Posts by big_D

Re: Only X ?

As stated in the story, it isn't the only one, but it is the only one that seems to be blatantly ignoring its legal duties.

Re: Why shove this into the CPU

Probably because most people don't have graphic cards or slots to put them in. Most have laptops or compact desktops with integrated graphics.

Also, GPUs are much more efficient than current CPUs at AI tasks, but they are still a long way from being optimised for AI. Then there are bandwidth issues, the graphics RAM is quick, but you still have to shovel all the data over the bus to the graphic card.

This is where integrated designs, like the Apple Silicon range excel, fast memory directly integrated into the chiplets.

Integrating the NPU into the CPU, along with graphic cores, makes sense for a lot of devices, where GPUs are not needed or there is no energy or thermal overhead to cope with them.

Re: "they will have devices like sensors with that level of compute"

On the other hand, when I was growing up, 16KB was luxury and a microprocessor faster than 4Mhz unheard of... We might be coming close to a stalling point, but never say never.

The EU (all nations togethr) sets the regulations, which have to be implemented into local laws in each country and testing and prosecution is each country's perogative.

Re: It just keeps getting better

I'm glad I have a dumb car, and I won't be updating it to anything smart.

Given the track records on security alone, I just don't see these companies providing monthly security updates in 10, 15 or 20 years. I'll continue to treat cars like every other appliance I buy, I'll buy a dumb version and add cheap, replaceable smarts, where they make sense.

Europe has relative good free speech rules, but you can't incite to riot, cause harm, death or racial hatred for example.

Germany is more sensitive, holocaust denial and the glorification of national socialism is illegal, which, given their history, is understandable.

The big problem with these platforms is, they ignored such laws when they were small or threw lawyers at the problem, instead of actually tackling such problems, until the cost of lawyers and fines exceeded acceptable levels or the cost of doing it properly. But, by the time they were big enough that authorities really start pressing them to comply with the law, they were too big to do any sort of compliance at scale.

If they had implemented the compliance at the beginning, it would have scaled with their userbase - the userbase wouldn't have been able to grow as quickly, as it would have to have been held in check with their compliance responsibilities, but at least we wouldn't have the problems we face today. But lawyers seem to be cheaper than staff to actually deal with the problems these companies have caused.

Re: Not sure I get it

No, you can do that. But other programs shouldn't be able to that without your permission.

If you try and edit the config file yourself, you should get a warning, but can continue.

If another program tries to edit the settings, or replace part of the program, it is blocked and you are warned, if you started that other program, you can let it continue, but until you give it permission, it should be blocked.

This is the part that is broken, if that other program uses a sandboxed program, like TextEdit to do the dirty work for it (automation), you don't get warned. If you try and edit the config file yourself with TextEdit, you won't get a warning.

We had a sex-obsessed character in one game. The DM was getting tired of him wenching his way through every tavern or encounter on the road, so he had made one encounter with witch, who cursed him...

Let's just say, if it was dark, we didn't need a torch, just a trouser-less dwarf. It also made the character less appealing to the women he encountered...

Re: I understand why but it's a bit of a bullshit charge

Yes, this is just scapegoatism, to divert attention away from the real problem.

Re: Good timing for me?

My T480 is nearing its end of life. My colleague had an L480 and joined a month after me, but it died a couple of months back - it looks like that generation of Ls had a lot of problems with dry soldering joints, bad BIOS updates, it throttled itself to 400Mhz on several ocassions, for example.

Re: Interesting column

But with companies championing AI, and Apple putting neural cores in their iPhone and Apple Silicon Macs, it is a poor show that they still can't work out the context of a sentence and decide whether a pronoun or a verb is needed. It is even worse in German, where every verb is also a noun and all nouns start with capital letters, even their keyboard on the iPhone and iPad gets confused with this all the time.

Having the option to mark words as pronouns would be useful - although I suspect, given the sinking levels of comprehension, that might confuse some users.

I know, when I learnt German, I had to go back and relearn some English concepts I took for granted, I knew what nouns, pronouns, adjectives and adverbs were and could use them without thinking, but actually thinking about them, when trying to apply it to a foreign language, made me realise how much I don't need to think when speaking or reading English. And verbs, present, future i/ii, conjunctive, past, past perfect, future i/ii conjunctive, future progressive and so on. Then subject, accusative, dative, genetive, singular, plural (and then in German masculine, feminine or neutum).

Re: Idiocracy

For me, doctor, dentist, shops (supermarket and clothing, shoe shops, electornics, book store etc.) are within 15 minutes walk, railway as well. When I worked in the city, I'd walk to the station every morning and catch the train to work.

I now work in the town where I live and commute on my bike - 15 minutes. I hardly need to use the car at all these days. When I was in home office, I'd walk to the local supermarket at lunch time and buy ingredients to cook a fresh meal.

Re: Firefox for Android already support a handful of extensions

I thought that it used to have extensions - I switched from a Samsung Galaxy S20+ with Firefox and the extensions I needed to an iPhone 2 years ago.

I thought I'd somehow fallen into a timewarp...

Re: Lifespan

We recently finished a round of upgrades, most of the old kit was between 7 and 10 years old. There are still a few older PCs kicking around, attached to equipment whose applications can only run on XP or Windows 7...

Re: At least Germany has water

Yes, we had a well in our garden, in north Germany. It was used by the previous house owner for nearly all water in the house. We removed the pipes and only used it for watering the garden, but the well ran dry in 2016 and we tried to dig a new one, we hit bedrock at about 6M and only about 20cm of water, too shallow to pump up to the surface.

Also, if you are in volume manufacturing, the last thing you want is a flakey cloud system ecompassing the company motto "That's the only way to deliver innovation with speed and agility,"

You want stability, you want consistency, you want 100% uptime. You don't want "move fast and break things," that might work for social media, but it doesn't work in big business.

Re: Revivified MIPS

ARM is only 1-2 years younger than MIPS, at most. The others are a little younger, but not by much.

Re: CCDH: a front for the alphabet people?

I did go out with a Marxist once, but, no, I'm not a communist, just a good old European Socialist.

Re: IPv6-mostly?

Actually, no. I pay for a 300/100mbps connection, I actually get 305/105 at peak times. I asked them, they like to see that we get "at least" what we pay for... Not moving, unless I have to.

While I think some of it is rhetoric on behalf of Wyden, if the certificate really had expired 2 years ago and could still be used to generate new credentials in 2023, there are definitely questions to be answered.

Keep doing it, until the fines & lawyers cost more than doing it right...

Re: Extension of the Existing Situation

I gave an upvote, but... It depends on the copyright the code is bound by - and that doesn't necessarily have to be in the header of each or any module of the code. If there is no header in the code describing which copyright model it is held under, you will need to find out which one applies. You can't just assume, because there is no copyright notice or open source license etc. in the code that it is totally public domain, you should assume that it is copyrighted, until you can prove otherwise - E.g. if it is internal code from a company that has been stolen, they might not have copyright headers, because they never expected that the code will never be seen by anyone outside the company...