Posts by Fazal Majid 566 publicly visible posts • joined 16 May 2007
Certainly Google and Facebook go direct to ODMs like Quanta for their servers, with none of the proprietary lock-in "value add" the enterprise vendors love to include. With projects like Open Compute, you'd think smaller hosters like Rackspace would follow as well.
They are not talking about human rights. They are talking about security. If I were Airbus, for instance, I would be far more concerned about government-abetted industrial espionage from the US than from China. That doesn't mean China isn't also a threat, just that the US is a bigger one. This is nothing new, Bill Clinton is the one who added "economic intelligence" to the NSA's missions.
Much as I loathe to defend telcos, authenticating callers to determine if they are legitimate police officers is a hard problem. There are so many agencies that unless the States take charge of implementing some sort of authentication or 2FA challenge-response mechanism, the telcos have really no viable way to do so in an emergency situation.
This is a stopgap, but since the flawed design of the keyboard hasn't been corrected, they will be back for repairs until AppleCare runs out, but if Apple wants to avoid the cost of class-action lawyers, they'd better put in place an unconditional warranty extension until the butterfly keyswitch can be corrected and all MacBooks and MacBook Pros made since 2005 recalled.
If you are referring to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, he did in fact advocate against declaring war on the United States, because he was well aware of the US' industrial might and the impossible odds of winning, but he was overruled, on the basis that the superior Japanese warrior spirit would prevail.
That said, even his bosses were aware at a certain level that winning against the US was impossible, but a surefire defeat was less dishonorable than the alternative of surrendering when Japan's oil supplied dried out due to the US embargo, as described in this official US miltary history of the road to Pearl Harbor:
http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pdffiles/PUB905.pdf
The typical WiFi AP has radio power of 1 watt. The typical cellular base station will be under 100 watts. The typical digital TV broadcast emitter has power in the *hundreds of kilowatts*, e.g. 1.3MW total for the Crystal Palace transmitter that covers most of London:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_transmitting_station#After_switchover
During the WWII Manhattan Project, copper was hard to come by, and they needed huge amounts of conductors for the electromagnets in the uranium refineries. So they used silver from the Federal Reserve instead. 6000 tons of it:
https://hubpages.com/education/The-Manhattan-Project-and-The-Borrowed-Silver
Machine learning or other GPGPU workloads usually written using nVidia's proprietary CUDA API (wrapped in TensorFlow et al) rather than the open OpenCL one. As another poster pointed out, nVidia imposed onerous licensing restrictions, you can no longer legally use CUDA on a GTX1080 or similar, you have to use even more overpriced Pro cards like Quadro or Tesla. A naked cash grab if there's one.
The French tax authorities are finalizing a tax that will be applied this year.
Google's violations are so egregious and clear-cut, it's almost as if they were daring the DPAs. After years of impunity under their buddies in the Obama administration, they've developed a sense of impunity, and are going to be disabused. European Civil Law legal systems are not as vulnerable to abuse by capricious Common Law judges.
Until 1911, California's venal legislature was fully in the pockets of the Big 4 (Huntington, Crocker, Hopkins and Stanford, yes, that Stanford). They controlled the Southern Pacific Railroad, and were not shy of abusing their monopoly to extract rents from Californians (most of the markets for agricultural produce were on the East Coast, which meant Southern Pacific could charge pretty much whatever it wanted).
In 1911, Hiram Johnson, a Progressive governor was elected, with a mandate to reform the corrupt legislature. He did that by creating the initiative, referendum and recall processes that give California an unusual level of democracy for the US. In this case the initiative process is working exactly as intended, allowing the people to prevail over entrenched interests that captured the legislature.
Of course, the lobbies adapted and learned to abuse the initiative process for their own ends, as the sugary-drinks lobby is using the same tactic to blackmail the legislature into preempting city soda taxes like Berkeley or San Francisco's.
Tesla cheaped out by not including a LIDAR, unsurprisingly as those are still extremely expensive, but no self-driving car or ADAS 3+ should be allowed without it.
As for Musk, he richly deserves all the opprobrium headed his way for his despicable attempts to pin blame on the victim.
Google can and does suppress content in specific locales, such as the EU’s right to be forgotten. The difference of course is that the EU has much more heft than New Zealand, and their Civil (Roman) Law courts take a dim view of sophistry the more capricious Common Law jurisdictions like NZ or the US sometimes let slide.
IP addresses are explicitly considered PII under GDPR. Google doesn’t get to make that determination.
Opt-out is also not sufficient, the user has to explicitly opt-in (checkboxes checked by default are considered invalid consent and still expose the data controllers to steep fines, as they should).
The public data in WHOIS is so often obfuscated as to be useless. Copyright lawyers have access to a private database with full details, that’s what this whole debate is about.
ICANN’s delusion is because they are used to the capricious arbitrariness of (British-inspired) Common Law rather than the rules-based (Roman) Civil Law where judges don’t have the latitude to give their buddies or fellow members of the elite a break just for the asking.
Indeed. The whole point of NVMe is to reduce latency by getting rid of legacy SCSI command bloat. Adding the latency of FC or Ethernet would be a huge step backwards, which is why it makes no sense to anyone other than storage networking vendors in denial about their irrelevance in an era of microsecond latency.
Is an exceedingly tony suburb of Paris, as befits the birthplace of Louis XIV, and as much a part of Paris as Hampstead would be in London. This is not at all to minimize the brazen and repeated abuses of power Mr Batistelli committed while in office. I hope his departure will lead to reforms in the EPO's governance.
Given how slow general purpose CPUs are compared to GPUs, how even GPUs have been superseded by ASICs for Bitcoin, and how JavaScript code is orders of magnitude slower than the native C/C++ code that can"t compete with GPUs, I don’t understand how this can make money for the operators. Granted, crypto currencies other than Bitcoin or Ethereum have not started the hardware race of their more mature forebears, but it would probably take less effort to code a CUDA or OpenCL implementation of Monero than all this infrastructure for JS mining.
Tolkien admitted as much:
No reviewer (that I have seen), although all have carefully used the correct dwarfs themselves, has commented on the fact (which I only became conscious of through reviews) that I use throughout the 'incorrect' plural dwarves. I am afraid it is just a piece of private bad grammar, rather shocking in a philologist; but I shall have to go on with it. Perhaps my dwarf – since he and the Gnome are only translations into approximate equivalents of creatures with different names and rather different functions in their own world – may be allowed a peculiar plural. The real 'historical' plural of dwarf (like teeth of tooth) is dwarrows, anyway: rather a nice word, but a bit too archaic. Still I rather wish I had used the word dwarrow.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien 17: To Stanley Unwin, Chairman of Allen & Unwin. October 1937
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