* Posts by BlokeInTejas

54 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Mar 2016

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Intel's processor failures: A cautionary tale of business vs engineering

BlokeInTejas

Re: "underinvestment in critical manufacturing technologies"

Nah. Inmos UK wasn't 'engineering-led'.

It was driven by a vision, not by engineering.

The vision - that all systems were naturally concurrent and could be best and most efficiently executed on concurrent hardware - could well be true. But the actual implementation of the early transputers became uncompetitive fairly quickly, and the next-gen t9000 was much too late probably because it was much too complex. This complexity I'd attribute mainly to the choice of a stack-based architecture rather than a register-based one and on the lack of competent management at the UK end. But in any case, though the t800 was competitive with available RISC processors, it fell behind almost immediately, and because of choices (no cache, no page-based VM) it couldn't be used for systems which needed a UNIX-like OS. So it missed workstations initially and later the PC/Mac market.

Further, the insistence that the things be programmed in Occam was a major barrier to adoption.

Not to say there weren't good things done well - there were. The memory interface; the just give it 5v and a 5MHz clock, the 'if one isn't fast enough use more' scalability, are good examples. And the breaking graphics market provided a major opportunity.

transputers could have been killer GPUs. But alas no.

Twitter loses second head of Trust and Safety under Musk

BlokeInTejas

Re: Content moderation = politics

Strangely, you forgot to mention that the Guardian's owner also pays no (or very little) tax.

And I believe it's no longer a Trust, but a carefully-contrived company.

The first real robot war is coming: Machine versus lawyer

BlokeInTejas

Re: Just like an engineer

What's your problem?

Not knowing what's true or real is just an ordinary part of the human experience.

The generative models have just made it cheaper to construct bucketloads of plausible BS.

But for the past few decades, the West has been drowning in the stuff from the mainstream press, clowns teaching diversity theory etc in the universities, and TV and its analogues.

So - no big change. You couldn't trust anything you saw or read before, and now you can't either.

It's time to reveal all recommendation algorithms – by law if necessary

BlokeInTejas

The fundamental problem is that FB etc are ad-supported.

So you're going to get ads.

The 'recommendation systems' they use are clearly shit.

So you're going to get shit ads.

One day, the advertisers will realize that they're paying waaaay over the odds, and things will calm down.

Then, perhaps, folk will remember that once upon a time they used to pay for a daily newspaper. It, too, had ads, but they were passive and could be ignored.

Even today, some folk subscribe to paper magazines (examples: Stereophile and the Spectator). These too have giant ads. But they're preselected to be relevant (in the case of Stereophile) and mostly harmless (in the case of the Spectator).

Bottom line, if you pay for a 'feed', you'll get less crap ads. Might be time to start re-contemplating the "you get what you pay for".

Python head hisses at looming Euro cybersecurity rules

BlokeInTejas

Re: Something needs to be done to protect consumers

I would agree that if you write and publish some source code, then someone who chooses to use your source (rather than write their own) and include it in a product sold to 'the public' owns the liability for the product.

If they choose to give away the resulting product, then they should have no liability for errors in the product. It was free, they gained no revenue from it. Folk who use that product use it at their own risk.

So llvm, for example, used as is, should not impose liability on the authors (even if they sell tee-shirts and mugs) even if it generates stupendously evil code

The Linux authors are also exempt from liability, even if there's no inter-process protection or the file systems does horrible things to disk drives.

Fred's OK Software Company, however, who sell a data base or a financial package or whatever should be liable for damage arising from the use of their product. Since the product uses Linux to perform some tasks, Fred is liable even for errors in Linux that cause his software to misfunction. He's also liable for such misfunction caused by errors in llvm. And its libraries.

Similarly, Ford is liable for misfunction caused by (I make this up) the steel alloy they use to construct vehicles being out of spec. In general the vendor of the product, should be liable for any and all misfunctions that are attributed to the thing you're selling. True, perhaps the supplier who sold you the imperfect steel needs to make good that problem; but that should be an issue between Ford and the supplier.

When you build a software product on top of or through the use of free (in the "it costs no dollars" sense) then you can't go sue the providers. They're not in business; they **published** the source; you're the one who chose to use it.

Amazon to shutter Digital Photography Review

BlokeInTejas

Completely agree, but I'd generalize a bit: all the Big Name manufacturers are making good stuff. Buy from Sony (my choice, because I started with Minolta), Canon, Nikon, Panasonic/Lumix and you'll generally get an excellent image-maker.

Then indeed the important thing is how does it feel in your hand(s) and how does it feel to operate.

No reliable way to detect AI-generated text, boffins sigh

BlokeInTejas

It really doesn't matter who or what writes stuff.

The Guardian seems to have a never-ending supply of woke idiots who don't understand reality; wouldn't matter much if the articles were written by an LLM.

What matters is whether or not the stuff written is true, or misleading, or incorrect, or badly written.

That can be judged the way we judge such things anyway.

No new problem - except perhaps for the volume of merde. But hopefully one can reduce the merde count (by, for example, not reading the Guardian)

Twitter rewards remaining loyal staff by decimating them

BlokeInTejas

Re: It just got worse (again)

I believe that Mr Adams said that " if the poll results were true then..."

But of course it's much more fun to jump in with knee-jerk "he's a racist" rant than actually think.

Plus, as someone else here has mentioned, folk who do polls generally know what result they want, and word things so they're likely to get them.

The BBC is not a neutral organisation; they have an agenda and they choose and present news that suits that agenda. And you can see the agenda at work, if your quote is accurate, because they left out the important context of "if the poll results were true.."

And of course, when you've already interpreted what someone has said without bothering to check there's no reason whatsoever to go check before uttering bullshit. Just spread the hate, right?

Musk said Twitter would open source its algorithm – then fired the people who could

BlokeInTejas

Re: firing more than half your staff is not a good way to get any software successfully out the door

Fred Brooks said - not says.

But Twitter isn't a project; it's a going concern doing something not enormously difficult - because the machinery is automated. You don't need employees to watch the Tweets coming in, decide whether they're terribly important, and use a mouse to move each tweet into its rightful place in the queue; and nor do you need an individual to take the things on the queue and give them to the Twitter servers. Its software. Once you've got that up and running, you need server monkeys to keep the machinery working - but apparently they've increasing offloaded that to Google and then AWS.

After you've got the small kernel of folk who are needed to keep it all going, all you need is a means to stop people who this week's glitterati detest from having a voice. And the best way of doing that is of course to use the algorithm approved by the federal government. If they have the authority, then they must most certainly be able to describe what should not be said and to offer a reference algorithm which performs as they wish, then all social meeja would be required to run the same algorithm and you don't even need the Karens to stop hurty things that hadn't previously been recognised as hurty from being said.

Of course, then you've got the Feds controlling speech, a situation far too many people think would be just fine. But governments are political, so what's hurty will change with government...

BlokeInTejas

First, it's disappointing to read such rude negativity against an individual.

Second, it's bizarre that so many people seem so well-acquainted with the insides of Twitter's engineering that they **know** that there's no engineering staff left who could open-source Twitter's "algorithm".

Third, it's very strange indeed that the commentaries here are unable to distinguish between "open sourcing the code that Twitter thinks it uses to implement its algorithm" and "open-sourcing the algorithm"

The algorithm is presumably representable in many ways with many implementations in many languages.

Core-JS chief complains open source is broken, no one will pay for it

BlokeInTejas

Over simplifications

Basics:

If something is vital, and you've given it away - you've given it away.

If something is useful, and widely used - you've given it away.

If something is crap, and you've given it away - you've given it away.

If you want to be reliably paid for something you've built, you have to NOT give it away.

Not giving it away has implications, too. Perhaps if you sell it, you need to have a support contract. You have time to fix bugs from thousands of customers? Is your software guaranteed correct and/or free of harmful bugs? You going to take responsibility for damages when your stuff breaks and a system fails?

Giving it away moves responsibility for dealing with side effects to others. This, too, has enormous value. Most vendors of stuff have to offer guarantees and repair and replacement; someone writing free software may have internal pressures, but has no external obligations.

The reality is if you were giving it away and now wish you hadn't - too bad. Just don't do it again.

British government torched over lack of chips strategy

BlokeInTejas

Re: Our strategy

Actually developing a world-leading fab would require a plausible plan for it being profitable.It might help to have it owned and operated by a successful company.

So if you want one in the UK, make it attractive for TSMC or Samsung (or, for second-best, Intel) to build one here. To find out what would make it attractive, you'd have to talk to them.

BlokeInTejas

It seems as though folk who want a 'semiconductor strategy' have forgotten a few detail - unless all they want is to have **their** friends showered with trillions stolen from the common taxpayer.

The problem is that semiconductor design, manufacture, test, packaging etc is a business. Which means it has to make a profit to continue to exist. Which means that something it does is usefully better than what someone else offers. How exactly can a government guarantee that?

The best it can do is get out of the way. So it could simplify and reduce laws on planning permissions; but then the unhappy citizens of some portion of the UK run the risk of seeing - horrors - a factory being erected near their back doors. It could reduce taxation in general; but then competent business folk would invest in stuff that has a probability of making money, not a capital-intensive long term risk. It could reduce labour law constraints; but then any fab might be staffed by 1000 robots, ten humans and a pride of lions, paid to eat the humans if they touched anything. Etc etc etc.

That said, the government **could** have an overarching strategy. The best seems to be to be as small as possible, which results in minimal taxation, leaving more money in the hands of people.

And people, amazingly, tend to think that they are the best deciders of how to spend their income and wealth; look at the number of people who avail themselves of the ability to donate to the government. It's essentially zero...

Quantum entanglement discovery could enable futuristic comms tech, Nuclear physicists say

BlokeInTejas

Orson Scott Card didn't invent the term 'ansible'. He, and many others, simply re-used it.

The term was invented by Ursula Le Guin.

Check Wikipedia (which is correct in this instance)

University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?

BlokeInTejas

Re: AI is the new pocket calculator

Lusty

Forgive me for asking - but what amazing feats of science, engineering etc has your generation created? A few examples would be helpful.

You appear to misunderstand the idea being universities - it's to teach you to think, and to use that skill along with available tools to do neat stuff in the domain of interest. Artificial problems are a very simple way of checking you do actually understand how to go about problem solving; they're not there as the end goal. Perhaps you never understood that?

BlokeInTejas

As is to be expected, too many commenters - and the folk in the article - miss the big point.

The big point is that writing is being de-skilled - or at least, if the stupid soi-disant AI's improve enough, writing will be de-skilled.

So you won't need university departments to teach you to write, anymore than you need to have university departments teach you spelling and grammar.

The whole 'writing' thing should be taught at primary and secondary school level, so that young un's can go forth being able to correctly write English (or whatever). But after that, your favorite novel-writing AI will provide you with books to read, perhaps interactive ones - and, later, videos.

You might even get correct, readable, technical publications which help you understand how to make your VCR work.

Automation de-skills. It's a Good Thing. It means that stuff that is popular is manufactured at low cost. Niche stuff will still be done by artisans, but there won't be very many artisans making a living from writing. Oh well.

Killing trees with lasers isn’t cool, says Epson. So why are inkjets any better?

BlokeInTejas

All the complaints about tiny tiny overpriced cartridges are misplaced.

Epson will happily sell you an EcoTank printer which has ink tanks, which you refill at home. They seem to clog a lot less than the ones with nasty little cartridges.- one cleaning cycle after 5 months of non use seems to be my average. And the ink costs are way lower.

Getting all wound up because a company claims a reason for ditching a product line is 'Gaia -based' is as stupid as believing in Net Zero as a worthwhile goal. The whole green agenda is dishonest lies, but apparently plays well to the public and politicians; no blame to Epson for playing along.

Telecoms networks could provide next-gen GPS services without the need for satellites

BlokeInTejas

The obvious advantage of a terrestrial system - properly implemented - is that when the Russians start destroying satellites, we can still navigate.

Only iPhone 15 Pro models will have higher data transfer speeds on USB-C – analyst

BlokeInTejas

"Cynical move"

Utter bullshit, author.

Nothing wrong with a little snark, but you're letting personal stupidities get in the way of reporting. Nothing wrong with a USBC connector, even if the electronics is last year's stuff and only ticks fast enough for USB 2.0.

Next you'll be demanding that everything that plugs into a UK wall electricity outlet consumes 13 amps all the time....

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

BlokeInTejas

Musk's OK

There's lots of ways of finding out what the real situation is.

One is to say something which may or may not be true - but which sounds inflammatory. Then the idiots come out from cover and show themselves.

What we learned from this exchange is that apparently-senior tech people in Twitter are eejits.

And that the software's rubbish.

Good return on a quick tweet, I'd have thought.

China's 7nm chip surprise reveals more than Beijing might like

BlokeInTejas

Re: Ours

"Ours"???

You mean in the UK?

But the UK has been controlled by EU (and local) greenery for decades. Fabs are not only very expensive, they're not particularly green. And they require lots of customers.

The EU is so far behind in 'high tech' they're spending billions of euros trying to attain "digital sovereignty". Going to be a very long slow expensive stern chase. Soon Europe (not American or Taiwanese fabs in Europe, but European-owned fabs) will be able to build stuff that the rest of the world was doing in 2005 or so. There are European semiconductor companies; NXP, ST and Infineon exist and build stuff. When they use their own fabs - NXP uses TSMC for their advanced stuff - it's not very state of the art (see the recent announcement about ST and Global Foundries building a fab near Grenoble).

Nowt to do with greed. Much more to do with the dead hand of the EU. The EU is much more concerned with diversity, keeping people employed regardless of the merits of the company, keeping the dammed furriners out (especially Americans, because they're just too effective), reducing inequality - all nonsense that really gets in the way of high tech (or indeed any business).

STMicroelectronics and GlobalFoundries to build wafer fab in France

BlokeInTejas

True.

It’s a bribe.

Apple's guy in charge of stopping insider trading guilty of … insider trading

BlokeInTejas

Ain't no cure for Stupidity

The simplest analysis is not that he's a vile opportunist, grabber of money while trampling the poor underfoot, nor any of that...

It's simply that he's an incompetent idiot.

Or that he had a giant payment to be made to someone with a trusty squad of knee-breakers to hand.

RISC-V International emits more open CPU specs

BlokeInTejas

Re: and the inter-web melts in China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, ...

Architecture is just paperwork.

To replace your tank’s fire control system you need actual silicon. A bunch of pdfs won’t do much for you.

Vlad’s paradise doesn’t make chips.

New York to get first right-to-repair law for electronics

BlokeInTejas

The right to repair is a legal thing.

They'll sell you parts and info at a fair price....

Doesn't mean the thing is practically repairable...

You really think you can replace that M1-Ultra? and have it work? For how long? And how much is that M1-Ultra? Purchased in thousands, it's probably sorta OK - but thousands will cost quite a substantial sum, but one by one to an individual?

California Right-to-Repair bill quietly killed in committee

BlokeInTejas

..so are you. And Bill Gates. And a putative 'Right to Repair' orhganisation.

What's the problem?

But having a right to repair doesn't mean it's feasible to fix a specific thing. When a cellphone is just 4 chips (logic/memory, radio, flash, I/O) you'll need to remove the failing chip, buy a replacement, install it, test it.

If the bill demanded that things be repairable, that'd be different. That would stop the vendors using modern tech, and sticking with old, The products would probably not even be sellable..

Experts: AI inventors' designs should be protected in law

BlokeInTejas

Re: Duh...

Nope; you can't "patent a program".

You can patent a "method for doing X", or "a means for doing X".

The method has to be novel and non-obvious and useful, as does the means.

You can encode the method in a program.

All current AI systems work basically the same way, and so the method (give data to this program, which has been constructed by a statistical inference method) is known. You might be able to patent different statistical methods for training.

But once you've got the machine, you give it some data, it churns a lot, and out comes whatever. You haven't contributed anything, except the data, and the program was constructed using known methods.

Very hard to see how you can patent its output. Elucidate, please.

BlokeInTejas

Duh...

A patent can be granted for something which is non-obvious and of value.

If the something can be repeatedly invented by running a given program over and over again, then the combination of that program and its input data are mechanical, and its output must be deemed obvious.

Can you patent a program? Nope.

Can you patent data? Nope.

Nothing left to patent, then, is there?

RISC-V needs more than an open architecture to compete

BlokeInTejas

At last, some RISC V Sanity

I think the article is a useful breath of fresh air.

RISC V has exactly one unfair competitive advantage - the hype surrounding it. Technically, it's yet another '80's RISC, perhaps with a bit more forethought given to instruction encodings, and without a delay slot. Ho-hum. Nothing wrong, but no unfair technical advantage whatsoever.

Recall that when it started, it was said to have been brought into existence to simplify the lives of computer architecture researchers. Prior to RISC V, such researchers had to cast about for an architecture which they could modify to explore and then show the fruit of their research. There really weren't many available - MIPS was an obvious choice because it was 'open', at least for a while.

But the problem for the researchers was that before they could get their brainchild to do useful work, they had to create an OS for it, and a compiler, and a library. And these had to be as good - more or less - as the existing ones for existing architectures. This meant that interesting research could spend only a small fraction of the research effort on the neat new stuff - they also had to do all this adaptation/redevelopment work on the software infrastructure.

The big thing that RISC V promised was that - if everybody based their research on RISC-V - then there were no architecture licensing issues - it was free and open as an architecture; and that the infrastructure work of compilers and OS and library etc would be done once, and everybody could share. Thus - higher quality research. And for that use, being "just a MIPS without a delay slot" was an advantage - adding neat new architecture to a vanilla old machine was just the playground one would like to show how much better your architecture improvements made things.

But now, folk are reckoning to get rich selling IP, or maybe SoCs, or maybe both based on designs with RISC-V cores inside them.

These products have no inherent advantage over (say) equivalent ARM-based products. Anything RISC-V in silicon will have exactly the same supply chain problems as an equivalent ARM-based SoC. Or a MIPS-based SoC. It's fab capacity that's in short supply. Not .pdfs

And there's nothing in the RISC V architecture which makes it better in silicon than an equivalent ARM. There's no magic.

So, yes; RISC V is a fine thing for academia. It's unencumbered. You can modify it if you insist. There's an OS port or two. llvm works. You can experiment using it in systems which choose to do things differently - where the fact that it's a RISC V is largely irrelevant, but having a free and unencumbered processor is highly convenient.

But for products? For profitable business?

As the article says, entirely unclear how RISC V leads to business success for RISCV IP and silicon vendors. Doesn't mean it won't or can't happen; just that its completely unclear.

An international incident or just some finger trouble at the console?

BlokeInTejas

An old colleague at a European computer company said that the language spoken at work was "European English".

It had, he said, many words in common with actual English.

And some of them even meant the same.

.. A useful insight.

UK watchdogs ask how they can better regulate algorithms

BlokeInTejas

Algorithms aint nuttin new...

Algorithms....

Well, they've been in use.. forever.

Been employed? The employer had an algorithm to sort out the likely candidates from the less likely, and one to decide when to stop sorting.

Ever had a pay raise? Algorithm.

Ever got fired? Algorithm.

Ever got stopped for speeding? Algorithm.

Ever been convicted of a crime? Algorithm.

Ever paid tax? How much you were supposed to pay was set by an algorithm.

And all those and more were algorithms implemented by people. And apparently make society systematically racist. Or inegalitarian. Or rich. Or something that a whiner doesn't like.

I don't think the idiots muttering about algorithms have the vaguest idea of what an algorithm is.

But in the end, suppose that we have two companies (or equivalent large scale entities). One tunes its algorithms to find and hire mostly black candidates. The other tunes its algorithms to find and hire the best they can find, using the measures of competence and all the correlated data they've found.

Who likely gets the best additions to its workforce?

And if you don't like the wording 'to find and hire mostly black candidates', change 'black' for whatever. If you're not using the best search possible, you'll end up at a disadvantage.

So algorithms act in a competitive marketplace. So they'll get better.

Which leads to all sorts of issues, all of which are the same as if it the algorithms 'running' on humans instead of giant piles of silicon.

Study: How Amazon uses Echo smart speaker conversations to target ads

BlokeInTejas

Are people seriously complaining that when you purchase something from a vendor, the vendor takes note and tries to sell you related items, or the same thing later on?

Or that if you talk to a vendor about some product, then you're surprised when they notice and try to see you the things you were discussing?

Seems a ridiculous complaint to me.

Goldman Sachs reportedly set to head up $60bn Arm IPO

BlokeInTejas

Re: Yikes

Opens up a host of fun opportunities, then, eh?

As long as you avoid designing yer own chips for 7nm and below.... That's expensive.

But hot damn, 28nm let quite a lot of neat stuff get built.

Out of beta and ready for data: 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS is here

BlokeInTejas

Re: A silly idea from a silly person...

The correct answer to your question is- spend the 100 bucks and see for yourself

Now, you can't actually do that right now because of limited supply, but it's still the right answer because only you know how many zillion tabs you want and what the speed of an elk falling through molasses should be.

Open source, closed wallets, big profits – nobody wins the OSS rock, paper, scissors game

BlokeInTejas

TANSTAAFL

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

If you as an individual or a corporation choose to build your business on software that someone else wrote and offered with no warranty, no way to get fixes within a guaranteed time, and which you personally didn't test to within an inch of its life to the same standards as internally-developed stuff - then you're an idiot.

If you want stuff you didn't pay for to be reviewed for errors, but you're not prepared to do it or pay for it to be done - then you're an idiot.

What may fix the whole and complete nonsense of "yeah, it's software, but it comes with no warranty of correctness whatsoever" is somebody who embodies software in their product getting sued to within an inch of their lives - or beyond - for supplying stuff that didn't do the job it was clearly supposed to do.

I'd guess that this will eventually come about in the automotive space, because cars can kill people.

If there were a real threat of serious financial damage being done to you when you ship product embodying flawed software and said software fails, then perhaps things would change.

Until then, it really and truly doesn't matter. Stuff that matters has financial implications.

Please, no Moore: 'Law' that defined how chips have been made for decades has run itself into a cul-de-sac

BlokeInTejas

About time too

Moore's Law has been the ugly luxury that has lead to the death of computer architecture. What was the point producing something which was 10x better than an x86 when simply waiting three to four years gave you the same performance without having to rebuild toolchains/recompile/redesign/rewrite?

But now we live in interesting times. With a bit of luck, two things will happen:

- mainstream computing will realize that even a 1-time massive performance/power gain through improved architecture is a big win

- folk who think that the way you should classify things seen by humans is by using tera-operations per second to build unreliable "AI" systems will realize that's nuts, and find a much better way of doing it.

This may have an effect on how software's written, too

UK artists seek 'luvvie levy' on new gadgets to make up for all the media that consumers access online

BlokeInTejas

It's basically a demand that the gummint pay them for failing at their hobby (it must be hobby, because if it were work they'd be getting paid).

What we need is lions. Fierce, hungry lions. That'd fix this particular problem, and might work well in other areas, too.

BlokeInTejas

Citation needed.

Not only were half of an AI text adventure generator's sessions NSFW but some involved depictions of sex with children

BlokeInTejas

Ummm....

Dear El Reg, hy do you continue to refer to this garbage as "AI"?

It's just adaptive pattern matching.

Intel to finally scatter remaining ashes of Itanium to the wind in 2021: Final call for doomed server CPU line

BlokeInTejas

If Intel had been sure that Itanium was the architecture of the future - and it could have been: done right the silicon should have been simpler to design, simpler to verify and simpler to test, so products would come to market sooner and more cheaply, and the silicon would indeed suck less power and be cheaper - then they'd have had the courage of their convictions and launched it into the important market first- PCs and laptops. This would mean convincing some major PC makers up front, and making sure that the new machines could run x86 binaries. Then they could have tweaked one more thing, and persuaded Microsoft to distribute PC binaries in an architecture-independent form, with the final compilation to the actual computer being done at app installation time.

On the assumption that the architecture really did have commercially-useful benefits in implementation, this would have let AMD continue to make x86s, but lag further and further behind, and set up a fun universe where the upstart ARM could find a place in PCs (purely on merit) and oh, yeah, the server market was now a continuous part - as far as software was concerned - of the extremely high volume PC market. My, they might even have got into cellphones.

But, there y'go...

Another data-leaking Spectre CPU flaw among Intel's dirty dozen of security bug alerts today

BlokeInTejas

Re: You make your bed ....

Intel did not invent speculative execution. Almost certainly, IBM did.

Check your history. Google 'Tomasulu'.

Twerps.

Plans for half of Europeans to get 100Mbps by 2020 ain't gonna happen – report

BlokeInTejas

Rural little village in Normandy; too far from anywhere to get anything even approximating bad ADSL. Even the pigeons avoid the place...

So the solution is to buy a 4G/LTE box, which offers entirely acceptable up and down speeds (I'm not there at the moment, so I can't measure).

But the downside is - a budget of only 20GB per month. That goes very quickly, even though we don't stream music or movies. One software update to one phone once and you eat 10% of that. Ouch.

Apple store besieged by protesters in Paris 'die-in' over tax avoidance

BlokeInTejas

Idiots

If these bien-non-pensants have a beef with taxes paid by corporations in France, they should go and harass their own government, which is the entity that sets the tax paying rules in place.

Oh, they're French. Yep. No idea how the real world works (lookout the current SNCF strikes...)

Intel outside: Apple 'prepping' non-Chipzilla Macs by 2020 (stop us if you're having deja vu)

BlokeInTejas

No need for virtual machines....

Moving from x86 to ARM within a controlled environment like MacOS/OS X can be much simpler than deciding to have to run emulators/jit compilers and the like. Instead, long before the processor architecture swap is put in place, you change the form of the 'binaries' that the computer will accept and install.

And you change that to something equivalent in form and function to the llvm compiler's internal representation. And when you install that binary, you perform the last pass of compilation to whatever processor architecture your computer has installed. And everything runs at native speeds.

This can even be back ported to the appropriate last few OS releases; it will leave those who insist on staying the past somewhat high and dry, though.

London mayor: Self-driving cars? Not without jacked-up taxes, you don't!

BlokeInTejas

Suppose for a moment that we should tax the use of roads; then the solution is simple. The best indicator of actual road usage (including damage done etc) is the rate at which tyres are replaced on a vehicle. So slap an added purchase tax on tyres.

Tesla to charge for road trip 'leccy, promises it will cost less than petrol

BlokeInTejas

Taxing times indeed

Seems t'me that the simplest replacement for a petrol tax is to tax tires. They wear out, you have to replace them. And they wear out more when you go further. Or faster. Perfect.

Microsoft tries, fails to crush 'gender bias' lawsuit brought by its own women engineers

BlokeInTejas

I reckon, from observation, that company assessments are cruelly flawed. They have no reliable metrics. They have no reliable method of knowing the metrics were properly applied. They have no metrics to decide whether a pay rise of X should be given to A rather than B. They clearly have no metrics for measuring managers against baseline competence, nor one external candidate from another.

Personally, if I have a good view of an individual's work, I can generally rank them as "yeah, more or less ok", "bloody magic" or "bloody useless". Since there aren't generally many magic or useless folk, this ranking doesn't do much for fine gradations between employees. And, of course, I don't have good knowledge of most people's performance, so much of any ranking has to be the fourth, important, category "dunno".

Not at all clear that managers have, in general, even this degree of insight into people's performance.

oh well.

Zilog reveals very, very distant heir to the Z80 empire

BlokeInTejas

Z8000's, I'd wager, not Z80's.

Zilogs answer to the challenge of proper 16 bit microprocessors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z8000

I well remember the days at ICL when all the 16 bit microprocessor vendors came trooping through Kidsgrove trying to sell us the magic things. Even TI, with the 99000, explaining that it were bloody good because it was software binary compatible with the 990 (??) minicomputer...

Wannabe Prime Minister Andrea Leadsom thinks all websites should be rated – just like movies

BlokeInTejas

Re: Stupid thinking similar to Donald Drump

"barmy", not "balmy"

Unless you're referencing the Mighty Steve

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