Posts by DS999

Tesla fires gigafactory staff after someone made the mistake of mentioning unions

Re: Denial[TM] to the rescue!

I know two people who have a Tesla, one of them has already when she's in the market for a new car Tesla will be off the list. Though I think half of that was due to all the build quality defects it took a couple months to resolve after taking delivery, but Musk turning into a Trumper definitely didn't help the case with her. There are more and more alternatives for EVs every year, and within a few years every major automaker will have them.

There's no first mover advantage and no network effect with cars, it is nothing like tech products. Every time you buy a car there is no benefit to buying the same brand you had before, no cost for switching to a different brand.

Biden: I want standard EV chargers made in America by 2024 – get on it

It is so funny to see Trumpers in love with Musk now. Hope you don't hold any Tesla stock, the more he cozies up to Trump the more all the people who have been buying Teslas up til now start looking to buy their next EV from ANYONE else!

The right may cheer him on now but far fewer of them are interesting in buying EVs versus Biden voters...can't see anyone wearing camo going fishing or hunting rolling up in a Cybertruck. His buddies would give themselves a hernia from laughing at him so hard!

I'm starting to think this is the wrong approach

Sure, we need charging stations on major highways for people making long trips, but most charging will happen at home. That's fine for people who have a garage, but there are a lot of people who live in apartments, or have more cars than they have garage bays. We need to at least start thinking about solutions to help spur adoption there.

There's so much focus on chargers on the road because people are too locked into thinking about the way it works today with gas stations. If everyone had a way to charge their car where it is parked each night, that's where 98% of charging would happen. The overwhelming majority of places that sell gasoline today would not refit with charging stations, they would probably continue as convenience stores - just look at how many people park in front, fuel is far from the only reason people go there.

What Brit watchdog redacted: Google gives Apple cut of Chrome iOS search revenue

Re: Flawed logic

It is ridiculous to think that if Google wasn't paying Apple that Google Search would be Safari's default search engine. Why hand over all that user data? They'd either make something like duckduckgo the default search if they weren't allowed to accept payment, or they would develop their own search engine and realize some advertising revenue on that - search engines would work quite well if the only "personal data" they took into account was your current and past search terms.

Maybe advertisers wouldn't pay as much for ad placement there because it doesn't take into account all the other stuff Google has amassed on you over the years but as far as the end user goes the results would likely be more useful. When I search I am looking for something specific, it doesn't need to know what kind of car I owned 15 years ago to "tailor" my search results!

Qualcomm claims to be 5G Advanced-ready with Snapdragon X75

Re: 5G

The spectrum efficiency is better

Not true. 5G didn't make any gains in bits per symbol versus LTE. The higher speeds are from the ability to use more megahertz of bandwidth at once, which is primarily down to using higher frequency ranges where there's more room.

That's why 5G in the "traditional" cellular bands isn't really any faster than LTE. 5G is better at sharing spectrum when there's a lot of contention, and has lower latency (at least when used in standalone mode, which most 5G isn't)

99 year old man says cryptocurrency is for idiots

It has manufacturing roots going back to the 1800s

Both "Berkshire" and "Hathaway" were founded in the 1800s, in the textile industry. They merged in the 1950s.

Buffett started acquiring shares in 1962 and expanded into other businesses like insurance and the last manufacturing vestiges of Berkshire-Hathaway closed in the 80s but the name remains.

Musk says he ain't going anywhere as Twitter CEO until at least late 2023

He's becoming Trump

He wants the algorithm changed because he's upset Biden is getting more views than him? That kind of thing is straight from Trump's playbook.

I wonder if Trump heard about the change to boost Musk's tweets, and will tell him "I'll come back to Twitter if you give me the same boost". That would be a quick way to cause millions to drop Twitter!

Warren Buffet cashes out of TSMC, which splashes cash on fabs

Re: Warren Buffet

I wish I had people working for me making "grievous mistakes" with a 33% return in three months!

Workers who help Teslas become robots explore starting a union to avoid same fate

As of today they've been fired

I'm sure Musk will have some excuse about how they had planned to fire them BEFORE they announced their plans to form a union.

Musk's view count antics are perfect cover for Twitter's paid API failure

So he's become Tom from Myspace?

He might have more in common with Tom down the road, if he kills Twitter's value so much he ends up selling it for the same $580 million Tom sold Myspace for (he could have got a lot more if he'd sold out a few years earlier)

Taking notes from AWS, Google prepares custom Arm server chips of its own

Re: BYO

You're exposing your cluelessness. A 5nm fab costs over $10 billion to build, and produces far more chips than Google's datacenters could ever use.

No company on Earth has an internal demand for enough chips to justify operating their own fab anymore, not Apple, not Intel, not Samsung. The foundry model is the only model going forward.

US military spends weekend shooting down Useless Floating Objects

Re: Stupid Brandon administration

The only practical EMP attack requires detonation of a nuclear warhead. The "pinch" from Ocean's 11 does not exist.

If someone is detonating a nuke above the US, it doesn't really matter how it is delivered but a balloon is unlikely to be chosen method of delivery.

Google's $100b bad day demo may be worth the price

Reddit as a source

That strategy is only viable so long as it is not used by many people. If it becomes common for people to search that way, or search engines give reddit posts with more engagement a greater weight it will inevitably lead to SEOs polluting reddit with posts with fraudulent engagement the same way they creating spam sites propped up with link farms when Pagerank was king.

That's not a TP-Link access point, it's a… vacuum?

Re: Does it actually clean edges and corners ?

I want something that can dust!

New from iRobot, the Doomba, the dusting version of the Roomba! It flies around your house dangling dusters (insert pic that shows something that looks like a Predator's head floating around your house) which thanks to the charge from the propeller blades will attract all the dust from anything it comes into contact with.

Warning: Please safely store any Ming vases and lock your cats in the bathroom before setting it loose!

Water-hunting NASA cubesat won't reach Moon after total thruster fail

If its a "cubesat" I assume it this was a pretty low budget project?

Probably smart for NASA to try to some less important projects using cheap satellites to compare with the big budget stuff that has a mission life of 5 years but ends up lasting for the better part of 50. Might be that they need multiple cheapskate launches to insure success, but that's still probably much cheaper. Save the high budget stuff for the more public facing, or "one in a lifetime" projects like Voyager being able to gravity assist to reach all the planets.

BOFH: Generating a report the Director can show the Board – THIS is what AI was made for

Re: The BOFH & PFY using ChatGPT

So who is going to learn more ways to be evil in this collaboration from hell?

What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage

What type of hellish job

Has someone on call to fix power issues in a home office?

If told none of the gear will power on I would have said call an electrician and hung up!

Apple complains UK watchdog wants to make iOS a 'clone' of Android

Re: But...

You're assuming Chrome is bug free. If you implement something and it works in Chrome thanks to some bugs, but doesn't display correctly on something without the same set of bugs, whose fault is it? And if you don't even test on other browsers as more and more web devs are now doing, you won't even know.

This is exactly what happened with IE 6, which had its own set of bugs and non standard behaviors that web devs coded to, and even when Netscape implemented standards correctly pages didn't display right and other than a stubborn few of us almost everyone moved to IE 6 believing all other browsers "sucked".

Re: But...

That should be implemented with a specific API in the OS that is secured and limited for a specific purpose, not by giving browsers carte blanche access to every possible method of authentication device.

Re: But...

Not sure if it is still true but as of a year or two ago Safari was the fastest browser going.

True it isn't keeping up with the latest standards as well, but some of that is deliberate - not implementing "standards" that Google pushed through that allow the browser to access bluetooth, USB, NFC etc. that it has no business accessing.

When a site works on Chrome but doesn't work on Safari I'll bet 99% of the time it has nothing to do with Safari being behind in standards. It is instead the exact same reason why IE 6.0 worked and Netscape didn't 20 years ago - web designers are designing and testing Chrome and don't care about testing or fixing for other browsers. So if you want a web monoculture controlled by Google where everyone is forced to use Chrome because web designers will just tell people on iPhone "use Chrome if you want this site to work" then you'll have your wish before if Apple allows a "full" Chrome browser in the app store.

Find My Kids app is basically AirTags for your offspring

Re: Who on earth buys an Apple Watch?

My girlfriend has one, her main use is viewing notifications for texts etc. when she doesn't have her phone in hand - she is a hairdresser so glancing at her wrist to see if e.g. her next appointment is telling her they are running late is better than grabbing her phone to look. But she uses that function all the time because she's always leaving her phone laying about wherever around the house (or is able to leave her phone laying around wherever because of this)

Not sure if she uses it during workouts since we don't workout at the same gym, but I would guess she probably does.

So at least for her, it is useful, but definitely not worth it for me. I could see getting something to wear during bike rides and runs to track my heart rate but an Apple Watch would be overkill for that so I'd probably get some fitness band with limited functionality.

Used EV car batteries find new life storing solar power in California

They would never end up in a landfill

Consumers aren't disposing of EV battery packs themselves, that happens in some sort of authorized service center or an automotive junkyard if the vehicle is too old/damaged to get a new battery.

No one is sending entire gasoline powered cars to a landfill, catalytic converter and all. Similarly, no one is going to send battery packs to a landfill so long as it is economic to recycle them for such materials or there are laws similar to the laws regarding disposal of used engine oil that require recycling to recover the useful materials.

US and EU looking to create 'critical minerals club' to ensure their own supplies

What about Canada and Mexico?

They should probably be included too, both have a lot of land area where new sources of critical minerals might be found. For Mexico, in particular, anything that helps grow their economy helps reduce the incentive for its people to want to illegally migrate to the US (or for those fleeing central American countries to want to come to the US instead of stopping in Mexico) so it should have support from republicans who want to reduce illegal (or lets face it, all) migration to the US on the southern border.

Scammers steal $4 million in crypto during face-to-face meeting

Not very "Trusted" I guess

I wonder if one of these guys was involved with the creation of this Trusted Wallet thing, and either knew of or added a backdoor for this type of theft.

But I'm still laughing at the fool who lost $4 million in play money. Once again showing why crypto is not, should never be, and never will be a replacement for fiat money.

Could RISC-V become a force in high performance computing?

Re: RISC-V is inherently high performance

Modern ARM is clearly superior to MIPS, it doesn't suffer from its weaknesses like branch delay slots - but neither does RISC-V as it learned from MIPS' mistakes. It is a very silly argument that RISC-V is somehow better than ARM because it came from MIPS (which makes it worse) or because ARM was originally conceived for low power applications (which is irrelevant because AArch64 is its own thing that's not backwards compatible with any previous ARM ISA)

AAarch64 is probably the best ISA going since it was conceived so recently - more recently than RISC-V. It also includes a lot more stuff as standard, so there is much less room for fragmentation vs RISC-V which because it was originally designed for research not for commercial applications. The base ISA doesn't even include multiplication, though that is part of the "standard extensions" so no one is going to be using such a stripped down implementation for anything real.

Surprise! China's top Android phones collect way more info

Re: As an owner of a Xiaomi

It doesn't matter where the chips were made (which hint hint is in Taiwan not mainland China) they can't "slip in undocumented features" in Apple's or Qualcomm's SoCs.

Short of rooting it and installing vanilla Android

No.

Which runs the risk you might not be able to take advantage of stuff like that 1" sensor...

Google unleashes fightback against ChatGPT, a Bard by any other name

Google is desperate

They've successfully connected themselves to 'AI' in the minds of the average person, then suddenly there's a new 'AI' thing in the news that isn't Google's, and worse has funding from Microsoft! So they have to roll something out to compete.

The magic of voice assistants has worn off for most people. At first they mostly sucked, but with years and countless billions of interactions they've improved to where they are all pretty much indistinguishable in how well they work so people take that for granted and are no longer impressed like they were when someone would get an Echo right after they came out and their friends willing to overlook all the stupid mistakes it made for the times it got things right.

So the next big thing will be assistants that can carry on a conversation with you or generate content for you. I could see the former being useful, but the latter - other than people trying to pull a fast one on their professor or boss - would have much less appeal to people for day to day use.

The dream of course is that you could have one that collects enough personal data about you (while keeping it absolutely private!!) that it could take what it knows about into account in its responses. I could be looking for a new car and it already knows I will only consider ones with AWD, hate SUVs and crossovers, prefer 2 doors to 4, etc. and it could help me limit my search further by showing me options and carrying on a conversation about it ("ugh, that has a spoiler, those look stupid I don't want anything with a spoiler") and that would actually be of real value. The "keeping my personal data private" part would be a bigger roadblock to this IMHO than the technology to make an assistant "smart" enough to do this, unfortunately.

Private company set up to oversee UK's prototype fusion reactor

Don't make it too small, or Larry the cat will knock it off the table it is sitting on

Trust, not tech, is holding back a safer internet

Re: "Global spending [is] a quarter of the US defense budget"

Canada isn't going to pose a threat of invasion to the US no matter how much it spends on its military, both because it would still be outmatched and because Canada doesn't want to invade the US anymore than the US wants to invade Canada so I don't see a problem with bumping spending up to the 2% level that European countries are doing. If you want to be in NATO, you should contribute as an equal member. If you don't want to spend that much, then withdraw from NATO.

It is just giving other members an excuse if they see Canada not pulling their weight but remaining a member of NATO.

Google works on Blink-based iOS browser contrary to Apple's WebKit rule

That's a HUGE downside

I don't see any argument where being able to use other browsers on iOS outweighs the damage that would be done by going back to the bad old days where web sites are only compatible with one browser. Especially with Google being that one company, given how many more fingers they have in the web compared to Microsoft in the "best viewed in IE" days.

If the government forces Apple to open up to other browsers they should simultaneously force Google to divest Chrome and not allow them to offer any browsers other than if they want to bundle one with Chrome.

Wow, turns out cloud sales can slow down – eh, Amazon, Google?

Re: Growth Sustainability

It is a problem for Google because their cloud business has never reached profitability, so I guess they need it to get bigger until economies of scale kick in or something.

ChatGPT (sigh) the fastest-growing web app in history (sigh) claim analysts

Re: Worrying.

You're picking ONE example where it won't write about a specific person then will write about another specific person who happens to also be the president at the time, and assuming the entire model is "woke". If you test it and it refuses to write anything positive about republicans and always writes something positive about democrats then maybe you have a point, but writing your post based on one data point it is still you who is the absolute cockwomble.

Re: Worrying.

Oh look another Trumper got his liddle feelings hurt because an AI won't kiss the ass of the orange clown he worships! The unending victimhood from the same people who used to call the other side "snowflakes" is almost impossible to believe.

China unveils massive blockchain cluster running homebrew tech

Re: Small question...

Not all "transactions" require equal computational effort. Comparing whatever China is doing with whatever this LMAX disruptor does is folly. Especially when we know blockchain transactions require quite a bit more effort than a "standard" database transaction.

No more free API access, says Twitter: You pay for that data

Re: Well that *IS* his aim,

Why else would he dispute in court, the existence of 'The Trump Organisation' if he didn't already have the papers for Chapter 11 on his desk

He (or rather his terrible lawyers) made the huge mistake of filing papers for "Trump Org 2" or something like that. Having a "backup" corporation ready to move assets to leaving a shell that's in legal trouble to go bankrupt is only going to bring the hammer down harder. Both on Trump and his lawyers. Remember what MAGA stands for: Making Attorneys Get Attorneys. The ones foolish enough to represent him in this mess may not only lose their licenses, but be in legal trouble themselves for this stunt.

They might have had a chance of getting away with it if Trump wasn't so vain he had to have his name on the replacement, making it easy to find. If it had been given some innocuous name and used a different mailing address etc. it might have flown under the radar.

Should Google location data be a tool for cops?

Cellular data isn't precise enough

They can't tell who is within 150 meters of a certain location, so a geofence of everyone who might have been in the bank during the hour in question would be a much longer list of people for them to go through.

I suppose a bank could install microcells for all three major US carriers, which phones would automatically connect to (the baseband does it, there is no way for the phone's owner to prevent it) which would provide them their own data to give the cops even if this type of data trawling is ruled unconstitutional.

The lesson here is smart criminals will leave their phone at home when robbing a bank. Or better yet, visit a grocery store and hide it behind stacks of cereal or something, then retrieve it after the robbery is complete. If the cops finger you, you can claim you were grocery shopping at the time they say the crime was committed. And your lawyer can subpoena your carrier who will produce data to back that up - which might introduce just enough reasonable doubt in one or two jurors to get you off the hook!

Re: Why Google?

In the US it is basically 50/50

Re: Why Google?

Probably 99% of them, because only the type of people who read The Register would even consider turning it off.

Tesla admits it was asked to hand over Autopilot, Full Self-Driving docs to investigators

Cue Musk going full Trump

And tweeting about a "witch hunt" in 3..2..1

Everyone's doing it: PayPal sends 2,000 workers packing

Re: Back to normal?

Sure but it is nearly impossible to identify those 10%? You might have felt 10% of your co-workers were useless, but maybe one of them was responsible for some function weren't fully aware of that was vital. Even if employees are able to identify that 10% you can't rely on them - because those 10% will be doing some of the evaluation, people will give a pass to their friends or use it as an opportunity to knife someone they dislike in the back.

I wonder how long before someone tries to use ChatGPT to evaluate employees and choose those to be culled...

Atos and Nest part company two years into 18-year £1.5bn contract

Re: what a surprise ..... not !!!

Yep I've seen these sort of things before and they probably thought Atos would cave to their demands over fears of losing a long term contract. Their bluff was called!

Intel cuts some workers’ pay to fund its future

Why are they so afraid to suspend dividends?

Dropping dividends would have more than paid for all these pay cuts, but that would hit the stock price - which would hit the options of those at the top and that's where they make their real money. A 15% or 25% cut in salary is nothing when most of your income is via options.

NASA Geotail spacecraft's 30-year mission ends after last data recorder fails

Re: Say what you want about NASA's inefficiencies

At least in the US, "guys" is often used to refer to both sexes in mixed groups. If it had read "so men, how long..." then your point would stand.

Say what you want about NASA's inefficiencies

When it comes to missions lasting many multiples of the planned life they are the undisputed champion.

Any iPad is foldable if you try hard enough but Apple guru says a hinged one is coming

A folding iPhone risky because it "would cannibalize existing iPhone sales"???

Why would Apple care, if they sell fewer regular iPhones and more folding iPhones so they sell the same number that's just as good. The fact a folding iPhone would undoubtedly cost more so even if the margins are the same the profit per phone would be higher. That part would be a win/win.

The risk is that it develops problems over time like a visible seam where it folds or some type of mechanical failure. Plus there's the risk that if it is a niche product like folding phones currently are it may not be worth their trouble to design & sell it. They quit making the iPhone "mini" because it wasn't selling enough despite it selling quite a few more units than all the folding phones from all the Android OEMs combined. If they ever start making a folding iPhone they want to be sure it sticks around or they will piss off customers if they discontinue it after a couple years.

I don't really have much desire for a folding phone, but that seems much more useful than a folding tablet. At least a folding phone allows a bigger screen that what would fit in your pocket otherwise. I don't really see a reason why I should want a tablet to fold to a smaller size, but I guess the draw is that at a 90* fold its form factor is basically that of a laptop and can sit on its own (but then why the mention of the stand in other articles...maybe I'm not understanding what the target market is for this)

A moment of silence for all the drives that died in the making of this Backblaze report

Re: How busy are the devices ?

I never observed much difference in life between drives that were active 24x7 in DBs and drives that had a more sedate life as lower utilization file servers. There may be some slight correlation there but it wouldn't be worth them selecting for.

The reason they pull out boot drives could be something else, like choosing a smaller size for those or maybe they recycle veteran drives that were used for the main file store and don't want the physical handling required to count against them.

Re: They(Backblaze) have done them before

Controller failure is a problem for HDDs as well - that's usually what causes those early failures in the first few months of operation.

It would be interesting if they tracked S.M.A.R.T. stats for remaining life for their SSDs along with failure rates. Storage Review did a long term test a few years ago running SSDs flat out for as long as it took for them to fail. Some exceeded their write life by as much as 3x.

EDIT: I read the article after posting this and it looks like they are doing exactly what I wished for above so it'll be interesting to check back in a few years.

McDonald's pulls plug on Wi-Fi, starts playing classical music to soothe yobs

Classical music

Didn't do much to stop Kubrick's droogs from inflicting ultraviolence on those around them!

Former Facebooker alleges Meta drained users' batteries to test apps

Re: I seem to be running on 'empty'

Yeah I could see testing basing on load latency, that is something immediately obvious to the end user. But how could they know Messenger is draining their batteries more than normal, unless they are using it for hours on end every day and hardly using anything else?

If your phone heats up as a consequence of pointless battery draining I suppose you'd notice that. I would be less likely to use an app that heated up my phone if it was doing something that shouldn't require much work, like a Messenger app. But the average person who knows nothing about programming has no way to know whether a given type of app "should" create more or less performance load on a phone.