Posts by DS999

Ahead of Super Tuesday, US elections face existential and homegrown threats

Its a combination of misinformation and hyperpartisanship that's the risk

When there is no news source that both sides will trust, how do you counter the misinformation? Will the side that benefits be willing to give up that benefit by using their news outlets to tell people it is misinformation? How does that even work for people who don't listen to "news" at such at all, but rely only on what their friends share via social media? Someone who shares something false may not want to admit they were duped and share a retraction/correction. Some are so unwilling to admit fault they will double down and attack anyone who dares to correct them.

The other problem is that AI is good enough (or many people BELIEVE is good enough) that we will see video evidence of a candidate making a specific statement denying it and claiming it was an AI fake. Won't matter when people stand up and say "yes he did say it I was there" because the candidate having got out in front of it by making the denial will be believed by his followers regardless of how much evidence to the contrary is piled up.

We've already seen this in fact, when the pussy grabbing tape was released, Trump at first claimed it was a fake. Though Trump does have a pattern where at first he denies something, then later admits and it claims it was no problem (i.e. "perfect call", "the president records act lets me have those documents", etc.) so he might have trouble maintaining a claim of an AI fake for long if he follows his usual pattern.

The Who’s Who of AI just chipped in to fund humanoid robot startup Figure

Re: That's how you enable a server only rogue AI to gain access to the physical world :-(

Seems like an island might be a good escape, it may have trouble walking along the ocean bottom. Or alternatively, live on a boat. Unless it can also operate a boat, all it could is walk on the sea floor until it was under you, but a terminator would be far too heavy to reach the surface unless it had prepared ahead with something it could inflate to carry it.

Re: That's how you enable a server only rogue AI to gain access to the physical world :-(

Being chased by a terminator that moves at 1/6th human speed (and I'll be generous and assumes that means 1/6 human walking speed and it can't run) would be pretty awful in a post apocalyptic world where you had no powered vehicles. Assuming it can't lose track of you you'd have to be constantly on the move to keep away from it, because even if you walked four hours every day you wouldn't widen the gap!

Re: Honestly 16% of human speed is not a problem

The point of using humanform robots is that they can work in the warehouse, they can load trucks, they can ride along with the trucks and drop off stuff at customer's houses, etc. They are far more flexible than a solution designed to do only one thing like an autonomous fork lift or grabby robot hands whizzing around on ceiling tracks.

Honestly 16% of human speed is not a problem

If they were affordable enough, you just have more of them.

If you figure they operate nearly 24x7 (I'll assume they have fast charging so minimal "coffee breaks") so they do the work of four 40 hour per week employees that's maybe $200K/year including employee health insurance and so forth. But they're 1/6 of the speed so down to $33K/yr. If they last six years including warranty/repair that's $200K. Betting they cost more than that, but if the next version works at 50% of human speed and operates untethered and cost less than $500K Amazon would buy as many as they can get.

Their best feature in Bezos' mind would be that they won't try to form a union!

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

Re: Obviously I’m missing something

If you have a proper lawyer draw something up Growler won't be able to cut him out regardless of how he feels about "in writing".

IANAL, but I would think something in writing which gives Corey some sort of say over what happens to the company being sold would force Growler to honor the deal. Include a proviso that the buyer is notified of this up front so they know that any deal requires both Growler and Corey's approval/signature. If agreement is that Corey gets x% of the sale proceeds, Corey can therefore insure the way the purchase agreement is written that the buyer pays him that x% directly. Since Growler could not sell the company by himself thanks to the document the lawyer drew up for Corey and Growler signed, he would have no way of cutting Corey out and Corey would not need to sue him to collect his share.

Re: Obviously I’m missing something

No Corey should have done what I suggested in my post above. Get something in writing from Growler ahead of time. If he says no then Corey can have the satisfaction of telling him "well good luck trying to make the sale without my help" rather than passive aggressively telling the wife at the last moment.

If he turns up at the meeting, it isn't "at worse he gets nothing". At worst he gets nothing AND Growler makes buy an island money....and then Corey kicks himself every day for the rest of his working life that he'd be retired if he'd tried negotiating with Growler rather than showing up like a chump and getting taken advantage of.

Why wouldn't he insist on something in writing before the meeting?

Maybe Growler had someone on the hook willing to pay a lot, and would grudgingly cut Corey in versus risking the whole deal falling apart? As it was he got nothing but the satisfaction of leaving Growler over a barrel, but he has no idea whether he missed out on more "Premiere League footballer money"

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

This makes no sense

I could understand them not wanting open source HDCP 2.3 code, but why are they blocking HDMI 2.1? Especially over 4Kp120 which is not used by any media (i.e. no one is broadcasting or streaming 4Kp120, 4Kp60 is the most you can get from anyone)

For the most part this affects gamers, and they aren't using HDCP. There has to be more to this story, hopefully someone will be able to uncover it.

Incoming wave of AI is making buying PCs riskier for businesses

Re: There is no "risk" of buying the wrong PC

What's funny is that Apple and Qualcomm have been building "AI" circuitry into their iPhone and Android (and Mac) SoCs for over half a decade, while Intel and AMD sat on their hands ignoring that. But once ChatGPT got Wall Street to put the AI hype into overdrive they were suddenly all in!

There is no "risk" of buying the wrong PC

That's just what Intel/AMD/Dell/HP/etc. want you to believe to force you to buy a top spec "AI PC" due to worries that to do otherwise would be akin to outfitting their whole company with Blackberries in 2018!

Smart companies will keep up the same policies they have been, and will probably slowly shift in "AI PCs" not because they feel they have to have them but because pretty quickly it will be impossible to buy a non AI PC in the price bands corporations typically buy from.

Musk joins OpenAI lawsuit queue, says there's nothing 'open' about it

Re: Just when you think Musk can't get any more psycho

Oh yeah I forgot he's also been using the threat of doing AI in a separate company to try to force Tesla shareholders into giving him that ridiculous $56 billion payout. Such a "if you don't do what I want I'll take my ball and go home" crybaby moment lol

I don't think he really cares about improving the world like he used to claim. I think he's hoping to be able to brag about becoming the world's first trillionaire. That's the only reason someone already worth north of $100 billion would be whining about not collecting another $56 billion off the backs of the "little people" (i.e. all those Tesla fanboy shareholders who have supported him for years)

Missing out on AI will really hurt his chances - he probably doesn't want OpenAI banned from doing commercial stuff but wants a settlement giving him a chunk of ownership of that commercial effort so he can add to his net worth.

Just when you think Musk can't get any more psycho

He finds another thing to go psycho about.

If he wanted to permanently hamstring OpenAI to be non profit only he should have paid for better lawyers to write better founding documents for OpenAI that would have prevented them from having an investor come along and help them create a for-profit arm. But judging by how he stiffs paying people all the time he's probably like Trump and hires cheap lawyers and doesn't always pay them.

Judge orders NSO to cough up Pegasus super-spyware source code

Re: I'm glad

Even if we had a president willing to use that leverage, congress would not let him. Other than the far left wing of the democrats, everyone else is in thrall to Israel for some inexplicable reason. Few things would unify congress more than this, they'd pass a bill by an easily veto proof margin tying the hands of any president who dares to stand up to Israeli leadership.

The only reason congress hasn't voted for Israeli aid already is that the democrats are holding out on it to get Ukraine aid, similarly to how the republicans were doing with border security (until Trump told them he wanted to pass on the best border deal they were ever gonna get so he could campaign on it)

I'm glad

The Supreme Court rejected their ridiculous idea of "diplomatic immunity" for a foreign company!

But I'm unsure exactly what leverage the US court system will have to force them to produce that source code.

Air National Guardsman Teixeira to admit he was Pentagon files leaker

Not sure how much it will reduce his sentence, but it will reduce it. There is no point in taking it to trial if you're guilty, unless you are willing to take a shot the government prosecutors screw up somewhere and you can get off on a technicality (and can afford to pay a few million in legal bills for the kind of representation you'd need to pay for representation in a full trial involving classified material)

And yes, the military does seem to take punishing higher ups for failures a lot more seriously than the business world where at worst an executive lose part of his bonus for one year then everyone forgets about it!

Stack Overflow to charge LLM developers for access to its coding content

Re: "traffic to Stack Overflow has steadily dropped over time"

I've never heard of Tek Tips, I suspect because stackoverflow is paying to show up in searches and Tek Tips is not.

Meta kills Facebook News in the US and Australia

Re: What is news ?

Despite dropping the News "tab" I have a feeling here in the US bottom of the barrel foreign sponsored schlock like "Sputnik News" and "Epoch Times" will be getting shared wildly again serving up plenty of Trump loving disinformation.

Turns out cops are super interested in subpoenaing suspects' push notifications

That would be easy to eliminate

Just stop keeping any records of push notifications, then there is nothing for the government to request. Cellular companies don't keep your SMS messages and that's probably a fraction of the data from app notifications these days, so the government could whine but I don't think they'd get much support for a law requiring Apple and Google to maintain that info.

Chinese 'connected' cars are a national security threat, says Biden

Re: Came to say the same thing

China will have a lot of sales in the US eventually, simply because they are able to manufacture cars significantly cheaper. Just like Japan and Korea took a big chunk of the US automotive market.

Tesla is losing share in China because now they have competition, and will eventually be like other US/EU brands having just a tiny niche from people wanting to show "I have so much money I can afford to buy a car from the US/EU!"

So even if this might hurt Tesla more in 2024, it will be helping them (and Ford et al) by 2034.

Came to say the same thing

I don't want China to be able to disable my car as part of a tit for tat if they invaded Taiwan and the US was helping Taiwan defend itself. But I wouldn't want a US or EU based automaker to have that power EITHER.

Because if they have that power, that means hackers could potentially gain that power, or my government could force them to use it against me. They'd say they are taking that power "for the children" (i.e. disable a vehicle identified during an "Amber Alert") but that's always how it starts. Pretty soon they are disabling your car because you have $100 in unpaid parking tickets or because your wife said something mean to the police chief's wife and she went crying to her husband.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

You know how certain businesses

Will send you birthday greetings each year for good customer relationships (i.e. local businesses like dentists, auto shops, restaurants)

Or maybe that's just a US thing. Anyway, I receive a few around my birthday each year. I have a friend born on Feb. 29th, and she once said she only gets those things every four years. Because her "birthday" doesn't come up on those systems the other three years!

Water worries flood in as chip industry and AI models grow thirstier

They can recycle but probably most don't because that's an extra expense. That'll have to change in places where water is scarce.

Arizona might be good in one way because they already have a well developed "gray water" system that pipes non potable water (which might be recovered from say car washes and other users of potable water that don't leave it requiring full treatment at the water facility) to places that use it instead of potable water for irrigation like golf courses.

A fab uses a lot of highly purified water to wash wafers during various stages of the process, and while some stages might introduce chemical contaminents, many do not. That water could either be purified and reused on site, or if it saves money piped to the city gray water system.

Plans to heat districts with datacenters may prove too hot to handle

Re: People may not want to live next to a datacenter

A datacenter would produce WAY too much heat for a laundromat, other than maybe some sort of huge laundromat that's doing all the laundry for a major hospital or something.

No datacenters are doing pure air to air cooling, so their "mildly warm" output will be in the form of water or refrigerant like R134a. It is fairly easy to concentrate that heat to far higher temperatures if you need something in multiple hundreds of C above boiling for a particular process.

Re: People may not want to live next to a datacenter

The need for heat for greenhouses, similar to the need for heat for houses, is highly seasonal. For most of the year you have a bunch of heat with nothing to do with it. That's why you want something that can use that heat 24x7x365.

People may not want to live next to a datacenter

And heat will be lost transporting it a distance from there.

Seems easier to site something that requires a lot of heat next to it. Put a cement plant next to it, sized to use the excess heat from the datacenter. By using heat that would have been released into the atmosphere in a standard cooling solution that heat is not only cost free but zero carbon, so the cement costs less to produce (there will be some cost associated with concentrating the heat to the required temperature, of course) and you can probably charge a premium for it.

Apple's Titan(ic) iCar project is dead as self-driving dream fails to materialize

Re: I don't get it

I expect that by the time I'm so old the only way I am able to hit the road is because cars can drive themselves manual driving will be banned in most places except very rural roads. The kinds of places that allow ATVs on the roads today will allow human driven vehicles. On major or minor highways and streets in towns bigger than 5000 or so human driven vehicles will be banned.

Re: I don't get it

Granted automotive infotainment systems suck, but look at how people are using those in their cars today - i.e. they aren't. They use CarPlay / Android Auto to interface with their phone. What people really want is for that capability to be extended so that the display is owned by your phone. If you have an iPhone it will have a CarPlay interface, if you have an Android it uses that interface.

Some automakers will be resistant to this because they no doubt hope to use that as a continuing source of revenue, but consumer demand will eventually win out. Any automaker that tries to force people to use their own will lose in the marketplace. Doubly so with autonomous cars, because in those even the owner is always a passenger rather than often being the driver who needs to devote most of their attention to that task (ideally all of it, but we all know that's not the case in the real world) In a Level 5 vehicle there will be a big display in front of each seat, and it'll interface with your phone. There won't be a role for a native infotainment system, because no one is going to buy a car based on that (unless it doesn't support carplay/AA well in which case people will NOT buy a car based on that!)

Re: I don't get it

No chance Apple would have built software for others. What's the value add, unless they alone solve Level 5 automation? Otherwise the software is mostly invisible to the driver, who only interacts with the car to tell it "take us to grandma's house" and then everyone sticks their head in their phone or watches a movie on their personal display in front of them. What's the branding angle for Apple being just software in that car, totally hidden from the passengers? Why would an OEM pay $1 more per car to Apple for this versus a competitor who also markets Level 5 automation software?

The only way to make it work was for Apple to make a car. Or rather DESIGN a car, and presumably contract out the manufacturing. The problem is that while contracting out the manufacturing of small items that are basically 100% and 0% mechanical content like phones (other than the physical buttons, which Apple wants to eliminate) and laptops (the hinge and the keyboard being the only mechanical items there) the manufacture of a big item like a car which totally flips that with overwhelmingly more mechanical items even in a modern EV.

A bigger problem is that the "premium" auto segment may no longer exist when we finally crack Level 5 automation. If you are just going to sit in that car not doing the driving (and therefore not caring about handling, acceleration and other things people pay more for in today's cars) and your only interaction with the car is to tell it where to go and use the display in front of you like a dumb wireless monitor for your phone (or whatever replaces the smartphone in the future) then what's the value proposition of a car that costs several times as much as the average car? I mean heated leather seats versus cloth, OK, but I think the market for premium vehicles is going to crash when Level 5 EVs arrive. It will still exist, some people will pay more just to be seen, but the days where the kind of car you drive was part of your identity are already gone. Gen Z think the idea that people would care whether you have a Ford or a Chevy or a Mercedes is ridiculous, just ask them. That all gets even less important when you aren't even behind the wheel, because there is no wheel.

Texas judge turns out the lights on federal survey of cryptominers' energy consumption

The judge didn't say the EIA can't do this

He approved the injunction because the EIA was trying to this as an "emergency" basis, rather than following the standard process of putting up regulations for public review. Obviously the cryptominers fear the information gathered will be used against them for future regulation, and they have a pretty sweet deal in Texas getting paid more to not mine during peak alerts than they could ever make from mining (which passes on the cost to everyone else) and they don't want stuff like that to end.

Nevada sues to deny kids access to Meta's Messenger encryption

This would HELP child predators

If you try to initiate communication with someone and their end reports "encryption not supported" or something like that bingo you know they're a minor! If it is possible "test" connections to determine that without actually sending a message, you could do pinpoint the children out of a big list of people which is presumably exactly the opposite of what Nevada lawmakers intend.

Re: TikTok "proof of age"

Send in a photo with the parent and child's face visible

Good thing it isn't possible for AI to fake a photo!

How in the world does TikTok know who the parent is or what they look like? If a 14 year old signs up for Tik Tok and says they were born in 2002, how does Tik Tok know they are underage to request the "proof of age" hostage photo?

The real problem is

How does Meta know who is over or under 18 years old? If they had true IDs on everyone then things would be pretty simple - not allowing adults to contact someone underage unless that underage person contacts them first would fix most of the problem. Make it warn the underage person "the person you are messaging is 45 years old, continue Y/N".

Wouldn't fix everything but would get us most of the way. But there is no practical way for Meta to have proper ID information on all their users, and any possible implementation of that would be far worse than stripping encryption from minors. They wouldn't want to do it anyway, because they'd lose the half of their "users" that are fake, bots, second/third/fourth accounts and so forth and their stock price would plummet!

Underwater cables in Red Sea damaged months after Houthis 'threatened' to do just that

Re: Why do they need a submarine?

When you lower your anchor you typically want to stay in the same place, so you won't go dragging that anchor for miles. So yes you can hook a cable and damage by accident, but damaging cables is far more likely if that's your goal - you're dragging your anchor on the seafloor deliberately in an area you know or have reason to believe has a cable.

Why do they need a submarine?

You only need that if you want to tap the cable. If you want to damage it, you just need a small but powerful boat like a tugboat to drag its anchor around in the area where the cable is and if you get lucky and snag it, just power your engines to full and keep pulling. It'll break.

This is easily within the capability of the Houthis. They've probably been trying it for a while and finally got lucky.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

Re: That's not what he said

Which is what a compiler does, after all ...

Not at all. A compiler has very explicit syntax rules for what it will accept, and allows no deviation from those rules. It does not accept a "concept" as input, a human must translate that concept into the very explicit syntax first. i.e. a compiler will not accept "sort the list of helicopter parts by vendor name and within that larger search order the list of parts for each vendor by part number" as input.

You need to translate that concept (which is "spec") into C (or whatever) language following the very explicit rules for C - from everything such as using the correct data structures that contain that list of helicopter parts all the way down to including a ';' after each line.

Re: That's not what he said

I don't think regenerating code in a non-deterministic way from a spec

Who said the process should be non-deterministic? The one requirement I would make of that "AI" is that it perform the same process so that it DOES result in the same output every time. That way if there's a bug "when the monthly spending is over $30,000 you need to use a different tax form" then you include that in the spec and next time that bug will be gone. You seem to be assuming that fixing that one item in the spec (and the spec isn't a "document", I thought I was pretty clear about that) will result in something else breaking just because that's sometimes how it happens with patching computer code.

I don't think that necessarily follows at all - if it does then you weren't precise enough about your change to the spec to fix the "bug". That's why humans need to write the "spec" (or "collect it", in the case of stuff like applicable laws/regulations that have been written by others) because they alone can understand exactly what the "bug" is and what requirements need to be changed to address it. If fixing it breaks other stuff, then either that part was screwed by up a human or the person reporting the bug did not get the bug report correct - it is either only a bug in certain cases or is a broader bug than believed.

Re: That's not what he said

It isn't a programming language if it doesn't have any spec. I purposely listed a lot of unrelated stuff (English text, flowcharts, mathematical formulas, laws, etc.) to indicate that it is NOT another language. There is no fixed format for what the spec is. That's not a "programming language", any more than a random assortment of letters and numbers is a "book".

If the "AI" truly is as capable as Huang wants us to believe, it will be capable of turning that disjointed set of information into computer code. Because that's what "coders" do after all.

Re: That's not what he said

If that were true the end user wouldn't need you as a middleman

The end users can't write a spec - they don't know what they want. Someone has to tease out of them what they actually want/need versus what they think they want. Someone has to ask all the right questions. If you asked the end users to write a spec today for replacing an existing/legacy system (which is what most programmers do these days) they would say "I want it to work just like the current system does". Some of them might throw in a few things here and there "I wish the screen that let you choose shipping addresses remembered which addresses had been used with which people so that the options I'd actually use would be at the top instead of alphabetical order" but mostly they'd just want things to work exactly how they have always worked. How is an automated system going to know "what the current system does"? That's where you start asking a bunch of questions, watching how people work to see what steps they follow and you build flowcharts and so on.

Writing something new is even more impossible to automate, because the potential userbase has no reference point. That's where you usually get the worst designs, because programmers (who have no idea how the people who will be using the system do their job or what would be most efficient) design something that makes sense to them. Then they get all frustrated and talk about "stupid users" because the end users understand the new app's workflow that seemed "obvious" to their on-the-spectrum brain.

No, automation will never replace that part of programming until we get a true AGI.

That's not what he said

He said CODERS would be replaced by software.

That I can believe (eventually, some future generation of AI well beyond the current one) because that's basically rote translation of a concept into code. That's easy, a lot more people can do that than the truly difficult part of programming. That is, gathering requirements and creating a spec for what the program is supposed to do. That's the really hard part, and AI won't help you there - but he wasn't saying it would.

But assuming some humans have done that and produced a detailed spec saying exactly what the program should do and how it should react to all the various inputs and circumstances then yes I could easily see some type of automation take over and translate that into whatever computer language you prefer.

It won't do what you want, because you'll have got the spec wrong, but the one improvement of this method of programming over the current one is that instead of making code changes trying to fix the shortcomings/errors in the spec (i.e. do what the end user WANTS rather than what he told you or what he thought he wanted until he saw it in action and realized that wasn't what he wanted after all) is that after fixing the spec you can have the automation generate new code from scratch. Basically the spec (which might be part English, part flowcharts, part mathematical formulas, part government laws and regulations, part APIs from third parties, and who knows what else all combined into a toxic witches brew) becomes the source code.

I've long thought one of the reasons there are so many computer languages is that academicians think programming is writing code, so they think a language that makes that code more "elegant" will be better. They don't understand what real world programming is.

Man admits to paying magician $150 to create anti-Biden robocall

Good luck insisting on public testimony before the House

Hunter Biden wanted that too, but republicans refused and insist it must be behind closed doors, so they can selectively leak parts of it to fit their narrative.

Microsoft trying to stop Copilot generating fake Putin comments on Navalny's death

Re: leaders queued up to declare it a murder and blame Putin

I think he's queued up second in line behind Trump to suck Putin's dick next week

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

Re: Do not want!

Who the hell wants to "restart the OS in an eyeblink"? The whole POINT of a reboot is to get a known good state!!

If aren't doing stuff you need to do to reach that known good state, like resetting the CPU and all I/O devices and zeroing "RAM", how is that even a restart? Just because you have the capability for persistent memory that survives a reboot doesn't mean you want it ALL persistent. Otherwise how would you recover from an OS bug that locked up your GUI, for example, or malware that has scribbled on some OS data structures it shouldn't?

You'd need to at minimum zero all memory that will be allocated by the OS when memory is requested, starting the OS with no allocated memory and requiring it to rebuild its data structures from scratch to insure their integrity (or to, you know, allow the system to be different if you have e.g. installed kernel patches or changed configuration files!) So you gotta build page tables from scratch, start with a blank page cache, reach the correct execution mode (system boot starts with the processor in the most privileged state) step by step to reach user mode and so forth. A reboot takes time because doing all that stuff takes time, and as CPUs and I/O protocols get more complex at best faster CPUs can only keep up. Persistent memory isn't going to change that, unless you change the meaning of "reboot" to mean basically nothing has been done, and when you want to reboot by today's meaning of the word "reboot" you'll have to do whatever a REAL reboot is now called!

And I'm just talking about a warm reboot here. A cold boot from a power off state means that the CPU and I/O devices are in an unknown state, so even if you want some sort of meaningless "fast restart" for a warm boot you sure as heck can't cut any corners in a cold start.

Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not

HAHAHA

PC OEMs are always looking for the "next big thing" that will juice up the long declining PC market. This will be another on the list of failed initiatives that they breathlessly promote as a must have reason for upgrading your perfectly functional PC.

It is a bird, a plane or a Chinese spy balloon? None of the above

Re: China insisted was an errant weather balloon

that Chinese balloon could have been photographing stuff... but so do satellites, every frigging day

Satellites are hundreds of miles up, versus the ~15 miles that balloon was so it would be able to get better pictures/video and intercept weaker RF signals. The US also knows the orbits of Chinese (and Russian) spy satellites so if they wanted to hide something sensitive they could do it when those satellites were known to not be overhead. Yes spy satellites can adjust their orbits but as they are constantly tracked the US will be aware of any chance in their orbits, and they can only move so fast without prematurely expending their fuel.

The balloons were apparently not noticed or mostly ignored, at least until it became a big issue and congress demanded the DOD "do something" and probably invested many millions in technology to insure they weren't missing any overflying balloons (several Chinese balloons were later known to have overflown the US in the late 2010s without making the news at the time or being reported to congress, and the fear was that others were overflying without anyone being aware)

Whether it deserved the hysteria it did is another matter, but to say it can't get anything that satellites could is clearly wrong.

Musk 'texts' Nadella about Windows 11's demands for a Microsoft account

Re: The option is named following way

Nice!

I would be checking every option on that screen, sounds like a very useful program if/when I ever install W11 on anything.

Intuitive Machines' lunar lander tripped and fell

90 degrees better than Japan

Who landed theirs upside down!

Seriously though for all the crap NASA gets for their costs compared to private efforts like this one, they do have a much better track record of sticking the landing.

Greener, cheaper, what's not to love about a secondhand smartphone?

I recently saw an article

Claiming that the longer replacement cycles for smartphones were started to impact the secondhand market, with fewer recent model phones available causing their prices to rise. So if you're looking for say a two year old used phone instead of four years old, you might have to pay more than you did last time.

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

Re: Ugh I hated SCSI cables

I assumed the article was talking about the Centronics style with the clips and someone had just neglected to engage the clips. That was often ignored, just like the "screws" on the side of the DB25 style or 68 pin UWSCSI cables were ignored (the ones with spring latches were worse than the ones with the screws assuming the screws were properly engaged which was its own problem given that depending on location you might not have room for a very long screwdriver or any vision of what you're trying to screw)

It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox

Re: If Google loses, it does not win

That's why I think Apple will just enable their own search engine which they've had cooking for over a decade. It might have growing pains, just like Apple Maps did, but nowadays almost everyone on iPhone uses Apple Maps and I think the situation would be the same with Apple Search assuming they made the necessary investments.

That would hurt Apple since it would be impossible to replace the lost Google revenue without turning Apple Search into the advertising monster Google Search is which they wouldn't want to do.