WD was recently caught red-handed on trying to sell HDDs to NAS duties that use SMR technology without informing about it (and, actually, by actively trying to misled customers and then silence the whole situation). that ended up in lawsuit. while others were also caught trying to do similar things, they backed up immediately, while WD still tried to say that “white is black, you know, really”. ...
i was ranting some time ago about slowness in which IT industry is moving from silicon to light, to speed up not only transport of information (we already do that by means of GBIC/SFP/SFP+ modules), but also processing of traffic. there are already means to do exactly that, and we as Cisco are working on delivering such features in next years. i just stumbled upon this article, which deals with doing similar thing but with machine learning - this quote is stunning: ...
great book. short but perfect. i will not try to praise and underline my deep knowledge and uderstanding of - Nosowska works. i know her almost exclusively from ‘texan’, and by the way she writes about people like me in one of the chapters about psychotherapists. i did not even knew, that she has a feed on instagram, publishes video - and in general - as a private person. not to mention all of her works. ...
great and unfortunately very short book about british geeks. it consists of couple of short chapters covering specific areas - from satellites (Ariel program), Blue Streak missiles, through Concorde (and all history of trying to keep it in service), to geeky pieces like legendary David Brabens Elite game. you won’t find too much about Elite game itself, as author is focusing more on the business side of things. however, there are couple of interesting pieces - like David relentless work on optimizing game code for BBC Micro (20kB of RAM!). game went on sale in september 1984 - i was six years old at the time, and in two years my father will buy ZX Spectrum 81. with shocking… 1kB of RAM! :) i only got to know Elite much later - in late 90’s in PC era. ...
another trilogy worth reading, rightly celebrating popularity as part of the (weak, and painfully crippled) Netflix screening. it consists of Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies. they all cover adventures of a single hero, however because of the “altered carbon” specifics, it’s almost like three different books. Takeshi Kovacs is single character, former Envoy, but given he’s constantly using different bodies, books are fast paced and interesting. ‘broken angels’ keeps ‘altered carbon’ tempo and adds some interesting twists, and ‘woken furies’ in my humble opinion is weakest of all three, but still written well and keeping the level overall. ...
all three books are great, and whole trilogy - delightful. they’re refreshing in style, and for me personally very similar to writings of Stanisława Lema (well, at least there where it’s close to intergalactic travels and technology) and Asimov. everything embedded into chinese cultural environment that i studied recently for professional reasons). some of that can be seen very clearly in long term (really long term) strategies mixed with tactical execution. ...
for the first time in a few years I took three weeks of vacation. …and this is starting to catch up with me :) i took few books with myself, but only some of them are worth mentioning - like ‘Hit refresh’ by Satya Nadella (though I have not read it yet) and ‘Now. The physics of time’ - I am in the process and it is fascinating to read. the remaining two positions will remain in the shadow of oblivion. ...
it was not built for US military. it wasn’t even built to enable survivability of US military infrastructure after nuclear war. there’s a myth in the “internet circles”, that i’m fighting for couple of years already. recently, i was reading great book - Dream Machine. it’s as good as (at least) Dealers of Lightning or 747 - but maybe even better. you probably heard the story already - US gov ordered RAND to check if they could built survivable comms system. that system could have survived almost total annihilation - including nuclear war. RAND asked one of his consultants - of Polish origin - Paul Baran to do the job. and he basically prototyped with his team network capable of packet switching, not circuit switching. it is said and repeated, that Paul work was in effect ARPANET. almost everything here is true, apart from last sentence - ARPANET was neither inspired or created thanks to Paul work. ...
140 characters at most, 5 minutes, sandwich you catch up while on the run… and then silence at around 2am and wake up call at 6am… this is how life of most of us looks like. daily. I had a chance to get back to book I’ve read too long ago - Rays Bradbury 451* Fahrenheita'. just take a look at following dialogue: ...
ARPA, established in 1958, was first and only space agency at that time in United States. to this day it drives fantasies and is unequivocally identified with the emergence of the Internet, but did you know that ARPA (before it became DARPA in 1972) was responsible for underground nuclear testing (as seismology allowed to determine whether other countries somewhere on Earth were conducting their nuclear tests), guerilla warfare (ARPA reps travelled to and stayed in Vietnam, Thailand and Laos long before US under falsifed “proofs” attacked North Vietnam), or development of machine rifle that became what is today known as M-16? ...