Folding at Home has surpassed the exoflop mark, AMD got hacked, Uranus is leaking (heh), and Trump's a socialist now.
Hey everyone. I hope you're all staying away from each other because cooties are gross when they cause symptoms crossing between the flu and pneumonia. Still zero confirmed cases in my area, which is great news but, statistically speaking, I don't expect it to last. If you want to help from home remember that you can easily, freely and anonymously download and run Folding@home and put your PC or workstation to work on running models to help find weaknesses in the Covid-19 protein, as well as many, many other diseases. I've mentioned this before but just hit up Foldingathome.org to get started. Folding has very recently surpassed the nearly unfathomable exoflop mark. If you don't know what an exoflop is, here you go: An exoflop is one quintillion floating point operations per second. That's a 1 followed by 18 zeros guys. More than twice as fast as the Summit Supercomputer. Pretty amazing. I'm actually not sure why we don't have our own Folding team here at Twinstiq...
AMD had some troubles in the past few days when someone was able to hack into a server and steal some unencrypted files pertaining to research and development. Said 1337 Hackz0r tried to blackmail AMD into giving them $100 million or they'd leak the information for the entire internet. At least that's how I understand it. The problem is that the data that was stolen was unencrypted so maybe not quite as important as something that was say, encrypted. So AMD is upset about being hacked and having data stolen and is, in fact, looking into legal action to take in order to protect their IP. However, they also said the data isn't integral to major projects so it could have worse. I still feel like it's a pretty major threat to make and it could be a big deal. Espionage is bad.
Urnaus is leaking gas (heh). I can't even write that without cracking. The Voyager 2 probe passed by Urnaus way back in 1986 when I was still but a five year old munchkin and when it did, it happened to encounter a plasma cloud coming from the surface of the planet. Don't worry though, Urnaus isn't drying out any time soon (heh) but it could help explain why Mars' atmosphere nearly all leaked into space over billions of years. Interesting.
Finally, president (cheeto dust) Trump has managed to sign a bill into effect that is the biggest stimulus package the US has ever seen at two trillion dollars. As much as I don't like the guy, this seems like decent plan to me overall. Though it will only be a one time thing, folks and businesses will be getting a federal check in the mail to help with bills etc while we're all stuck at home or laid off work during the pandemic. Not everyone will qualify but the people who need it most should be getting some money to help out. Interesting how democratic socialism can, in fact, be put to use in our country isn't it? Oh wait I mean "Americanism" as Trump's calling it. You can't even imagine how hard my eyes rolled when I first saw that. It's okay as long as your name isn't Bernie and it's called something else I guess. Anyway I'm ranting now and politics just makes me angry so...
**Update 3-29
In a move of ridiculous dickery, one company in Texas has decided to create and enact a rule, perhaps it could even become a permanent clause, called the "Employee Acknowledgement of ‘Government Assistance’ Pay Reduction.” What does that mean? It means that this company is deducting the money that their employees will receive from the coming stimulus check from those employees' paychecks in order to help the company's own bottom line. Not only are they doing that but it seems like they're doing it now before people even receive the money. And it's something they can easily predict because the checks, themselves, are based on worker salaries. So this company knows exactly how far over the barrel to bend their people before they're screwed. This comes from a news feed blurb that popped up on my phone from Fox News. Check it out yourself here if you'd like to read the disgusting details.
The company in question is a larger business making large profits in the hundreds of millions each year so I'm not sure they would qualify for their own government assistance check, but you can bet that if they can they will do gladly take that money as well. Gross.
Games this weekend?
AJ: Doom and Yoshi’s Crafted World.
Scroo: I finished Doom Eternal and now I'm going back and playing the end game content. There are challenges and secrets that I missed, plus the Master levels that add extra challenge to previous areas. Tons of fast paced fun. On the other side of the extreme is still Farming Sim 2019.
Greywolfe: evoland 2 cleanup on stream, which basically means collecting all the cards. i dipped back into secret of mana during the week, and it's still a clunky, silly game :P