Posts by BOFH in Training 418 publicly visible posts • joined 5 May 2020
Use that offer letter as a selling point when you create a startup.
If Mark is valuing him//her at 10m a year, whatever the startup is creating must be worth alot more. Or at least tell that to investors.
And you will be owning / running a unicorn in a year or two. Sell your share for lots of money, retire, do whatever you want.
lol
The problem is, did Trump's statement means that the government is cancelling the contracts or is it considered a "joke" as some of his statements have been explained away.
If it's considered as the leader of the executive branch issueing a cancellation, SpaceX is presumably in the clear.
Elon may not be able to take SpaceX out of the country, but you can bet that he has alot of sensitive info on SpaceX, from tech specs to manufacturing to pretty much everything else.
Am sure alot of other nations will be happy to have him "migrate over' and create a SpaceX 2.0 - maybe even fund him. Even if thats just China or Russia.
With the statement from TACO king about cancelling Elons government contract and Elon's response about shutting down Dragon spacecraft, who needs who more now?
I assume one can afford a lose of a few billions in revenue.
Can the country afford the lose of it's only crewed space transport?
Some of the sanctions on China are due to political reasons (so that they don't catch up with Western companies in terms of tech / dont take market share from western companies).
Only way to get those sanctions removed is if China agrees to never compete aggressively in whatever field that the US decides that China should not compete in.
Doubt China will agree to that. And if it's a matter of not respecting US IP, etc - don't forget that in the older days, US did not respect European IP, so they used to just do whatever they needed to do to catch up with European powers.
Sounds like China is just following US playbook.
As title says, US is pushing China to innovate by putting various restrictions on them.
There is a decent chance that with all the engineering resources they have over there, they may figure out a better way of doing AI/chips/whatever else they are being restricted on.
In whatever thing they innovate, they will presumably have first mover advantage.
Nvidia is also selling TSMC produced products and is making huge profits.
AMD is also selling TSMC produced products and is making nice profits.
Only difference : Different types of chips for different purposes from whatever intel is selling (Nvidia GPUs vs Intel CPUs) or better designs (AMD CPUs vs Intel CPUs).
I know there is some overlap with both Nvidia / AMD and Intel doing GPUs as well, but Intel is such a small player that I don't think I should count it.
OS may be the best option, cos if someone buys Chrome, they need to make money from it. That means paying for Chrome / updates / everything.
Of cos if going OS, there is always Firefox ..... no idea if Mozilla can combine both browsers together into the one.
Google and MS and whoever can always customise the OS Chrome. Or create their own plugins to the OS Chrome.
Apple, AMD, NVidia, TI, etc will be looking for the cheapest options which meet their quality / legal requirements.
That means I doubt they will be lining up to be big customers in a US based fab, unless they are forced to use US based fabs. Maybe US defence industry will use them due to legal requirements. Can't think of many other companies which has that as a requirement.
I have seen that happen with a small client some years ago. I was on site when another contractor came to do some pest control.
His invoice said X if paid within 30 days, and X - I think 3% if paid immediately. That client immediately paid in cash. And this is a client who has a history of holding invoices unpaid for as long as possible before payment.
Not sure if the original invoices are inflated, but it was something interesting to observe.
I recall reading something years ago about Palantir doing something like that - thru a mobile app.
Someone demo'ed something where they take a pic of a random person and got all sort of details within seconds.
At least that was what I recall reading. If they could do it years ago, as a company, it will not take much for a couple of people to do something similar - with all the other services you can use to connect everything together.
Advantage of FOSS is that, if you are not paying / paying much less licence fees, you can always pay for a couple of devs to make whatever changes / features / updates you need. And if you are a large org, you will probably come out ahead financially.
I think the value to society has dropped as well.
After all there are possibly millions of people from the above mentioned society who are concerned if their computers have a degraded CPU.
Oh yeah, society also includes the 1000s of Intel staff who were laid off. Even if the share price went up after a head count reduction (as it happens in some companies - but not in this case), it will probably be a net negative to society, since there will be 1000s of newly unemployed people due to Intel. Some will get new jobs. Some will have savings. And some will collect unemployment benefits (which are paid for by society via taxes and other means).
Still, I have to give Cloudflare credit for finding a way to ride the AI hype train without all the hassle of building/ training models etc. Full marks for crafty thinking, maybe next time do it without stealing visitor data. ------ they claim to be using AI to detect these AI scrappers. So presumably they have build models and trained them.
Indonesia is hardly a super power when it comes to war fighting abilities.
Not to mention even US can't seem to do much when they get caught with ransomware troubles from bad actors linked to other governments.
And most of the nations linked to such bad actors are Russia (which has nukes although a crap conventional warfare capability), China (which also has nukes and unknown conventional fighting abilities) and North Korea (which also has nukes and does not seem to give a damn about what others think), who hardly fear Indonesia in the first place.
Boeing has said they will not bid for any more fixed price contracts, especially if they building something new / modifying something to a new requirement.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/boeing-says-it-cant-make-money-with-fixed-price-contracts/
I understand they have lost a bunch in at least 3 fixed price contracts with the government so far.
Starliner which we are discussing now.
KC 46 air force tankers.
https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2024/01/09/cautionary-tale-how-boeing-won-a-us-air-force-program-and-lost-7b/
And the new air force one.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/25/business/air-force-one-boeing-loss/index.html
I imagine they going to have a tough time asking for a cost plus contract when someone else is willing to do a fixed price contract for the same item in the future. Thats probably where the millions they spend in lobbying will help.........
They don't have spare boosters. They booked enough Atlas V boosters for the planned launches from ULA and ULA can't build more as the first stage uses rocket engines from Russia. And you can't exactly go to a nearby store to pick up a space russian rocket or two. Especially with Ukraine war and other issues.....
So once the currently available boosters run out, thats it.
In theory starliner can launch from Falcon9 as well I think (may need some modifications), but that will probably mean another demo or 2 on falcon 9s to certify that combination before it's man rated.
And since this is a fixed price contract, whatever extra flights are needed, Boeing is going to eat the cost. Last I heard starliner program is already about a billion in the red and Boeing is probably hoping to get the rest of the launches contracted for to go without issues so that they don't end up going another billion or two in the red.
They can always give up and not get the next milestone payments and finish off with just a billion in the red and probably alot of egg on their face. Not a good look if you want to get into the next government contract.
Or they can soldier on, do everything they have to do, no matter the cost, to make sure they manage to complete the contract, and hope they get another cost plus contract in the future so that they can drag that out to make back whatever they lost on starliner. This assumes that all the astronauts on this and future starliner flights are safe and nobody dies.
who ordered the government not to entertain any enquiries from businesses in English?
https://www.pmo.gov.my/2023/10/govt-depts-reminded-not-to-entertain-letters-written-in-language-other-than-national-language/
That link is from Anwar's (Prime Minister's office).
I think there is even some controversy over what language is used to teach Maths and Science (last I heard the government schools are only supposed to use the local Malay language and not English).
And sure this will work out well when asking for international investments where you need to know alot of science / technical matters. /s
When Intel launched the Arc GPU, it kind of sucked, with driver issues, etc.
They promised/stated that performance and stability will improve in the next few months with some upcoming updates.
And they did as they promised. Performance improved over the next few months until it came to be considered as worthy of purchase as low / mid range GPUs.
The promises about improvements were not in a spec sheet. And they did not specify that they will improve the performance by X%. So people who bought it knew they will get some improvement, not how much. And the improvements came. I think in some cases it even doubled the initial performance for some games.
Elon, as the CEO, and the main / only public representative for Tesla was making all sorts of claims on upcoming capabilities of his company's vehicles. If his claims were not expected to be met, nobody in Tesla corrected what he said.
If I bought anything, and the CEO of the company that made and sold the item is telling everyone that it will be able to certain features soon, it better happen unless the company wants some very unhappy customers. I know Sony is on my blacklist for many years since they made some claims about upcoming capabilities and it ended up costing me a bunch of money.
Not all police forces use "police system" software for everything.
Am familiar with at least 1 police force which used Lotus Notes for taking reports, investigation notes, records, etc- about 25 years ago. Of course they customised it to fit their needs, but still, it does not require a special licence or permission to buy licence Lotus Notes for police work.
And presumably if there was a problem with the software, they may not just want to reveal what data created the problem to a random support / developer.
How well it performed is another thing of course. I know they ditched Lotus Notes some time ago.
Something to keep in mind :
Pass few wars that US has been in, they have been mostly attacking. So most / some of the local population saw Americans as aggressors.
If US actually steps in to defend Taiwan, I think most, if not all of the local population will be happy with US helping with the defence, and be supportive of whatever actions US took in Taiwan.
Ukraine does not have TSMC. That may push US to step in, regardless who / which party is in power in the US.
Unless US wants TSMC to die / get captured by China. Even if the TSMC infrastructure is destroyed, China will suddenly have 1000s of experienced fab engineers who can "assist" in getting China's own fabs to a better level.
The trick is, there is no formal defination of what "One China" means - Taiwan controls the whole of Greater China, or China (CCP) does.
That ambiguity allows most countries to agree to that policy. But I understand China is trying to push it's preferred meaning.
Do you need actual divers if you can send in remotely controlled underwater drones to place explosive at the cable area? Y
You dont even need the drone to return as you can just have it parked at the cable with the bombs and going boom with a timer. The "base ship" only has to hang around until the drone reaches the bottom, after that, once drone is attached to the cable, can just cut the control / power cable from the ship to the drone and just move off.
Depending on the depth, and the speed of the drone, it may take a few minutes to a couple of hours to get it done and the ship to move off.
How do you ban individuals or companies from buying a mass produced consumer item?
Sure they can be officially banned, but they can always go to Amazon (or whatever local telco shops they have) and just pay for Apple products like any other person. Maybe they will be banned from buying stuff from Apple.com or from Apple Stores. Thats about the best that Apple can do, in terms of "banning them".
Unless Apple wants to ban the whole of Israel / block all IPs from the whole country, so that it will make it slightly more difficult / expensive(paying for delivery from some other shop overseas) to buy Apple products.
Affinity has decent photoshop / illustrator / indesign competitors. And they are of the pay once / use forever (until your OS is not supported, presumably) style. And alot cheaper, compared to Adobe.
I only use 2 out of the 3 softwares Affinity provides, but I paid for all 3 (they are very very cheap comparatively) so that Affinity has just that bit more cash on hand to do the good fight against Adobe.
And yes, I was a fan of Macromedia's DW and FW those days.
I recall reading a similar story sometime ago about someone else using that site.
My understanding is that the FBI is aware of this site and it's actual function. And so they are perfectly fine with the site's operator, especially since they get to catch the occasional stupid wannabe criminals / criminals thru that site.
Russia can be as modern / superb as it's leader(s) allows it to be.
It has alot of resources and know how. Even has alot of educated (and not educated) people as a workforce to work in many different things. It was even doing reasonably well economically (compared to the rest of the world - with everyone in the process of recovering from covid).
It could even have taken advantage of China's total lockdown to get some investors over to start manufacturing (and doing other stuff) within Russia. Of course it may have to improve it's rule of law abit (but it wasn't all that worst when compared to China).
But instead Putin had to start shit and get most of the rest of the world pissed at him and his country. And now most of Russia's resources are being used to fight in Ukraine, when even half of that could have made Russia into a more powerful country economically.
I don't think Putin/Russia will recover from this any time soon. Huge brain drain, any educated male(and females) who wants a future and has a chance is hoofing it out of there.
There is even speculation that after Putin is gone (he is old and I don't think he is immortal) that Russia may break up (just like the old Soviet Union). Not sure I like that idea, with all the nukes and other stuff there, but if that's what happens, that's what will happen. Maybe if we are lucky, if there is another break up like the SU, hopefully the nukes and other gear will still be relatively safe.
Roscosmos is a recrutment ground for the Russian armed forces.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/06/it-appears-that-roscosmos-really-is-recruiting-soldiers-for-the-ukraine-war/
Not sure if they will be put in some sort of support capacity (tank mechanic, etc) or actual meat for the grinder.
It actually makes sense - less launches, less space stuff being done, more men in Roscosmos presumably free and hanging around.
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