Oleg Zabluda's blog: August 31, 2018

Oleg Zabluda's blog

Friday, August 31, 2018

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The undisputed king ... The new performance numbers indicate that the expendable version of the Falcon Heavy is more powerful than the Delta IV Heavy rocket, previously the world’s most capable, even for very high-energy missions where the Delta’s hydrogen upper stage has a big performance advantage.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/99dsxl/elvperf_news_falcon_heavy_performance_updated/?st=JL6TV94O&sh=dd7b5488

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS) is a solar electric propulsion system for spacecraft that is being designed, developed and tested by NASA and Aerojet Rocketdyne for large-scale science missions and cargo transportation. It is "the most likely engine"[1] to propel the PPE module of the planned Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway to be launched in 2022. Four identical AEPS engines would consume most of the 50 kW generated by solar power.

The Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) for the Lunar Gateway will have a mass of 8-9 metric tons and will be capable of generating 50 kW of solar electric power for its ion thrusters
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The AEPS Hall thruster system was originally developed since 2015 by NASA Glenn Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to be used on the now cancelled Asteroid Redirect Mission. Work on the thruster did not stop following the mission cancellation in April 2017 because there is demand of such thrusters [...] Since May 2016,[6] further work on AEPS has been transitioned to Aerojet Rocketdyne via a competitive contract,
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AEPS is based on the 12.5 kW development model thruster called 'Hall Effect Rocket with Magnetic Shielding' (HERMeS). The AEPS solar electric engine makes use of the Hall-effect thruster [...] aims to achieve [...] a full life of about 50,000 hours.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Electric_Propulsion_System
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Electric_Propulsion_System?wprov=sfla1

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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The Soviet company that manufactured the one-time pads produced around 35,000 pages of duplicate key numbers, as a result of pressures brought about by the German advance on Moscow during World War II. The duplication—which undermines the security of a one-time system—was discovered and attempts to lessen its impact were made by sending the duplicates to widely separated users. Despite this, the reuse was detected by cryptanalysts in the US.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project?wprov=sfla1

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

This bull market doesn't give us joy. We like it, but we don't love it.
This bull market doesn't give us joy. We like it, but we don't love it.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/08/23/americas-stockmarket-passes-a-milestone

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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As of GCC version 4.5, asm goto may be used to have the assembly jump to one or more C labels. In this form, a fifth section after the clobber list contains a list of all C labels to which the assembly may jump. Each label operand is implicitly self-named. The asm is also assumed to fall through to the next statement.

This form of asm is restricted to not have outputs. This is due to a internal restriction in the compiler that control transfer instructions cannot have outputs. This restriction on asm goto may be lifted in some future version of the compiler. In the mean time, asm goto may include a memory clobber, and so leave outputs in memory.
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https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.7.1/gcc/Extended-Asm.html

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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Arnd Bergmann posted a patch to remove Blackfin, CRIS, FRV, M32R, Metag, MN10300, Score, and Tile. He also gave his opinion on why these particular pieces of hardware had disappeared from use. Apparently, as he put it, "while the eight architectures are extremely different, they all suffered the same fate: There was one company in charge of an SoC line, a CPU microarchitecture and a software ecosystem, which was more costly than licensing newer off-the-shelf CPU cores from a third party."

The moral of that story seems to be: Companies shouldn't make custom hardware when generic will do just as well
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http://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2018/213/Kernel-News

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

Entire yeast genome squeezed into one lone chromosome

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05857-9

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

Special relativity validated by neutrinos

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05931-2

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

Google and Mastercard Cut a Secret Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
Google and Mastercard Cut a Secret Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales
Google found the perfect way to link online ads to store purchases: credit card data
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Since 2014, Google has flagged for advertisers when someone who clicked an ad visits a physical store, using the Location History feature in Google Maps. Still, the advertiser didn’t know if the shopper made a purchase. So Google added more. A tool, introduced the following year, let advertisers upload email addresses of customers they’ve collected into Google’s ad-buying system, which then encrypted them. Additionally, Google layered on inputs from third-party data brokers, such as Experian Plc and Acxiom Corp., which draw in demographic and financial information for marketers.

But those tactics didn’t always translate to more ad spending. Retail outlets weren’t able to connect the emails easily to their ads. And the information they received from data brokers about sales was imprecise or too late. Marketing executives didn’t adopt these location tools en masse, said Christina Malcolm, director at the digital ad agency iProspect. "It didn’t give them what they needed to go back to their bosses and tell them, 'We’re hitting our numbers,’" she said.

Then Google brought in card data. In May 2017, the company introduced "Store Sales Measurement." It had two components. The first lets companies with personal information on consumers, like encrypted email addresses, upload those into Google’s system and synchronize ad buys with offline sales. The second injects card data.

It works like this: a person searches for "red lipstick" on Google, clicks on an ad, surfs the web but doesn’t buy anything. Later, she walks into a store and buys red lipstick with her Mastercard. The advertiser who ran the ad is fed a report from Google, listing the sale along with other transactions in a column that reads "Offline Revenue" -- only if the web surfer is logged into a Google account online and made the purchase within 30 days of clicking the ad. The advertisers are given a bulk report with the percentage of shoppers who clicked or viewed an ad then made a relevant purchase. Mastercard's spokesman said the company does not view data on the individual items purchased inside stores.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-and-mastercard-cut-a-secret-ad-deal-to-track-retail-sales
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-and-mastercard-cut-a-secret-ad-deal-to-track-retail-sales

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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