Ultra-high capacity SSD drives have made a device the size of the Snowmobile unnecessary today, what formerly needed a cargo container of spinning platters can now fit in a footlocker.

You'd be surprised how many organizations have the need to move petabytes of data, mostly archival data which is only marginally accessible on stored tapes or tape libraries that break down as they age. Moving it into the cloud can make it available for analysis or ML training, or other usages which were not practical in its previous storage configuration, and depending on the options chosen and the cost of the previous storage may not even cost noticeably more.

It's worse than limited symptom-treating, they'll have no need to purchase data at all when they can just compel domestic companies to hand the data over China-style:

https://news.slashdot.org/stor...

Full Disclosure: I worked on the physical security of the Snowmobile when it was originally introduced, it was a really fun project.

The idea of the Snowmobile was to enable gigantic transfers of data, in the case of the first customer it was a GIS company with a data lake of 20 years of archived data. They built a fence in the parking lot next to the loading bay, ran some serious fiber to it, put in a bunch of cameras, and Amazon brought a cargo container full of racks of drives and parked it there. They then spent the next six weeks transferring their data to the Snowmobile (breaking their backup tape library three times in the process) while the AWS SOC continuously monitored the security of the container and their onsite security monitored the data line. Then Amazon hooked up the tractor, drove it to Portland (again continuously monitored by the AWS SOC), plugged it into the PDX data center, and over the next couple of days moved it all into their racks. Within a week the customer was offering products that their former configuration hadn't allowed.

The customer had estimated that transferring that much data via the fastest available connection would have taken 3 1/2 years, assuming no issues (as if that has ever happened). My understanding is that the Snowmobile was originally envisioned with the Pentagon in mind, as they have entire data oceans of GIS data currently stored on systems so old that they're buying parts on (literally) eBay. Today the Snowmobile is outdated, as a petabyte of data can now fit in a carry on suitcase.

Maybe Republicans really like dick picks

Thanks Yuri. How's the weather in St. Petersburg?

Maybe if Israel hadn't been politically and financially backing Hamas, it might have been different. But hey, all that counts is "Palestinians bad, Israelis good". Simple is so much easier to cope with than reality.

I think that humanoid robots are not yet worth the time, mostly for psychological reasons. People see something that looks kind of like a person, even something as bizarre as Handle, and they automatically assume human-like capabilities so of course they will be disappointed. No one expects much of a dog, which is why people are so impressed with Spot.

I'm really curious about what this might be. Sure, there would almost certainly be a "next girl" but there could be subsequent "next guys" after that...

US to China: Nobody gets away with turning all their megacorporations into arms of a giant state surveillance apparatus - except us!

Oh, carp. Posting to undo erroneous mod.

If your enterprise depends on a product that can't parse a textfile correctly without appropriate and simplistic sanity-checking, you absolutely and desperately need a new product for your enterprise.

And if that product says "Oh, we can't do that, because it's undocumented and the format could change at any time, so no warranty for that..." take that as a hint.

I would guess that absolutely nobody is paying the kernel team to solve their boo-boos with their third-party, out-of-tree, unnecessary KConfig parser for enterprises that they're charging a fortune for. It's on them to fix it if their parser is so immature that it can't handle a space in an often manually-edited config file.

If it's undocumented, third-party integrators should be asking for such and/or KNOWING that their integration could break at any time and that they should therefore do a lot more sanity-checking.

It's actually incredibly likely that we're NOT.

But the problem is that simple physics gets in the way and the chances of two civilisations existing at the same time, within communication distance of ANY kind, and who notice each other and can do anything about it (beyond having conversations with 4000-year round-trip times), are infinitesimally small, even with a million such civilisations.

Basically, the limiting factor here is the speed of light - and if that's literally the limit of the universe, every civilisation that exists will basically be forever isolated from all others, just by sheer probability. It doesn't matter how advanced they get, how fast they spread through their galaxy, how many millions of years they last.... the chances are they won't meet another, or even catch a glimpse of evidence of their existence.

It's far more likely we're one of countless civilisations, even in our own galaxy, but almost certainly in the countless trillions of galaxies we can see, but that we'll never actually know that. The maths tells us so.

And if someone can "break the speed of light" (without tricks like holes in space, etc. but actually break the speed of light), they could probably also go spend all of eternity locating every civilisation that ever existed anywhere from the point they discover that, and basically visit them at any "time" in that civilisation that they desire. Would they choose 2024 Earth and humans from a universe of possibilities? Almost certainly not.

We're not alone, we're not the most advanced life. But we will likely be entirely unable to provide any evidence of that for the complete window of our entire existence. That's, by far, the most likely scenario for every civilisation in the entire universe.

Russia just had an election earlier this year. If that's the quality of your knowledge of the world there's no reason to pay attention to anything else you say.

Oh, you're an AC, of course there's no reason to pay attention to you.

but that won't work out

It generally works for centuries at a time, which is much longer than military occupations tend to last.