God bless Winamp for still supporting MOD files. I still have a few from days gone by. This has sparked me to throw a few of my favorites into the playlist.

I still have respect for the tech that could encode what to most ears sounds like a full-featured 5-minute song in 750kB...

I remember a software wavetable synth driver for Windows 3.1 and that really brought those MIDIs to life, but what I loved was MOD muaic (and S3Ms and all others). I loved downloading those from BBSes and listening to the great original music, and the cool demoscene compositions that were like nice realtime music videos that used personal computer hardware in impressive ways.

For the longest time I thought MIDI sucked because it sounded like crap.

Really MIDI is just sheet music in electronic form. How good or bad (e.g. MS synth) it sounds depends entirely on the performance.

Have a collection of 110k MIDI files eating up some 3 GB of storage. Much larger collections are readily available online.

VirtualMIDISynth with about 4 GB of my favorite sound fonts loaded and MIDI files sound amazing some sound nearly identical to recordings of real life performances when the instrument mappings are not screwed up.

Been using it since the Nokia days. Good thing that Android kept MIDI support. (Well, I'm not sure if it still does, the latest Android version I had on a phone was 6.0, but that supported it. Hopefully it does. I'm used to that ringtone and it's unique, since I did some editing of the MIDI data.)

MIDI is still the standard music production protocol. You seem to assume it somehow went away because you only know things if they exist on the web. Just like you probably think Java is "that applet thing in browers".

Yes, your USB keyboard uses MIDI too.

People complained about prototype.js and how it was more of a series of hacks and one shouldn't modify DOM but should encapsulate it like jQuery's approach. HOWEVER, if we had all used prototype perhaps most of it's features would be built-in today and it would be extremely easy to migrate away once IE was not longer the prime driver of browser difference patching. But we went with jQuery so now it's quite entrenched and it's nicer workflow has many still clinging to it way beyond it's usefulness. Perhaps it's impact will be better designed interfaces for programmers?

It certainly is not making people think twice about jumping into entangling their projects around libraries which merely automate some steps by creating a whole new framework of doing things... almost like how we keep inventing new languages... something else that has spread into this world... (at least typescript is more like a future javascript.)

The problem is scripting has it's purposeful niche just like libraries and we eventually end up with feature creep pushing them beyond where they are best suited... rising to the level of their incompetence... what scripting should be doing is linking components written in many different tools as the coupler of loosely coupled work. At least web assembly has a promise of making that a reality and perhaps reducing the demand to make javascript the scripting version of C++ (and all the mess of browser issues and now the language itself requiring a mess of tools if you want to use new things early... all needing to be handled at runtime... big sites running slower on faster computers. ) Why we couldn't have macro/parser hacks in JS -- they should have done it in ECMA 6!! It would have mitigated some of the mess that continues to fester... while some would have abused it; that wasn't the reason to stop it.

Let say I build a basic Hello World HTML page, including a vulnerable jQuery library that's only used to print the Hello World text. Please explain how can jQuery be exploited and who are the victims.

Thanks.

So you can sideload stuff and feed it into the DOM easier and more relyably in jQuery?

Well, duh, Captain Obvious, that's the whole point of jQuery.

That's what jQuery is supposed to do. It is not jQueries job to check libs and plugins you ad without checking what they do and, most importantly, without managing your own dependencies. That's the job of the web developer.

This "study" is beyond pointless. I want my 5 minutes back.

The SATA link is a bottleneck on modern drives. Having it get compressed before passing over that link is a benefit to speed and software compression often gives speed boosts.

The law of diminishing returns applies, and in this case likely won't benefit much on modern NVMe drives.

For various and sundry reasons, you generally don't want your storage device doing this for you. Use the built-in filesystem compression. Unless you have some strange workload, a compression task eating up one of your cores won't be a big deal usually.

If you are on an industrial scale, you want a dedicated file-server doing this for you. Ideally, use ZFS with it's built-in compression. It works great. If you are moving a ton of stuff over and overwhelm the compression algorithms, you can use an uncompressed SSD to cache the writes to the array and maintain performance.

Your cpu has other things to do, the controller does not.

On a modern desktop/laptop/cell-phone, that is generally no longer true. CPUs have become so insanely fast relative to the rest of the hardware on the machine, that scenarios where the CPU is the limiting factor in performance are uncommon.

Instead, system bottlenecks are usually found in RAM or I/O bandwidth -- so it's usually faster to reduce the amount of data the CPU pumps out (e.g. by compressing it on the CPU) than to lighten the CPU's workload, since the CPU would only use those extra cycles to wait for I/O to complete anyway.

As for relative power efficiency -- well, maybe, but mobile CPUs benefit from dumptrucks full of R&D money every year to make them more power-efficient, while a one-off "intelligent" I/O controller probably won't.

The dude is asking about a drive that does the compression on its own (Without using any processor time).

Yes, but Slashdot is a discussion site, not an "answers" site. So rather than just giving him what he thinks he needs, you should explain why it is likely NOT what he needs.

In-device compression is dumb for the following reasons:

1. Many files are already compressed, including photos, movies, pdf, zip, tgz, etc.

2. By sending uncompressed files to/from the device, you need more I/O bandwidth, which is likely to be a bigger bottleneck than the CPU.

3. Your main CPU is likely FAR more powerful than a small embedded coprocessor in the drive. So the coprocessor may be compressing/decompressing while the CPU is idle, waiting for it to finish.

4. Your main CPU can use the latest algorithms for compression, can easily update those algorithms, and has more information about the filesystem and the types of files being compressed. A "smart drive" co-processor may only have a block-level view.

5. If you have N dollars to spend, instead of buying a "smart drive" that will speed up only one aspect of your system (and likely not even that if you are I/O bound), it is usually better to spend the same N dollars on a BETTER CPU or MORE CORES, which will speed up many more aspects of your system.

The ecosystem only true nutjobs care about, and everyone else wishes a quick and permanent death?

Which will happen as soon as WebAssembly gets all the APIs that JS has in the browser, and nobody needs to learn or use JS anymore, unless he really wants to.

This is not going to end well. Now there will be an incentive to fork projects and try to get money. Maybe all your fork does is add a command line option or something else trivial but if through SEO and other hacks you can get people to pick your fork you make money.

Of course the licenses low this but most devs expected their open source library to be some tiny part of a much larger program. If people are getting paid for individual tiny libraries they're not going to be happy seeing others take that money.

ignore IT problems until it becomes a massive disaster that costs you hundreds of millions if not billions, then hire a pile of over priced consultants from IBM, Booz Allen, etc.

Then ignore all your IT problems again, until the next disaster.

Since I've harped on terrible design decisions that go into the aircraft, the supporting infrastructure is bad or even worse when it comes to actual security and other bits.

Aerospace, in my experience, is the place where IT is least valued. Everything comes down to return on 'investment'. IT brings no profit to the table so why spend money on it? /s

Not to mention the Aerospace engineers that never worked in any industries push back hard enough that sometimes IT gives up. Because 2FA is "hard" and they already have enough to learn.

IT also suffers from the 'grandfather' clauses plugging the airplane design. Actual secure systems aren't used because they're not certified. But the certified systems are 20 years old and "already certified". GE Aerospace's entire Git/etc infrastructure is external facing: https://vault.geaviation.com/ Everything up to ITAR is protected by that https. You actually had to disconnect from the 2FA VPN to connect to The Vault because internally they couldn't plumb the traffic correctly. But the Vault is ITAR certified and certified for DO-178 work. So the vault is what gets used.

It's not just the big companies that have this problem. All of their sub-contractors used to money just flowing in haven't put any work into bettering their setup either. GitLab's 2FA was failing because of a slight time error. IT couldn't be bothered to fix it. So an ITAR, functional safety, Aerospace GitLab server is just sitting on a Cox cable modem (wsip-*.ph.ph.cox.net), forward facing the world without 2FA. Their IT/security departments have grown with the company and just not needed to do anything 'right' because 'it works why fix it'.

It all comes down to liability for the company, I have a family member that works brokerage company. They have everything locked down to the 9s. Because if they screw up their company is on the hook for millions. If Boeing gets hacked and it takes down a future plane we see a human life is $150k a head. Proper IT security would cost way more than that, so nothing gets done.

The worst quality of C++ is that it's obscenely complex. I do C++ right now and one of my C++-nerd co-workers and I were joking about how shitty Perl is and how the code looks like a mishmash of random punctuation.

We had our ha-has (I still use Perl for some basic scripting, it's fine for linear automation) and then the next day he was showing me some template code he wrote to do automatic dereferencing deep copies of a pointer or some shit.

That code (Paul Harvey voice)? A random fuicking hideous mishmash of ellipses, angle brackets, and inscrutable keywords that would be 100X as much of a 'write-only' exercise than the worst fucking vomitous Perl code you can imagine. Now you know..the rest of the story.

Sounds less like a problem with C++ and more like he wrote some shit that didn't need to be done, and sounds like an early draft that should be simplified after the problem is understood.

That's exactly how we get inscrutable perl code, too. It's not the law, it's just "clever" coders being smartasses, usually when there's a library in CPAN to do what they're trying to do much easier.

Worse worse... all they seem to have done is made a system that allows for a lower error over a bit larger timestep, hence making it look 'faster', however it cannot give error bounds! so you have no way of tracking the cumulative error... on an iterative solution....

In other words, its junk for any real use - but at least its fast!

There are similar systems for turbulent fluid flow... they work very well... most of the time, until they dont.

1) You don't think you can have a meaningful calculation in 80 milliseconds? The actual paper suggests, by the way, that the time taken was on the order of 1 millisecond, no need to reverse engineer. It's a fixed-time result. Which means that I agree it can't be totally general in an analytic sense.
2) In physics the inputs are *always* precision-bounded, so outputs are always in comparison, even in chaotic systems. Chaos here is a relative term, not absolute. Almost any chaotic system is non-chaotic when the changes in initial conditions are constrained enough. Given the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and well, practical reality, a truly absolutely chaotic system is one we cannot make predictions on, so it's ultimately indistinguishable from truly random and therefore irrelevant to something we think we can calculate. In any case, chaotic systems are sensitive to initial inputs, but the accumulated error is *not* initial inputs, it's outputs (and intermediate internal states). The arxiv article contains analysis of error accumulation.

Climate scientists predicted that the temperatures would rise, sea levels would rise, and polar ice caps would shrink.

Temperatures have risen, sea levels have risen, and polar ice caps have shrunk.

Models can make useful predictions that nevertheless contain some error. The goal is to create models and continue to refiine them so that they have as little error as possible. That's not unmeaningful or impractical -- that's just how you build models.

Science makes predictions all the time that contain some error. Get over it.

Here's a webpage with a meta-analysis of old climate predictions and giving the difference between predictions and observations, all well beyond 5 years:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/an...

Not all of the ones that were looked at were within 20%, though all were within 30%, and not all of them were over or underestimates, and 20% is pretty much an arbitrary limit that isn't applied generally to all cases of other sciences like Physics and Biology. *Especially* when error bars are provided beforehand.

if "Climate Science" were a real scientific discipline, it would've produced numerous such predictions the way Physics or Biology do.

Funny you should say this, this *is* predictions using physics. Biology predictions are quite difficult and it's interesting you should say that. The obvious analogy is to predict the future course of evolution for a multicellular nimal species given predicted changes to the environment.

Also, your last argument is not sound, you do not get net linear motion from moving internal portions of something. Throwing an artillery shell just changes the shape of the Earth, but nothing leaves the Earth. Only things like space shuttle launches have any real relevance, and even that has a calculatable influence.

Any factor that may have made the mother take acetaminophen may be what caused the actual observation in the babies. There is no reason to assume a causation here without some actual proof that there is.

It this turns out to be true, the Anti-vaccine community will have a collective embolism.

All this time, it was Mom's Tylenol, not the vaccines.

Q: Do they still give Tylenol to women in labor? Please stop.

Despite the "autistic genius" stereotype, children with autism are far more likely to have intellectual disabilities than non-autistic children.

Until at least these possibilities are examined we cannot know for certain whether or not this chemical is dangerous to the fetus. But at the same time we also need to very critically find out how much acetaminophen has been taken by the mothers who gave birth. Johnson and Johnson has historically resisted putting stronger warnings on this medication for liver patients and alcoholics. If one of their biggest cash cows does turn out not safe for pregnant women then you can bet they will again lobby to keep Mr. and Mrs. J Q Public in the dark about how dangerous the overuse of tylenol and the generics of it can be.

I say this as I take my extra strength Robax with acetaminophen seeing that I have not had a beer this week fortunately I am not pregnant!

Eating meat does not equate to support of inhumane treatment of animals. Healthy and humane livestock production are serious and important issues that are not dealt with by simply reducing meat consumption and increasing soy (for example). Plant based food production has a plethora of environmental and health concerns that similarly should not be ignored. Eating vegan does not equate to support for agricultural replacement of rain forests.

We consume a lot and there are a lot of us. No matter how we satisfy our needs, our methods of food production have a massive effect on the environment. Don't be thinking that tending soy, wheat, or rice is really any better than raising cows and chickens. You can argue that the cost of one is cheaper than the other, or that the food value energy efficiency is better but modern massive plant agriculture devastates insect populations, pollutes ground water, and damages soil.

My neighbors' cattle operation makes very localized and limited use of pesticides and medications. His fields are natural grass that are fertilized with composted manure. He almost never tills a field. Their cattle have a diverse genetic heritage and they work to keep it so. Contrast that with local canola production that depends on massive spraying of fertilizer and pesticides. The soil is tilled annually and the crop seed genetic diversity is suspect. It's genetics are patented and diversity is not part of the plan. They also consume a heck of a lot of diesel fuel throughout the production process.

The real issue is too many people on Earth along with the drive to increase production by any method without regard to the ethical and environmental consequences.

Ah yes, the devil called health. When it comes to food I've never heard more yelling about health ever before in history. Yet the same people are usually drinking ethanol or smoking, not getting enough sleep or regular exercise. So what is health to people really?

I view it as a large spider that sits right next to them. Its invisible until they look at it. And when it bites the fuck out of them, they yell and look at it for a brief moment, then move the exact distance of its fangs out of reach. Then look away and stay where they are.

So the bigger issue with meat isn't health effects, its environment impacts. Feed conversion ratios for beef are horrible. Pork is not much better. But chicken and certain farmed fish are a lot better. It would be far better for us all to focus not on dropping meat entirely but switching to more efficient production of it. This doesn't require waiting for lab grown stuff to be market ready either.

First the eco-fascists wanted to take away your car and mcmansion so you could move into a much more energy efficient community college dorm (hello, AOC and the Green New Deal). Next, they wanted to make you vegan. And now finally they're admitting that they want to take our pets away too.

"Everything in moderation" is a cop out. The real answer is "we have no fucking clue".

"Everything in moderation" is a cop out. The real answer is "we have no fucking clue".

If you "have no clue", moderation is an excellent strategy. Same as in investing: you don't need a ton of research to know that diversification reduces your risk at little cost.

a Mozilla representative wrote: "We are working on a fix to the authentication prompt bug that we expect to land in the next couple of releases (either in Firefox 71 or 72)."

What could be more important than fixing a DoS bug in a basic browser feature? Tighter Pocket integration?

Worth noting that this "feature" has been around for several years at this point. My mother called me about getting this exact problem with firefox over a year ago, and she didn't know what to do about it locking her "internet" down.

I told her to pull the network plug out of the VDSL2 modem sitting next to her, then press ctrl-shift-esc, find firefox, right click on it and select kill process and then press enter. Then start firefox again and close the offending tab and then plug the cable back into the same spot she took it out of.

To my understanding, this is still the easiest method to bypass this problem should you run into it. Mozilla didn't give a single fuck about fixing it back then. I guess the scams got big enough that they can't just look away any longer.

Don't allow Javascript to every Jo and Sam that comes around.

My dad just got hit by that one this morning while using Edge. Killing Edge, disconnecting from the network, restarting Edge, and closing out the tabs was the only way out.

It's sheer stupidity that the "restore all tabs" behavior can't be disabled other than by a registry edit.

Hypersphere. It's like a sphere, but rounder.

They're referring to the macroscopic shape of spacetime. If you imagine a 3D (+1 time for you nerds) grid of spacetime coordinates, and can picture how that grid distorts in the presence of stars and black holes, the question is how this grid is distorted overall, by the presence of all the universe's energy & matter.

Because there's both positive energy density in the form of particles and fields and dark matter, and negative energy density in the form of "dark energy", the net curvature depends on how well these balance eachother.

Hitherto, it's been thought that they were perfectly balanced, and therefore flat -- at the very least the curvature is so small that the full universe would need to be a minimum of 10^30 times larger than the observable universe to appear so flat.

The article doesn't do any favours by referring to it as spherical, which is a specifically 3D form, which isn't what a 4D curvature would look like. Unless I'm mistaken, it'd look like a ring in just the 4th dimension -- the one along which spacetime curves -- nothing terribly obvious in our usual 3 spatial, except that in principle light rays would eventually return to high the back of a flashlight.

Announcements of revolutionary breakthroughs in cosmology are much more common than actual breakthroughs. This looks like serious work, but it needs to be scrutinized by other researchers before we can judge its significance.

This can be a little tricky to talk about or visualize, because our brains aren't wired to perceive additional dimensions. But I'll take a stab at it. We'll have to talk by analogy though

Picture a sheet of paper lying on the table. Now put a 2D universe on it - a bunch of little stick figures, living their lives, talking about how they know what "flat" means when you're talking about a line, but what does it mean when you're talking about a 2-dimensional thing? And it's going to be kind of hard to see from their perspective. 2-D light only travels along the surface of the paper, so even if you came along in 3D space and curled the paper into a tube, they couldn't see across the gap to the other side of the tube, still just along the surface. But something important would have changed - while the universe was flat they could see forever in in every direction, but now that you've curved their universe back on itself - if they look directly parallel to the direction you curled the paper, they'll look all the way around the tube and see the back of their own head. From their perspective within the 2D universe they're looking in a perfectly straight line and something profoundly weird is going on. But from our perspective we can see that the line is in fact curved, because the paper it's drawn on is curved - the curve is just happening in a 3rd dimension that they can't see.

Does that make any sense? If our 3D universe were curled into a small enough 4D tube, we could look out into space in the right direction, and see the opposite side of Earth looking back at us, because our whole 3D universe is looped back on itself in a direction we cant see.

Of course there's no particular reason the curvature would have to be a tube, you could wrap it into a mobius strip instead, or just stretch and wrinkle it without curving it back on itself at all. That's essentially Einstein's insight with General Relativity - there isn't actually any "force of gravity" pulling the Earth towards the sun - instead the sun stretches the universe itself in such a way that when the Earth travels in a straight line, it keeps ending up back where it started. Or something like that - I admit I don't really understand the details.

Physicists though like to keep things simple - so when they talk about the shape of the universe they're mostly ignoring the "gravity wrinkles" , and in the absence of a compelling argument usually assume it's the 4D analog to one one of three simple shapes that are curved uniformly in all places and directions. Each of which has distinctive geometric properties. Using our 2D analogy the corresponding 3D shapes would be:
-- A flat plane = no curvature. Things keep going in all directions forever (or maybe there's a boundary somewhere), a straight line is actually straight no madder how many dimensions you're looking at it from, and if you fired parallel laser beams out of your eyes, the center of those beams would stay a fixed distance apart.
-- a sphere = positive curvature - go far enough in any direction and you'll end up back where you started - straight lines all follow "great circles" (e.g. lines of longitude are straight, lines of latitude are actually curved), so your parallel laser beams would actually end up crossing each other because space is always curving towards itself.
-- and finally a shape we don't normally see - a hyperbolic surface with negative curvature. Like the flat plane it doesn't curve back on itself, but your laser beams are actually gong to get further apart the farther they travel, because space is curving away from itself. To compare it with a sphere - if you tried to lay out the the surface of a non-stretchy sphere (an orange peel for example) on to a flat surface, you'll have to cut it up into pieces first because the further you get from your central starting point, the less orange peel you have to go around. If you tried to do the same thing with a hyperbolic surface you'd have the opposite problem - the further you get from the center, the mo

2000+ people are being laid off but, the executive being fired gets a 1.7 billion dollar buyout. Corporate greed at its finest.

This is just SoftBank throwing good money after bad. The CEO literally said he thought WeWork was going to be another Alibaba.

This was never going to be another Alibaba because the business model is completely stupid. When you're losing money in REAL ESTATE, and your strategy is to get bigger, faster to go public, to continue to lose money in REAL ESTATE, you're doing it wrong. I have been reading the WeWork stories in the WSJ for some a while, and my first thought after reading one of the early articles was how stupid the business model was . . . essentially a middleman office rental agency which was losing money. Consistently. Umm, wow?

This was sold as some sort of a technology company, but it was really just a [building management company] + [pothead, kibbutz-raised, hippie CEO/huckster/carnival-barker] + [free beer]. The only reason this is "News for Nerds" is because it was marketed as something "nerdy," but the "nerdy" that was being marketed was about like a Marvel movie being marketed as science fiction.

While this is not a Theranos 2.0 situation, it just amazes me how people can get so excited about an IPO for a company which does not have a viable path to profitability. That this stupid company was ever a major business story says so much about what is wrong with modern business, because a large corporation can be exciting and attract investment--not because it's profitable--but because investors think that they will sell the stock for a profit. As a small business owner, it annoys me that the excitement was never about the dividends but about the growth potential of the stock and the suckers down the line after the IPO.

So they will just stick to the core business of defrauding investors now?

Adam Neuman, the founder, was given $1.7 billion as an exit package.

This is the same founder who charged the company $5.9 million for the tradmark "We". Yes, that is right!

And now he (and other company officials) are being sued for the botched IPO.

I'd love to say that in 2013 I used to work for Bitcoin. 12 hour days clicking around for .1btc. My computer was mining from an fgpa and I traded deligebtly through the highs and lows. Everyone thought I was mad but now I am retired with a collection of rare gold coins. In reality I just browse Slashdot and still have to work.

... I would like to see "carbon footprint per employment" statistics comparing that with other jobs. I am guessing bitcoin jobs would be number 2 on the list after professional deforesters from Amazon or wood burning countries like Indonesia.

Four years ago, there was one person working with Bitcoin, now there are fifteen full time workers and the original person is semi-retired.

These percentage rise statistics don't work when something is new and the base number is very small.

Nah, this is not the "tulips" phenomenon. This is the "growth from zero" phenomenon. It is always spectacular in percentages, because when you divide by zero you get infinity, and when you divide by a number close to zero, you get something very large.

You can easily see when the "growth numbers", i.e. percentages, are irrelevant - when there ain't no absolute numbers in there that will let you put things in perspective. 1470% growth in 4 years may sound amazing. "Growth from 10 people to 147" over the same 4 years - not so much.