The drivers of big tech’s growth are losing momentum

The drivers of big tech’s growth are losing momentum

This cycle ( integrating web services with mobile telephony) is more about consumer convenience and distribution of services such as AirBNB and Uber than productivity. The labor component of the service is poorly paid and stripped of income security and other standard benefits: Uber drivers don’t qualify for unemployment, disability, healthcare etc. unless they pay those very costly labor overhead expenses out of their own pocket. In other words, it isn’t just absurd IPO valuations that are suggesting this tech bubble is about to burst–the fundamentals of the business models and the deflationary impact of technology are about to reduce the cash flows and profits of tech companies.

Source: charleshughsmith.blogspot.com

Learning to Listen, in a Los Angeles Cafe Built for Vinyl

Learning to Listen, in a Los Angeles Cafe Built for Vinyl

Mr. Cowie pays attention to the quality of pressings, and allows in the bar’s collection only reissues transferred from original analog-tape masters, as opposed to vinyl records made from digital masters, which are essentially CDs on vinyl. This means that the inherent continuity in the analog process (as opposed to the chopped, discrete sound-wave in digital) travels all the way: from the original recording technology through the storage medium through the playback gear, and then even through the purposeful, undistracted way the record was put on by the bartender that Monday morning, whose name was Dane. If a record isn’t something so valueless you can’t give it away, it’s the signifier of taste and an ambitious, highly tailored social life.

Source: www.nytimes.com

AVE Mizar

AVE Mizar

The AVE Mizar (named after the star Mizar) was a roadable aircraft built between 1971 and 1973 by Advanced Vehicle Engineers (AVE) of Van Nuys, Los Angeles, California. [5]

On a test flight from Camarillo Airport in California on August 26, 1973, according to test pilot Charles “Red” Janisse, the right wing strut base mounting attachment failed soon after takeoff. On September 11, 1973, during a test flight at Camarillo, the right wing strut again detached from the Pinto.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

Witcraft by Jonathan Rée and the History of Philosophy by AC Grayling

Witcraft by Jonathan Rée and the History of Philosophy by AC Grayling

Rée is too subtle a thinker to reduce this quarrel to Reason versus Superstition, but AC Grayling has no such qualms. Whereas Rée shows how religion and political radicalism can strike up fruitful alliances, the briskly rationalist Grayling refuses the title of philosophy to any view of the world that involves religious faith. Indian philosophy is summarised in around 15 pages, which is about the same amount of space devoted to John Locke, while African thought gets just short of seven pages, about half of what Grayling gives to Kant.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Why GitHub use Haskell for their newly released Semantic package

Why GitHub use Haskell for their newly released Semantic package

The Semantic project is concerned with parsing, analyzing (evaluating), and comparing source code and as such we are firmly rooted in the academic domain of programming language theory (PLT) and spend significant time applying existing research to the real world problem of analyzing source code on GitHub. At this point, we are pretty firmly attached to Haskell’s language features to enable many of the objectives of this project: abstract interpretation, graph analysis, effect analysis, code writing, AST matching, etc. As it stands today, we’ve got 20k lines of Haskell code and some incredible program analysis capabilities at our disposal with little fear of adding more languages or supporting the changing needs of GitHub.

Source: github.com

Crystal 0.29.0 Released

Crystal 0.29.0 Released

#Internals

The crystal implementation tool got a really useful feature. In case your code needed to handle big files via there was one stopper issue. Many of the breaking changes in this release are actually deprecations, so you probably want to check for warnings in order to do a full upgrade to Crystal 0.29.0.

Source: crystal-lang.org

macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

(50704322)

When your iPad App on Mac is launched directly into the background, it experiences all the state transitions of a regular app launch — such as and — followed by state transitions to return to background state from there — and . (51033745)

When the user quits an iPad App on Mac, the app transitions to UIKit background state and the app’s audio will be stopped; however, no interruption notification will be posted. Additionally, if an iPad App on Mac attempts to activate an , start an , , or other high-level player object while in UIKIt background state, it might succeed.

Source: developer.apple.com

How does Apple privately find offline devices?

How does Apple privately find offline devices?

Each time Lassie sees some (unknown) device broadcasting an identifier, she won’t know if it belongs to Timmy: but she can send it up to Apple’s servers along with her own GPS location. The pseudonym approach described above should work well to keep Timmy‘s identity hidden from Lassie, and even from Apple (up until the point that Ruth searches for it.) Ruth can send in Timmy‘s pseudonyms to Apple’s servers, and if Apple finds a match, she can obtain and decrypt the GPS coordinates.

Source: blog.cryptographyengineering.com

RFC-1149: IP over Avian Carriers

RFC-1149: IP over Avian Carriers

[9] Winston beat the data transfer over Telkom’s ADSL line, with a total time of two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds from uploading data on the microSD card to completion of download from card. The Hungry Beast team took up the challenge after a fiery parliament session wherein the government of the time blasted the opposition for not supporting telecommunications investments, saying that if the opposition had their way, Australians would be doing data transfer over carrier pigeons. The pigeon won the race with a time of approximately 1 hour 5 minutes, the car came in second at 2 hours 10 minutes, while the internet transfer did not finish, having dropped out a second time and not coming back.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

How do I delete bytes from the beginning of a file? (2010)

How do I delete bytes from the beginning of a file? (2010)

The underlying abstract model for storage of file contents is in the

form of a chunk of bytes, each indexed by the file offset. In theory, a file system could support truncating an

integral number of storage chunks

off the front of the file by updating its internal

bookkeeping about file contents without having to

move data physically around the disk. For example, after you decommitted the first 96KB of the file above,

the logical byte zero would be 98,304,

and all file offset calculations on the file would be biased by

98,304 to convert from logical offsets to physical offsets.

Source: devblogs.microsoft.com