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Comment Re:It was bloated anyway (Score 2) 21

Not really lots of groups, just VSD - the first x86 Mac Pro took just a few months to develop and was a relatively light-lift for Intel. It was a dual processor workstation motherboard that was slightly repurposed, using a slightly modified off-the-shelf EFI bios with the legacy side removed (EFI aka tiano was really new at the time), and a few ATI graphics adapters. The laptops didn't come until later and leveraged our initial work.
 
Apple - Apple never changes. Their focus on secrecy was paramount. We all had to sign NDAs to even know about it, and it was kept in a locked lab inside the locked lab. Out of the 10 people on my team I was the only one working on it, and it was the same for most of the dev/validation teams. There was even a re-work station built inside the locked lab for this and the boards were not allowed to leave the room.
 
Most of the heavy lifting (software side and case design) was done outside Intel as OSX was shipped to us for testing already compiled and running for x86 around half-way through the project testing. We used test platforms until we got the chassis, which was more or less similar to existing powerpc mac pro workstations but adapter to size/power reqs. We had to recompile and adapt our stress/testing tools and modify the BIOS code to fit what apple wanted. Before we received the actual OSX code, most of the testing was done using Linux, I'm sure Redhat or Suse since those are what we tested with in the lab.
 
We also did a project around the same time for Google with a stripped down headless serverboard, but I remember less details about that, and it was even less people required to get that one off the ground and never really took off since google took the design in-house after that. I think we did the first two iterations for Apple before they took over designing their own boards and bios stack.

Comment It was bloated anyway (Score 4, Informative) 21

When I worked there 15 years ago they had around 85,000 employees, and there was a lot of bullshit teams, tech marketers, and desktop gaming promoters that literally did nothing. A team of only around 30 people or so in the VSD (volume server division) helped usher in the first x86 Mac Pro...so much bloat in so many places that didn't make money.
 
At a recent count they are up to 125,000. Now they've fired 35,500. They really don't have that many more products than they had back then (they were working on failed compute and GPU back then too), so it sounds like they could trim some more and still be bloated.
 
Regardless, in NYSE terms, this means their stock should jump by 5-10%, right?

Comment Re:When Windows 10 ended support (Score 3, Interesting) 49

There are sooo many external USB bluray drives to choose from, and literally the first item I searched for was a 4k bluray player (with software included). Some even have built in USB hubs if that's your thing. A quick search for internal drives finds plenty from Asus, Hitachi, and Liteon - do you have some weird specific thing you are looking for that limits your options??

Comment Re:Testing strategy (Score 2) 191

All three are separate even with the same base language. I can understand a great deal of a language due to having lived in this foreign country with fluent children for a long time, and can read the language very well, but can barely speak it because speaking is a different part of the brain than understanding, and I work in english all day....And writing? My spelling is atrocious and I hear words I think is a single word but its really 3 words said quickly together so when I write said words as a single word, and spelled badly to boot, no one can understand what I just wrote. But I certainly understand them when they are questioning my ability to communicate. I have known the opposite too - people who can speak english with high fluency but cannot understand half of what is said to them. And those who can read and write but can't understand when it is spoken.

Comment Re:AWW POOR BABY (Score 1) 75

THAT was the part you focused on instead of "drive an EV you built from scrap" ?? LMAO!!! It was an exaggeration meant to portray an overly net-negative carbon person, not a play on reality. ;) The idea was to NOT purchase new cells but recycle to such an extreme that you become carbon negative. Which is really impossible if you are a part of mechanized, electrified, modern society.

Comment Re:AWW POOR BABY (Score 1) 75

It *is* flamebait since its simply trying to provoke a reaction without adding anything thoughtful or debating the points at all, which is why the 'ok doomer' AC response got an upvote. ;)
 
When you say "we earned it" keep in mind "we" is too inclusive at this point since 99.9999% of the population of earth, humans notwithstanding and even including humanity (especially children and those without electric in their homes) have no say or choice in what happens on this planet, and in fact unless you're a millionaire or have more influence than your CV suggests, you didn't really have any choice in this either. Maybe you feel more powerful than you are, since you can take part in the status quo or recycle and compost and drive an EV you built from scrap and recharge using old calculator solar cells - you are not making really any difference in the outcome of the planetary pollution.
 
Do you think you're actually voting for change if you vote for progressive environmentalists who are most likely paid for by corporate interests or other billionaire funds? There's no choice in the USA. And the EU is being fully influenced at this point by corporate MNC interests wanting more profit. The other continents were so colonialized they are desperate to regain any power, environment be damned....
 
Unless you think violent insurrection is the answer, which it very well might be, the choices of our great+ grandparents on how our culture should run have continued, cemented in to a childs vision of what it means to live in our society, with the 1% controlling the outcome for all other life on this planet.
 
Or more likely you just have self-loathing and maybe no kids you care about? I certainly don't give a shit about myself at this point, but I'd love for my children and their children to have a healthier planet to live on.

Comment Re:An amazing accomplishment (Score 0) 26

The amazing accomplishment is it took so long for this to be a dupe article - https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/10/03/234236/signal-braces-for-quantum-age-with-spqr-encryption-upgrade, though I guess an Ars Technica write up of the original that was covered here may be a fraternal dupe instead of an identical dupe.

Comment Re:Halloween (Score 5, Informative) 101

Can't believe its been so many years since the Halloween Documents were written, and I'm sure this AC comment was a troll from someone who wasn't even born back then, and not a reference to this infamous time period, but the Halloween Documents are the reason so many of us still distrust Microsoft. Its not really the telemetry, which every app has now, or the proprietary nature, which is every non-free OS at this point. Remember - Microsoft is the reason the term FUD exists. They were masters of marketing and propaganda in the 90s and early 00s and actively sought to destroy Free software, Linux specifically. They've supposedly made peace with Linux but I don't trust them and just can't due to the nature of their business. Sorry MS.

Comment In other news.... (Score 3, Interesting) 23

...money drives half of crime. I mean, quantifying the number is interesting but was this written by an AI or Mr. Obvious?

"Governments must build frameworks that signal credible and proportionate consequences for malicious activity that violates international rules."

Translation: Crime flourishes when the government looks the other way. Yes?

For example, a hospital must quickly resolve its encrypted systems, or patients could die, potentially leaving no other recourse but to pay."

Is this scare mongering, or real?? What hospital is running life support on public networks? You know what, I'd rather not know because when you're in a life and death situation, the closest hospital is the best one and it probably is running BloodPumperPro on the internal LAN and, unfortunately, I'd still prefer that to no hospital at all in the case of my life depending on it.......

Comment Re:Do not trust "AI", period. (Score 3, Insightful) 70

The funny thing is that Reddit has completely misread the room. If people wanted LLM answers they would go to ChatGPT or Gemini or something. People are going to reddit *to ask the probable human experts* on a field, or at least find a general consensus, not get an LLM crap-answer. A "smart" search on reddit to find duplicate postings of what you're posting about might be a better use of AI but this was someone wanting to answer the question "How can we use LLM since LLM is using us" and came up with a wrong answer...anyway if you want to pull LLM traffic from the Big Players, it has to be better than them.

Comment Re:What's the Difference? (Score 2, Interesting) 46

Hi Elon. Yes it's a semantic difference in the specific thing you pulled out to focus on, why would you even care about that??. The problem is not the semantics here, its that the US Government via SpaceX Contracted Deliverables are violating international standards (aka Agreements, pedantically, things the US Government has Agreed to follow in order to ensure other governments also follow them so we don't cause each other problems). It could in this case disrupt or make it so other countries have difficulties in communicating with their satellites.
 
Potential vs ability to disrupt? If its disrupting non-US national security satellites no one is going to make a big press release about it but it could be that suddenly those satellites experience a large amount of EMI or maybe even overpowered lasers shined in their port holes.... or worse, those countries also ignore the international agreements and just start doing whatever they want on any frequency.

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