history, from which he has made an extremely informative short documentary. Introduction # In 1983 Yamaha Corporation released the now iconic DX7 synthesiser. Featuring a novel form of digital tone synthesis called frequency modulation, it would introduce musicians to a world of new timbral possibilities not possible with its analog contemporaries. By all accounts it was revolutionary, its brassy, metallic timbres would go on to define the characteristic sound of the decade. It would become the first commercially successful digital synthesiser, going on to sell over 200,000 units worldwide. The frequency modulation synthesis that forms the basis of Yamaha’s FM synthesiser technology had its origins in the research of Stanford University professor John M. Chowning. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Max Mathews at Bell Labs, Chowning shifted his course of study from music composition to focus on computer music. While experimenting with the modulation of a sound wave’s frequency, Chowning discovered that as the frequency of the modulating wave increased into the audible spectrum new and interesting harmonic partials were created in the carrier tone, while retaining the same pitch characteristics. Through a controlled application of this process a much wider range of tones could be synthesised than was possible using contemporary analog synthesisers. The significance of Chowning's discovery was not lost on his colleagues, who urged him to patent this remarkable new technique. Interestingly, at this point in history it was not actually possible for an algorithm —or in fact any other kind of software— to be patented under United States law1, so Chowning enlisted the help of fellow academic Andy Moore from Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab to come up with a suitable hardware implementation. Their work together would yield the paper The Synthesis of Complex Audio Spectra by Means of Frequency Modulation[pdf], published by the Audio Engineering Society, and would ultimately become United States Patent No. 4,018,121. In mathematical terms, FM synthesis is achieved by using the instantaneous amplitude of a sound wave (the modulator) to adjust the rate of change in the phase angle of another wave (the carrier). As convoluted as this sounds, it makes more sense when visualised: The above diagram demonstrates the variable rate of change in the phase angle of the modulated carrier wave’s signal. There are many fantastic resources available online that give a much better explanation of FM synthesis than I can offer. Here is one particularly informative resource that I recommend. Another more mathematical approach to documenting frequency modulation can be found here, created by composer and synthesiser pioneer Barry Truax. By the mid-1970s Stanford’s Office of technology and licensing had yet to successfully find a prospective licensee for their breakthrough in American music technology manufacturers2. At this point in time, the investment required for these companies to pivot towards the manufacture of digital synthesiser technology was simply too big a financial risk to take. The technological requirements were simply not commercially viable for companies specialising in analog equipment. To find a licensee, Stanford would need to look overseas. Despite not having a significant market presence on American shores, at that time the largest manufacturer of musical instruments in the world was Yamaha. As fate would have it, one of their senior engineers —an expert in digital technology named Kazukiyo Ishimura— was visiting their American branch at the time, apparently researching the design and development of the very kinds of integrated circuit technology that would make their future FM synthesis technology possible. He was willing to take a trip out to Stanford to hear Chowning’s breakthrough for himself. In Chowning’s own words: “In ten minutes he understood; he knew exactly what I was talking about” (Darter, 1985). Yamaha would go on to purchase an exclusive license to the technology from Stanford, the rest is history. An extremely comprehensive and entertaining mini-documentary on the history of the Yamaha’s FM synthesiser range made by content-creator MadFame can be seen here. In his memoirs, Roland Corporation’s founder Ikutarō Kakehashi wrote that he had also met with Chowning to discuss his research. Unfortunately for Roland, Stanford were unable to enter into any arrangement due to the exclusive license they had signed with Yamaha only six months earlier. Kakehashi admits that Yamaha were the right people for the job, given their capability to manufacture the LSI chips necessary to make the technology viable. (Kakehashi, 2002, pp. 194-195) Roland’s technical R&D director Tadao Kikumoto —himself no stranger to innovation, having been the inventor of the iconic TB-303— spent a year poring over Yamaha’s technical literature looking for a way to implement an FM synth without running afoul of patent infringement3. By his own account he had also invested considerable time searching high and low for prior art to invalidate Yamaha's patent. This search would ultimately prove unfruitful (Reiffenstein, 2004, pp. 275-276). However unsuccessful these efforts may have been, Roland's research in the area of digital synthesis would lead to them produce their own groundbreaking digital synth: The D50. Yamaha’s approach to patenting their FM technology is by all accounts comprehensive. It’s through these patents, service manuals, and the heroic reverse engineering efforts of some extremely talented engineers that we have been able to gleam what information we know of the DX7’s internals. Hardware # The beating heart of the DX7 is a Hitachi 63B03 microprocessor, an enhanced version of Motorola’s venerable late 70s 8-bit CPU built under license as a second-source supplier4. Clocked at around 2MHz, it provides the synthesizer a steady pulse, albeit not the arithmetic power required for real-time digital synthesis5. The DX7’s real capabilities lay inside two proprietary integrated circuits: the YM21280 FM-Operator Type S chip, otherwise known in Yamaha’s technical literature as the OPS, and it’s counterpart the YM21290 Envelope Generator or EGS. As their names suggest, the OPS and EGS are responsible for operator and envelope generation respectively. The DX7 also features a “sub-CPU”, responsible for handling keyboard input, measuring key velocity, and panel switch scanning. This is a Hitachi 6805S, a member of the 6800 family of 8-bit CPUs. The analog-to-digital conversion process for interface signals and the sub-CPU’s communication with the main CPU are described in detail in the service manual. Handling of MIDI communication is performed by the main CPU, via an integrated UART interface. It's worth noting that this is referred to in the service manual as an ACIA (Asynchronous Communications Interface Adapter), and as an SCI (Serial Communications Interface) in Hitachi's technical literature. Interestingly, the TX7 features a different
(read more)
Learn the hack - Stop the attack WebGoat is a deliberately insecure application that allows interested developers just like you to test vulnerabilities commonly found in Java-based applications that use common and popular open source components. Description Web application security is difficult to learn and practice. Not many people have full blown web applications like online book stores or online banks that can be used to scan for vulnerabilities. In addition, security professionals frequently need to test tools against a platform known to be vulnerable to ensure that they perform as advertised. All of this needs to happen in a safe and legal environment. Even if your intentions are good, we believe you should never attempt to find vulnerabilities without permission. The primary goal of the WebGoat project is simple: create a de-facto interactive teaching environment for web application security. In the future, the project team hopes to extend WebGoat into becoming a security benchmarking platform and a Java-based Web site Honeypot. WARNING 1: While running this program your machine will be extremely vulnerable to attack. You should disconnect from the Internet while using this program. WebGoat’s default configuration binds to localhost to minimize the exposure. WARNING 2: This program is for educational purposes only. If you attempt these techniques without authorization, you are very likely to get caught. If you are caught engaging in unauthorized hacking, most companies will fire you. Claiming that you were doing security research will not work as that is the first thing that all hackers claim. Goals Web application security is difficult to learn and practice. Not many people have full blown web applications like online book stores or online banks that can be used to scan for vulnerabilities. In addition, security professionals frequently need to test tools against a platform known to be vulnerable to ensure that they perform as advertised. All of this needs to happen in a safe and legal environment. Even if your intentions are good, we believe you should never attempt to find vulnerabilities without permission. The primary goal of the WebGoat proj
(read more)
How much time do you spend doing research before you make a decision? The answer for many of us, it turns out, is “hardly any,” even with major investments. Most people make two trips or fewer to a dealership before buying a car. And according to survey results in a 2003 paper by economist Katherine Harris, when picking a doctor, many individuals use recommendations from friends and family rather than consulting other health care professionals or “formal sources” such as employers, articles or Web sites. We are not necessarily conserving our resources to spend them on bigger dec
(read more)
The moon is a beautiful thing that has captivated humanity for centuries, particularly before the advent of television and the Internet when there was nothing else to watch. [JCM_MatSci] developed a clock which tracks the phases of the moon, so you can keep an eye on the state of Earth’s satellite without even having to turn your gaze to a window. The clock relies on a simplified model of the lunar phases, based around the synodic month which averages 29.530588 days. For non-astronomical purposes, it’s pretty much close enough. The clock uses a high-torque off-the-shelf
(read more)
Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner capsule, designed to carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station, will not fly until the first half of next year at the earliest, as the manufacturing giant continues to tackle an issue with the spacecraft’s valves. Things have not gone smoothly for Boeing. Its Starliner program has suffered numerous setbacks and delays. Just in August, a second unmanned test flight was scrapped after 13 of 24 valves in the spacecraft’s propulsion system jammed. In a briefing this week, Michelle Parker, chief engineer of space and launch at Boeing, shed more light on the errant components. Boeing believes the valves malfunctioned due to weather issues, we were told. Florida, home to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center where the Starliner is being assembled and tested, is known for hot, humid summers. Parker explained that the chemicals from the spacecraft’s oxidizer reacted with water condensation inside the valves to form nitric acid. The acidity corroded the valves, causing them to stick. Engineers managed to free nine out of 13 faulty valves, but four remained stuck. The capsule was returned to the factory and two valves have been removed and handed to NASA for further analysis, with a third on the way. Boeing said will not resume flight tests of its CST-100 Starliner module until the first half of next year. NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, who were expected to fly aboard Boeing's first official crewed flight for its Starliner-1 mission, will now hitch a ride to the ISS as part of Crew-5, a SpaceX mission in the second half of 2022. Boeing's Calamity Capsule might take to space once again ... in the first half of 2022 Nothing says 'We believe in you' like NASA switching two 'nauts off Boeing's Starliner onto SpaceX's Crew Dragon Dozy ISS cosmonauts woken by smoke alarm on eve of 5-hour spacewalk The Register recreates Apollo 15 through the medium of plastic bricks, 50 years on “NASA decided it was important to make these reassignments to allow Boeing time to complete the development of Starliner," the US agency previously said, "while continuing plans for astronauts to gain spaceflight experience for the future needs of the agency’s missions." Veteran astronauts Butch Wilmore and Mike Fincke have still been assigned to fly on Starliner. An official date hasn't been set for their launc
(read more)
Informatica's former UK & Ireland vice president was correctly sacked after letting a salesman take Highways England's executive IT director on a $5,000 golfing jaunt, the Employment Appeal Tribunal has ruled. Not only did Derek Thompson breach Informatica's anti-corruption policies but he also warned underlings to "be discreet" about the jolly – and told HR investigators "Why does anyone do any customer entertainment?" when asked how playing golf benefited the business. Thompson lost his appeal against a judge's earlier ruling [PDF] that his October 2017 sacking was reasonable, with the Employment Appeal Tribunal publishing its judgment [PDF] last week. Highways England's executive IT director Tony Malone was invited to speak at an Informatica conference in 2017. Highways England had signed a $4.8m contract with the US software development firm the previous year. Keen to impress the customer, Informatica salesman Colin Grey suggested he accompany Malone to California's Pebble Beach Golf Club so Malone could tick it off his "bucket list". Thompson cleared the jolly with senior EMEA veep Steve Murphy – but didn't check back in with Murphy when the likely cost of the overnight stay became clear before the conference, reasoning that the "cat was out of the bag" and the company couldn't retract its invite to the Highways England manager. Informatica bids to become Switzerland of data with SaaSy governance and catalogue tool The magic TUPE roundabout: Council, Wipro, Northgate all deny employing Unix admins in outsourcing muddle Senior IBMer hit with £290k demand from Big Blue in separate case as unfair dismissal claim rolls on I was fired for telling ICO of Serco track and trace data breach, claims sacked worker Informatica spent $5,400 on a one-night stay for Malone at the club, including dinner, green fees and a private hotel transfer on top of costing around $2,000, with Employment Judge Vowles noting in his 2020 ruling: "The Pebble Beach Golf Club is a very expensive venue, and widely known to be so, being one of the top golf clubs in the US." Internal auditors at Informatica immediately flagged up the transaction and bosses hauled Thompson in for various grillings that culminated in a disciplinary hearing where he was sacked, in October 2017. Informatica's anti-bribery policy, which Thompson had signed to indicate he had read, mentioned both the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the UK's Bribery Act 2010. Both laws prohibit trying to bribe or influence government personnel. Mr Justice Cavanagh, giving the Employment Appeal Tribunal's judgment, ruled that Thompson had broken the US section of the policy. Malone was not American and therefore was a foreign official for the purposes of the US-headquartered company – regardless of Thompson being a Briton employed in Britain for a British subsidiary and entertaining a British government official. He didn't even go on the golf trip himself. Thompson's main four grounds of appeal were all dismissed by Mr Justice Cavanagh. They included that Employment Judge Vowles, who originally ruled against Thompson, had made a finding of gross misconduct
(read more)
Increasing numbers of "non-business" Internet of Things devices are showing up inside corporate networks, Palo Alto Networks has warned, saying that smart lightbulbs and internet-connected pet feeders may not feature in organisations' threat models. According to Greg Day, VP and CSO EMEA of the US-based enterprise networking firm: "When you consider that the security controls in consumer IoT devices are minimal, so as not to increase the price, the lack of visibility coupled with increased remote working could lead to serious cybersecurity incidents." The company surveyed 1,900 IT decision-makers across 18 countries including the UK, US, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia, finding that just over three quarters (78 per cent) of them reported an increase in non-business IoT devices connected to their org's networks. Smart lightbulbs, heart rate monitors, gym equipment, coffee machines, and even smart pet feeders were all found on corporate networks during 2021, Palo Alto Networks said. Such devices are infamously poorly secured – but in the COVID-19 work-from-home era, such devices being adjacent to corporate networks presents a problem for blue teams. "Remote workers need to be aware that IoT devices could be compromised and used to move laterally to access their work devices if they're both using the same home router, which in turn could allow attackers to move onto corporate systems," said Palo Alto. Poor IoT device security stems mainly from manufacturers' desire to keep price points low, cutting security out as an unnecessary overhead. This approach inadvertently exposed large numbers of easily pwned devices to the wider internet – causing such a headache that governments around the world are now preparing to mandate better IoT security standards. Even IoT trade groups have woken up to the threat, albeit perhaps the threat of regulation rather than the security threat, but if that's what it takes, the outcome is no bad thing. Mobile app security standard for IoT, VPNs proposed by group backed by Big Tech So you're doing an IoT project. Cute. Let's start with the basics: Security IoT security? We've heard of it, says UK.gov waving new regs The Internet of Things is a security nightmare, latest real-world analysis reveals: Unencrypted traffic, network crossover, vulnerable OSes Half of respondents said they worried about attacks against their industrial IoT devices, with 46 per cent being similarly worried about connected cameras being compromised. Smart cameras are a tried-and-trusted compromise method for miscreants – and some vendors are better at securing their gear than others, as past incidents have shown. More than a third (37 per cent) of respondents to Palo Alto's latest survey said they were worried about connected home devices being breached. Perhaps in light of today's findings that number might increase a little. ®
(read more)
Today, PHP is used by almost 80% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know. Popular websites such as Slack, Etsy, Wikipedia, WordPress, Mailchimp, Canva, Indeed, Investing.com, and others are powered by PHP. However, in the coming months, many websites that fail to upgrade to the latest version of PHP 8 will be left running unsupported versions. Usage of server-side programming languages for websites (source: w3techs) PHP 7 EOL (end of life): Upgrade to PHP 8! PHP 7 was released back in 2015, and 68% of PHP-based websites still use PHP 7. Mean
(read more)
It will be a long time before such procedures become routineON OCTOBER 19th, USA Today, an American newspaper, reported that surgeons in New York had successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a huma
(read more)
Willingness to look stupid People frequently1 think that I'm very stupid. I don't find this surprising, since I don't mind if other people think I'm stupid, which means that I don't adjust my behavior to avoid seeming stupid, which results in people thinking that I'm stupid. Although there are some downsides to people thinking that I'm stupid, e.g., failing interviews where the interviewer very clearly thought I was stupid, I think that, overall, the upsides of being willing to look stupid have greatly outweighed the downsides. I don't know why this one example sticks in my head but, for me, the most memorable example of other people thinking that I'm stupid was from college. I've had numer
(read more)
MBB Forum 2021 The "G" in 5G stands for Green, if the hours of keynotes at the Mobile Broadband Forum in Dubai are to be believed. Run by Huawei, the forum was a mixture of in-person event and talkin
(read more)
IBM has blamed another quarter of tepid performance on its servers. Big Blue's last quarter before it spins out services limb Kyndryl saw it land revenue of $17.6 billion – just 0.3 per cent above revenue for the same quarter in 2020. For the year to date, which now covers three quarters, the corporation has posted anaemic 1.6 per cent growth. Investors were told that the quarterly growth figure is 2.5 per cent if you consider Kyndryl's imminent ejection, or 1.9 per cent after adjusting for divested businesses and currency. Whatever number you choose, CEO Arvind Krishna described growth as "modest" and reiterated that IBM plans "sustainable mid-single-digit revenue growth starting in 2022". On the earnings call, financial analysts asked unusually pointed questions about whether or not the one-time behemoth can deliver. Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi offered his own take on IBM's numbers. In his view the company went backwards – an assertion Krishna did not dispute. He then challenged the CEO's growth plans, arguing that IBM needs to grow faster than predicted to meet the mid-single-digit target. Krishna suggested that improved software sales, future acquisitions, and tweaked sales incentives should do the trick. IBM US staff must be fully vaccinated by December – or go back to bed without pay Kyndryl, the artist formerly known as IBM's Global Technology Services, names 10-person board IBM's former Chinese Power Systems partner sues for theft of customer data One IBM acquisition – Red Hat – is doing rather well with revenue up 17 per cent. Red Hat has also made a $3.5 billion contribution to the firm's Global Business Services unit (soon to be renamed "IBM Consulting") which grew revenue by 11 per cent. Recurring revenue derived from Red Hat's container management platform OpenShift rose by over 40 per cent, suggesting Big Blue is making ground as organisations adopt Kubernetes. Hardware had a rough quarter, with revenue from the Systems unit down 12 per cent. Krishna argued that mainframes suffered because IBM's last refresh – the z15 – has been on sale for nine quarters, so orders are naturally tape
(read more)
Arm has teased an upcoming graphics processor unit, due to be unveiled next year, and said it is tuned heavily for running artificial intelligence code. This unnamed GPU will provide a 4.7x FP32 performance improvement over its Mali-G76 cousin, said Ian Bratt, fellow and senior director of technology at Arm's machine learning group, during a speech at the chip business's DevSummit conference on Wednesday. This mystery "2022 GPU" won't be announced until next year, it appears, and likely ship much later. To put the performance improvement claim in context, the Mali-G76 was announced in 2018, and the latest in the series, the G710, was announced earlier this year and is expected to ship in silicon in 2022. Arm's Ian Bratt teasing the unnamed 2022 GPU in a DevSummit talk The G710 GPU, which is targeted at premium smartphones and Chromebooks, it said to provide a 35 per cent improvement in the performance of AI applications, such as automatic enhancements to images and videos, over the G78, which was announced in 2020 and is appearing this year in things like the Google Pixel 6. As such, you can see that Arm GPUs tend to ship the year after they are announced to the world, something to bear in mind for the "2022 GPU." We also have to provide the software, the tools, the libraries
(read more)
China's National Internet Information Office has revisited some of the government's recent internet crackdowns, to put a stop to workarounds such as renting or selling accounts for online games to minors in order to circumvent the three-hours-per-week play time imposed by Beijing. China's lawmakers introduced the play time limits in August, restricting gaming to between the hours of 8pm and 9pm on Friday, Saturday and Sunday – with an extra hour allowed as a treat on public holidays. Beiing's stance is that it’s a necessary precaution to prevent gaming addiction. It believes that gaming does not reflect Chinese values, is unproductive, and anti-social. The rules quickly sparked a black market for online gaming accounts – a black market Beijing is looking to eliminate. According to the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission (CAC), the Internet Information Office has also revisited recent rulings on instant messaging, news information, forums and communities, live webcasts, knowledge Q&As, life services, e-commerce, and online videos. China to allow overseas investment in VPNs but Beijing keeps control of the generally discouraged tech Chinese tech minister says he's 'dealt with' 73,000 sites that breached the law Forget everything you learned playing Lunar Lander: Chinese boffins reveal secrets of Chang'e 5 probe's touchdown Specifically, they target the "reincarnation" of illegal accounts, meaning those that have been shut down must remain inactive and cannot be reregistered – at least for a determined length of time. Accounts with fake names designed to resemble those of agencies or organizations, or falsely claiming to be run by members of certain professions, will also be getting attention. Fake fans of celebrities' accounts will also be disallowed, addressing a space noted for aggressive behavior in which online gangs, consisting largely of teenage females, battle to assert their ardor for the celebrity of their choice. Last of all, clickbait (referred to by the commission as "malicious marketing of Internet user accounts") is getting some scrutiny as Beijing looks to reduce the prevalence and impact of articles that
(read more)
THE INSTITUTE Artificial-intelligence systems are nowhere near advanced enough to replace humans in many tasks involving reasoning, real-world knowledge, and social interaction. They are showing human-level competence in low-level pattern recognition skills, but at the cognitive level they are merely imitating human intelligence, not engaging deeply and creatively, says Michael I. Jordan, a leading researcher in AI and machine learning. Jordan is a professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science, and the department of statistics, at the University of California, Berkeley. He notes that the imitation of human thinking is not the sole goal of machine learning—the engineering field that underlies recent progress in AI—or even the best goal. Instead, machine learning can serve to augment human intelligence, via painstaking analysis of large data sets in much the way that a search engine augments human knowledge by organizing the Web. Machine learning also can provide new services to humans in domains such as health care, commerce, and transportation, by bringing together information found in multiple data sets, finding patterns, and proposing new courses of action. “People are getting confused about the meaning of AI in discussions of technology trends—that there is some kind of intelligent thought in computers that is responsible for the progress and which is competing with humans," he says. “We don't have that, but people are talking as if we do." Jordan should know the difference, after all. The IEEE Fellow is one of the world's leading authorities on machine learning. In 2016 he was ranked as the most influential computer scientist by a program that analyzed research publications, Science reported. Jordan helped transform unsupervised machine learning, which can find structure in data without preexisting labels, from a collection of unrelated algorithms to an intellectually coherent field, the Engineering and Technology History Wiki explains. Unsupervised learning plays an important role in scientific applications where there is an absence of established theory that can provide labeled training data. Jordan's contributions ha
(read more)
Umami is a simple, fast, website analytics alternative to Google Analytics. Getting started A detailed getting started guide can be found at https://umami.is/docs/ Installing from source Requirements A server with Node.js 12 or newer A database (MySQL or Postgresql) Get the source code and install packages git clone https://github.com/mikecao/umami.git cd umami npm install Create database tables Umami supports MySQL and Postgresql. Create a database for your Umami installation and install the tables with the included scripts. For MySQL: mysql -u username -p databasename < sql/schema.mysql.sql For Postgresql: psql -h hostname -U username -d databasename -f sql/schema.postgresql.sql This will also create a login account with username admin and password umami. Configure umami
(read more)
A lightning talk by Gary Bernhardt from CodeMash 2012 This talk does not represent anyone's actual opinion. For a more serious take on software, try Destroy All Software Screencasts: 10 to 15 minutes every other week, dense with information on advanced topics like Unix, TDD, OO Design, Vim, Ruby, and Git. If you liked this, you might also like Execute Program: interactive courses on TypeScript, Modern JavaScript, SQL, regular expressions, and more. Each course is made up of hundreds of interactive code examples running live in your browser.
(read more)
It’s a story that has caused consternation and mirth in equal measure amongst Brits, that the owners of a car in Surrey received a fine for driving in a bus lane miles away in Bath, when in fact the camera had been confused by the text on a sweater worn by a pedestrian. It seems the word “knitter” had been interpreted by the reader as “KN19 TER”, which as Brits will tell you follows the standard format for modern UK licence plate. It gives us all a chance to have a good old laugh at the expense of the UK traffic authorities, but it raises some worthwhile points about the fallacy of relying on automatic cameras to dish out fines without human intervention. Except for the very oldest of cars, the British number plate follows an extremely distinctive high-contrast format of large black letters on a reflective white or yellow background, and since 2001 they have all had to use the same slightly authoritarian-named MANDATORY typeface. They are hardly the most challenging prospect for a number plate recognition system, but even when it makes mistakes the fact that ambiguous results aren’t subjected to a human checking stage before a fine is sent out seems
(read more)
GIMP 2.99.8 is our new development version, once again coming with a huge set of improvements. “Work in Progress 2” (follow-up of 2.99.6 image) by Aryeom, Creative Commons by-sa 4.0 - GIMP 2.99.8 To get a more complete list of changes, you should refer to the NEWS file or look at the commit history. The Clone, Heal and Perspective Clone tools now work when multiple layers are selected. There are 2 new modes in particular: When sourcing from multiple selected drawables then cloning into a single drawable, the pixel source is the composited render of source layers. This is similar to “Sample Merged”, except that it is limited to a list of drawables and you don’t have to hide the layers that you don’t want to source from. When cloning while multiple drawables are selected, each drawable clones from itself to itself, i.e. every drawable is both its source and target (the layers selected when sourcing do not matter in this case). This can be very useful in particular when you need to heal several layers exactly the same way, for instance when working on textures and various texture mappings. Development of this feature was proposed and financially supported by Creative Shrimp: Gleb Alexandrov and Aidy Burrows, well-known Blender educators. Here’s an excerpt from a new course where multi-layer cloning is already used: Your browser does not support the video tag. Extract of a video course by Creative Shrimp (Gleb Alexandrov and Aidy Burrows) Selection cue fixed on Wayland and macOS¶ Windows drawing logics evolved in recent compositing window managers. In particular, the drawing of image selec
(read more)
Munich, Dallas, 21 October 2021 FlixMobility acquires Greyhound Summary + Combination of FlixBus and Greyhound will be able to better serve U.S. intercity bus service passengers  + Addresses significant opportunity from increased U.S. demand for affordable, sustainable, collective mobility   Boilerplate About FlixMobility  FlixMobility is mobility provider, offering new alternatives for convenient, affordable and environmentally friendly travel via the FlixBus and FlixTrain brands. With a unique approach and innovative technology, the company has quickly established Europe's largest long-distance bus network and launched the first green long-distance trains in 2018 as well as a pilot project for all-electric buses in Germany, the US and France. Since 2013, FlixMobility has changed the way hundreds of millions of people have traveled throughout Europe and created tens of thousands of new jobs in the mobility industry. In 2018, FlixMobility launched FlixBus USA to bring this new travel alternative to the United States.  
(read more)
<87a401645968914465921351d3b44d9d>] >> stream x�cbd`�g`b``8 "9�A$�.0�"����u� �e ���LY@�1�D�|�]"���ً@$�4&�?`s�����$uH�yH2�x7��C��0� endstream endobj
(read more)
We always get excited when we buy a new tablet. But after a few months, it usually winds up at the bottom of a pile of papers on the credenza, a victim of not being as powerful as our desktop computers and not being as convenient as our phones. However, if you don’t mind a thick tablet, you can get the RasPad enclosure to fit around your own Raspberry Pi so it can be used as a tablet. Honestly, we weren’t that impressed until we saw [RTL-SDR] add an SDR dongle inside the case, making it a very portable Raspberry Pi SDR platform. The box is a little interesting by itself, although
(read more)
© 2021 Steven Obua July 1st, 2021 Abstract I propose a simple Unicode-based lexical syntax for programming language identifiers using characters from international scripts (currently Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Math). Such cosmopolitan identifiers are designed to achieve much of the simplicity of Fortran identifiers while acknowledging a modern international outlook. This seems particularly advantageous in contexts where such identifiers are not (only) used by professional programmers, but are exposed to normal users, for e
(read more)
Surveying has been critical to the development of modern society. Across the centuries, surveying has helped our ancestors map their terrain. It has laid the foundations for our roads and cities. It even played a core role in the legal division of parcels of land. The boundaries of our natural and constructed world are determined by the work of surveyors – and they started working quite a long time ago. On this page, we will take you through an overview of the history of surveying. There are a number of articles on this website that unpack surveying’s history from specific angles. You can find a list them at the end of this page, but first and foremost, this is definitely the place to start learning about how surveying has changed across the years. Back to the beginning, over
(read more)
While controls over the Earth's climate system have undergone rigorous hypothesis-testing since the 1800s, questions over the scientific consensus of the role of human activities in modern climate change continue to arise in public settings. We update previous efforts to quantify the scientific consensus on climate change by searching the recent literature for papers sceptical of anthropogenic-caused global warming. From a dataset of 88125 climate-related papers published since 2012, when this question was last addressed comprehensively, we examine a randomized subset of 3000 such publications. We also use a second sample-weighted approach that was specifically biased with keywords to help identify any sceptical peer-reviewed papers in the whole dataset. We identify four sceptical papers o
(read more)
Amazon Web Services, the outfit famous for pioneering pay-as-you-go cloud computing, has produced a bit of on-prem hardware that it will sell for a once-off fee. The device is called the "AWS Panorama Appliance" and the cloud colossus describes it as a "computer vision (CV) appliance designed to be deployed on your network to analyze images provided by your on-premises cameras". "AWS customers agree the cloud is the most convenient place to train computer vision models thanks to its virtually infinite access to storage and compute resources," states the AWS promo for the new box. But the post also admits that, for some, the cloud ain't the right place to do the job. "There are a number of reasons for that: sometimes the facilities where the images are captured do not have enough ba
(read more)
Analysis Dell and VMware have named the day they'll break up: November 1. The conscious uncoupling starts on October 29, when VMware will pay a special dividend of $11.5 billion to all current shareholders. On the same day, Dell shareholders will also receive a dividend, in the form of VMware stock, to compensate them for Dell letting go of the 81 per cent of VMware it owns but which isn't publicly traded. All that paper-shuffling should be finished by November 1. At which point VMware will be an independent company for the first time since EMC acquired it in 2004. In hindsight, that acquisition was a brilliant decision: VMware's revenue has grown from under $1 billion a year in 2004 to the $12 billion it is forecast to haul in this financial year. EMC, and th
(read more)
If you work on old equipment, you know that there’s always that tense moment when you first plug it in and turn it on. No matter how careful you have been, there’s some chance your garage sale find is going to go up in smoke. [BasinStreetDesign] built a little box that can help. On one side is a variac and the device you want to test goes into the other side. In the middle? A lightbulb, a few switches, and a meter to monitor the current. The magic happens because the lightbulb will stay relatively cool and only light dimly if the device under test is drawing an appropriate amount of current. You match the bulb wattage with the approximate watts you expect the load to draw. If the device’s power is shorted to ground, though, the bulb will light brightly and this causes the li
(read more)
Contents of this repository This tutorial illustrates how to write C programs with Gtk4 library. It focuses on beginners so the contents are limited to basic things. The table of contents are shown at the end of this abstract. Section 3 to 21 describes basics and the example is a simple editor tfe (Text File Editor). Section 22 to 24 describes GtkDrawingArea. Section 25 to 28 describes list model and list view (GtkListView, GtkGridView and GtkColumnView). It also describes GtkExpression. The latest version of the tutorial is located at Gtk4-tutorial github repository. You can read it without download. Gtk4 Documentation Please refer to Gtk API Reference and Gnome Developer Documentation Website for further topics. These websites are newly opend lately (Au
(read more)
Kelly S Payne et al. J Urol. 2019 Oct. Free PMC article Abstract Purpose: With cannabis consumption on the rise and use prominent among males of reproductive age it is essential to understand the potential impact of cannabis on male fertility. We reviewed the literature regarding the effects of cannabis on male fertility.
(read more)
In 2018, Alibaba founded T-Head, a fabless semiconductor subsidiary with the intention of designing custom in-house ASICs. T-Head has since introduced a number of custom chips including the Hanguang 800 neural processor and various RISC-V processors. At the company’s Apsara Conference 2021, Alibaba introduced their latest addition to the last – the Yitian 710. Alibaba’s Apsara cloud comprises compute and accelerator nodes powered by various chips. “We have taken a multiple ISA strategy. Today, our cloud computing provides the most number of ISAs. We have x86, ARM, RISC-V, and many more. And our clients can actually choose Intel and other solutions and I believe this is great progress and the biggest benefit of cloud computing as we’ve made it more interoperable and more comp
(read more)
Theranos blood-testing machines, which US prosecutors claim failed over 51 per cent of the time, provided no indication if things went awry during demonstrations for visitors, a court has heard. Seven weeks into the criminal fraud trial of Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes, the feds are trying to show that Holmes, along with her former partner and COO Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani (to be tried next year after denying any wrongdoing), raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors based on misrepresentations about technology that didn't work. In court on Tuesday, Daniel Edlin, a former Theranos project manager who used to operate Theranos' Edison blood-testing machines, testified that device demonstrations, given mainly to VIP visitors, ran a demo app that hid failure messages.
(read more)
The price of a 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer is going up $10, and its supply is expected to be capped at seven million devices this year due to the ongoing global chip shortage. Demand for components is outstripping manufacturing capacity at the moment; pre-pandemic, assembly lines were being red-lined as cloud giants and others snapped up parts fresh out of the fabs, and the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak really threw a spanner in the works, so to speak, exacerbating the situation. Everything from cars to smartphones have felt the effects of supply constraints, and Raspberry Pis, too, it appears. Stock is especially tight for the Raspberry Pi Zero and the 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 models, we're told. As the semiconductor crunch shows no signs of letting up, the Raspberry Pi project is
(read more)
$ Please enter a valid email Email: Please enter a valid email Country:
(read more)
This script is an lldb helper that just loops through all the comments stored and prints out the comment along with the address corresponding to the comment. For example, I'm crashing in JIT code at address 0x0000000110000168. Using the `lc` helper I can see that it's probably crashing inside the exit back to the interpreter ``` (lldb) bt 5 * thread #1, queue = 'com.apple.main-thread', stop reason = EXC_BAD_ACCESS (code=1, address=0x22220021) frame #0: 0x0000000110000168 * frame #1: 0x00000001002b5ff5 miniruby`invoke_block_from_c_bh [inlined] invoke_block(ec=0x0000000100e05350, iseq=0x0000000100c1ff10, self=0x0000000100c76cc0, captured=, cref=0x0000000000000000, type=, opt_
(read more)
Simon OkotieRoyal FamiliesThe death of Ikenwoli Godfrey Emiko – the King (or Olu) of Warri – was announced in the same week as that of Prince Philip. Established in the fifteenth century by the Itsekiris, an ethnic group in the Niger Delta area of modern-day Nigeria, the realm is an offshoot of the Kingdom of Benin. Rumours had been circulating of the monarch’s death from Covid complications in December, with the official announcement coming on Monday 5 April.My father, who came to the UK sixty years ago this year, was an Itsekiri. He met my mum, a working class white woman, at Gilbey’s Engineering in Barking, east London, in the mid-Sixties. She had trained at Mile End Hospital and the Royal London, and was visiting the factory as a nurse. Her parents didn’t attend the wedding, or speak to the couple for six months after I was born, but were eventually reconciled. We moved to rural Norfolk when I was nine, my grandparents having retired there. My grandfather’s heart attack and subsequent stroke meant mum had been travelling back and forth, with us in tow, to care for him, until we finally made the move permanent. His funeral – at the newly opened Mintlyn Crematorium in King’s Lynn – was my first.My father also suffered a stroke, in 1994, surviving until 2000. He is buried in a small church that was the centre of the local community in the village where we lived. As a writer, I am the self-appointed family historian, something that even my two competitive brothers would surely not dispute. This role involves an acknowledgement of impending death, and the time with my father in the six years following his stroke are extremely precious to me, despite his s
(read more)
The plane had just landed when the unmistakable smell of smoke began to waft throughout the fuselage. As the aircraft taxied on the runway of São Luís’s Marechal da Cunha Machado airport, the passengers on LATAM flight 3419 fidgeted in their seats. A minute earlier, they had heard a loud whacking sound, followed by a sudden crack, coming from just outside their windows. A bird had lodged itself within the plane’s turbine during takeoff, impeding the rotation of its fan and cracking its shaft. Within seconds, the entire turbine ceased functioning. From a distance, residents of São Luís took photos; they later recounted the sight of thick smoke flowing out of the plane’s engine. “I saw a vulture fly right into the turbine,” claimed one bystander. “And then it was like, poof, all black smoke!” Modern planes, and push-button pilots, make it possible to glide a compromised fuselage back down to earth, and flight 3419 was no different: the aircraft touched back down on the runway only fifteen minutes or so after it had first embarked for bluer skies. The incident would be registered by Infraero, the body that administers Brazil’s main commercial airports, as an official bird strike. Bird collisions are a near constant threat to the aviation industry, and Brazil is the site of a disproportionate number. In 2019, the country recorded almost 2,500. The unfortunate creature involved in the bird strike on flight 3419 was a black vulture (Coragyps atratus), a carrion feeder that pilots and air traffic specialists have long considered a collision threat given both its size and flight behavior. Of Brazil’s ani
(read more)
AbstractA major goal in human genetics is to use natural variation to understand the phenotypic consequences of altering each protein-coding gene in the genome. Here we used exome sequencing1 to explore protein altering variants and their consequences in 454,787 UK Biobank study participants2. We identified 12 million coding variants, including ~1 million loss-of-function and ~1.8 million deleterious missense variants. When these were tested for association with 3,994 health-related traits, we found 564 genes with trait associations at P≤2.18x10-11. Rare variant associations were enriched in GWAS loci, but most (91%) were independent of common variant signals. We discover several risk-increasing associations with traits related to liver disease, eye disease and cancer, among others, as well as novel risk-lowering associations for hypertension (SLC9A3R2), diabetes (MAP3K15, FAM234A) and asthma (SLC27A3). Six genes were associated with brain imaging phenotypes, including two involved in neural development (GBE1, PLD1). 81% of signals available and powered for replication were confirmed in an independent cohort; furthermore, association signals were generally consistent across European, Asian and African ancestry individuals. We illustrate the ability of exome sequencing to identify novel gene-trait associations, elucidate gene function, and pinpoint effector genes underlying GWAS signals at scale. Author informationAuthor notesThese authors jointly supervised: Jonathan Marchini, Aris Baras, Gonçalo R. Abecasis, Manuel A. FerreiraLists of authors and their affiliations appear in the Supplementary InformationAffiliationsRegeneron Genetics Center, 777 Old Saw Mill River Rd., Tarrytown, NY, 10591, USAJoshua D. Backman, Alexander H. Li, Anthony Marcketta, Dylan Sun, Joelle Mbatchou, Michael D. Kessler, Christian Benner, Daren Liu, Adam E. Locke, Suganthi Balasubramanian, Ashish Yadav, Nilanjana Banerjee, Christopher Gillies, Amy Damask, Simon Liu, Xiaodong Bai, Alicia Hawes, Evan Maxwell
(read more)
Business|Tesla’s quarterly profit nearly quintuples to $1.6 billion as car sales surge.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/business/tesla-earnings.htmlCredit...Alex Plavevski/EPA, via ShutterstockOct. 20, 2021Updated 5:13 p.m. ETTesla made $1.6 billion in the three months ending in September, the second quarter in a row that its profit has exceeded the billion-dollar mark.The bottom-line figure exceeded the $1.1 billion it made in the second quarter and was nearly five times its profit from the third quarter of 2020.The automaker reported a big jump in revenue, to $13.8 billion from $8.8 billion a year ago, as sales of the Model Y continued to rise in the United States, China and Europe. The company delivered 241,000 cars to customers in the quarter, up from 140,000 a year ago.Electric vehicle “demand continues to go through a structural shift,” the company said in a statement. “We believe the more vehicles we have on the road, the more Tesla owners are able to spread the word about the benefits of E.V.s.”Tesla repeated a previous forecast that sales would grow about 50 percent per year on average for the next few years, but the company cautioned that “semiconductor shortages, congestion at ports and rolling blackouts have been impacting our ability to keep factories r
(read more)
More than six years after proposing export restrictions on "intrusion software," the US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has formulated a rule that it believes balances the latitude required to investigate cyber threats with the need to limit dangerous code. The BIS on Wednesday announced an interim final rule that defines when an export license will be required to distribute what is basically commercial spyware, in order to align US policy with the 1996 Wassenaar Arrangement, an international arms control regime. The rule [PDF] – which spans 65 pages – aims to prevent the distribution of surveillance tools, like NSO Group's Pegasus, to countries subject to arms controls, like China and Russia, while allowing legitimate security research and transactions to continue. Made available for public comment over the next 45 days, the rule is scheduled to be finalized in 90 days. Pegasus allegedly has been used by governments to spy on activists and journalists, among others. The United Nations recently called for a ban on the sale of "life threatening" surveillance technology and specifically criticized the NSO Group, which claimed it "sells its technologies solely to law enforcement and intelligence agencies of vetted governments for the sole purpose of saving lives through preventing crime and terror acts." The Israel-based company, which is awaiting to see whether the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will immunize it from WhatsApp's snooping lawsuit, subsequently said it would no longer respond to criticism. Basically, if you want to sell Pegasus or similar device-penetration software, and you have a presence in the US, you need a license to sell to China, Russia, or the other covered governments. NSO was said to have a marketing and sales arm in the United States, a point the Israeli biz rejects. Europe clamps down on cybersurveillance exports, pushes human rights focus United Nations calls for moratorium on sale of surveillance tech like NSO Group's Pegasus NSO Group's Pegasus malware was used to spy on Dubai princess's lawyers during child custody dispute So you’ve got a zero-day – do you sell t
(read more)
Oct 11, 2021 - 11 min readOpenSCAD is an open-source CSG based script-only CAD package. As it’s script-based, it’s fantastic for parametric design and the files can be version controlled just like a software project. It’s popular within the 3D-printing community due to its ability to produce STL files.1Despite being actively developed, broadly used and powerful2; there are many shortcomings which make it difficult or sometimes impossible to use outside of 3D printing.I’ve used OpenSCAD3 to produce a few things that were sent to be manufactured; this article shows how I adapt its output capabilities and how I approach a design. This allows to produce files that can be used for sheet metal cutting, machining and renders – while allowing for complex designs without creating a mess.General approachIn this section I’ll detail a few hints I’ve thought about when producing a lot of designs for various things around the house.Work in 2d firstIn OpenSCAD, if your design can be described as one or more 2D shapes that can be extruded (etc) into a 3D features, it’s much better to start them in 2D first – here’s why:No z-fighting, so no marginal adjustments to make sure you avoid co-incident planesThe offset transformation allows easy rounding, filleting and shelling if combined with separate 3D operations. See the later section..It’s useful to re-use the 2D objects again for things like holes, supports, etcThe 2D parts are fast to render!Internal / external chamfers / filletsOpenSCAD can’t currently chamfer or fillet 3D objects. There have been user-land solutions however, but with caveats. For instance https://github.com/openscad/openscad/issues/884It’s easy, though, to chamfer/fillet extrusions in negative and positive space. This is often performed manually using a hull between circles, for example: module rounded_extruded_square(l,d) linear_extrude(l) hull() { translate([d/2,d/2]) circle(d=d); translate([d/2,l-d/2]) circle(d=d); translate([l-d/2,d/2]) circle(d=d); translate([l-d/2,100-d/2]) circle(d=d); } Note the manual arithmetic required to retain correct dimensions. Using offset, twice, can simplify t
(read more)
[Norbert Zare] has identified a problem many of us suffer from – chronically bad posture. Its very common to see computer users hunched forwards over a screen, which eventually will lead to back problems. He mentions that most posture correction devices are pretty boring, so the obvious solution to [Norbert] was to build a simple robot to give you a friendly nudge into the correct position. This simple Arduino-based build uses the ubiquitous MPU-6050 which provides 3-axis acceleration and 3-axis gyro data all processed on-chip, so it can measure where you’re going, whic
(read more)
Andrew Huth October 20, 2021 Accessibility isn't fixing a giant backlog of audit bugs. Being accessible is a design and engineering process that identifies and fixes issues in a tight feedback loop. And ideally involves testing with real people. Subscribe below to get future posts from Andrew Huth Or grab the RSS feed
(read more)
Doug McIlroy, Tom Van Vleck, Jim Mills, Bob Freiburghouse, Ron Harvey, John Gintell, Paul Green, Tom Linden, Don Wagner ... edited by Tom Van Vleck Corby's talk about PL/I As a Tool for System Programming from Datamation's May 6, 1969 issue, is online thanks to Peter Flass. Bob Freiburghouse's paper, The Multics PL/1 Compiler is a thorough description of the version 1 PL/I compiler, available at this site. PL/I Frequently Asked Questions. The Choice of PL/I [THVV] The supervisor for CTSS, the early 1960s predecessor system to Multics, had been written almost entirely in the 7094 assembly program, FAP. At the time, almost all operating systems were written in assembler, because developers felt that compiled code was not efficient enough. One module of the CTSS supervisor, the scheduler, was written in the MAD language, in order to make repeated experimentation with the scheduling algorithm possible and safe. About half the command programs for CTSS were written in MAD. (See Corby's paper.) [MDM] During my connection with Multics there never was any doubt that we'd use a higher level language. There was no question that it was possible: Burroughs had already written the B5000's operating system in a dialect of Algol. The only question was what language would allow us to write the programs we wanted without circumlocution or gross inefficiency. The big two languages in the US at the time were of course FORTRAN and COBOL, the latter of which got no respect in the scientific/academic community. (It didn't have full respect in the commercial community, either. When the ex-Multician Vic Vyssotsky took over the business data processing effort at Bell Labs, his predecessor assured him that it was a COBOL shop. Vic, who was the first administrator at that level to actually know about programming, walked around the shop and found that FORTRAN was overwhelmingly dominant; programmers' ways had nothing to do with management edicts.) [MDM] Besides FORTRAN-- and Algol which was known if not used by most people on the project -- there were home-grown alternatives: MAD, which Bob Graham had brought from Michigan, AED-0, which Doug Ross had been developing, and PL/I, for which I was on the design team. MAD fully existed. Ross's group could do wonders with AED-0, but it was in constant flu
(read more)
Enlarge / Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes collects her belongings after going through security at the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building with her defense team on August 31, 2021, in San Jose, California. Ethan Swope | Getty Images There is a saying in the startup world that many companies try to fake it till they make it. From yesterday’s testimony in the criminal trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, it sounds like her company took that saying to heart. Prosecutors questioned Daniel Edlin, a former product manager, about Theranos’ investor pitches and other relationships, trying to build the case that the blood-testing startup knowingly misled investors about the capabilities of its technology.  Edlin was recruited to work at Theranos through his friend Christian, Holmes’ brother—the two had attended Duke University together. At the startup, he was involved in a range of investor-related activities, including giving tours. Each tour was scripted—that’s not surprising—but the path was approved by Holmes herself, Edlin said, which adds to evidence that she had the final say on many investor-related matters. Before one tour, he recalled, Theranos’ proprietary testing devices were set up in a room to look like they were in active use. In demos of the company’s technology, investors would have their fingers pricked for testing alongside one of Theranos’ proprietary devices, but the actual test would be run in a lab away from prying eyes. Machines that were shown to investors often ran a “demo app” that would prevent error messages from displaying on the device’s screen or a “null p
(read more)
By Alexandra Ulmer | Reuters SAN FRANCISCO – The head of California’s largest union was arrested on Friday, a day after the prominent activist was charged with grand theft and tax fraud. Alma Hernandez, the executive director of SEIU California, and her husband Jose Moscoso were charged on Thursday with allegedly underreporting some $1.4 million of income between the 2014 and 2018 tax years. Another complaint alleged that Hernandez, while working on a political action committee for a Democratic state senate candidate in 2014, approved a $11,700 payment to her husband for services he did not provide. Moscoso also allegedly did not disclose that his air duct-cleaning business had multiple employees, resulting in over $300,000 in unreported wages. Hernandez was being held at The Sacramento County Main Jail was and was ineligible for bail, according to the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office’s website. SEIU California said that Hernandez, a 42-year old who had led the union for 11 years, had resigned. “We are deeply concerned about the allegations against Alma Hernandez,” wrote Bob Schoonover, the president of SEIU California State Council, in a statement. “We have accepted Ms. Hernandez’s resignation, and we have cooperated fully with authorities on this matter and will continue to do so.” Reuters was not immediately able to contact Hernandez, Moscoso, or their lawyers. Hernandez faces two counts of grand theft, one count of perjury and five counts of filing a
(read more)
COVID crimes — Brazilian lawmakers walked back initial claims of mass homicide and genocide. Enlarge / President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro coughs during a press conference. A Brazilian Senate committee investigating the country's response to the COVID-19 pandemic has recommended that President Jair Bolsonaro face nine criminal charges, including "crimes against humanity," for his role in the public health crisis. In a lengthy report released Wednesday, the 11-member committee said that Bolsonaro allowed the pandemic coronavirus to spread freely through the country in a failed attempt to achieve herd immunity, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. The report also took aim at Bolsonaro's promotion of ineffective treatments, such as hydroxychloroquine. The committee blames the president's policies for the deaths of more than 300,000 Brazilians. In addition to crimes against humanity, the committee accused Bolsonaro of quackery, malfeasance, inciting crime, improper use of public funds, and forgery. In all, the committee called for indictments of 66 people, including Bolsonaro and three of his sons, as well as two companies. Brazil has been hit especially hard by the pandemic. The country of more than 212 million has reported nearly 22 million cases of COVID-19 and over 600,000 deaths. That is the second-largest death toll in the world, behind the US's 730,000 deaths. A “little flu” Throughout the pandemic, Bolsonaro made international headlines as he downplayed the pandemic. Bolsonaro has discouraged mask use, urged local public health officials to lift health restrictions, encouraged mass gatherings, pushed unproven treatments, questioned vaccines, and suggested that the country's death toll was inflated for political reasons. Early in the pandemic, he referred to COVID-19 as a "little flu." Later, he suggested that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine can turn people into crocodiles. The committee's report suggests that Bolsonaro's dangerous opinions on the pandemic were spread and amplified by a network of conservative pundits and online influencers that Bolsonaro and his sons controlled. Bolsonaro's three sons are each accused of spreading fake news under the recommended charge of inciting crime. A draft of the committee's report, which leaked to the press, also accused Bolsonaro of mass homicide and genocide against Indigenous groups in the Amazon. However, the committee members walked back the accusation before the public release, saying it went too far, according to The New York Times. The Times notes that it's unclear if the report will lead to formal charges being brought against Bolsonaro and others. Next week, the committee will vote on whether to approve the report, with seven of 11 members in support. If it is approved, the lower chamber of Brazil's Congress will also have to sign off, and the country's attorney general will have 30 days to decide to pursue criminal
(read more)
1. What is Mathematical Platonism? Mathematical platonism can be defined as the conjunction of the following three theses: Existence. There are mathematical objects. Abstractness. Mathematical objects are abstract. Independence. Mathematical objects are independent of intelligent agents and their language, thought, and practices. Some representative definitions of ‘mathematical platonism’ are listed in the supplement Some Definitions of Platonism and document that the above definition is fairly standard. Platonism in general (as opposed to platonism about mathematics specifically) is any view that arises from the above three claims by replacing the adjective ‘mathematical’ by any other adjective. The first two claims are tolerably clear for present purposes. Existence can be formalized as ‘∃xMx’, where ‘Mx’ abbreviates the predicate ‘x is a mathematical object’ which is true of all and only the objects studied by pure mathematics, such as numbers, sets, and functions. Abstractness says that every mathematical object is abstract, where an object is said to be abstract just in case it is non-spatiotemporal and (therefore) causally inefficacious. (For further discussion, see the entry on abstract objects.) Independence is less clear than the other two claims. What does it mean to ascribe this sort of independence to an object? The most obvious gloss is probably the counterfactual conditional that, had there not been any intelligent agents, or had their language, thought, or practices been different, there would still have been mathematical objects. However, it is doubtful that this gloss will do all the work that Independence is supposed to do (see Section 4.1). For now, Independence will be left somewhat schematic. 1.1 Historical remarks Platonism must be distinguished from the view of the historical Plato. Few parties to the contemporary debate about platonism make strong exegetical claims about Plato’s view, much less defend it. Although the view which we are calling ‘platonism’ is inspired by Plato’s famous theory of abstract and eternal Forms (see the entry on Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology), platonism is now defined and debated independently of its original historical inspiration. Not only is the platonism under discussion not Plato’s, platonism as characterized above is a purely metaphysical view: it should be distinguished from other views that have substantive epistemological content. Many older characterizations of platonism add strong epistemological claims to the effect that we have some immediate grasp of, or insight into, the realm of abstract objects. (See e.g., Rees 1967.) But it is useful (and nowadays fairly standard) to reserve the term ‘platonism’ for the purely metaphysical view described above. Many philosophers who defend platonism in this purely metaphysical sense would reject the additional epistemological claims. Examples include Quine and other philosophers attracted to the so-called indispensability argument, which seeks to give a broadly empirical defense of mathematical platonism. (See the entry on indispensa
(read more)
Corporate technology soothsayer Gartner is forecasting worldwide IT spending will hit $4.5tr in 2022, up 5.5 per cent from 2021. The strongest growth is set to come from enterprise software, which the analyst firm expects to increase by 11.5 per cent in 2022 to reach a global spending level of £670bn. Growth has fallen slightly, though. In 2021 it was 13.6 per cent for this market segment. The increase was driven by infrastructure software spending, which outpaced application software spending. The largest chunk of IT spending is set to remain communication services, which will reach £1.48tr next year, after modest growth of 2.1 per cent. The next largest category is IT services, which is
(read more)
♻️🔋 — The materials create a more porous structure for the ions to negotiate.
(read more)
A&W Restaurants is releasing a cleverly rebranded 1⁄3 lb. burger to make amends for a decades-old marketing mishap that’s seen renewed interest on social media lately. Just check out this Instagram post. In the 1980s, A&W tried to compete with the immensely popular McDonald’s Quarter Pounder by offering a bigger, juicier 1⁄3 Pound Burger at the same price. Unfortunately, Americans aren’t so great at math. Confused consumers wrongly assumed that 1⁄4 was bigger than 1⁄3 and the whole experiment went down in history as a huge marketing fail. The chain—founded in 1919 and the oldest in America—has spent e
(read more)
Once upon a time, during the Cretaceous period, a tiny crab wandered out of the water onto land and somehow got trapped in amber, which pres
(read more)
For the Scot in everyone — Holy Panda switches, tall, scooped keycaps result in custom look without the DIY work. Scharon Harding You can often tell a custom-made mechanical keyboard when you see it. The keycaps have a selection of colors, shapes and/or heights that you haven't seen united before. The owner swears the mechanical switches are something special, and they're all housed in a chassis of their favorite color, topped off with the perfect level of stabilizers, lubrication, and sound dampeners that you can't handpick with a prebuilt alternative. Drop, which sells parts to keyboard enthusiasts, knows that not everyone has the time, patience, or even skill to make something like this. Its line of prebuilt keyboards—from its $500 Paragon Series to its more attainable Expression Series and, in the middle ground, Signature Series—seek to bring that hand-assembled custom keyboard experience without requiring you to DIY. The Drop Signature Series Islay Night keyboard is, arguably, the most unique option among the seven added to the series last week, because it's a 60 percent keyboard. No function row, no numpad, and, especially, no arrow keys are a no-go for many. And its $349 price tag will get it kicked off even more buyers' lists. But if you're willing to splurge on a tiny keyboard like this, the Islay Night is a premium way to take part in hot mechanical keyboard trends like hybrid switches, diffused RGB, and a detachable USB-C cable without having to do any building. And you get to pay subtle tribute to Scotland as well. Drop Signature Series Islay Night Keyboard (Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.) Use arrow keys? This isn't for you Named after the Scottish island Islay, this keyboard is on a bit of an island itself. If it's not obvious by now, you're not paying for key count with the Islay Night. It doesn't have a numpad, but if you don't spend a lot of time with numbers or spreadsheets, this may be perfectly tolerable. By dropping the numpad, you also get extra desk space, a win for minimalists, small-desk owners, and gamers with frantically moving mice, alike. But 60 percent keyboards take the small keyboard thing to a different level by dropping all navigation keys, including the arrow keys.Enlarge / Arrow users need not apply.Scharon Harding You can still enter arrow keys by holding the diamond key on the right side, which serves as Fn, and [, ;, ', or /. The placement is actually intuitive. I couldn't tell you which keys do double-duty as arrows off the top of my head but can find them without
(read more)
Why did this happen? Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy. Need Help? For inquiries related to this message please contact our support team and provide the reference ID below. Block reference ID:
(read more)
Hammers are pretty straightforward tools. If you need more impact force, just get a bigger hammer. Alternatively, you can look at enhancing performance with chemical means, and we don’t mean by using steroids. No, instead, you can try hammering with the aid of gunpowder, and [i did a thing] has done just that. The build relies on using 6.8mm blank cartridges designed for the Ramset brand of explosive nail drivers. However, rather than buying such a tool off the shelf, [i did a thing] built one in a traditional hammer format instead.
(read more)
Foreign ownership capped at 50% Other stories you might like Memory maker Micron moots $150bn mega manufacturing moneybag AI and 5G to fuel demand for new plants and R&D Chip giant Micron has announced a $150bn global investment plan designed to support manufacturing and research over the next decade. The memory maker said it would include expansion of its fabrication facilities to help meet demand. As well as chip shortages due to COVID-19 disruption, the $21bn-revenue company said it wanted to take advantage of the fact memory and storage accounts for around 30 per cent of the global semiconductor industry today. Continue reading Microsoft unveils Android apps for Windows 11 (for US users only) Windows Insiders get their hands on the Windows Subsystem for Android Microsoft has further teased the arrival of the Windows Subsystem for Android by detailing how the platform will work via a newly published document for Windows Insiders. The document, spotted by inveterate Microsoft prodder "WalkingCat" makes for interesting reading for developers keen to make their applications work in the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA). WSA itself comprises the Android OS based on the Android Open Source Project 1.1 and, like the Windows Subsystem for Linux, runs in a virtual machine. Continue reading Software Freedom Conservancy sues TV maker Vizio for GPL infringement Companies using GPL software should meet their obligations, lawsuit says The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit which supports and defends free software, has taken legal action against Californian TV manufacturer Vizio Inc, claiming "repeated failures to fulfill even the basic requirements of the General Public License (GPL)." Member projects of the SFC include the Debian Copyright Aggregation Project, BusyBox, Git, GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers, Homebrew, Mercurial, OpenWrt, phpMyAdmin, QEMU, Samba, Se
(read more)
As Sylvain Peyronnet already mentioned, logic is an important part of theoretical computer science. However, it is not enough to learn logic from textbooks tailored for pure mathematicians. In other words, it's also important to learn logic from a more "computer science" perspective. Finite Model Theory We want to learn techniques that deal with finite structures. It is well-known that many traditional tools from model theory, e.g., compactness and Löwenheim-Skolem theorem, are not applicable to finite models. This leads us to the study of Finite Model Theory. For this area, I recommend the following excellent books: Leonid Libkin, Elements of Finite Model Theory. (textbook) Grädel et al., Finite Model Theory and Its Applications. (survey articles and applications) A sub-area of finite model theory is descriptive complexity, where we want to characterizes complexity classes by the type of logic needed to define the languages. The definitive reference for descriptive complexity is: Neil Immerman, Descriptive Complexity. Proof Complexity Another important area of logic in computer science is Proof Complexity, a study of three way relationship among complexity classes, weak logical systems, and propositional proof system. The following two related aspects are considered: (i) the complexity of of proofs of propositional formulas, and (ii) the study of weak theories of arithmetic, called bounded arithmetic. Aspect (i) has to do with the following question: "Is there a propositional proof system in which every tautology has a proof of size polynomial in the size of the tautology?" Aspect (ii) studies logical systems which use restricted reasoning based on concepts from computational complexity. In other words, we assign with each complexity class $C$ a logical theory $VC$, where the provably total functions in $VC$ are exactly the functions in the complexity class $C$. One recent development is a new research program called "bounded reverse mathematic" proposed by Stephen Cook and Phuong Nguyen, where the goal is to classify theorems (of interest in computer science) based on the (minimal) computational complexity of concepts needed to prove them. Aspects (i) and (ii) are closely related by the notion of propositional translation proposed in Cook's 1975 paper, which introduced the equation theory $\mathsf{PV}$ for polytime functions and showed how theorems in $\mathsf{PV}$ can be translated into families of tautologies which have polynomial length proofs in the extended Frege proof system. For excellent surveys on proof complexity, I recommend the following two books: Stephen Cook and Phuong Nguyen, Logical Foundations of Proof Complexity. (draft made available here) Jan Krajíček, Bounded Arithmetic, Propositional Logic and Complexity Theory. The book by Cook and Nguyen is essentially self-contained, and all the necessary logic background is given in Chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 9 is particularly interesting since the authors introduced an extremely easy method to define your own theory for any complexity classes within $\mathsf{P}$. In this method, we only need to add one additional axiom
(read more)
ClickHouse is the workhorse of many services at Yandex and several other large Internet firms in Russia. These companies serve an audience of 258 million Russian speakers worldwide and have some of the greatest demands for distributed OLAP systems in Europe. This year has seen good progress in ClickHouse's development and stability. Support has been added for HDFS, ZFS and Btrfs for both reading datasets and storing table data, a T64 codec which can significantly improve ZStandard compression, faster LZ4 performance and tiered storage. Anyone uncomfortable with the number of moving parts in a typical Hadoop setup might find assurances in ClickHouse as being a single piece of software rather than a loose collection of several different projects. For anyone unwilling to pay for Cloud hosting, ClickHouse can run off a laptop running MacOS; paired with Python and Tableau there would be little reason to connect to the outside world for most analytical operations. Being written in C++ means there are no JVM configurations to consider when running in standalone mode. ClickHouse relies heavily on 3rd-party libraries which helps keep the C++ code base at ~300K lines of code. To contrast, PostgreSQL's current master branch has about 800K lines of C code and MySQL has 2M lines of C++. There have been 13 developers that have made at least 100 commits to the project this year. PostgreSQL has only had five developers reach the same target, MySQL has only seen two. ClickHouse's engineers have managed to deliver a new release every ten days on average for the past 2.5 years. In this post I'm going to benchmark several ways of importing data into ClickHouse. ClickHouse Up & Running ClickHouse supports clustering but for the sake of simplicity I'll be using a single machine for these benchmarks. The machine in question has an Intel Core i5 4670K clocked at 3.4 GHz, 8 GB of DDR3 RAM, a SanDisk SDSSDHII960G 960 GB SSD drive which is connected via a SATA interface. The machine is running a fresh installation of Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS and I'll be running version 19.15.3.6 of ClickHouse. The dataset used in this post is the first 80 million records from my 1.1 Billion Taxi Ride Benchmarks. The steps taken to produce this dataset are described here. The 80 million lines are broken up into 4 files of 20 million lines each. There have been three formats of each file produced: uncompressed CSV totalling 36.4 GB, GZIP-compressed CSV totalling 7.5 GB and Snappy-compressed Parquet format totalling 7.6 GB. Below I'll install ClickHouse 19.15.3.6, MySQL 5.7.27, PostgreSQL 11.5, OpenJDK and ZooKeeper for Kafka and Pigz, a parallel GZIP implementation. $ sudo apt-key adv \ --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 \ --recv E0C56BD4 $ wget -qO- https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc \ | sudo apt-key add - $ echo "deb http://repo.yandex.ru/clickhouse/deb/stable/ main/" \ | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/clickhouse.list $ echo "deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ xenial-pgdg main" \ | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list $ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install \ clickhouse-client \ clickhouse-server \ mysql-serv
(read more)
In context: Reports from users trying out Windows 11 are starting to indicate that the anti-cheat software in Riot Games' competitive first-person shooter requires secure boot and Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM 2.0) when played on Microsoft's upcoming operating system. Valorant's "Vanguard" anti-cheat is already known to be on the stricter side, and now Riot seems to be making use of Windows 11's controversial hardware requirements. Anti-Cheat Police Department, a Twitter account that aggregates reports on cheating in online games, recently collected some forum posts from users having issues running Valorant on Windows 11. They show a "VAN9001" err
(read more)
Pornhub seems like the last place on earth you’d find a 50-minute, fully clothed calc lesson, but this Taiwanese teacher is the tube site’s newest star In the depths of Pornh
(read more)
Shipping containers are unloaded from ships at a container terminal at the Port of Long Beach-Port of Los Angeles complex in Los Angeles, California, U.S., April 7, 2021. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson LOS ANGELES, Oct 19 (Reuters) - Southern California's Los Angeles and Long Beach ports handle the most ocean cargo of any ports in the United States, but are some of the least efficient in the world, according to a ranking by the World Bank and IHS Markit.In a review of 351 container ports around the globe, Los Angeles was ranked 328, behind Tanzania's Dar es Salaam and Alaska's Dutch Harbor. The adjacent port of Long Beach came in even lower, at 333, behind Turkey's Nemrut Bay and Kenya's Mombasa, th
(read more)
Supporting imagery Model Motherboard Diagram A quick introduction In 2006, Sony unveiled the long-awaited ‘next generation’ video-game console, a shiny (albeit heavy) machine whose underlyi
(read more)
Chip giant Micron has announced a $150bn global investment plan designed to support manufacturing and research over the next decade. The memory maker said it would include expansion of its fabrication facilities to help meet demand. As well as chip shortages due to COVID-19 disruption, the $21bn-revenue company said it wanted to take advantage of the fact memory and storage accounts for around 30 per cent of the global semiconductor industry today. AI and 5G investment were accelerating demand for memory chips, said Micron president and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra in a pre-canned statement. While Micron did not specify where it would invest, reports from the Nikkan Kogyo newspaper suggest that it will build a new factory at its Japanese production site in Hiroshima at a cost of around $7bn. Pandemic-hit supply chains and spiking demand have prompted a flurry of investment from semiconductor companies recently. Memory price 'correction' is coming, world's fourth-largest DRAM-maker warns Intel's €80bn European chip plant investment plan not bound for UK because Brexit Memory maker Micron offers hope for PC parts supply returning 'in the coming months' Samsung testing memory with built-in processing for AI-centric servers Earlier this month, contract chip manufacturer TSMC said it would increase capacity to meet the growing demand for chips in equipment related to 5G, high-performance computing, and automotive products. "COVID-19 has... fundamentally accelerated the digital transformation making semiconductors more pervasive and essential in people's lives," CEO CC Wei said during an earnings call. "TSMC is better positioned to capture the course from its favourable industry megatrend." TSMC is expected to construct a new factory in Japan to fabricate chips using older 22 and 28-nanometer nodes. The factory will go live in 2024, but TSMC didn't mention the type of chips the facility will produce. Meanwhile, Intel has announced an $80bn investment in Europe but has said the expansion plans would not include the UK after the nation's departure from the EU trading bloc. In the short term, the world's fourth-largest memory maker
(read more)
Legal eagles — Game maker says it "could raise serious questions about... underlying investigation." Enlarge / Activision's Los Angeles offices.Getty Images In a new legal filing, Activision Blizzard is pointing to alleged conflicts of interest within California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) in an effort to delay or stymie the state agency's continuing lawsuit over alleged discrimination and sexual harassment at the company. Conflict claims Those who have been following California's slowly unfolding case against Activision since it first became public in July may remember that the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) brought a similar but separate lawsuit against the company last month. Activision Blizzard quickly agreed to a consent decree to settle that federal case, setting up an $18 million restitution fund for affected employees in the process. Earlier this month, though, California's DFEH filed an objection to that federal settlement, saying in part that it had a "potential prejudicial impact on the state of California's pending enforcement of [the Fair Employment and Housing Act]." T
(read more)
AbstractTransatlantic exploration took place centuries before the crossing of Columbus. Physical evidence for early European presence in the Americas can be found in Newfoundland, Canada1,2. However, it has thus far not been possible to determine when this activity took place3,4,5. Here we provide evidence that the Vikings were present in Newfoundland in ad 1021. We overcome the imprecision of previous age estimates by making use of the cosmic-ray-induced upsurge in atmospheric radiocarbon concentrations in ad 993 (ref. 6). Our new date lays down a marker for European cognisance of the Americas, and represents the first known point at which humans encircled the globe. It also provides a definitive tie point for future research into the initial consequences of transatlantic activity, such as the transference of knowledge, and the potential exchange of genetic information, biota and pathologies7,8. MainThe Vikings (or Norse) were the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic9. However, the only confirmed Norse site in the Americas is L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland9,10,11,12 (Extended Data Figs. 1 and 2). Extensive field campaigns have been conducted at this UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) World Heritage Site, and much knowledge has been gained about the settlement and its contemporary environment2,13,14,15 (Supplementary Note 1). Evidence has also revealed that L’Anse aux Meadows was a base camp from which other locations, including regions further south, were explored15.The received paradigm is that the Norse settlement dates to the close of the first millennium9; however, the precise age of the site has never been scientifically established. Most previous estimates have been based on stylistic analysis of the architectural remains and a handful of artefacts, as well as interpretations of the Icelandic sagas, oral histories that were only written down centuries later2,16 (Supplementary Note 2). Radiocarbon (14C) analysis has been attempted at the site, but has not proved especially informative3,17,18. More than 1
(read more)
In a famous letter penned by Victorian era author Oscar Wilde, he wrote: “Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility.”  We can’t help but wonder if [Eirik Brandal] was evoking such Wilde thoughts when he wrote to tell us about ddrysfeöd, an electronic sound and light sculpture which he called “uselessly applied electronics.” Given the mood created by the video below the break, we have to agree that it is indeed quite artful. But if it serves a purpose to inspire and cause wonderment, is it really useless? Let the philosophers philosophize. On to the hack! [Eirik] was himself inspired by mazes such as those found in children’s activity books and magazines whose goal is to keep a child busy challenged by drawing a solid line from start to finish. With these in mind, [Eirik] constructed ddrysfeöd as an intricate entanglement of electronics, metal, clear and mirrored acrylic, and plated steel, all flung into a three dimensional vortex. ddrysfeöd is at home evoking moods in the light as well as the dark. LED’s of red and white oscillate in time with each other. Orchestrating the multimedia symphony is an ESP32, with one core relegated to dealing with the mundane functions of the sculpture while the other waves its electronic wand to keep the ensemble suitably arranged. LED’s are bored into the base, and the acrylic is sanded on the edges to diffuse the supplied light. The electronics run on the usual  +5 V, but a +12 V power supply gives volume to the LM380 audio amplifier. We also appreciated that [Eirik] expanded his skills on this project by using Sketchup to plan out the project, even printing the patterns for cutting and drilling the acrylic glass. If [Eirik]’s build style looks familiar, it may be because you’ve seen it here on Hackaday’s Circuit Sculpture Contest, where some of his work was named Most Beautiful. You can also feast your eyes on a BEAM bot inspired pummer in the shape of a satellite. And remember, if you run across something that presses your buttons, let us kno
(read more)
Sponsored We know for sure that ransomware attackers and sundry dark forces want to break into critical infrastructure. Ransomware attacks on industrial environments have increased by 500 per cent since 2018. But the evidence also shows that at least a third of the flaws exploited to achieve this are zero days. And while we know the attackers are coming, we don’t always know whether their objectives are data exfiltration, data locking, causing simple disruption, or something far sinister. We also know that traditional approaches to security are increasingly out of sync with the threat. But do we know what the alternative is? One thing we know for sure is that you’ll get a far better grip on the nature of the threat and how cutting-edge technologies including AI can be used to thwart i
(read more)
The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has released an interim final rule, establishing controls on the export, reexport, or transfer (in-country) of certain items that can be used for malicious cyber activities.  The rule also creates a new License Exception Authorized Cybersecurity Exports (ACE) and requests public comments on the projected impact of the proposed controls on U.S. industry and the cybersecurity community.  License Exception ACE would allow the export, reexport and transfer (in-country) of ‘cybersecurity items’ to most destinations, while retaining a license requirement for exports to countries of national security or weapons of mass destruction concern.  In addition, countries subject to a U.S. arms embargo will require a license. While
(read more)
Getty Images | Aurich Lawson Many of us make jokes about how we've outsourced part of our brain to electronic devices. But based on a new paper by the University of Texas at Austin's Adrian Ward, this is just a variation on something that has been happening throughout human history. No person could ever learn everything they need to know. But that's OK, according to Ward: "No one person needs to know everything—they simply need to know who knows it." Over time, we've developed alternatives to finding the person who has the information we need, relying on things like books and other publications. The Internet simply provides electronic equivalents, right? Not entirely, according to Ward's latest results. Based on data he generated, it seems that search engines now return information so quickly and seamlessly that we tend to think we remembered information that we actually looked up. And that may be giving us unjustified confidence in our ability to pull facts out of our brain. The speed of search Ward's hypothesis is based on the idea that we probably categorize the recall process based on how easy it is. Wading through al
(read more)
These new number statues are really strange — The source code has been out all month, but updates are finally hitting devices. Lost in the hubbub of yesterday's Pixel 6 launch is the fact that Android 12 shipped for older Pixel phones, too. Google took the odd step of releasing Android 12 to Google's AOSP (Android Open Source Project) repository on October 4, but it didn't ship any finished binaries for Pixel phones, which normally get day-one updates. During the Pixel 6 launch, Google's marketing department finally opened the floodgates with a blog post, a new website, a virtual AR statue, and builds for compatible devices. Officially, Android 12 is out for the Pixel 5, 5a, 4, 4a, 3, and 3a. Android 12 marks the first major update the Pixel 2 has missed out on, though it has been without security updates for a while. You have a few options to get Android 12. The easiest is to wait for the update to hit your device, which will happen sometime in the next month as it automatically rolls out to users. Another option is to head to developer.google.com and download the OTA update for your device. There are also full from-scratch system images that will wipe out your existing data. Applying either of those last two will require some light command line work and tools downloads, and Google has listed full instructions on its site. Enlarge / Google used to make real-life Android statues, but now it does AR
(read more)
Microsoft has further teased the arrival of the Windows Subsystem for Android by detailing how the platform will work via a newly published document for Windows Insiders. The document, spotted by inveterate Microsoft prodder "WalkingCat" makes for interesting reading for developers keen to make their applications work in the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA). WSA itself comprises the Android OS based on the Android Open Source Project 1.1 and, like the Windows Subsystem for Linux, runs in a virtual machine. This is currently on the Windows Insider blog. (Note the "LINK COMING SOON") The brief note details how developers should set things up in Windows 11, deal with the inputs and outputs of Microsoft's wares and finally submit apps. The latter step requires the use of the Amazon app-store. "Your device," warned Microsoft ominously, "also must meet specific Windows 11 requirements." The document was rapidly followed by a lengthier blog post detailing the tech's arrival for Windows Insiders. What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps Microsoft rethinks the Windows application platform one more time Brave's homegrown search claims to protect your privacy but there's a long way to go if it's to challenge the big G If your apps or gadgets break down on Sunday, this may be why: Gpsd bug to roll back clocks to 2002 To kick things off, the Amazon Appstore (or an Android or Amazon app from the Microsoft Store) must be installed, which w
(read more)
Why Code Install Use Jobs Cache vs MySQL Replication Blockchain Multizone Chat Contact Bedrock is a simple, modular, WAN-replicated, Blockchain-based data foundation for global-scale applications. Taking each of those in turn: Bedrock is simple. This means it exposes the fewest knobs necessary, with appropriate defaults at every layer. Bedrock is modular. This means its functiona
(read more)
This is the analysis for our gigantic icon map. Send feedback to help AT gurge.com. this is only 20,000 favicons Websites crawled: 100,000 Favicons downloaded: 425,909 The humble favicon was messily birthed with the pernicious IE5 release. Since that fateful day, browsers have slowly expanded favicon technology to encompass many wildly differing and lightly documented use cases. Here in 2021 favicons are found primarily in browser tabs, home screens, and Google search results, but they continue to pop up in the strangest places. Recently my team was tasked with building a fa
(read more)
Members of a team at the Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines lab in Cape Town, South Africa. The World Health Organization has enlisted the company to replicate Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine. Tommy Trenchard for NPR hide caption toggle caption Tommy Trenchard for NPR
(read more)
More Linux for your Windows — Android app support has higher system requirements than Windows 11 itself. Enlarge / Android apps listed in the Microsoft Store.Microsoft Windows 11 shipped without the promised support for Android apps from the Amazon App Store, but Microsoft has announced the first preview of the feature for Windows Insiders in the Windows 11 Beta channel today. The initial preview is only available to users in the United States, and it still isn't live as of this writing, despite Microsoft's blog post. But when the update does hit, it will provide access to 50 Android apps, including games, educational apps, and the Kindl
(read more)
Enlarge / Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes collects her belongings after going through security at the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building with her defense team on August 31, 2021, in San Jose, California. Ethan Swope | Getty Images There is a saying in the startup world that many companies try to fake it till they make it. From yesterday’s testimony in the criminal trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, it sounds like her company took that saying to heart. Prosecutors questioned Daniel Edlin, a former product manager, about Theranos’ investor pitches and other relationships, trying to build the case that the blood-testing startup knowingly misled investors about the capabilities of its technology.  Edlin was recruited to
(read more)
SpawnFest is an annual 48 hour online contest where teams try to build the best BEAM-based application, as determined by the judges based on certain criteria. In this blog post I am going to introduce the new tool I created during SpawnFest.eFlambé is a tool for rapidly profiling Erlang and Elixir code. It is intended to be one of the first tools you reach for when debugging a performance issue in your Elixir or Erlang application. With a single command you can visualize your code’s performance as an interactive flame graph in your flame graph viewer of choice. It’s written in Erlang and published to hex.pm.eFlambé flame graph viewed in speedscopeThere are no new ideas behind eFlambé. Brendan Gregg introduced flame graphs nearly a decade ago and there have been several Erlang projec
(read more)
If you or someone you know is diabetic, it is a good bet that a glucose meter is a regular fixture in your life. They are cheap and plentiful, but they are actually reasonably high tech — well, at least parts of them are. The meters themselves don’t seem like much, but that’s misleading. A battery, a few parts, a display, and enough of a controller to do things like remember readings appears to cover it all. You wouldn’t be surprised, of course, that you can get the whole affair “on a chip.” But it turns out, the real magic is in the test strip and getting a good reading from a strip requires more metrology than you would think. A common meter requires a precise current measurement down to 10nA. The reading has to be adjusted for temperature, too. The device is surpris
(read more)
Enlarge / Aerial image of L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, Canada.Glenn Nagel Photography Centuries before Christopher Columbus stumbled across the Bahamas, the Vikings established a beachhead at L’Anse Aux Meadows, a site on the northern peninsula of what is now Newfoundland, Canada. A recent study narrows down the date of the Norse arrival in North America to as early as 1021 CE, based on scraps of discarded wood from the site and with help from the aftermath of an ancient solar storm. Vikings and cosmic rays In the early 1200s, Icelandic authors wrote down two sagas describing Norse explorers’ trips to a place called Vinland. The expeditions had happened about two centuries earlier. Based on those sagas and the types of art
(read more)
But seriously, update the app — 5.1.4 in a reasonable package: Great sound reproduction stymied by usability issues. Enlarge / The Klipsch Cinema 1200 set includes a sound bar, two satellite speakers, and a subwoofer. Hidden within a few of these are the key differentiators: upward-projecting speakers.Klipsch I'm a longtime apartment dweller in a dense city, so home theater space is hard to come by. I have to decide what I can comfortably add to a living room already packed with PC and console hardware. For too long, that has meant saying "no" to good surround sound. But surround-friendly soundbars now make good sound po
(read more)
This gallery consists of shots taken from today's PC reveal trailer. They all seem to better resemble live gameplay than the sweetened images on the PlayStation blog. Sony Interactive Entertainment
(read more)
Peter Thiel. Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for New York Times Tech billionaire Peter Thiel said bitcoin's surge to $60,000 underscores his view that the US political system is unsustainable, according to The Information. Thiel railed against President Biden, the Obama administration and central banks, the report said. Bitcoin's price surged Wednesday to mark a new all-time high above $66,000. The US political system is not sustainable and the skyrocketing price of the decentralized cryptocurrency bitcoin underscores that point, says tech billionaire Peter Thiel, according to a report from The Information. "I don't know that you should put all your money into bitcoin at $60,000 a bitcoin right now," Thiel said at a Monday night gathering of the Federalist Society, a conservati
(read more)
During our Apport research we exploited Ubuntu’s crash handler, and following that, we decided to once again audit the coredump creation code. But this time, we chose to focus on a more general different target, rather than a specific crash handler. In this post, we will explore how the Linux kernel itself behaves when a process crash happens. We will show bugs we found in the Linux kernel that allow unprivileged users to create root-owned core files, and how we were able to use them to get an LPE through the sudo program on machines that have been configured by administrators to allow running a single innocent command. On Linux, a coredump will be generated for a process upon receiving several signals. The signals that result in a core dump are listed here (taken from “man signal
(read more)
Author: Chloé LourseyreEditor: Peter Fordham Context Header guards Every C++ developer has been taught header guards. Header guards are a way to prevent a header being included multiple times which would be problematic because it would mean that the variables, function and classes in that header would be defined several times, leading to a compilation error. Example of a header guard: #ifndef HEADER_FOOBAR #define HEADER_FOOBAR class FooBar { // ... }; #endif // HEADER_FOOBAR For those who are not familiar with it, here is how it works: the first time the file is included, the macro HEADER_FOOBAR is not defined. Thus, we enter into the #ifndef control directive. In there, we defined HEADER_FOOBAR and the class FooBar. Later, if we include the file again, si
(read more)
Looking at our AWS bills, there was one particular line that stood out like a sore thumb. Data transfer. It seemed way out of proportion. “Doh!” I hear you bemoan, “everyone knows that the AWS data transfer bill is always larger than you expect.” However, this wasn’t our production account which actually does have significant usage and the cost is all in line with what we expected. This was on QA and DEV environments. So we have this setup in which there’s these two services that communicate a lot between them, but they happen to be in different execution units (pods in Kubernetes parlance). This means they might get spun up in different Availability Zones (which are different data centers in an AWS region), which in turn means they are subject to the data transfer
(read more)
The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit which supports and defends free software, has taken legal action against Californian TV manufacturer Vizio Inc, claiming "repeated failures to fulfill even the basic requirements of the General Public License (GPL)." Member projects of the SFC include the Debian Copyright Aggregation Project, BusyBox, Git, GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers, Homebrew, Mercurial, OpenWrt, phpMyAdmin, QEMU, Samba, Selenium, Wine, and many more. The GPL Compliance Project is described as "comprised of copyright holders in the kernel, Linux, who have contributed to Linux under its license, the GPLv2. These copyright holders have formally asked Conservancy to engage in compliance efforts for their copyrights in the Linux kernel." The lawsuit
(read more)
Foundry ambitions — Intel wants to be a foundry—again. Will this time be different? Getty Images | Aurich Lawson Last month, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger stepped to a podium on a hazy, wind-whipped day just outside Phoenix. “Isn’t this awesome!” Gelsinger exclaimed, gesturing over his shoulder. Behind him, two large pieces of construction equipment posed theatrically atop the ocher Arizona soil, framing an organized tangle of pipes, steel, and fencing at the company’s Ocotillo campus. “If this doesn’t get you excited, check your pulse,” he said with a chuckle. A handful of executives and government officials applauded at the appropriate points. Despite the gathering dust storm, Gelsinger genuinely seemed to enjoy himself. He was in Arizona to announce not one but two new fabs that, when finished, will form a $20 billion bet that Intel can return to the leading edge of semiconductor manufacturing, one of the world's most profitable, challenging, and cutthroat businesses. “Semiconductors are a hot topic these days,” Gelsinger continued. “What aspect of your life is not being increasingly driven by digital transformation? If there was any question on that, COVID eliminated it.” Enlarge / Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger spoke before the company's groundbreaking ceremony at its Ocotillo campus, where it's building two new fabs for $20 billion.Intel Over the last year and a half, as the pandemic has everyone turned to their screens, demand has surged for devices (phones and laptops) and cloud ser
(read more)
October 20, 2021 by Chris Dias, @chrisdias Back in 2019, when the .dev top-level domain opened, we picked up vscode.dev and quickly parked it, pointing at our website code.visualstudio.com (or, if you are from the Boston area like me, we "pahked it"). Like a lot of people who buy a .dev domain, we had no idea what we were going to do with it. And we certainly didn't anticipate that it would end up being the fulfillment of a mission over a decade in the making. Bringing VS Code to the browser Fast forward to today. Now when you go to https://vscode.dev, you'll be presented with a lightweight version of VS Code running fully in the browser. Open a folder on your local machine and start coding. No install required. With the availability of vscode.dev, we begin to finally realize our original vision of building a development tool that can run fully serverless in the browser. For a full history lesson, check out Erich Gamma's VS Code Day talk "VS Code An Overnight Success…10 Years in the Making". So, what can you do on VS Code for the Web? Quite a bit actually… ) Modern browsers that support the File System Access API (Edge and Chrome today) allow web pages to access the local file system (with your permission). This simple gateway to the local machine quickly opens some interesting scenarios for using VS Code for the Web as a zero-installation local development tool, such as: Local file viewing and editing. Quickly take notes (and preview!) in Markdown. Even if you are on a restricted machine where you cannot install the full VS Code, you may still be able to use vscode.dev to view and edit local files. Build client-side HTML, JavaScript, and CSS applicat
(read more)
Image: NORBERT MILLAUER/DDP/AFP via Getty ImagesA consortium of museums in Vienna have created an OnlyFans account to post nude artworks as part of a “new wave of prudishness” on social media platforms. The so-called “Vienna Laid Bare” initiative was launched by Vienna’s tourism board late last week along with its OnlyFans account. As of writing subscribers can receive a complimentary Vienna City Card, or a ticket for one of the museums featured on the account.  Helena Hartlauer, a spokesperson for the Vienna Tourism Board, told Motherboard that the museums launched the initiative after the city’s museums had their social media accounts suspended for uploading nude artworks. In July, the TikTok account of the city’s Albertina Museum was banned for posting photographs from Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki depicting obscured breasts. TikTok did not immediately reply to an email from Motherboard regarding the ban. “Vienna and its art institutions are among the casualties of this new wave of prudishness – with nude statues and famous artworks blacklisted under social media guidelines, and repeat offenders even finding their accounts temporarily suspended,” the Vienna Tourism Board wrote in a press release. “That’s why we decided to put the capital’s world-famous ‘explicit’ artworks on OnlyFans.”“Major social media channels like Instagram and Facebook have nudity and ‘lewd’ content firmly in their sights,” it added. Among others, the OnlyFans account will feature artists Egon Schiele, an Austrian Expressionist painter, and Koloman Moser, a twentieth-century graphic artist. On the Vienna Tourism Board’s other social media accounts it teased the so-called “x-rated” artworks, including in a YouTube video showing a suggestive image of a statue with the text: “Want to see Venus — and her mound of Venus?” This isn’t the first time that the fine art world has run up against increasingly strict rules on depictions of nudity on social media platforms. In 2018, the Flemish Tourism Board mocked Facebook for continually censoring nude paintings from the Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens. And, in the same year, a French
(read more)
The Competition Pro joystick is often considered to be the pinnacle of input devices, at least as far as the 1980s gaming goes. But the design isn’t perfect, and time hasn’t been kind to certain aspects of its mechanism. For example, the large rubber disc used to keep the stick centered on early generations of the hardware will invariably be hardened up on any surviving specimens. Looking to return these classic controllers to their former glory, and then some, [mageb] has released a number of 3D printed modifications for the Competition Pro that should be of great interest to the vintage gamer. The new microswitches First and foremost is the deletion of the original rubber disc for a new spring mechanism. Even if this is the only modification you do, [mageb] says you’ll already have a better and longer-lasting joystick to show for it. But if you want to continue with the full rebuild, be aware that there’s no going back to stock. Once you start cutting the original parts, you’re committed to taking it all the way. Assuming you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty, the next step is cutting the metal contacts from the bottom of the face buttons so they’ll work with the new microswitch array he’s designed. Each button gets its switch, and four h
(read more)
I’ve been wanting to publicly comment on Lenovo’s statement on Linux support for a while, as there’s much to say about it, and my failing attempt at finding a suitable replacement for my venerable T510 gave me an excuse to document my love-hate relationship with Lenovo all at once.This is of course my own personal views and ideas, and does not reflect the Haiku project’s position on the topic, nor that of Haiku, Inc. But I feel they deserve to be brought here due to history and the direct and indirect effect it might have had on the project, including previous failed attempts at commercial applications using it.While Lenovo is still above many other manufacturers on some aspects, and on others domains, well, nobody does any better anyway, they purport to perpetuating the IBM legacy, so I think (sic) they should be held up to the standard they claim to follow. Yet the discussion about repair and documentation pertains to almost every vendor.Also, it’s a long read, an hour or so, so make yourself comfortable, get a coffee, or tea and biscuits.Skip to the middle for the more political views on Right to repair, schematics and specifications, but you’d really be missing some history and facts for the subsequent discussion, and rants about the T510 and nvidia. If you just want to see me complain about current hardware just go further down.Time travelI had several computers before ThinkPads, not all of which were good, so I’ll go through them for context. It’s also of historical interest to BeOS and Haiku fans I suppose. That’s only the ones I actually used for coding and daily tasks, not those I try not to collect because my flat is already full.ORIC AtmosThe ORIC Atmos had a MOS 6502 CPU and 64KB of RAM. We had three of them at the back of the class in 1989, and I managed to get my mum to buy me one.It’s still working, the user manual has all the register descriptions to program it in assembly language, and I have the full schematics in case I need to fix it. And I still write software and make hardware for it.Some hardware limitations but still respectable specs with regards to contemporary machines.And it’s black and red. 😎And it’s beauti
(read more)
Windows is a platform for creators Windows is the most open platform on the planet for creators. Part of living our commitment to openness is welcoming partner technologies and content that deliver powerful experiences. And what makes Windows, well, Windows is the variety of apps available. So, with Windows 11, we announced a new Microsoft Store to showcase the best experiences from developers, a flexible and transparent commerce model, and the introduction of Android™ apps. Today, we are announcing the first preview of our Android apps experience into the Windows Insider Program. We are proud to deliver this experience with our partners – Amazon and Intel – to Beta Channel users in the United States on eligible devices running Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm platforms. Experience Android apps on Windows for the first time To dive in, open the new Microsoft Store and find a selection of mobile experiences that were not available on Windows before. These Android apps and games join our broader catalog, which has everything you are looking for – from core to casual games, sophisticated productivity suites to social experiences, creativity tools to niche hobbyist apps, and developer tools to entire virtualized environments. Our new Microsoft Store search experience delivers the best results available, regardless of the technology used to build an app, because we are committed to offering you choice when more than one option is available. And when you’re ready to download an Android app, the Amazon Appstore will guide you through the rest of the flow and get you on your way. Running Android apps and games on Windows 11 will feel familiar, effortless, and integrated – just as you would expect. You can easily run these apps side-by-side with the help of the new Snap Layouts feature, pin them to your Start menu or Taskbar, and interact with them via mouse, touch, or pen input. Android apps are also integrated into Alt + Tab and Task view to help you quickly move back-and-forth between the apps that matter most to you. You can see notifications from Android apps notifications in the Action Center or share your clipboard between a Windo
(read more)
Pi shortage — Raspberry Pi 3B+ production is also being "deprioritized." Enlarge / The Raspberry Pi 4.Raspberry Pi Foundation Pandemic-driven supply chain problems have prompted the first-ever price increase for a Raspberry Pi product, according to Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton. Acknowledging that the 2GB configuration of the Raspberry Pi 4 and the Raspberry Pi Zero had been particularly hard-hit by shortages, Upton announced that the pric
(read more)
Korean DRAM fabber SK hynix has developed an HBM3 DRAM chip operating at 819GB/sec. HBM3 (High Bandwidth Memory 3) is a third generation of the HBM architecture which stacks DRAM chips one above another, connects them by vertical current-carrying holes called Through Silicon Vias (TSVs) to a base interposer board, via connecting micro-bumps, upon which is fastened a processor that accesses the data in the DRAM chip faster than it would through the traditional CPU socket interface. Seon-yong Cha, SK hynix's senior vice president for DRAM development, said: "Since its launch of the world's firs
(read more)
Picture one of America’s wealthiest people – say, Warren Buffet, Sergey Brin or Larry Ellison – and you’re more likely to regard their enormous riches as fairly earned and deserved, the product of hard work, talent and ingenuity. But if you consider “the superwealthy,” “the 1%” or “the economic elite,” rather than individuals, you’re more likely to attribute vast wealth to systemic advantages that have contributed to decades of widening income inequality in the United States, and to feel more troubled by it. That finding, reported in new psychology research by collaborators from Cornell and the Ohio State University, suggests our tolerance for inequality – and support for redistributive policies intended to reduce it – may depend on who people are led to think about at the top of the economic ladder. “When you think about ‘the wealthy’ or ‘the 1%,’ the mind goes to situational attributions much more readily,” said Thomas Gilovich, the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences. “You think about the system being rigged, the privileges they have, and therefore you’re much more willing to support, for example, an inheritance tax to deal with growing income inequality.” Gilovich is a co-author with Jesse Walker, M.A. ’17, Ph.D. ’19, assistant professor of marketing at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business, and Stephanie Tepper, M.A. ’21, a doctoral student in the field of psychology, of “People Are More Tolerant of Inequality When it is Expressed in Terms of Individuals Rather than Groups at the Top”, published Oct. 18 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Across eight studies involving a total of 2,800 survey participants, the researchers found people were more willing to accept extreme disparities in wealth or resources, and less supportive of policies such as a wealth or inheritance tax, in the context of successful individuals. They found the same level of inequality less fair when it applied to groups. Driving that effect, the scholars propose, is our tendency to see internal traits as more responsible for individual successes and failures than for group outcomes. Also at work: the “streaking star effect,” in which Gilovich and Walker found people are more inspired by individual success than team success. The
(read more)
Our trip through the world of audio technology has taken us step-by step from your ears into a typical home Hi-Fi system. We’ve seen the speakers and the amplifier, now it’s time to take a look at what feeds that amplifier. Here, we encounter the first digital component in our journey outwards from the ear, the Digital to Analogue Converter, or DAC. This circuit, which you’ll find as an integrated circuit, takes the digital information and turns it into the analogue voltage required by the amplifier. There are many standards for digital audio, but in this context that used by the CD is most common. CDs sample audio at 44.1 kHz 16 bit, which is to say they express the level as a 16-bit number 44100 times per second for each of the stereo channels. There’s an electrical standard called i2s for communicating this data, consisting of a serial data line, a clock line, and an LRclock line that indicates whether the current data is for the left or the right channel. We covered i2s in detail back in 2019, and should you peer into almost any consumer digital audio product you’ll find it somewhere. Making A DAC Is Easy. Making A Good DAC, Not So Much. The Philips i2s to parallel converter. Remembering that i2s is a technology from the end of the 1970s, it’s a surprisingly simple one to create a DAC for. The original Philips specification document contains a circuit using shift registers and latches to capture the samples, which can be fed to a simple resistor ladder and filter to perform the conversion. This is an effective way to turn digital to analogue, but as with every audio component it carries with it a level of distortion. If you look at the output of a
(read more)
The UK's efforts to copy US government and military innovation outfit DARPA are stalling, according to a leading figure in research and development. Appearing before the Science and Technology Committee, Sir John Kingman, former chair of UK Research and Innovation, told MPs this morning that ARIA – the Advanced Research and Invention Agency – was a good example of departmental research spending that could be cut, sidelined or delayed. "A very high-profile example would be ARIA, which has been this big plan for the Boris Johnson government, and yet here we are a few years into the Johnson government and it still hasn't even begun to happen," he told MPs. Earlier this month reports suggested attempts to find a leader for the innovation unit had stalled. The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, which leads the ARIA project, has been contacted for a comment and offered the opportunity to provide an update on progress. ARIA was launched as a policy statement in March this year. It was earmarked for £800m investment in the budget and was set to be modelled on the principles of the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) now renamed DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). ARPA was behind ARPAnet, a precursor to the internet. Earlier this year, ARIA attracted criticism for a lack of focus in its mission. Officially it is tasked with "funding high-risk research that offers the chance of high rewards, suppor
(read more)
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) auction in February, 2016, for oil and gas drilling rights near Arches National Park was unremarkable. The high bidder, Tempest Exploration Co. LLC, paid $2,500 for the 1,120 acre lease by credit card and began paying annual rental fees. What soon did prove remarkable, though, was the revelation that the company had been created by the environmentalist, Terry Tempest Williams. She intended to keep the oil in the ground. BLM promptly canceled the lease. This extractive bias against conservation is legally mandated for most of America’s public resources. When our public lands laws were written almost a century ago, the goal was to put the lands to productive use as quickly as possible. If you found valuable minerals and staked a claim, it was yours. If you diverted surface waters and put them to a beneficial use, they were yours. This practice has largely continued to the present day, where there is a “use it or lose it” requirement for bidding on access to public lands. If you want to keep the trees standing, the oil in the ground, or the range free from grazing, you’re not allowed to bid at all.In a piece published today in the journal Science, Allow “nonuse rights” to conserve natural resources, my co-authors and I argue that it is well past time to end this practiceThe focus on extraction activities on public lands may have made sense when the nation actively sought to promote the productive use of its natural resources and settle the West. Such rules, however, are outdated today. Preventing conservation interests from participating in resource markets betrays current values and foments controversy. When conservation advocates are unable to participate in markets, they are forced to pursue what are often less effective and less efficient strategies such as litigation or lobbying for regulation. These battles pit resource-dependent communities against conservation organizations, resulting in controversy and outcomes that are vulnerable to shifts in political influence.Current examples are easy to find. Near the end of its term, the Trump administration finalized plans to allow logging in areas of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, lease oil and gas in parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, and expand livestock grazing in national monuments that had previously been deemed off limits to such activities. While environmentalists vehemently opposed these policies, they had few options other than litigation because such groups lacked rights to these resources or even the ability to acquire them. The Biden administration is attempting to undo some or all of these policy changes, but nothing prevents a future administration from reversing course yet again, as has happened in the past. Rejecting outdated legal shackles, conservationists’ exercise of non-use rights should hold the same status as extractive interests in acquiring public resource rights. This approach will allow market mechanisms to reveal unmet demands for additional conservation of publicly managed resources currently subject to political decision-making and create more durable conservation outcomes. There is good reason to th
(read more)
19th October 2021 - Language design , Nim , Programming This is a question that has come up time and time again in the IRC channel, when talking to people in person, and in the comment section pretty much every time Nim has an article on Hackernews or one of the bigger programming subreddits. It’s also a question that has been answered a lot of times, both with a short and efficient “no”, but also in longer form. This article will go into some detail about why the answer is “no” and can hopefully serve as a reference the next time this question gets asked. What is a compiler anyways? Those who ask the question “is Nim a transpiler?” usually means “as opposed to a compiler”, so to understand why the answer is “no” we need to understand the difference between a compiler and a transpiler. While these words are sometimes used interchangeably there is a subtle yet important distinction in their meaning. But before we get into that, what exactly is a compiler? Compilers have existed almost as long as computers have been in use. The first ones started to crop up in the early ’50s as computers became more and more capable. The job of a compiler is to take a program written in an abstract language, and convert it into something more concrete. Many compilers will compile from your language of choice directly into binary code, like GCC, or into a particular VM bytecode format, like the Java Compiler. Other compilers will take a language of higher abstraction, and simply compile it into a more concrete implementation in a different language. An example of this is TypeScript, which compiles its code into JavaScript, running all the static type checks and such before outputting only valid JavaScript code. But I thought a transpiler just converted between languages? This seems to be the misconception that leads to people asking the question which titles this article. While it is true that a transpiler converts from one language to another language the distinction lies in levels of abstraction. By compiling C to assembly you’re essentially using information in the C language to make decisions about what assembly code to generate, discard the information in the process. A transpiler on the other hand is a tool that converts between two languages while keeping the same level of abstraction. A theoretical perfect transpilation is therefore a two-way process where you could go back and forth between languages. This is typically not the case however because of structural changes and the assumptions required to transpile between two different languages. Examples of transpilers include JSweet which converts from Java to TypeScript, f2c which transpiles Fortran 77 to C, or J2ObjC which converts from Java to Objective-C, or even the tool c2nim which ships with Nim and compiles from C to Nim. Transpilers are typically used when you want to use code from one language which is on the same level of abstraction and use it in a language of the same or higher abstraction. And even this list is using the term a bit lo
(read more)
The Atari 2600, branded as the Atari Video Computer System (Atari VCS) until November 1982, is a home video game console developed and produced by Atari, Inc. Released in September 1977, it popularized the use of microprocessor-based hardware and of games stored on swappable ROM cartridges, a format first used with the Fairchild Channel F in 1976. On this page I have the most recent additions you can navigate though the games via the game(s) title or see all additions so far in the View All Section. This is what I know exists, but always, looking for people to contirbute more information. Feel free to drop any information just conta
(read more)
The Brave browser will now default to the company's own search engine, claimed to preserve privacy, while a new Web Discovery Project aims to collect search data again with privacy protection. The Br
(read more)
The Chromium team has finally done it – File Transfer Protocol (FTP) support is not just deprecated, but stripped from the codebase in the latest stable build of the Chrome browser, version 95. It has been a while coming. A lack of support for encrypted connections in Chrome's FTP implementation, coupled with a general disinterest from the majority of the browser's users, and more capable third-party alternatives being available has meant that the code has moved from deprecated to gone entirely. Support for fetching document resources over FTP was stripped from Chrome 72, proxy support for FTP was removed in Chrome 76, and Chrome 86 introduced a flag to turn it off completely. In b
(read more)
Every week at the Browser we conduct edifying interviews with interesting figures. Today we speak to Jon Ingold, game designer and founder of Inkle Studios — developers of interactive
(read more)