Posts by Doctor Syntax

US datacenters in for shock as Canada mulls cutting the juice over Trump tariffs

Re: I wonder...

The real problem here is that head of state and head of government are, AFAICS, combined.

Re: How about...

I wonder how that plays with international conventions. However when you decide to tear up international conventions you can't call on them to protect you.

Re: Short term pain for long term gain.

Taking action just provides him with something onto which he can divert blame for the inflation he'll cause. It probably takes more courage, however. I suppose, of course, they could just tell him outright why they're quite happy to let him burn his house down and they're not going to lift a finger to help him nor to hide the fact that he's the arsonist. But I suppose it's beyond a politician anywhere to not be seen to react.

Re: Short term pain for long term gain.

Covid was a gift for the Brexiteers. It confused the issue and even 5 years on they're blaming all our woes on it. The pandemic has gone, Brexit is still here.

Re: Short term pain for long term gain.

I suppose you're covering your eyes and not noticing that the UK has has an economic growth problem. Namely it's stalled.

"GenAI workloads are going to be somewhat resistant to increases in the cost of power overall, given the capex cost of the Nvidia systems themselves at cluster and supercluster scale, and the substantial investment in state-of-the-art datacenter facilities to house and power them. "

Sounds like sunk costs to me.

Re: Erm

The other answer seems to be to make Canadians poorer by adding tariffs to US products. Now he's got somebody to blame for the consequences of his own actions. He'll certainly do that.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

"the artificial hardware requirements are just that"

But necessary to prevent free upgrades when they want everyone to buy a new box just so they also pay for a W11 licence but also allow the more recent purchases to upgrade so they can avoid the class actions they'd be hit with otherwise.

Re: Same story, different year

First post, I see. You joined up just to praise W11?

Re: The only reason to update to Windows 11 is to satisfy Nadella's cost cutting.

"Until Linux offers a unified desktop UI API, backwards compatibility, and ends its ideological hate for commercial software, it won't be able to replace Windows regardless how much Nadella cripples it."

You should give it a try. What is this unified desktop API you're looking for that doesn't exist. What would it let me do that my disktop doesn't currently do? Who are what is this Linux that holds opinions such as idealogical hatred? It's only people who have idealogical hatreds - and it comes steaming out of that sentence I quoted.

Re: Windows 12?

I suspect they're on a permanent downward trend now. There's nobody there with any idea of what an OS should do and what it shouldn't do. That may not be strictly correct but it's obviously the case in marketing and they're calling all the shots.

As to the last, we'll just have to take your word on that.

Re: Elderly like Mint

"They revert back to widows and then, because I appear to be an expert, call me up when they can't do something "

If they revert there's no support. That's the rule. Stick to it.

OTOH my CiL's 50 something Windows-using children find they can use her Zorin if they need to so it's not all youngsters who are stuck.

"saving precious vertical monitor space"

Can't the Windows task bar autohide?

Re: Tune Win11

"if I were travelling to some country like Israel where they routinely scan visitors' computers without permission"

Something like a Chromebook would be the solution to that. Not an actual Chromebook because you'd want to connect to your own server. You could then give one set of credentials to security and use something completely different for work.

Re: Bought a cheap (off amazon) micro pc

To clarify that - just in case you want to send it back. Alternatively set up dual boot. Then occasionally you can boot up the Windows partition so you can point and laugh.

It's work knowing you can update those cheapos. SWMO's own laptop has a dodgy M/B and the W2K era one she's using now is really slow. But I was worrying that something really cheaped out might not have access to a boot menu.

Nope, it's all grist to the mill. Do you really think the Windows division doesn't have sales targets?

Don't underestimate greed. OTOH you may be right. Take a look at what's being swallowed up feeding OpenAI. OTOH again there'll be bonuses tied to overall profits.

Now I've got to listen to that lot again. Especially the barrel.

"IT departments must press the upgrade button rather than pay exorbitant fees for extended support,"

What are the actual of cost of ongoing support compared with buying new H/W to replace kit which is functioning quite satisfactorily? I'm sure MS would prefer to keep what in effect becomes a subscription going as opposed to the one-off price of a W11 "perpetual" licence and will price it accordingly. They win, customers lose a bit, MS's old H/W buddies lose substantially. Once the subscription habit is ingrained W12 can become subscription only.

Ireland's AI minister has never used ChatGPT but swears she'll learn fast

"In 2017, then British Home Secretary Amber Rudd emphasized the need to get people who "understand the necessary hashtags" talking."

She must have mastered her brief. According to Wikipedia she was last seen touting herself as a consultant in cybersecurity. Interesting read there about her early career in finance...

Treating them all with even-handed scepticism would be about right. But maybe it'll really be about making sure the DCs have enough power and collecting the money.

US accuses Canadian math prodigy of $65M crypto scheme

I thought all this sort of thing was the sole purpose of cryptocurrencies.

Call of Duty studio co-founder pleads guilty to crashing drone into firefighting aircraft

Re: He got hosed

"It's called being neighborly."

OP probably forgot such a thing existed. It seems to be rapidly going out of fashion.

Oops.

I hope they gave the goose a good roasting.

He didn't even get charged with the cost of repairs. Maybe that's a separate civil suit.

"Not only is he one of the founders of game developer Treyarch, which was acquired by Activision and became one of the studios behind the Call of Duty franchise, but he's also the president of Skydance Interactive, a Skydance Media subsidiary that develops VR apps and video games for the media giant. Oh - and Akemann also holds a PhD in mathematics from UC Berkeley."

But a bit short in the common sense department.

Amazon's Kuiper secures license to take on Starlink in the UK

Tariffs incoming.

Musk’s DOGE ship gets ‘full’ access to Treasury payment system, sinks USAID

Once the smoke has cleared in 4 years time it might be a good idea for the US to look at their constitution and ask if it needs a few more safeguards built in.

It's common to say of the UK that it doesn't have a written constitution* but it is flexible. At the time America went on its merry way the UK had made a lot of progress in separating the roles of head of state and head of government and continued to do so. The US seems stuck in that past, indeed I'm not sure its as far advanced as the UK was at that time.

* It's not all written in one place but there are a lot of separate Acts of Parliament which together go a long way to amount to one and a whole lot more in court judgments about common law. Fortunately there's enough flexibility left for it to keep evolving.

Re: Idiots took over

If you look at Trump's declared ambitions re Canada, Greenland & Panama canal the only real difference between that and Putin's active ambitions re Ukraine is the breadth of the grasp.

Make that an entrance exam for candidates. Add a criminal record and financial history check as well.

"Are the majority in the middle?"

Not necessarily. It was thought that proportional representation in N Ireland would favour moderates. What happened was the two extremist parties ended up carving up the spoils between them sharing government.

"the IRS, an out-of-control body that is a law unto itself"

This is characteristic of all tax-collecting bodies.

Not even Nvidia's Jensen Huang can talk President Tariffs out of chip import taxes

Re: Regularly bouncing the stock market

The Underpants Gnomes?

As Trump slugs Canada, Mexico and China with tariffs, industry groups hope trade war weapon isn’t pointed at their feet

“push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more.”

That could backfire. Tariffs on digital services. Requirement for data sovereignty. All pretty obvious I'd have thought.

Re: 'de minimis' exemptions are gone too

"products that are avoiding duties that should be paid, drugs, illegal weapons, illicit archaeological items, products derived from protected species, etc."

They'll all get through provided payments are made.

"no doctor wants to lose a paying patient"

At least, not in the current quarter.

"Yes it would hurt, but it would make Trump look like a complete idiot, and that's worth something."

No. It would give Trump a chance to blame somebody - everybody - else. The sensible thing would have been to do nothing at all, let the increased prices take their toll with nobody to blame but himself. Now he can point to all these other countries being nasty to the poor old US.

Nobody imposes tariffs on other countries. They impose them on their own residents who buy the products of those other countries. Governments allegedly imposing tariffs on the US should remember that. But hysteria is catching.

Re: It's all in how you look at it

"Where in the world has the money and the population to buy the $25bn of expensive German cars that previously went to the US?"

They might not be badly affected. Top end markets are always willing to pay silly money.

Privacy Commissioner warns the ‘John Smiths’ of the world can acquire ‘digital doppelgangers’

"this is only an Australian problem"

You think so?

AFAIK the ID checking was farmed out to a credit checking outfit - I can't remember which one - so he may have had other problems arising from that situation.

Re: Tough Problem

They weren't twins who'd been given the same name, were they?

(I have seen that in a baptismal register. It may have been that the family were still following the traditional practice of letting the godparents choose the name.)

2 officers bailed as anti-corruption unit probes data payouts to N Irish cops

Re: Decades in the 1990s

"and eventual partition"

Without partition, of course, there'd undoubtedly have been an extremely bloody war of secession.

"Police's data is considered especially sensitive in Northern Ireland, where many officers never reveal their job or role, even to family members, because of the tension with local Irish nationalists who do not believe the region should be under British control."

When I lived there I reckoned on the risks coming equally from the prods and would expect they still do.

FuriPhone FLX1: A Debian-powered brick that puts GNOME in your back pocket

"It means that the FuriPhone can run thousands more apps than a pure Debian phone"

I wonder how many of those thousands are not leaching data, insecure, depending on long and dubious supply chains etc.

UK biz dept overspent by £208M prepping to pay workers hurt in Post Office IT scandal

Re: The wheels of British so-called justice turn extremely slowly

1. If the defendant has (been coerced into) pleading guilty then neither judge nor jury has any role in reaching a verdict. As some of the victims were in that position why are you blaming judges in those cases?

2. If the defendant pleads not guilty and opts for a jury trial it is the jury, not the judges who reach a verdict.

3. If the defendant pleads not guilty and opts for a summary trial then it is the judge's role to reach a verdict. That verdict can only be based on the evidence put before the court. I'm only familiar with judge-only trials in the so-called Diplock procedure in NI. There the judge gave a fully reasoned verdict, based on the evidence.

4. I'm not sure as to the balance between 2 & 3 but I'm sure someone with a handle like VoiceOfTruth will be able to provide authoritative figures on this despite the lapse in knowledge about court procedure..

5. Whatever the form of trial the judge's role is to remain impartial, and not imagine what they think the evidence should have been in areas where they have no technical knowledge. Thank goodness,

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

"is it a good thing ?"

No. Can't you get a crash helmet that's just a crash helmet any more?

Toothbrush porn?

Re: You should never need to reboot a machine.

If it was a 360 shouldn't that have been IPL?