* Posts by MachDiamond

8717 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2012

Musk's broadband satellite kingdom Starlink now cash flow positive – or so he claims

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: They can't spin off

"I'm guessing the satellite tracking stuff on their dish is a bit more challenging on a moving vehicle than on a stationary rooftop?"

It's pretty good. A ship isn't moving that fast even in heavy seas for the antenna to not be able to track fast enough except in extreme circumstances (very few sats visible, low angle).

A race truck in the Baja Rally isn't going to stay locked nor a missile. Passenger aircraft are lumbering beasts where a fighter jet isn't.

None of that is to say that if there was an application that needed super fast tracking that it couldn't be done. I expect the hardware would be much more expensive and the dishes much larger to accommodate more cells.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: They can't spin off

"Having reasonably fast Internet access on board ship is extremely valuable to the crew, and quite valuable to the operators as they get more information about WTF the ship is doing and can take fewer risks - physically and financially.

The operators don't give a toss about most of the crew. I looked into working as an AV tech on cruises some years ago and ... no thanks. There are plenty of people that have YouTube channels where they talk about what it's like and bandwidth is something you can burn what's left of you pay buying after you've settled up at the crew bar. The ships already have comms via providers that specialize in that service and things like location, ship status (fire/flood alarms) and engine performance are already taken care of. There's instant point to point comms available between the ships and offices all over the world that don't go through something as dodgy as the internet. You'd be right in thinking they don't want to rely on a system that could be hacked by somebody on the ship. The comms they have could be compromised, but it would take physical access and specialized knowledge.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: They can't spin off

"It only works because the launches are incredibly cheap, by using hardware and slots that nobody else has bought"

The hardcore fans are spewing all sorts of positive, glowing praise for all of those launches and how SpaceX has launched more rockets in the last year than anybody else. They've launched more kgs than anybody else, more cubic, moar. The also go one step further and claim that SX is more profitable than any other launch provider and nobody else is supplying ISS (Northrup Grumman, JAXA, Russia must have all gone out of business). When it's pointed out that the vast majority of what they are doing is Starlink, that's just being a hater (guilty, but not just to hate). If I've made the comment, I'm also shorting Tesla stock, anti-American (they don't know where I am) and know absolutely nothing about rockets. I sort of want to post a photo in defense, but then again I suspect it would be a very bad idea.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Cash flow positive

"But if, as claimed, he's planning on taking it public in the near future, wouldn't such statements have legally-binding consequences in that context, even if the IPO hadn't been formally announced at the time they were made?"

SpaceX still has to raise hundreds of millions dollars every year to fund operations. If they were turning a profit, it would hard to understand why. If the company goes public, the Mars fantasy dies. There's no business case and a publicly traded company has to be run for the benefit of the shareholders and a massively expensive program with no realistic plan to earn a profit would put somebody in prison. There's also a board of directors to deal with, the extra costs to be traded on public markets, etc etc. Who thinks Elon wants to work with the SEC with a company he's been overlord of since inception. The "as claimed" is the usual speculation that always surrounds Elon. There are already so many things that he does talk about that I suppose one more that makes no sense is easy for somebody to believe, but is has be asked why he would take SpaceX public. They could raise a bunch of money, but the cost would be in a currency that Elon already has problems with.

There's a photographer I like on YouTube that presents mainly about the business of photography including all of the mistakes he's made along the way. One that he just talked about was how archaic the commercial product photography industry is with layers of ad agencies, agents, hangers on and all sorts of frustrating way things are done (business-wise). His bit of advice is, if you want to work as a commercial photographer, suck it up and just deal with it, you aren't going to be able to change it no matter how you whinge. A lot of what Elon has done is not do things to match how the real world works. The launch tower in Boca Chica isn't permitted. Getting permits to build such a structure in the midst of several nature preserves would have been onerous so he didn't and claimed it was just an "integration tower", not a launch tower. The rocket bidet he hopes prevents destroying the launch mount again is "not a deluge system" as building one of those would require working with the Army Corps of Engineers who had to notify SpaceX that they application was closed due to zero communications from the company. Toss in the "not a flamethrower, flamethrower" and you get how he's been allowed to operate thus far and why he tells everybody to push off and does what he likes. There will be a point where he hits the wall. Currently he's lobbying in the town center of X to cast hate towards the US Fish and Wildlife agency since they haven't signed off on another Starship launch (in the middle of all those nature preserves). The FWS may wind up having a backbone and little need to cater to Elon in the same way the FAA does. If they give a downcheck do to all of the promises SpaceX has already reneged on with regards to not polluting the area and cleaning up their mess when they do, it could mean a very long return to explo---, umm, flight, for Starship.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Are they foreggtin the technical debt?

"Also the Spanish-language text on their website looks like machine-translated garbage."

Right?! That tells me a whole lot about a company when they don't hire a live person to "localize" a translation. While Spanish is spoken in many places around the world (wherever the Pope gave Spain the approval to conquer), it's not all the same. Neither is English, Portuguese, French... pretty much any broadly spoken language you care to name. There's a Russian sci-fi author that has a series whose story line I like but the translator (to English) is horrible. The idioms and aphorisms common in Russia don't always come out with the same flavor and need to be converted to those in use in the US/UK/etc. ex A straight translation might be "to my eye" and in the US it would be "the way I see it". That's an easy one, but illustrative of my point.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Price not related to internal cost

"LEO also gives the opportunity to talk directly to a cell phone. "

Not really. Phones don't have the power or a steerable antenna. The whole mobile network architecture is based on being able to reuse frequencies which makes a satellite footprint suck up a huge amount of service slots if the customer hardware is compatible. In most of the developed world there is phone service in just about every place there is a high enough density of users to justify a tower. There may be some opportunity for sat<->tower applications where an area is on the borderline for what it would cost to place a tower and run links (wire, microwave, etc). I'm not that bothered that when I'm out in the woods that I don't have signal. It can be a blessing. I take my handheld HAM radio with me and I'm not traipsing off of official trails, traveling alone or going out when the weather is looking dodgy. Decades into infesting this planet and, knock on wood, its never been an issue. I'd get rather pissed off if I was sitting around the campfire with a group and people were neck deep in their phones and taking calls. They should have stayed at home wrapped in bubblewrap and packing peanuts.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Price not related to internal cost

"You've hit the nail on the head in identifying the rural US market as the only paying market. It is the sole sane market for StarLink. The trouble is that putting up a load of LEOs is an extremely inefficient way of serving a geographically confined market. "

Common Sense Skeptic did a pretty good analysis. They are firmly in the "Elon is a putz" camp, so if you are fan of Elon, the slant can be dealt with by just looking at the figures and not listening to the audio. The market for Starlink is a bit more than the US. CSS showed a map of the world colored in by average annual income. Any place outside of the 1st world cannot afford Starlink. It's unlikely they can afford a personal computer and many can't pay for a mobile. There's masses of old computers that people could be given for free, but they won't run an up to date OS and therefore can't run a version of internet software that will work. My old Mac Powerbook sits in a closet for that reason. Mainstream web sites won't work and there's no browser I've found that will help that. Mail is no problem and I'll likely find some use for it at some point.

The pitch that Elon is going to bring internet to the world's out of the way places isn't a total lie, but it's only going to to that for those that can already afford it. I've seen a few videos from people bumbling around the Outback using Starlink. Bully for them, but a satellite network ISP just for that is a waste. There are already providers if you're not playing Call of Duty and need sub-20ms ping times. Selling bandwidth to a military might be something that allows the rank and file to phone home, but no country in their right mind would outsource tactical comms to a private company. Cruise ships? After paying that sort of money you are going to sit somewhere and pull up Netflix? Again, there has already been internet via satellite and latency isn't a concern for the tour operator. Ship comms are going through a separate service. What really surprised me was how fast they got approvals for use on aircraft. Getting hardware certified to use on passenger aircraft is a Herculean task.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Price not related to internal cost

"Popular guesses at the internal cost of a Falcon 9 launch are under $20M"

The rocket engineers I used to work with estimate that the costs are closer to $40mn and more for relandable versions. The red tape is a significant cost center even when the fuel isn't. Gwynne is on record as promising launch PRICES getting down as low as $7mn/launch with reused cores. That's why people in the industry regard a lot of what she says as parroting what Elon wants out there rather than reality in this space/time. She's certainly not a "dumb blonde" (even thought the blonde comes from a bottle) and she has access to the honest accounting and should know better.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Are they foreggtin the technical debt?

"I don't see how they could possibly be "cash positive" with all that historic debt still around the neck of Starlink. "

I can see how it might be possible for Starlink to be in the black today and still not be a viable business venture. There's still tens of thousands of satellites to launch if they are going to build out to their stated 42,000 constellation. Gwynne Shotwell said (on video) that the life of the satellites is estimated at 5 years. This means that the entire constellation will need new birds every 5 years. It's easy to see why Elon hopes to get Starship working (not blowing up) and able to carry many more of the bigger and heavier version sats on each launch. They need to average a launch cadence of 70 new satellites every three days for replacement in addition to getting the initial birds in place. This is also a continuous operation, not something that will every be finished. That's a lot of fuel, a lot of launch slots (Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg don't typically launch more than one rocket per day and since it's military/government, a few times a week is a major chore for them) and SpaceX has external paying customers to service as well. Even if Starlink can become profitable, can it be profitable enough that if it impedes on other launches, SpaceX as a whole isn't making less?

Let's say Starlink makes money and the spin it off as it's own thing. Go with me here... Does the new separate corporation pay SpaceX cost on launches every few days or will they have to start paying retail launch prices? Even after an IPO, Starlink would still be necessarily joined at the hip to SpaceX. Especially true of satellites are being launched on a new SpaceX heavy lift rocket, be it Starship or something else. Nobody else has a larger payload bay to stuff more Starlink satellites in. Falcon Heavy can lift the mass, but it doesn't have the cubic that gives it an advantage over the single core version. The cure could be a more capable satellite that's a similar size but more massive. If they could get 20 sats to take over for what it took 60 to do previously, the added mass could be carried by F9H. A comment I've see before on a rocket engineering forum asks the question why SpaceX isn't toying with a F9/Raptor variant or a Falcon XL/Raptor with a larger payload envelope since the Falcon system is working very well at this point.

India's lunar landing made a mess on the Moon

MachDiamond Silver badge

Microwaves

There's a concept using a high power microwave emitter that trundles along the surface fusing the regolith into a solid surface. The trick is to be able to create roads with enough thickness so they can take the weight of rovers and rolligon buses. Laser fusion wouldn't likely work for more than a few mm. Perhaps there will be a combination of things that get used. Different frequency microwaves for building up the base from the bottom and a laser finishing pass for the best surface finish. Whatever is used will be high powered for certain so generating lots of energy and being able to route power all over will be important.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: "chronic or long-term effects of such dust exposure could be a problem for future missions."

"Buzz Aldrin, one of the first to be exposed to lunar dust, seems to be pretty much immortal"

Every time I'd see him he demonstrated clear mental problems. He wants people to land on Mars and I believe it's a better step to establish a base on the moon first. Clearly he's bonkers.

Actually, when I was involved more in journalism I would see Buzz quite often and it was like we both had Tourettes. When passing I'd cough 'moon' and he'd reply 'Mars' in something like a bark. It was all in fun and he's a real character. Charlie Duke was the most fun. Walt Cunningham and Rusty Schweickart both contributed articles to the same magazine I worked for so I got to see them the most. I miss that job! The Apollo astronauts are/were amazing people.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: resrarch

"What happened to Spell Check?"

A couple of things happened. Plenty of people wonder why words are being underlined with a red squiggly. Some believe that the way they spell the word is correct and the computer is being silly. Another group doesn't think it matters.

I misspell stuff all of the time, but I do go back and correct it. My bigger problem is not checking that what I have written is coherent before I hit "submit". Some of that is when I edit something and don't check my edit. Oh well. At least just about everything I post is spelled correctly. Mrs. Menzies would be proud.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: "chronic or long-term effects of such dust exposure could be a problem for future missions."

"Good job the Apollo astronauts kept their helmets on - otherwise they could have long term health effects"

I'd call it short term health effects and long term death effects.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Why does anybody want to go there?

According to Heinlein it would be "loonies".

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Artificial gravity doormat

" IIRC it's static that keeps it on the spacesuits..."

It's bone dry so there's a big problem with static electricity. It's easy to see all of the regolith that clung to the Apollo astronauts suits.

I've met a fair few of the moonwalkers and they describe the smell of the moon (once back inside the lander) as more like burnt cork rather than gunpowder.

Google ends partnership to build four San Francisco GoogleBurbs

MachDiamond Silver badge

"Your train may be 20 minutes, but you'll be lucky to board it during rush hour. Most likely it will come late or be cancelled. Then there is time to actually get to the station."

This is way many people that can work at home don't want to go back into the office. Even if the company wants to have people in once or twice a week, they could schedule that outside of rush hour so it's no problem to take a train. It's better for sanity and better for the train system. Companies might want to try luring people back by shifting hours so the commute isn't so bad. A lot of people working from home have jobs that don't need rigid 8a-6p time schedules. It can also allow some families where both parents work to have one parent getting the kids off to school and another parent that's getting home earlier in the day to look after the kids when they get home, get dinner going, etc. The hour the work gets done isn't a big deal as long as it's done sometime on a particular day. The trains can push this along by offering discounted monthly passes valid only during off-peak as some do.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Idea good, placement bad

I've seen several companies with projects in places where it would be good for them to develop some residential properties their employees have access to. Some bean counter will want to make them "profit centers", but that would only mean they'd have to pay those employees more to afford the additional rent. Maybe there's a tax dodge in there, but they could also operate at a loss and take a deduction while paying the employees less.

SF is horribly expensive for everything so it's not a great place to locate offices. With an internet company such as Google, it doesn't matter where they put an office as long as there is power and good bandwidth. I'm not getting the fascination with big city downtown living and don't believe that everybody that works at a dot com yearns to live in one. In the US there are scores of established cities with cheap land and/or buildings that could be refurbed/repurposed. If there isn't enough available housing, Google could develop a tract of homes and a block of flats and offer them to employees at a reduced rate. They wouldn't even have to twist arms to get a pile of free taxpayer money to do it. I somehow wound up on an email list for a service that lists commercial buildings across the US. For what it costs to buy a small shop in SF, one could buy a large office complex elsewhere. If I even win a big lottery, I want to buy one of those buildings and turn it into my own personal playground, maker space, hacker space and incubator.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Workhouses

"Last time I checked[0], anyone making less than $110,000/year (four person family) is considered "low income". "

The last time I had a friend in Silicon Valley tell me what they paid in rent (one bedroom flat on the 4th floor with one parking space), it was $3,200/month. That's post-tax money since rent isn't deductible. Taking away nearly $40k from an annual salary means it takes a really big paycheck just to live alone. Add a spouse and kids, a bigger house, another car and that everything in the area is proportionally higher priced, ouch.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Workhouses

"Clearly it doesn't, if people still can't afford the basics."

A visit to somewhere such as San Francisco/Silicon Valley to look at the cost of living and the difficulty in getting around goes a long way to showing why a worker may not be able to afford the basics. Take that SF wage packet and live someplace with a low cost of living and you don't have money in the bank, you have royal coffers.

I've said it many times, I earn less than many of my peers in the same business but the cost of living where I am lets me keep more every month than they do. My home was much cheaper (and paid). I have big garage workshop with vacant land around my home and I'm looking to purchase the parcel next to me at the next tax auction. I'm using that plot for a garden anyway since its sat unused for 4.5bn ish years and it would be expensive to extend utilities to it compared to many other properties in town. My car is owned outright and I don't have an CC debt. That's not all just due to living someplace inexpensive, but it's easier to achieve because of it. I'm a couple of hours from the big city so I can still see major concerts (except for Ticketmaster), sporting events, theatre, ballet, symphony, etc. I'm going to a big trade conference and it will take me 45 minutes to get to the train station with an end point around a block from the convention center so I won't be sat in traffic for hours just to attend (between the petrol, parking fees (don't know if they take cash or not)) and the time, the train(s) are a bargain and mean living outside of the big city isn't an impediment. It's not like I attend one of these monthly.

Scarlett Johansson sics lawyers on AI biz that cloned her for an ad

MachDiamond Silver badge

What gets me..

Is the audacity that some person thinks that just by putting a disclaimer on something like this they will be in the clear. It's like the people that will post an album on YouTube and make a comment that it isn't their property and no infringement was intended. Sorry sir, I didn't mean to knock you to the ground and take your wallet. What? A court is going to say "well that's all good then. He DID apologize."

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Just waiting for...

"an advertisement for a porn site using either AI generated Elon Musk or Donald Trump - or perhaps both?"

Oh, good god! Something like that would put me off faster than a dip in a glacial lake.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: An interesting twist

"Anyway, its kind of wrong to use a person's likeness without their permission unless it falls under 'fair use' or that person's long deceased (and even then there's a small matter of the ethics of bringing dead people back to life)."

By "long deceased" you'd have to mean >100 years. There are estates such as with Elvis Presley where copyright and moral rights are still in term and maintained. Once those copyrights expire, any descendent will be far enough removed for there not to be any chance of repetitional harm. One of the boys in my graduating class was a direct descendent of Benedict Arnold but it was much more interesting than actionable since it was many ancestors ago. From Wikipedia "He led the British army in battle against the soldiers whom he had once commanded, after which his name became synonymous with treason and betrayal in the United States."

It could be very interesting to have AI generated historical figures come to life to reenact history to the extent that we think is accurate. I'd rather see a movie than read page after page of dry text. It also give a chance to show clothing, what cities would have looked like and how people lived. I see a lot of people that criticize people from the past without any understanding of those times. Their judgement is based on modern circumstances.

Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

"'yeah we just blocked off the valve as it was cheaper than fixing it'."

That's what you get when you have a load of MBA's running a business and when repair and maintenance costs more than what's been allocated. They stop doing them to keep from ruining all of the work they put in formulating the budget. The engineer telling them that not having that valve working properly is a massive fire risk only has a bachelor's degree and they have a Master's so how smart can that senior engineer be?

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

"The biggest shock to the US system was probably the OPEC crisis that helped kick the shift from muscle cars, land yachts and assorted gas guzzlers into high gear. Now, the US is creating another OPEC crisis by destabilising many of OPEC's members, cancelling US production and has been flogging off it's strategic reserves. Politicians really are smart, aren't they?"

As old as I am, I can barely recall the OPEC crisis (1973?). One has to remember that the answer from the US car companies was to come out with "mid-size" cars when everybody was buying small imports that got much better mileage. The US companies did deals with the Japanese companies and re-badged some small cars so they'd have something on the lot that would sell.

There's plenty of US oil that can't be processed in the US. Not all oil is the same and refineries can only use certain narrow grades that they are designed for. New refineries are not being built in the US and haven't been built for decades. I agree that plenty of reserves are not being tapped that could be mainly due to politicians pandering to one anti-oil group or another. I don't see it as being a bad thing to not use it all up as fast as possible, but the political angle is not good. The selling off of strategic reserves is also politicians buying votes even when it makes no sense at all to do it. I'm sure the military could use up what's left in a month of war given how inefficient military machinery is. A B-52 long range mission burns up over $1 million of fuel. Pilots don't often train the full cycle due to the costs.

Politicians are smart, it's just that their aim in self-enrichment, not running a country for the benefit of the citizens. If you look at it that way, they're genius level.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: People vastly overrate the amount of at home charging

"Of course we also just cut out a major distribution step in the petrol supply chain, and we wouldn't need to refine the fuel as heavily (saving a pile more energy), so the balance is actually even further in favour of the EV."

A further benefit is that on a kWh basis, the emissions from a power plant are much less than a bunch of ICE's producing the same amount of energy in cars. It's not feasible to fit the same level of emission controls on a car. I haven't seen a verifiable scientific study I can quote, but I have seen many articles on how even a coal fired plant with modern scrubbers outputs less per kWh than vehicles. If carbon capture is ever perfected for utility scale coal power plants, that would make EV's even more eco-friendly.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: People vastly overrate the amount of at home charging

"I don't think having kids is the problem, it's more general population growth."

The historical way population has increased is through people (women) having kids. Weather local population growth is home grown or imported is just fiddling detail.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: People vastly overrate the amount of at home charging

" Replacing all that with electricity is a lot more than just a few kw per vehicle per night."

All of that petroleum based fuel was refined using gobs of electricity so swapping ICEV with BEV gets some of that back. The transition isn't going to be overnight and it's a good thing for it to take time so all elements of grid, car repair shops, etc have time to adapt. This is why I'm against government mandates and taxpayer money being spent on public charging. It wasn't needed to go from horses to automobiles and it shouldn't be necessary for people to switch from ICEV to BEV if it makes sense. The infrastructure took some time to build before many people didn't need to own a horse or saw value in something with a petrol engine (or an EV early on). The bonus now is electricity is all over the place and it's a matter of having the right amounts in the right place. In the mean time, if you need a charge and all that's available is a bog standard outlet, it can work even as painfully slow as it might be. The same thing applies if your horse needed to eat and the only fodder available was a grassy field that was going to take more time than if you could have put hay and oats in a trough.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: people like me who drive about 3 miles per week.

"Get a bike and use a hire car/van if you need to shift anything heavy?"

I can't count how many times I've seen a good deal on something that won't fit in my car and hiring a pickup makes it too expensive. I can't justify owning a pickup truck, but I still move enough things and drive in inclement weather often enough to justify having a car.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: No shit

"You're confusing power with energy. "

I agree with the OP about using the term "power". Electric showers draw a bunch of power to be able to heat water instantly. A 3 hour use of the shower would total a lot of energy where a quick 5 minute sluice wouldn't be nearly as much.

US officials close to persuading allies to not pay off ransomware crooks

MachDiamond Silver badge

Cast in stone policies

Bad guys don't play by the rules, QED. For the "good" guys to set down unbreakable rules they have to abide by just makes it easier to play the system against itself.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Finally doing what I said they should do

"After all, companies manage to pay bribes without writing "cost center: general corruption, item: bribe" on their balance sheet. "

It's not a bribe, it's payment for consulting and local project guidance.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: The "ransomware is a false flag to crack down on crypto" meme

"The cryptobros are just worried that one of the biggest "markets" for crypto will go away if everyone quits paying ransom."

There's still guns and drugs with some underage pr0n thrown in.

FBI boss: Taking away our Section 702 spying powers could be 'devastating'

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: not until

"The FBI has been politically corrupt (maybe less than 100 of staff)"

It could be relatively few, but there's the contamination that spreads to other's work since nobody at the FBI works in a vacuum. If an honest agent looks at the file on somebody and a bad agent has made a note that some issue was investigated and the person is in the clear (when they are not), the honest agent's time is wasted and the crime is not solved. Not only is time wasted, the dishonest agent uses far less time to queer an investigation than what's spent by everybody else involved by a wide margin.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"I've got a sidearm, I can take care of myself."

Not at the scale we rely on government to secure for us. Even for up close and personal, being armed may not be very useful. Not being armed in some situations could mean staying alive since if you draw your weapon when a bad guy already has his out, you immediately become a priority target. Feeling lucky?

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: It is funny

"There needs to be term limits and age limits."

I agree. Public office should not be a career. It should be something that one does as a service for a limited time and goes back to doing real work after.

My mom is older than many politicians and still sharp as a tack, but I know of other people that haven't aged nearly as well so it's hard to say that people over a certain age are unable to do what's required, but statistically there is a good cut-off point. 65 could be a good where at the end of the term the person will be 65 or under. It could as easily be 60 or it could be that there is a required cognitive exam that has to be passed for a candidate over a certain age (still with a max age in place).

I'm older and I'll admit that I'm more "set in my ways" than I was when I was younger. Some of that is not bad as I've seen quite a lot of what doesn't work and what does, but too much of it leads to a stagnation of policies in a changing world. Will that latter part be me? Maybe, I won't rule it out but at that point I'll have far less personal future to worry about so it's all about getting to the finish line in good standing. For somebody in politics, they need to have to ability and care to do the most good for at least a couple of generations into the future, if not longer.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: ?

"Genuine question, how many big cyberattacks have they been able to stop,"

They can't comment on those in any detail due to national security. It's IS more than one.

In the mean time we are still inundated with robo-calls that don't get stopped due to the fat checks the phone companies make. There's still issues with people being scammed using the ol' gift card payment trick. Why can't there be purchase limits on buying gift cards so people aren't going to be scammed for more than a couple of hundred?

IBM to scrap 401(k) matching, offer something else instead

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Not to be trusted

"Just at the point that IBM should have been investing hard in Cloud computing even if this meant a degree of “eating your own babies” in terms of existing on premise computing revenues."

Big companies will do that. They don't sit down with the thought that it's inevitable that Cloud computing/storage will happen and they need to have a plan to make money from it. There is still a good case to be made for having hardware on premises for certain applications. A hospital has to be able to function if somebody with a digger severs the fiber coming into the building(s). They can't have current data all stored in the Cloud if it means they can't see surgery schedules and what meds a patient needs to be given and when. A large manufacturer would be in the same hot water if their factory operations software/data was suddenly missing. It's not a problem if the VIN's of cars that have left the factory are stored off-site, but those currently on the line will need the data for their build-out ready to hand. IBM would have been able to come up with a whole new ecosystem to sell and stay relevant at the same time. Instead, manglement got out their forks and tried to hold back the tide.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Saving are good but

It's not a bad thing to save for retirement, but early in one's career it can be better to forego a retirement plan/account and put money into a house. Pulling money from a retirement account means a big cost in fees and penalties and a house purchased wisely can "earn" more money over time. I have a few miles on the odometer and don't have a million in the bank, but I also don't have any debt and my housing cost is down to annual taxes. I'm a bit happy when I look at that over having stacks of money in accounts I am still too young to draw from and having to pay whatever rent a landlord demands. Rent that goes up each year just enough to make moving someplace else a bit more expensive. And again the next year and the next....

Had I a better financial plan way back in my twenties, I would be further ahead, but I smartened up with enough time to spare. I know people that have retirement accounts they can't touch and own nothing of consequence. One of them has been leasing their cars for a long time so they don't even own the car at the end of the term and just turn it in and lease something else that's honestly out of their budget.

Apple lifts the sheet on a trio of 'scary fast' M3 SoCs built on a 3nm process

MachDiamond Silver badge

The efficiency is great...

It's the rest of the package that Apple has been delivering lately that sucks. No way to upgrade the RAM. Storage is non-standard and the CPU is stuck on with no upgrade path either. If you don't spend a bunch of money upfront and find in a year or two that you need more, you have to buy new all over again and see if it's even worth your time to sell your old one or just use it to collect dust in the closet. I've been upgrading my cheesegraters to the point where they are now topped out with CPU and RAM. They still work very well and to replace them with a new Mac Pro would require getting a sparky around to run a dedicated circuit which adds another couple of grand to the purchase. Sadly I think they are getting to the end of life as Apple has a new OS every 6 months and nobody has seen a way to install them on those machines. Maybe I'm ok as I'm old and can continue on with the work I do for some time. I was looking at a Studio, but with zero upgradability, I'm not interested.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"Even with a 5-way Teams conference, I don't have to quit other applications - on the ThinkPad, I had to quit just about all running applications, because it ground to a halt and started stuttering."

Maybe someday we will get to the point where the next performance increase in hardware are so expensive that even large companies start deciding to extend what they have a few more years. This should give devs a big kick in the pants when it comes to optimizing their code. I had some engineering friends that escaped from the USSR when the wall came down and since they only had access to 640kb PC's, the code they wrote was about as optimized as it comes. One showed me an FEA program that blew my mind that it would run on a very antiquated PC. The output was mainly numeric, so you didn't have pretty pictures to look at and needed to know what you were doing, but ..

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: We need a new metric

"Default behaviour of chrome "

Microsoft, Apple, Google: Choose your manner of torture. Given the sorts of things Google gets up to, I'll stay clear of Chrome.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: We need a new metric

"People edit video on an Apple Silicon computer with 8GB."

It can certainly be done, but it's not efficient if you do a lot of editing or are doing complex video effects.

Somebody just doing office tasks can certainly be just fine with 8gb of RAM. But, that's today. Next month with a new OS release it could be a problem or the computer is needed for another task where 8gb isn't sufficient.

The cost of 8gb of RAM has dropped in the last several years while the cost of an Apple computer has gone up. If Apple is going to continue to make throw-away computers that have no CPU, Memory or Storage upgrade path, they should at least have enough of all three to survive longer than a Chromebook.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: We need a new metric

"Yeah - fully agree. Its also that a lot of devs have nice wizzy machines and just don't understand that Fred in accounts has a 20 year old Windows 98 PC (ok a bit OTT but you get the idea)"

A little hyperbole never hurt anybody and it does illustrate a good point. If a new app requires the latest OS, which only runs on the latest generation of hardware, the buy-in to be able to run that app can be thousands. I just saw a neat utility for Mac that would be handy except it won't run on anything more than a year old and with Apple prices, that's a big pile o' money. If it would run on something older, I would have sent them the money.

I think there could be a market for software that runs on older machines. I have an old CCTV application that runs on an older computer and it's fine. I'd love more features but I'm not going to splash out for a brand new computer just for that. I also have a stack of PC's in the closet I've been given (I have a friend that does estate sales). They all work and I've popped in a freshly formatted drive with W7 or Linux on it so they are ready to go. One is slated for a small CNC router I want to build. That doesn't need gobs of performance, but many new CNC programs require the latest everything. Why? G code is just a text file and the computer isn't doing anything more complex than squirting that out to the router. If you want to write your own code, you can do that on a Pi, but it's easier to manage on a Windoze box.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: We need a new metric

"Biggest question really is what you need all that RAM for and why 8GB isn’t enough."

You don't edit any video files, do you?

There are plenty of applications for more than 8gb of RAM. I can sometimes get into projects where I have a couple of VM's going and a handful of applications open and it would have the OS using disk storage as swap space. I can be much more productive if I'm not waiting on the computer. When my new cheesegrater is swapped into my office array, I'm going to add another 32gb of RAM (making 96gb total) for ~$25. That's very little to pay for the times when I'll use that much RAM. When I do need it, I expect it will be in the midst of a big and complicated project that I'm being paid good money to do (on a fixed contract). The faster I can do that work, the more my customers will love me.

If I did nothing be commentard on el Reg, this wimpy little laptop would be sufficient.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: We need a new metric

"-- things ought to have moved on since then! --

WHY?"

4k video. Highly compressed media files (that need very fast decoding). The biggy is that memory costs have dropped so it's the same or less money to equip a new computer with 16-32gb of RAM for what 8gb cost several years ago. The same applies to storage. It seems like everytime I buy another SSD, I spend the same money and get twice the storage, yet Apple wants an additional $400 to go from 1tb of storage to 2tb the last time I looked at a Studio. Everything I have now has a 4tb main drive as I'm tired to the system bitching at me when temp files use up all of the free space and I have to close everything and reboot to clear the docks.

The UK government? On the right track with its semiconductor strategy?

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: The UK Government could not

"The UK Government could not

organize a pissup in a brewery even with 5000 £1000 a day consultants to help out."

Don't give them any ideas or it will be 7500 consultants hired to do a preliminary study due in a couple of years.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: As some of us said at the time...

"It might be that other countries are subsidising the sector heavily, but throwing money into companies to make them "competitive" is a cost, not a benefit"

If there were a business advantage for a company to have fabs in the UK, there would be some. Government, no matter where, only has one tool in their box and that's to throw money at things. If they concentrated really hard before their 3 martini lunch, they might develop a new tool that can be used to analyze why there are no fabs in the UK and working on fixing those issues which might cost nothing at all.

In the US, top level politicians are tripping all over themselves to spend taxpayer money on EV charging stations. Going by the recent past for this type of thing, whatever they come up with will be rife with fraud and waste from the onset. A huge problem is when the charging companies have to deal with local government to get planning permission, permits and inspections. The red tape is akin to concertina wire and the locals are always adding to the barrier. The same goes for putting solar on your home. The compliance and permitting costs are a significant percentage of the build and the delays through inspectors showing their importance by nit-picking items or just not being able to visit sites in a timely manner to do their work adds endless costs.

The Tesla Shanghai plant was built in short order partially due to it being a government project (they hold the title) with full time inspectors on site checking and signing off work in real time so the next trade could come in and start their work without delay. If this show of urgency was implemented in other places, loads of money could be saved.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"They can build factories in the USA, but where will they find people with the needed knowledge to work there?"

The plants are mostly automated so they don't have to find many. The bigger question is how they will make any money when they have to petition the US State Department to get a license every time if the customer isn't the US government. I can't remember the cut-off, but processes smaller than a certain size are considered a National Security concern. Build the fab in Asia somewhere and export is no problem.

The USSR was building ICBM's with Z80's and it was a big concern for the US. It's not like they need the latest cpu's for something like that. Perhaps the worry is RADAR, SONAR and signal analysis or supercomputers decrypting communications.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"My question is, how much cheaper is it to build a 32nm fab today than a 3nm fab?"

The cost to build and staff a fab is so expensive that it makes little sense to not build a new facility to the latest spec. I think it's hitting hard limits on scale at this point and what's needed is a new approach to the overall layout. Another factor is how many quarters (not years) before there's a return on the investment. It can be faster if one spends a few more billion to be able to charge much more per chip.

Five Eyes intel chiefs warn China's IP theft program now at 'unprecedented' levels

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Decouple

"To make it work, you'd have to start bringing manufacturing back to other nations which would drive up costs significantly because we have regulations that make sure the air we breathe is generally safe, same with the water, and that we pay people at least a certain amount."

There's a very good book by former Dow CEO Andrew Liveris, "Make it in America". It's a very good look into the sorts of issues large corporations have to consider when looking where to grow their businesses and where to pull back. Labor costs are becoming much less of a factor as there's less human labor in many products and wages are rising in places such as China as there's more competition to attract skilled workers.

Environmental regulations are a good thing, but how they are implemented can be a problem. In the US there can several overlapping agencies regulating the same thing, all with different reporting requirements and often conflicting rules. Put a factory up in another country and not only have to deal with fewer regs, the ones that are policed only go through one agency. For a big company, that can eliminate a whole department of compliance personnel all commanding premium wages that are needed to juggle all of the rules and make sure the company is sticking to them.