Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Supercomputer vs PC. (Score 1) 53

Don't expect AI to ever use only a small amount of compute. You can do a lot by pre-training, but there are limits.

OTOH, I'm rather sure that the current algorithms are a lot more wasteful than a later version will be. A factor of 100 wouldn't surprise me. Personally I think the way to handle it is with a raft of Small Language Models, each one tuned to a specific context, and a higher system that switches context as appropriate. (I've seen signs in the news that we're already headed that way.)

Comment Re:They won't depreciate that much (Score 1) 53

Moore's law may be over, but the 3D version of it is just getting started. The real problem is moving the heat away from the chip. I think we're in the early part of the ramp up of 3D chips.

N.B.: That it's actually do-able was proven decades ago, but only for custom sculpted 1-off chips in a lab setting. (I believe it was the Tennessee Valley Authority...but I'm more sure about the Tennessee than about the rest.)

Comment Re:"Costing tens of thousands of dollars each..." (Score 1) 53

AFAIKT, China is 4-5 years away from "breaking into this market", if they market is the upper end of the chips. Possibly even a bit longer. OTOH, for many purposes their chips are already good enough, so they'll break into it at the lower end as soon as they have enough chips for export. (Aren't they already doing that?)

Comment Re:Apple way or the highway (Score 1) 56

Just a thought... you could get a portable monitor, which are regularly available for around $50 for a 15.6" one, and pair it with a cheap mini pc or even a RaspberryPi. The Pi would even have the advantage of having GPIO pins so you could add buttons easily and cheaply. Since it's just going to be sat on your organ, I suspect it'd be fine to plug it in somewhere, but you could run it off a cheap battery pack if need be. A bit more setup work, but the result would likely be better than any tablet for your purposes.

You're off by a lot. My setup shows two pages at once, which means it's a 26-inch Android tablet (IIRC).

  • To get integrated storage on the main board (for reliability), you'd have to go with something a lot less supported, like Rock Pi, and you'd spend over a hundred bucks just for the board.
  • You'd have to add a 26-inch touchscreen monitor for another $250.
  • You'd have to spend at least $20 on a case.

So even before the cables, you're at about $370 plus shipping, which is really close to the $400-ish price of the prebuilt Android tablet. That's with Android pre-installed, zero extra setup needed, no flash card to get accidentally dislodged and crash everything, just plug in, connect to a network, set a passcode if desired, and you're done.

Comment Re:Typical Apple gaslighting. (Score 1) 34

This wasn't about consumers, it was about developers you mid-wits. This is nothing more than an attempt from Apple to gaslight the EU by somehow claiming that something that worked exactly as intended, wasn't working.

More than just developers. There's an entire in-app purchase industry that basically doesn't exist because of Apple's monopolization of that market. Their behavior doesn't just affect app developers. It also affects banks that make merchant accounts available. It affects small-company payment processors like Stripe. And so on.

Comment Re: That's a bad look on Marriott. (Score 2, Insightful) 41

This is not on Marriott, but on Sonder. And in this case it's also in the user, as he got a mail during his stay, so he should at least called the frontdesk to see what's up, niw saying he thought it was spam is of course just an excuse to try to get some sympathy. Of course I do feel for people when such a thing happens, but it's a business, not a social institute. And those accomodations need to generate money.

In all your life, have you ever gotten an email from someone in the middle of a trip saying that your pre-arranged hotel stay is cancelled, and you need to leave the room ASAP? That's not something anybody would ever expect to get legitimately.

Moreover, something like this would be *massively* disruptive to the person's vacation, possibly literally forcing them to live out of their cars, depending on when it happened and how busy the hotels were at the time. Even if you didn't ignore it, if your only option was to leave — especially if you had already paid for the room — you'd be more than just furious. You'd be filing a lawsuit against everyone involved.

It's not on Marriot that Sonder didn't pay their bills as Marriot wouldn't just terminate the contract, in most cases they already hadn't got paid in weeks or even months.

No, it absolutely is on Marriott. Either the booking is prepaid, in which case you have paid for the room, and it isn't your fault that Sonder screwed you, or the booking is not prepaid, in which case you're paying Marriott, and it doesn't matter that Sonder screwed Marriott.

I am therefore assuming it is the former, which means you've pre-paid for the room, and you are legitimately entitled to service. Them breaking their contract with Sonder might excuse them for preventing future bookings, or even cancelling bookings beyond a certain date if they are not prepaid, and providing a way for the customer to pay directly, but it does NOT relieve them of responsibility for honoring any existing prepaid bookings, nor any active bookings that are already in progress.

In all likelihood, a judge would conclude that the people staying in the room are a party to an implied contract the moment they entered into the agreement with Sonder, and that Marriott is REQUIRED to honor those bookings under the principle of promissory estoppel. The liability for failing to meet those obligations would absolutely *DWARF* any possible savings from being able to rent the room to someone else. Think "million dollar pain and suffering claim" here. And because Sonder is not the one who kicked those people out of their hotel rooms, that liability falls on either the individual hotels, who would then sue the hotel chain to recover those losses, or directly on the hotel chain, whose only option would be to try to sue the defunct Sonder to recover the cost of those payouts.

Moreover, anyone who experienced this would not care in the slightest whether Sonder and Marriott had a falling out. They would only care that their vacation was ruined because a hotel room that *THEY PAID FOR* was suddenly yanked out from under them, kicking them out into the street. So those people will never trust a Marriott hotel again as long as they live, and they will tell all of their friends not to trust Marriott. This level of breach of trust is how companies die.

What Marriott did is so far from okay, whether you mean ethically, morally, or legally, that IMO, heads should roll at the C-suite level within the next week over it.

This just shows that you should think before booking an accomodation through a third party who advertises it for much cheaper as directly.

Why? Those companies get a discount for bookings. They pass those savings on in different ways. Some use reward points. Others give a discount up front. Why would you deliberately pay more for a hotel booking than you have to?

Like I said, Marriott had an implied contract with you, the person staying in the room, and that became binding on them when you checked into the hotel at the absolute latest, if not the moment you paid for the stay or any portion thereof. What they did is not only unethical, but also blatantly illegal, and whatever executives authorized or were in any way aware of the termination of the contract in this way should be fired for it, if not outright jailed.

It's sad that people think that such flagrant abuse of individuals by giant corporations is okay. It isn't. It is illegal, it is immoral, it is unethical, and it cannot be tolerated in a decent society.

Comment Re:Apple way or the highway (Score 1) 56

You know you can buy a new iPad for $349 right? You don’t need the Pro version for you use case.

My eyes are not 22 years old anymore. So yeah, I really do need the Pro version.

  • Modern sheet music is usually printed on 9" x 12" paper. This is the equivalent of a 15-inch iPad, if Apple actually made such a thing.
  • The largest iPad Pro, at 13 inches, is about the size of an 8.5" x 11" piece of paper, give or take. That means in many cases, it is only 92% as big as the original, which makes it noticeably more difficult to read music than at full size.
  • The largest non-pro iPad, at 11 inches, is only 82% as big as a standard 8.5" x 11" piece of paper in its smallest dimension, or 74% as big as the original. That's a *lot* smaller.

So even the largest iPad Pro is smaller than I'd like, and is a noticeable compromise, but any standard iPad would be considerably worse.

Also, half the music I play on organ is some poorly scanned public domain music off of IMSLP, and that stuff is hard enough to read even at full page size, even after laser eye surgery. The last thing I would want is a screen that makes things smaller than 8.5" x 11" paper. So from my perspective, anything smaller than the largest iPad Pro model really is a non-starter, and if Apple made a 15-inch tablet, that would be even better.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much nearer the truth. -- Alfred North Whitehead

Working...