Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:For how much longer? (Score 4, Insightful) 63

Exactly that's why it's also on the rise in Germany, despite the current government trying its best to stop it. I just makes so much sense that it cannot be stopped. It's just so affordable that at least home owners can simply invest in it.

It's a microeconomic decision, it will rise from the bottom up. It's not like macroeconomic decisions you can just dictate from above to suit the needs of some big companies. (like it's done in Germany with cars)

Comment Yeah, but the travel argument... (Score 1) 39

... kinda never was valid. After all, countries like the US can already force Apple to comply to their will... and companies like Apple or Google have no motivation to admit that they are doing it. Mock trials can be arranged easily while, in the background, such cooperation is already happening.

Or to put it differently, Apple can already get at that data.

Comment Well the price-increase strategy is failing (Score 2) 135

The car industry in the "west" has a big problem, the market doesn't grow. You won't be able to sell twice as many cars as you do now in X years, as your market is saturated. The only way to increase revenue (without doing anything difficult) is to increase the price of the cars themselves. If you don't grow, investors will get angry.

Car manufacturers saw the switch to electric vehicles as a way to increase car prices. That's why they offered them at higher prices than comparable ICE vehicles.... even though the costs to make an electric drive-train are now smaller than for an ICE. (which was predictable and predicted of course)

Chinese manufacturers don't have that problem. They sell more cars every year. They don't care about raising car prices that much. That's why they now offer affordable electric cars.... BTW the total subsidies the Chinese government puts on Electric cars there... are in the same magnitude as car subsidies in Germany. (Germany is obviously a much smaller market)

Now how to get out of this problem? It is similar to the problem the photographic film industry faced. The successful example of a company managing to deal with this change was Fuji-Film. They realized that they had lots of "side projects" that came out of the film manufacture business. They made special plastic sheets for LCDs, they were making chemicals for the pharma and cosmetics industry. They had consulting businesses for emulsions. They realized that they could strengthen those "side-quests" to get through the storm. Today Fuji-Film not only still exists, but it's a strong company again... and yes, they still make film, but now it's just a small part of their business.

Could this be a model for the car industry? In theory yes, however, at least in Germany they went through extreme outsourcing. There is virtually nothing left that is not directly car related that is non-trivial to do. They don't have knowledge about rubber... since the tires are outsourced. They don't know about semiconductors... since they outsourced that.

Comment I think the headline already shows the problem (Score 1) 65

We are talking about $400k for a movie. That's an insane amount of money, only very few movies can recoup that much money. The cost of AI video generators is likely to go up, once the companies start trying to move their business model from "burning investor money" to "not making to much of a loss".

Comment Such systems exist for decades now (Score 1) 40

In fact such systems have existed before fiberoptic cables... however there is a problem they have called "weather". While microwave links, which BTW can also reach 10 Gigs if you plan them right, will fade a bit in rain, laser-based systems typically fail completely and much faster.

For decades it never managed to get out of its niche, and there seems to be no progress on the horizon to change that.

Comment That's not very hard (Score 3, Interesting) 68

Particularly if you have a system that supports multi-agent teams, you can just spin up a bunch of them, create a harness that makes them talk to each other in real-time and tell them what you want to do. It's not hard to do that.

For companies like Amazon that probably makes sense. They want to prolong the bubble of "Frontier model" companies. For the rest of the world, price hikes will eventually make them creative. My prediction is that we might see something a bit more clever than current coding agents that can deliver good, if not even great, results with comparatively tiny models. The smaller the model the easier it is to train, so maybe... future models will be so small you can train them for your project, on your own computers, for a fraction of the price of current solutions.
Nobody knows, but at our company, the next Anthropic price hike will mean very substantial costs for the company I'm working at. The kind of cost that gets you a substantial number of programmers.

Comment It's like selling a 5 ton bag of sugar (Score 1) 70

It's not that hard to build such an SSD. Yes, cooling can become a problem, but there are established ways to deal with that. Essentially it just boils down to comparatively simple packaging. You just put more chips onto boards and cram more boards into your case. Putting chips onto boards is something that scales very well.

The hard thing is to do that cheaply.

Comment It really only had a short window (Score 1) 180

I remember having exactly one use for my ZIP drive, to get some files from my PC to a PC with a CD writer. I did that exactly once.

Retrospectively it seemed like such a short time solution. It was rare, so you couldn't exchange discs, and after a few years there was the Internet, a fast and simple communications medium where you could just operate an FTP-Server at home and move files that way.

Comment I call bullshit on this (Score 1) 262

This either is completely fabricated or something _way_ more mundane blown up a chain of bad reporting.

There is no plausible way you can detect any physical signal from reasonably long distances... and separate it from noise that looks identical.
Also it uses the word "quantum" which impresses some people, even though it means very little. My computer uses quantum effects, sure... but so does a rotting fish.

Comment Well yes, obviously (Score 1) 116

Linux does typically require more RAM than Windows. I mean Linux is a full operating system including network stack and multitasking, while Windows essentially is a shell for DOS... with some added benefits like having a GUI-Toolkit that supports multiple applications running at once due to cooperative multitasking.

So while your typical Windows system was sold with 4 Megs of RAM, a Linux system typically isn't usable with less than 8 Megs of RAM.

Of course this is now largely irrelevant as RAM is fairly cheap. You can literally have a machine with multiple Gigabytes of RAM, way more than himem.sys would support. (the limit is at 1 Gig, BTW)

Comment Are you sure that is true? (Score 0) 49

It seems to me that many people confuse "Apple Computer" with "Apple" since they have a similar logo, one with a rainbow apple, one with a plain apple, and worked in tangential areas, one sold computers, the other one sold computerized consumer products.

I mean "Apple Computer" had an excellent reputation as treating their customers as equal, providing them with all necessary documentation for fixing and modifying their computers in any way. In contrast "Apple" today doesn't even let you run non-approved software without going through their hoops.

You might as well say that we are at 58 years of Apple, since Apple Records was founded in 1968. They too have an apple as their logo.

Slashdot Top Deals

Shortest distance between two jokes = A straight line

Working...