Posts by gnasher729 2112 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Oct 2014
So my understanding is that you want to treat it as RAM. Probably your normal RAM becomes L4 cache and you could run your software unchanged. Except you throw your database out and keep your data in RAM. And Word doesn’t save documents anywhere but keeps them in RAM.
Until your app crashes. Then you have to restart it and it needs to be restarted so that it’s fine with all documents and the database in the same place. Not really that difficult. Could be made to work.
But then… what price?
We had one of the first colour laser printers in our office. Canon, a monster weighing 350 pounds.
They had tried to talk to various governments about how to design bank notes that couldn’t be copied, but apparently nobody wanted to listen to them.
(They can’t copy water signs, can’t copy transparent materials, and have huge problems with lots of very fine wavy lines).
In the UK, there are about 1.1 million different postcodes for (rough guess) 30 million households. So on average 30 households per postcode. There are also databases for all house numbers and house names per postcode, but I don’t think they have locations.
As far as the “3 feet” is concerned: I once went to a hotel and ended up 3 feet behind the fence at their back garden. Was almost a mile from there to the front entrance.
When you say that… A few days ago my wife couldn’t pay in a cheque with her Barclays banking app. So I tried it on my phone, couldn’t do it either. Googled it, instructions say click here, click there, the select “pay in check”.
I call Barclays support. The very friendly and competent lady says “I’ll try this” and 10 seconds later “the option is gone on my phone as well”. I said thank you very much, I’ll try it again later, and made her promise to tell her developers not to _rrmove_ a button when they have problems but disable it.
Few hours later it worked again.
I have seen one situation where this makes sense: IBM selling servers with say 2, 4, 6, or 8 cores; you pay for what you need today, and if your business grows and you’d need an upgrade, you just pay for activating two more cores.
The alternative for the customer would be to find someone willing to buy a used 2 core server, buying a new 4 core server, and transferring everything over - substantially more expensive. So the guys insisting “I was given a server with 8 servers, I can activate the remaining six without paying” can be told “if you insist, then we stop selling that way, and everyone loses”.
Now let’s say BMW charged £500 for heated seats. And it costs £100 to put in a deactivated heated seat. (You think they are ripping you off? Tough to be you then). That means I can turn the heated seats on in my new BMW for £500, same cost as before. BMW saves money by needing to build only one model. And without the heating built in, changing your mind would cost significantly more or be impossible.
So overall this could be beneficial for the customer. Especially if you didn’t want the heating, and 3 years later you want to sell your used car to someone who insists on heated seats. No problem.
It looks like Apple is at least pretending to be taking this seriously. Did you know that iPhone chips run at 2,500 MHz and TSMC has stopped shipping any chips over 25MHz to Russia?
I wonder if they have a competition between their junior lawyers who can send the most underhanded reply to Russia. Sending the address of a bank in Cupertino together with a map would be a nice move.
Seems there is _someone_ with real OCD. Probably hiding under the table when I mentioned 10GB or 20GB RAM.
I actually have an old MacBook Pro with 10GB. Bought the cheapest model with 4GB, two chips, replaced one with a third party 8GB, making it 10GB. Hope that doesn’t make anyone’s head explode.
You need to think a little bit further.
Apple created a family of chips, named M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max and M1 Ultra. Each a lot more powerful, bigger and expensive than the previous one, using the same technology. The Ultra is twice as powerful, twice as big, and twice as expensive because it’s literally two Max chips.
Now they started a new family. The first one, the M2, is ready. It’s a slightly improved low-end chip (and low-end is very relative). The technology is a bit better, all in all about 25%. Nowhere near the M1 Pro. But the next chips will be M2 Pro, M2 Max and M2 Ultra.
And then they will release a slightly improved chip and call it M3 (with M3 Pro, Max and Ultra following), and so on.
On the M2, the highest possible performance is higher than on M1 with higher power usage. But it can also deliver the same performance as the M1 with lower power.
So if you run M1 and M2 at full power, the M2 will run faster and throttle earlier. But throttled it can still produce the same performance as M1 for longer.
Client side encryption, plus not sending or receiving messages that are deemed illegal without further action, and a way for the user to check and send something they believe is marked incorrectly. Like a picture of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus that could easily be mistaken for something else.
Well, what they do isn’t really difficult to implement. Instead of protecting say your mail app from bugs in the processing of a gazillion different attachments, attachments other than images are just disabled. And I could imagine that only the most popular image types will be supported so your phone is easily protected against bugs in the processing of a gazillion obscure image formats as well.
My favourite was a script that was supposed to test if a date was valid that broke on Feb. 2nd, 2000. It turned out that it was never given an invalid date, and the script was totally brain damaged and checked whether the date contained the digit 1.
Many years ago I worked at the German inland revenue for a few months. In the postal department. Their job was to open letters and put them into piles to send them to the right people.
That was three or four people 40 years ago when everything was done by mail. They were the only people in the whole office opening letters. Today, you could take one man or woman, a fast scanner and a good address book, and no problem. All letters in the right email.
I did write instructions once how to set up the environment for a new software developer. It assumed that you started with a Mac inside its box. And it started with the instruction to follow all instructions and produce a new setup document including all changes the had to make because the instructions were only used once a year or so.
It’s too late for regulations.
The principle of Bitcoin is that money paid out equals money paid in, minus losses from the cost of producing, buying and selling Bitcoin, minus the cost of outright fraud. That’s the simple math, and there is no way to get around it.
So by protecting future victims you just punish the ones who are already victimised.
I’ve seen a complete delete feature twice: One, Apple’s “Time machine” allows you to remove a file from all backups. Two, Perforce, the source code control system, has a command “obliterate” if I remember right, that will remove a file completely from source control. Very useful if you commited all your passwords by mistake, or if you have a megabyte video and someone checked in the 4GB original.
No, you have enough to _pretend_ to be the rightful owner. If you make a mistake, and you send a DMCA notice to take down Abby's Greatest Hits of an unknown singer when you own Abba's Greatest Hits, that's a mistake with no consequences. But if you pretend that you have the copyright or represent the copyright holder of Abby's Greatest Hits when you don't, that's perjury. Jail time. Remember that you can't file an anonymous DMCA request.
The ruling makes absolute sense.
When a website gets a DMCA notice, then it can just take the post down, and that’s it. They might not even know who posted without detective work, so that should be fine.
Or they could tell the poster, which is a nice thing to do, so at least they know why their post is gone. The poster could send a counter notice which the site can ignore, at this point there is still absolutely no reason why the website should give any info out.
Only if the poster sends a counter notice that the site uses to restore the post, that’s the poster effectively telling the copyright owner “you stink, I dare you to sue me”. That should only happen if the poster gives his name and contact information and that should be passed on, because at this point there should be a court case. (Maybe the website should have to pass on this info if the copyright holder actually goes to court. )
Why iPhone? The real use would be inside a MacBook
MacBooks are full to the brim, but an sd card is tiny and should be made to fit. Now MacBooks come with ssd drives that are bloody fast and bloody expensive. But I don’t need a 2TB ssd drive that is bloody fast. A 512 or possibly 256 GB of bloody fast SSD, with 0.5, 1.0 or 1.5 TB of a bloody slow and dirt cheap SD card would be absolutely fine for me and for many people. Now take Apple’s “fusion” software and you don’t have to worry where things are stored. Looks like one drive. With everything you use daily bloody fast, and long term storage slow.
I always wonder if someone is ever going to use powerful computers to improve the sound. Take just an iPhone; GPUs capable of gazillions of floating point operations per second, and AI chips even more powerful, that should be good enough to take raw input from the players needle, and fix all sound problems easily.
I have two CDs with piano music where the source material is a 40s radio recording (that is someone sitting there with a microphone held to the radio speakers). It should be possible to reconstruct the sound from that, how it would have sounded in the same room with the piano. At a less awful source, take any sixties recording which has just awful sound quality.
“Are you sure” questions are daft. It doesn’t matter whether I’m sure or not, and if it mattered the buttons should be “yes” or “no”. Instead it should say “Press “keep” to keep the booking. Press “remove” to remove the booking” with a “keep” and a “remove” button.
(I’ve done a lot of MacOS development, and there “Cancel” means without exception “Remove the dialog or alert, and continue as if the user had never taken the action causing the dialog to be shown”. Since this conflicts with “cancel” meaning “cancel the booking”, “cancel” cannot be used at all. )
In one very widely used software, the user at some point had two options. Neither made sense to me. The help text for each made me say “WTF”. Investigation showed that A was what 99% of users would need, and B would be right in 1% of the cases. I added “use A unless your admin tells you to use B” to the help text.
What apple proposed didn’t need to decide. Before uploading a picture onto iCloud (Apples servers, so they have a right not to want some images on there), your phone would scan an image and say it looks dodgy. It tells you and shows you the image, then you decide whether to upload (because it’s harmless), or whether to upload (because you don’t care it’s illegal), or not to upload (because it’s illegal and you don’t want it outside your phone), or to delete it (because it’s dodgy, you have no idea how it got on your phone, and you don’t want it).
All the data on an iPhone is accessible. Once the user entered the passcode. I can attach a photo from my photo library to an email. And send it. How is that working if my phone can’t read the photo? So this argument of “getting a foot in” is pointless. Data that my phone can’t read is useless.
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