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Comment Re:Get a Border Collie (Score 1) 72

The border collie helps round up the cattle but it would be easier if the rancher knows where the cattle are located to send out the collie. Some ranches can be hundreds of thousands of acres. And that is the main herd. If there are stragglers, they have to be located too.

Border collies generally work with sheep, cows not as much simply because cows don't really give a damn.

But sheep you have to be careful with - an entire flock in the UK had to be euthanized because they figured how to escape their fencing, and if that knowledge spread, it would basically render all farms using that fencing to keep sheep worthless. They apparently are very good at teaching fellow sheep things like that, and it was only a matter of time before the one or two that figured out how to escape taught the rest of the flock, and that flock would then teach neighboring flocks on neighboring farms and so on. It was cheaper to euthanize the flock than to have the entire country's farms re-fenced.

Comment Re:Did they find.. (Score 2) 75

The entire mission is obviously an AI fake. As acclaimed physicist Joe Rogan explained, they crew would be dead once they'd hit the Van Allen Radiation Belt (tm)

That should've been obvious by the fake globe Earth image they reportedly sent back after launching.

The earth is flat. Not a globe. The fact they had to publish this image shows the whole thing is fake.

Comment Re:Not a 486 thing, but... (Score 1) 111

Actually, many consumer gigabit Ethernet switches lack 10Mbps support these days. They are 100/1000baseT only.

Business and enterprise switches though I've found (including Cisco ones, which you can find dirt cheap used) still are 10/100/1000Mbps. Even newer business and enterprise class switches retain support.

Of course, once you step into 10Gbps Ethernet, you have to be careful because many only are 10Gbps only, while some do support 1/10Gbps. 2.5Gbps support is iffy unless it's specified which is annoying since many things have 2.5Gbps ports.

As for 486, there are still new CPUs using it. The Vortex86 has a CPU that executes 486 instructions though newer ones do support Pentium minus the FPU. These are modern chips, with IDE emulation of SD cards, Ethernet and USB support, as well as running at speeds of 800-1GHz.

And you've seen them used - any fast food restaurant with the ticket screens is powered by a mini PC using these SoCs. They do run Windows and MS-DOS, and early restaurant e-ticket systems used MS-DOS. But later ones nowadays use some form of Linux.

Comment Re:4GB has been insufficient for many years now (Score 3, Interesting) 108

Developers don't have a culture of being economical with resources.

That's because in say, the 60s and 70s, computer time was expensive. It behooved you to make your code as efficient as possible - like today's cloud services, they often billed by the CPU cycle. And the run-debug cycle was on the order of a day, so you didn't want to make a stupid error because it meant your job got delayed a day at the least.

Sometime around the 80s and 90s, this flipped - human time was expensive. Computers were cheap and getting cheaper, RAM was plummeting as was hard drive space. The math started to work the other way - you don't want developers wasting time debugging code so libraries were popular - because it was more efficient (cheaper) to utilize the fact one person presents a well-debugged library that other developers could use and that means developers don't have to write that code, and they don't have to debug that code either.

That's why we have bloat - because it's cheaper that way. You could have a developer write nice and tight code, but how much are you willing to pay for it? If it takes them an extra week to make their library run 10% faster, was it work say, the $5-10,000 it cost? ($5000 a week is around $250K/year including benefits, or around $150K take home pay plus benefits, while $10,000 is $500,000K/year including benefits, or around $250,000-300,000 without benefits). Will that improvement let the company make back that investment?

You have to realize that if you want to charge $150K/year salary, spending a week optimizing costs the company $5000, so unless they can save that $5000 elsewhere (e.g., in reduced cloud compute fees, or customers will pay extra), there is no incentive to do it.

And that's really a valuable consideration. Also, compilers are really good these days. Like, really good. They will often so very strange things to save a few cycles. Some, like Clang, can be "too smart" and apply closed-form mathematical transforms to your computation (E.g., if you attempt to sum integers from 1 to n, and you do the "stupid way" with a loop, Clang will recognize it and actually generate the code to calculate n(n+1)/2 and eliminate the loop).

So it's a mix between the cost of a developer to optimize their code, the increasing intelligence of compilers to optimize code, and other things.

If you want to learn more about how compilers generate code, including being able to add in 0 cycles (hint: it uses the CPU's address calculation unit instead of the ALU to do simple addition and subtraction and even multiplication when it can, so the actual execution time is zero since the computation was done as part of operand calculation), Matt Godbolt of Compiler Explorer fame runs through a whole series in his Advant of Compiler Optimization series. (Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playli... ). Trust me, it doesn't pay to outsmart the compiler.

Comment The fines are very small. (Score 3, Interesting) 28

The fines should be proportional to actual damage caused (ie: 100% coverage of any interest on loans, any extra spending the person needed to do in consequence, loss of compound interest, damage to credit rating along with any additional spending this resulted in, and any medical costs that can reasonably be attributed to stress/anxiety). It would be difficult to get an exact figure per person, but a rough estimate of probable actual damage would be sufficient. Add that to the total direct loss - not the money that went through any individual involved, and THEN double that total. This becomes the minimum, not the maximum. You then allow the jury to factor in emotional costs on top of that.

In such cases as this, the statutary upper limit on fines should not apply. SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled that laws and the Constitution can have reasonable exceptions and this would seem to qualify.

If a person has died in the meantime, where the death certificate indicates a cause of death that is medically associated with anxiety or depression, each person invovled should also be charged with manslaughter per such case.

Comment Re:Good luck. (Score 1) 79

There was an initial large disruption as they dumped a huge number of packages into alternate delivery systems that weren't prepared for the sudden massive increase in load. Within a few weeks, it had settled down, and shipping times had improved enough that same-day and next-day shipping were once again available, albeit with shorter "order by" windows. The quality of the delivery experience has dropped significantly (in terms of failed/late deliveries) due to them relying exclusively on "Intelcom" (a gig delivery service) rather than Amazons own delivery system.

My understanding of how it works, at least for Montreal (which used to have multiple Amazon warehouses in the metro area), is that all orders are shipped from the Toronto area, a ~6 hour drive away. Amazon loads orders onto big Amazon trucks (semi trailers) and drives them to an Intelcom distribution centre in Montreal, and Intelcom handles the last-mile delivery. Intelcom doesn't do inter-city delivery, and Amazon doesn't have any infrastructure in Montreal (or Quebec more broadly).

As for why Amazon services Montreal's orders from Toronto (a ~6 hour drive away) instead of Ottawa (a ~2 hour drive away), my only guess is that Ottawa (1.5m metro pop) wasn't big enough absorb all of Montreal's (4.3m metro pop) demand, but Toronto (6.2m) was.

Comment Re:Tim Cook #2?? (Score 3, Insightful) 47

Not a lot against the guy, but he should be #5 .. he merely continued the trajectory set by the others.

For nearly 15 years.

Jobs passed in 2011. Tim Cook has been at the helm for 15 years since then. Even if he was coasting, Apple has done remarkably well in those 15 years just coasting alone. Most companies falter and die out by then. Heck, after Apple ousted Jobs as CEO, they were struggling by the time Jobs came back and he wasn't gone nearly as long as he is now.

Even if Tim Cook did absolutely nothing for the 15 years he was CEO, the fact that Apple is still around and still going strong is already a huge credit to his (non-)leadership in managing to keep the ship steady.

Tell me how many other CEOs are like that - because history is littered with failed companies whose leadership wanted to make their mark and then their companies imploded. Like Apple nearly did 20 years ago.

Tim Cook, by "doing nothing", managed to keep Apple on the up and up, and history reveals this isn't usually what happens.

Comment Re:Antitrust (Score 1) 23

The last time, it was likely Intel buying up AMD CPUs and dumping them. As well as forcing Microsoft and Sony to use AMD chips.

AMD has its ups and downs, and Intel was riding high, but Intel needed AMD to survive to avoid antitrust activity as well. Getting rid of fabs was one thing as they are expensive.

But Chipzilla is still very big and making a lot of money. And they released new chips that are surprisingly competitive. They're not fast against the top end 9860X3D CPUs, but are very cost competitive when compared to the midrange parts, or even faster than them. At the same price or lower.

They've also seen a bump in sales in chips supporting DDR4. So going into 2025 it was doom and gloom for Intel, but for 2026 so far, Intel is holding its own and maybe even starting a comeback.

Comment Re:UK has them, Waze still useful (Score 1) 186

And even after all these years there are still plenty of idiots who don't understand what the word "average" means. I always see them slowing down for a camera then speeding right back up again afterwards. How do people this dumb get a license?

There was a comedy troupe that posted 3 people along the first. The first one carried a sign that read "Speed camera ahead".
The second one carried a sign that read "Just kidding".
The third one carried a sign that read "Sorry".

The thing was, there was a speed trap between the second and third person. They'd slow after the first, speed way up for the second and get caught, then the third sign apologized.

There's a YouTube video of them driving and what you'd see and it's been reported a few times.

Also, many toll roads especially in Asia do this as well - you get a ticket when you enter the toll road, then you'd hand it in when you exit and they'll charge you the toll based on distance travelled. Problem is, they also note your average speed.

Though I do remember at least one having a rest stop with a restaurant on it - so stopping for a break and/or food would lower your average speed considerably.

Comment Re:diversity (Score 1) 80

Honestly, that's a pretty good spread for a small crew. And is much higher than any other population sample you could take. It only happened because these things are planned out so far in advance, that Trump's anti-DEI couldn't have taken effect without delaying it for at least a couple more years.

And the moon is not an easy feat - if you want a rough idea of scale, put a half inch sized circle on one of your wrists, Then put a dot on the other wrist. Then stretch your arms wide and you have a near scale representation of the Earth, the Moon, and the distance involved. Yes, it's that far apart and likely a lot further than books and school would have you believe. Or likely you would even believe.

Comment Re:You have no IP address. Your neighborhood does. (Score 1) 34

How are you going to host a game server on a home computer if you share your IPv4 address with other subscribers to the same ISP in the same neighborhood,[1] and the combined modem and router that your home ISP requires all subscribers to use lacks an option for port forwarding? Both of these are true, for example, of T-Mobile US Home Internet.

[1] Many home ISPs apply carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to conserve IPv4 addresses since the worldwide exhaustion.

You don't. Because home internet connections, even the multi-gigabit ones, are terrible for things that need constant ping.

It's why people have been hosting services where they can get a dedicated IP, or likely one shared with similar services. Those hosting servers tend to have guarnateed connectivity.

Because direct IP connections sucked, and it's why booter services aren't so common nowadays. Because that's what happened in the past - if you got angry, you started pingflooding the host IP and making everyone's game terrible.

These days, you still have booter services, but they're services you pay for, and they're not used as much because the hosting server often hides the IP of everyone else.

I don't disagree with local servers, but maybe let's leave them on the local LAN plan. If you want to expose it to the Internet, then you can, and if you do, better have the expertise to know how to host it yourself.

And no, IPv6 won't fix this - because IPv6 only guarantees everyone gets a globally unique IP address. It doesn't guarantee that end-to-end connectivity will work. Thanks to firewalls and such which are a practical necessity these days.

The popularity of online multiplayer competitive play is driven in part by centrally hosted servers where there are people who do protect them against attacks meant to spoil the fun of everyone involved. Only a huge data center really has that ability. But if you want to host a small scale server on your own for you and a few friends, you should have the option as well

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