hurin

In part I think the difference is the user/customer-base. For Google or Facebook their CEO's actually have to pay lip-service to user-data-privacy and pretend to be outraged at government surveillance because it would hurt them economically not to do so.

For Oracle's customer-base those concerns just might not mean as much, so Ellison gets to float around ideas like National ID Cards (https://web.archive.org/web/20141224053509/http://archive.wi...) their big corporate subscribers probably wouldn't have minded.

I don't know what the actual news is but it sounds like the article is misrepresenting what is happening here.

Julia and JuliaBox are both MIT Licensed: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://github.com/JuliaLang/JuliaBox/blob/master/LICENSE.md

The only factual content I was able to gleen from the article was that they plan to have a paid offering for: https://www.juliabox.org/ ?

I think I need to sleep.

> OpenBSD requires at least 8 bytes of random data per TCP connection. Limiting a system to 1000 conn/sec (to say nothing of any other processing those connections may require) probably isn't going to fly.

They can use the generated random values to seed a CSPRNG. I guess for containers or other virtual environments this has distinct advantages (at least that's one of the reasons given in the introduction).

> As a comparison, I can read from /dev/random (and write to /dev/null) at over 300 MB/s.

You can read from /dev/random only if there is enough entropy in it, and it's rarely very much, I don't know how you got that 300MB/s figure.

> /dev/random is a PRNG, and predictable. You shouldn't use it for security applications but only for specific state/algorithm randomness.

> /dev/urandom requires hardware noise/key events, etc. to generate its entropy. These become hard to find when your dealing with purely virtualized installations.

You have it backwards. http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=/dev/random

Is there a significant advantage? Either-way you just need to fill /dev/random enough for /urandom to be well seeded.

>>> def foo(x,y):

... return x,y

debug: OperationError:

debug: operror-type: SyntaxError

debug: operror-value: ('EOL while scanning string literal', ('c callback', 1, 12, "r = c.push('def foo(x,y):\n", 0))

>>>

It's simply not a difficult problem: there are no consensus requirements between individuals, so scaling can't be made any harder by increasing N.

You trust the holder of the Bullion or I guess https://www.anthemvault.com/ in this case, so the difference between a piece of paper that gives you ownership of the gold would really be that you can purchase/exchange it via. a Blockchain transaction.

I'm not sure you get any advantage from the Blockchain in this case though, you still have to trust a single-party, and their local government may still require all kinds of identifying information for regulations sake from this single-party.

Further the article doesn't specify which Blockchain they are using (neither does their website)? All of the extant Blockchains aside from Bitcoin are prone to various security problems.

> Those who don't google search are doomed to reinvent..

Not to be critical - but you are also forcing people to reinvent by having a custom-rule parser, rather than wrapping an existing lexer library.

> A better example is frequency capping. Ever watch something on Hulu and see the same ad 4 times in a twenty-minute commercial? Or even, worse, back to back?

Yeah, but when that happens I usually don't think, oh hey they are lacking an optimal in memory distributed database solution.

I think, well... their engineers suck. Or they don't care. Pick one.

edit: His point is vague, so there is nothing technical to respond to. I am very much interested in a good technical example - but the things mentioned so far are by all appearances relatively straight-forward and linear, hence lack of effort or bad engineering are the only reasonable assumptions left.

I'm really not seeing what you gain out of running fine-grained control all-the-time here. Even if it were vital for a customer that you hit a budget target exactly you could dynamically change the granularity of control as you got closer. If anything predictive modeling would give you better budget use when you do have the flexibility than granular adjustment would (I don't know much about the area though and just going with your description of the problem here.)

Why does this need to be in real-time, if their daily budget is $1000, you can still wait quite a bit and then apply increments in aggregate (e.g. hourly)? More so it sounds the customers aren't inter-connected - it hardly seems like the complex distributed problem.

I think it's not such a rudimentary and obvious question whether they are a money-service-business or not. Their argument would be that they are only providing a protocol, and those using the protocol are money-service businesses.

The counter-argument of course being that they are charging XRP for use of their protocol ergo: money-service-business like any other.

On the other-hand what about Bitcoin in that case? Is Gavin Andresen running a money-service-business because he's developing a protocol? Are the miners because they are collecting transaction fees?

There are a lot of open questions here.

Ripple is semi-centralized, so unlike Bitcoin they can in fact enforce actions against them in a way that affects all of the protocol users.

Hey it's one button guitar hero!

That's not answering my skepticism to GGP's post - what he is saying is: a non-charging plugged in device has a significantly hotter battery than a non-plugged in device because of thermal-conduction across a non-charging wire?

I'm not a hardware/electronics guy, but I'm rather skeptical that this is any kind of notable amount - do you have a reference?

Why would the battery be heated if it's not charging? You can set a gap - e.g. 80-100% where the battery won't start charging until it drops below 80%. Look at the documentation for your relevant power-management module.

You can control the battery % at which a device will begin and stop charging - so there's no need for this. Idk what all this misinformation is about.

One thing I never understood -- and these articles don't appear to cover, is how laws enabling civil forfeiture were never struck down as unconstitutional in the first place. Isn't this an obvious disregard for the fourth amendment?

> The above link is just laziness: they have correlated P values with low quality research,

My point was rather that there was so much low quality research they decided to try to filter it by banning a statistical tool. Are you saying the reasons for so much low quality research had nothing to do with methodological problems? Maybe it's not low-quality, since you know it's "subjective"...

> The article submitted was not peer reviewed, and could very well be bad science, but I think accusations of non-science are not very productive and do not provide feedback in how to do better.

You are addressing a point I never made. What I said was(quote): The advisors should have encouraged a smaller and more manageable scope with a more thorough methodology

Because an important part of undergraduate education is in fact learning to be able to tell what good research is. The advisor's aren't really benefiting them by not pointing out methodological problems and letting them do research ">>>>> wherever that may lead them" - because that only encourages methodologically sloppy work in the future.

> "Correct methodology" and "real research" are very subjective things.

That's exactly the attitude emblematic of the portion of academics producing worthless output.

Here is a recent reference: http://www.nature.com/news/psychology-journal-bans-p-values-...

Not a methodological problem?

> The goal is for the student to get some experience with performing their own research wherever that may lead them.

You mean it has nothing to do with learning correct methodology or actually doing real research?

How could it be slower than a mutex? Is it from compiling all your increments to use LOCK? What exactly were you timing? That sounds really strange..

Well you could refuse to sign that form -- though they'll probably find some excuse to hold you for an extra 6 hours.

You can compile on x86 for atomic increments? (Go seems to support it https://golang.org/pkg/sync/atomic/)

Yes, because the point is being able to write (on a resume): successfully presented thesis on "Evaluation of C, Go, and Rust in the HPC environment".

The advisors should have encouraged a smaller and more manageable scope with a more thorough methodology where the results would actually be worth something.

> I do agree that the advisor should have pushed back lots harder on the methods; it's a weak paper, even as an experience report.

I agree - this seems to be mostly the advisors fault, by the looks of it it's not that the student didn't put a lot of work into it but methodological problems are what advisors are supposed to be there to address; I saw a lot of this back in college, at least with technical papers it's easy to tell what's wrong, with the humanities it's just a complete disaster.

You could do some anonymous block-chain ledger type-service, really doubt that it would win over simply bit-torrent though, and ultimately I'm kind of biased since I really would prefer that real creators get to exercise their rights.