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Comment Re:x86 is !dead (Score 2) 201

by MountainLogic (#61904927) Attached to: Apple Introduces M1 Pro and M1 Max
Sure an M1 is fine for virtual machine apps, browsing, etc, but if you need those intel instructions, you are screwed. (Yes, I really do develop low-level ASM code for medical imaging) and Apple just kicked me off their ecosystem. The x86 are amazing chips and ARM is decades away from getting there for high end computing, even even with NEON extensions.

Submission + - NASA to regain radio link to Voyager 2 (nytimes.com)

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Back in March 2020, NASA shut down the Australia dish in its Deep Space Network for repairs and upgrades. For the duration of the outage, NASA had no means for communicating with Voyager 2. From the NYTimes:

On Friday, Earth’s haunting silence will come to an end as NASA switches that communications channel back on, restoring humanity’s ability to say hello to its distant explorer.

Because of the direction in which it is flying out of the solar system, Voyager 2 can only receive commands from Earth via one antenna in the entire world. It’s called DSS 43 and it is in Canberra, Australia. It is part of the Deep Space Network, or DSN, which along with stations in California and Spain, is how NASA and allied space agencies stay in touch with the armada of robotic spacecraft exploring everything from the sun’s corona to the regions of the Kuiper belt beyond the orbit of Pluto. (Voyager 2’s twin, Voyager 1, is able to communicate with the other two stations.)

A round-trip communication with Voyager 2 takes about 35 hours — 17 hours and 35 minutes each way....

While Voyager 2 was able to call home on the Canberra site’s smaller dishes during the shutdown, none of them could send commands to the probe....

NASA ... did send one test message to the spacecraft at the end of October when the antenna was mostly reassembled.

Comment There is still a need for Intel CPUs (Score 1) 216

by MountainLogic (#60231442) Attached to: Apple's ARM Switch Will Be the End of Boot Camp
I know I'm in the minority, but I do have a real need for an Intel CPU with all those obscure SIMD instructions to do realtime signal processing, the Volk Vector Library, Software Defined Radio and GnuRadio. All the GPUs in the world just don't get the job done. Even my modern-ish MacBook Pro can dog-out and make the fan scream from the processing load. VIrtualization kills the I/O performance and is just not a practical option. It is nice to be able to keep that in a single laptop, so I guess I may have to someday move to some gamer PC (I hate bomber nose art for an industrial design theme on my computer) or to a dedicated headless box.

Comment Humans Make Mistakes Too (Score 3, Interesting) 181

by MountainLogic (#60092406) Attached to: Siri, What Time Is It in London?
About a decade ago I was working for a global tech company in Redmond, Washington, USA (no not Microsoft). I hosted a meeting where an exec from another global company living in the UK was invited. Late the night before the meeting I got an email that said he would not be there until 10:30 AM. Turns out he told his company's travel dept that he had a meeting in Redmond. When he got off the plane at 10 PM the night before the meeting he left the small airport fond the lone taxi and gave the cabbie the address to the hotel. Without hesitating, the Cabbie told him that the ride would be over $1k and take 8 hours if he wanted to get to Microsoft first thing in the morning. (he arrived on the last flight into Redmond) Turns out cab rides from Redmond, Oregon, USA to Redmond Washington USA happens more often than you might think. Redmond Oregon is the small airport that serves the tourist headed to Bend in central Oregon and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SeaTac) serves Redmond, Oregon. So type in Redmond USA as your destination and you might get a surprise.

Submission + - Would a Post Office Bankruptcy Kill e-Commerce (cnn.com)

Submitted by MountainLogic
MountainLogic writes: WIth the US Postal Service slated to run out of money this summer, a congressional bailout has become embroiled in the usual, critical and unusual political fights. Every day letter carriers deliver some of our web orders, there are many other functions the post office performs including providing an address validation API that is the core of many shipping systems. Would the collapse of this service mean a major disruption of e-commerce? What other impacts to technology would we face with the collapse of this constitutionally guaranteed service (Article I, Section 8, Clause 7).

Are there other services that the post office could perform to gain revenue? For example, the post office is where many Americans who live outside of major metro areas go to get a passport. A US passport is the gold standard of ID. Could the post office become the ultimate place to go to validate ID and act as a signing authority? If you forget your password, go in to your local post office, show ID and reset your password. Seems like financial institutions would happily pay a few cents per reset to prevent billions in identity theft. Is there any other institution in America that could perform such a service on this scale. How else can the post office become more relevant and more solvent? Is profitability even a reasonable standard as we do not hold DoD to such a standard?

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