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Comment Re:Can one buy these and use them? (Score 2) 30

It's marketing as they try to stay relevant in the new AI era. Standard playbook but this time they have no control of the players because their OS is not relevant.
When they'd just announced Maia 200 earlier this year and now the 300 which the claim is that it's faster than the Maia 200 it's fluff and puffing hopping to be noticed and seen as 'trying".

After all, they're claiming it'll be used in their own data centers and nothing more. And I'm sure Microsoft doesn't like being just another line item on NVidia's purchasers list.
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Comment Re:data || GTFO (Score 1) 94

If you go old enough, you have to take into account that memory bandwidth was terrible.

On a Pentium 1, I believe RAM can do somewhere around 100MB/s. And sure, it gets better later, but still. If you consider that a serious RAID-5 for instance, you're reading at a minimum 3 drives, and computing parity, then yes, you can easily take most of your memory's bandwidth just on that. It makes a lot of sense then to offload stuff to a RAID card.

These days hard disks are laughably slow compared to the rest of the computer, but it didn't use to be quite like that. A high end SCSI drive of the era might do maybe 20 MB/s, which is a good fraction of the system RAM's capability. Put just 3 there and it's starting to get tricky.

Also, we have the benefit that some slowness stopped to matter. If you're RAID5-ing 3 x 8GB/s NVMes and not getting the ideal performance out of it there's lots of cases where that doesn't matter because you don't have a workload capable of doing anything with what even a single drive is capable of providing anyway.

Comment Re:Putin's "Project Panama" (Score 2) 64

They don't need to be.

The thousand-men armies scanning books get the books by buying them by the pallet load. It's stuff that nobody really wants, like old technical books that are out of date, self-published books, etc.

If the book was actually valuable you wouldn't expect the seller to sell it for dirt cheap.

Comment Re:Windows? (Score 1) 90

Nobody does AI on Linux so it makes so much more sense to keep playing three legged racing with Microsoft tied to you. NOT.
NVidia has always been tied to MSFT and their Linux software has always looked like it was done by a single NVidia employee after hours in the basement office.
Besides, Windows is sooo 'yesterday' no matter how much Microsoft pays Qualcomm or NVidia to tie themselves up with.

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Movies

Sony Boss Urges Theaters To Stop 30 Minutes of Trailers and Ads Before Movies (variety.com) 152

Sony Pictures chief Tom Rothman urged theater owners to cut down the roughly 30 minutes of trailers and ads before movies. "Get off the ad crack," Rothman told the audience at CinemaCon this week. "Get rid of the endless advertising and substantially shorten the long pre-shows." Variety reports: He noted that frequent moviegoers now show up a half hour late to avoid all the spots (something that reserved seating has made easier than ever before). Rothman said that means many people "don't even see the trailers," which results in "enticements gone to waste." Rothman predicted that the 2026 box office, which has already benefitted from hits like "Super Mario Galaxy Movie" and "Project Hail Mary," will rebound in a big way. But he acknowledged that attendance still trails pre-pandemic levels.

Rothman has been a vociferous defender of the big screen, pushing studios to embrace longer windows so that movies will stay in cinemas longer. That was a theme that Rothman returned to at CinemaCon, pressing exhibitors to hold strong and agree not to show movies that quickly appear on streaming services or on-demand platforms. "Enforce longer windows," Rothman said. "Yes, even if that means you cannot play every film."

In addition to stumping for exhibition, Rothman has practically begged Hollywood to invest in new stories along with all the franchise fare. In a recent New York Times op-ed, for instance, Rothman, the longest-serving studio chief, wrote, "For all the success of films driven by existing intellectual property, originality is essential to movies. Neither movie theaters nor the art form itself can survive without at least some originality. After all, you can't make a sequel to nothing."

Comment Are the MS-MiB still operating (Score 2) 126

Does anyone remember when the US State of Massachusetts went to switch to OpenOffice and the ODF file formats? The MS-MiBs were all over the place making sure MA senators got trips to One Microsoft Way for a bit of the 'flashy thing'. Then the MS-MiB sent out worldwide to MS-ISVs with checks and scripts in hand to flood the ISO in order to vote MS-OOMXL( MS-Office Open XML ) format as an international standard so the Massachusetts government could vote it as their open standards format for public documents.

The MS-MiB were sent out worldwide to shut down the One Laptop Per Child initiative so that poor children around the world wouldn't be forced to use a Linux based laptop which could operate for 8 hours on a charge, be charged with a hand crank and was readable in full sun besides having built-in mesh networking. The MS-MiB have been instrumental in other things too. Like when school districts across the US were getting notices of required district wide licensing audits costing many $10s of thousands of dollars or sign new license agreements with the MS-MiB folks. When a couple of districts rescinded their licenses and switched everything over to Linux and started to show other school districts how they too could do it. Did the MS-MiB get recalled back to One Microsoft Way.

Tucked neatly under the MS-Marketing department lives the MS-MiB offices and if they've been reduced over the recent years, surely France has given them reason to throw a few hundreds of millions of dollars into upgrading the offices.

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Comment So the robot installs like humans but faster? dumb (Score 1) 55

Why would they build a machine which just does what humans do in the field instead of building a stationary machine in a factory which builds 20' long sections which fit on a Semi trailer( 2 sections end to end and 2 sections side by side ) and then just have a standard crane on wheels run the sections out onto pre-installed posts? They are talking about "utility scale" installations so the ground has been leveled and prepped so it's not like the custom layouts needed for root-top distributed solar installations.

It seems short sighted when companies build robots which just mimic what humans do with our limited 2 short arms and 5 digit hands.

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Comment Re:Looks like panic to me (Score 2) 80

More like the total opposite, I'd say.

I can't imagine what's the business value of having ChatGPT doing a BloodNinja impression. It's not good for PR, it'd risk exclusion in serious environments, school and the like, it'd risk legal trouble, the list goes on. The potential for trouble far outweighs any possibly benefit, which is what? There's only downsides because it'd go wrong in some way sooner rather than later.

No, doubling down on serious, well paying uses and removing controversial ideas of little worth is exactly what looks like a clear, decent strategy here.

Comment Re:No law was broken (Score 1) 65

Were the product key labels fake? That wasn't stated in the brief, only that she was said to have "illegally trafficked MS product key labels".
It's more like someone purchasing a case of valid store product coupons for cheap, finding a way to market them to the public selling them for a bit more than she paid. Just look at what she was charged with, ie not providing the software with the product key labels.

This reminds me of when Microsoft send their goons after school districts across the US threatening license verification processes costing 10s of thousands of dollars or else relicense the latest versions of Microsoft software. They only stopped when a couple of school districts removed Windows and Microsoft software and installed Linux and open source software AND did a presentation at the annual schools IT conference on how they saved 100s of thousands of dollars annually by dumping Microsoft.

Hopefully she finds some lawyers willing to take up the appeal and expose how this is a corporate policy failure, not a criminal action.
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Comment Re:drive them to less regulated/more costly? (Score 1) 309

So you're telling me all those with good credit don't get those 19%-21% CC rates but instead get nice low rates? LOL
So the knuckleheads get dropped and they move to other options while the majority of the population gets 10% rates.
I don't think it will happen and I think Trump has other motivations than doing what will help the public.

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Comment drive them to less regulated/more costly? (Score -1) 309

"The American Bankers Association warned that such a cap "would only drive consumers toward less regulated, more costly alternatives."

LOL, I'm sure people would see that they now have a 10% cap on their CC interest rate and jump to one with an interest rate more than 10%.
Because that's the smart thing to do?

LoB

Comment Re:With all those tariffs killing the economy... (Score 1) 309

Does taking less qualify as putting money in their pockets?
Taking less give the belief that the amount not taken is then left in their pockets to spend but anyone who carries CC debt such that this would make much of a difference will be underwater so much that it only slightly increases the distance between them and the bottom of the lake.

But it would give Donald Trump a good number to spin to his voters.

LoB

Comment Re:Makes No Sense (Score 2) 187

TIOBE's methodology is to plug "$LANG programming" into a bunch of search engines (including oddly enough Amazon and ebay), apparently take the "1.2 million results" stats in the corner at face value, apply some magical fudge factors and call that good.

I'm constantly mystified why this nonsense gets this amount of prominence when there's better data sources. Look at employment offers, Github or something at least.

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