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Comment Re:No. (Score 1) 113

From everyone else's perspective, there's a constant stream of annoying drones flying overhead (and occasionally crashing into their neighborhood) destroying their ability to peacefully enjoy their backyards. I guess that's an externality that just doesn't need to be considered.

That's why Amazon is going to have their drones fly in at altitude, balloon down to complete the delivery and back up, out of the annoyingly loud range.

Submission + - I need suggestions for rugged ARM systems 7

Submitted by pecosdave
pecosdave writes: I need suggestions for commercially made ARM systems that will work in temperature ranges from -35F to 140F (-37C to 60C) for an engineering project. These things are going to be in metal boxes on the side of Texas Highways. The existing Intel systems we're using in other areas are all fan-less, but I'm not going to rule out systems with fans. Considering the extremes of Texas temperatures I'm actually contemplating putting fans on top of our fan-less systems anyways.

Almost everything I can find pre-made with ARM is a bare board, or something not nearly as temperature tolerant as some Intel systems I can find. The very nature of an ARM processors should be more tolerant simply because they produce less heat, but I can't seem to find any manufacturers exploiting that fact.

Submission + - Is Software Eating The Useless Class? (hackernoon.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “He’s not great at the basics of daily life: directions confound him, because roadways aren’t logical, and he’s so absent-minded about sunglasses that he keeps a “reload station” with nine pairs on his hall table,” wrote Tad Friend in a profile for the New Yorker magazine.

He grew up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin. The population? 1,500. At the age of 8 he taught himself the BASIC programming language. Yet his small town lacked the resources to quench his curiosity. “We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away. So I came from an environment where I was starved for information, starved for connection,” he said in an interview with tech magazine Wired.

In his New Yorker profile, he described his family as “Scandinavian, hard-core, very self-denying people who go through life never expecting to be happy.” One winter, with money tight, his father decided to stop paying for gas, heating, “ and we spent a great deal of time chopping fucking wood.”

His colleague, Ben Horowitz, has said of him, “He reminds me of Kanye, that level of emotional intensity—his childhood was so intensely bad he just won’t go there.”

As a senior at the University of Illinois he took a $6.85-per-hour programming job at high-tech think tank, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He was introduced to the internet.

He immediately saw the need for an easy-to-use internet browser. He hacked together a prototype. His browser idea later became the influential Mosaic browser, and his company Netscape.

In August of 1995, Netscape went public. At 23, he was worth $53 million and coined the “Golden Geek” and “Internet Evangelist.” By December, his stock was worth $174 million. And by 1998 Netscape was sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. But he isn’t known today just as someone who got rich from the internet, thanks to his browser, he’s recognized as someone who helped build it.

“Netscape was based on my beloved’s own inability, as a child, to access knowledge in a small town.”
His wife attributes his success to his childhood, “Netscape was based on my beloved’s own inability, as a child, to access knowledge in a small town.” Yet his success may have come at the cost of the working class people like those in New Lisbon.

This is the story of how a boy from Wisconsin became an elite tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist. It’s the story of his software eating the useless class. It’s the story of whether that boy, who is now 6 ft 5 with the physique of a linebacker, can save the growing useless class, and if he even cares enough to try. This is the story of Marc Andreessen.

Submission + - Boeing unveils 737 Max fixes

Submitted by hcs_$reboot
hcs_$reboot writes: Boeing previewed its software fix, cockpit alerts and additional pilot training for its 737 Max planes on Wednesday, saying the changes improve the safety of the aircraft which has been involved in two deadly crashes since October.
Among the notable changes to the MAX flight controls:
  • The plane’s Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, automated flight control system, will now receive data from both “angle of attack” sensors, instead of just one.
  • If those disagree by more than 5.5 degrees, the MCAS system will be disabled and will not push the nose of the plane lower.
  • Boeing will be adding an indicator to the flight control display so pilots are aware of when the angle of attack sensors disagree.
  • There will also be enhanced training required for all 737 pilots so they are more fully aware of how the MCAS system works and how to disable it if they encounter an issue.

By the end of this week, Boeing plans to send the software updates and plan for enhanced pilot training. After the FAA approves the fix, Boeing said it will send the software update to customers.

Submission + - Senators Ask Why Vendors Sell Voting Machines With 'Known Vulnerabilities' (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Four senior senators have called on the largest U.S. voting machine makers to explain why they continue to sell devices with “known vulnerabilities,” ahead of upcoming critical elections. The letter, sent Wednesday, calls on election equipment makers ES&S, Dominion Voting and Hart InterCivic to explain why they continue to sell decades-old machines, which the senators say contain security flaws that could undermine the results of elections if exploited. “The integrity of our elections is directly tied to the machines we vote on,” said the letter sent by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mark Warner (D-VA), Jack Reed (D-RI) and Gary Peters (D-MI), the most senior Democrats on the Rules, Intelligence, Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, respectively. “Despite shouldering such a massive responsibility, there has been a lack of meaningful innovation in the election vendor industry and our democracy is paying the price,” the letter adds.

Their primary concern is that the three companies have more than 90 percent of the U.S. election equipment market share but their voting machines lack paper ballots or auditability, making it impossible to know if a vote was accurately counted in the event of a bug. Yet, these are the same devices tens of millions of voters will use in the upcoming 2020 presidential election. ES&S spokesperson Katina Granger said it will respond to the letter it received. The ranking Democrats say paper ballots are “basic necessities” for a reliable voting system, but the companies still produce machines that don’t produce paper results.

Submission + - Researchers have Identified a Virus that Attacks Human Cancer Cells (healthfoodis.com)

Submitted by Mizumi
Mizumi writes: This virus also known as Senecavirus, mainly affects pigs and cows, but in recent years, it has been found to be able to selectively attack human cancer cells. Its efficacy in eliminating cancerous tumors while ignoring healthy cells was tested in two human clinical trials — the first in relapsed solid tumors in children and the second in lung carcinoma. The problem was that the experiments also found that the patient's immune system was fighting the virus and effectively removing it from the body within three weeks, thus preventing it from completing its anticancer action.

Submission + - ARM in the Datacenter isn't Dead Yet! (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by prpplague
prpplague writes: Despite Linus Torvald's recent claims ARM won’t win in the server space, there are very specific use cases where ARM is making advances into the datacenter. One of those is for use with software defined storage with open source projects like CEPH (https://ceph.com/). In a recent The Register article, Softiron's CTO states about their ARM based CEPH appliances that "It's a totally shitty computer, but what we are trying to do here is storage, and not compute, so when you look at the IO, when you look at the buffering, when you look at the data paths, there's amazing performance – we can approach something like a quarter of a petabyte, at 200Gbps wireline throughput." and " claimed that, on average, SoftIron servers run 25C cooler than a comparable system powered by Xeons." So... ARM in datacenter might be saying "I’m not quite dead yet!"

Submission + - Continuing progress on Babbage Analytical Engine (plan28.org)

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: The project to actually construct Babbage's Analytical Engine, the first design for a general purpose computing machine, continues with the documentation phase of the programme. Since Babbage continued to refine his design almost until the day of his death, working out what he actually wanted to build is quite a task. The last year's work is reported to includes work on a batch of previously unknown and uncatalogued materials discovered since the project's inception in 2011.

These decades, people don't think much of producing a new programming language to suit particular tasks — to "scratch an itch" in the vernacular. As with so many things, Babbage was a pioneer :

There have already been significant finds. The Notations for Difference Engine 1, dating from 1834, thought to exist, had never come to light. These have now been found and represent a crucial piece in the puzzle of the developmental trajectory of the symbolic language Babbage developed as a design aid, to describe and specify his engine, and used extensively in the development of the Analytical Engine.

Anyone who has been tasked with taking over a project from someone else (retired, sacked, beheaded, whatever) will recognise this feeling :

The survey so far has identified mis-titled drawings, single drawings that have two unrelated catalogue entries, and drawings known to exist from earlier scholarly work but not located.

The hope of the project is to have a working machine in time for Babbages sesquicentenary in 2021.

Submission + - Hoping to Fix College Teaching, Carnegie Mellon U Open-Sources Trove of Software (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: CMU announced today that it will make an adaptive-learning software platform and dozens of related tools to improve college teaching free and open source. It will also make a national push to get other colleges to adopt them and try to bring a more "engineering" approach to college teaching.

The biggest challenge will be changing the culture. While professors care about teaching, they think they're better at it than they are, according to many studies. The work is inspired by a former CMU professor who won a Nobel Prize, Herbert Simon, who championed the idea of learning engineering in the '60s.

As he wrote way back in 1967:
"We take the traditional organization of colleges so much for granted that we must step back and view them with Martian eyes, innocent of their history, to appreciate fully how outrageous their operation is,” he wrote. “If we visited an organization responsible for designing, building, and maintaining large bridges, we would expect to find employed there a number of trained and experienced professional engineers, thoroughly educated in mechanics and other laws of nature that determine whether a bridge will stand or fall. ... What do we find in a university? Physicists well educated in physics, and trained for research in that discipline; English professors learned in their language and its literature (or at least some tiny corner of it); and so on down the list of the disciplines. But we find no one with a professional knowledge of the laws of learning, or of the techniques of applying them.”

Submission + - When Charles Babbage played chess with the original Mechanical Turk (ieee.org)

Submitted by the_newsbeagle
the_newsbeagle writes: The 19th century British engineer Charles Babbage is sometimes called the father of the computer. But his first design for a massive computing machine, a contraption called the Difference Engine that had some 25,000 parts, was just a giant calculator intended to handle logarithmic tables. It wasn’t until he began designing his first Analytical Engine that he began to dream of a smart machine that could handle more general-purpose computations.

This short essay argues that Babbage’s creative leap was inspired by an early example of AI hype: A supposed chess-playing machine called The Turk that had astounded onlookers throughout the courts of Europe. Babbage played two games against the Turk, and lost both.

Comment Re:I hope it takes off (Score 1) 308

by jdschulteis (#58192286) Attached to: Gab Wants To Add a Comments Section To Everything On the Internet

It's funny that Trump can't block people on Twitter because that would infringe on people's rights to communicate but somehow Twitter can ban whoever they like and that doesn't infringe on those exact same rights.

A bit of an inconsistency there.

There is no inconsistency. A judge ruled that replies to Trump's tweets were protected by the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech". Twitter is not the government, they are not bound by the First Amendment, only by their terms of service, to which every user must agree. The terms of service unsurprisingly say users get to keep using the service only so long as they conform to Twitter's rules.

Comment Re:well duh (Score 1) 218

by jdschulteis (#58067920) Attached to: 2018 Was the 'Worst Year Ever' For Smartphone Shipments

maybe they will pull their heads in and sell something consumers want

I won't pay more than $400 for a phone
I need root access without having to risk bricking the device
The battery must be easily replaceable
It must have a standard audio jack

Is this so hard?

I don't want a notch.
I want the phone to be thick enough to hold a battery that will last longer.
The extra thickness and making the sides less slick will make it less likely to slip out of my hand.
The reduced chance of dropping the phone means they can go back to making the glass more scratch resistant.
They could make the front glass easier to replace if it does crack.
The one thing I can compromise on is a memory card slot; if they build in a decent amount (minimum 128GB) of storage without jacking the price (a name-brand 128 GB micro SD card is only $25), I can do without the slot.

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