uxcn

Joined 12 years ago

Karma

235

Submissions

278

Member since

Jan 6

https://twitter.com/uxcn_

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Recent submissions

Comment · 7 years ago

awk, sed, cut, etc... are excellent as long as the format is regular and you only need to process the file once

Comment · 10 years ago

This may seem like an odd question, but strategically, why acquire the stake (aside from dividends)?

As I understand, ASML already depends on Carl Zeiss. I would guess ASML will depend more heavily on them with EUVL over the next decade, but I honestly haven't done the research.

Is this going to give them more control over production? Does it somehow reduce their costs?

Comment · 10 years ago

People and businesses in countries like Venezuela, where the native currency is volatile and under strict government control, use cryptocurrencies. They're more stable (not as stable as USD/EUR though) and easier to transact (particularly cross-currency).

Comment · 10 years ago

Okay... I agree adding features to email and IRC are probably not the easiest things in the world. There are a number of useful features that have been added to email over time though, and I don't think decentralized control of the protocol is the bottleneck. Wave might or might not be a good example.

Comment · 10 years ago

I'm a huge fan of the IRC protocol, and I think I've set up IRC channels at nearly every company I've worked for.

Freenode and Weechat seem to support the changes, but I honestly worry that the protocol ends up more complicated than it needs to be, or possibly more complicated than people can use. Diaspora already provides a lot of what IRCv3 looks like it's trying to do. I guess I'm just not sure what the difference is.

Comment · 10 years ago

Seattle has set up more than one tiny house village [1], at least that I know of. Some of them even have internet access.

We still have a very real homeless problem though, and you'll see panhandlers if you drive through the city. People have even set up camps along I-5.

[1] http://www.kiro7.com/news/seattles-first-tiny-house-village-...

Comment · 10 years ago

It's estimated there are 10^80 atoms [1] in the visible universe, so 2^256 is definitely a huge number. I didn't realize 256 bit brute force was nigh feasible with only a solar system.

I'm a bit surprised the quantum algorithm only gives a polynomial speedup.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_con...

Comment · 10 years ago

ORWL was designed specifically to prevent undetected tampering with any of its electrical components, including the entire motherboard and storage drive. When tampering is detected, ORWL immediately and irrevocably erases all your data, even if it is unplugged at the time.

and...

Upon any tampering, the secure microcontroller instantly erases the encryption key, causing all data on the SSD to be irrevocably lost.

If only the key is deleted, wouldn't that leave the drive susceptible to brute force?

Comment · 10 years ago

I personally think life is probably common in the universe. We've only been able to prove exoplanets exist within the last few decades, but the evidence is already that there are a number of planets that are hospitable to life (our kind at least). We've only just started scratching the surface and we've already found things like Tabby's Star [1].

Obviously I think there's a point to us trying to communicate with whatever is out there, I just think we shouldn't be surprised by the lack of response.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852

Comment · 10 years ago

This is a really good point. There has been a lot of research into this area lately, as well as animal intelligence in general.

My point is still that life less intelligent than us has nothing to communicate to us that we would care to respond to.

Comment · 10 years ago

Two civs probably need to be within half a millennium or so of technological development (human time) to have any possibility of communicating.

Intelligence seems to expand polynomially or exponentially by a lot of measures though (e.g. technology). The closest analogy for us compared to another civilization that could actually receive our radio communication I think would be chimpanzees using sticks to eat termites.

If I had to guess, I'd guess there's probably some kind of technological asymptote, but considering the scale of the universe (more importantly its complexity) I think we are probably nowhere near it.

Comment · 10 years ago

Yeah, I'd care about that octopus. I would want to study it and see what else it does.

Sure, I mean intelligent life is interesting to us because it's novel. If there is other intelligent life in the galaxy (universe), it probably implies that intelligent life is relatively common. So, more (less) intelligent life would be extremely inconsequential to them. Why waste resources studying something already well understood?

Comment · 10 years ago

I think it's likely intelligent life outside our planet just doesn't, or won't, have any interest in us outside the infinitesimal possibility of a threat.

Consider everything less intelligent than us on our planet... If anything tried to communicate with us, would we even bother trying to figure out what it was trying to say? Would we try to communicate back?

Suppose an octopus stacked rocks in piles of prime numbers (not including unity). Would we care beyond possibly putting it on display in an aquarium?

Comment · 10 years ago

jvisualvm is largely a superset of jconsole, with a plugin interface, so it probably is.

I have no idea how many other people actually use it though.

Comment · 10 years ago

If it's exposed through JMX, would it also be visible via something like jvisualvm?