Posts by mevets 426 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Mar 2012
I am not sure what the exact crime was -- fraud or losing money?
It seems that Theranos did almost the exact same thing as Uber -- used investors money to pretend they had a viable service when they didn't.
One difference is that Uber had a sort of business model.
All it needed to do was drive the traditional taxi companies out of business, then could stop *dumping* its services and charge realistic fines.
In effect, the use of investors money transformed from *providing the illusion of a viable product* to *bankrupting the competition in taxi-like services*.
Yet there is no talk of Uber facing *anti-trust* charges for predatory pricing; nor dozens of others that exploited similar strategies.
That they ran extra-ordinary extractions through?
Personally, I don't see how HP having their head so far up their ass they couldn't see they were being scammed is a criminal offence.
I understood that to be *buyer beware* in the land of the free and all that.
However, the idea of corporate malfeasance including a junket in a Syrian torture chamber wouldn't exactly have me coughing up a few more dollars for Amnesty Int.
It would likely be good for freedom everywhere if these assholes understood that their *innovative business idea* might lead to a little waterboarding.
In the article: a retiring bloke with an overactive imagination.
In the comments: A load of still wet behind the ears oo'n and awe'n over regression, determined that it is a new paradigm rather than second year algebra.
In the cheap seats: A load of folks who remember the last time neural nets awed, over promised, and crashed like a dot com.
I am a recovered Catholic; but with my Irish heritage, a recovered Cat Lick.
The institution of enforced chastity had nothing to do with morality.
The key problem was that the serfs were set to have the first (male) inherit the lot; the second goes to service the army of the (land)lord; and the third goes to the church.
Process wise, the second almost always died before the parents.
So the inheritance was split between the primary, tertiary, and surviving others.
The one given to the church's family would process inheritance in a similar fashion.
This hurt the church's reach, so preventing the priest from having a family insured that all inheritance eventually fell into the church.
It is a nice example of how, despite so much evidence, the church isn't stupid. They are just playing a different game than you.
And you thought MicroSoft were evil.
It is very nice of Stanford professor Jeffery Pfeffer to take up the cause of an obligation to the health and welfare of workers.
Surely the fine professor knows that in the USA, the only obligation is to the wealth of the shareholders.
In this case, where it appears Facebook's 3d fantasies are beating the drum of the death march, they only have a few choices.
Abandon metaverse, or cut liabilities.
Has there ever been a popular activity that requires wearing *disco-bondage headgear* ( to quote the late, great, Johnny Fever) ?
Ok, skiing, snorkling, motorcycling, racing, ... -- but in all those cases, the headgear is necessary for one of safety, survival, comfort or screening bugs.
It is an astounding result; but the editorial here seems a bit much. Unless I've misread the paper.
Each test subject is scanned looking at each image several times as part of a training set.
Then each test subject is shown some images again, and the machine determines the image they are looking at.
If a given subject, subj01 does not participate in forming the training set, then the machine can't recognize what they are looking at.
At least, the paper does not allude that it can, and I'm pretty sure it would have been in the title if it could.
The paper also doesn't claim whether it is a per test subject training set, or one big one for everybody.
While the core complexity wouldn't really change, the shear data, computational power and utility would be higher.
Cool project though. I'm jealous.
I guess their muskiness wouldn't like the competition. Bing Bot has been identified (https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/17/microsoft_ai_bing_problems/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/microsoft_ai_bing_error/ ) as being a sort of virtual Elon Musk -- a prejudiced media whore with a general disdain for facts and decency. A dickhead.
Do they need a version cast in the image of their idols: D Trump; J Peterson; A Tate; rather than them-self.
"...many of you still continue to think Microsoft is the Evil Empire..."
Lets flip that:
" a few of you still don't know how truly awful Microsoft was, and most likely is..."
Until a measure of what evil vs virtuous becomes available, we have another stat.
MicroSoft applied illicit measures which set the software industry back by 20 to 30 years.
So, by 2040, assuming the trough ended with Balmer, we can set Microsoft to neutral.
Providing they don't continue with their assholery, which I think they already breach a dozen times since End Of Balmer.
I had assumed that the rise in bling-y IRC in corporate communications was to circumvent the email retention rules outlined in Sorbanes Oxley.
It seems the wily legislatures hadn't heard of chat or even usenet.
I remember when the act passed, the CEO of Sun gave an internal radio talk on the importance of knowing what your management would have wanted you to do, thus just do it and don't put it in an email. Great times...
I can pay Apple some sort of Developer Tax to put whatever I want on my phone.
An open source browser could be built and installed by anybody with one of these licenses.
If google open source this, a whole pile of people could use it (* gasp *) even on their apple TVs...
So Please Google; I promise I'll stop making fun of your lousy search, geo-location, voice rec, etc....
Did we learn that Alaskan Air Space was penetrable by Ballons (or rather objects flying slowly at that altitude) ?
That British Columbia either didn't notice or were too stoned to think it was real isn't much of a surprise.
Suddenly knee jerk at the lower 48 may be revealing something.
Is there some sort of collective that sell their electronic goods for cost plus a reasonable margin?
That is the business model of the Mennonite and Amish communities; but is there a technology equivalent?
Do Samsung, LGE, ... sell for a reasonable price because they are community minded, or is viability?
The problem with price is not the producer that sets it. If there is a problem, it lies with the consumer who accepts it.
Yeah, sorry, I didn't realize there was a difference between "make" and "manufacture". But from my reading, I can order a:
MacBook Air M1
MacBook Air M2
MacBook Pro 13" M2
MacBook Pro 14" M1-Pro/8+14
MacBook Pro 14" M1-Pro/10+16
MacBook Pro 16" M1-Pro/10+16
MacBook Pro 16" M1-Max/10+32
MacBook Pro 16" M1-Max/10+32 (*)
IMac M1 M1/8+7
IMac M1 M1/8+8
IMac M1 M1/8+8 (*)
Mac Mini M1/8+8
Mac Mini M1/8+8 (*)
Mac Studio M1-Max/10/24/16
Mac Studio M1-Max/20/48/32
Mac Pro 8086/8-28 + 1.5TB
Mac Pro 8086/8-28 + 1.5TB (*)
Which is actually 17. Sorry, ran out of fingers. The ones with (*)'s seemingly have similar base specs, but are separate modes because < who cares >; they are separate devices.
I can only imagine what segregates one dell laptop from another; perhaps the box, or the colour coded audio and video connectors?
Older versions? So it only counts if a company makes a new product in the last 1, 3, 6, 12 months? In that case Dell is shit out of luck. It is still selling ancient shit with whichever tray it can beg off of intel. It arguably has one product.
Of course it is terrible of apple to have some sort of standardization. I suppose that is what happens when you control manufacturing quality instead of slapping a badge on whatever piece of whitebox crap you can buy from alibaba.
That is a key insight. They only make:
- computers 4 flavours
- laptops 8 flavours
- tablets,12 flavours
- cell phones, 16 flavours
- direct ear buds, 2 flavours
- bluetooth ear buds, 2 flavours
- bluetooth other head phones (beats), ? flavours
- bluetooth can head phones
- home speakers, multiple flavours
- tv streaming box, multiple flavours
- wheels for big ass computers (???)
- monitors
- stands for monitors
It is pretty dramatic, compared to say 1980:
- computer
or 1990:
- computer, 2 flavours
or 2000:
- computer, 3 flavours
or 2010:
- computer, 4 flavours
- mp3 player
- cellphone
,,,,
There is a lot to slag apple for; maybe most of all for having too many products.
How F*ing dare anyone out there make fun of Siri after all she's been through.
She lost her audio chip, she went through a rehost. She has two fuckin clones.
Her AI turned out to be a luser, a stupid, and now she's going through an integrity battle. All you people care about is... readers and making money off of her.
SHE'S A VOICE-BASED-ASSISTANT! (ah! ooh!) What you don't realize is that SIRI is making funny you all english this, and all you do is write a bunch of crap about her.
I like big text. I like having a large hi-resolution screen rendering beautiul large fonts so I can pretend this shit isn't as awful as it is. If this display technology ever catches up to reflective matte print on paper, I will be its biggest fan. I will switch back to 12 pt text.
But displays are still crap; e-paper is in a neck and neck race with linux to take over the desktop in ( $current.year - 2000 ) years from now; and modern software is abysmal.
While pdf / ps / di / ... all have their limitations; spend a day with your default font size switched to 16 or 18 on everything -- your computer ( + apps like firefox that gloriously ignore system defaults ); your i/a/? - phone & pad.
How well do things work?
Apple's setup.app on i-devices is the funniest; switch the font size, and piles of your settings become unreachable because they are rendered off the screen, with no scrolling ability. I would have been truly joyful if it made it impossible for you to switch the font size for this reason. Maybe the next update, which is likely in hours....
So, yes, please, clever *designers* or whatever pretentious title you prefer this week; make PDF, PS, ... obsolete. But not just by saying it.
There is a scene in an episode of MASH where Major Burns is lecturing on the strategy of Romel; and Hawkeye slyly notes, ' so now we are taking advice from the losers ? `
At what point does anybody from MicroSoft think they can advise anybody on anything about secure programming, design, not being a complete dip shit, and not making really really shitty software?
I took it on a general OK that RUST was likely pretty good. Now that MS thinks its good; I have to re-evaluate my preconceptions.
Everything MS touches turns to shit.
Of all the health concerns somebody who surgically implants a car key into their body obviously faces, the inability to get an MRI is pretty far down the list. Closer to the top include impulse-control-disorder, possibly paraphilic disorder, and NOS-self harm disorder. (SDM-V; but i-ANAS)
Nor the people that were properly prescribed the medicine. Being available on only a prescription basis, any clown that couldn't find a bent physician had to scoff it from the local feed store. Bill Gates, of course, knew this, and had it laced with micro control sensors i80666 to fulfill his evil plans.
The real victim here is satire. I don't really give a horse tranquilizer for what inanity some folks are driven to; but to boldly adopt such a humourless stance is just deplorable. People who have strength in their convictions do not bristle and gentle needling. Reactionary behavior is very much linked to insecurity.
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