Posts by GraXXoR

Raspberry Pi 4 takes a trip to Vulkan, sharpens 3D vision

Re: Invisible

When you say you already have half a dozen, did you buy them in the last six months or when the R4 first came out?

I bought two back when they were at RRP. One for me and one for my programming class kids to mess around with.

Scalpers (on Amazon and Yahoo shopping) here in Japan are charging up to 250 dollars for a R4B 4Gb model! At those prices I have a selection of all in one mini PCs I could buy..

Absolutely ridiculous prices.

Why Intel killed its Optane memory business

A bit sad...

I bought one second hand in Akihabara a few years ago and put Star Citizen on it which is known to have a horrendously long boot time. That one game filled over a quarter the drive but Holy Smoking bits, Bat Man, was it fast. Load times were about 1/3 of my PCI SSD despite having much slower throughput on paper.

It's a shame that this technology remained a proprietary niche rather than being licensed out to other companies.

These centrifugal moon towers could be key to life off-planet

Re: Not practical

"Others include getting materials there, keeping the vacuum outside of the habitat...."

It's surprisingly easy to keep the vacuum outside of the habitat... The difficulty is keeping the air in the habitat..

Your job was probably outsourced for exactly the reason you suspected

An indian friend of mine lives in Japan and instead of doing the dev work himself, he just outsourced it to a bunch of guys he knew back home in India. This cost him about 1/3 of his salary.. He then actually spent his time he spent developing a CRM solution for another client. He was pulling in about $150k and AFAIK his company never cottoned on to what he was doing.

America's chip land has another potential shortage: Electronics engineers

Mirrors my path pretty much exactly.

Started off in Electrical Engineering, moved to Electronics and nanotechnology.

Eight years of education later I was offered a job as a system engineer that paid more than anything I could find in the hardware field. I then moved into Windows deployment and finally started my own educational establishment here in Tokyo to teach programming to young kids.

My 10 year olds are already learning Python which pays highest here in Tokyo, and I'll follow the money and create courses as necessary to see my kids have the most fiscally valuable skills.

I'm 50 and have never used any of my postgrad technical skills outside of presentations to parents.

Intel’s first discrete GPUs won't be a home run

Proof just how effective modern marketing is

When someone calls a $400 card "entry level".

Feels like, if the price of something has only three digits, it's mid range at the very best.

A FTW3080 still costs about 40,000 yen more than it did when I bought mine in October of 2020. (weak Yen is not helping, I'll admit).

Same goes for phones. In Japan we pay the same a basic iPhone 13 Pro Max 256 basic model as we do for the MacBook Pro M2 16Gb/512.

Still, competition is generally a good thing and I'm very happy that we have Teams Red, Green and now Blue in the GFX Card space.

Bogus cryptocurrency apps steal millions in mere months

A friend of mine asked me what I thought of crypto and I explained my belief that it is basically an elaborate Ponzi scheme and those who are left with the burnt out rigs after the progenitors have moved on to their next scam will pay dearly.

Browsing though our chat history makes for a sad read:

Turns out he had already sunk a sizeable chunk of their savings into a powerful mining set up and it was dated last October!!

Possibly the worst time to have got on board with rigs costing astronomical fees.

What made this re-read worse was that the company he invested in was based in eastern Ukraine and was apparently looted in the conflicts earlier this year and no longer exists as a business entity.

To say that he was gutted would be a pretty fair summary, figuratively and fiscally.

CP/M's open-source status clarified after 21 years

Re: The title is no longer required.

I had a CPC-6128 and used to run a bunch of software like Logo (a turtle control program) and a Pascal compiler on CP/M Plus... I even dabbled in a spot of Assembly Language.

Ah... Nostalgia.

I had a client...

...and that client used to run a brace of rack mounted Xserves back in the day.

But when the Xserve was discontinued, I decided to move the company over to Windows Server 2003 instead of getting a new mac.

Not because I felt it was better (although it was cheaper), but because I was pretty much superfluous after I had got their Xserves up and running smoothly only getting called out once per quarter or when a hard disk failed in their RAID setup.

Luckily, moving to Windows was the right choice, I got a call out most weeks from that point on and have kept myself on almost call out or remote access for 17 years. I've earned a small fortune from them over the years.

I'm only partly joking when I say that I believe that Windows was designed to encourage IT support work and many of us would lose our livelyhoods if companies moved en masse to more reliable software.

Oracle agrees to settle class action over cloud sales tactics for $17.5m

so 10,000,000 of their customers get to apply for $1 refund and the lawyers pocket the remaining $7,500,000.

I know this is a gross exaggeration but class action mainly benefits the lawyers, unfortunately.

PC sales take double-digit tumble in Q2 amid economic downturn

And add to that those price increases we're seeing across the board and there's nowhere to go but down.

Now-frozen crypto-lending biz Celsius accused of devolving into a Ponzi scheme

A (former?) colleague of mine…

Asked me what I thought about crypto last year.

I told him I thought it was basically a Ponziesque bubble with zero intrinsic value that was about to burst and that any people attempting to enter now (arse end of 2021) would likely be entering at the top.

He said a subdued “thank you” and that was the last I ever heard from him.

I found out from his Facebook page a few days later the reason why he’d asked was that he’d just pumped $20k into a mining rig which he was still waiting for.

Now you’ve made me wonder how that all turned out.

Oh damn I quit Facebook last year, too, so I guess I’ll never know.

Apple's new MacBook Air: Is the jump to M2 silicon worth another $200?

Re: Stamp Sized?

I just sold my 11” 2011 Air last year after picking up a 13” MacBook Pro second hand.

I miss the sheer portability of it and form factor but not much else. Its battery was poor and the screen was pretty abysmal with an enormous bezel.

I really do wish the bring out a MacBook Mini in that form factor but doubt it will happen given their move to higher margins.

Yup. That’s the mistake I made. For some reason I was thinking about the M2 Pro that has exactly the same body as the M1 machine.

Re: It *might* have been worth it...

Absolutely agree. The M2 is a brilliant upgrade form the M1 overall. 25% is not to be sniffed at.

Sorry. I was focused on the M2 13” MacBook Pro not the Air. My bad.

Re: It *might* have been worth it...

Good point. How did I forget that? Magsafe was the single most TCO reducing addition to their range back in the day and has saved my laptop several times.

It *might* have been worth it...

IMO, If they had doubled the storage capacity at the same pricepoint...

As it stands, it's questionable at best.

It finds itself in a stupid place sandwiched between the M1 and the Pro/Max chips.

Anyone who really needs performance will get a Pro/Max

Anyone who doesn't will be more than fine with an M1.

The only edge case for an M2 is someone who wants the lightest possible computer available with the most performance.

Tech professionals pour cold water on UK crypto hub plans

Buzzword Bingo.

And on today's marketing buzzword bingo card we have:

Global Crypto Hub.

Re: Meanwhile...

From the clip it seemed he had absolutely no idea what Crypto Fascist even was... as don't I.

Microsoft gives its partners power to change AD privileges on customer systems – without permission

One downvote.

I see one Microsoft parter has downvoted all your comments. Lol

Tough news for Apple as EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Re: A good day for Intel, I guess...

Welp, after reading your comment, all I can say is your choice of icon checks out.

Suspected phishing email crime boss cuffed in Nigeria

Sent a long email in broken English telling him that I'm the second cousin of the wife of the chief of police and that if he sends me 100 BTC, I will make sure the CoP knows that he's innocent.

Beijing needs the ability to 'destroy' Starlink, say Chinese researchers

To keep track of the laser penguins that protect the earth's southern boundary wall from attack and potential oceanic leakage if wall is breached.

Problems for the Linux kernel NTFS driver as author goes silent

Obligatory XKCD

https://xkcd.com/2347/

Beanstalk loses $182m in huge flash-loan crypto heist

The length of the article...

... is clear indication of the depth and sophistication of the attack. Genius in its simplicity.

Star loses $500,000 NFT after crooks exploit Rarible market

When I saw the title...

I just assumed the specialty printer company had got hacked... LOL.

French court pulls SpaceX's Starlink license

10GHz will affect the cattle?

That there is Rookie level crazy.

My Japanese, former NHK newsroom wife believes that Corona was spread downstream by 5G and received by people with 5G compliant smartphones and spread to their neigbours... Then vaccines facilitated the upstream return via the injected bluetooth antennae in order to transmit you bio data back to Bill Gates, helped by government mandated tracking apps...

This level of fear is tame in comparison.

Asahi Linux reaches 'very early Alpha'

Re: 53G of disk space?

From another article:

The distribution explained that it needs the space due to having around 2.5GB for Apple's bootloader and firmware, as well as a full copy of the macOS recovery image and spare space for the ability for macOS to do updates.

"You need 15GB for Asahi Linux Desktop, but macOS itself needs a lot of free space for system updates to work, so the installer will expect you to leave 38GB of extra slack in macOS by default to avoid shooting yourself in the foot," it explains.

Ukraine invasion: We should consider internet sanctions, says ICANN ex-CEO

Re: its over

“one major benefit of it is in deterring war. Free communication allows information to get to the people on both sides of a border, people to become closer to one another in spite of geographic or even linguistic barriers”

Jeezus, the internet doesn’t even make people in the same household become closer together despite the *lack of* of geographic and even linguistic barriers.

Just watch any teenager with a phone.

Amazon stretches working life of its servers an extra year, for AWS and its own ops

Re: AD Revenue

$10M per episode is not unusual.

Netflix's Arcane, an acclaimed animation made by Riot games (yes, the LoL creators) is thought to have cost the French animation studio Fortiche €80M for 6 hours of animated TV.

That's just the animation fees. Riot's own writing staff and hiring the voice actors, marketing etc. costs have not been revealed.

Modern AAA TV series, like modern AAA games, is now a $100M+ investment.

By the way, Arcane was incredible. And ironically better than 99% of the stuff on Amazon Prime last year.

'IwlIj jachjaj! Incoming LibreOffice 7.3 to support Klingon and Interslavic

Re: Well done Liam...

I'm an immigrant living in Japan and have been for a quarter century.

I remember when I got here, I had already learnt Japanese by making Japanese friends in the UK at uni, going out for drinks at night, sharing meals and generally interacting. By the time I got to Japan I was able to speak and read Japanese without too much difficulty. (Writing was a different matter. LOL)

For the first year or two, I picked a tiny town in the middle of the countryside where there were no English speaking foreigners, just to prevent me relying on anyone besides myself. Once I was fluent enough to do everything myself I moved to Tokyo.

Many visitors on the so-called JET Program at the time were big Japan fans and had learnt Japanese at university with the aim of living in Japan.

However, since they had spent the entirety of their education merely learning Japanese, they had absolutely no useful skills and were unable to find work. I on the other hand could already understand and speak Japanese more fluently than they could with their "book language skills" and had a number of technical degrees under my belt to secure any future jobs I might apply for, which I was able to easily find especially because I had serviceably Japanese on top of education.

The vast majority of those Japanese learners on the JET program could only find menial jobs or teach English as lowly paid unqualified assistant teachers. Some of the ladies were able to find night-time "entertainment" work or become a "model." O_O

Really not an ideal life at all. As such, most just gave up and went home.

So my advice to people is always this: never waste your precious time at university learning the language if you intend to live in that country eventually. If you do, you'll have squandered your precious time in tertiary education learning a skill that most native ten-year-olds have already mastered.

Instead, try to pick up the language as a hobby, find some visitors or locals who speak the language and get fluent by actually speaking it on a daily basis after class.

Intel ‘regrets’ offending China with letter telling suppliers to avoid Xinjiang

Oh noes, then we'd have to ask them kindly to stop "tweaking" the democracy of HK that they promised to protect for 50 years...

The shame of it.

Ah, so THAT'S why the people of Hong Kong

Are so happy to be back home and reunited with their fatherland and out from under their century-long oppressor's thumbs and have removed the heretical statues of and vigils for fake massacres.

Apple arms high-end MacBook Pro notebooks with M1 Pro, M1 Max processors

Re: eWaste

If you want to run linux and you don't like apple's approach, vote with your wallet. Buy a windows machine and put linux on it instead or buy a framework modular laptop (is that what it's called?)

win:win You get linux, apple doesn't get your money.

That seems far more reasonable a stance to me than buying hardware from a company you dislike and trying to crowbar an OS onto that they have made abundantly clear they don't want to see running on bare metal.

Re: It has a notch!

If you mean ironic in an Alanis Morissette sort of way, then sure.

They are merely just listening (at least in part) to their professional customer base for once instead of churning out stuff that looks good and (except for the notch), giving them what they had literally been clamouring for for years.

And magsafe... woot!...

TBH, I'm glad they're admitting - in deed if not in so many words - that they fucked up and need to roll back. If these devices live up to the numbers posted in their livestream then they are going to redefine what laptops are capable of away from the mains supply.

Facebook posts job ad for 10,000 'high-skilled' roles to 'build the metaverse' – and they'll all be based in the EU

Re: Faecesbook are getting involved

At least your palm is only hitting your face... Imagine where a lot of peoples palms are going to be when surfing some dodgy but highly fidelitous VR locales...

As the saying goes, if it exists...

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

Just waiting for the first textbook with a section entitled Two Alices, one cpu.

Toyota needs more than its Cheer Squad to deal with chip shortages, as five more home factories forced into idleness

Designing in-house chips...

And of course, they've purchased a $5bn in-house fab and brought in all the expertise needed...

iFixit prises open the iPhone 13 Pro, claims 'any display replacement knocks out Face ID'

Not tied to the phone... but...

We all know from iFixit that last year, if you swapped cameras between two legitimate iPhone 12 devices, you lose most of its functionality and end up in some compromised lo res mode.

This year, it's worse... According to Louis Rossmann, they've DRMed the screens (the #1 breakable component)

So you are free to swap the screen between two iPhone 13 devices, and the screen itself is not impared, but Face ID dies if you do that...

Call me cynical but that sounds like a clever way of getting around any laws that state "you cannot purposefully disable any genuine component that is swapped in place of a broken component."

The component itself is fine, you just lose access to some random function elsewhere.

Apple are doing their best to lock out all 3rd party repairs... You should hear the 'C'hoice word Louis uses to describe Apple. And in this case, he's not wrong.

Astounding greed from the worlds richest company.

BOFH: You'll find there's a company asset tag right here, underneath the monstrously heavy arcade machine

Re: "I'm sure we'll lose the records of it in the fire, though...""

But why was it carrying lost assets in the first place?

Re: Personal heaters

I only managed to understand it after reading your comment and spending a moment to actually reread and absorb the statement...

I have a friend who thinks like that... He is a public menace with anything above half an Amp.

EU to formally probe Nvidia's $54bn takeover over British chip designer Arm – report

Re: Whatt???

I suspect China would “discover” some silicon that turns out to be *extremely* similar to current ARM designs down the back of their sofa.

Right to repair shouldn't exist – not because it's wrong but because it's so obviously right

Brain fart.

I meant Raspberry Pi not Arduinos when talking about Linux. Arduinos I only really use for real time control of things like temperature sensors and LEDs.

I was just about to add to the chorus.... If Framework can ship to Japan without breaking the bank I'm in.... I will order a couple of the unbuilt ones and use them as teaching materials for my modern computing class... where we build computers together.. .from Arduinos to i5 powered Linux boxes (sorry, the word boxen still brings me out in a beardy rash) and set them up as web and media servers and video phones etc.

It will be nice to show the kids that a completely modular computer is possible... Even if RTR is not in time for me, I hope I can educate a bunch of up coming youngsters in the "evils" of proprietary / locked down / black box hardware and get them to push for more openness in the future.

Apple wants to scan iCloud to protect kids, can't even keep them safe in its own App Store – report

Parental Oversight

I still can't shake the idea that all these checks and balances are put into place because parents hand over smartphones to children without oversight.

Heck, most parents don't know the first thing about technology, yet are willing to hand over $1200 iPhones to 10 year olds here in Tokyo and most of the phones I see them using are unrestricted, with Line, instagram and so on. I asked my students about their phones and they all said they just lie and say they are over 13 so that they can access the various services.

I have also seen one or two girls casually browsing "questionable" comic book content on their iPhone 12 pros (which everyone over the age of about 10 seems to have) and contacted their parents with my concerns directly. However, as many may know, Japan has a somewhat different outlook when it comes to that sort of content.

Still, I'm in a tiny minority here who is reluctant to let our girls (both of secondary school age) own a smartphone and I believe my kids are the only ones in their class to not have a smartphone.

They have access to a pair of iPads in the lounge which they use for homework and listening to music, but we are still opposed to giving them free access to a smartphone with all its attendant applications and web browsers until they are of an age where their actions will have less serious consequences.

Zorin OS 16 Pro arrives complete with optional 'Windows 11' desktop

Re: The thing about OpenOffice/LibreOffice

I run libreoffice 7 on a pokey GPD pocket and pocket 2... its plenty fast enough, even on the older model.

I guess, we all have subjective tolerances to what indeed is and isn't slow.

Chocolate beer barred from sale after child mistakes it for chocolate milk

Re: Couple of recommendations....

you've really got to fancy your beers to risk a visit to CCP land just to drink one.

only recently became a fan of European so-called cookie stouts... took me a while to figure out what makes them tick... but now I can enjoy one or two on a cold winter night. not a daily tipple, for sure, but a worthy addition to any comprehensive beer hall's arsenal.

Malaysian Police crush crypto-mining kit to punish electricity thieves

Cleanup

Would be doubly delicious if the crims were now alsoresponsible

For cleaning and recycling the e-waste.

It does seem a waste, but it’s designed as a spectacle. I can imagine the sphincters of any other illegal miners watching this on the news, tightening a notch…