Posts by Pascal Monett

"the CMA misdirected itself [..] and exercised its jurisdiction in breach of international law"

What international law, pray tell ?

Which international law does Facebook think means it has the right to purchase any company it wants ?

If I'm not mistaken, Nvidia has just been prevented from realizing a $66 billion merger with Arm. Does The Zuck really imagine his $400 million merger is more important ?

Of course not. It's just that, as a complete human failure, he cannot compute when he hears "no".

"Despite being unenforceable outside Hong Kong, it is applied across the planet"

Ah, so they have the USA approach to law. Good for them.

In any case, I note that "The exodus from Hong Kong to Singapore is well underway ", which is perfectly normal.

Yes, Hong Kong will become just another Chinese city. Yes, the Great Internet Firewall will be thoroughly applied. Yes, anyone with any sense of freedom and a smidgen of intelligence should get the hell out of there while they can.

There might still be money to make in Hong Kong, but it will be under Beijing's full control. Your choice.

"2023/4 looks like being a rocky year for the industry"

Well duh. With all the new chip fabs in construction or being planned, that conclusion was foregone.

I said so myself.

Nice to see that the experts concur.

"Saying if you don't want it on the internet, don't put it up there is too trite a response"

It is still a very valid response.

It's right up there with "don't say anything in public you might regret".

Gossip used to be the drive to disseminate information. It was the old "can you keep a secret" and the next day you hear about it at the company lunch room.

Now we have Social Media, and gossiping is in overdrive.

The solution remains the same : only say something in public if you are willing to stand up and own up to it.

"the general concept of holding the Microsoft flag and being proud of what we're doing"

Being proud of making users test your code ?

That's a novel concept.

"Lessons learned after event tend to be the toughest ones"

Indeed. You can't go back and sort things out anymore so, more often than not, you're looking at one of your failures. Or, if you're really, really lucky, one of your closest brushes with disaster.

"will take action as appropriate"

Oh, so you'll do eff all ?

As usual.

"Intel will start selling a chip to mine bitcoin"

What's the point ? Bitcoin is nearing end-of-life, the number of minable coins is almost depleted.

Once again, industry is reacting once the forest has burned down.

Make a chip to mine Ethereum, that thing that redefines what it is on a whim.

"53 per cent in Belgium"

That figure is significant because, around 20 years ago, cable was 99% in Belgium if I'm not mistaken.

So that's almost a 50% decline in two decades.

"The company disbanded its media relations unit in 2020"

So now the company relies on court cases and government directives for its communication ?

Is Tesla that shitty ?

Sovereign clouds

I rather agree with that idea.

And basically I'll agree with anything that keeps the NSA away from my data.

Since I cannot prevent or forbid anyone from putting the data they gather on me in a cloud, well a sovereign cloud is the least bad option.

Of course, that presumes that the NSA doesn't have its claws in it in the backend somehow - and that might be quite a presumption.

Especially if the cloud uses Cisco hardware.

240Tbit/sec

Wow. That's a lot of cat videos, to be sure.

Given that this is going to be a brand new cable, I'm guessing it will use the latest tech, signal multiplexing etc etc. We've seen articles here on transfer speeds in the lab, so what tech is actually going to go into this new batch of special fibres ?

We need a kitty icon.

"the Agency is very keen on protecting civil liberties"

Just like the NSA, we know.

They both want to keep civil liberties closely protected.

Very closely.

Brilliant !

Government creates for-profit enterprise to supply government, then decides that it can bestow contract on it without public tender.

No way anything can possibly go wrong with that.

Next you'll be telling me that there are absolutely zero MPs or parliament officials involved on either side of this deal.

Is Dido Harding lurking anywhere near ?

Oh goody

I wonder how long that will take to fall over.

It really is a shame the boffins couldn't work in a brush on a stick.

Not blaming them at all, I'm sure they thought of the problem.

It's just a shame they couldn't get one in.

"The application supplier assured the southern-England council these changes could be accommodated"

Okay, point 1 : the application supplier lied. What a surprise.

Point 2 : the application supplier mismanaged the project. Everybody knows that you accept a project on a given list of points. Anything else is punted on to the v1.1 to-do list.

Well, if you know how to run a project, that is.

Wait, what ?

"Other areas cited where the US exceled within IT were OS kernels"

I'm sorry, am I supposed to believe that the Windows 1 0 kernel is a point of excellence ?

Apple's iOS might be slightly marginally better, but I would still not call it excellent.

Linus Torvalds is the only person I know of who could be called excellent at OS kernels. The fact that he lives in the US now is just a coincidence.

Now, China may be behind on tech today, but thanks to the rampant and very public xenophobia of the previous US resident in the Oval Office, it has recieved the impetus it needed to start getting up and standing on its own two feet.

China might be suffering now, but the tech landscape will change and the US (and Europe) is going to have to learn to fight tooth and nail with quality, not just bluster, diplomatic backhandedness and aircraft carriers.

The dragon is waking up, and that is going to shake the market like nobody can imagine today.

That's a nice list of bullet points

One I'd like to see Apple adopt.

So nice to see that the worst enemy of the richest company in the world is the next-richest company in the world (they're in that ballpark anyways).

Ah, to think that there was a day when Apple was only 5% of the market . . .