* Posts by gnasher729

2106 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Oct 2014

Intel's $699 Core i9-14900KS turbos to 6.2GHz – assuming you can keep it cool

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: time travel

AMD also just changed their part numbers. Intel built a 2.6 GHz chip, AMD built a 2 GHz chip and named it “AMS 2600”.

Legal eagles demand $6B in Tesla stock after overturning Musk's mega pay package

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Biased Judge Kathaleen McCormick ..

I think the proposed pay package was about 50 times higher than that of Tim Cook, who has during his career increased the market capps of Apple by about 3 trillion dollars. So I think we can say with rather good conscience that Elon Musk wasn't anywhere near worth the sucggested pay package.

Trump 'tried to sell Truth Social to Musk' as SPAC deal stalled

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: How much?

If Twitter is worth $44 bn, then anything claiming to tell the truth is worth at most minus 10 billion.

What a surprise! Apple found a way to deliver browser engine and app store choice

gnasher729 Silver badge

What “standards” are you talking about?

gnasher729 Silver badge

Obviously a phone bought by an Italian living in Italy all his life and used in Italy should have access, and a phone bought by an American etc. shouldn’t. So there must be a switch somewhere. That could be exposed in the UI.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: I welcome that walled garden... have you seen the mess outside?

Why should Apple pay to keep your phone safe from apps where apple didn’t benefit from the sale?

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

gnasher729 Silver badge

Getting it right is easy. Figuring out what you need to get right is hard. Someone reported their software calculated “average revenue for the last 5 years” and failed on Feb 29th in leap years because “5 years before today” didn’t exist.

Now imagine they wanted “average revenue for the last four years”. The difference is that the date “four years before today” will always exist until Feb 29th 2104. That’s the first time when “for years before a leap year” is not a leap year.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

The 25 microseconds is the precision with which we can determine “highest position of sun above Greenwich”. In that time the Earth at Greenwich moves about 1cm below the sun. What actually is measured is the position of some quasars in the middle of the night.

Earth rotation speed is off by 0 to 4 or do milliseconds every day; that determines how the difference between UTC and UT1 changes. That can be 100 times more in a day. Plus the 25 microseconds are not cumulative. They don’t add up. Every day we get the exact UT1 date with an error of +/- 25 microseconds.

So if you really want Earth rotation as the basis, ut1 gives you that within 25 microseconds, UTC is off up to 0.9 seconds.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Because in 1582 the leap years that had been removed had shifted the seasons by 11 days.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Simple question: Does my lease expire within the next year? Solution: Take today’s date. Add one year. Compare with expiry date. If the expiry date is before (today plus one year) then it will expire in less than a year.

Except on Feb 29th 2024 “calculate one year from now” fails.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

Removing leap seconds is actually reasonable.

There are two reasonable time systems: Solar time where the sun is at its highest above Greenwich exactly at noon every single day. Which can be measured within 25 microseconds. And atomic time, where each second lasts exactly one SI second, within a few nanoseconds every year. Currently 37 seconds ahead of solar time.

UTC is a perversion that tries to match up atomic time and solar time. Every time atomic time goes too far ahead of solar time they insert a leap seconds. So you get a mix of solar time before the decimal point and atomic time to the right of the decimal point. With solar time you get the time within 25 microseconds without problems. Atomic time gives you the time within nanoseconds. With UTC getting the time within a second is hard.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

I bet the problem was that the same day in the previous or next year doesn’t exist.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

Your downvotes come from the fact that years divisible by 400 (not 1000) are leap years. And getting it right is important because if I see code that fails on this trivial problem, how can I trust the developer to get anything at all right?

gnasher729 Silver badge

That was interesting. Stupid worked. Clever worked. The halfwits in between failed. In 2100 the halfwits will be fine, only stupid will fail.

And my prediction is we will get rid of utc. Only solar time to keep things working, and atomic time with 37 seconds offset for precision. Posix time will be solar time.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

The company I worked at at the time had a Feb 2nd, 2000 problem. The root cause was utter stupidity but everything was fine up to that day. That wasn’t an edge case. I bet the problem was “todays+/-1 year is a valid date”.

Apple gets in on the AI PC hype, claims fanless M3 MacBook Air is fab for LLMs

gnasher729 Silver badge

There are some more differences: One is hardware compression. If you run out of memory, memory first gets compressed with basically zero cost. That lets you work without swapping to disk until you use much more than the available RAM. Say 10 instead of 8 GB. This also makes swapping a bit faster, because you write and read caressed data.

Then the fact that you are swapping to a very fast SSD so a few GB swspping doesn’t slow you down. And last because the processors are fast you can be much more aggressive removing say decompressed images.

EU-turn! Now Apple says it won't banish Home Screen web apps in Europe

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: "We have received requests"

USB-C: Just today my niece couldn’t charge her new iPhone because she didn’t bring her charger and she has USB-C which doesn’t work with my wife’s lightning cable.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: "We have received requests"

My iPhone battery is easily replaceable. I take the phone to the nearest Apple Store, pay my money, and get my phone back with a new battery. And a good chance the old one doesn’t end up in the landfill.

If you meant “user replaceable”: That has several problems. First it means “user damageable”. Second it means huge problems keeping the phone waterproof. Third huge risk of users buying Chinese rubbish (note that China builds both very fine 4TB SSD drives and fake “4TB” drives with a 64 Mbyte chip inside, and I expect the same for batteries). Next, a user replaceable battery needs more free space around it and therefore has less capacity. Fifth, all friends and relatives will come and ask _me_ to replace their iPhone batteries. Thanks, but no thanks.

gnasher729 Silver badge

That’s quite ignorant. PWAs have a lot of capabilities that could be abused if not prevented by the browser. And Safari prevents that kind of abuse (and if it doesn’t, apple will fix it), while other browsers have no motivation to do that.

Apple's Titan(ic) iCar project is dead as self-driving dream fails to materialize

gnasher729 Silver badge

Where do you get that from? My next MacBook will be z as n M5Nax refurbished. In four years time.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: I don't get it either

30 or 40 years ago some Mercedes cars had a footbrake instead of a handbrake. If you don’t know that you are literally stuck.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: I don't get it

Nobody other than some techie’s care about prioritising between the driver and bystanders when a deer runs in the road. Which no human driver would be capable of doing.

And the techies don’t see the simple solution. Which is that the deer gets it. Sorry, Bambi.

Apple makes it official: No Home Screen web apps in European Union

gnasher729 Silver badge

If Apple said “We did the maths. Making PWAs working securely with all browsers will cost us X dollars and doesn’t benefit Apple in any way. Stopping PWAs from working completely will annoy some customers, who may stop buying iPhones in the future, costing as Y dollar. Making PWAs work with Safari only is no effort but will get us a Z dollar fine.

We pick the choice with the smallest number. No PWAs for anyone.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: No problem

There must be something in this EU ruling that says exactly what phones it applies to. Could be phones sold in the eu. Could be phones used in the eu so the GPS check would be correct. Could be phones owned by eu residents. Could be phones using a EU App Store. There could be a switch in Settings that must be set on phones sold in the eu and can be changed by the user.

And I would assume that all changes are made in the exact same circumstances.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: No problem

If your employer mandates iOS for your work, that’s what they do. Your employer can’t mandate iOS for your private use.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Did anyone ....

Compliance = equal playing field for all. And that’s what they provided.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Did anyone ....

The problem is not “deeper integration”. The problem is apple needs to know that the browser does nothing insecure. With Safari, apple knows. And if there are problems due to Safari, apple can fix it. For any other browser, apple doesn’t know and can’t fix problems.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Did anyone ....

The required change is equal playing field for all browsers.

These apps worked with safari and were secure. Part of the security came from apple controlling safari so they know it doesn’t anything dodgy. Any other browser, apple would obviously not be secure.

So apple has two choices: move security from browser to api which is difficult and costly. Or stop the api. Apple did the latter. Fully compliant and in the spirit of the judgement. Inconvenient for users.

Apple promises to protect iMessage chats from quantum computers

gnasher729 Silver badge

If any of the conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination had been true, then someone might have written it down, using crypto that took 50 years to break. That information would still be very interesting 50 years later (about now).

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: How long?

If they are a requirement for some folks in government, then unlike lockdown mode where I actually give up functionality, there seems to be no reason not to use this in general?

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Let's Check the Server Room Access Log

Only if you suspect the hardware.

I worked at a place where one day every wax in panic because continuous builds didn’t build. It took two hours trying to get it working until someone decided to go to the server room.

They found a window broken open, and no server.

It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox

gnasher729 Silver badge

Just tried, it now answers with a link to a Wikipedia article. “Moderate success with The Tourists”, not a direct answer.

Siri shows three answers as text, and The Tourists are visible on my screen twice (and Eurythmics are not). Well, would be bad if Siri couldn’t answer this.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: The Landan response: f**k off and do one mate.

“Big IR35 fail” - wouldn’t that affect both the company and the contractor? In one case the client pays salary minus taxes minus ni to the contractors company, and tax plus twice the ni to the inland revenue. So whatever the contractor would have received is income minus tax minus ni, so the real salary was much higher and the company needs to pay it?

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Fire in haste, regret at leisure

You are confusing things. If it’s your stuff (your computer, your hard drive) forgetting the password is no excuse. But it is if it’s someone else’s stuff and you shouldn’t have that password (anymore). Like servers of a company that fired you.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Fire in haste, regret at leisure

“ Careful with that, UK law considers passwords to be the same as physical keys, so they remain the property of your employer. What you are suggesting can land you in the dock for extortion.”

There is the sad, sad story of Nissan motors, Uzi Nissan, and the lawyers.

Uzi Nissan had a small computer shop and registered www.nissan.com. A year later Nissan motors figured out the wanted that url. I would have offered mr Nissan a free Nissan car every four years for the rest of his life. Nissan motors called their lawyers instead.

They f***** it up so much that Mr. Nissan couldn’t use his own URL, Nissan motors couldn’t, and they managed to make it impossible for Mr Nissan to ever sell the URL to Nissan motors. Right now, www.nissan.com is dead.

(Apple was in the same situation once where some small shop had registered a URL that Apple would have lied, totally innocent. Apple sent a cheque for $25,000 and paid all the cost for a new URL and making all IT changes needed. $25,000 unexpected profit for the shop, and much cheaper than getting any lawyers. Or apple had a very good lawyer who charged them one hour for advice and they just followed it).

Now this company needs good lawyers. Not aggressive lawyers who want to bury the opponent, but good lawyers who will find the best way to get the password.

gnasher729 Silver badge

“Currently we use music related names. "A, B, C, C#, D, E, F, G" “

Just a few days ago I found out that path names with a # inside are problematic for use in URLs. Those and paths containing a question mark. Will be confused with queries and fragments.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Being polite is great

In that case: Let her do her thing and then increase the font size. Or add three words to the first sentence.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: "And to this day, the more he dislikes someone, the more polite he is towards them."

A quote I heard: “Never burn bridges. Either leave them standing, or blow them up to smithereens”.

Google Maps leads German tourists to week-long survival saga in Australian swamp

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Only part of the plan

One of my better mishaps was a paper map showing me clearly that i should turn to the left, but I couldn’t see any road there! Got out of the car, looked around, and figured out I was on an overpass, lots of trees on both sides so you didn’t notice, and the road turning to the left was 10 meters below me :-)

gnasher729 Silver badge

Apple Maps says “directions not available due to road conditions at this time”. Some problem shortly before Coen.

Google sends Gemini AI back to engineering to adjust its White balance

gnasher729 Silver badge

Is there actually any evidence of black German soldiers in 1943? Considering that all black people in Germany had their citizenship removed systematically since 1933, and there were not that many black people in the first place?

If you asked for “British voter 1780”, there are zero women and as far as I know exactly one black man. So what kind of drawing do you expect? There were maybe one million voters of which one was black.

gnasher729 Silver badge

That was not AI, that was just facial recognition. And with photography based facial recognition it’s a fact that black faces have less contrast and are harder to recognise. Of course it is embarrassing if you demonstrate your facial recognition to the public and it not only doesn’t recognise black faces, it doesn’t even recognise the presence of the face.

Apples faceID doesn’t use photography but analyses the surface of a face. So it has no problem with dark (low contrast) faces or with makeup / camouflage/ warpaint that makes a face unrecognisable to a human.

Air Canada must pay damages after chatbot lies to grieving passenger about discount

gnasher729 Silver badge

My only success that way was stopping an ad for a penny auction site for a few weeks (writing that I realise they have disappeared completely. What happened?)

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Air Canada must really be terrible

"I can't believe they took this case to court instead of just paying the $1000 or so difference, esp. considering their pathetic justification that the chatbot was its own entity. What idiots."

The people asking for money fall into three categories: Idiots who are just trying it on, people you damaged and that you legally have to compensate, and people that you damaged but for some reason you don't have to compensate them. Appearing in small claims court sorts out the first category. And that is important, because if you pay them, there will be more and more appearing. The other two categories, you just pay because that is cheaper than a defense with a real lawyer, and it's the right thing to do. You might actually turn them back into happy customers.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: re: corporate policy

On the other hand, if that legally worthless sign keeps drivers away from your truck at a reasonable distance, and avoids damages, that's money and annoyance saved for everyone,

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: And if that position was legally defensible

I think in your example there would be no legally binding contract formed. But if I took a taxi to the airport to get my first one-dollar flight and get turned down, they might very well be liable for the cost of the taxi both ways.

But not if I tried it again, because I now would know there is no contract.

Are you ready to back up your AI chatbot's promises? You'd better be

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: They didn't pay damages

No contract was created. Their website provided misinformation which led to damages, and they are responsible for the damages. If you approach a bridge in your car, and ask me if the bridge is safe, and I lie to you and your car ends up in the water, I’m responsible for the damages. I didn’t enter a contract to make the bridge safe.

gnasher729 Silver badge

I don’t think it has anything to do with LLMs making promises. It’s all about what appeared on their website. How it got there (as long as the company is responsible and not done hackers) doesn’t matter.

And I don’t think anything was “legally binding”. They just had to pay for damages that their website caused. So they had to pay for giving the wrong information.

Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: It's a shame

Nobody forced him to enter business with a drugs dealer.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: So, he was just fired ?

I cannot see that at all. An uncle giving a nephew a chance to stop whatever he was doing and do an honest job instead, that’s highly commendable. It’s not as if the nephew was taking anyone’s job away. And then, companies hire people, and sometimes these people are idiots, including idiots committing idiotic crimes.

The weak-minded nephew is gone, most likely for some jail time because the uncles protection would have instantly ended, the receiver was a drugs dealer and not some corporate spy, so little harm done. The owner of the other company will most likely feel sorry for the uncle.