Posts by Pascal Monett 16758 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
You're going to end up being hardcore with 12 employees.
Keep on making stupid decisions, then making stupid demands from whoever is left.
I'm sure your costs are going to go down sharply in the days to come - your payroll is going to go near weightless.
Of course, at that point it's going to be you running around trying to make everything work.
We're just here to cheer you to your doom.
First of all, he failed to notice which customer he was talking to, or didn't care.
Second, as a manager, you do not immediately defend anything. You get the customer's side of the story, then you tell said customer you'll call back. Then you go get the recording of the call and listen to it with the helldrone.
THAT is when you can decide to defend the guy, or, as it should have been in this case, drag him over the grill, then call the customer back and be all sweet and helpful and replace the doggone drive.
He deserved to lose that contract.
Nice idea, but I'm guessing that beaming energy from a geostationary orbit would require an order of magnitude in tightening the beam so as to not to have a 200km-wide reception area.
If said satellite is is low Earth orbit, it's likely a lot easier to hit a (relatively) small region on the ground.
But you're right, it is also very much more at risk of getting shredded by space junk.
That being said, I wonder exactly how precise those reports are going to be.
Not giving out any specifics, but I rented an RB&B flat once (a few years ago). It was such a nice place that I returned the year after that.
At that point, I had the landlord's phone number. Guess what ? He told me that, instead of going through the website, I could just call him to rent and, if it worked out, he'd give me 10% off (paid in cash because duh).
I'm guessing I'm not the only one who has that kind of agreement that completely bypasses any control.
I'm sorry, aren't you supposed to be managing Tesla 40 hours per week already ? Minimum ?
Oh, silly me, that's for the peons (aka everyone but you).
But really, hotline operator ?
Do you really think anyone's going to buy that bullshit ?
Well, at least you might have done one good thing for Twitter : kill it.
Like that should work. You're part of my IT ? Then you don't need my access codes.
It's like the time, way back when, when I got a call from "my bank". After a minute of droning on about a security check, the guy asks me for my credit card number.
I said : "What ? Why are you asking me for my credit card number ? You are working in my bank, so you don't need me to tell you."
Then I hung up.
Indeed.
I think we were told, way back when color monitors existed and the first high-end graphics cards were born, that 16.8 million is "True Color".
This is the important bit for those who can't follow the link :
"For a display to fool the eye into seeing full colour, 256 shades of red, green and blue are required; that is 8 bits for each of the three primary colours, hence 24 bits in total. However, some graphics cards actually require 32 bits for each pixel to display true colour, due to the way in which they use the video memory – the extra 8 bits generally being used for an alpha channel (transparencies)."
So now I get it. The graphics card is no longer bothering with just 256 shades + transparency. Instead of using 8 bits per RGB value, it is now using 12 bits for every color.
12 bits gives up to 4095 values, raise that to the third power and you get 68 billion.
I doubt the eye is going to see much difference though.
Thanks to Trump and his stupidity, China has finally woken up to the fact that it has most of the resources everybody else wants.
China didn't really care about the tariffs, it wasn't the one paying them and it had barely an impact since the USA makes nothing and imports everything, so it was just the consumer that got shafted.
Now China is making sure everyone understands that it is holding the cards. Electronics depend on China at this point in time, and even if rare earths are hardly that rare, it'll take years before the rest of the world can ramp up to no longer depend on China.
Years that those fabs being built in states with the least amount of water won't have.
Thank you, NSA, for your contribution to criminal organizations everywhere.
Putin must be laughing his ass off.
Meanwhile, instead of suing Zurich, Mondelez should sue Washington DC.
And, while I'm at it, there should be a law stating that a company that holds more than one brand should have its name on the packaging of every product it sells.
That way, people will know who it is they're buying from.
Intel has no more leadership window.
PR bullcrap is all very nice in announcements to the public and to investors, but the fact is that AMD, the once-eternal underdog, has taken first place in the technology race.
Intel is now running behind.
It's nice to see a change at the top.
Thorium reactors can use "used" nuclear reactor fuel in addition to Thorium, and they produce comparatively little waste which lasts vastly less long.
On top of that, they do not need active surveillance because, if the reaction gets too hot, the salt plug melts and all the reactive material just drops into retaining pans. The reaction stops automatically.
All you need to do after that is wait for the existing matter to cool down, put in a new plug, scoop it all up and start over (of course, I am aware that this is a largely oversimplified version of reality, but I'm not a nuclear scientist, nor even an engineer).
The thing is, nobody wants to do Thorium reactors because everyone wants to get the Plutonium that EPR reactors make, to make more bombs.
We have more than enough bombs.
Let's get back to making civilization function.
Okay, for me that begs the question : how many 1U units can a rack hold ?
Because if 2KW units are put in a 42KW rack, it should hold at least 21 of them.
But if 21 units is less than half the rack's capacity, that would mean that a rack can hold in excess of 42 units.
Did I get that right ? How tall are those racks anyway ?
The difficulties in landing anything on Mars is demonstrably non-negligeable - and that is just for stuff that was never meant to take off and come back.
This time, they want to send a robot that not only has to land intact, but must also rejoin the rover, extract the sample tubes, store them safely, and then take off and come back to Earth.
And all of that, practically on its own.
The difficulty of this mission is exponentially higher. If the engineers manage to pull this off, that will be one hell of a feather in their cap.
He's already been very publicly humiliated by Ukraine, which didn't just roll over when Russian troops came to invade. What a surprise.
70 years of NATO doctrine stated that the Russian army was a formidable adversary. Six months of Ukraine says they're incapable of anything but retreating and waiting for General Winter.
It would seem that Putin has let the Russian army languish in 1970. He doesn't have the means to meaningfully harm any satellite constellation, either militarily or financially.
But let's cut to the chase : space will become a battlefield, because there are just too many selfish pricks in positions of power that cannot resist doing that.
Was that a picture of him on stage ?
Is there an unwritten rule that says that now, all CEOs on stage must dress like their teenage son ?
Why isn't he wearing a suit ?
He's the CEO of a company that brought in $79 billion in 2021.
Steve Jobs is dead. Wear a suit.
So Mars has protected Earth from at least one asteroid impact, and Bruce Willis can rest easy for a while longer.
Now, I'm guessing that an asteroid that's only 0.54 brontosauri wide is kind of difficult to detect beyond the orbit of Mars, but doesn't this mean that, when Musk will be living on Mars, he's going to need to have some form of asteroid alert system ?
And now I've just realized : on Mars you'll never see a shooting star.
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