* Posts by Paul Smith

533 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jul 2007

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French cloud Scaleway starts renting Alibaba's RISC-V SoC

Paul Smith

Using a chip from China

"Using a chip from China – a nation credibly suspected of using its presence in tech supply chains to enable economic espionage – is an interesting way to establish sovereignty and free users from geopolitical constraints."

Obviously safer than to using chips from the USA, a nation categorically proven to use its presence in tech supply chains to enable economic espionage.

SBF likely off the hook for misplaced FTX funds after cops bust SIM swap ring

Paul Smith

FTX theft...

"Powell was reportedly arrested in Chicago last week and is being held without bond "

If I had successfully stolen $400 million, I would a) not still be in Chicago in mid-winter and b) have a sufficiently good lawyer that the idea of being denied bail was laughable.

FBI confirms it issued remote kill command to blow out Volt Typhoon's botnet

Paul Smith

Re: Thanks for nothing

Why would you presume that they would limit themselves this time?

JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry

Paul Smith

Bad grammer is usually an indication that something was written by an actual human.

US Navy sailor swaps sea for cell after accepting bribes from Chinese snoops

Paul Smith

Black adder goes forth...

Captain Darling:

So you see, Blackadder, Field Marshall Haig is most anxious to eliminate all these German spies.

General Melchett:

Filthy hun weasels, fighting their dirty underhand war!

Captain Darling:

And fortunately, one of our spies...

General Melchett:

Splendid fellows, brave heroes risking life and limb for Blighty!

OpenAI: 'Impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials'

Paul Smith

Straw man argument

The training of the AI is a straw man argument. Using material to train an AI model is not a problem and is *not* a misuse of copyright assuming they have legitimate and legal access to the material in the first place. It is the use of copyrighted material in the output, without permission, payment, or accreditation that is the problem. If openAI can't build a business model that respects other peoples property and rights, then they don't have a business.

China bans export of rare earth processing kit

Paul Smith

Re: "unproven spying from Huawei equipment"

If there was any actual evidence that Huawei had done any of the things they are accused of, it would be splashed across every front page on the planet. A decade ago, Snowden proved that US TLA's subverted US companies to do exactly the things Huawei is accused of, and by all appearances, it is still ongoing.

Artificial intelligence is a liability

Paul Smith

Re: As You Were

There is enough quality pron to suit all tastes available for free. Why would you want to pay for SI and have to put up with the extra Lorem Ipsum?

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

Paul Smith

Sorry, but that is simply not true, get yourself some faster storage. I have a dual boot PC running a 5800X. Cold boot to login, Windows 11 or Ubuntu is five or six seconds with SSD boot disk depending on the password. In 1984, it took longer then that just for the CRT to warm up.

Amazon's game-streamer Twitch to quit South Korea, citing savage network costs

Paul Smith

Re: is this better for SK Broadband?

Last time I checked, electricity companies charged me for access to electricity, and charged me for how much I used and charged me at different rates for when I used it. It also charges different rates to the small business next door and the large factory down the road so there is nothing new or original in customer based charging. The toll road doesn't charge based on the contents of the truck but they do charge based on the size and weight of the truck and sometimes on when the truck wants to travel. Telcos are not suggesting charging for the contents of your downloads (cat videos are the same price as pussy videos) but they would like a share based on the size of the download. Why should they have to bare the total cost of upgrading to 1Gig+ fibre to the door just so you can watch an 8K UHD grumble flick? Does it really look much better then 720i?

Government and the latest tech don't mix, says UK civil servant of £11B ESN mess

Paul Smith

Clueless

I don't expect elected politicians to be experts at anything other then getting elected, but I have to ask why they are so consistently incapable of surrounding themselves with knowledgeable advisors?

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

Paul Smith

Swearing is the choice of those with a limited vocabulary.

If you only know one swear word, then your vocabulary is clearly limited.

The true definition of a polylinguist is someone who can swear fluently in multiple languages.

Half a kilo of cosmic nuclear fuel reignites NASA's deep space dreams

Paul Smith

Re: significantly lower power degradation over time

88 Year half life means half of it will still be generating heat and power in 88 years time, and half of what's left will still be working 88 years after that, not really much of a constraint.

FBI Director: FISA Section 702 warrant requirement a 'de facto ban'

Paul Smith

Re: Warrant phobia

After over 20 years of this they very clearly do not *need* to change anything. If the need was real, the elected politicians that didn't change would have been replaced by elected politicians that did change.

Regrettably, one of the consequences of democracy is that you get the politicians you deserve. The American public is (en masse) happy with lying, spying, fear and corruption and their politicians reflect that.

As the Top500 celebrates its 30th year, with a $5 VM you too can get into the top 10 ... of 1993

Paul Smith

Moore's law

The first PC I worked on was a IBM clone ((Olivetti I think) in 1984. It ran an 8086 at 4.77MHz and cost about £1,500 (all in).

Today my home PC is a running a 5800X at 4.7GHz and would cost about £1,500 to build from scratch tomorrow.

Moore's law (double the performance for the same price every 18 months) equates to about 42% per year. 39 years at 42% starting from 1 gives 869,451.64

My current PC is about a million times more powerful then that first one so Moore's law is still holding.

Paul Smith

But can it run Cryses?

A raspberry Pi 4 has over 4GFLOPS while a Pi 5 is reported to have over 10GFlops.

Kubernetes' Tim Hockin on a decade of dominance and the future of AI in open source

Paul Smith

And the alternative is... ?

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Paul Smith

Placement, and replacement.

Paul Smith

Irish planning law has insisted for years that meters can be read without having to enter the premises and the sky hasn't fallen in. Perhaps you could suggest something similar to your local councillors.

Paul Smith
FAIL

No corruption here.

Not only will nobody loose their job over this, but I expect everybody involved to still receive their full bonus.

If the Linux Foundation was a software company, it'd be the biggest in the world

Paul Smith
Devil

Re: Wrong

Linux is obsolete? Are you sure? You do know that "obsolete" means no longer used, and last time I checked, Linux was still being used quite a lot.

Spawn of Satan icon because it looks like a handbag :)

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Paul Smith

They say you get the politicians you deserve.

There is an apocryphal story of the man on the Clapham omnibus being asked if he would vote for a politician being accused of corruption. "Of course", said the man, "if he can't look after himself, how can I expect him to look after me?"

The Tories may be corrupt, but at least they can look after themselves.

The world seems so loopy. But at least someone's written a memory-safe sudo in Rust

Paul Smith

Re: Explain

Why are you so keen on pushing the merits of a fifty year old computer from a company that ceased to exist over twenty years ago? This obsessive equine flagellation flagrantly promoting obsolete obscurities lacks relevance to the topics at hand.

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

Paul Smith
FAIL

Re: Where are the backups? @AC re:"still writable"

"...the TSM server is the only one that can manipulate the tapes,"

Ever had to deal with a TSM server with a misaligned head that decided to develop another fault?

Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers

Paul Smith

Re: I spy a business opportunity

Security guards on minimum wages are not always as conscientious as their employers might wish.

Cops cuff pregnant woman for carjacking after facial recog gets it wrong, again

Paul Smith

"No reason to assume she was a criminal." If you believe that a stranger is simply someone you haven't met yet, then you are right, she is innocent until proven guilty and all that. If, however, you believe a stranger is a threat, and many people including police training officers do, then you get guilt by association laws and a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.

Paul Smith

Some US states have guilt by association laws. If a person (even a heavily pregnant person) handled a mobile phone in that turned out to have been stolen (handing it in is still handling it), that is sufficient to allow her to be associated with the original crime.

SEC lawsuit against Terraform Labs and cofounder Do Kwon lives to fight another day

Paul Smith

huh?

The US cigarette and tobacco industry revenue in 2022 was $52bn. (https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/market-size/cigarette-tobacco-manufacturing-united-states/).This one single crypto company lost $42 billion all on its own. For a judge to say it can not be compared in importance is ridiculous!

Now Apple takes a bite out of encryption-bypassing 'spy clause' in UK internet law

Paul Smith

Re: "Strong" encryption?

Strong encryption is any encryption where the cost in money/time/effort to crack exceeds the value of the information retrieved.

Since the value of the information being protected is variable, the relative strength of the encryption used is also variable. ROT-13 is strong enough to protect my Christmas present shopping list from my children's prying eyes this year, but might not be strong enough next year.

Posing as journalists, Pink Drainer pilfers $3.3M in crypto

Paul Smith
Joke

Re: @Neil Barnes - someone lost almost $320,000 in stolen non-fungible tokens (NFTs)

Wouldn't it be justice if the thief who sold the NFTs in the first place had been paid with stolen crypto.

Nvidia's RTX 4060 and 4060TI are actually priced like mid-tier cards

Paul Smith

I bought my 1060 in May 2017 so at six years old, it is definitely is getting a little long in the tooth but in all that time, this is the first card that I have even looked twice at as an upgrade. I am still not convinced and going fro 6G to only 8G is not going to do it for me. That said, it will have to get some pretty amazing reviews if I am going to even consider spending €400 on it.

It's time to reveal all recommendation algorithms – by law if necessary

Paul Smith

Re: Are these much hyped algorithms really that complicated?

If you searched for X, Y, Z, W...

you are categorized into the group of people that searched for X,Y,Z,W...

we will offer you more of what you have already searched for (eg ads for products you bought last month)

or

we will offer you what others in your category searched for that you did haven't (ads for things they bought that you haven't).

if we don't know enough about you to put you into a category,

we will offer you random shit.

Today's old folks set to smash through longevity records

Paul Smith

Absence of evidence

For all of human history, there have been rare individuals that lived 100+ years. The average life expectancy is increasing, not because people can live longer then before, but because less people are dying early.

Yes, Samsung 'fakes' its smartphone Moon photos – who cares?

Paul Smith

What a laugh...

I confess to getting a giggle from all the photography nerds discussing the impossibility of such photos as if the 5 stop range of film applied to digital cameras as well. It doesn't. The most spectacular shots I have taken in the last few years were not on my Nikon (which has been effectively retired) but on first a Pixel 4 and then a Pixel 6. What made them spectacular was the phones ability to work in a range of lighting in dawn, dusk or night conditions. Detail in the shadows. Getting a good shot of the moon is not hard if you switch to manual. Getting a good shot of the moon and what ever was going on that made it interesting, is a real challenge to even expert photographers, but is something that digital phones can do quite well.

Catholic clergy surveillance org 'outs gay priests'

Paul Smith

Land of the free

I am so glad that I am not an American.

The Great Graph Debate: Revolutionary concept in databases or niche curiosity?

Paul Smith

Modelling graph traversal on a relational system isn't really difficult, but then, writing the entire DB system in Perl is also possible, but neither is actually advisable. If you have an RDBMS problem, then use an RDBMS to solve it. If your problem is graphing relationships, then a graph database is the most natural tool to use. This is not an either/or debate.

Twitter stiffed us on $2m bill, claim consultants in lawsuit

Paul Smith

Well?

What did Twitter expect would happen when they fired Mary from Accounts?

Huawei teases bonkers gadget combo

Paul Smith

Irony alert

I look forward to seeing this device being used in the next James Bond movie.

TikTok NSFW if you work for the South Dakota government

Paul Smith
Mushroom

Pot calling Kettle, Pot calling Kettle. Come in Kettle.

And in related news, Germany has announced that it is banning Microsoft 365 products from its schools because of their inability to operate without sending personal information to the United States.

University orders investigation into Oracle finance disaster

Paul Smith

Software 101

When replace a working system with a new system, do not turn off working system until new system proven to work better.

FTX disarray declared 'unprecedented' by exec who cleaned up after Enron

Paul Smith

not efficient market functioning

Efficiency is a relative term, not an absolute one. Ponzi schemes are remarkable efficient ways to make money right up until the moment they fail.

Business can't make staff submit to video surveillance, says court

Paul Smith

Re: Good luck getting the money

Really stupid behavior since the additional legal and PR costs are going to far outweigh the costs of just paying the guy off.

From today, America and UK follow new rules on how they can demand your data from each other

Paul Smith

GDPR ?

This deal would appear to allow the UK authorities to request information about non-UK citizens (as long as they are not US citizens) if that information is stored in the US, and allow the US to request information about non-UK citizens that is stored in the UK. Anybody providing that information will have to deal with the consequences of being forced to be in breach of GDPR. This could get entertaining...

Ever suspected bankers used WhatsApp comms at work? $1.8b says you're right

Paul Smith

Re: Fines mean nothing to banks

I can't agree with that. You do the best deal you can with the information available to you. If someone else has better information then you, that is neither their fault not their problem.

Paul Smith

"Finance, ultimately, depends on trust..."

Duh, no it doesn't.

Finance depends on having an edge and the biggest edge you can have is knowing what is going to happen before the rest of the market. Traders have always shared that knowledge among other traders to earn or repay favors. Before phones were invented, those back channel communications took place in coffee shops which is why financial institutions are packed so tightly together into places like wall street or the square mile.

Is it time to retire C and C++ for Rust in new programs?

Paul Smith

Re: Real programmers

What utter nonsense. Programmers then were the same as programmers now; some good, some bad, some lucky and some clumsy.

C was designed to solve a set of problems that had no other easy solution in the early 1970's. It was easy to learn and easy to use and you could get something working quickly so it became popular.

Rust was designed to solve problems that didn't exist in the 1970's. It is not as easy to learn or use as C and it takes a little longer to get something working, so it will never be as popular as C, but if the problems it solves are ones that concern you, then it will repay the extra effort required to learn to use it well.

Personally, I find I can solve most of the problems that matter to me most easily using Python, but when the occasion demands, I will and have used most other languages

DoE digs up molten salt nuclear reactor tech, taps Los Alamos to lead the way back

Paul Smith

Timing

You don't think this has anything to do with the recent announcement that China is about to turn on their first Thorium reactor?

Browsers could face two regimes in Europe as UK law set to diverge from EU

Paul Smith

Quo Bono?

Exactly who is this change supposed to benefit? Lose the adequacy agreement and the UK loses access to easy data exchange with the EU, on the other hand, it means the likes of Facebook can do whatever they want with data about UK people. Cambridge Analytics MkII?

I would suggest that someone takes a very serious look at who is lobbying whom and how much they are paying, because this stinks.

Huawei under investigation for having tech installed near US missile silos

Paul Smith

Re: Mass paranoia

I am afraid that you don't seem to know very much about how cell towers, communications or telcos work. You aren't a politician by any chance? The telco buys the gear and installs it in base station at the foot of the cell tower. Huawei don't choose who buys their gear, Huawei don't choose where it is installed, and Huawei doesn't pay for the juice it consumes. Double the data and you double the juice and yes, the telcos would notice, and no, you couldn't slip an extra power supply in there, telcos would notice that as well. Also, since telcos haven't been allowed to buy Huawei gear for quite a while, these towers must have been installed quite some time ago.

MaCarthyism is alive and well in the land of the free.

Crypto sleuths pin $100 million Harmony theft on Lazarus Group

Paul Smith

Does this actually count as theft?

Stop laughing and think for a minute. The 'rightful' owner of the crypto currency token is which ever wallet it is registered with in the blockchain - if the blockchain is updated so coins that were in your wallet are now in my wallet, then the coins that were yours are now, legitimately, mine. You might argue that the blockchain update was not correctly authorized, but you can't say I 'stole' your coins.

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