Posts by Pascal Monett

"hires 5,000 engineers"

Am I supposed to believe that there were 5000 engineers lying around waiting to be hired ?

Okay, it's China, but even in China I would think that an engineer is not exactly the kind of person that waits for a job.

So that would mean that he hired 5000 newly-minted engineers from China's universities ?

Hmm. So they'll be getting their experience on the job, then. Good for them, maybe not so good for Xiaomi.

"highly complementary business profiles"

Yes, let's absolutely merge together all anti-virus companies.

After all, they all use the same principle : compare binary code against signatures, which has proved time and time again to not be enough.

Then we can start talks about monopoly, and how we need to break them up again.

The world goes round and round . . .

"The costly App, which [..] designed to help" . .

. . all the Minister's friends and allow them to make bank during a time of crisis.

In that, it has indeed been supremely successful.

As for preventing infections, well given that they don't know who has the app, who's using it and who has uninstalled it, just how reliable do you really think those figures are ?

"improve import and export compatibility with Microsoft Office"

I applaud the effort, but it is misdirected.

It is Borkzilla that should improve its compatibility with the Open Office standard.

That said, we all know what standards mean to Borkzilla . . .

They purchase a company and shut down the product after 2 years ?

Seems to me that either the purchase was ill-considered, or the changes they wanted did not fit the product (aka, ill-considered).

Oh well, they're following in HPs footsteps, apparently.

Dust

I find it surprising that they have not implemented a pump to store Mars atmosphere and a spigot to spray the solar panels with.

I'm far from a NASA engineer, so i'm guessing somebody did think of it and the decision was that it was too costly for the energy budget, because frankly I fail to see any other reason.

"Any analysis at this stage needs to bear in mind that the pandemic is not yet over"

Not by a long shot.

We're now being told, in France, that a fourth wave is going to happen. The D variant is, apparently, much more contagious.

Despite all the vaccinations.

All of this is just an excuse to force people to get vaccinated whether they want to or not. Macron has pleged billions to the pharma companies, so now we are marched to the needle despite all Constitutional and Human Rights arguments.

I am sick of my government changing its tune like a weathervane.

Pick a path and stick to it, for frak's sake.

iAM Smart

More like iAM Screwed.

You will be assimilated.

"mine cryptocurrency on smartphones"

I am aware that smartphones a quite powerful these days - for their form factor.

But it pays to know that entire racks of powerful machines are used in farms to mine funny monies ; a smartphone, as powerful as it may be, cannot hold a candle to a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080.

So a mobile app to mine stupid money is about as useful as a tricycle in a Formula 1 competition. You'll get there one day, years after everyone else has forgotten you even exist.

But of course, the article used the right word when it said "marks". Yup, one born every minute.

"profile pictures seemingly created by AI software"

Oh, so like TPDNE then ?

"China also fears the US gaining power through data"

With one caveat : the US already has boatloads more data than China, so China's fears are justified.

The US' fears are simply that China gets more data than it has.

And we are stuck in the middle, being data-raped all day long by everyone else.

Fun times, right ?

Dancing to someone else's tune

It's great that someone offers a free product with useful functionality.

It's less great when that someone is an Internet behemoth that changes its mind on a whim. Disruptive is meant to improve the user experience, not destroy it.

Killing Drive and then ressurecting it to kill its successors demonstrates that nobody thought the whole thing through in the first place.

Google should test its products internally more thoroughly before offering them to the public, and then throwing everything away. Again.

"historic" [..] "seismic shift"

I'll believe that when I hear that, following the adoption of said proposals, Google/Facebook/Apple/etc is finally paying something in tax.

1.5 million wafers a year

I wonder what this vast increase in production capability will have as an impact on water pollution.

All those additional millions of gallons of water aren't going to clense themselves.