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Comment My suspicion (Score 2) 60

At least some of this will be stress. If you're enjoying something, then you won't be stressed. If you're feeling positive and delighting in what you do, then you won't be stressed in unhealthy ways. This looks similar to the Mozart Effect, which turned out to be that if you liked something, your brain functioned better.

Yes, charging around the stage playing rock music isn't exactly gentle, but it IS extremely good exercise for the heart and the rest of the body. Again, that's going to have positive effects.

(We can ignore Keith Richards in this model, as he's older than the universe and only created it as a place to store his guitars.)

Comment Re:So? (Score 2) 42

When CUDA started taking off we had ATI hardware, to support their open source pledge, and looked into ROCm.

Just getting the drivers to build on EL-anything was an extreme effort, and it wasn't my first rodeo.

Without betraying confidences, I was told second-hand that there were only ten people on the GPU driver team across all platforms and that they were doing their best and not sleeping enough as it was, with Compute way behind gaming bugs on the priority list.

I couldn't independently verify of course but the theory fit the data.

I immediately empathized with the suffering of the devs and went out and bought nVidia cards, annoying binary drivers and all.

Since then I've felt like that some bean counter at AMD wrote nVidia a trillion dollar check.

If you're not a tiny company *overstaff* your engineering departments so you don't miss new opportunities as they arise. The opportunity costs exceed the opex costs.

Comment Re:alternatively (Score 1) 90

Same here but this lack of support will matter much less than dropping i486.

There are still embedded systems sold today that only meet i486 specs. I don't use them but some industries do.

Sure a $12 ESP32 can handle those tasks but it's a revalidation thing.

Not that anybody from those vendors stepped forward to maintain a tree.

Comment Re:Symptomatic of US decline (Score 2) 209

All of what you said but there is more: most people will do some reading before buying an EV. What will they probably see? A few scare stories about charging on the road (if I don't go to a supercharger or a fast charger I've never used or not recently used it's always a bit scary whether the fast charger will work - and of course mostly they do).

But mainly they'll read how much better other cars and mainly Chinese cars are.

Who wants to buy 2nd or 3rd best?

I spoke with a colleague here in the UK who recently bought a car (not an EV) because he was worried what the resale value of current generation EVs will be when the 400 mile WLTP range, 5-10min charge next generation (mostly Chinese) hits the market. And he has a point.

To be fair even I bought my EV (Model 3) second hand to shave of the steepest part of the depreciation curve.

Comment Re:On Star Phone Home (Score 1) 41

In my younger and more foolish days I had a Pontiac and I opted out with wire cutters to the Surveillance module's power cables.

At the time I was actually more concerned with remote unlock hijacking than tracking but still I didn't trust GM.

All together now: WE TOLD YOU SO.

If I had to guess 20 years later doing that would disable the ECU.

Comment Ho hum. (Score 1) 72

Most posters seem to be assuming it's a scam. I can't possibly think of a reason why they might think that. (A few million, yes, but getting it down to one is hard.)

However, that's almost by the by. It's rated for 5G. 5G is old. 6G is the new standard and WiFi 6 has been around for a while now. If you're actually serious about designing a new phone from scratch, and have not yet released it, you'd almost certainly want it to be 6G-capable. Nobody in their right minds designs for yesterday's standards, when they're going to be competing with tomorrow's products.

This, to me, is far far more important than whether or not it is real. If you're designing a product for a market that's on its way out, you've got a serious problem. If you're clamouring for a product that's designed for a standard that could be phased out by the time you see it, then you're not thinking straight.

Why does this matter, if the product isn't real anyway? First, we don't know it's not real, we shouldn't assume that. But, second, it means that nobody thought it was worth bothering with taking the potential customers seriously. The customers are merely meat with cash. That's not an attitude I can respect. Whichever vendor is making these phones is worthy only of my utmost contempt.

Comment About time (Score 5, Insightful) 95

Given that citizens of the US have elected Trump as the US president twice it is pretty clear that EU countries cannot count on the US being a 100% reliable ally in the future.

That has all sorts of consequences and will require the EU to develop all sorts of capabilities.

The question of course is: will this mean willingness to reduce benefits / increase working hours to pay for all this to develop genuine competence through significantly more effort or will it be just performative?

Comment Re:A city at 7000 ft elevation but sinking (Score 1) 28

The problem isn't the population. Bedrock can handle more than that. London isn't sinking because of all the people (and London is huge!), it's sinking because the ice sheet that pressed the Highlands deep into the crust has been gone for the last 10,000 years, resulting in the entire island tilting back to where it naturally should be. You could move London's population into the Great Glen and it would not make the slightest difference - London would still be sinking. The ice sheets were a whole lot heavier than a few tens of millions of people.

(Ok, it would make a difference. If the rich people actually lived in Scotland, the transit system and public services would see a thousand percent improvement inside a week. If they were also forced to speak Gaelic, English would vanish in a month.)

Comment Re: Incredible Foolishness (Score 1) 28

Every place? Fascinating.

There are towns in England and Wales that have been occupied for the past 10,000 years. Manchester isn't the greatest place on Earth, but I'm really not convinced it's going to start sinking into the ground any time in the next thousand years. If "short term" is longer than the remaining lifespan of the human race, I am not convinced "short" is really the right word.

"Short term" is only meaningful if it's shorter than the time needed to take meaningful remedial action, and the time it would take to remediate the problem in Mexico City vastly exceeds the time it will take for the city to crumble into oblivion.

The sun will not explode in 4 billion years. It's far too small. It might well run out of hydrogen by then, but that will simply cause it to swell. If, in four billion years, we can't find a way to drift the Earth outwards to remain within the goldilocks zone, then we're a failure as a species. Of course, we might well have built a Dyson Ring by then. Although, to be honest, if we were going to do that, we'd want to find a gas cloud that was about to form a stellar nursary and head there. If we arrive as the proto star fires up, we've maximum resources in the easiest possible form (a dust cloud, so no mining needed and minimal processing required), can build the Dyson Ring or Dyson Sphere by the time the star really gets going, and have another ten to fifteen billion years.

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