Posts by DoctorNine 147 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Dec 2011
Whataboutism isn't a logical rhetorical argument anyway. It makes about as much sense as Putin claiming that sending cruise missiles into civilian apartment blocks is justified by the Ukrainians blowing up a bridge that carries bombs and war supplies into Crime.
No. No it's not.
Such apologetics are typical of Russia and China these days.
Many larger tech concerns simply ignore laws which cannot be adequately surveilled.
It's as if the pertinent laws simply do not exist for them. C'est un monde heureux!
If anyone notices, there is always a convenient employee to be blamed, and never the corporation's fault.
No one wants China to go away. The Chinese people are some of the most industrious and productive people anyplace. What WILL happen eventually, is that their authoritarian government, which increasingly poorly represents their actual interests, will be bypassed by the population, who will get tired of the ossified politics of the CCP, and creatively reinvent themselves. It may not be soon, as demonizing an external enemy will help Xi cement immediate patriotic influences and maintain control. But the whole of Chinese history is a recurring cycle of consolidation, bureaucracy and then either revolution, or conquest by an outside power. Some of the forces causing this were pretty well outlined by Wittfogel in the 19th century, but even accounting for the limitations of that model, more contemporary analyses still give Xi little options besides opening up authoritarian control.
It therefore makes sense for capitalists to be exceedingly cautious with investment in a social model that is teetering on the edge. As a fairly well invested individual myself, putting more of my own resources in Apple, are definitely predicated on a judicious balance of moving production to less threatened locales, and also simultaneous constructive engagement with the current Chinese government to encourage First-World behaviors.
It can't be just one or the other.
Well, they recently got their f-keys back, but I think the dalliance with that touch strip thingy has messed with their muscle memory. Apple needs to press PRAM and go for a hard reset in India or something.
And to their credit, I think that's the direction they appear to be moving. So.
..then you look for some handy foreign stalking horse to publicly flagellate, hoping your loyalist partisan base overlooks the domestic issues, and rallies against the specter of a foreign aggressor.
The fascinating thing, is that both the principals here are doing the same thing.
Xi is very worried about maintaining his remarkable run of economic growth, now that the West is getting tired of unfair business practices, lies about 'two systems' in Hong Kong, and various pugilistic forays abroad, while COVID19 is putting a serious damper on PRC economic output. He has to keep up delivering the expected growth that got him where he is, or his fortunes may turn south. Having a spat with Evil America is just the thing to brighten up an otherwise not-so-cheery political horizon for him.
Pelosi, meanwhile, has just had the door slammed in her face by the Supremes over Roe v. Wade at home, and wants to buff her cred with a little China-bashing. She's always been keen to parry accusations of being a clueless Democratic Dove, by living out her 'tough-on-China' fantasies whenever and wherever she can. This is another one of those.
In the end, Pelosi is probably right that the CCP is going to do whatever the CCP is going to do, regardless. And Xi is probably right, that his loyal partisans will be successfully distracted by some good old chest-thumping anti-Americanism, especially if it's served piping hot, and fresh.
It's kind of pathetic, if predictable. But well... Here we are.
Well said. This is perhaps the crux of the issue. Choose how you want to be annoyed. Using Windows, Mac and various species of Linux, It's always been my feeling that you look at what you need to do with the machine, and choose your poison. As others have mentioned, Linux has some nice choices for low overhead work-oriented boxes (I used to be an OpenSUSE partisan, but have grown past that) and game with WinWorld, but like OS X for setting and forgetting with family home computers. And they really aren't that expensive anymore. £699 for a Mac mini isn't that big an ask. Besides, most of them just use their desktops to port stuff to their iPad...
I was there and mostly agree with you. Particularly the server/performance per watt ARM situation. As far as I can tell, x86 will continue to bleed market share due to ongoing performance pressure though. Still, it will be a slow decline, since there is enough legacy software that needs x86, and gaming prefers it. The only thing that could change this, would be MS pushing more development efforts into ARM. However, I think this is unlikely, considering the direction they appear to be going with Windows 11.
Some criminals realize that the price wasn't worth the crime. If the cost of the crime is too low to actually change behavior though, then it will almost always simply result in a return to the original criminal behavior, once the social sanction costs expire.
It's been about a generation since IE. I'm sure this MS overstep will go by the same playbook.
The number of reader upvotes or downvotes does not correlate with the veracity of the observation.
Especially when it involves the CCP.
On a side note, you should probably learn English better before posting in an English language tech forum. Your attempts at insults are making everyone laugh, because they are either meaningless or just plain silly.
Cheers.
That's not really true. Maintaining an environment in which business can be conducted, has value of its own, and has been recognized as such since the first organized markets rented out stalls in the Neolithic. What can be observed with dead certainty, is that 'value' is always extant, when one person is willing to pay someone else for it. What the thing is that gets paid for, is not always so cut and dried though. It can be hard goods, services, or even a chance at the possibility of future profit. Humans are insanely creative when it comes to figuring out how to make a profit.
Once the unwashed masses have correctly identified that technology is indeed magic, it should come as no surprise to anyone, that they suspect the intent of the evil sorcerers behind it all. Their only mistake of course, is related to WHICH magic is causing the problem.
I am somewhat hopeful that the benefits of the shared memory design and increased internal bandwidth could be utilized by Linux in the same way as MacOS does it. But the problem here, is that the M1 (and subsequent) chip hardware is tuned for Apple's software pretty specifically. One of the reasons why I am interested in the Linux reverse engineering, is to see how much of that theoretical hardware advantage could be used by another, different software approach. It's not a slam dunk. But it does show promise.
It's not volume alone that determines sales success. It's profit per unit sales. For reference, see Chanel. Or Porsche.
I suppose the utilitarian view of the computer as a machine, which those of us at The Reg can espouse since we generally use whatever is thrown at us, would simply assess capabilities and compare the cost to obtain them within each ecosystem. But consumers don't generally do that. They want a curated, premium experience, and will buy based upon that criterion.
Apple delivers on that.
Since the desktop is no longer where most consumers do their computing, by far the most important thing to them is ease of use with their watches, phones, intelligent houses, and cars. In this competition, which you can see with Apple Car Play, Apple watches, and Apple phones, they have a reasonable amount of success.
So despite the desktop OS per se not holding a great percentage of the desktop market, the ecosystem which it created, has a very large percentage of mindshare. And that's what's important.
Since there is little cost to sending another invite to the Zoom meeting, I find myself roped into many things that wouldn't justify taking admin people out of their offices in the past. This does mean many more people can hear the important bits of new plans and ideas than would have been possible before. But the best thing, is that I can be officially present for the 5% of the time I'm really needed, and snoring loudly for the rest. I love it.
Just a note: herbal teas don't actually keep you awake. But they ARE yummy.
I'm very interested in learning more about this 'leveraging into the client' business. Is there a video demonstrating the appropriate procedure? And just to be safe, is this something I can watch at work, or should I wait until I get home behind locked doors?
You are wrong.
Here's some propaganda for you:
1.) Over 502,000 people have died in America from this pandemic.
2.) More people in the US have died from COVID19 than all the US deaths in WWII.
3.) About five times more died here from COVID19, than all the US deaths in WWI.
4.) Almost ten times more have died here from COVID19, than all the US deaths in Vietnam.
Clearly, COVID19 is not a negligible hazard.
As an academic physician who is here because he dabbles in theoretical computing and simple network stuff, I don't usually comment on such idiotic spew as you have here inflicted upon us, but this is right out there. I am now, currently, taking care of these people in hospital who are the ones dying. And they are not only old people ready to die anyway. One recent victim here was a 35 yo colleague who had just been married a month before. A triathlete actually.
Please refrain from your non-scientific pandemic denial conspiracy theories, if you expect anyone to take you seriously. It is at very least in poor taste, if not downright offensive.
Theoretically, any organization which has large real holdings, could back an electronic currency with those real holdings. Think the 'Spice' in Dune. Although the world doesn't use gold formally anymore, any valuable enough commodity could be used to back it. Maybe potable water will be the next real good backing currency. Considering climate change, it may become shortage-driven sooner than most people realize.
The banks are counting on the certainty of a very short memory in the public. Just remember how easily they convinced regulatory agencies and even Congress that no one needed the Glass-Steagall Act in the US. It's like mom and the cookie jar. As long as the incentive remains, attempts to subvert economic safety systems will occur. Regardless of the state of the law. And because electronic banking systems have the largest potential for illicit gain, any new technology will likely result in a certain number of successful breaches before the system is hardened, or it is found to be unworkable. Which of those two endpoints will be reached in this case, is at the present indeterminate.
While I definitely agree that the evolution of legal control of internet personal data is more respectful of human rights in the EU than in NA, I'm afraid that it's somewhat a specious distinction to separate the US and the EU in regards to their internet 'model'. We are at a moment in history, where the liberal democracy impulse toward globalization (and thus the regime of internet control advocated by the US and all European liberal democracies) is being challenged by alternative models of global integration. (Most notably authoritarian dictatorships of various species.) Unless and until THAT challenge is resolved politically, then the control of all means of electronic communications will simply become increasingly fragmented and confined to the relative spheres of influence of those socio-economic competitors. This is a logical inevitability. There is no technological answer to political disagreements. That is a conceit which technocrats seemingly still believe, despite decades of evidence that it simply isn't true. Amazingly.
Yeah. The argument that 'a law was broken' is, morally speaking, a pretty weak justification for the determination of the reasonableness of any given governmental action. The rationale of the law in question, as well as its primary and secondary effects, have to be accounted for, because the only legitimate laws, are those promulgated by the consent of the governed. So if they abrogate that standard, they are, ipso facto, illegitimate. I think in both this case, and even more so in the case of Edward Snowden, the alleged 'crime' was more rubbing the government's nose in its own dirt, than anything else. In my opinion, the general public hasn't been given enough details in either case to assent to their designation as 'criminal' based upon demonstrated damage to that public.
Of course, I still think Assange is an ass. But that's beside the point.
80%-20% rule. 80% of the population are of significantly limited cognitive function, and not to be trusted with sharp objects or life and death decisions. The remaining 20% struggle to keep everyone alive and functioning, whilst constantly under assault by those very semi-undead zombies surrounding them, who mistakenly believe that they understand what they are about, and try to 'help improve security' by random acts of self-defeating frippery.
It has ever and always been this way.
Although despair isn't a universal reaction to this fact, it is a common one.
And typically no one documents the document functions either. It's all 'put it it in and see if it outputs correctly' on the design. Then when parameters are shifted, or something goes out of bounds, no one even knows that the bloody thing is orders of magnitude off. I feel like someone just affixed panniers to a unicycle, and is selling it as a viable transcontinental adventure bike. Gads.
Well, putting this idea forward does have the secondary side effect of encouraging ISP's to get rid of data limited plans that have no basis in the economics of their provision (fibre as opposed to satellite, for instance) because if they figure this out, then they can also sell ubiquity of the connection, and further monitor user behavior, which is one of the things they sell now. So if they are interested in that, they may figure out a way to require it as a term-of-service for connectivity. At which point consumer objections become moot.
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