Category: technology

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/nagorno-karabkah-drones-azerbaijan-aremenia/2020/11/11/441bcbd2-193d-11eb-8bda-814ca56e138b_story.html

Here’s a metaphor for you. Drones are the new truck bombs. Hands down. In the realm of asymetric warfare, now all you need to defeat an enemy is take out their “spendy” weapons export licensed systems (sold to you courtesy of Vladimir Putin). Then what do you have? Sounds like nothing, you got nothing.

And that’s how asymetric warfar works. Whether it’s a protracted guerilla war of attrition or one of these drone strike extravaganza’s as described in WaPO, Azerbaijan gained the upperhand:

Their tally, which logs confirmed losses with photographs or videos, listed Armenian losses at 185 T-72 tanks; 90 armored fighting vehicles; 182 artillery pieces; 73 multiple rocket launchers; 26 surface-to-air missile systems, including a Tor system and five S-300s; 14 radars or jammers; one SU-25 war plane; four drones and 451 military vehicles.

Azerbaijan, the group concluded, had visually confirmed losses of 22 tanks, 41 armored forced vehicles, one helicopter, 25 drones and 24 vehicles

By Robyn Dixon
November 11, 2020 at 4:06 PM EST

So one does not need to have 1.)a space program, 2.)a missile program, 3.)an atomic bomb program, or 4.)a biological weapon program. You dictators, save your money. Just buy drones, lots of drones from Turkey, or Israel and suicide bomb every weapon system on your opponents battlefield. Then roll on in and start the real urban warfare, street by street, bullet by bullet, landmine by landmine.

The OBS Screen Timer Zoom Trick

Good ol’ Alan Levine has done it again. That man is more curious, patient, and adaptive than any other programmer, instructional technologist. Hands down he tries things, and sees if they stick. He was project managing an online educational conference and attempting to design a Zoom layout/scene source that would allow him to host a meeting, keep speakers on track for time remaining and help prompt attendees on the topic being presented (with a title slide) all contained in an OBS Studio virtual camera output to Zoom. And I have to say, I followed Alan’s notes and directions and it works! So that’s the true mark of an instructional technologist,… can you summarize and step-wise your process and get it out there in words so anyone else could duplicate what you did? If you can, you are well on your way to being a valuable asset in any Instructional Technology context in education (Higher Ed, K-12, doesn’t matter it applies everywhere).

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Cerebras is finally hitting the racks in some locations and doing benchmarks to see how well it performs. And as compared to custom made/bespoke computer clusters with a mix of CPU/GPU, it’s performing very well. One benchmark has shown it is a significant improvement over the #82 ranked supercomputer (200x faster on certain benchmarks) and performs those calculations at a reduced power consumption 20KW versus 450KW (for #82 ranked super computer). So as a first time out, it seems like some of the promises and hand-waving made by the company are being proved out. The question still remains as Venture Beat points out, is how applicable Cerebras CS-1 is to a range of compute problems. The value of any of these multi-million dollar specialty compute machines is only as good as the range of problems you can solve with them. Thinking back to the 1970s, Control Data Corporation spent a fortune optimizing for vector math with their first vector-based super computer. But that was all for naught when scalar type calculations were mixed in. Seymour Cray saw this and addressed it with the Cray-1 by allowing a performant mix of scalar, with much better performance vector calculations. So having a good enough performance on scalar, was so far ahead of the CDC vector-optimized that people gravitated to the Cray-1 instead. We’ll see how closely the Cerebras CS-1 hews to this pattern over the next year or so as people figure out what it is good at and whether or not it’s good value for the money.

Following Japan’s “paper tiger sandwich” incident, we went out and bought every sandwich we could find to investigate. It’s impossible not to feel the draw of the snack food and pastry aisles on a trip into a Japanese convenience store, but they also have plenty of tasty, sensible meal options too. Any convenience store in…

25 different Japanese convenience store sandwiches – What’s inside them?【Photos】 — SoraNews24 -Japan News-

Japanese researchers use mannequin heads to prove that face coverings really do work against COVID-19. After over half a year of flip-flopping from the international medical community and the World Health Organisation on the efficacy of masks, Japanese researchers have now proven that face coverings help to reduce coronavirus transmission.  Professors at the University of Tokyo’s Institute […]

World-first confirmation that masks can protect you from coronavirus【Video】

I’ve written enough about the challenges of Windows devices and the real-time clock that you’ve probably heard this one before:  Windows stores the time in the real-time clock in the local time zone, which causes problems if you install a new OS on the device and it boots up in a different default time zone […]

Windows 10 and a PC’s real-time clock — Out of Office Hours

Mike makes a good point here. So much behavior today in setup/deployment/config of PCs and updates to PCs is guided by practice set back in IBM PC/AT Bios days. Real-time clocks should all be UTC with the offset calculated by location, or sync based NTP settings. That way you’re always at least “correct” to UTC, you just need to refine the display of that UTC counter to the human being running the computer. By now, one would have thought this was solved or coordinated. But it’s all just random, with set workflows, and production steps for each and every computer manufacturer. Me personally, I’m going to follow Mike’s sterling example. I’m going to set my Win10 Registry setting to use the UEFI UTC real clock for my system clock and be done with it.

Now this is what I call “Reclaim Video” but Japanese Style (shout out Tim and Jim). Seems like there’s more than one person on this planet that also wants to hold onto those tapes.

1.) My commissioner of elections cares about my health and safety and sent out, (without me even asking) an application for an absentee/mail-in ballot including a No Postage Necessary self-addressed stamped envelope.

2.) I have filled it in, signed and have mailed it.

Thankyou Monroe Co. Election Commissioners and USPS. Because of you I can exercise my rights as a grown ass U.S. Citizen. All of us together, there’s nothing we can’t do!