Posts by Marcelo Rodrigues 460 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2007
"Except, notably, it's not really Microsoft's customers complaining but Microsoft's competition . . . who are also known for abusing their monopoly power in their own domains. "
Yes, Tou are absolutely right. But what I would like to see is this thing going ahead, and Microsoft getting condemned.
And then, to get back at competition, I would like to see Microsoft egging the regulators against its competitors.
And let them burn one another to the ground on the courts.
Thar North Korea will stop this. Makes no sense whatsoever.
After spending all this money and resources, they will say "Well, yes, You are right: I will give up on my independence from another country to launch things up there. How much do You want to launch my stuff?"
Yeah. Right. If You believe this, I have a bridge to sell You: it's a steal, going over the Mariana trenches! You will make a fortune in no time, I swear!
"The only issue I've had with Samsung is when an 850Pro failed (started to show bad sectors) and they refused to honour the 10 year warranty as it was (apparently) a grey import. (I'd bought it off amazon)."
I stopped buying Samsung when they did almost the same to me. The difference was: it wasn't a grey import. They just didn't feel like honoring the warranty.
Fuck them.
"The mission primarily serves Russian propaganda: look at us, we can still send rockets to the moon! But also, look we can still send ICBMs wherever we want. Russia gave up on science a couple of decades ago."
Looking at the state of (no) maintenance its armed forces have... would the ICBMs even leave the silos?
"Regardless, I agree that trying to rewrite the rules to enforce a monopoly and browser monoculture is foolish. I don't think it's going to work,..."
Sadly, I think it might ($DEITY protect us all).
You see, the potential reward is much too great for Google to just drop it. I would love for You to be right, but I have my worries.... If the Chrome engine wasn't so popular, it would be easy. As it stands, this atrocity has a real chance to go forward.
Have I already said "$DEITY protect us all"?
"Seems like they would be have to weight several hundreds of pounds to shoot straight while flying."
Not really. You don't need to put an aircraft .50 machine gun on it. A light 22 (or a 9mm) is more than enough.
Put the gun at the center of the drone and recoil is your only problem.
Sure, it won't be a 500g drone, but I think it coild be done with something weighting 2 or 3kg on the whole.
" I generally ask if they would prefer cash, because often they're paying 2 or 3 percent of their sales to the credit cards companies."
People acts as if accepting money was free... It isn't.
1) Open the cashier
2) Close the cashier
3) Take the koney to the bank (wonpaysbthe risk cost?)
4) Take insurance against robbery
And so on.
Credit? Don't even need to open the cashier: it's all acconted for - and you don't even have to think about fake bills. After visa/mastercard/whatever gives the ok, it's not your problem anymore.
Sure, accepting plastic has its costs to. But money isn't as free as they say...
"Now, I just need someone to explain cups of non-liquid cups like flour and stuff."
Let me help with your despair.
Did You know that here, in Brazil, the portuguese used value of the ingredients on the recipes?
It wasn't onu cup, or 200ml. It was X cents of flour, Y cents of butter.
There is people trying to recreate reipes from Brazil Imperial time, but it's hell - since you have to adjust for inflation AND local prices.
There. Feeling worse already?
"They will be used how often, exactly, in the lifespan of the data center? So how many "carbons" are really going to be saved?"
I remmember one datacenter I used in the past.
They had four generators, but needed two.
In order to verify they worked, and to keep them warm, they switched over every night, for about two hours.
And the two generators used where never the same two from last night.
So. How often they used? Two generators, every night, for two hours.
Correct if I'm wrong, but isn't "algorithm" one thing and "code" another? Let me explain.
The "algorithm" (to me) would be the rules to be followed. Something like my rules for email filtering.
The "code" would be the software that executes these rules. Something like (say) Thunderbird.
So.
Wouldn't "opensourcing the algorithm" be just publishing the set of rules followed by some program? Sure, they must be quite convoluted, with a huge amount of rules. I have no idea what they use, so can't say if publishing the rules would be enough to someone else run them - let alone understand/audit. But it's beside the point, isn't it?
It's no excuse to not follow on the promises, mind. It even diminishes it - as I don't think there would be patents risk, in this case. It would be quite simple to publish them: dump the lot and upload to somewhere.
Or am I missing something?
"...I find that trying to install Nvidia's Linux drivers is a step too far"
I can't speak for everyone (and every Distro) else, but
I've run OpenSuse since 9.3
All I have always had to do is enable the "NVidia package repository". And that's it. The system downloads and installs the drivers for me. Easy and simple. Don´t have to compile something, don't have to run some CLI arcane thing. Just fill a checkmark and Bob's your uncle.
Every time someone starts with "flying cars", I start thinking about energy usage (forget about decapitations, mass accidents and general carnage).
The world is in the middle of an energy crisis. Gas (or petrol depending on where You are) prices are going through the roof.
We have several changes in usual habits - like people avoiding to fly, trains getting more used and so on.
And then we see this: what must be one of the most intensive and less efficient use of energy to move someone from "A" to "B". There must be a market for this, of course. No one said a Ferrari is efficient. But boggles the mind to see people investing all this time and engineering on something like this.
Or maybe I'm just an old grumpy git. Who knows?
"Not to rain on that 1000km parade but most of travelers - at least in US - would skip any but a "pit stop" breaks for such a trip. Not to mention that they'd be done within 10 hours with absolutely no speeding (obviously assuming no gridlock on the way)."
Of course You could. I did it myself. My father used to do a 2900km trip in one go, only stopping to eat, refuel and "uneat" - it meant about 27 hours of driving nonstop (yes, at way over 100 km/h). Doesn't mean it's a good idea - You get tired and stressed, accidents happen. At 100 km/h one could stop each two hours to rest, stretch the legs, eat something and attend to his business.
It would add about 15 minutes to each two hours - but the trip would be oh so much better... We are not machines, we are humans. Rest, stretch, respect your body. It pays in the end.
Although everything said is technically true, there is one key point that doesn't have to be: the power usage. They did the math with 840W - and I believe their numbers are right, when the computer uses it. But the self driving problem doesn't uses a infinite amount of processing power - sooner or later we will reach the "this is really good" point, and the computational power needed will not grow further. Then the tech evolution will take care of power usage.
So, it may use 840W today - but in 20 years time it may very well be down to just 20W.
"more or less since current processors do not allow you to boost indefinitely with normal cooling"
The AMD ones do. It is the Intel ones that can only boost for a set period of time. At least it was this way up until... 12xxx? I'm not sure if still is true now. But up until very recently, it was.
I have two Ryzens 5600x. One of them liquid cooled, but the other uses now a good old Coolermaster Hyper212 as cooler - and it used the one that came with the CPU before.
Both of them hit thermal stability pretty fast, and after that they dance around the max clock, going up and down about 50MHz or so. The air cooled one reaches thermal stability in about 2 minutes after load. It stays at about 4420MHz in all six physical cores, at 79C. Funnily enough, the water cooled one reaches stability at about 69C - but runs much slower, at about 4300MHz. Must be the CPU binning, or the mainboard - as they are different models. This I just tested now, with and ambient temp of about 28C.
But, yes. The 5600X have a turbo speed of "up to 4,6GHz", and a nominal speed of 3,7GHz. Keep in mind that the turbo speed is measured with only one core running. I am getting 4,3 GHz on all six, with air cooling. Constant. I have rendered things that took hours, and the clock didn't change.
"... of all the data centers we can power and cool by damming that big river in Brazil."
I know You are jocking, but just in case aren't...
The Amazonas is huge, but not possible to contain. Too large a cross section and too little slope.
As for cooling... It would (could) work. Except it is in the middle of nowere, with no infrastructure and no population.
Like 1000km from anything.
“Your machine is overheating, your monitor is 60hz, it can’t display 200fps, match your game frame rate to your monitor speed and it will run cooler and not crash.”
FPS issues apart, the machine shouldn't overheat. Period. If it is overheating we have a cooling problem, not a FPS one.
"Used to be rated as a 1:10 ratio. You gain 1 customer per satisfied customer and you lose 10 customer for 1 unsatisfied customers."
This one must be true. Years ago a friend ask me the brand of my refrigerator. I couldn't remember - 15 years working, and not single blip. He said:
"We never remember the brands of the good appliances, since we never think about them again!"
Makes sense. Problem is: if I don't remember the brand, I can't recommend it to anyone, can I? So, this 1:10 ratio looks reasonable to me - I DO remember the brands that screwed me over, and I make a point of steering my friends away from them.
"In 2022, isn't it time that political pressure was brought to bear on the custodians of these increasingly necessary BLOBS, to open them up?"
These BLOBs are just to pass the cost on the consumer. It would be perfectly possible to put some storage on the device, keep the BLOB there and load it on boot. One could even create an API to upgrade said BLOB.
Like, I don't know, almost every piece of hardware that doesn't cheap out? We use to call it a firmware, really. Just like mainboards, hard disks, SSDs, and so many other things do.
"Japans reaction to the incident can safely be described as overblown and definitely was (in a lot of cases, not every time ofcourse) generally not sensible."
I do agree with You: it was way overblown. The only (and great) mitigation factor would be Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For better or worse, I think taking two atomic bombs on the head does leave its fair share of public trauma.
I don´t think they needed all that reaction from Fukushima - but from an historic point of view I do understand. Probably would do the same, if I where in their shoes.
"I wonder just how many people are also looking at the cost of electricity and the specs of the new cards requiring even bigger power supplies and thinking the GPU isn't worth the TCO change"
I did this. Was waiting for the black friday, but my old 1050Ti died on me. Got one 3060 12GB, as one 3060 Ti would force me to upgrade the PSU - and I couldn't justify this cost.
"Dammit! The only reason I'm playing the lottery in the first place is to build a meteor proof house, are you telling me that's a bad strategy?"
Only id tou go about with the winninf ticket on your hand.
Ask someone you can trust to get the money, and problem solved!
After all, our calcularions assumed the winner would be holding the ticket...
Yes, yes: I kid You not.
Once upon a time, when I was doing freelance support, I got this one gig. It was usual to a given online chat interview someone. This time they were interviewing one Playboy centerfold. And it went like this:
The questions where asked by anyone, on the public chat
They filtered it, and sent on a back channel the ones that should be answered
The operator (me) read these, relayed them to her, that gave the answer, and typed it back. That was the job. So.
I went to her house, and to her computer. Covering the full wall was one of the Playboy pictures of her - on all fours. Yeah, good look concentrating on the job with this one wall looking at me.
After the interview was done, she asked me if I could extract some pictures of her from the Playboy CD! Yes, looks like they didn't gave any copy of her pictures to her, and she wanted me to extract some.
So, we opened the CD program (it was all heavily condensed and obfuscated, exactly to fight this kind of thing), and went looking for HER pictures. With her saying "I like this one", "Can You get that one?" and so on.
No, I couldn't extract them - but it made for a fun story...
"...then why shouldn't systemd provide a mechanism to read that information?"
Because of the UNIX philosophy: "Don one thing only, and do it well". Systemd is trying to be the jack of all trades, doing everything under the sun. It shouldn't - it creates complexity, makes it harder to maintain and broads the attack surface.
ONE thing should do what the old sysinitV did.
ANOTHER thing should take care of the network
A third one should read the sensors.
And so on. NOT one monolithic monster, spreading its tentacles over everything.
"In some jurisdictions he could have kept it as an "unsolicited gift" - and even flogged it without interacting with amazon again."
Here in Brazil, for example. If someone sends You something, and You get in touch saying "Hey, I didn't buy this thing, take it back!" they have 30 days (30 or 90, can't remember now) to take it back.
Otherwise it's legally Yours - with a valid warranty and everything.
"
Isn't madness defined as continually doing the same thing and expecting a different result?"
Yes. But no one said El Reg expected a response. They are only asking to be shielded from prosecution.
"Really, your honor. We DID ask Apple to comment..."
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2023
