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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Gartner defines Bimodal IT as: “the practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on stability and the other on agility. Mode 1 is traditional and sequential, emphasizing safety and accuracy. Mode 2 is exploratory and nonlinear, emphasizing agility and speed”.

I find myself more than a little bemused by the concept. First of all, why would I want to manage two separate modes of activity? That means that either I have to employ different people with specialisms in different approaches (expensive) or I have to take on people who are skilled in both areas (which by definition means they're not going to be best-of-breed in either).

Second, I have a strange liking for the concepts that Gartner mentions in Mode 1: safety and accuracy. I find it useful that my IT systems don't kill people; here in Jersey, for example, it's frowned upon if too many employees die in tragic business systems accidents. And in my experience, the CFO tends to be quite irritable if the month-end numbers don't add up. I also find security and integrity fairly useful too, along with availability – all things that can suffer in Gartner's so-called Mode 2 at the expense of agility and speed.

Although the term “bimodal IT” is relatively new, the concept isn't. Back in the 1990s I worked in an environment with two distinct approaches to IT: one slow, steady and methodical, and the other fast-moving and bleeding edge. Did the latter break more than the former? No, actually it didn't – but only because it was done by a small number of very technical people who could respond quickly to issues. Did it bring advantages? Yes: it was doing IP-based wide area stuff long before the other part of the IT world.

Would I go back to that setup tomorrow? Not on your nelly – it put a group of techies out on a limb, largely unsupportable by the other team and hence permanently lumbered with supporting bleeding-edge technology whenever it threw a tantrum and interfacing it tenuously into the core systems in the face of reluctant sighs from the core support group.

I had another of these “parallel” examples more recently, when a new senior techie decided that he would spin up cloud-based servers seemingly at random alongside the company's well-managed, well-documented and extremely stable infrastructure. He took exception, for some reason, when someone called him a “f**king cowboy”.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

MIT professor emeritus Robert Fano passed away a couple weeks ago at age 98. Fano was born and raised in Italy, but fled with his family at age 21 when Mussolini ramped up an anti-Jewish campaign similar to Hitler's. Arriving in the United States, he enrolled at MIT and quickly obtained a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. In 1944, after Italy had left the war, Fano was able to obtain a security clearance to join the MIT Radiation Lab as a researcher and designer of microwave components for radar systems. He obtained his doctorate degree after completing a thesis deriving an important theoretical result on bandwidth limitations for impedance matching. He then branched into the nascent field of Information Theory, becoming one of the field's most prolific researchers. During this period Fano encouraged one of his students, David Huffman, to try to improve on the method Fano and Claude Shannon had independently developed to efficiently encode a string of characters; Huffman later admitted working on the problem fruitlessly for months until he had his A-ha! moment.

I found a lively and informative lecture Fano gave to students at MIT (1985) on the origin of time-sharing systems; Fano describes the excitement of working in the new field of computing in the early 1960's. The first seven minutes are a capsule biography provided by the introducer. Fano brought in a deck of Hollerith cards to explain to the young audience what mainframe batch computing was, why it was a PITA, and why people would typically gather several inches of line printer output from each run. He traced to beginnings of time-sharing to online computing, done on Whirlwind computers at Lincoln Labs throughout the '50s, which used a reservation system where each user could have exclusive use of the machine for a period of time. (DEC founder Ken Olsen came out of Lincoln Labs).

In the lecture, Fano credits John McCarthy (creator of LISP) and Christopher Strachey (denotational semantics) for independently proposing time-shared use of the mainframe computers at universities. While this quickly captured the imagination of Fano and others in the MIT community (Fano makes the analogy of a distribution system for electrical power ), not everyone was in favor of the idea. Fano names some detractors: Richard Hamming, Eugene Amdahl, and Jay Forrester all thought it was an appalling waste of computer power to allow people to sit in front of a terminal trying to think what to do next. It's hard not to think of some of today's debates involving cloud computing.

Here's an interview with Fano in which he discusses his career.

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hubie writes:

As seen back in December, there was a tantalizing hint of a boson more massive than the Higgs, which if true, would point to some new and very exciting physics. Unfortunately, the blip in the data does not appear to be holding up under the scrutiny of better statistics. When the potential particle was announced, 377 papers were thrown up on arxiv as would-be Einsteins set out to stake a claim in the new theoretical physics wilderness. The null result was presented at the biennial International Conference on High Energy Physics.

The null results also set up one of the more humorous situations at the meeting. Immediately following the talks in which experimenters said the purported particle didn't exist, five different theorists took turns explaining what the particle might be.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

New data shows that the majority of robot-enabled scam phone calls came from fewer than 40 call centers, a finding that offers hope the growing menace of robocalls can be stopped.

The calls use computers and the Internet to dial thousands of phone numbers every minute and promote fraudulent schemes that promise to lower credit card interest rates, offer loans, and sell home security products, to name just a few of the scams. Over the past decade, robocall complaints have mushroomed, with the Federal Trade Commission often receiving hundreds of thousands of complaints each month. In 2013, the consumer watchdog agency awarded $50,000 to three groups who devised blocking systems that had the potential to help end the scourge. Three years later, however, the robocall problem seems as intractable as ever.

On Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, a researcher said that slightly more than half of more than 1 million robocalls tracked were sent by just 38 telephony infrastructures. The relatively small number of actors offers hope that the phenomenon can be rooted out, by either automatically blocking the call centers or finding ways for law enforcement groups to identify and prosecute the operators.

"We know that the majority of robocalls only come from 38 different infrastructures," Aude Marzuoli, research scientist at a company called Pindrop Labs, told Ars. "It's not as if there are thousands of people out there doing this. If you can catch this small number of bad actors we can" stop the problem."

Pindrop researchers reached the conclusion by creating a security honeypot of phone numbers that received more than 1 million robocalls. The researchers transcribed about 10 percent of the calls and analyzed the semantics with machine-learning techniques to isolate identical scams. The researchers combined those results with analysis that tracked 150 different audio features of each call. By studying the codecs, packet loss, spectrum, and frequency inside the audio and combining the results with the machine learning, the researchers were able to obtain a fingerprint of each different call center.

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takyon writes:

Rapidly heating milk for less than a second can eliminate most of the bacteria left behind after the pasteurization process and extend the shelf life of cold milk by several weeks:

Bruce Applegate, Purdue associate professor in the Department of Food Science, and collaborators from Purdue and the University of Tennessee published their findings in the journal SpringerPlus, where they show that increasing the temperature of milk by 10 degrees for less than a second eliminates more than 99 percent of the bacteria left behind after pasteurization. "It's an add-on to pasteurization, but it can add shelf life of up to five, six or seven weeks to cold milk," Applegate said.

[...] The low-temperature, short-time (LTST) method in the Purdue study sprayed tiny droplets of pasteurized milk, which was inoculated with Lactobacillus and Pseudomonas bacteria, through a heated, pressurized chamber, rapidly raising and lowering their temperatures about 10 degrees Celsius but still below the 70-degree Celsius threshold needed for pasteurization. The treatment lowered bacterial levels below detection limits, and extended shelf life to up to 63 days. "With the treatment, you're taking out almost everything," Applegate said. "Whatever does survive is at such a low level that it takes much longer for it to multiply to a point at which it damages the quality of the milk."

The LTST chamber technology was developed by Millisecond Technologies, a New-York-based company. Sensory tests compared pasteurized milk with milk that had been pasteurized and run through MST's process. Panelists did not detect differences in color, aroma, taste or aftertaste between the products.

The effect of a novel low temperature-short time (LTST) process to extend the shelf-life of fluid milk (open, DOI: 10.1186/s40064-016-2250-1)

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

BlackBerry has filed a patent lawsuit (PDF) against Internet telephony firm Avaya. The dispute marks a turning point for Blackberry, which pushed into the Android market last year but has been struggling.

In making its case that Avaya should pay royalties, BlackBerry's focus is squarely on its rear-view mirror. The firm argues that it should be paid for its history of innovation going back nearly 20 years.

"BlackBerry revolutionized the mobile industry," the company's lawyers wrote in their complaint. "BlackBerry... has invented a broad array of new technologies that cover everything from enhanced security and cryptographic techniques, to mobile device user interfaces, to communication servers, and many other areas."

Out of a vast portfolio, BlackBerry claims Avaya infringes eight US Patents:

The patents have various original filing dates, ranging from 2011 back to 1998.

Accused products include Avaya's video conferencing systems, Avaya Communicator for iPad, a product that connects mobile users to IP Office systems, and various IP desk phones. The '961 cryptography patent is allegedly infringed by a whole series of products that "include OpenSSL and Open SSL elliptic curve cryptography," including the Avaya CMS and conferencing systems.

[...] A patent cross-license that BlackBerry executed last year involved Cisco paying a "license fee," although the amount was confidential. In May, BlackBerry CEO John Chen told investors on an earnings call that he was in "patent licensing mode," eager to monetize his company's 38,000 patents.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story by Simon Sharwood at The Register:

This week, reader “Earl” tells us that just this year he responded to “a Craigslist ad for a Novell NetWare Admin to figure out why .nlm files would not be loaded and fix the issue.”

[...] The return call came “almost instantly” and Earl “gave them my expensive price and advised them that I was not the first choice for a NetWare admin, but I had extensive system troubleshooting experience.”

Those caveats didn't matter: the person who placed the ad said he's run it for months and months and never had a reply from anyone in the USA. Earl was just 90 minutes away by train and got the gig.

When Earl visited the site, he was told that an electrical storm had taken out the NetWare server and Windows 95/98 clients. Said server was a Dell PowerEdge 1300 with 64MB of RAM and a 10GB IDE hard drive. Earl reckons it was built in 1997 or 1998, so was a bit taken aback when told this was “the new server”.

[...] Next came a request to boot up the Compaqs, which had power supply and fan failures. A request to swap the disks from the dead Compaqs was not something Earl could do, as they had tossed out the necessary SCSI cables a few years back.

Earl was asked to do all of these things so the company could run its bespoke accounting program, which was written for it in 1993.

The developer, it turned out, had died in 2001. But the source code was in the company safe … on about 2000 pages of dot matrix printer paper. And there were backups of the old data … on 20 years worth of floppy disks and a pair of CD-ROMs.

[...] Earl told the company that they'd need a working server, running NetWare, before he could even begin to contemplate the task of typing in the source code so he could see if the backups could be restored. Then he'd have to hope that a Pascal compiler could cross-compile for NetWare to have even a chance of setting things to rights.

To the company's credit, it tried hard to meet his requests. Two weeks later Earl says he returned to the company, where a working PowerEdge 1300 with a PCI network awaited.

[...] But he didn't have his own monitor.

[...] He somehow got to work. DOS 6.22 and all the device drivers “installed like a charm”. NetWare 4.1 installed. It was seen by both Windows 95 and 98 on the frail network. Now it came time to restore the application.

But it turned out that the stack of disks contained only data, not the application. Even the 10MB disk from the “old” server was uselessly corrupted.

Earl tried to explain this problem, but the client was having none of it and showed him the door.

Earl tells The Register the client owes him about US$5,000.00 for his time and is showing no signs of paying up. At least he didn't have to re-type all that source code: perhaps there weren't enough keyboards in the office!

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fork(2) writes:

"I'm the rabbit that has seen the most stars."

New Scientist reports:

The moon just got a little more lonesome. China's State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND) announced today [in Chinese] that its moon rover Yutu, or Jade Rabbit, has finally stopped operating after 31 months on the surface.

Yutu touched down on the lunar surface in December 2013 as part of the Chang'e-3 lander mission, making China the third country to reach the moon after Russia and the United States.

It was prematurely declared dead in February 2014 after a harsh lunar night -- the moon experiences two weeks of dark followed by two of light -- then showed signs of life, but was unable to move. Despite these issues, in October 2015 Yutu claimed the record for the longest operating rover on the moon.

SASTIND says data from Yutu has generated over 100 scientific papers about the moon, including the discovery of a previously unseen layer of lava flows.

Yutu's death isn't the end of China's lunar ambitions. The Chang'e 3 lander, which hosts a robotic telescope, is still going strong, and in 2017 the nation plans to launch a probe to gather moon rocks and bring them back to Earth.

[Continues...]

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Holding out the promise of quicker deliveries to its customers, Amazon.com on Thursday unveiled Amazon One, the company’s first branded air cargo plane.

The online retailer said the first branded aircraft will be showcased over the weekend at the Seafair Air Show in Seattle. The Boeing 767-300, seen in this video being painted with the Amazon logos, is one of 40 airplanes that the company has agreed to lease through air cargo partners Atlas Air and Air Transport Services Group and will be rolling out over the next couple of years.

Amazon currently has 11 dedicated airplanes flying for it, with Amazon One the first in the fleet to be branded, Amanda Ip, an Amazon spokeswoman, wrote in an email. 

The company’s entry into air logistics suggests that it wants greater control and higher efficiency over the movement of its goods at the backend. It is not clear at this point whether the new network could down the line impact Amazon’s current ties with UPS and FedEx. "We utilize a variety of great carriers and expect to continue doing so," Ip said.

Amazon has been experimenting with new ways of speeding up the delivery of packages to its customers, including using drones for home deliveries. The air cargo service has the Prime Air name that the company gave to its drone service, which has been delayed awaiting relevant regulations from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. "Prime Air represents a family of programs we’re utilizing to fly packages – air cargo planes and our innovative drone program," Ip said.

Additional reporting:

• https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/04/amazon-to-launch-prime-air-its-own-dedicated-cargo-planes-to-speed-delivery/
• http://www.computerworld.com/article/3104160/internet/amazon-shows-off-its-amazon-prime-air-cargo-plane.html
• http://www.cnet.com/news/amazons-shipping-ambitions-are-now-sky-high

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An Anonymous Coward has found the following story:

Aziz Ansari already has a pretty thick resume -- he's an actor, stand-up comic and even an author. Now, he can add documentary narrator to that list. Sort of.

Reddit user BenMeiri84 this week apparently discovered that Netflix had inadvertently taken subtitles from Ansari's "Live from Madison Square Garden" special and added them to a nature documentary. The internet suspects that David Attenborough's "Planet Earth" is the victim.

"A friend was watching some BBC nature show on Netflix, and a glitch on Netflix cause it to have Aziz Ansari's stand up special's subtitles [sic]," the user wrote. Said friend's Facebook post was made on Tuesday.

You can see the full gallery in all its glory here.

Some of the shots legitimately look like what would happen if Tom Haverford, the character Ansari plays on "Parks and Recreation", got a gig as a nature documentary narrator.

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takyon writes:

Drone racing is the new poker is the new athletics:

The National Drone Racing Championships start today [Friday] in New York. It's the second time the race will be held, but the first time ESPN will broadcast the event. If you're a broadcaster like ESPN, you've got options (there are many different kinds of sports, after all). So why drone racing? Well, it turns out poker plays a hand.

"I never really thought of poker as much of a sport, until you could make a million dollars playing it, and then [have] ESPN televising it," said Patrick Rishe, director of the sports business program at Washington University in St. Louis. "That just shows you, if there's money on the line, and if you have a passionate fan base out there, then you're going to have viewers."

ESPN wants those viewers. Especially young ones. Like the kind who guzzle down energy drinks while Snapchat-ing about cord cutting. They generally don't bother to subscribe to old-fashioned cable. Ray Katz, a managing partner with ROI Sports Marketing Group, notes that "banks and insurance companies want to reach consumers when they're younger. Men's and women's grooming companies want to reach consumers when they're younger."

Also at NYT. Here is the website for the National Drone Racing Championships. It will take place August 5-7 on Governors Island, New York City.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

“Our mission is to change what’s possible so we can take huge strides forward in our national security capabilities,” said Arati Prabhakar at the post-contest press conference. “We did it today and it was a very satisfying experience.”

Each team was equipped with a server containing 128 Intel Xeon processors running at 2.5 GhZ and boasting over a thousand processing cores, 16TB of RAM and a liquid cooling system that required 250 gallons of water per minute to cool the big iron. They were let loose on a custom-designed operating system and instructed to find flaws, patch them automatically, and provide proof of concepts for flaws in each other's systems.

At the same time seven other similar system were used by the judges to monitor the progress of the event as the systems ran 96 rounds lasting 270 seconds, with 30 second breaks in between rounds. At stake was US$3.75m in government greenbacks.

The competition, which has taken three years and $55m to set up, is designed to automate the whole process of bug hunting.

Mike Walker, the DARPA program manager overseeing the Cyber Grand Challenge, said that this was the first stage in a possibly decade-long process to automate security monitoring and make networks more resilient.

“We have redefined what is possible and we did it in the course of hours with autonomous systems that we challenged the world to build,” he said. “I want people to understand how difficult it is to build prototype revolutionary technology and field it in front of the eyes of the world. I have enormous respect for those folks.”

A DARPA representative told The Reg that at this stage the winning team, with 270,042 points, was the ForAllSecure team, founded by the Carnegie Mellon University professor of electrical and computer engineering David Brumley. Results aren't final, but if confirmed his team will scoop the $2m top prize.

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fork(2) writes:

The Washington Post has a nice state-by-state breakdown of Zika in the continental US. It separates out "travel-related" cases and "local" cases and has links to each state's website with local information regarding the virus.

There are 7,360 confirmed Zika cases in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [as of Aug 3, 2016]. This includes 1,817 cases in the continental U.S. and 5,526 cases in the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and American Samoa.

The first local spread of Zika virus through infected mosquitoes in the continential U.S. occurred in Miami, Florida in late July.

takyon: Reuters has a timeline of Zika-related events. Bloomberg reports "Florida Shudders as Zika Spread Forces Miami Shops to Close". The Sacramento Bee reports "Two babies born in California with Zika-related severe birth defect".

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Bill Dimm writes:

An article in TechCrunch describes changes that the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) is considering to its Digital Authentication Guideline:

Additional comments are available on Bruce Schneier's blog.

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fork(2) writes:

AAAS' EurekaAlert describes research from University of Missouri which finds that kindergarteners are more successful when they understand the meaning of number words and can manipulate number sets.

While many studies have been conducted on infants' and preschoolers' math competencies, few have evaluated how toddlers' basic mathematics knowledge relates to early elementary school success. Now, in a study funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), researchers at the University of Missouri discovered that preschoolers who better process words associated with numbers, such as "three" or "four," and understand the quantities associated with these words are more likely to have success with math when they enter kindergarten. Findings also reveal that children who have a basic understanding that addition increases quantity and subtraction decreases it are much better prepared for math in school. Scientists contend that emphasis on these two skillsets could lead to greater success in school.

[...] The study, "Kindergarteners' fluent processing of symbolic numerical magnitude is predicted by their cardinal knowledge and implicit understanding of arithmetic 2 years earlier," recently was published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. The NSF (Grant 1250359) and the University of Missouri Research Board provided funding for the project.

[AAAS = American Association for the Advancement of Science. -Ed.]

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