From the command line interface to AI
Ever since they were invented, computers have been weird and hard to use. Technology becomes more widespread as it becomes easier to use.From the command line interface to the GUI and the touch screen, the history of technology has been a journey to make computers more intuitive  —  closer to our human experience. In a way, AI assistants are the new command line interface.

Photo: Penguin Random House

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein (G.P. Putnam, first edition 1966)

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
I have to talk about this classic novel. Photo: Saga Press/Simon Schuster

The Moon and the Other, John Kessel (Simon and Schuster, first edition 2017)

The Moon and the Other
In my opinion, reasons to go to the moon are few, reasons to stay fewer. Photo: HarperCollins

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, Andrew Smith (Harper Collins, first edition 2006)

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth
The premise of this nonfiction narrative is irresistible.

The episode was emblematic of a widening disconnect at the top of Apple that, invisible outside the company, was eroding the product magic created by Mr. Ive and the late Steve Jobs that helped turn Apple into America’s pre-eminent corporation. Apple’s association with Mr. Ive will continue; the company will pay his new firm millions of dollars a year to continue to work with Apple, people familiar with the arrangement said. Mr. Cook, an industrial engineer who made his name perfecting Apple’s supply chain, sought to keep Mr. Ive happy over the years, in part with a pay package that far exceeds that of other top Apple executives, a point of friction with others on the executive team, people familiar with the matter say.

All of this means that plants can replace dead cells or tissues much more easily than animals, whether the damage is due to being attacked by an animal or to radiation. And while radiation and other types of DNA damage can cause tumours in plants, mutated cells are generally not able to spread from one part of the plant to another as cancers do, thanks to the rigid, interconnecting walls surrounding plant cells. Interestingly, in addition to this innate resilience to radiation, some plants in the Chernobyl exclusion zone seem to be using extra mechanisms to protect their DNA, changing its chemistry to make it more resistant to damage, and turning on systems to repair it if this doesn’t work.

Read more: https://zd.net/2Wtzlh5

Three and a half years ago, Mark Russinovich, Azure CTO, Microsoft’s cloud, said, “One in four [Azure] instances are Linux.” Then in the fall of 2018, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive VP  of the cloud and enterprise group, told me in an exclusive interview, “About half Azure VMs are Linux”. Now, Sasha Levin, Microsoft Linux kernel developer, in a request that Microsoft be allowed to join a Linux security list, revealed that “the Linux usage on our cloud has surpassed Windows”.

The so-called “doomsday argument” holds that there is a 50% chance that the end of human life will come within 760 years. To apply this to the future of humanity, the doomsday argument begins by asking us to imagine a list of all past, present and future people, sorted in their order of birth. Drawing on ideas from Dr. Carter, philosopher John Leslie at the University of Guelph in Canada devised a version of the doomsday math that allows forecasters to plug in estimates for the probability of any chosen apocalypse(s).

The International Amateur Radio Union (IARU), which was represented at the Prague meeting, expressed “grave concern” to any proposal that would include 144 – 146 MHz in the proposed Aeronautical Mobile Services agenda item. IARU Region 1 President Don Beattie, G3BJ, said prior to the meeting that the IARU would “energetically” promote its opposition in Regional Telecommunications Organizations (RTOs) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) “to obtain assurances that the spectrum will remain a primary allocation for the amateur services.” According to the meeting minutes, the proposal provides no justification for targeting 144 – 146 MHz, and the IARU believes that sharing with airborne systems likely would be difficult and lead to constraints on the development of the Amateur and Amateur Satellite services there.

Before going on with the test I’ve installed rpi-monitor to have nice CPU temperature charts later on:

Let’s run sbc-bench without heatsink with old VLI firmware (version 00013701):

7-zip never completed, as it was killed three times due to running out of memory. This time all three runs for 7-zip could complete for some reasons, and while throttling still did occur, it did to a lesser extent, and the temperature was clearly lower during to single thread benchmarks (~70°C vs 75°C with old firmware). For reference, 7-zip benchmark score with heatsink averaged 5,397 points, without heatsink + old VLI firmware 4,423 points, but the “no heatsink with new VLI firmware” results are much better at 5,298 points.

Initially, when I started working on getting Wine-4.4 to build and run on NetBSD i386 the primary issue that I faced was Wine displaying black windows instead of UI, and this applied to any graphical program I tried running with Wine. I proceeded with the chroot approach as I wanted to know if Wine worked as promised on NetBSD, and if it didn’t, to what degree, it required patching. So, as the first step, I compiled Wine on amd64 and it ran fine.

Those domains, of which Grubhub owns as many as 23,000, are used to resemble a landing page for the official business, complete with an online ordering form, despite the sites being completely unassociated with the restaurants themselves. Left: The original business site / Right: Grubhub’s shadow site

Image via New Food Economy

Grubhub takes a 20 percent commission for orders placed through its shadow sites

The Grubhub-owned domains use a template that is consistent across all the shadow sites. However, if a customer orders from a restaurant using Grubhub’s “marketing” tactics, whether through an app search or these unassociated websites, Grubhub can bill for an additional 20 percent commission on a single order.