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Monday, May 11, 2015

Monday Macaroni Macarism

Few things seen on Wikipedia aggravate its users more than the annual fundraising banners.

 Yet millions of people continue to contribute, seeming to think that Wikipedia will "go offline" if they aren't given more donations.

 Yet as a new Wikipediocracy blog post reveals, the Wikimedia Foundation is rolling in dough — $53 million in net assets as of this year (that's actual hard sitting-around currency, currently put into various investment vehicles).

 Meanwhile it only costs about $2.5 million to actually keep Wikimedia project servers online and handling user traffic.

 The rest of the WMF's annual donations go for "staff salaries, travel and miscellaneous." 

And evidently, many people are growing disgruntled with this ongoing state of affairs, even Wikimedia staff who benefit from it.

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 If it could have been done, Apple would have installed Safari on it...
 
TechCrunch reports that the Apple Watch now evidently has an tantalizing, but unofficial, feature:

 A browser, created by the jailbreak developer known as Comex.

 "Not great" is their headline-level assessment of what it looks like to use, which can't be too surprising:

 Even a large watch face is still a small screen, by comparison to a laptop, a tablet, or even a phone.

 Venture Beat's assessment is similar:

"As you’d expect, it’s an awkward mess."

Making hardware do things it wasn't intended to is still a worthy pursuit, though, and TechCrunch notes:

 Out of the box, running arbitrary code like this shouldn’t be possible — while a native SDK is inbound, only stuff built with Apple’s somewhat limited WatchKit framework is supposed to run on the device for now.

 Is this a subtle demonstration of the world’s first jailbroken Apple Watch?

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 Yes, but bear in mind that Russia does not play the "planned obsolescence game" that other countries engage in. Audiophiles report that Russian vacume tubes are some of the longest lasting and best rated for their amps and preamps...
 
The news from a Russia Insider that MCST, Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies, has begun taking orders for Russian-made computer chips, though at least one expert quoted warns that the technology lags five years behind that of western companies;.

That sounds about right, in that the chips are described as "comparable with Intel Corp’s Core i3 and Intel Core i5 processors.

Also from the article:

Besides the chips, MCST unveiled a new PC, the Elbrus ARM-401 which is powered by the Elbrus-4C chip and runs its own Linux-based Elbrus operating system. 

MCST said that other operating systems, including Microsoft’s Windows and other Linux distributions, can be installed on the Elbrus ARM-401.

 Finally, the company has built its own data center server rack, the Elbrus-4.4, which is powered by four Elbrus-4C microprocessors and supports up to 384GB of RAM.

***
 Some people on YouTube have predicted earth quakes and weather anomalies by watching Haarp data.

  This story about a practical application of big data analysis as applied to the trove of sensor readings taken by satellites and by ground-based senosrs.

 A company called Terra Seismic says that earthquakes can be predicted 20-30 days before they occur, by sifting data for thermal, ionic, and other abnormalities in areas where quakes are considered likely.

Says the linked article:

 "The company claims to have successfully predicted a number of earthquakes.

 For example, on 5th of April 2013, the firm issued a forecast for Japan.

On 12th April 2013, an earthquake hit the identified area and 33 people were injured.

On 4th June 2013, the firm again made a prediction for an earthquake in North Italy.

 On 21st June, an earthquake hit the identified area.

On 3rd March 2013, the firm issued a forecast for an earthquake in Iran. Again, after 35 days, an earthquake hit the identified area."

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 Along the murky border of China and Myanmar, the stringent morals of both countries give way to a no-man’s-land where prostitution is unchecked, gambling is rampant, and the tiger bone wine flows freely.

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