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Comment Assembly, maintainability, repairability (Score 1) 130

Ford hired Tesla veterans Doug Field and Alan Clarke and says the new platform reduces parts by 20%, has 25% fewer fasteners, and 15% faster assembly time.

That sounds concerning. Sounds like the vehicles are designed to be snapped together once at the cost of quality, maintainability, and reliability.

I hope that's not the case. The world doesn't need more disposable junk (at the cost of consumers and the environment). I truly hope that the vehicles based on the platform:

  • Won't be glued and snapped together in a crappy way like the Cybertruck which has led to parts falling off and even flying off at highway speeds.
  • Will be maintainable and repairable instead of relying on single-use-only fasteners (and/or glue) that are made to be put together only once when the vehicle is assembled and prevent it from being taken apart for repair. That ish was bad enough on Mopars that I've workerd on.
  • Not have egregious single points of failure such as like the Cybertruck. Everything is daisy chained together on a CAN bus network that's on a single wire bundle. Taillights, break lights, nearly everything is connected to one single physical link layer that must not be interrupted. In other words, the Cybertruck is electrically (and apparently logically) wired like ancient Christmas lights or token ring - you get a break in the wiring or an issue with the bus and you're screwed.

Comment Re:Say what? (Score 1, Interesting) 51

I will walk the line personally to accelerate the pace of progress," Musk said on X
Yep, that does not inspire confidence. If these chips were going to be sold to many different buyers, that line right there would make me question Samsung's prospects. But since they're just for Tesla, go ahead, let Elon mess it up. If the contract language is tight with respect for protection for Samsung, it won't be any skin off of Samsung's back. However, if Samsung has too much skin in the game, that's a big risk. Elon is too unpredictable, too egotistical, and too much of a wild card to count on for good business.

Comment Re:AI is smarter than that. (Score 1) 73

When you say "news readers" and "journos", are you referring to unthinking, script-monkey news readers? Are you talking about journalists, people that actually find the news and report it? Or are you referring to both? If you're referring to both, then, in short, this is what people call would call prejudice, and your comment clearly shows the negative outcomes.

Yes, journalists are influenced by their corporate overlords, but holy fuck, outright dismissing them like you claim to do shows an astounding lack of critical thinking skills and understanding of nuance, context, or perhaps even reality itself.

Imagine if someone said that your profession was worthless. Imagine that you're a cloud engineer or technician--E.G., you do Azure or AWS stuff--and someone said that five nines worth of you people are worthless and unnecessary, just like you did. How would that make you feel? Bad? Would you feel better if they said, "Oh, but you're one of the good ones"? It shouldn't, because that basically means they still dislike everyone like you based only upon a pre-existing belief of theirs instead of contextual experience.

PS: What the hell is someone who claims they hate "journos" so much as you doing on a news site for nerds? Do you think that Slashdot and the 'net are not also media? "Media" means "filter" and getting your news through "social" media is still going through a filter. Same as going through the filter of a journalist or news reader person.

Comment Assumption: Intel still to blame for performance (Score 1) 44

Intel has failed to compete with ARM for laptops, tablets, and phones. They've failed with in-house efforts, and they refuse to let a third party develop something that competes well with ARM. Thus, I assume that Qualcomm is hamstrung, and this is one of the signs of that.

Quick disclaimer: I think I'm up to date on this, but if I'm not, or if I am somehow misinformed, please fill me in! I'd love to learn about the current "state of play" for Windows on ARM.

Intel's in-house efforts have failed to produce laptops, tablets and phones that compare favorably with ARM in terms of energy usage and performance. See: Atom. Meanwhile, Intel has publicly promised to guard their IP with the utmost litigiousness, specifically mentioning--in one blurb that I recall--what they did to Transmeta back in the day: scorched earth, no-holds-barred litigation for anyone cheeky enough to try to make Intel-ISA compatible hardware without bending the knee to Intel and presumably forking over lots and lots of money in the form of royalties or licensing. That is, if Intel would even be open to considering such a deal. They seem to prefer to stay at home with their ball rather than let anyone else use it at the playground.

Where does that leave Intel? That leaves them with their failed in-house attempts such as Atom and no partners--that I know of--to collaborate with on an ARM competitor. Where does that Leave Windows on ARM? Forget about the good old "Wintel". Because I've read nothing about a deal between Qualcomm, Intel, and Microsoft, I assume that Intel continues to be the one to blame for poor Windows on ARM performance.

Comment Fluffy nomenclature (Score 1) 107

Example: Intel "Core Ultra 5 1003H". That's Core, Ultra, 5, 1003, and H. That's too fluffy. A mix of multiple full words alongside numbers and letters is fluff. Throwing in in "Ultra" for what has traditionally been the mainstream/midlevel i5 is even fluffier.

It's much less fluffy--and even perhaps more intuitive--to use simple numbers and letters. For example, back in the day, it was as simple as "Pentium 75" and only as complicated as "P54C", "P54CQS", and "P55C" in the worst case.

Comment Switch to Chromium base (Score 1) 407

I can't help but think Mozilla should switch FF to a Chromium base to get the slick looks, the compatibility, and the speed. At the same time, they should commit to supporting Manifest V2 on Chromium like other Chromium-based browser are doing, in order to continue to provide content blockers the power they need.

Comment Re:Every pixel will be encrypted... NOT (Score 1) 135

Cable card was a real pain as well, but worked well enough with my silicondust ethernet enabled tuner to record even pay channels like HBO.

I had a CableCard with my Tivo and that worked great. I had dabbled with offloading some shows using something that used Python or Java, and that had worked pretty well too.I think it was Tom's Tivo To Go, or something tlike that?

I've since moved to a OTA silicondust tuner after ditching cable and it's NEVER had any problems sending OTA channels to be recorded by my media server unencrypted.

I've heard good things about those. A friend of mine has one. I don't know if it's OTA or cable TV or both, but last I heard, it worked well for him with Plex.

Comment Re:What if there's no Internet? (Score 1) 135

This is probably another nudge for me to finally set up PFSense, or mess with my router/gateway some more, or something, to head off / cut off all the damn advertising and tracking traffic from TVs and to put my smart devices on their own VLAN. If anyone has any suggestions for doing that, I--and I bet others here--would love to hear them. Maybe just a PiHole would be enough?

Why haven't I done it already? I've been reluctant to start on this because in my mind, knowing what I've read about home smart stuff and my experience with VLANS at work, it'd take a bunch of tweaking for things to work right, and I would not look forward to that. For example, in the home space, Eufy cams owners have recently found out how Eufy's/Anker's advertising claims of local-only and no-cloud operation fall very short of reality and their EULA, and subsequently, they found out how temperamental some of the models are about being firewalled from the internet (boot looping or otherwise not working while firewalled). Another example is my how my damn TCL Roku TV flashes the light around the IR receiver when it isn't connected to the internet. I would cover it up, but the remote is IR, so that'd make the remote not work. And then there's my experience from work, where I hear fairly regular from users about issues where there's a rule to let some app or system talk to a server while on one of three or four VLANS (Ethernet, WiFi, VPN, Phone System) but not the others, and it just seems like a pain to configure VLANs to allow things to talk across them when needed.

Comment Re:Does that mean ... (Score 1) 86

Because the official party line is a lie/is impossible, the CCP can spin things however they want, whenever they want. What is attributable to Xi and what is not is nearly totally opaque and very hard to discern. The CCP I'm sure will attribute all good things to him (or perhaps the party) and attribute all bad things to rotten individuals in the CCP; the West; America; anyone and everything except Xi or the party as a whole.

It's such a farce. The official party line ostensibly precludes the possibility that there is anything but Xi in Chinese politics. But to your point, in reality, given enough time, given enough people, there is always dissension, disagreement, and differences in opinion among people, no matter how much of a stranglehold the leader or the organization has on its members.

This reminds me of my concerns about Trump: during his time in office, he would never admit to being fallible; never admit to to not knowing something or even to not knowing everything about any given subject; he took credit for himself for all of the good things but placed blame on others for all the bad things.

Comment Re:Does that mean ... (Score 1) 86

It's insult to pretend that all Chinese politics are solely about Xi.

Yes. But no, right?

Under the CCP, unless I'm mistaken, Xi Jinping is the state, and the state is Xi Jinping. No large group of people is ever fully homogeneous - no matter what the CCP says - so there is room for nuance in the discussion, but it's not unfair to lay a lot at the feet at Xi. My understanding is that the CCP wants everyone to think that he is infallible, his word inviolate, etc. Of course, that's impossible, but it's the official party line, isn't it?

Xi Jinping is a Chinese politician who has been serving as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) since 2012, and President of the People's Republic of China (PRC) since 2013. Xi has been the paramount leader of China, the most prominent political leader in China, since 2012.

The paramount leader - also named supreme leader - of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) is a term for the most prominent political leader in China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

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