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Clinton says 'nobody likes' Sanders and won't commit to backing him if he's the Democratic nominee

Hillary Clinton blasts Sen. Bernie Sanders in a new documentary, saying "nobody likes him" and declining in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter to say whether she would endorse and campaign for him if he's the Democratic 2020 nominee.

"He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done," Clinton says in the film, according to The Hollywood Reporter. "He was a career politician. It's all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it."

[...] In the THR interview, Clinton also pointedly questions the "culture" around Sanders' campaign, from "his leadership team" to "his online Bernie Bros."

"It's not only him, it's the culture around him. It's his leadership team. It's his prominent supporters. It's his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women," Clinton said, before suggesting that Sanders himself was complicit in promoting those voices.

#ILikeBernie Trends After Hillary Clinton Says 'Nobody Likes' Bernie Sanders

Despite Clinton's criticism, Sanders is a clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination, with the latest data from Morning Consult showing that he has the highest favorability of all candidates in the primary race. Sanders is viewed positively by 76 percent of voters, while former Vice President Joe Biden is viewed favorably by 71 percent. Senator Elizabeth Warren comes in third at 65 percent.

Meanwhile, only 17 percent of respondents said they had an unfavorable opinion of Sanders, while 22 percent had an unfavorable view of Biden. Warren was viewed unfavorably by 18 percent.

Hillary Clinton Defends Harvey Weinstein Association: 'How Could We Have Known?'

Hillary Clinton has defended her years-long association with disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein, saying it was "something that everybody thought made sense."

Weinstein has long been a major donor and fundraiser for the Democratic Party and reportedly brought in over $1.4 million to Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

Clinton has since disavowed Weinstein, saying she was "shocked and appalled" following the publication of numerous claims of sexual assault and harassment against him in 2017 that led to his fall and the rise of the #MeToo movement.

It could be a moot point. FiveThirtyEight forecasts a 45% chance for Biden to win the nomination, and just 18% for Sanders.

Just a quick update:

Things are still going really well. L and I are good. My wife and I are good. Daughter is good. Baby (who we now know is a boy) is good and seems healthy.

The last update was from just before Christmas. Christmas was great. It was nice having L around for Christmas. She stayed over on Christmas Eve and I went to sleep with her in the basement, then set an alarm for 1/2 way through the night and went up to sleep with my wife for the rest of the night.

We all woke up on Christmas morning and made coffee and opened presents. L ended up staying the entire day and slept over again on Christmas eve. That night, I went to sleep with my wife for the first part of the night, then joined her for the second part of the night. When My wife and I were going to bed, we got a little frisky and L heard that downstairs. That didn't feel all that good for her and resulted in quite a bit of talking through it. We were eventually able to work our way through it.

L is rapidly becoming part of my family. She is over for dinner several times per week, helping with the preparation, cleanup and bed-time routines. We do things together, like walks or shopping. She was at my daughter's birthday party last weekend and met my mom, brother and sister.

My wife and L are also getting closer and more comfortable with each other. My wife is a hairstylist and will be cutting L's hair next weekend (a pretty big step!!), and frequently after we get dinners all cleaned up and my daughter to bed we will all crawl into the king-size bed and watch TV. (Obviously, that is pretty amazing for me :D. I get cuddles from both sides. It can be uncomfortably hot, but it's a small price to pay to be practically drowning in love.

L is very thoughtful and caring of my wife. The other day my wife mentioned that she was worried about headaches because there was going to be a big weather change. L went out and bought a peppermint head roller thing because she thought it might help. Lots of little gestures like that make me feel good about the whole situation. L really enjoys being around my house and being part of the family atmosphere and my wife has told me several times how she likes having L around the house too.

I got a promotion at work very recently. I'll be joining the Security team doing cyber security work. I'm really exited about the opportunity. It's an amazing opportunity for me in a high growth area. I'm excited to be doing something new, and especially excited to be working in something that I find personally interesting. All 4 of us (Me, Wife, L and Daughter) went out last weekend for dinner to celebrate.

This turned out longer than I was expecting, but I guess a lot has happened in the last month. Things in my life are going amazingly well. I'm very happy at the moment and feel like I'm one of the luckiest people alive!

Quibi Versus the World: Can Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman change everything about video on your phone?

Jeffrey Katzenberg insists that his new video-streaming service Quibi isn’t competing against Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, or any of the other streaming services that have launched or are launching soon. You’ve got it all wrong. You’re not even asking the right questions.

“We don’t think we’re in the streaming wars,” Katzenberg, the former boss of Walt Disney Studios and founder of DreamWorks, tells The Verge in a closed-door meeting the day before the company’s grand reveal at a CES keynote. “They’re all battling for this,” he says as he thrusts his arm toward a TV in the room. “We’re going for this,” he says, gesturing toward his phone. “Don’t tell them!”

Katzenberg and Quibi CEO Meg Whitman, who is best known as the CEO of HP and eBay, are publicly announcing Quibi at CES — but not quite unveiling it — after having raised $1 billion on the promise of a roster of Hollywood stars and supposedly revolutionary video-streaming technology that delivers portrait and landscape video at the same time. Everything on Quibi is designed for viewing on a phone, on the go, in 10 minutes or less. These chunks of video are called “quick bites” — hence, “Quibi.”

A streaming service for millennial goldfish. Should be about as successful as Meg Whitman's campaign for Governor of California.

I had been looking for a replacement for my old Acer Aspire One for years. It was my favorite computer, small form yet capable. It’s had problems with age, so I bought a used HP laptop at a pawn shop a few years ago, but it’s far too big for a lap. They should call those big “laptops” portable desk computers.
        I bought another used one from a computer place last year. It, too, was way too big for a lap.
        I finally looked on the internet, not expecting to find a lap-sized laptop. But I did. A Dell, only an inch bigger than the Acer. But Dell’s web site refused to sell it to me.
        So I bought it from Amazon for about two hundred. Dell had wanted three.
        I charged it and turned it on, and was faced, of course, with installing Windows when it should be ready to run; the “new machine setup” was far more onerous than installing Mandrake in the early 2000s.
        Then I was faced with the horrible Windows Ten. This is the absolute worst operating system I’ve ever used (I never used eight). Microsoft is the only entity I’ve ever encountered that would remove usability, functionality, and features and then call it an “upgrade”.
        Case in point: File manager traded menus for that awful “ribbon” interface and lost the drop down that allowed you to quickly select which app opens a file. Now you need a right click. Usability? Who needs that?
        They added ads to Solitaire and took away the function that quickly ends a game.
        They mangled the start menu.
        But what’s worse, in Windows 7 they added something incredibly unintuitive and annoying, and made it a hard to change default, since they completely change the interface with every iteration: gestures. I’d forgotten bout them since I’d disabled them in the Acer a decade ago.
        Gestures make lots of sense on a touchscreen, but not on a touchpad. I finally found the setting to shut them off, and the right mouse button stopped working. Fixing it was frustrating.
        Getting on the network, finally, was no problem. Now to install all the programs I need. The computer refused to install programs, while showing me how to go to its unintuitive process for shutting that particularly annoying “feature” off. In fairness I do know folks for whom it would be essential.
        Then I finally started paying attention to the hardware. There was no network jack, but doesn’t really need one with wi-fi, even if its wi-fi is old and weak. But it does have an HDMI jack, which I thought might solve a problem I had.
        Disney launched its streaming service for seven bucks, and I wanted to see the beginning of Star Wars Episode 3 in 4K. It was awesome in the theater. So I signed up, since I had a smart 4K Sony TV. The trouble is, the app locks the TV up. Disney works fine on the tablet, but if I cast it to the TV the sound and picture are out of synch, and it isn’t 4K.
        So I fired up Firefox, logged on to Disney+, and there are multi-second screen freezes. Chrome, Opera, and Edge all did the same thing. I don’t know if it’s a hardware or software problem.
        While on the internet I discover that this is the first computer I remember owning that had no page up or down keys; rather, its page up/down keys move up and down one line. I also discovered that it had no LAN jack, which isn’t much of a hassle since it has wi-fi, even if the wi-fi is slow. However, using this computer to back up a terabyte of data from one network drive to another was a terrible idea; it’s been going for a full week and is only 91% complete.
        There are also four USB ports and one new port I’d not seen before that probably isn’t very useful.
        It does have a touch screen, making Windows 10 less awful, but not much less. It’s a convertible; the screen bends all the way around to the computer’s back, making it a tablet. However, unlike any other tablet, it has no way to automatically discern screen orientation. You have to tell it manually, which is a pain.
        As I mentioned, it’s a replacement for the ten year old Acer. It has twice the processor speed, twice the memory (more memory than any computer I’ve owned) and half the drive space. I only use the drive for application and temporary files, since I have a 3 TB network drive, so that’s no problem.
        But it boots no faster, apps load no faster, and Audacity is dog slow. It was ten times faster on the old one. At first I thought maybe the old computer was 32 bits and this is 64, and I got the idea that maybe I was running a 32 bit program on a 64 bit computer; none of my old 32 bit games will even install.
        So I logged on to Audacity’s site and found the answer at https://www.audacityteam.org/download/windows/.

WINDOWS VERSION............RECOMMENDED RAM/PROCESSOR SPEED.MINIMUM RAM/PROCESSOR SPEED
Windows 10 (32- or 64-bit).4 GB / 2 GHz....................2 GB / 1 GHz
Windows 8 (64-bit)
Windows 7 (64-bit)

Windows 8 (32-bit)
Windows 7 (32-bit) (except Starter) 4 GB / 2 GHz............1 GB / 1 GHz

Windows 7 Starter ..................2 GB / 1 GHz............512 MB / 1 GHz

        The Acer had Windows 7 starter with two gigabytes of RAM. So I installed the latest 64 bit version, and it was actually a little faster than the Acer.
        In short, it isn’t a bad little computer as long as you’re running newer 64 bit programs, but on a scale of one to five, I give it a two. I wouldn’t recommend it.

        A question: does anyone know how I can run those old 32 bit games on a 64 bit machine? It seems someone should have written an emulator.

CES 2020: Innogrit SSD Controllers Score Multiple Design Wins

Phison At CES 2020: Preparing For QLC To Go Mainstream

NAND flash memory prices are projected to climb in 2020. The manufacturing transitions to 96-layer 3D NAND and beyond are not going to increase bit output as quickly as demand will be growing. This will be a major change from the NAND oversupply that caused price crashes in 2018 and into 2019.

SSD controller vendor Phison is betting that increasing prices will finally push the consumer SSD market to embrace 4 bit per cell QLC NAND flash memory, which thus far has seen only limited success in the retail SSD market and virtually no adoption from PC OEMs. The price premium for SSDs with 3 bit per cell TLC NAND has been small or non-existent across all market segments, so the performance and endurance advantages of sticking with TLC NAND have been worthwhile. Those days may be coming to an end. Phison expects—quite reasonably—that when NAND flash memory supplies are constrained the bulk of the TLC NAND manufactured will be snatched up by the higher-paying enterprise SSD customers, more or less forcing the consumer SSD market to start shifting toward using QLC as the mainstream option.

QLC data retention, write endurance, and speed drop-offs: manageable?

CES 2020: Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 SSD Makes An Appearance

OWC Releases Accelsior 4M2 SSD: Quad-M.2 For Over 6000 MB/s

CES 2020: ADATA Preparing Three PCIe 4.0 Consumer SSDs

The next-gen consoles due for release in late 2020 have been rumored to use faster-than-typical SSDs.

Dear Dad,

I had another dream about you last night. It's hard to believe you've been gone more than 10 years. Although the dreams you're in occur less frequently, I'm still glad when it happens. Sad too, but a happy sadness, if there is such a thing.

I was coming down the stairs, and you were coming up. We met in the middle, you had your back to the banister and my back was against the wall. You were so close, I could see the wrinkles in your forehead, the knowledge in your soft, hazel eyes, and when you talked, I saw your uneven teeth. You pointed at the top of the steps and asked, "When you go to Charlotte, can you take those two boxes and the duffel bag with you?"

Your breath enveloped me in that familiar scent of yours, a memorable mixture of Kent Golden Lights and Lectric Shave. For a moment I stood there, looking at you, unable to answer, because I knew from my past lucid dreams that when I start talking, I realize it's just a dream. And then it ends too quickly. I wanted to bury my face in your shirt while you hugged me, but instead I blurted out, "Can't you be here, now?"

There was no sorrow in your wise face when you responded, "I can't be here, but I'll be around."

As always, I woke up sobbing, desperately wanting it to be real, but knowing it was just a dream. It's ok, though, because my dreams are the best it can be now and I wouldn't trade them for anything.

I miss you Dad, and this one is for you.

Love, Paul

I have become convinced.

There is no bottom.

There is no low that is too low. No ethical boundary that cannot be crossed. No crime that cannot be ignored. No profanity or taking the Lord's name in vain that cannot be hand waved away.

Trump really could parade naked in the streets, with hookers and drugs, shoot some or several random persons in the middle of the street in broad daylight . . .

and his band of FoxNews fed mouseketeers would just wave it away. Fake News! It didn't happen. We won't hear any witnesses. No evidence. Witch Hunt! Anyone who says it happened is a liar! I cannot recall! I would have to check my records. The trial judge is working closely with Trump's lawyers to fix this, so no worry.

The evangelicals cover their eyes or look the other direction. Justify and rationalize it by inches at a time.

Good is called evil and evil is called good.

We are all numbed to the bizarre and irrational. Reporters are afraid to report on the worst of Trump's behavior because it is so bad that they fear people will think they are biased against Trump merely for telling the simple facts. Because it sounds so bad that in normal times you would think the press is biased. Comedians make jokes about it, but it's not even funny any more. Just boring every day events.

Hear no evil, See no evil, Speak no evil.

People who don't like Java shouldn't use it. Use something more to your liking.

Java is not perfect (shocker!)

Java has warts from being designed in the early 90's and released later in the 90's. Computers and their limitations were different back then.

The Java runtime is a big disk footprint. At least if you use other languages, and don't realize what all you're getting in this fat package.

Java likes lots of memory.

Java programs start up slowly.

Java is not ideal for all programming tasks. (shocker! I can't write my bootloader or micro controller code in Java!)

Java (rather the JVM) does not have tail call optimization.

Java has Garbage Collection (GC). (Some people see this as a problem. If GC is a problem, you probably don't want Java, nor the JVM runtime system.)

Terminology clarification

From here on I'll try to use Java to mean a programming language that you write source code in, and compile it to JVM bytecode. I'll use JVM bytecode to mean the object code from compiled source languages, including the Java language. I'll use JVM to mean the Java Virtual Machine, that is the runtime system which executes JVM bytecode -- no matter what source language it was compiled from.

Virtues of Java / JVM -- Garbage Collection

Java and the JVM have Garbage Collection (GC) ! Free clue: all modern languages now have GC. Visual Basic. Visual FoxPro. JavaScript. Python. Arguably: Perl. C#. Erlang. Go. Lisp like languages. Prolog, Haskell and other higher order languages. And many others.

If GC is so horrible, why do so many languages have it? Some will say because programmers do not know how to manage memory. But that is not true. Speaking for myself, I wrote untold amounts of Pascal in the 80's, with complex data structures and understand quite well how to manage memory, avoid, detect and deal with memory leaks.

I would point out: Greenspun's tenth rule

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

(and that includes garbage collection along with other higher order programming idioms)

JVM GC is not comparable to other systems like Python or Node.js. Modern JVMs can run with Terabytes of memory and hundreds of cpu cores and have only 1 ms GC pause times. (Please call me when your Python or Node.js or Go can do that!)

Java offers multiple GCs to choose from. Each one has various tunable knobs and dials. Instrumentation (like VisualVM) can give you insight into the GC behavior of your large program that has many third party libraries so you can tune accordintly. (again, call me when your system can do that)

Red Hat's Shenandoah, and Oracle's ZGC are the current new state of the art GCs on Java. Both of these are open source in the latest Open JDK builds.

Multiple languages

Multiple languages compile to JVM bytecode. Not just Java. Kotlin. Scala. Clojure. And other languages run on the JVM (Groovy, Jython, even C).

Cross Platform

Java object code (JVM bytecode) is cross platform. I can take a desktop GUI program written in Java using Swing in 2004 on Windows, and run that object program on a Raspberry Pi (different OS) which did not even exist when the program was written. It runs perfectly.

Java programs, especially servers, which have no GUI are extremely cross platform.

The only pain points I can think of is (1) serial port communication, (2) doing extremely platform specific things (uh, say, accessing /proc or /sys). There are some nice cross platform solutions for serial communication; I had to use one a few years ago. I had to deal with whether to use names like /dev/ttyS1 or COM3:.

Compiled JVM bytecode runs on amazingly diverse platforms. From Blu Ray players to giant IBM Mainframes with seemingly strange architectures. Smart cards, car infotainment, single board Linux (eg, "Pi" type boards), and who knows what else.

Speed, yet dynamic access

The JVM runtime interprets JVM bytecode. It dynamically profiles every function to see how much CPU time it is getting. (How "hot" it is) Hot functions are immediately compiled (C1 compiler). C1 rapidly compiles the JVM bytecode into unoptimized native code. The function is added to a list to be compiled later by the C2 compiler.

Later, when the C2 compiler comes along, it spends significant time and effort recompiling that function into highly optimized native code.

C2 is one of, if not the most sophisticated compiler on the planet. The product of a couple decades of much research. It has only one source language to compile: JVM bytecode. It has multiple target instruction sets to compile to.

C2 compiles to the instruction set of the actual hardware it is running on. Something that an ahead of time C compiler, for example, cannot know in advance. C2 knows which instruction set extensions your actual processor has. Does your processor have SSE, MMX, ISSE instructions?

C2 also has global knowledge of the entire linked runtime program. Also something that a C compiler does not have advance knowledge about. C2 could know that a certain function could be called efficiently in two different ways from two other parts of the program, and compile two separate versions accordingly.

All method references in Java (JVM) are "virtual" (to use C++ terminology). But in practice many or most methods do not actually need to be virtual. C2 can (and does) prove that a method is never called in a way that it needs a vtable entry, and can compile efficiently accordingly. The programmer never needs to make decisions about whether functions should be virtual or not.

Research has shown that in many cases even when a virtual polymorphic function is called, from a specific call site, it often always calls the same concrete function at that call site. The new GraalVM takes advantage of this and cache which virtual function to call for next time. If at this particular call site (where function is called from) this time a different virtual method will be invoked, then a runtime error occurrs, is handled, the right virtual function computed and it is now cached.

C2 aggressively inlines code for performance. It is after speed not small code size. Memory is cheap. You can never get back time.

Now suppose that YOUR function A calls MY function B. When C2 compiles your function A, it may inline my function B inside the native code of your function to avoid function call overhead. Now suppose that the class which has my function B is dynamically reloaded. Oh no! Your function A now has a stale version of my function B inside of it! Not to worry, the JVM de-optimizes your function A back to being bytecode interpreted. If your function is still "hot" it will very soon get recompiled by C1 and then later by C2.

This "hotspot" and C1/C2 behavior is one reason why Java programs seem to "warm up". They start up slowly and then within a few minutes become very fast. If you have a program which needs to be restarted very infrequently, runs for a very long time between restarts, then this is for you! (example: long running servers) If you have a program that is rapidly and frequently started from the command line and needs to do something very quickly and exit, then this is definintely NOT for you!

When running a 64bit JVM with less than 32 GB of memory, JVM can do a pointer optimization trick. It can use 32-bit pointers instead of 64-bit pointers. All objects start on 8 byte boundaries (on x86/x64). So the low three bits of a 32-bit pointer are always zero. So why have them. Thus a 32-bit poiner can reference objects in 32 GB of memory. Next time you start the program with more than 32 GB of memory, it will have to use normal 64-bit pointers everywhere.

GC is the lubricant between different code libraries

In C or C++ there may be different memory management disciplines. Different calling conventions. Different ideas of responsibility about who "owns" something and is responsible to dispose of it. Even different allocators. Are there instances where glue code is needed to adapt the conventions of one code base with another that are both used in the same program?

An overlooked and maybe little known benefit of GC is that these problems go away. Everything uses one memory management discipline. Same calling conventions. A library written two decades ago can be passed data structures from another library that was only recently written.

GraalVM

This is so new I am not very familiar with it.

The JVM runtime is written in C++. Such a complex runtime, with GC, hotspot, C2/C2, native code interfaces, dynamic code reloading, etc is getting hard to maintain. Especially with multiple GCs to choose from. One of the things GraalVM does is let much more of the JVM be written in Java. Graal VM can also run code from LLVM, and other languages like R, Python, etc. So your C, Python and Java code could call functions within each other in the same runtime, and pass parameters transparently.

Concluding remarks

I know it is fashionable to hate Java. Yet Java is consistently year after year the number one language on various job sites and programming language surveys. Java is used by many major corporations. Red Hat, Oracle, SAP, IBM, Azul Systems and others see enough major players needing commercial support that they all seem to have a very tidy business with Java. Amazon and Microsoft Azure both bend over backwards to provide optimized Java runtime systems for these major customers with bucketloads of money. Microsoft recently partnered with Azul to provide their optimized runtine for free to Azure Java users. They did't do that for no reason.

Java must be doing something right. It is the best at what it does. There is nothing else that comes close to doing what I have described above.

Even if it is not right for you.

It's here to stay for a long time. Even if you hate it. But why hate it? Just don't use it.

If there were one perfect programming system for every use, we would all be using it already.