Xiaomi said today it is spinning off POCO, a sub-smartphone brand it created in 2018, as a standalone company that will now run independently of the Chinese electronics giant and make its own market strategy. From a report: The move comes months after a top POCO executive -- Jai Mani, a former Googler -- and some other founding and core members left the sub-brand. The company today insisted that POCO F1, the only smartphone to be launched under the POCO brand, remains a "successful" handset. The POCO F1, a $300 smartphone, was launched in 50 markets. Xiaomi created the POCO brand to launch high-end, premium smartphones that would compete directly with flagship smartphones of OnePlus and Samsung. In an interview in 2018, Alvin Tse, the head of POCO, and Mani, said that they were working on a number of smartphones and were also thinking about other gadget categories. At the time, the company had 300 people working on POCO, and they "shared resources" with the parent firm.

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We've known since the 1980s that you don't need mega-constellations comprising thousands of satellites to provide global internet coverage to the world. Continuous worldwide coverage is possible with a constellation of just four satellites placed at much higher altitudes. So why don't we have that? The big obstacle is cost. Several factors work to degrade a satellite's orbit, and to combat them, you need a huge amount of propellant on the satellite to consistently stabilize its orbit. Manufacturing, launch, and operational costs are just too high for the four-satellite trick. An anonymous reader writes: A new study proposes a counterintuitive approach that turns these degrading forces into ones that actually help keep these satellites in orbit. Instead of elliptical, the satellites' orbits would be circular, letting them get by with less fuel while still providing nearly global coverage (at slower speeds). The team ran simulations and found two that would work -- but there are still too many other issues for it to ever happen.

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Doc has been outlining his podcast, so I started outlining mine. I have not recorded it yet, but I have show notes.

The best way to experience my blog these days is via email, not RSS. That's not the last word, but right now that's where we're at. That goes for my podcasts too believe it or not.

With a phone, anywhere else is always just a tap away. From a column: Those old enough to remember video-rental stores will recall the crippling indecision that would overtake you while browsing their shelves. With so many options, any one seemed unappealing, or insufficient. In a group, different tastes or momentary preferences felt impossible to balance. Everything was there, so there was nothing to watch. Those days are over, but the shilly-shally of choosing a show or movie to watch has only gotten worse. First, cable offered hundreds of channels. Now, each streaming service requires viewers to manipulate distinct software on different devices, scanning through the interfaces on Hulu, on Netflix, on AppleTV+ to find something "worth watching." Blockbuster is dead, but the emotional dread of its aisles lives on in your bedroom. This same pattern has been repeated for countless activities, in work as much as leisure. Anywhere has become as good as anywhere else. The office is a suitable place for tapping out emails, but so is the bed, or the toilet. You can watch television in the den -- but also in the car, or at the coffee shop, turning those spaces into impromptu theaters. Grocery shopping can be done via an app while waiting for the kids' recital to start. Habits like these compress time, but they also transform space. Nowhere feels especially remarkable, and every place adopts the pleasures and burdens of every other. It's possible to do so much from home, so why leave at all?

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If I ask you to post something you wrote on Facebook on your blog, so I can point to it, it's because I thought you said something interesting, and I'd like to share it through my blog and feed, but I can't share Facebook posts outside of Facebook. I have a rule about that, and I rarely break the rule. Lots of reasons for it.

The NPD group has rounded up sales stats for the last month, but with the flip from 2019 to 2020 it is also listing some of the best sellers over the last ten years. From a report: Grand Theft Auto V is the best selling game across all platforms and outlets tracked from 2010 through the end of 2019, but otherwise the top ten is dominated by the Call of Duty series, with Red Dead Redemption at number 7 and Minecraft at number 10 as the only other titles. 1. Grand Theft Auto V 2. Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. Call of Duty: Black Ops II 4. Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 5. Call of Duty: Black Ops III

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Catalin Cimpanu, writing for ZDNet: Attacks on Citrix appliances have intensified this week, and multiple threat actors have now joined in and are launching attacks in the hopes of compromising a high-value target, such as a corporate network, government server, or public institution. In a report published today, FireEye says that among all the attack noise it's been keeping an eye on for the past week, it spotted one attacker that stuck out like a sore thumb. This particular threat actor was attacking Citrix servers from behind a Tor node, and deploying a new payload the FireEye team named NotRobin. FireEye says NotRobin had a dual purpose. First, it served as a backdoor into the breached Citrix appliance. Second, it worked similar to an antivirus by removing other malware found on the device and preventing other attackers from dropping new payloads on the vulnerable Citrix host. It is unclear if the NotRobin attacker is a good guy or a bad guy, as there was no additional malware deployed on the compromised Citrix systems beyond the NotRobin payload. However, FireEye experts are leaning toward the bad guy classification. In their report, they say they believe this actor may be "quietly collecting access to NetScaler devices for a subsequent campaign."

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My great-uncle, Arno Schmidt, a German author, died in 1979.

Rainer Maria Rilke: “Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

The university underemployed more than 1,000 students -- primarily undergraduates in computer science and engineering -- in order to avoid paying union benefits, UAW Local 2865 says. From a report: The University of California at Berkeley owes student workers $5 million in back pay, a third-party arbitrator ruled on Monday, teaching assistants at the university say. More than 1,000 students -- primarily undergraduates in Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer science department -- are eligible for compensation, the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2865, which represents 19,000 student workers in the University of California system, told Motherboard. In some cases, individual students will receive around $7,500 per term, the union says. "This victory means that the university cannot get away with a transparent erosion of labor rights guaranteed under our contract," Nathan Kenshur, head steward of UAW Local 2865 and a third-year undergraduate math major at Berkeley, told Motherboard. Thanks to their union contract, students working 10 hours a week or more at Berkeley are entitled to a full waiver of their in-state tuition fees, $150 in campus fees each semester, and childcare benefits. (Graduate students also receive free healthcare.) But in recent years, Berkeley has avoided paying for these benefits, according to UAW Local 2865. Instead, the university has hired hundreds of students as teaching assistants with appointments of less than 10 hours a week. On Monday, an arbitrator agreed upon by the UAW and the university ruled that Berkeley had intentionally avoided paying its student employees' benefits by hiring part-time workers. It ordered the university to pay the full tuition amount for students who worked these appointments between fall 2017 and today, a press release from the union says.

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I really liked Jojo Rabbit, even though it got mixed reviews. You start out wondering what the hell they're doing, but in the end it's a good simple little story that has a lot of meaning. A sort of lite version of Handmaid's Tale. I really liked that Rebel Wilson was in it, a good fit, as was the chief Gestapo guy, and Jojo's best friend. What's not to like? It's a good movie for our times.

Alan Buis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, writes: There's an old saying that "the proof is in the pudding," meaning that you can only truly gauge the quality of something once it's been put to a test. Such is the case with climate models: mathematical computer simulations of the various factors that interact to affect Earth's climate, such as our atmosphere, ocean, ice, land surface and the Sun. For decades, people have legitimately wondered how well climate models perform in predicting future climate conditions. Based on solid physics and the best understanding of the Earth system available, they skillfully reproduce observed data. Nevertheless, they have a wide response to increasing carbon dioxide levels, and many uncertainties remain in the details. The hallmark of good science, however, is the ability to make testable predictions, and climate models have been making predictions since the 1970s. How reliable have they been? Now a new evaluation of global climate models used to project Earth's future global average surface temperatures over the past half-century answers that question: most of the models have been quite accurate. In a study accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a research team led by Zeke Hausfather of the University of California, Berkeley, conducted a systematic evaluation of the performance of past climate models. The team compared 17 increasingly sophisticated model projections of global average temperature developed between 1970 and 2007, including some originally developed by NASA, with actual changes in global temperature observed through the end of 2017. The observational temperature data came from multiple sources, including NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP) time series, an estimate of global surface temperature change. The results: 10 of the model projections closely matched observations. Moreover, after accounting for differences between modeled and actual changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other factors that drive climate, the number increased to 14. The authors found no evidence that the climate models evaluated either systematically overestimated or underestimated warming over the period of their projections.

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It's a tantalizing prospect for traders whose success often hinges on microseconds: a desktop PC algorithm that crunches market data faster than today's most advanced supercomputers. Japan's Toshiba says it has the technology to make such rapid-fire calculations a reality -- not quite quantum computing, but perhaps the next best thing. From a report: The claim is being met with a mix of intrigue and skepticism at financial firms in Tokyo and around the world. Toshiba's "Simulated Bifurcation Algorithm" is designed to harness the principles behind quantum computers without requiring the use of such machines, which currently have limited applications and can cost millions of dollars to build and keep near absolute zero temperature. Toshiba says its technology, which may also have uses outside finance, runs on PCs made from off-the-shelf components. "You can just plug it into a server and run it at room temperature," Kosuke Tatsumura, a senior research scientist at Toshiba's Computer & Network Systems Laboratory, said in an interview. The Tokyo-based conglomerate, while best known for its consumer electronics and nuclear reactors, has long conducted research into advanced technologies. Toshiba has said it needs a partner to adopt the algorithm for real-world use, and financial firms have taken notice as they grapple for an edge in markets increasingly dominated by machines. Banks, brokerages and asset managers have all been experimenting with quantum computing, although viable applications are generally considered to be some time away.

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Scientists have identified 3,000 ash trees with suspected resistance to a deadly disease.