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🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Linguistics

The Slashdot effect, also known as slashdotting or the hug of death occurs when a popular website links to a smaller website, causing a massive increase in traffic. This overloads the smaller site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily become unavailable. Typically, less robust sites are unable to cope with the huge increase in traffic and become unavailable – common causes are lack of sufficient data bandwidth, servers that fail to cope with the high number of requests, and traffic quotas. Sites that are maintained on shared hosting services often fail when confronted with the Slashdot effect. This has the same effect as a denial-of-service attack, albeit accidentally. The name stems from the huge influx of web traffic which would result from the technology news site Slashdot linking to websites. The term flash crowd is a more generic term.

The original circumstances have changed, as flash crowds from Slashdot were reported in 2005 to be diminishing due to competition from similar sites, and the general adoption of elastically scalable cloud hosting platforms.

🔗 Linguistics

Initial-stress derivation is a phonological process in English that moves stress to the first syllable of verbs when they are used as nouns or adjectives. (This is an example of a suprafix.) This process can be found in the case of several dozen verb-noun and verb-adjective pairs and is gradually becoming more standardized in some English dialects, but it is not present in all. The list of affected words differs from area to area, and often depends on whether a word is used metaphorically or not. At least 170 verb-noun or verb-adjective pairs exist. Some examples are:

• record.

as a verb, "Remember to recórd the show!".

as a noun, "I'll keep a récord of that request."

• permit.

as a verb, "I won't permít that."

as a noun, "We already have a pérmit."

🔗 Economics 🔗 Business

The principal–agent problem, in political science, supply chain management and economics (also known as agency dilemma or the agency problem) occurs when one person or entity (the "agent"), is able to make decisions and/or take actions on behalf of, or that impact, another person or entity: the "principal". This dilemma exists in circumstances where agents are motivated to act in their own best interests, which are contrary to those of their principals, and is an example of moral hazard. Issues also arise when companies have an incentive to become increasingly deferential to management that have ownership stakes. As shareholders are dis-incentived to intervene, there are fewer checks on management. Issues can also arise among different types of management.

Common examples of this relationship include corporate management (agent) and shareholders (principal), elected officials (agent) and citizens (principal), or brokers (agent) and markets (buyers and sellers, principals). Consider a legal client (the principal) wondering whether their lawyer (the agent) is recommending protracted legal proceedings because it is truly necessary for the client's well-being, or because it will generate income for the lawyer. In fact the problem can arise in almost any context where one party is being paid by another to do something where the agent has a small or nonexistent share in the outcome, whether in formal employment or a negotiated deal such as paying for household jobs or car repairs.

The principal–agent problem typically arises where the two parties have different interests and asymmetric information (the agent having more information), such that the principal cannot directly ensure that the agent is always acting in their (the principal's) best interest, particularly when activities that are useful to the principal are costly to the agent, and where elements of what the agent does are costly for the principal to observe (see moral hazard and conflict of interest). Often, the principal may be sufficiently concerned at the possibility of being exploited by the agent that they choose not to enter into the transaction at all, when it would have been mutually beneficial: a suboptimal outcome that can lower welfare overall. The deviation from the principal's interest by the agent is called "agency costs".

The agency problem can be intensified when an agent acts on behalf of multiple principals (see multiple principal problem). When one agent acts on behalf of multiple principals, the multiple principals have to agree on the agent's objectives, but face a collective action problem in governance, as individual principals may lobby the agent or otherwise act in their individual interests rather than in the collective interest of all principals. As a result, there may be free-riding in steering and monitoring, duplicate steering and monitoring, or conflict between principals, all leading to high autonomy for the agent. The multiple principal problem is particularly serious in the public sector, where multiple principals are common and both efficiency and democratic accountability are undermined in the absence of salient governance. This problem may occur, for example, in the governance of the executive power, ministries, agencies, intermunicipal cooperation, public-private partnerships, and firms with multiple shareholders.

The relationships between investment managers and corporate management is an especially common example of the principal–agent relationship. There are several drivers of agency problems that affect investment managers of index funds and mutual funds include. First, investment managers receive a fraction of the benefits resulting from stewardship activities while having to handle all the costs. competition among investment managers is can also contribute to agency problems.And, lastly, another driver of agency problems is that investment managers can be heavily influenced by private incentives provided by the managers of corporations.

Various mechanisms may be used to align the interests of the agent with those of the principal. In employment, employers (principal) may use piece rates/commissions, profit sharing, efficiency wages, performance measurement (including financial statements), the agent posting a bond, or the threat of termination of employment to align worker interests with their own.

🔗 Apple Inc./Macintosh 🔗 Apple Inc.

In the Apple macOS operating system, .DS_Store is a file that stores custom attributes of its containing folder, such as the position of icons or the choice of a background image. The name is an abbreviation of Desktop Services Store, reflecting its purpose. It is created and maintained by the Finder application in every folder, and has functions similar to the file desktop.ini in Microsoft Windows. Starting with a full stop (period) character, it is hidden in Finder and many Unix utilities. Its internal structure is proprietary, but has since been reverse-engineered.

🔗 Companies 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Lists 🔗 Business 🔗 Business/Accounting

This page lists the largest annual and quarterly earnings and losses in corporate history. In general terms the oil and gas industry is the one generating both largest annual and quarterly earnings. In contrast, both the annual and quarterly losses are more distributed across industries.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Astronomy

The Chandrasekhar limit () is the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star. The currently accepted value of the Chandrasekhar limit is about 1.4 M_☉ (2.765×10³⁰ kg).

White dwarfs resist gravitational collapse primarily through electron degeneracy pressure (compare main sequence stars, which resist collapse through thermal pressure). The Chandrasekhar limit is the mass above which electron degeneracy pressure in the star's core is insufficient to balance the star's own gravitational self-attraction. Consequently, a white dwarf with a mass greater than the limit is subject to further gravitational collapse, evolving into a different type of stellar remnant, such as a neutron star or black hole. Those with masses up to the limit remain stable as white dwarfs.

The limit was named after Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an Indian astrophysicist who improved upon the accuracy of the calculation in 1930, at the age of 20, in India by calculating the limit for a polytrope model of a star in hydrostatic equilibrium, and comparing his limit to the earlier limit found by E. C. Stoner for a uniform density star. Importantly, the existence of a limit, based on the conceptual breakthrough of combining relativity with Fermi degeneracy, was indeed first established in separate papers published by Wilhelm Anderson and E. C. Stoner in 1929. The limit was initially ignored by the community of scientists because such a limit would logically require the existence of black holes, which were considered a scientific impossibility at the time. The fact that the roles of Stoner and Anderson are often forgotten in the astronomy community has been noted.

🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Ancient Egypt 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Ethnic groups 🔗 Israel 🔗 Palestine 🔗 Dacia

The Sea Peoples are a purported seafaring confederation that attacked ancient Egypt and other regions of the East Mediterranean prior to and during the Late Bronze Age collapse (1200–900 BCE). Following the creation of the concept in the nineteenth century, it became one of the most famous chapters of Egyptian history, given its connection with, in the words of Wilhelm Max Müller: "the most important questions of ethnography and the primitive history of classic nations". Their origins undocumented, the various Sea Peoples have been proposed to have originated from places that include western Asia Minor, the Aegean, the Mediterranean islands and Southern Europe. Although the archaeological inscriptions do not include reference to a migration, the Sea Peoples are conjectured to have sailed around the eastern Mediterranean and invaded Anatolia, Syria, Phoenicia, Canaan, Cyprus and Egypt toward the end of the Bronze Age.

French Egyptologist Emmanuel de Rougé first used the term peuples de la mer (literally "peoples of the sea") in 1855 in a description of reliefs on the Second Pylon at Medinet Habu documenting Year 8 of Ramesses III. Gaston Maspero, de Rougé's successor at the Collège de France, subsequently popularized the term "Sea Peoples" — and an associated migration-theory — in the late 19th century. Since the early 1990s, his migration theory has been brought into question by a number of scholars.

The Sea Peoples remain unidentified in the eyes of most modern scholars and hypotheses regarding the origin of the various groups are the source of much speculation. Existing theories variously propose equating them with several Aegean tribes, raiders from Central Europe, scattered soldiers who turned to piracy or who had become refugees, and links with natural disasters such as earthquakes or climatic shifts.

🔗 Computing

SQRL (pronounced "squirrel") or Secure, Quick, Reliable Login (formerly Secure QR Login) is a draft open standard for secure website login and authentication. The software typically uses a link of the scheme sqrl:// or optionally a QR code, where a user identifies via a pseudonymous zero-knowledge proof rather than providing a user ID and password. This method is thought to be impervious to a brute force password attack or data breach. It shifts the burden of security away from the party requesting the authentication and closer to the operating system implementation of what is possible on the hardware, as well as to the user. SQRL was proposed by Steve Gibson of Gibson Research Corporation in October 2013 as a way to simplify the process of authentication without the risk of revelation of information about the transaction to a third party.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of religion

The self-referencing doomsday argument rebuttal is an attempt to refute the doomsday argument (that there is a credible link between the brevity of the human race's existence and its expected extinction) by applying the same reasoning to the lifetime of the doomsday argument itself.

The first researchers to write about this were P. T. Landsberg and J. N. Dewynne in 1997; they applied belief in the doomsday argument to itself, and claimed that a paradox results.