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Comment Re:Fine (Score 1) 115

It's still a bit early to call the results, but it seems like both Canon and Sony are taking advantage of Fujifilm's large price increases to pad their own pockets, strategically. Well, businesses being opportunistic and cutthroat is certainly no surprise. Fujifilm is just creating a vacuum for greed to fill. At least they are diversified enough to hold the line, probably. I think the US part of their revenue is only about 15-20%.

Comment Click X to Pay (Score 1) 245

I wonder if this kind of thing will make it easier for something like X Money to slide into the competition mix. Although since it's in partnership with Visa, it seems like there could be problems on that front. Elon Musk has expressed displeasure with the practice of payor censorship especially as it affects the cultural exports of Japan and other vendors of anime and anime-styled games.

Comment Say What? (Score 1) 138

Sure, there is plenty of systemic failure within the legal system. Good luck stamping that out, and I would welcome the news. However, the sheer hubris of Mrs. Holmes applying herself to the task as if she were any kind of victim doesn't sit well with me. The hallucination she's presenting makes me wonder if she uses some AI copilot for making her press releases.

Comment Just Why? (Score 4, Insightful) 78

Wow. How do you have an e-commerce site with an improperly configured robots.txt file? It sounds like they learned a relatively inexpensive lesson. Perhaps robots.txt should have a configuration to limit bandwidth and/or access frequency. That would allow crawlers to have responsible access without having to lock them out entirely. Still, a large crawler like OpenAI also needs some self-throttling heuristics to keep from crushing poorly-configured Websites. It's pretty easy to tell when your latency suddenly increases or packets start getting dropped that you might be stressing a target. For that matter, why not interleave queries rather than dropping the bomb site by site?

Anyway, it's good to see these stories every once in a while so that those who learn by example have some grist for their mills.

Comment We Worked Hard and Everything Was All Right (TM) (Score 2) 134

I was working with a large manufacturing company at the turn of the millennium. They had invested in IT early and broadly. By the late 90's, we had a couple hundred VAX/PDP/Alpha clusters and a couple dozen Windows NT-based systems, with 30 years worth of custom code from assembler to FORTRAN and Top-down to OOP. We had FMS Forms, Visual Basic using ODBC, Pathworks, and custom network stacks. COBOL and QNX, RSX with overlays, and DEC everything. We had DCS and other PLC-based systems and interfaces. Automation, both logical and physical. All of it supporting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment and annual revenues.

Around '97 we began Y2K testing on our systems and uncovered the alarming fact that we stood to suffer a cascading failure which would shut down our operation for at least a couple of years, put 5k people out of work, and upend our market segment globally. This had more to do with the sensitive nature of our chemical processes and custom DCS controls, so I wouldn't call it representative of industry as a whole, but at least for us, Y2K was a real horror story. No planes falling out of the sky or satellites crashing to Earth, but it would have resulted in thousands of miles worth of seized pipelines, vessels, and precision machinery that would have to be cut out and totally replaced.

We had an IT team with roughly 60 professionals across the spectrum from telecom to applications, though, and all the code was ours. Still, by the time Y2K rolled around, we were all at home (but carrying pagers). Most of us had dedicated up to half a year doing testing, remediation, and mock runs. Just setting up the testing environments kept us busy for quite a while. As an IT professional, I can testify it was the best of times. There was a lot of hype, and much of it was undeserved, but I hope those coming after realize it wasn't all smoke and mirrors.

Comment What Comes Around... (Score 3, Interesting) 41

So, apparently some folk claim to have needed these ill-gotten goods to facilitate their personal growth. I myself admit to having taken great advantage of my public library in my youth since I wasn't able to purchase all of the periodicals and other reference books that I needed to further my self-education. Sure, there's a difference in the fact that using a traditional library is legal and using a Z-library probably isn't, but the need was the same. Anyway, I'm curious. How many of those Z-library users will return the favor after they benefit? Do they plan on sharing their own contributions with the underserved, pro-bono? I really hope so. For my part, I turned around and ended up buying thousands of books and other sources of IP when I finally hit my earnings potential. I've donated time and money to my childhood library too. Paying forward isn't too bad, when it's all you can afford.

Comment Re:Can someone translate the summary into english (Score 5, Informative) 99

If you go down one more level into the Tom's Hardware link, you can find this in the comments section:

"According to the conversation with the police, an email was sent to the police and another to other rescue workers saying that I had killed my wife and now wanted to take my own life."

Comment As Expected (Score 1) 63

I'm not sure why Engadget is so hung up on "can/can't" when the problem is "won't." Apple's here to make money. What's not to get about that? I'd probably be upset if I had an Apple 15 and wanted to use the feature without getting a device upgrade, but I wouldn't be confused about why I would be gouged, especially by Apple.

Comment Those Lying Numbers (Score 1, Insightful) 231

Well, more like deception. Here's a question. When is 20GW not 20GW? Well, if one is power plant output and the other is battery output, the answer is simply that you are comparing a continuous rating versus instantaneous. One is backed up by a deep pool of reserves, and the other...isn't.

What would have been more helpful and less deceptive would be to mention something about how battery backup is only good for maybe four hours of continuous output at the rated capacity. So, 20GW of constant power versus 20GW of power for four hours, increased by any gains from charging activities. In other words, adding an equivalent, or even 10X amount of battery power can be quite a bit less than its gas plant counterpart, depending on one's point of view.

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