Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment What is efficiency? (Score 1) 117

It does open a conversation regarding efficiency. The wide distribution of home ownership in the USA is inefficient. People should move to cities for faster broadband.

USA citizens are not necessarily demanding gigabit fiber out in the boondocks. I was paying $60 monthly for 3mbps ADSL well past 2019. I've since moved, but the ADSL didn't even meet Obama's 10mpbs cellular mandate, much less the 25mbps hardline mandate. Ping times were better on ADSL than cellular, and hardline obviously gets more than 1 bar of signal past the mailbox and indoors.

Efficiency may mean cutting off service outside of official city limits, leaving rural customers without internet altogether. Though, that may be less efficient for the customer.

Efficiency may mean longer lines, more efficiency for businesses to hire fewer employees. Though, that may be less efficient for the customer.

Efficiency may mean not letting employees have fun at work. That may mean they are more likely to be in a sour mood when I need their assistance, or they may not have time to properly understand my issue and just drop me into a call transfer loop until I give up with the issue unresolved.

DOGE is Efficient for who?

Comment Re:Musk is grandstanding... (Score 2) 303

Safety is the image of SpaceX that Boeing sold the world. That Elon Musk could make executive decisions on taking risk and being disruptive, and playing it safe when it actually matters.

The call to de-orbit the I.S.S., an aging station which is past its prime, isn't a new call. Nobody is calling for the I.S.S. mission to be extended. Musk took the opportunity to reduce the safety image of SpaceX, making Boeing the superior option. Musk is acting like an unhinged maniac, unsuitable for the role he has been positioned in.

Elon Musk destroyed Twitter, as irrelevant as that platform is all of it is managed risk. Then he took an eccentric risk and disrupted the financial viability of Tesla. However, calling for an "A.S.A.P." de-orbiting of I.S.S. is crossing the line between eccentric and irresponsible. It is unhinged, and if this behavior continues, SpaceX stock will tank. People are getting fed up with Elon.

Comment Re:48 hours to explain what you did last week (Score 1) 303

In a society where sarcasm can be used for good, I can see this trending on Twitter, with a trend of every single photo in 2025 being digitally edited to include an orange hard hat, in case of space debris. It could be captioned "Elon Musk, explain what YOU did last week".

Comment Re: So SpaceEx can profit? (Score 3) 303

Boeing was having major issues. There was this whole thing on social media about whistleblowers being silenced, permanently, while Boeing's planes began to develop a reputation for unreliability. When I watched the Starliner launch with Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, I thought I was watching the end of the space program. When I.S.S. was de-orbited that would be the end.

I didn't know what Musk and SpaceX would do with their commercial Space Program. He talked big about going to Mars, but, talk is cheap. I thought SpaceX would be the safer choice. I didn't expect Musk to destroy Twitter, Tesla, and finally SpaceX, in some seemingly Kanye-esq prolonged bi-polar manic insanity. Bro is off his meds...

I was not expecting that I would be wishing that Boeing and the Starliner program had brought Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore back, clearing some checklists on that vehicle for a fallback from crazed Elon Musk. I thought we would have a little more time to go through the official process. I didn't think the doomsday clock we were watching was the baby boom Trust Fund surplus.

Comment Elon Musk is threatening me. (Score 1) 303

Am I the only one honing in on the "ASAP" temper tantrum of an unhinged maniac engaged in a Twitter/X spat?

Yet, I feel like Musk is threatening me, with the notion of not bothering to accurately calculate the trajectory of the I.S.S. de-orbiting maneuver.

I also wonder what the implications are for negotiations with Russia, when Musk is simultaneously threatening Russia cosmonauts. Elon Musk or "Elon Kim".

Comment I'm Captain Obvious... (Score 1) 62

"Isn't that just Reinventing the wheel?"

Google is both a search engine, and a subsidiary company under "Alphabet". The Alphabet organization surely has the technological means to know the answers, they just won't tell.

Alphabet does not seem to have configured the Google search engine and YouTube website to function interactively in a manner required by the researchers, thus the need to reinvent the wheel. I don't know if there is any indication of how much code is from scratch, or if the users were able to appropriate Open Source portions of the Google Search technology.

Comment Re:Maybe someone can explain this... (Score 1) 42

It seems to be about the areas of luxury resorts. Casino Royale and James Bond are an interesting pairing, it might be a tourist attraction for those looking to follow up on the film or book with a visit to an actual casino. The goal appears to be to cash in on Bond's lifestyle.

If they can't license the Bond name, or just don't want to pay the fees, they may look to force the Intellectual Property into the public domain.

The legal basis appears to be more closely linked to the Costa Rica "Super Mario" case, where Nintendo shouldn't be able to hold the IP for grocery store chains or "Super Markets", nor for the more common outside of Japan name of "Mario", and neither also the possible combination of "Super Mario". "Super Mario" may be uniquely exclusive within Japan's national borders, but elsewhere it is generically mundane.

Comment Re:Owning names (Score 1) 42

This is Slashdot. Perhaps we can pivot to a discussion of compensation for Open Source GNU/Linux maintainers? Stories enrich the culture, the public. There is value in those stories. It behoves us to ensure appropriate compensation for contributions to society. We do not wish to encourage piracy of intellectual property, but we do want to be able to build, maintain, and grow, and otherwise make use of those contributions.

Out of your list, I'm going to choose Moses, "The Prince of Egypt", because it is more easy to pivot to something like the 2014 "Noah" by Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel, starring Russell Crowe. My argument is that the contribution of 2014's Noah is more significant than 1998's "The Prince of Egypt", in the conversation of the protection of intellectual property.

Perhaps the discussion may diverge into the value of KHTML, Webkit, and Chromium "Blink". With a nod to Netscape, Mozilla, and Firefox, as well as OpenOffice and LibreOffice.

We must weigh the compensation of the original contribution with the value of the fork of the project, as well as legal considerations towards intersecting rights such as in the Costa Rica "Super Mario" case.

Steamboat Mickey doesn't seem to require a fork, Mickey's contribution to society seems to largely be as a mascot. However, when should Star Wars enter the public domain?

Comment Re:Framework for laptops, NUC for desktops? (Score 1) 62

You are focusing on the trees, and not the forest. Get your head out of the sand, and look around. Pay attention to the writing on the wall. One doesn't represent all, but when you start compiling lists, it is clear this is a period of diminishing returns of an ever approaching technological plateau when is progress simply not worth the cost anymore?

Comment Re:Framework for laptops, NUC for desktops? (Score 1) 62

The issue with NVIDIA's RTX cards, particularly of the x90 Enthusiast range, is three fold.

1. The 12VHPWR connector shows an unfortunate increase in power demand, which may not be represented by the expected Moore's Law increase in performance. The 5090 is not a massive improvement in raw power, and thus the improvement claims are questionable. The 12VHPWR suggests that the Moore's Law gain in performance will exceed consumer 15 AMP breakers, and thus exceed maximum stability. The early flammability of the port further increases the risk to the consumer. California may move to ban 12VHPWR as A.I./Robotics class non-green components. Insurance may move to not cover fire damage if an 12VHPWR was present and connected, or cited as the cause of the fire either directly or via electrical cabling. If not true of the 12VHPWR, then it may be true of seeking any successor that would demand more than 15 amps in order to sustain Moore's Law gains.

2. The RTX class GPUs upscaling and frame-generation capabilities are quickly rendered inadequate compared to native. Latency and Responsiveness matter, and Frame-Rate was the old way to measure responsiveness. 50 series Frame-Generation alone is a red-herring, the ultimate goal is to unlock 60-90 FPS. Unlocking more compute headroom can be used for higher resolutions over 1080p, higher detail in the rasterization up to the limits of the resolution chosen, or enable more compute heavy elements such as Ray Tracing or PhysX. If the performance gains are as "massive" as claimed through DLSS, then why do you need an x90? Over 90 FPS baseline responsiveness, and DLSS trends more towards self-defeating, and especially so if you don't use Ray Tracing in order to get higher raw rasterization and lower latency. Why do you need raw rasterization if you don't need raw rasterization?

3. GPUs with adequate power are making substantial gains in rasterization performance to unlock 1440p and 4k resolutions, as well as high refresh rates of 200+ FPS on 8th Generation level games. 9th Generation level releases seeking to avoid being "held back" by CPUs, are becoming increasingly more CPU bottlenecked below 60 FPS. NVIDIA has a track record of not supplying enough VRAM to trade horizontal frame rate and lowered latency performance into vertical performance of higher resolutions and texture detail. Microsoft, Intel, and AMD cannot keep up with NVIDIA. And NVIDIA cannot keep up VRAM with rasterization.

Even if you think that Mac is trash for high performance, it stands the argument that the M1 silicon can "catch up" to x86 "endgame". There are indicators that x86 can no longer maintain that lead due to actual physics limitations. A zenith or plateau for growth that Apple hasn't hit yet. SoC architecture looks to be the final evolution, and Apple has a "head start".

Finally, UbiSoft's "quadruple A" has justification in that multiple studios were involved in the development of the game. The discussion is around budgets, and if a "AAA" single studio budget is unsustainable, then a "AAAA" budget is likely in even worse stance of recouping development costs from a single game.

Comment Re:Framework for laptops, NUC for desktops? (Score 3, Interesting) 62

There are indicators of stagnation in the x86 architecture. Apple shifting to their own ARM based silicon was seen as a significant disruption and unsettling of the dominance of Intel and x86. This is further exacerbated by recent hardware issues, and the lack of significant gains over 9th Generation console hardware suggesting the end of Moore's Law for enthusiast consumer purposes.

The excitement of "newest shiny" is in the "laptop mechanics" of the Apple Silicon line. Perhaps more "smart phone" mechanics with SoC and soldered RAM. Diminishing returns on high end configurations may drive consumer sentiment towards mini-PC configurations.

Software developers on the Windows platforms struggle to benefit from high core count CPUs. Writing threaded and parallelized code is challenging. Video Game developers and publishers are struggling with ever increasing costs trying to one-up themselves each generation, and the effective loss of Moore's Law is shrinking the install base rather than growing it. Riskier projects like UbiSoft's "Quadruple-A" Skull and Bones title, may not get greenlit. With no AAAA games, and fewer AAA games, the demand for enthusiast hardware is expected to diminish in favor of the Steam Deck.

This shift could potentially break Windows if ARM actually manages to gain a significant competitive advantage over the x86 architecture, since a significant part of the Windows base is centered around backwards compatibility and longevity of code. The longer the code runs, the greater the return on investment. Microsoft may be able to salvage Windows, in an x86 to ARM migration strategy. However, Microsoft's focus on the cloud, in the wake of Broadcom's VMWare may have introduced just enough anxiety in the business world to begin a shift away from the Microsoft and VMWare hegemony. In such a world, it may be wise to have Wine or Proton provide a failsafe to Microsoft's DirectX platform.

In a world where the Steam Deck might dominate over ATX hardware, it may be prudent to consider replacements for ATX. The question is why something new and not Mini-ITX?

Comment Not Necessarily (Score 1) 62

Not Necessarily. Video Games are a driver of consumer upgrades. Console development is about squeezing the maximum performance out of budget hardware, which includes soldered "Shared Memory", which moves in the direction of System on a Chip (SoC) architecture.

Seeking a competitive edge, Apple has gone down the SoC path with its Apple Silicon. Microsoft has engaged Qualcomm for ARM CPUs in their flagship Surface product, and is actively maintaining an ARM flavor of Windows in the event of a significant market shift to ARM based SoC "e-waste" designs.

Dell has undergone an Apple-esq rebrand of their fleet of computers, which also seems to be eyeing a shift to SoC "e-waste" designs.

Framework is an entire company that was brought into existence in protest of these Ultralight and otherwise "e-waste" platforms. While Framework mostly focuses on the Shell, they do still retain RAM module upgrades in their motherboard designs. Not being an industry leader, I'm not sure how long Framework will be able to support RAM upgrades. If Intel's designs gain traction, I would be interested in how compatible they are with the base Framework 13 design.

Slashdot Top Deals

Hackers are just a migratory lifeform with a tropism for computers.

Working...