infinite monkey
2^(20*20*20) = 2^80000 or ~ 10^24083
is quite a lot of combinations to brute force. Checking all the "results" to see what they resemble could be quite time consuming.
1031 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2018
He is the co-founder, CEO and president of Nvidia. A firm that last year took in $130 billion of sales revenue. Nvidia and the position it commands is very largely down to his direction and selection of the right people to employ. Being paid $50 million dollars for the year equates to less than 0.04% of sales revenue, so not unreasonable. If you think it's an unreasonable reward perhaps you are suffering from "invidia" which was the inspiration for the company name.
If successful the lawyer will probably get about $8 million and their client $12 million. Possibly a little more each as the total value of the claim is $23 million. All we know about this case so far is what the lawyer is claiming in the law suit filing, so I'm inclined to take it with a grain of salt. The true events are likely to be somewhat different.
I play games, browse the web, file away email, do some financial stuff on excel, occasionally draw some stuff on Visio (2007), rarely write a letter on Word, sometimes check WhatsApp if I can't be bothered to pick up the phone. A little bit of Arduino dev too.
I put a new motherboard/processor/memory in my PC a few months back as it was over 6 years old. Moved Windows 10 to Windows 11 probably about a year ago. Both of those were easy taking perhaps 30 mins of my time each. My files are stored on a NAS which I do a cold copy backup on every 3 months. It always seems to want to install a new software version so I probably spend more time looking after the NAS than the PC.
With PC related maintenance taking me 30 minutes a year and Windows costing me nothing I have no compelling need to move off Windows. To me the O/S is almost an irrelevance. I've had Linux machines in the past, and before that used dozens of different flavors of Unix. They are all the same: just something needed to support the things you want/need to do, not something you should be devoting time to.
The first electronics lab session of my electrical engineering degree course involved a valve amplifier running at a painful but current limited and non-lethal high voltage. That lab had precisely nothing todo with the course syllabus. The perverse design of the apparatus seemed to have the sole purpose of luring fingers in the wrong place.
It was years later that I realized that lab was survival training, before moving onto the really dangerous stuff in the heavy electrics lab where fingers in the wrong place could be lethal. That lab had open knife switches, despite them being obsolete, switching hundreds of volts at hundreds of amps. In retrospect I suspect they were survival training too as they dispelled complacency.
A near miss on the moon is more likely than an actual impact and a near miss could do something very exotic to the asteroids impact. The moon's escape velocity isn't high enough to capture it so the moon won't get a moon. I'm also pretty sure it's not enough to send it back towards the Earth, but where it went could be exciting.
Electric cars are very quiet. The noise you are complaining about is probably the legally required audible warning system that operates at low speeds to warn pedestrians. This turns off as the car goes faster when the tyre and wind noise is enough for pedestrians to notice.
It was a long time ago but I recall salary within a grade stepped up year by year but there was a limit (perhaps 5) to the number of salary steps in the grade. Grade increases were tough with a ceiling on the maximum grade that some people could attain within their path. I remember having a beer with one chap in his early 30's celebrating reaching the highest grade possible for his civil service career path. It was more of a wake as his career could go no further.
Some fast track career paths did have automatic promotion up to a certain level and there were even very very rare ones that could skip a grade.
Many many years back I worked for the MOD for a few years. Some time after I left I was surprised to receive a cheque for the refund of my non-contributory pension payments. It was very welcome, particularly as I did not know that non-contributory pension contributions could be "refunded". The concept still bemuses me.
A few weeks later another cheque arrived. This one was for a grade related pay increase that was backdated to April in the year I left.
The icing on the cake came a week or so later when I received yet another cheque. This one was for the refund of the non contributory pension that applied to the back dated pay increase.
Vandium flow batteries look good at first glance because more long term storage just means bigger tanks. On second glance you see how expensive the vanadium electrolyte is. This means that they are only considered for short term storage and hence compete with lithium batteries.
It might work for Australia with only 5hours of storage, but not for the UK or north Europe where from time to time thanks to a dunkelflaute we get insignificant wind and solar generation for a couple of days.
Besides dunkelflautes we also get periods with negligible wind for a couple of weeks. These result in the wholesale cost of gas shooting up following demand.
The biggest difference however is solar. Solar is terrible in winter thanks to the high latitude. London is 51.5 north, so far higher than Australia were even Tasmania is only 42 south. A search using AI (hence untrustworthy) shows that 18% of Australia is above the Tropic of Capricorn!
The US defence industry needs TMSC chips. China does not have "easy" access to them so is rapidly advancing its own industry. Consequently the US has a strategic dependance on those fabs in Taiwan and China does not have that same dependance. The solution is taxation i.e. tariff to make building and running those fabs in the US economic.
Would they make any other investment on that basis?
Yes, advertising. This is demonstrated by the John Wanamaker quote “I am convinced that about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half.”
A lot of staff hires won't have a positive ROI either based on the the number of employees who seem to do nothing of value.
NASA's latest risk assessment (September 2024) for keeping the ISS in operation beyond 2028 doesn't look pretty. https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/ig-24-020.pdf?emrc=67b9d4c2ce4da
Cracking and increasing air loss, lack of supply chain spare parts for 30 year old equipment, material degradation due to high energy particles, structural recertification work required as the current certification is about to expire etc.
On top of this the "Russian Orbital Segment" of the ISS handles Guidance, Navigation, and Control for the entire Station, but Russia has not yet committed to operations beyond 2028.
If we had access to everyone's purchasing records, we could advertise even more efficiently.
To which the skeptic at board level replies "but the car took 12 weeks to be built from me putting in my order. What do you mean you need access to all my purchasing data. You already have access to our car orders database. The problem is that you have handed over our advertising budget to a third party that doesn't care if the customer buys a car or not as they already have our money."
No. The 400GW number is in the referenced report and probably correct. The fact that this potential 400GW demand is holding up new bit barns is also correct. People's interpretation on the title assuming this 400GW of power is for new bit barns is incorrect. The consequential leap which many people make assuming this must be for AI is consequently also incorrect.
It's a headline that leads a lot of people to wrong conclusions. Perhaps it's clickbait, or perhaps it's Hanlon's razor.
No. Just because you have restored from a backup doesn't mean that it's really there.
Back in the early 90's our new SA implemented tape backup and we knew it "worked". When we asked him to restore a recently deleted file he would load the previous days tape and have it back in seconds. Oddly there was no evidence of it working with files that had been deleted or modified further back in time. Eventually I got suspicious and took a look at his backup/restore script. This in turn led me to look in /dev and see that one of the devices there was not a device but a very large file. What he had done was to make a typo with the tape device name so instead of backing up to the tape drive through /dev/rmt0 he was backing up to and restoring from the regular file /dev/rmtO
All the backup tapes he had been cycling through for months were blank. Our sole project backup was a snapshot from the previous day and stored on the same disk drive as our live project data.
I use the phrase "girls night out" or "boys night out" even when those involved are pensioners, That said, if this instance had involved two boys I would probably have said "two chaps". If it was a girl and a boy that would be tricky, though in that instance, and being some 20+ years ago, it's even less likely for them to have the same name.
We had this issue many years ago at work. Two girls with the same full name started work on the same day. All their ids for multiple system were getting mixed up or being flagged as duplicates and generating alerts. I phoned them to establish who had which primary id only to discover they had the same date of birth too! In the end I used their postcodes to disambiguate them.
A good part of the lack of uptake will be inertia with people locked into existing 2 year contracts so they will wait till their current deal expires before moving to fiber. On top of that there will be plenty who will not even have realized that the contract they were on has already expired so the are paying more for less.
Ok, every part has been replaced at least twice, but only one part at a time so its always been the same PC. PC's are modular: applications, O/S, case, PSU, storage, monitor, keyboard/mouse, GPU and motherboard/CPU/memory.
The last 3 not always but normally get upgraded together as whilst I have upgraded just the CPU it is seldom cost effective. Similarly I have only once or twice added extra RAM. Normally memory technology advances mean its also time to change the motherboard and CPU.
My last upgrade of almost a year ago was the GPU and it will get a CPU/motherboard/memory upgrade by the end of summer. The case is the oldest bit: its my second since 2001 and I see no need to change it anytime soon.
If this doesn't demonstrate that PC's are modular I don't know what would.
All software development has a looming wafer thin trust problem. An awful lot of software currently gets written by cut and pasting code found on the internet. The same bits of code get used time and again and is subjected to lots of scrutiny. As time goes on this will be replaced more and more by people asking their favorite AI to write the code which the "author" then admits as having been written by AI or passes it off as his own code. The author becomes prolific and pushes out lots of code. Everything is fine but now we have to trust the AI as it's very hard to tell if the code written by the AI for one user/purpose would be the same for all. An AI trained by a suitably malevolent group could insert backdoor code for a specific developer and inferred application which would not only be hard to detect by eye but also be crafted to be invisible to code analysis tools.
One day later the Reg gives us this:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/29/nvidia_gpu_ubuntu_downgrade/
Were this to happen during a Windows upgrade (as it does) there would be headlines here and people saying it's time for Linux desktops for all, because Linux is forever. Except it's not.
In a perfect world were the legacy drivers to be maintained forever this wouldn't happen but it's not a perfect world. Old Linux distros die and disappear too, with Absolute Linux being "possibly" the latest.
The same one had me clicking on traffic lights. Some in the foreground covered multiple squares, do you click on the squares with just the coloured lenses, or the boxes as well. What about the supporting poles and gantries. Do humans considered those bits as "part" of the traffic lights?
I learnt BASIC at school and typed my first program onto a Model 33 teleprinter at the local technical college. Don't knock it: UPPERCASE was all we had back then. The teletype had a paper tape punch.
I took my rolled up paper tape from the terminal room to the computer room and gave it to the white coat wearing "all mighty operator". Without uttering a word he took my tape and fed it into the reader on the mainframe, then wound it up on a winding machine and handed it back to me. All the time I was expecting him to press some button to run my program and the line printer to burst to life. Instead he said "Parity Error", turned his back and I was dismissed. Being a teenager with no computer education I had no idea what those two words meant. It's amazing I persisted and went on to work with computers. I can only attribute it to the technical collage also having a "glass terminal" with 300baud modem link to the Open University computer that had a lunar lander game.
I abandoned those expensive plans long ago and pay $395 a year for unlimited everything
Which illustrates a problem Starlink has outside the US. In the UK I'm paying £60 a year for unlimited UK calls and texts plus 5GB of data and 100 international call minutes each month. What appears cheap to US users can be eye wateringly expensive to the rest of the world.