Four Bad Habits to Avoid at City Council Meetings – CitiesSpeak

This is a great lesson on how some common parliamentary procedures are frequently misused.

There are a number of “urban myths” about Robert’s Rules of Order that can get in the way of democratic process for your council. If your municipality, county council, or special district avoids these bad habits, congratulations! If these errors happen at your meetings, however, you might want to bring them to the attention of your colleagues to straighten them out – in a pleasant way, of course.

Source: Four Bad Habits to Avoid at City Council Meetings – CitiesSpeak

Apple’s new campus: North Carolina Research Triangle on shortlist, report says

I don’t know why I feel better about the possibility of Raleigh landing Apple than I do about Amazon. Both are huge, game-changing projects. It might be because I think Apple treats its employees better.

North Carolina lawmakers are preparing a bid for a new Apple campus, according to a report in the Triangle Business Journal.Separately, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has also floated areas near Washington D.C., like Crystal City and Tysons, as locales for Apple.

Citing unnamed sources in real estate, law and the North Carolina government, the Triangle Business Journal said the Research Triangle Park “tops Apple’s short list,” although the process is far from finalized — Apple is still looking at sites across the country.

Source: Apple’s new campus: North Carolina Research Triangle on shortlist, report says

The Electrical Outlet and How It Got That Way | Hackaday

This is pretty interesting.

Right now, if you happen to be in North America, chances are pretty good that there’s at least one little face staring at you. Look around and you’ll spy it, probably about 15 inches up from the floor on a nearby wall. It’s the ubiquitous wall outlet, with three holes arranged in a way that can’t help but stimulate the facial recognition firmware of our mammalian brain.

No matter where you go you’ll find those outlets and similar ones, all engineered for specific tasks. But why do they look the way they do? And what’s going on electrically and mechanically behind that familiar plastic face? It’s a topic we’ve touched on before with Jenny List’s take on international mains standards. Now it’s time to take a look inside the common North American wall socket, and how it got that way.

Source: The Electrical Outlet and How It Got That Way | Hackaday

Google AI Blog: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real-World Tasks Over the Phone

Google’s AI has gotten so good, it’s scary.

A long-standing goal of human-computer interaction has been to enable people to have a natural conversation with computers, as they would with each other. In recent years, we have witnessed a revolution in the ability of computers to understand and to generate natural speech, especially with the application of deep neural networks (e.g., Google voice search, WaveNet). Still, even with today’s state of the art systems, it is often frustrating having to talk to stilted computerized voices that don’t understand natural language. In particular, automated phone systems are still struggling to recognize simple words and commands. They don’t engage in a conversation flow and force the caller to adjust to the system instead of the system adjusting to the caller. Today we announce Google Duplex, a new technology for conducting natural conversations to carry out “real world” tasks over the phone. The technology is directed towards completing specific tasks, such as scheduling certain types of appointments. For such tasks, the system makes the conversational experience as natural as possible, allowing people to speak normally, like they would to another person, without having to adapt to a machine.

Source: Google AI Blog: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real-World Tasks Over the Phone

The Weird, Dangerous, Isolated Life of the Saturation Diver – Atlas Obscura

This is a fascinating look into the world of a saturation diver.

For 52 straight days this winter, Shannon Hovey woke up in the company of five other men in a metal tube, 20 feet long and seven feet in diameter, tucked deep inside a ship in the Gulf of Mexico. He retrieved his breakfast from a hatch (usually eggs), read a briefing for the day, and listened for a disembodied voice to tell him when it was time to put on a rubber suit and get to work. Life in the tube was built around going through these same steps day after day after day … while trying not to think about the fact that any unintended breach in his temporary metal home would mean a fast, agonizing death.

Hovey works in one of the least known, most dangerous, and, frankly, most bizarre professions on Earth. He is a saturation diver—one of the men (right now they are all men) who do construction and demolition work at depths up to 1,000 feet or more below the surface of the ocean.

Source: The Weird, Dangerous, Isolated Life of the Saturation Diver – Atlas Obscura

Rewriting computer history

I was reading this New York Magazine article about how the pioneers of the Internet were apologizing for what it has become, nevermind that many of the “pioneers” they mentioned were Johnny-come-latelys in comparison to the actual beginning of the Internet.

NYMag’s story did feature two actual pioneers, though computer pioneers more than Internet ones: Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. They included this photo and captioned it “Steve Jobs (left) in his parents’ garage in 1976, working on the first Apple computer with Steve Wozniak.”

There are a few problems with this photo and caption. First off, the photo is backwards. If you switch the photo to the proper orientation, you’ll be able to read that the text on the computer under Wozniak’s hand reads “Apple II.”

This brings us to the second issue with this photo and caption: it is not the first Apple computer (the “II” thing kinda gives this away). Apple’s first computer, the Apple I, did not come with a keyboard nor case. It was essentially a circuit board.

Was this photo really taken in the garage of Jobs’s parents? Wozniak has said that the whole garage thing is a myth and that no testing or production ever took place there. The photo shows a very neat-looking workspace with a workbench. According to what’s said to be the first news story on Apple Computer, the Steves were still working out of the Jobs garage when the article was written.
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Intel SPI Flash Flaw Lets Attackers Alter or Delete BIOS/UEFI Firmware

Yet another security flaw with Intel chips.

Intel has addressed a vulnerability in the configuration of several CPU series that allow an attacker to alter the behavior of the chip’s SPI Flash memory —a mandatory component used during the boot-up process.

According to Lenovo, who recently deployed the Intel fixes, “the configuration of the system firmware device (SPI flash) could allow an attacker to block BIOS/UEFI updates, or to selectively erase or corrupt portions of the firmware.”

Source: Intel SPI Flash Flaw Lets Attackers Alter or Delete BIOS/UEFI Firmware

NFS Exports And XFS’s inode64 Mount Option – mmacleod.ca

I recently formatted my home NAS with the XFS filesystem, then was mystified when some NFS exports worked fine while others didn’t. It turns out it’s an XFS quirk and needs a tweak to the /etc/exports file, as detailed in this blog post below.

I fixed it by adding fsid=1, fsid=2, … to the export options of each share in /etc/exports so that NFS could individually identify them. Kind of a bother but it works!

I recently turned up a new RAID array and plopped an XFS filesystem down on it. I didn’t bother setting any specific tunings when I created the filesystem. However I couldn’t for the life of me export any subdirectories from the volume over NFS. Local access was fine and I could export via netatalk and samba.On the server I saw messages like this in the logs:

Feb 14 13:08:43 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.50:1003 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:08:57 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.50:1002 for /opt/music (/opt/music)Feb 14 13:15:19 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:717 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:15:20 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:1001 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:15:22 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:1002 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:15:26 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:801 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:15:34 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:967 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:15:44 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:794 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:15:54 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:855 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:16:04 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:863 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:16:14 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:932 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:16:24 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:830 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)

On the client I would get two different behaviours, depending on whether it was NFSv4 or NFSv3 that was being used. With NFSv4 it would mount the directory, but any attempt to read from it would give a ‘Stale NFS handle’ error:
root:~# mount -t nfs -v 192.168.1.10:/mnt/music /mnt/mount.nfs: timeout set for Fri Feb 14 16:49:39 2014mount.nfs: trying text-based options 'vers=4,addr=192.168.1.10,clientaddr=192.168.1.20'root:~# ls /mnt/ls: cannot open directory /mnt/: Stale NFS file handle

Source: NFS Exports And XFS’s inode64 Mount Option – mmacleod.ca

How a group of neighbors created their own Internet service | Ars Technica

When you live somewhere with slow and unreliable Internet access, it usually seems like there’s nothing to do but complain. And that’s exactly what residents of Orcas Island, one of the San Juan Islands in Washington state, were doing in late 2013. Faced with CenturyLink service that was slow and outage-prone, residents gathered at a community potluck and lamented their current connectivity.

“Everyone was asking, ‘what can we do?’” resident Chris Brems recalls. “Then [Chris] Sutton stands up and says, ‘Well, we can do it ourselves.’”

Doe Bay is a rural environment. It’s a place where people judge others by “what you can do,” according to Brems. The area’s residents, many farmers or ranchers, are largely accustomed to doing things for themselves. Sutton’s idea struck a chord. “A bunch of us finally just got fed up with waiting for CenturyLink or anybody else to come to our rescue,” Sutton told Ars.Around that time, CenturyLink service went out for 10 days, a problem caused by a severed underwater fiber cable. Outages lasting a day or two were also common, Sutton said.Faced with a local ISP that couldn’t provide modern broadband, Orcas Island residents designed their own network and built it themselves. The nonprofit Doe Bay Internet Users Association (DBIUA), founded by Sutton, Brems, and a few friends, now provide Internet service to a portion of the island. It’s a wireless network with radios installed on trees and houses in the Doe Bay portion of Orcas Island. Those radios get signals from radios on top of a water tower, which in turn receive a signal from a microwave tower across the water in Mount Vernon, Washington.

Source: How a group of neighbors created their own Internet service | Ars Technica

Amazon built its hyper efficient warehouses by embracing chaos — Quartz

Good look at how Amazon takes advantage of randomness in its warehouses.

Amazon has completely redefined warehouse efficiency and customer convenience. Through its Prime membership, it has promised tens of millions of customers free two-day shipping on more than 100 million products, and, last year, it shipped 5 billion items to them. “That was the major innovation,” says Daniel Theobald, who cofounded a warehouse robotics company called Vecna in 1998 and counts major retailers and logistics companies as clients. “As soon as people realized, you can order something and get it tomorrow, that turned the industry upside down.”

The core of this disruptive efficiency, though, is not Amazon’s automated shelf-moving warehouse robots, which is the innovation that gets the most attention. And it isn’t, on its surface, something that you would associate with a well-oiled machine. It’s not even a breakthrough technology. In fact, some version of it was already in place when Alperson worked in Amazon’s early warehouses.

What makes Amazon’s warehouse work is the way they organize inventory: with complete randomness.

Source: Amazon built its hyper efficient warehouses by embracing chaos — Quartz