williamDafoe

Cruise missiles have an incredibly good terrain following navigation software - I don't think it's hard to navigate without GPS people get fat dumb and lazy because of GPS...

Apollo 11 was set to land automatically using the computer when Armstrong took controls at the last minute supposedly to avoid a Boulder Field. It's not really clear that his takeover of the automatic controls was necessary - what is clear is that mankind landing for the first time on another celestial body using automatic computers is probably not cool. ... And NASA was driven and sold to the public as a human interest project ...

It took 12 attempts to land a robot on the moon for the USSR. Their heavy booster program was in shambles. They literally never developed anything close to as powerful as Saturn V (5m pounds of thrust). They would be lucky not to crash 12 human vehicles on the moon. Leading for the first 5 miles of a marathon doesn't make you the winner!

I am very sad. In kindergarten in 1968 I learned to sing "Jamaica Farewell" which is one of Harry Belafonte's signature hit songs. It was one of the first things I ever learned at school. My kindergarten teacher (who was french) played guitar and sang it to us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh1ow6zKapQ&ab_channel=TheEd...

I think you guys are ALL missing the point. Imagine if you bought a brand new car but later found out it had a stolen engine? This is probably why Qualcomm is collecting data from its chipsets. Qualcomm gets a 5% royalty (5% of the cost of the entire handset) payment from each vendor.

Qualcomm needs to know if a vendor is lying about the number of chipsets it has used. They need to know if the vendor claims 10M cheapo handsets and 1M expensive handsets - they need to know if the numbers are actually reversed!

This backdoor can get them the evidence they need to invalidate a license with a vendor - cut of chipsets shipments - and start a new negotiation. Remember, Chinese vendors will cheat like bananas. Chinese vendors asked for a HUGE discount on domestic phones - and they go it - but at the cost of a higher-than-normal royalty for exports. They are probably cheating, it's what they do.

It's likely to keep track of how many black market chips tsmc is producing, and how many times Qualcomm is not getting royalties ...

If one particular vendor has 25% Black market Qualcomm chips inside for which Qualcomm never gets a royalty then I think they would definitely be getting a phone call from Qualcomm pretty soon...

I agree with the author on just about all the advantages of Perl. However, I think that python actually now shares the same advantages since almost everybody is using Python 3.x. Perl's greatest strength was its regex library and string handling and Python has stolen everything it could from Perl's regex language and most of its string handling so the advantages of Perl are much diminished now. Python is showing signs of being an absorbing language - like English - any great words that are developed in another language, are stolen by English pretty soon afterwards ..

Thomas Jefferson argued strenuously for the estate tax and for inheritances (without a will) to be divided evenly among the children. In Europe the law of primogeniture put inheritances in the hands of the firstborn male which guaranteed that a dynasty could always be preserved! Ick!

If you are a fan of Alexis DeTocqueville's "Democracy in America" you probably realize that he left off the very ending of that book title, "Democracy in the American Midwest" !! A lot of the really positive things he saw were seen among hardworking people of the MidWestern USA.

It's ironic that Ohio was so advanced because it used to be the USA's Silicon Valley (birthplace of American Aviation and many other inventions) but now has fallen economically the most among Midwestern states ... It's become the most Republican state now ... Coincidence? I think not!

I've noticed an alarming number of torturing crimes come from Ohio lately, too, thankfully it has displaced California which had a terrifying reputation after the Manson murders of the late 1960s!

We have a similar problem with a Lexus rx300 2001. The computer never goes to sleep. I was thinking of looking for (or making) a patch-fuse with a kill switch to stop the drain. Computer sleep depends on the flakey door controller switches.

I would love to load a D12 into this baby and see how high it would go!

With the right orbit and atmosphere, such a moon might stay warm for over a billion years after separating from a Sun. My question: How could life arise without photosynthesis on such a dark, warm planet?

These foolish projections never account for accidents, destroyed uninhabitable lands, or nuclear waste disposal which currently costs infinity in the USA since all waste is stored at reactors and guarded, forever.

You really have to be foolish to believe in nuclear power ...

Don't forget the 50-60 hr real workweeks (more than 10% of the search team I was on was always working 11pm-12pm midnight). Turnover is actually pretty high at Google. My whole team (9 people) quit in the year that I left.

I did that. My first gaming computer was a Celeron 300 overclocked to 400 with a 3dfx card. At the time celerons we're just getting off the ground and there was virtually no difference in performance - just a much cheaper price!

Yeah full frame cameras like the Minolta himatic viewfinder model were considered entry level back then. Thank God the mission wasn't delayed by one year because Kodak developed the truly terrible instamatic 126 camera in 1963, with awful resolution and picture quality ...

Guns don't kill people. People kill people. The only way to stop a bad 6-year-old with a gun is to have another good 6-year-old with a gun. ALL NONSENSE!

What a joke every teenager knows how to cloak themselves with a VPN to evade parental access restrictions & new tech will emerge to thwart all these laws! Google builds infra to make sure your kids have 24/7 access to YouTube! I know I used to work there! The only restriction we could impose at our house was to turn off the router at midnight!

I freaking HATE google / YouTube for filling my kids' childhoods with Smosh videos instead of real books or high quality active play.

And yes my son flunked out of college because of online social media - twice! He's got ADHD which makes him a perfect target for the addiction phd psychologists employed at social media and videogame companies! For these online tech vampire companies addicting your kids is like shooting fish in a barrel! And yes I'm a cs phd who got my start in network security!

As a left-wing free speech parent STILL STRUGGLING against online addiction with a 21-year old son who is STILL spending 24/7 to waste time online I'd put the threat up there with : hard drugs & gambling addiction. Yes it's that severe for a not trivial part of the population. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Which OS release did they hold recently where "The Big New Thing" was new Emoji Packs?

I recently tried to install gdb on a Mac. Well after 1 hour I gave up and went a different direction. gatekeeper was refusing to install code that wasn't signed out the wazoo and the 14-step instructions on how to sign, approve, bless, and sprinkle holy-water on top of a gnu gdb binary was just too much. it didn't matter what i did - even if i downloaded the source code, compiled and ran it as root, that wasn't going to make gatekeeper happy. gdb was never going to start.

if you watch this talk you can tell that gatekeeper is taking away your freedoms. they are trying to turn each and every binary on your machine into a walled garden.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/701/?time=1...

this will put apple in a superior position - the only company able to make a binary that can use every resource in the OS - and will put developers at a great disadvantage!

Exactly. Everyone is missing the big picture, focusing on Ken's jukebox, when its pretty shocking that Ken's giving up on a BSD-inspired (UNIX v7-descended) OS. Frankly, I was ready to throw my employer's mac against the wall when it refused to allow me to install gdb. The move towards gatekeeper and putting everything inside its own private walled garden will definitely ruin open source tools that can access any file on the system, making apple superior to all developers. I am pretty sure that some of these gestapo changes have been rolled back.

So when XSIS (Xerox System Integration Standards?) first started selling MAC address blocks in the early 1980s, I think it cost $1k for 16M mac addresses (168 addresses per penny). So there are only 16M blocks of mac addreses available, and it IS possible to run out, if vendors waste the addresses. I don't know what registration costs from The IEEE right now, but once the equivalent of $16B is spent on mac addresses, we will run out of blocks.

Maybe today they are selling smaller blocks but the MAC is basically divided into 16M blocks (specified by the first 24 bits / 3 bytes) - each with a registered owner or "unassigned") and 16M MACs within the block (the lower 24 bits). That's why you can enter a MAC address into a lookup website and find out who made the NIC (google search "mac address lookup"):

https://aruljohn.com/mac.pl

In the original ethernet design, routers were not used (because 8-bit processors were too slow and 16-bit processors were just starting to emerge). So the original standard proposed repeaters as the way to extend a large network, and this was a very very cheap analog way to grow your network. It was quite common to have a whole building or even several nearby buildings on one ethernet and then a high speed (i.e. 56 Kbps or maybe even a T-1) link to other buildings either nearby or in other cities.

The CRC is at the end, sorry if my explanation did not make it clear. It comes after all of the payload bytes.

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

The 1972 tour is widely known, but if you worked at Xerox in the early days you should know that they are good at taking credit and minimizing the work of others who came before them. It goes with the egos which were too large to fit in hyperspace. P.S. who are you? we should talk.

ACM awards are dominated by the theory community. A lot of theoreticians with NO impact on the world have awards. Metcalfe was one of a dozen people who co-invented Ethernet and does not fit the historians "Great man" theory where history is decided by a few "Great Men" who went a different direction at a critical moment ... Ethernet's success is only 25% due to him.

For example, in 1979 at UIUC a grad student built 230kbps S-100 cards using rs232 chips and I wrote the Z-80 csma/cd drivers (as a high school student) so it was not rocket science.

So there was reluctance to give him an award for something he didn't pioneer all alone.

Original DIX Ethernet was standardized by my manager, David Redell of Xerox. It was the bare minimum to do the job, 6-byte station destination, 6-byte source address, 2-byte packet length, a 2-byte Ethertype field (the latter 2 were combined for networks with hardware framing), and 32-bit CRC. NO arc in the hardware. It leveraged the move to byte-based memories and small CPUs. It followed the end-to-end principle in system design just about optimally - the most minimal MAC design of all time. EASY TO BUILD UPON AND ENHANCE.

Ethernet (CSMA/CD) is a protocol that copies human speech patterns. After someone stops speaking people hear the quiet (carrier sense multiple access / CSMA) and wait a very short and randomized amount of time and begin to speak. If two speakers collide they hear the collision and shut up (CD - collision detection). They both pick a randomized amount of time to pause before trying again. On the second third etc. collision people wait longer and longer before retrying.

The thing about original ethernet (1981) is that it wastes 2/3 of the channel because a highly loaded channel has too many collisions and too many back offs. But deployment and wiring were expensive so running a single wire throughout a building was the cheapest possible way to start (enhanced by thinwire Ethernet and twisted pair to have a less bulky cable a few years later). The frame design was PERFECT and within ~10 years people were using ethernet frames to build switched networks and today only radio networks are CSMA/CD = Ethernet.

ACM Turing award committee has its head up it's ass? Seriously 25% of winners have NO impact on the field ...

Metcalfe was controversial because Alohanet from university of Hawaii pioneered the idea and Metcalfe was seen as writing a nice proof in CACM of the 1/e capacity breakdown theorem and popularizing an already extant technology. He did not build it alone Chuck Thacker probably built most of it but didn't have a PhD! Oh the horror!

He should not have gotten it now - either give it sooner or not at all - and he should not be the only one getting it!

You could not be more wrong! Efficiency and overhead are measured as a percent of frame size and 128-byte packets (X.25) or 48-byte frames (Atm) are abortions. 1500 bytes at the outset and the overhead is < 1% and < 0.2% with jumbograms (8kB). Every 802.11 standard is a superset of Ethernet and that makes DIX Ethernet the most scalable network protocol of all time!

It was Xerox & Yogen Dalal's choice, not Bob's choice! Xerox blew it with 8-bit station addresses in PuP (PARC Universal Protocol) and wanted to give each station a UID to break ties in database transactions, hence the 48-bits. XNS actually had 3-byte station and 3-byte network size to fit in 6-byte MAC addresses! Metcalfe is not a software engineer and wouldn't have these insights ...