Computing | Software and Hardware

[Doc]

The Register | Blockchain study finds 0.00% success rate and vendors don't call back when asked for evidence

Where is your distributed ledger technology now?

Counter example:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... r-election

West Virginia to offer mobile blockchain voting app for overseas voters in November election

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3 ... othly.html

W. Va. says mobile voting via blockchain went smoothly
West Virginia's Secretary of State said the technology, first tried out in this year's mid-term election by a small group of voters, is not just a trend. It's 'the future.'

[Typhoon]

USA Today | Despite controversies, Facebook apps were the most used and downloaded in 2018

Seems as though most people will happily trade privacy for convenience.

[noddy]

nearly all carrier android phones come with facebook preinstalled and you cant remove it.

on my phone, all i could do was disable it, and trust, that its actually disabled.

[noddy]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02 ... -sneakers/

"The first software update for the shoe threw an error while updating, bricking the right shoe." Another says, "App will only sync with left shoe and then fails every time. Also, app says left shoe is already connected to another device whenever I try to reinstall and start over."
"My left shoe won't even reboot." writes another. One user offers a possible solution, saying, "You need to do a manual reset of both shoes per the instructions."

"I bricked my shoes" is not a sentance I ever thought would exist.

[Typhoon]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02 ... -sneakers/

"The first software update for the shoe threw an error while updating, bricking the right shoe." Another says, "App will only sync with left shoe and then fails every time. Also, app says left shoe is already connected to another device whenever I try to reinstall and start over."
"My left shoe won't even reboot." writes another. One user offers a possible solution, saying, "You need to do a manual reset of both shoes per the instructions."

"I bricked my shoes" is not a sentence I ever thought would exist.

The future turned out to be rather different than what many of us expected.

[Typhoon]

Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition

I use Linux solely for scientific/numerical computation so most of these issues don't trouble me much.
However, the reason that I do this is that most of the academic scientific community chooses to write their code first on Linux with Windows a possible afterthought.
The rationale seems more historical and ideological than practical.

The one complaint that I do have, which is discussed in the article, is the windowing system.
X.org on Ubuntu today appears little different from what I used on Silicon Graphics workstations back in the late 1980's, early 1990's.
It is still as clunky.

[Simple Minded]

https://www.fastcompany.com/90311572/lu ... ad-to-moon

OK, that's good to know. Too bad the ancient aliens didn't save all their advanced knowledge on a zip drive for us.

The scientists of SimpleMindedStan downloaded all our knowledge and history on a 286 hard drive last month. Since we had a fair amount of memory left over, we filled it with donkey porn. Just so posterity won't have any delusions about their ancestors.

Back to the moon, what if the alien aliens (aliens that have not spent a lot of time on Earth, not the ones that look like us and are already living here) download it before our descendants can recover it?

[noddy]

However, the reason that I do this is that most of the academic scientific community chooses to write their code first on Linux with Windows a possible afterthought.
The rationale seems more historical and ideological than practical.

not at all, i would consider it insane to trap an algorithm or important bit of code against a windows API for very good reasons - microsoft does everything it can to own your logic and your data and keep you paying for access to it and their libraries are propriety and can be deprecated with no warning.

the posix/unix api has all sorts of historical problems but quite literally lets me run programs from the 1970's dawn of computing with minimum fuss on a modern linux box even tho that program might have been written on IRIX or SOLARIS etc

a goodly part of my income over the years has been re-implenting microsoft based applications because the API went away - they have changed core libraries such as the database layer half a dozen times in the previous decade.

which isnt to say I dont scream with frustration at some very tedious parts of the modern linux system - the init system and controlling various components like networking and whatnot is a nightmare of incoherant Not-Invented-Here variations.

the audio subsystem is a fragile mess too.
---

I mostly think the linux on the desktop thing has got to the point that the remaining differences are due to close sourced drivers - most of the rant above is due to these and nothing will ever change on that front - which is why android and apple (which are *nix on the desktop) exist, they pay the license fee, they get the secret sauce - this is how capitalism works.

he also spends alot of time raving that the problem is a bunch of hackers doing their own thing without a disciplined integration, which is sort of missing the point of what it actually is, what he wants is android or apple if he wants authoritarian conformance with minimum learning curve.

he is out of date on gaming and flash and video.

linux mint works out of the box better than windows for me but im not doing anything that needs the dark corners of the GPU driver, so meh

[noddy]

The scientists of SimpleMindedStan downloaded all our knowledge and history on a 286 hard drive last month. Since we had a fair amount of memory left over, we filled it with donkey porn. Just so posterity won't have any delusions about their ancestors.

nice, do you have a copy. asking for a friend.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90311572/lu ... ad-to-moon

put the instructions for how to get to the moon, on the moon.. genius.

[Typhoon]

Visual Capitalist | Everything breath you take, every purchase you make

[noddy]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson ... f672ad7d20

Each tiny computer is equipped with extra sensors to monitor things like temperature, vibration, proximity and energy usage.

As it spies on a piece of automated equipment or robot, it then sends information to a database using a secure protocol that Edwards’ team developed. Some of the Pi’s have cameras that record a video feed of the machines which, for instance, gets processed by vision-recognition software to look for irregularities.

“It allows us to avoid having to have a person painstakingly watch over a machine,” says Edwards. “This is how we stop people walking around with clipboards.”

Sony is now replicating his experiment in three other factories in Asia, including two in Japan and one in Malaysia, which will also install between 50 and 60 Raspberry Pi’s to monitor equipment there.

He’s heard of several divisional managers or middle managers at industrial plants who are experimenting with the Raspberry Pi, often buying the equipment with their personal credit cards.

The goal is capturing the same kinds of efficiencies promised by bigger, more-expensive IoT companies like Siemens or factory-automation specialist Omron.

The Pi costs five to ten times less than similar equipment from larger firms says factory-manager Edwards, who declined to name any of these companies.

“You need to experiment and fail to drive meaningful innovation,” says Bieler of Gartner. “If you fail at $100,000 it’s painful. If you fail and you’ve spent $1,000, it’s a different type of failure.”

[Typhoon]

The Raspberry Pi is a neat little device.

It is powerful enough to run a complete Unix operating system, Raspbian, derived from Debian.

[Typhoon]

NY Times | How a Bitcoin Evangelist Made Himself Vanish, in 15 (Not So Easy) Steps

In October 2017, a SWAT team descended on Jameson Lopp’s house in North Carolina. Someone — it still isn’t clear who — had called the police and falsely claimed that a shooter at the home had killed someone and taken a hostage. After the police left, Mr. Lopp received a call threatening more mayhem if he did not make a large ransom payment in Bitcoin.

To scare off future attackers, Mr. Lopp quickly posted a video on Twitter of himself firing off his AR-15 rifle. He also decided he was going to make it much harder for his enemies — and anyone else — to find him ever again.

Mr. Lopp, a self-described libertarian who works for a Bitcoin security company, had long been obsessed with the value of privacy, and he set out to learn how thoroughly a person can escape the all-seeing eyes of corporate America and the government. But he wanted to do it without giving up internet access and moving to a shack in the woods.

Many celebrities and wealthy people, wary of thieves, paparazzi and other predators, have tried to achieve Mr. Lopp’s vision of complete privacy. Few have succeeded.

Mr. Lopp viewed the exercise as something of an experiment, to find out the lengths he’d have to go to extricate himself from the databases and other repositories that hold our personal information and make it available to anyone willing to pay for it. That helps explain why he was willing to describe the steps he’s taken with me (though he did so from a burner phone, without disclosing his new location).

[Typhoon]

IEEE Spectrum | The case against quantum computing

The proposed strategy relies on manipulating with high precision an unimaginably huge number of variables.

[Typhoon]

Bleeping Computer | Go big, go to jail

He should have spent an equal effort to cover his tracks.

[Miss_Faucie_Fishtits]

Bleeping Computer | Go big, go to jail

He should have spent an equal effort to cover his tracks.

A good example of you might be able to bite one off, but you sure as hell can't chew it........'>...........

[Typhoon]

The Register | Blockchain study finds 0.00% success rate and vendors don't call back when asked for evidence

Where is your distributed ledger technology now?

Counter example:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... r-election

West Virginia to offer mobile blockchain voting app for overseas voters in November election

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3 ... othly.html

W. Va. says mobile voting via blockchain went smoothly
West Virginia's Secretary of State said the technology, first tried out in this year's mid-term election by a small group of voters, is not just a trend. It's 'the future.'

Counter counter example:

Gartner Survey | 90% of blockchain-based supply chain projects are in trouble

The lack of well-identified use cases is causing “blockchain fatigue” to set in; caution urged for early adopters.

[Typhoon]

IT runs on Java 8

Sometime in 2011, I stumbled across an unassuming site called Hacker News. At the time, I was a data analyst working mostly with Excel and SAS, and almost all of the headlines there were foreign to me. Git diffs? PyPy? Real-time APIs?

I realized quickly, though, that HN was the heartbeat of the tech industry, the place where many threads and points of interest were discussed. There’s a lot to dislike about the commenters and some of the discussion generated, but I still don’t know of any other outlet like it for any other industry that allows the emerging practitioner to become quickly familiar with the latest news and slang of their given profession, with such a high discussion volume. (Other than maybe r/programming.) . . .

Another example of the disconnect between social media and the real world?

[noddy]

in my country, business runs on dotnet, the internet runs on python or dotnet and all the high paid low level work runs on C or maybe C++.

their is also masses of 20+ year old dbase and firebase and access scripted database hacks powering many small business.

java is barely visible and usually means an app written 15 years ago when it was flavour of the month in those same business magazines which currently push python.

all the kids are being taught python and javascript now, and javascript is turning into mutant hybrid of python/dotnet via typescript, so ...

--

which is a gibberish way of saying its all variations on c++ with its problems tamed, objects without clutter, c family syntax.

[Typhoon]

Quantum computing bullsh*t detector:

https://twitter.com/BullshitQuantum

[Doc]

Scientist invent Bunny data storage
gNzHcaQov80

When these come to market I wonder if they will have volume discounts?

[Typhoon]

The Register | Windows to become emulation layer atop Linux kernel, ensuring final triumph of Linux on the desktop, predicts Eric Raymond

As I'm currently using WSL2, which is far better than dual-booting a system to Windows or Linux, I would welcome such an evolution.

[noddy]

ESR passed into harmless crank territory a decade or so ago - id never denigrate him or his work but his finger is a long way away from the pulse.

[Typhoon]

ESR passed into harmless crank territory a decade or so ago - id never denigrate him or his work but his finger is a long way away from the pulse.

I'm not familiar with ESR. Here's a counterargument by someone who seems to be knowledgeable.

No, Microsoft is not rebasing Windows to Linux

I would be very happy to be able to run Linux seamlessly under Windows. Looks like the next release of WSL will get close.

WSL2 GUI

[noddy]

ESR passed into harmless crank territory a decade or so ago - id never denigrate him or his work but his finger is a long way away from the pulse.

I'm not familiar with ESR. Here's a counterargument by someone who seems to be knowledgeable.

along with Stallman, he is one of the original hippies who laid the foundation for Gnu/Linux - sometimes has colourful opinions but hasnt really been active in the industry this century so isnt always on target.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

No, Microsoft is not rebasing Windows to Linux

I would be very happy to be able to run Linux seamlessly under Windows. Looks like the next release of WSL will get close.

WSL2 GUI

I dabble in VM's from time to time but really dislike them - lose half your performance and end up with frustrating interplay between the host and hosted OS.

Ive personally given up on all that and have a NUC box running linux which is purely development tools and then a gaming laptop running windows which runs the things linux cant run and is my media and gaming machine aswell.

much better for me personally - all my work code and devel/debug tools lives on the dedicated linux setup and i have the source trees syncing with an identical machine at the office, so i seemlessy work from either location.

the windows laptop only does work related things when a vendor annoyingly only releases a windows only tool - something that happens less and less for me in the electronics world, even the good microsoft tools run on linux now.