I went from 0.3Mbps on T-Mobile to 50+ Mbps with this; on providers that limit hotspot speed by examining TTL, this can be an effective way to get around it.
(They assume if they see TTL as one lower than expected, data is passing through a hotspot/phone instead of directly from the phone.)
Years before this operation, we were stealing Soviet technology.
It was 1959, two years after the USSR had launched Sputnik. The USSR was showing off its achievements to other countries. Most were uninteresting, at least to the US government (in a country with electricity, stealing models of power stations would've done little good), but one was quite interesting: the Lunik spacecraft. It had to be a model, the CIA figured. After all, the Soviets had to have known Americans would've looked at that and tried to steal it, or at least figure out how it was made. Models were safer. But American agents figured it wouldn't hurt to look, and they found that it was a real one, albeit with some critical parts, like the engine, removed.
But you can't just saunter in during the exhibition and steal it, for fairly obvious reasons. The key was that it was a traveling exhibition, and as it was being transported, via some maneuvering and some possible/probable kidnapping of truck drivers (Sydney W. Finer notes the truck driver was "escorted to a hotel room and kept there for the night" on page 36 of his article[1] on it), the CIA managed to gain access to it.
After getting the all-clear to start, and, at one point, being scared witless by a possible ambush (it was people lighting the lamps, as was regularly scheduled), they opened the box carefully and began taking photographs of it. They took photographs or made drawings of everything, taking small amounts of things for study. Then they put it all back together and, eventually, gave it back to the original driver. They did their job hiding it well. In 1967, according to Finer's article (final page), there was "no indication the Soviets ever discovered that the Lunik was borrowed for a night."
The CIA has now declassified some documents on it[2], referring to it, somewhat euphemistically, as a 'loan' or 'borrowing' rather than 'theft'.
I've been reading the mentioned Bush memoir "Pieces of the Action" and it's pretty good. Stories about engineering and organizational politics. As good as any business classic (e.g. "My Years With General Motors" or "High Output Management").
One of the root problems with the UNIX signals IMHO is that they conflate 3 different useful concepts together.
The first concept is that of asynchronous external events that the process would like to react to in a timely manner (e.g. SIGINT): those can be processed on a dedicated thread, maybe it could be created anew every time a signal is delivered a la Windows [0], maybe it could be created once at the moment of execve and ELF format should get a "secondary entry point" field for it, whatever.
The second concept is that of synchronous internal events that the process has caused itself (e.g. SIGSEGV, SIGILL): well, those are just low-level exceptions, and could be processed on the thread that caused them. Some sort of structural exception handling [1] (only less awkward) could work, I think?
An interesting mix of those two kinds of signals is SIGALRM, which is an asynchronous internal event. Can be quite useful for implementing lighter-weighted/cooperative multitasking, I guess: it basically makes the OS to regularly punt your instruction pointer somewhere else where you could e.g. flush some memory and raise semaphores so a sibling thread could notice and report the progress to the user, while the main thread returns back to number crunching, or you could use it to to force coroutines/fibers to yield or something. To be fair, not sure what the proper interface for this should look like.
And the third concept is that of the control operations acting on the process itself, the operations that the process gets no chance to react to: SIGKILL, SIGSTOP, SIGCONT. They are not really process signals, they are the API of the process manager/scheduler that were implemented with the signals machinery because what was the other choice? Introducing new system calls?
I've watched key, core engineers and technical leaders work for US and European companies, develop their next generation products, then turn around and design and develop essentially the exact same thing for the Chinese market. They then build a company, in China, that makes essentially the same product, but for the Chinese Market, and with Chinese investors, etc.
Examples:
Thoratec/Abbot Heartmate III & CH Biomedical
Auris/Verb/J&J Robotic & Digital Solutions & Renovo Surgical
The ironic thing, is that some of these companies after success in China are working to sell and be competitive in the US and Europe.
It's not even secret or under the table anymore, it's overt and largely accepted as the way it is in our industry. A brave new world.
The other factor, is that it is very very difficult for a foreign company to do business and protect their assets in China, so often the wise companies don't even try. They often just license their stuff for the Chinese market to a Chinese company. That way they at least have a chance of not having it all just stolen.
Perhaps after you wind down the tugboat thing, you can open a consultancy to explain, based on simple anecdotes about your experience, why people’s dogma is often ridiculously wrong.
No, that will never work. But I bet you will be successful in some field where patience is a virtue.
Okay, this is embarrassing but I feel the need to contribute as a catharsis.
LEISURE TIME
1. WSJ: the OpEd section is neocon trash, but the journalistic content is well sourced, objective, and interesting.
2. NYTimes: probably the highest quality journalism in the English-speaking world.
3. Economist: slower news cycle, more deeply analytical and intellectual than WSJ or NYT.
4. Bloomberg: nice in-depth stories about things WSJ would not put on their front page. Good data journalism.
5. YouTube: Lex Fridman interviews, machine learning channels, Minecraft hardcore play throughs, and whatever else the algorithm brings me.
6. Podcasts: Economist Intelligence, CBC The World At Six, PBS News Hour, Bloomberg Odd Lots, NYT The Daily, This Week in Virology, Practical AI, Last Week in AI (this is new to me and good)
WORK
1. Slack: managing my team and also connecting with a couple of industry groups.
2. Email: it pours in all day. I have a lot of Gmail filters and some custom scripting to automate things.
3. I’m working on automating every manual process in my job as CEO, even though it’s painful. The investment will be worthwhile.
Is there a proper term or category for a monitor meant for high end installations that has no branding on it (e.g., as one would put into a display at a museum)?
I refuse to buy something with a logo on the front of it.
As a Norwegian I might be biased, but the viking era contains so many weird and interesting facts and happenings. I would strongly recommend checking out more on one of the following things I remember from the top of my head:
The works of Icelandic historian/poet Snorre Sturlason, he is most famous for what in English would be called 'Snorre's sagas of kings', which is widely regarded to be one of the most important books for Norway.
The Danelaw is also pretty interesting, but what I personally find even more interesting is the colonization and settlements in Ireland by vikings. Dublin, Cork, the Isle of Man and much more was settled by vikings. The Danelaw and settlements caused words from Old Norse to become fairly influential on English.
Someone else has mentioned Ibn Fadlan, who met vikings which came from the river Dnipro, which runs through modern day Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Vikings traveled from Sweden towards Russia, giving the country it's name. The name Rus was first used about the Scandinavians in Eastern Europe, but later referred to the Kievan Rus.
The region of Normandie in France has it's name from the vikings, as Rollo the Walker was made ruler of the region by the king of France. This was allegedly after the vikings had tried to sack Paris for the n-th time. This deal was made on the premise that the people of Normandie would defend the rest of France from vikings and other raiders. Rollo the Walker is a direct ancestor of William the Conqueror, and by extension the British royal family.
The title jarl is often translated into English as earl, but the correct translation would be duke. Jarl is simply just etymologically related to earl.
Hope this random list wasn't too confusing, if anyone is interested in this I would gladly help with finding good English language sources!
This reminds me of how my friend Nick Gray throws parties. If you're in Austin - you've probably been to one of them.
He's got a pretty good overview on different types of events to host (sometimes personally the details feel overkill to me but it's like an SOP for your social life and it works (https://party.pro/happyhour/)).
If you're trying to upgrade your social life & build more connections - his book is easily worth it several times over (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1544530072).
The problem here is these GDP measures measure value add. Let's work through an example:
Scenario A: You assemble everything locally with 50% of your components from east asian component manufacturers, the rest from the domestic market. Your costs are $800 per unit. Then you spend $200 on in-house design and sell your product for $1500, for a profit of $500 per unit and a domestic value add of $700 per unit. At that price point, you sell 2/3 of a million units, adding roughly half a billion to domestic manufacturing.
Scenario B: You outsource all of your assembly to China and parts from East Asian component manufacturers and only do design/QA in-house. If you pay $300 to your suppliers, spend $200 on in-house design but sell your product for $1000, you have $700 in domestic value add. Say at $1000 you sell a million units, so you've contributed a billion dollars to the manufacturing share of GDP.
Now if a company switches from Scenario A to Scenario B, most people would (rightly, I believe) assume that some manufacturing has left the economy. But actually the manufacturing share of GDP has increased! However it's a very fragile increase, because a change in the terms of trade and suddenly you pay more for your foreign inputs and at that point it will appear as if manufacturing's share of GDP has fallen. There is also the issue that foreign rivals are going to be in a better position to compete against you, so long term this does not bode well for manufacturing's share of GDP.
Now this is just one company, and buying from domestic suppliers also contributes to GDP. But they have the same issue -- they can outsource production leaving design/QA in house as well. So you can have a situation with high manufacturing share of GDP with nothing produced in the nation other than design/QA. So all these GDP by industry measures, at the end of the day, are measuring industry margins more than actual manufacturing per se, and really weren't designed with outsourcing in mind, and aren't intended to be used in a time series analysis during which a lot of outsourcing is happening.
Versioning is where the Microsoft world, and probably all graphical word processors suck big-time.
The world of pain I go through when I have to collaborate with partners in government or defence, sending back and forth word files from various word versions and tracking comments and changes leaves me losing the will to live.
Oh if we would only have the GitHub GUI for Office files!
sudo sysctl -w net.inet.ip.ttl=65
When done, switch it back:
sudo sysctl -w net.inet.ip.ttl=64
I went from 0.3Mbps on T-Mobile to 50+ Mbps with this; on providers that limit hotspot speed by examining TTL, this can be an effective way to get around it.
(They assume if they see TTL as one lower than expected, data is passing through a hotspot/phone instead of directly from the phone.)