Posts by Pascal Monett 19552 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
That is the single good thing about shareholders : at one point or another, you have to come clean about where the money is going.
Even the FBI can't get that information without a warrant, and PR is completely unreliable in the best of circumstances.
But file a quarterly report that goes to shareholders and you're screwed. There is no wiggle room. The numbers are the numbers and, at that level, shareholders know how to read them.
340 undecillion. For those of you, like me, who simply can't grasp the beauty of exponents, here is what that number looks like :
340282366920938000000000000000000000000
That's 340.28 trillion trillion trillion addresses (because I just learned of the existence of the word 'undecillion', and I still can't grok that).
Seems like a lot to me, but okay, IPv6 was apparently designed to be future-proof, so with enough space to guarantee that colonies on the Moon, Mars, Ganymede, the asteroid belt and the rest of the Solar System would be able to connect. Apparently, we'll have to invent a new version of NAT translation when we invade colonize Alpha Centauri. We'll handle that when we get there.
In any case; Starlink claiming that it has over 150 sextillion IPv6 addresses means that it holds, wait for it : 360 trillion trillion addresses.
We have an estimated 8 billion people on this planet. That means Starlink is hoarding enough IPv6 space to allow for more or less 125 billion IPv6 addresses for every single living person on the planet.
Now I realize that all that fucking "smart" tat that is being sold is going to take up a portion (mathematical, >0) of that space, and smartphones are selling like hotcakes despite the fact that, like PC tech, the newest version is now only incrementally better (for a given definition of 'better') than the previous one but still, it seems to me to be a bit much for one company to hold.
What in God's green Earth is Starlink doing with all of that address space ? There has to be a technical reason. No company buys address blocks for bragging rights.
It just might be that this false prophet is going to force us, as a civilization, to come to terms with the meaning of "truth".
But, given what I have learned of Human nature, and given the current example of the US Republican party, somehow I don't think that that will happen before a long while.
Oh, isn't that nice ? The powers that be have already multiplied by 4 the benefits their friends will be given.
That way, they will avoid 50% of the issues when the final cost of this project ends up sailing past £25 billion.
Because you know it will.
Talk about foresight . . .
That is actually an interesting argument. We are all following rules, the rules we learned from education and experience. Obey the people you depend upon for your survival, treat those you do not know with respect, find ways to learn new things to be useful, transmit your knowledge to those around you who can use it.
Yes, I am very bleeding-hearted, so sue me.
However you decide to act in society, there will come a point where you'll have to update your rules - generally because you got hit by a cluebat and need to avoid that in the future (yes, I'm talking about actual intelligence - idiots will flee to "social media" and complain that life isn't fair without learning anything).
So what is intelligence ? The ability to update your rules ?
I'm going to need to think about that.
This is all because we continue to be good little sheep, accepting that "employers" and "management" have the right to never stop asking us to do all the efforts they refuse to do.
Fuck them.
You pay me eight hours a day, I do eight hours a day. That's a 48-hour week. If you need me to do a 70-hour week, it's because you need to hire someone else.
So do your fucking job and spend the money instead of running us into the wall.
The European Union was a nice idea, full of hope for the future of peoples and messages of peace.
The the bureaucrates took over, the lobbyists found a way in, and now Brussels is just a shell of what it should have been.
Tear that house down. We'll be better off on our own.
Well duh, that's how you get people onboard with something they couldn't care less about.
Also, you gotta love the "Consumer trust and transparency are top priorities for Microsoft " bit.
Yes officer, I recognize that I was doing 100km/h in a 30km/h zone, but you see, now that you caught me, I would like you to acknowledge that respect of the law and of my fellow citizen are my top priorities. Now. Since you arrested me. What ? Prison ? Come on, I said something nice, didn't I ?
Apple. Who cares ?
Not Microsoft. And why should it ? It already doesn't care about its own users, why bother about less than 10% of the PC market ?
Because, I'm sorry for all you iPhone, white-Blutooth-earthingy-users who paid a thousand dollars for the privilege, but you are insignificant to Redmond. And to the world market.
By this site's statistics, Apple is credited with 2.2 billion Apple devices worldwide.
It also boasts that, of 3.84 million apps on its walled garden "store", over a million are games. So more than 26% of its apps are time-wasters. What a great excuse to crow about. Meanwhile, the Samsung Galaxy store totalled over 10 million downloads in 2010.
This site also declares that "In Q2 2024, iPhone sales accounted for 50.46% of Apple’s revenue". And ? The Apple share of smartphones in Q4 2024 is 10. Meanwhile, that site totals over 100 for Samsung. Yet, it has the balls to state that iPhone 16 "remained the world’s best-selling smartphone ". Um, really ? The most expensive, certainly, but 3 lines lower the Galaxy A16 is outselling the iPhone 16 by a factor of over 7 to 1. Talk about the Cupertino reality distortion field . . .
Finally, the desktop OS market share declares that MacOS is worth barely 10%.
So, I'm happy that you can afford a month's salary for your latest iThing, but you can fuck off if you think that you represent an actual force in the market.
The only thing you are is a valuable idiot in Apple's eye. And Apple is an expert in making you believe you are important.
But that is only Apple's opinion.
Incompetence.
It's incompetence.
Something that Borkzilla's Scroogesque pile of money has disguised as competence for decades now (remember Ballmer ?) and, thanks to the endless amount of incompetent managers and CEOs buying into the scheme, Redmond continues to be able to pretend it knows what it is doing when any technical person of actual experience and competence (the two do go together, you know) will be able to demonstrate just how much that is completely wrong.
Hello ? Houston to the Board : customers do not owe you their money.
You are supposed to convince them to hand it over.
If your only excuse is extortion and predatory licensing, guess what ? Your "customers" will tell you to fuck off, because you are not the Mafia and you can't say "what a nice procurement system you have, would be a shame if something happened to it" without getting a furious lawsuit you would lose, and rightly so.
The only way to convince your customers that your new license is in their interest is to prove it them, not to your Board.
In that, you are failing.
Deal with it.
Apparently, in the UK there are 254 working days per year (on average).
Given that UK gov is publicly stating that of pseudo-AI will save the peons money, it means that 295 government employees will be facing the chop.
Also, where is the basis for this figure ? Why not 7.5 million working days ? Then you could pretend to justify over 250 thousand redundancies.
What ? Too soon ?
That is going on my blacklist right now.
You can go on pretending that you've seen the light, I don't care.
On the other hand, you probably have a brilliant career ahead of you with Trump. You should ask for a meeting. Don't expect to get paid, though. Trump keeps whatever money he has for himself.
The orange shitgibbon doesn't care what happens to the peons. If anything, he would have invited Ginny to the White House for a nice Big Mac dinner (and posted the required photos saying that he paid for it himself).
Meanwhile, he has harped on green cards and managed to make sure he could make some money off of that, instead of plowing some much-needed funds into the US education system.
But nobody does that because educated people have a big risk of seeing through the bullshit and not voting for a serial loser like Trump.
Yes. They just assumed, and you know what they say about "assumed".
But, if I understand correctly, these "researchers" are based in China - so maybe they don't have access to those pesky studies that are revealing to the rest of the world that "AI" is not all it's cracked up to be.
You are completely right, some of these products can indeed represent a boon for the physically disabled. No one is criticizing that aspect.
It's the physically abled idiots that have more money than sense that garner our ire.
That and the fact that the companies hawking the tat are all using it as a means to monetize our private life under flimsy excuses.
No, it is not.
An artist is an individual who takes care of his artistic vision and strives to improve himself from one work to the next.
Borkzilla doesn't care about improving itself, and claiming that icons have colors does not make Redmond a painter.
I would really like to be a judge just to throw out this case with extreme prejudice.
Nope. Sorry, but not sorry.
If you had any respect for the Open Source community, you would have done things differently.
As it is, you have just demonstrated that you will bend over and take in the ass for anyone with enough money to impress you.
You're history.
The Internet does not forget,.
Agreed.
The hardware for the past ten years at least is more than capable enough to ensure Internet browsing, email and video.
One of these days, Redmond et al will have to recognize that the latest and greatest is just a pipe dream. 90% of users already have what they need.
Gamers and video makers will always be an exception, but you don't make revenue out of them - they're a percentile of the market.
