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Comment You want a) an ENDOWMENT and b) in "fiat" (Score 1) 82

If the Future "Fund" didn't have a endowment--an endowment in the form of cash "fiat" money--or at least a portfolio of conservative assets denominated in "fiat" money--then it was always a shaky reed. If they were gambling on their research funding coming from promise of future cash flow, from investment activity based on FTT play money, then they need to be big boys and accept their gambling losses for what they are.

Comment I don't think "mainframe" is right... (Score 1) 60

...not that there's any bright-line definition. But 1401's were considered "small computers" and the main use I knew for them was as satellite computers--auxiliary equipment used together with real "mainframes." For example, an IBM 7090 might perform input and output only to magnetic tape. The tapes were then mounted on the tape drive of a 1401, which read the tape and printed the contents on a line printer.

Comment The history of appendectomies (Score 1) 77

I read a fascinating book, "Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America," by Ira Rutkow, that answered some questions I'd always had about appendectomies.

If someone asked you to fill in the blank quickly in the sentence "The surgeon performed an _________" you would probably say "appendectomy." Yet it isn't such a terribly common operation today. Why is it the ur-operation, the one always used for purposes of hypothetical illustration? Why appendectomies?

According to Rutkow, It was a confluence of events. I hadn't realized that abdominal surgery had once been a medical taboo, with a nearly 100% mortality rate. Antisepsis ("Listerism") and anesthesia made it safe. It had once been extremely difficult to diagnose. I hadn't really thought of centrifuges, microscopes and blood counts as being a breakthrough in modern technology, but of course they were, part of the medical technology revolution that emerged from World War I. And they made it possible to diagnose appendicitis reliably. And there was one influential surgeon who promoted the idea that it was a surgeon's disease, that appendicitis "belonged to" the surgeon. Hospitals and surgeons found appendectomies to be lucrative, and they became almost a fad; Rutkow cites a hospital in which 1/5th of all operations performed were appendectomies.

Technology

Podcasting is Not Walled (Yet) (rakhim.org) 86

Rakhim Davletkaliyev, a software developer, writer and podcaster, recently launched two new podcasts. One of the things he was asked by people following the launches was "but how do I subscribe, it's not on iTunes/Google Podcasts?" He writes: Podcasts are simply RSS feeds with links to media files (usually mp3s). A podcast is basically a URL. And podcast clients are special browsers. They check that URL regularly and download new episodes if the content of the URL changes (new link added). That's it, no magic, no special membership or anything else required. The technology is pretty "stupid" in a good way.

Ever since tech companies started waging war against RSS, podcast distribution became visually RSS-free. What do you do to subscribe? Easy, just search in the app! For the majority of iOS users that app is Apple Podcasts, and recently Google made their own "default client" for Android -- Google Podcasts. It looks like podcast clients are similar to web browsers and just provide a way to consume content, but the underlying listings make them very different. Corresponding services are actually isolated catalogs. When you perform a search on Apple Podcasts, you aren't searching for podcasts. You are searching for Apple-approved podcasts. And if the thing you're looking for is not there, then... well, you get nothing.

Most Podcast clients still accept RSS. Apple Podcasts, iTunes, PocketCasts, OverCast, PodcastAddict. Google Play Music doesn't say anything explicitly, but you can just put RSS URL into the search field and it works. For now. I won't be surprised if these apps gradually and silently remove this feature.

Comment Microsoft has been saying this at least since 2010 (Score 1) 127

In 2010, Nancy Gohring reported in Infoworld, Ballmer bets Microsoft's future on the cloud.. "'Seventy percent of the 40,000 people who work on software at Microsoft are in some way working in the cloud,' CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday at the University of Washington. 'A year from now, that will be 90 percent,' he said.... 'Our inspiration, our vision ... builds from this cloud base,' he said. 'This is the bet, if you will, for our company.'"

I think there was similar rhetoric years earlier than that.

The Microsoft "Kin" phones lacked features normally implemented locally on phones, and Microsoft said that was going to be fine because modern-day young phone users were comfortable with relying on the cloud....

Bug

iOS 11 Is Causing Massive Battery Drain Problems (betanews.com) 158

Mark Wilson writes: A study conducted by security research firm Wandera shows that iOS 11 is causing iPhone and iPad batteries to drain faster than ever -- much faster. The difference between iOS 10 and iOS 11 is anything but minor; batteries can drain in half the amount of time following the upgrade. Wandera's report shows how, on average, an iPhone or iPad running iOS 10 takes 240 minutes of usage to drain the battery from 100 percent to zero. With iOS 11 installed, this number plummets to just 96 minutes -- over twice as fast. Users have also complained about the issue.
IT

Developer Accidentally Deletes Three-Month of Work With Visual Studio Code (bingj.com) 765

New submitter joshtops writes: A developer accidentally three-month of his work. In a post, he described his experience, "I had just downloaded VScode as an alternative and I was just playing with the source control option, seeing how it wanted to stage -- five thousand files -- I clicked discard... AND IT DELETED ALL MY FILES, ALL OF THEM, PERMANENTLY! How the f*uk is this s*it possible, who the hell is the d******* who made the option to permanently delete all the files on a project by accident even possible? Cannot even find them in the Recycle Bin!!!! I didn't even thought that was possible on Windows!!! F*ck this f*cking editor and f*ck whoever implemented this option. I wish you the worst.'

Comment "Putin & I... impenetrable Cyber Security unit (Score 1) 104

That sounds like what he discussed with Putin:

"Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded."

Donald Trump, July 9th, 2017
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FrealDonald...

The next day he said tweeted "The fact that President Putin and I discussed a Cyber Security unit doesn't mean I think it can happen. It can't..." But maybe it can. Perhaps Putin's role in it is one of the "Details [that] are still being worked out, but officials say they expect a decision and announcement in the coming weeks."

Comment Re:Following the trend (Score 1) 381

Indeed. I used to like checking the Christian Science Monitor, hasn't been a major news source for a couple of decades but often has interesting items others miss or an interesting slant on something... and it's now using a desktop monitor to display less information than you could display on a cellphone screen.

Comment Five stories instead of forty on a page... (Score 1) 381

I used to be able to scan headlines of about thirty or forty stories at a glance on my 1600x900 monitor. Now I can only see five. I'm interested in reading news, not complaining, and I've tried to figure out how to work around this, but I can't. The layout and sizing is such that if I use "reduced" magnification, by the time I get eight or nine stories onto the page the text is too small to read.

For heaven's sake! It's just a skin. With all the things they let you customize in Google News, why can't they give me a choice of information-dense and information-sparse presentations?

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