Posts by James 51

DEF CON bans Meta-style 'pervert glasses'

Time to resurrect the term glasshole.

SpaceX just about nails Starship test flight 13

Re: You can say what you like about Elon...

Space X doesn't have to start from scratch with 1950s tech or deal with congress parceling out contracts all across the country to spread the largesse. Space X has room to fail, if NASA had the same results for the same price, it would be roasted alive for constantly failing and wasting tax payer dollars. It's also worth mentioning that Apollo is suppose to have generated 14x its budget in the wider economy.

Re: You can say what you like about Elon...

Only if you don't count all the other launched that were canceled and abandoned or just straight blew up to get this far. It it also worth pointing out, that Musk probably has the least input into technical aspect of the operation out of all the companies he owns. I know he's credited as chief engineer, a claim with about as much credibility has his claim to being a gamer.

Sovereign AI is 'nonsense,' says Doctorow

Re: AI is 'nonsense', but ...

I thought this was amanfrommars until I checked the author.

Torvalds challenged the haters to fork Linux. Someone said 'hold my beer'

Re: Please Be Careful With Those Comments.....

Your numbers are meaningless without the proper context.

Memory makers are slaves to the boom-bust rollercoaster, and the AI boom is the wildest ride of all

Lookat what happened with GPUs and the crypto-crunch. The market eventually got less crazy but it has never gone back to what it was before. Now we're seeing the same pattern with RAM and SSDs. This is why we can't have nice things.

You only have to look at what happened to GPUs during the cyrpto-crunch. The market did end up less crazy but it has never recovered. We're going to see the same here. In five years, most of the VCs will have stopped shoveling cash into the boiler but the memory market will never go back to what it was.

Amazon Leo constellation nears 400 satellites as broadband launch looms

Re: Competition

Maybe if they had paid Musk five hundred billion dollars instead of a trillon, they wouldn't've needed to jack your bill by quite so much.

UK firm bombarded debt-ridden people with 5.5M texts

With regards to the fake threats, I don't how they avoided extortion or fraud charges. Until there are serious penalites, the fines are just the cost of doing business.

Britain sending Ukraine an extra 30,000 drones – now 150,000 all up

Re: Standard Operating Procedure

Just one flaw in your argument, Putin started the war. He could end it tomorrow, if he wanted to.

Atlassian built a tool to migrate Jira users to the cloud and it made the move slower

And all of this incompetence, expense and trouble could have been avoided if they hadn't killed off their on prem offering and shifted their focus to collecting more rent from their customers.

Atlassian swears it can handle AI without blowing out costs, or being swamped

If they wanred us to trust them, they wouldn't have forced us off on prem servers to the cloud. They deserve that fall in share price.

Actors' union complains about Epic Games cloning Darth Vader

Ryanir don't have to be dicks and try to force people to accept a lower wage, they are choosing to do so. This arose because there are multiple unions involved and Ryainair see a chance to divide and conqueror, sow discord and are taking every possible opportunity to screw their staff over. This is the company which quit an airport because the government of that country wouldn't allow the to violate employment laws in it. Yes, there's a bit of a turf battle going on but the unions aren't the villains in this scenario.

Liz Warren, Trump admin agree on something: Army should have right to repair

So you're going to volunteer to go to places like Ukraine to fix broken equipment I take it. Broken parts need to be replaced quickly, easily and affordably. The commercial interests of suppliers has to take a back seat in this situation.

You sound so much like a russian or chinese keyboard warrior trying to stir up stuff it is depressing.

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

Any chance the board will think twice about that record breaking contract?

Atlassian's Bitbucket Cloud went down 'hard' today

Everything is for the best, in the best of all possible clouds.

I am sure glad that we were forced off on site hosting and have to rely on someone else's computer always being up and available. Well, at least it wasn't something really essential like JIRA.

Amazon worker – struck and shot in New Orleans terror attack – initially denied time off

Not sure about this exact cirumstance but in France, unemployment benefit is based on what you earned before becoming unemployed.

Fining Big Tech isn't working. Make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain

Re: Small thinking

So, what are the odds this 'responce' was written using an LLM?

Chinese boffins find way to use diamonds as super-dense and durable storage medium

When I worked in an outsoircing office foe a US firm I was told we had floppy disks of every programme released (this was back in the 90s). I asked about reading them. Was told it was a legal thing, we had to have the disks, we didn't have to habe the hardware to read them.

iPhone 16 dubbed Apple's most repairable model in years

Batteries generally need replacing every two years and that port lasted for almost five years with daily use. When I had similar issues with my S6 then S9 I had to get a new phone as repairing it wasn't an option without equipment and experience I don't have. In contrast I've been able to do what ever needed doing to my Fairphone. Replacing the battery takes seconds, replacing the USB port took minutes. I could even upgrade the camera if I really wanted to. Instead hoping to keep this going until the Fairphone 6 comes out in a year or two and realistically I can keep it going for that long.

<quote>We can imagine the team from Fairphone, for example, taking a look at Apple's improvements and saying: "Oh, they've changed the battery glue. That's cute," before switching out the power unit in their device in a matter of seconds.</quote>

Indeed, Fairphone have a promotion were you get a free battery with your phone going at the moment. My Fairphone 3 is on it's third battery and second USB port at the moment.

LibreOffice 24.8: Handy even if you're happy with Microsoft

Re: If only there was a replacement for outlook...

Proton does everything you're asking for, though you might have to pay a reasonably small fee to get the best out of it.

Kindle sputters out: Amazon's e-readers couldn't download content for a short time

That's why I try to get my ebooks drm free and use calibre. I learned my lesson when waterstones closed their ebook store and I lost all those ebooks.

Nintendo sues alleged Switch pirate pair for serious coin

I have a switch lite and last year the thumb sticks started to have dead zones. I would love to have a legal way to play my games on my steam deck. As it is, making do with an 8bitdo ultimate and a stand. Won't be buying a switch two unless they've got hall effect controllers. Nintendo's response to their chronic hardware problems has been pathetic.

Meta faces multiple complaints in Europe over plans to train AI on user data

Re: Opt Out Now!

I had the same process. Live in the UK but was able to opt out too.

iFixit divorces Samsung over lack of real commitment to DIY repair program

I've had it for four years and counting. It's not unreasonable for the port to wear out after daily use after that much time. As for water proofing, that is improved upon in the Fairphone 4 and 5, I just haven't had the need to buy a new phone yet.

This is why I am sticking with my Fairphone Three. On the third battery and second USB port but still going strong. Going to try to make it last still the Fairphone 6 is out but I reckon that will be at least another three years.

Apple Vision Pro has densest display iFixit's ever seen, and almost-OK repairability

Tesla have already issued a warning for people to not wear them when driving their cars. Wonder if this is premptive or not.

China's great CPU hope – Loongson – may be only four years behind Intel

Seriously, a 5600GE would suit you well. AM4 is a mature platform with all the stuff you want and it's cheap.

The ryzen 5600GE fits your bill.

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

Fairphone are well ahead of the game then. It's a change that needs to be made.

Raspberry Pi production rate rising to a million a month

Re: Bonds

I think the person above had it right. If they can't meet demand for existing models, creating even more demand they couldn't meet with a new model would only make things worse. Better to wait a little longer, clear the backlog and secure their supply chain before handing out a fresh slice of pi.

Smartphone recovery that's always around the corner is around the corner

Re: Looking back (nothing to look forward to)

The fairphone 3 has all of that. The fairphone 4 is missing the earphone socket (unless you use a dongle).

Microsoft stumps loyal fans by making OneDrive handle Outlook attachments

I do pay for me email but I'd rather pay Proton than MS. Even get a VPN and cloud storage too. Oh and a calendar as well.

How the Internet Archive faces potential destruction at the hands of Big Four publishers

Sometimes the IA is literally the only way to access certain books. I've been trying to find ebook versions of the Belgariad and the Malloreon for years but they cannot be bought in the UK (between space to store books and old eyes, ereaders are just better now than normal books). They are available on Amazon US but as soon as it detects you're in the UK (usually when I try to pay as I don't have an address or a bank account or credit card in the countries where they can be bough), it stops you from buying them (Barnes and Noble did this too). The IA was the only place I could access them. The publishers are preventing certain works from being available and they want to collect rent on customers when they are available. IA is just trying to solve a problem the publishers themselves have created. I just hope the US judge sees sense and having the physical copy is enough to protect IA from these attacks.

Ex-GE engineer gets two years in prison after stealing turbine tech for China

Re: ridiculious sentence

A longer sentence is justifiable but murdering him isn't going to delete the data from where it has ended up.

More pre-Musk Twitter 1.0 execs leave the building

Re: And yet...

When a company that is suppose to have deep pockets backed by the (former?) richest man in the world is being evicted from offices for a $200,000 dollar debt, the writing is not only on the wall, the grave stone is being chiselled as we speak.

TSMC triples spending on Arizona advanced chip site with extra 3nm fab

You'll probably find a lot of the equipment from the most advanced nodes will be shipped for reuse in the US. Seems like a sensible stragety to increase ROI and there's probably still going to be a big market for N-1 chips if they are a resonable fraction of the cost of N. There's the whole supply chain to think about though. How independant will these factories really be?

Lenovo marks 30 years of ThinkSystem with slew of new kit

I'd settle for a thinkpad that had a good ryzen chip that wasn't throttled, has a poor heat distribution system, artifically cripped in some other way (lower spec RAM, screen etc) everything wasn't soldered.

Scientists pull hydrogen from thin air in promising clean energy move

You do occasionally get trolls or people farming downvotes or perhaps they're simply a victim of Poe's law (there's no act of satire so extreme it will not be mistaken for a genuine statement) but I doubt it’s the last one.

AMD refreshes desktop CPUs with 5nm Ryzen 7000s that can reach 5.7GHz with 16 cores

Just got at 5600g, for the price to drop £30 the day after it arrived. Good APU, certainly a big step up in number crunching than my 2400g and a nice if not mind blowing increase in the graphics too. The higher power draw of the new generation ensures it will be a few more years yet before I think about upgrading again.

Apple forgoes cooling systems in M2 MacBook Air

Re: Sticky Stuff

Seven or eight would probably be a better score but we won't have long to wait I'm sure.

Re: Sticky Stuff

Apple has a long history of keeping users out of the products they've 'bought'. I assume they're saying Apple is making it unnecessarily difficult for users and 3rd party repair services to get into the product.

Taiwan prosecutors claim Chinese biz swiped IP and R&D team from Apple supplier

There's usually a clause in such contracts that the IP you develop belongs to the company so patent or not, you couldn't use the same processes or designs at your new employer. You might find that the second company is making the product at the same cost or even more expensive but they don't have R&D costs to mitigate so can charge less.

The App Gap and supply chains: Purism CEO on what's ahead for the Librem 5 USA

Anyone give them fairpone's number?

Combine the modular construction and sustainability of fairphone with the privacy protections of this phone and you'd have one hell (of an expensive) phone.

End-of-life smartphone? Penguins at postmarketOS aim to revive it

Re: Yay!

I would agree with everything you've said except it being unbreakable. It was very strudy but by reputation the usb port was prone to coming loose and the space bar key on mine broke in two. Still have it in a drawer though.

Palantir summons specter of nuclear conflict as share price collapses

I always misread Peter Thiel as Peter Thief. Given the active harm this company has done, it can't go bust soon enough. Just when you think they can't go any lower, they throw in we're actually all more likeily to be nuked that you know, now give us some money.

Samsung reveals new smartphones, tablets... and yes. The S22 Ultra is undeniably good

Re: For 1K in cash I want

A fairphone 3 has everything on that list execpt physical buttons. Fairphone 4 doesn't have the headphone jack but has better waterproofing. Less than half the cost too.