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Comment Re:They saved lots of money not using another serv (Score 1) 18

It was openly discussed when we first adopted Slack. Part of the deal was that they wanted a video & audio capability, which Chime had. Note there's a difference between Chime the app and Chime SDK. Slack uses the SDK that gives the audio and video capability. Chime App wraps that into a desktop app.

Comment Re:Pretty stupid plot (Score 1) 151

Yeah, a bit of hyperbole from the article and dreaming from the suspect. Virginia is us-east-1 in Amazon - one of at least 20 regions now. Within us-east-1 there's 6 or 7 availability zones. Each zone would be more than one DC. Even if he managed to completely level one DC, it would be somewhere in the noise level of the amazon capacity loss, let alone the entire internet.

Earth

Do Animals Really Anticipate Earthquakes? Sensors Hint They Do (scientificamerican.com) 41

An anonymous reader quotes Scientific American: For centuries, people have described unusual animal behavior just ahead of seismic events: dogs barking incessantly, cows halting their milk, toads leaping from ponds... Now researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz, both in Germany, along with a multinational team of colleagues, say they have managed to precisely measure increased activity in a group of farm animals prior to seismic activity...

The researchers used highly sensitive instruments that record accelerated movements — up to 48 each second — in any direction. During separate periods totaling about four months in 2016 and 2017, they attached these biologgers and GPS sensors to six cows, five sheep and two dogs living on a farm in an earthquake-prone area of northern Italy. A total of more than 18,000 tremors occurred during the study periods, with more seismic activity during the first one — when a magnitude 6.6 quake and its aftershocks struck the region. The team's work was published in July in Ethology...

Analyzing the increased movements as a whole, the researchers claim, showed a clear signal of anticipatory behavior hours ahead of tremors. "It's sort of a system of mutual influence," Wikelski says. "Initially, the cows kind of freeze in place — until the dogs go crazy. And then the cows actually go even crazier. And then that amplifies the sheep's behavior, and so on...." This "swarm intelligence" can happen within or across species, Wikelski says. For example, "we did a study on Galápagos marine iguanas, and we know that they are actually listening in to mockingbirds' warnings about the Galápagos hawks," he adds. "These kinds of systems exist all over the place. We're just not really tuned in to them yet."

The researchers say the farm animals appeared to anticipate tremors anywhere from one to 20 hours ahead, reacting earlier when they were closer to the origin and later when they were farther away. This finding, the authors contend, is consistent with a hypothesis that animals somehow sense a signal that diffuses outward.

Earth

Germany is Banning Single-Use Plastic Straws, Cotton Buds and Food Containers (usatoday.com) 135

Germany is banning the sale of single-use plastic straws, cotton buds and food containers, bringing it in line with a European Union directive intended to reduce the amount of plastic garbage that pollutes the environment. From a report: The Cabinet agreed Wednesday to end the sale of plastics including single-use cutlery, plates, stirring sticks and balloon holders, as well as polystyrene cups and boxes by July 3, 2021. Environment Minister Svenja Schulze said the move was part of an effort to move away from "throw-away culture." Up to 20% of garbage collected in parks and other public places consists of single-use plastic, mainly polystyrene containers.

Comment Re:Emulated slow? DEC Alpha (Score 1) 235

JIT is always faster than Ahead-of-time, for the very reason that it now knows what the optimal code paths are. HP did a huge amount of research into this back in the late 90s with the Dynamo project

https://www.hpl.hp.com/techrep...

And there's more on it. On average, dynamically optimised code ran 30% faster than statically optimised. And, the dumber the original code was written the better the optimisations were.

Comment Re:I'm an OK violinist (Score 5, Informative) 469

"Few multiples" of $10K won't buy you much in the range of around half the orchestral instruments. You'd be flat out trying to pay $30K for a pair of Clarinets or a trumpet, but the less popular instruments can get very, very pricey. As a bassoonist, many of our top of the line instruments are rather expensive. A good Fox or Heckel will be around $30K - 50K USD before custom keywork is factored in (can add up to $10K to the base price). My Fox Contra was, 10 years ago USD $30K so it would be significantly more than that to replace it now. If I was to purchase the same instruments here in Oz about triple that price in AUD.

Double basses and 'cellos also are upwards of $50K in the USA for good ones. Harpsichords also up over $30K for a reasonable one that wasn't assembled from a kit (lots in kit form for $15-20K). Harps also waaay up there in price. That's just from instruments I'm personally familiar with that I either play or someone in my family plays.

Comment Re:Don't they have an fiber to the node cable netw (Score 1) 229

Friend of mine just moved into a new house that has NBN on it in NW Sydney. Fibre goes all the way to a termination box inside the garage and then he has standard cat6 ethernet ports connected to the fibre modem. No ability to have a fibre switch in there according to him.

Comment Re:Downgrade rights (Score 1) 671

Major problem there is the same as the mobile market - you have to write very fundamentally different code for a mobile and desktop. Some fascinating figures came out of this year's Siggraph. On the desktop you typically have up to 300W of power dedicated to graphics hardware. On a mobile device you have at most 1W (phone) or 5W (tablet). Those numbers will _never_ go up because anything more than that starts to fry your pocket or hand. So, the optimisation techniques that one uses to write a desktop app or game are extremely different to those written for a mobile device. There's just no getting around that at all.

One of the other interesting factors is that from a developer and graphics perspective now, except for the desktop gaming market, D3D is all but gone. I saw one mention of D3D at Siggraph this year, and that was because the chair of the panel was from MS. All those tablet/phone game writers were way over in the OpenGL ES camp. MS is trying to force the issue again like it's 1999 and now allowing OpenGL drivers on Win8, so you'll see how quickly the game studios will react to that - Even Valve were demoing OpenGL games this year that had better performance on Linux than on Windows on the same hardware according to their statements at one talk. Apart from business desktops, I don't see much more future market for the Microsoft and PCs. The games of interest are now appearing on mobiles and those developers are definitely not in the MS camp.

Summed up, it's a failed strategy and will do more to make people move away from MS than towards it.

Comment Re:Maybe they did it wrong... (Score 1) 395

You'd be surprised at how often point #2 cannot be assumed to be true. There are some personality types that just cannot see big picture stuff, despite how much you work on training them to see it. These are the detailed-oriented people who become fixated on minutae that they can't see big picture stuff.

Comment Re:most people arent wired for math (Score 1) 427

I'm wondering what that might make room for in the pre-7th curriculum.

Suggestions?

Have a look at what the Motesorri style of teaching does. I have a few relatives that are teachers (active and retired) in traditional schools and the younger ones are sending their kids there, rather than through the traditional system.

The Matrix

How The Matrix Online Went Wrong 144

As the July 31st deadline for The Matrix Online's closure looms, Gamer Limit is running a story discussing the game's shortcomings, as well as some of the decisions that led to its failure. Quoting: "I honestly thought the writers must have absolutely hated the remaining cast of The Matrix Trilogy or something, because they constantly seemed to go out of their way to phase out existing characters in favor of newer ones. The cast overall basically made me, as a player, feel distant from the main storyline and made the entire game feel like a Matrix side story instead of the continuation it was meant to be. ... When MxO first launched there was an entire team dedicated to playing the game as Agents and other key characters as a means to further in-game events and directly interact with players, giving players the feeling that they truly were making a difference. After the SOE buyout of the game the LESIG team was reduced to playing minor characters before eventually being phased out and replaced with a Live Event Team (LET) comprised purely of volunteers."

Comment Re:How many lives have been lost? (Score 1) 249

It was *not* banned. What was restricted was the federal funding for the research.

There was no restriction in private companies being able to do the research. What is truly shameful, is that the Liberals have used this issue for political gain, by obfuscating the issue as you have by implying that all research has been banned.

Liberals think all problems can be solved by sending men with guns to take your hard earned money for their social programs. If the research was so promising, then there are a number of companies that would jump at the chance to make a profit off of it. Pharmaceutical companies have deep pockets.

For shame, Liberals.

Comment Re:Going to be more changes soon (Score 1) 151

Look closer. Obama is popular, but his policies are not.

Most voters (58%) say the nation is heading down the wrong track:
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/right_direction_wrong_track/right_direction_or_wrong_track

Voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats on six out of 10 key issues, including the top issue of the economy.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/trust_on_issues/trust_on_issues

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 49% of voters see health care as a very important issue. That is down from 61% in early May and 62% in April. This is the first time since August 2007 that the majority of voters do not see the issue as very important.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/importance_of_issues2/importance_of_issues

Fifty-one percent (51%) of Americans favor an across-the-board tax cut for all Americans to stimulate the U.S. economy, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/economic_stimulus_package/june_2009/51_say_cut_everybody_s_taxes_to_stimulate_the_economy

Most voters (53%) believe increases in government spending hurt the economy, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/taxes/june_2009/53_say_more_government_spending_hurts_the_economy

And then there is the Generic Congressional Ballot which is an indication whether voters would vote for their district's candidate. It is tied right now and the Republicans actually took a two-point lead for a single week in the middle of March. Since mid-April, the parties have been roughly even.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/congressional_ballot/generic_congressional_ballot

The Obama Apologists should be concerned with the trends.

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