Posts by ffeog

Re: "...its hardware had not been tested at low temperature"

...well, it has now. Although one wonders if a cheaper test could've ascertained that sooner in the development cycle ;-P

Apex whale of the greater fool ponzi

Can't help but think that Son got swept up in the unicorn mania of the 2010's and 20's, forgetting that unicorns are almost entirely money-losing scale-ups sold at a large premium for an assumed and distant future benefit, but relying for their high valuation on fools selling to greater fools in the market. Softbank bought them as the greatest fool, the whale at the valuation apex, forgetting that there was no greater fool to sell onto (a ponzi in effect). And that the actual unicorn businesses are poor and marginal and churn their loss-making way through opex to slowly, maybe one day achieve the scale and monopoly position that might finally justify their valuation. They are basically dead money dogs for years if you have no greater fool to buy you out.

Re: Heat island

> you have to wonder how sensible it is to locate datacentres [in London].

True, but don't forget how many financial and fintech companies are in London, and the importance of locality and speed for certain missions, eg. High Frequency Trading (for the more general case beyond the nearby/ colocated FPGA stuff). Or where a lot of data benefits from being near another load of related data for big data operations where transit latency would be multiplicative.

Unless they could all agree where to keep their operations outside London but retain the locality benefits.

Re: Isn't quantum bullshit?

It both is and isn't bullshit that won't happen for another 500yrs. We won't know until its built and the superposition hand-wave function collapses by being looked at. Or something. Ponder that.

Re: What is it...

Presumably, having been shown to be wrong beyond any reasonable doubt, the FBI now need to find retroactive justification by getting their victim to seek to plea bargain (on the reasonable chance there is a selected jury that knows squat about computers but buys into the idea the evil English guy sat before them is trying to make their computers kill them, so says the well-paid besuited prosecutor), which apart from rational risk reduction, is a similacrum for guilt in the American euphemistically-misnamed 'justice' system.

Re: So the crackers were correct - it was a scam

The appearance of a two-sided market in order to bilk the one side that actually comes to market (which is then technically, not a market.) Not much sympathy for the clients of AM, but its a pretty common dodgy business practice for intermediary market 'makers', e.g. certain freelance job sites, don't really have any appreciable buy-side clients, but want to charge job applicants for 'access' to 'them' ?!