Posts by nintendoeats

Gung-ho tank gamer spills classified docs in effort to win online argument

Re: In the public domain

GOOD.

There are times when I believe it is appropriate to cycle on the sidewalk, but the fact that people treat it as the default is dangerous and they ought to be shot.

I no longer have a burning hatred for Jewish people, says Googler now suddenly no longer at Google

Re: Speechless?

In that region of the world, some of these prejudices run very deep. Their origins lie long before the modern North American nations existed. I think it's difficult to appreciate how that feels...I certainly don't claim to understand it.

That sounds entirely plausible. And maybe the guy is a prick, I don't know. All I'm left with is a perception that somebody is being punished for expressing a positive message.

I don't know if this essay was in earnest (or wasn't a bit nuts), but surely it is a good thing to be hearing people say such things? Role models for the capacity of the individual to discard bigotry? To acknowledge that the values they were raised with might be wrong?

To me, this man is just an abstract concept who might as well not actually exist. Those words are very real though. I will therefore judge the message rather than the man, and the message sounds pretty good.

How to keep your enterprise up to date by deploying the very latest malware

Re: Connecting a PC to a reactor

TMI did fail safe. It was a financial disaster, but there was no human or environmental cost. It was just very expensive. It didn't even affect ongoing operation of the other reactors at that site.

Fukushima is obviously much worse, but I would argue that Fukushima is an example of how good Nuclear safety is. Considering how many things went wrong and the circumstances they were under, the harm was remarkably light. If the comparison is to fossil fuels...deepwater horizon is comparable IMO.

Chernobyl: Soviet Russia. Nuff said.

Re: Been there - on a Nuclear Power Plant

But there is plenty of room for error. All the safety things, the years of design work, the obsessive documentation, the anal policies, are about creating room for error. Note how this didn't cause any real damage.

Try placing a pot plant directly above your CRT monitor – it really ties the desk together

Re: Your headline reminds me...

Sorry, yes, did know that. pre-coffee.

I'm imagining how much I would have cursed at you, come the day I came in to replace the monitor (since both the graphics card and the monitor would have needed repair).

But, I think all of us who have worked with pin/hole connectors have done this.

Re: Most common fault was Magnets

People who exclusively use laptops (read, most people).

Re: Your headline reminds me...

I...how is a vaxen making anybody money in 2021 outside of major infrastructure?

We already had this story!

WANT NEW STORY! WANT NEW STORY!

*hides under the covers while crying loudly*

Linux kernel sheds legacy IDE support, but driver-dominated 5.14 rc1 still grows

The last time I used IDE was yesterday, on a Pentium 1 board. I accept that the penguin cannot support my hobbies forever, if only there were 12 other operating systems I could run on that machine :p

Richard Branson uses two planes to make 170km round trip

Re: Bring back Concorde - much more impressive.

Given the reasons that Concorde was ultimately shut down, I don't think this is true, unless they can bring down the operating cost significantly. I don't think many airlines want to buy a high-price plane that you can only fly over water.

Uncle Sam sanctions Chinese AI outfits for links to Xinjiang Uyghur human-rights abuses

Certainly not. In fact, I do not use any program or service that tags my photos, for pretty much this reason. I merely concede that it would be really useful if I did, because tagging photos is deeply tedious.

Cool uses of machine learning:

Microsoft Flight Simulator

Quality control of difficult to quantify objects

Tagging my photos

Scary uses of machine learning:

Pretty much all the other ones

Focus on the camera, mobile devs: 48MP shooters about to become the sweet spot

Re: Why the obsession with MP?

The small size of the image sensor and lack of an adjustable aperture are also big problems. The circle of confusion doesn't go away just because you have a lot of pixels, nor does the amount of light hitting the sensor somehow magically increase. There is also a huge restriction on what kinds of photos you can actually take because a phone does not have aperture adjustment; this is of course irrelevent because most phonetographers don't know what that means.

The software seems to be pretty good at giving people "the photo they want, not the photo they took" which is fine if you are not really interesting in photography.

I do wonder if the aperture problem is going to be partially solved using IR cameras. One could judge the depth of each point in the image, then apply blurring to simulate different DoF. I would be surprised if we don't see that soon (or it isn't being done already).

Smuggler caught with 256 Intel Core processors wrapped around him in cling film

AMD chips have all been PGA for basically ever. Their next gen of chips will be LGA.

UK artists seek 'luvvie levy' on new gadgets to make up for all the media that consumers access online

Re: What ?

You know, that almost makes me feel better. Wait, no it doesn't.

Re: redress the balance caused by people accessing ... online without paying for it directly

I completely agree, this is not the solution. I just wanted to acknowledge that capitalism has completely failed to ensure that minor artists get paid.

Re: What about the people in the software world?

The bridge toll makes perfect sense. Bridge costs f(X) to maintain, where X is the number of cars every year. Unfortunately, f is not a linear function: even if the bridge has nobody going over it, there is still expensive maintenance and inspection that must be done (not to mention recouping the cost of building it, which is completely independent of usage).

It's pretty intuitive that if fewer people are using a fixed-cost resource, the cost to each user must go up.

Re: redress the balance caused by people accessing ... online without paying for it directly

I mean, the reality is that for music at least streaming has been horrid. It is almost impossible to make money on Spotify.

I've really had enough of salable products. The world is dramatically improved by the existence of non-salable products. Salability only demonstrates that somebody has convinced somebody else that the thing has value. Quite often, that event is completely independent of the thing's actual value.

This effect is not exclusive to the arts.

Re: What ?

Crap, so this is why CD-Rs are so expensive here. That is several times the actual cost of manufacture. I can't believe that some of my money has gone to Kanye West because I wanted to install software from companies that no longer exist on computers that are slower than the microcontroller in my fridge.

:(

Microsoft defends intrusive dialog in Visual Studio Code that asks if you really trust the code you've been working on

I'm going to be a horrible person and say that this sounds reasonable. The motives make sense, the implementation is mildly annoying but it's basically SUPPOSED to be, or it wouldn't work (as they demonstrated). I will complain about many Microsoft-related things, but this is not one of them.

GitHub Copilot auto-coder snags emerge, from seemingly spilled secrets to bad code, but some love it

If this technology matures into something sophisticated and reliable, I might be looking into a new career in 15 years (or at least moving to something like safety-critical systems where this will be a never-ever). Not because I think programmers will become irrelevent, but because it looks incredibly boring. I didn't get into software development so I could glue things together, I did it because I like writing code. If only the computer industry existed purely for my entertainment...

Ransomware-hit law firm gets court order asking crooks not to publish the data they stole

I agree completely. It's all very funny to go "haha, look et zee loyers unt zer seelee games", but the reality is that people employ lawyers for a reason. They know the ins and outs, the risks and benefits. They don't care if we think it's dumb, clearly this was worth their effort to do and I expect they have a good reason (even if it is not the reason stated).

Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web NFT fetches $5.4m at auction while rest of us gaze upon source code for $0

"The bottom line is that millennials and Gen Z especially have digital lives and it's natural to want to take digital representations of luxury brands, music and art into these worlds – and now they can – and this has value."

What? I have been able to bring digital representations of these things into the digital realm for a very long time. I still can. And that whole thing about equating NFTs to the internet...what an ass.

Yes yes, preaching to the choir, not saying anything new. I am just fablerghasted.

Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report

I want to acknowledge that the photo management software ACDsee put "performance improvements" front and center in their marketing this year. It was really nice to see somebody acknowledging that this is a feature that people will pay for (and one that the software badly needed).

It is much nicer to use now, though there is still room for improvement.

Huawei dev flamed for 'useless' Linux kernel code contributions

Re: Fortunately I've only suffered that BS once in my career

I think everybody pretty much understands that this is stupid now. I have been working on some very ugly code lately, and generally I am committing files that are several hundred lines shorter. If I didn't refactor out all the cruft, it would have been much harder for me to actually fix/extend the software.

My boss has not complained about this, presumably because she's not a suit.

FYI: There's a human-less, AI robot Mayflower ship sailing from the UK to US right now

Yes, when I see a boat travelling across the ocean, my first thought is "damn, I need to invest more in IBM technology to help my business identify new challenges on the horizon".

I mean, I know the logic he is using in making that stretch, but the distance he has to reach for it it is almost as long as the journey being made by the boat.

Chinese app binned by Beijing after asking what day it is on anniversary of Tiananmen Square massacre

Re: Blah blah blah

I don't (thank goodness), but any day of the week I would live in the United States instead of Russia or China. There are many bad things about modern western powers, but I could go to the central park right now and start putting up posters that say "Joe Biden is a dick and he eats your babies". I might get a telling off, I might get some individuals who want to pick a fight with me, but I will not be put in prison or assassinated.

Version 8 of open-source code editor Notepad++ brings Dark Mode and an ARM64 build, but bans Bing from web searches

Re: Censorship? In an editor?

As mentioned above, it's just not in the defaults. Anyway, he is using HIS write of free speech; his right to see somebody pull bullshit and respond "F! you".

The server is down, money is not being made, and you want me to fix what?

Note helpful to those who are colourblind >_>

Every time I have to plug in a 3.5mm jack to something with multiple ports, it's like I'm in some kind of quantum hell. It's just random whether I get the right one or not.

But I wouldn't call IT over it.

Arm freezes hiring until Nvidia takeover, cancels everyone's 'wellbeing' allowance

Re: This always ends well...

One cannot help but feel that this is the point. Is it possible that management know the company is due to be dismantelled, and is basically trying to let everyone down "gently"?

Big red buttons and very bad language: A primer for life in the IT world

Re: Red Button

You live in the sea?

Re: Replacement hardware?

My understanding is that they literally pack up all of the computing equipment used during design and shove it in a warehouse. Compared to an airplane, a few vaxen are no big deal to store.

Unihertz Titan Pocket: Like asking Mum for a BlackBerry and she tells you 'but we've got a BlackBerry at home'

Well, I ordered one at the 33%-off price (which was promptly offset by the shipping to Canada). Since in theory I have an fxtec coming, I'm sure I'll wind up with something acceptable (and sell the other). The aspect ratio issue is an...issue.

Nvidia nerfs RTX 3080, 3070, 3060 Ti GPUs to shoo away Ethereum miners

At least a 1050 is ok for the actual modelling. Renders might take a lot longer, and she might eventually hit limits with scene size due to limited VRAM, but depending on the course she might rarely ever be running ray-traced renders or working with large complex scenes. For just floating around the scene modifying things with the cheaper shader modes, The GPU doesn't usually matter very much.

Source: have done a lot of modelling (including a college course) on both a 1050ti and a 1060.

Samsung shows off rollable and foldable displays, suggests they'll arrive in 2022

Re: Transparent screens?

I've never understood that for normal usage. Behind my monitor is where the monitor arm, cables and dust go. Why would I want to see that?

I get that there are applications, but not as a replacement for the traditional home or office display.

The future is now, old man: Let the young guns show how to properly cock things up

Re: Just move some disks...

He wasn't the only one: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/walking-drives.html

Elon Musk hits the brakes on taking Bitcoin for Tesla purchases

Re: Fake excuse

If they were worried about a crash, why would they hang on to their bitcoin? They might as well sell ASAP (thereby causing a crash, which would be quite entertaining).

Salesforce fell over so hard today, it took out its own server status page

We really need to come up with another acronym for either Domain Name Service or Denial of Service. This article wasn't quite what I was expecting :p

‘Staggering’ cost of vintage Sun workstations sees OpenSolaris-fork Illumos drop SPARC support

Re: Indigo?

You should do well, the R8000s are an interesting oddity.

Re: Indigo?

The SGI community has particularly strong feelings against that sort of thing (but you know, other people ain't yo problem yo)

I have an R5K O2, it's what got me into SGIs. Unfortunately the cases are made from really brittle plastic that just disintegrates, so using them as a case is basically a nono. I also don't know how people can ship them safely.

I just enjoy mine for the real-time video features. It looks like garbage :/

Actually, I use an Indy as my...daily driver?...SGI. It's easier to keep running because you can easily run it off a SCSI2SD, and hasn't fallen apart.

I'd be interested in your SGIs...

The swift in-person response is part of the service (and nothing to do with the thing I broke while trying to help you)

Pedantry detected on radar, incoming, brace for impact

Technically, isn't this really a Who, Me?

Can't get that printer to work? It's not you. It's that sodding cablin.... oh beautiful job with that cabling, boss

Re: Bloody Developers and memory

A: Keep it under your desk, force them to net into it.

B: If they do that, then for a whole host of reasons they should probably not keep their job (since at that point they are deliberately and knowingly bypassing a fundamental development procedure that is REQUIRED for the programs they write to be useful).

Imagine the conversation:

Me: Why is there 256 MB in the test PC? it was specced at 128 MB.

Dev: My code wouldn't work in 128 MB.

Me: But the user PCs all have 128 MB.

If they continue to argue with you, then they are provably an idiot and you really don't want to keep them around.

Re: Time was...

That's unfortunate reasoning. If the care home said "We found out about this, we investigated and we turned the nurse in" I wouldn't have thought another thing about it...giving a reference in bad faith on the other hand...

Re: Time was...

But a 0.02% increase in Q2 profits!