* Posts by John Savard

2459 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Sep 2007

Apple's global security boss accused of bribing cops with 200 free iPads in exchange for concealed gun permits

John Savard

Missing Detail

It should be Sung and Jensen who are facing charges. Citizens who need to engage in their lawful business but are confronted by officials who demand bribes often have little recourse.

NEC to sell the accelerator cards it puts into supercomputers – for about $11,000 a pop

John Savard

Exciting

Oh, are these the SX-Aurora TSUBASA processors? Glad to know it's finally possible to buy one... of course, you would need at least a Threadripper, so you could also have a video card at the same time.

US govt proposes elephant showers for every American after Prez Trump says trickles dampen his haircare routine

John Savard

Not All Bad

Eventually, Trump might get around to also repealing the regulation on how much water can be in the tank of a toilet.

This would make toilets clog less often, helping reduce the occasions when people might have to come in close contact to other people's fecal matter to deal with the clog.

This would slow the transmission of poliomyelitis.

Pity the effect won't be enough to make up for all he's done to speed up the transmission of COVID-19.

John Savard

Positive Consequence

Well, if he also gets rid of the limits on how much water toilets can flush, this will help to reduce the chances of toilets clogging - which will help stop the spread of polio! So for a change Trump might be doing something useful.

Panic in the mailroom: The perils of an operating system too smart for its own good

John Savard

Overly Optimistic

Surely a public statement to the effect that the bills were only printed twice, but the customers' accounts were only debited once, so just pay one bill and throw the other away should have fixed everything! Well, almost.

The revolution will not be televised because my television has been radicalised

John Savard

Re: endless stream of recommendations to watch videos

Or, more to the point, a channel is a frequency allocation provided to a television broadcasting station. While when using an AM or FM radio, one tunes the dial directly to the carrier frequency used by the station you want to listen to, because of the complicated nature of television signals, with vestigial sideband, a color subcarrier, and a separate carrier for the audio, the different possible carrier frequencies for television stations in a given locality are simply assigned numbers, and when one selects one of those numbers, one is switching to the channel used by that particular broadcasting station.

John Savard

Not the One I Was Thinking Of

At first, I thought you might have been talking about Fox News, although I felt your description was perhaps a bit too harsh on them, flawed though they are.

But then I saw you were in Australia.

On YouTube, presumably because I've looked at the odd video concerning the American election result, I've seen several videos recommended from Sky News, and they appear to fit the description you gave.

Shock news: NASA lunar ambitions might be a bit too... ambitious

John Savard

Re: continue the fantasy that humanity

This is true enough, but what happens to humanity and all of its achievements if, despite our best efforts, we cannot preserve the Earth? After all, a number of things outside our control could destroy the Earth. An asteroid impact is one possibility.

Also, there are foreign countries with non-democratic regimes in possession of nuclear weapons; that means we can't carry out regime change on them, therefore their behavior is outside our control. So they might decide to start a global thermonuclear war on a whim, or simply decide not to cooperate in fighting global warming.

Of course, given that at the present time even some of the world's democratic nations have not worked to fight global warming, we have done worse than we could.

Setting up a self-sustaining colony on Mars or in the asteroid belt or orbiting the Moon would ensure the continuation of the human story even if most of us perished; while that would be a poor second-best, it is better than nothing and it's not clear that we will succeed in saving the Earth.

Of course, ultimately, we must fail, as the Sun will someday go off the Main Sequence. Proxima Centauri b, on the other hand, will be around long after that happens, since small stars live longer.

John Savard

Schedule Change

Well, barring any unusual modifications to the U.S. electoral result not anticipated by the mainstream news media, surely a schedule slip to 2028 would be fully acceptable under current circumstances.

Days before the US election, phishers net $2.3m from Wisconsin Republicans

John Savard

Re: Trump money and mouth miles apart

Eventually, though, surely the American thirst for justice will lead to attempts to fund the police entirely through the proceeds of convict labor.

John Savard

Re: High IQ thieves?

You've been the victim, rather than those companies being the victim? It's not like you have control over those companies' cybersecurity practices. Of course they can't control whether or not people keep their passwords secure, but otherwise the law should be clear.

Advanced Money-making Devices: AMD inks multibillion stock deal for FPGA specialist Xilinx

John Savard

Re: Smart move

Yes, that is quite right, so obviously AMD cannot afford to leave open the possibility of being blindsided by Intel as a result.

Hackers rummaged about in Finnish psychotherapy clinic – now patients extorted with public data dump threats

John Savard

Re: Wonderful...

Of course they do. We just have to persuade Russia to find them.

Nobody in his right mind living in a country with respect for the law would try a stunt like this.

John Savard

Re: Confuse I be

They weren't "accessible online" in the sense that you could go to the web site of the clinic and find them.

They were stored in a computer that was connected to the Internet, and obtained through hacking.

Since hacking exists, storing them in a computer connected to a net4work with an Internet connection was indeed irresponsible, but a lot of people don't yet realize that. Of course, that wouldn't be true if computers were genuinely secure, but that's not what we have now.

AMD scores 200,000 cores worth of secret silicon at new Australian supercomputer

John Savard

Not too secret

Basically the same silicon as will be in stores this November 5th, just with a few business features enabled, and clocked a lot slower. Just like last year's EPYC.

So it's not too mysterious what the silicon they'll be using can do, or is like, but maybe AMD will come up with some little surprises. I'm worried that given that the new Ryzens need fancy cooling where the previous generation didn't, the clocks on EPYC - especially a version with more cores - will actually be slower this year compared to last. Not enough to lose all the improvement due to the IPC gains, but still... so if AMD manages to avoid that, it will be a pleasant surprise.

India to build home-grown supercomputers, from the motherboards up

John Savard

Two Ways

It is indeed true that if India needs to have supercomputers urgently, it should buy them off the shelf.

But it is also true that India needs an indigenous supercomputer capability. That way, India will be able to have as many supercomputers as its people can build, not limited by the willingness of foreigners to buy Indian products so as to give India foreign exchange.

After all, India, like any other country, wants an economy like that of the United States, Japan, and other Western industrial nations, based on ownership of intellectual property, not one based on exporting resources, or the products of low-paying menial labor.

How one constructs a world economy with all generals and no privates, of course, is a question... but if India has its proportionate share of the commanding heights of the economy, even if there is also employment for farmers and factory workers and miners in India as well, that would be enough for contentment. Ultimately, that is the goal, for every country on Earth to be equal (as well as free and democratic, and with equality for all ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups within its borders).

Email-spamming COVID profiteers deleted database with 'key evidence' when UK watchdog came knocking

John Savard

Insufficient

Fined 40 thousand pounds? Thrown in jail with the key thrown away would make them less likely to do it again. And anyone else too, into the bargain.

Welp, it is the season for silicon mega-mergers... AMD rumored to be in advanced talks to buy FPGA slinger Xilinx for $30bn+

John Savard

Not Surprising

Since Intel did buy Altera, it would very much make sense for AMD to also have a foot in the FPGA game, if there was any chance at all that some important synergies between FPGAs and CPUs (or even GPUs, for that matter) crop up.

And I remember that after buying Altera, Intel then went and bought another FPGA maker... Omnitek.

Disgraced cop, 55, spared prison term after admitting he abused police systems to snoop on his girlfriend's ex

John Savard

Careful Reading

He was snooping on a previous boyfriend of his current girlfriend.

If he had been snooping on the current boyfriend of a woman who was an ex-girlfriend of his, I would have been outraged that he wasn't sent to jail for several years. But in this case, it's possible that either he or his girlfriend had a legitimate concern that the victim would be a threat of violence to them.

Third time's still the charm: AMD touts Zen-3-based Ryzen 5000 line, says it will 'deliver absolute leadership in x86'

John Savard

Not This Year for Me

I'm not too discontented that I broke down last year and bought a 3900X. Sure, this year's chip is even better, but it needs a fancy cooler. So I seem to have gotten on the train at the right time, and someday I'll upgrade again when there are more fantastic improvements.

It's great that their single-thread performance now beats Intel's, but last year it was just so slightly behind that it hardly made a difference.

Last year was the transition from being significantly behind Intel to near-parity, this year is just from being ever so slightly behind to being ever so slightly ahead, so it seems to me that this year is less exciting.

Unless the 'wider floating-point unit' means these chips have AVX-512. Then I would save my money and run out and buy one.

Cisco ordered to cough up $2bn – yes, two billion dollars – plus royalties after ripping off biz's cybersecurity patents

John Savard

Cisco prevented its own engineers from answering questions... in a court of law? How did it manage that? Did it terminate them with extreme prejudice?

You answer questions put to you in a court of law, or you go to jail for contempt. A criminal offence. Which totally outweighs, negates, and nullifies anything in any NDA or employment contract you may have signed - those things are no excuse for not giving a truthful and complete answer when questioned in a court of law, as it's a fundamental principle that contracts are only valid for purposes that are not illegal, and contempt of court or obstructing justice is illegal.

Thus, it's the judge's fault for not reminding those engineers where they're going if they don't answer the questions, not anything Cisco did.

Trouble in paradise: Just a day after G20 love-in, Japan throttles chip part exports to South Korea

John Savard

Re: Action Needed

That is reasonable. But today people of Korean descent born in Japan have to be fingerprinted every year. Because they're not citizens. This is an action being taken by the current Japanese government.

Daring to engage in this kind of trade dispute with South Korea is also an action being taken by the current Japanese government.

While punishing people to reform and rehabilitate them, if they have not themselves done any wrong acts, makes no sense, cost recovery for the consequences of wrong acts will sometimes extend into future generations because of the magnitude of the sums involved. It's not as if the heavy burden of reparations payments Japan is facing towards South Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan, the Phillipines and so on is making it a poor country, and so it is legitimate to increase the amount of money transfered from Japan to these nations to help them rebuild.

How do you expect people living in the Phillipines to understand it as fair that the average Japanese person is wealthier than the average person in the Phillipines? Something went wrong to lead to the innocent victims of aggression not to lead the way in the economic development of the region.

Windows to become emulation layer atop Linux kernel, predicts Eric Raymond

John Savard

Re: Sadly... this is the beginning of the end

I don't see it happening. Windows might follow MacOS and become a BSD distro... of course, back at the time of the Windows 2000 Professional source code leak, it was noted that Windows already has a few pieces of BSD in it, but clearly if Windows were to be a layer on top of something, making that something derived from BSD would give Microsoft more control.

Microsoft will release a web browser for Linux next month. Repeat, Microsoft will release a browser for Linux – and it uses Google's technology

John Savard

Re: At least

Well, that's not true. I mean, they'll have to port Crysis, Witcher 3, and a whole lot of other things to Linux before Windows is obsolete. Actually, though, I think a few major games are available in Linux versions.

Adidas now stands for All Day I'm Disconnecting All Servers as owners of 'smart' Libra scales furious over bricked kit

John Savard

Alternative

While I can't fault Adidas for not wanting to support the Libra scales with their own servers forever, they should have offered their customers an alternative: updated the scales to talk to their owners' own computers, with a downloadable program for local synchronization. This wouldn't help Libra owners who don't have a computer (or maybe even just a smartphone) but it would have made things right for most of them.

You're all wet: Drippy chips to help slash data centre power consumption and carbon costs

John Savard

Re: The Technology We Need

I certainly don't expect the CPU in my smartphone to be drawing 1700 watts of power!

But I think the usefulness of this technology does not lie in allowing a chip to draw more current, but in allowing a chip to be more compact. If you take an existing microprocessor die, and split up its circuitry into multiple fins, with water cooling between them, on a tiny substrate, now a lot fo the signal paths will be shorter.

John Savard

The Technology We Need

Obviously this is the technology that is needed to allow true 3D integrated circuits. None of this just putting one die on top of another, and still cooling them with a fan on top (i.e. Intel's Foveros). With this, we could have dies that are 100mm by 100mm... in a stack 100mm high.

That would definitely leave a lot of growth room for the continuance of Moore's Law!

Of course, keeping a 100mm by 100mm die cool would require a lot of water, so I may have let my optimism get away with me. But even 10mm by 10mm, 10mm high would be an incredibly massive improvement on what we have now!

Vivaldi offers users a 'break' from browsing. No, don't switch to Chrome... don't sw..

John Savard

Voluntary

Since this is a feature you have to choose to turn on, most people will just ignore its very existence.

That it might be helpful to some people who want a reminder to take an occasional break, however, is not something I can really dispute. Certainly, the intentions of Vivaldi's developers in providing this feature were good.

But I think that many other features would have been more useful.

Amiga Fast File System makes minor comeback in new Linux kernel

John Savard

Good News

Given theat Linux included support for the Amiga's file system, it's good to see that bugs in that support have been fixed. But while this forestalls a crushing blow to the survival of the Amiga, it won't lead to what I want: new 68000 chips with 64-bit addressing and contemporary levels of performance!

CenturyLink L3 outage knocks out web giants and 3.5% of all internet traffic

John Savard

My Personal Experience

I know I was able to use Discord during a period when, apparently due to this event, RuneScape was completely unusable. So it may have been one of the worst-hit services. Even parts of RuneScape's web site were not accessible.

IBM ordered to pay £22k to whistleblower and told by judges: Teach your managers what discrimination means

John Savard

Re: £22K? Is that all?

In that case (someone taking their employer to an employment tribunal won't get a decent job with anyone else either), the British government should just confiscate the assets of all the companies at which she will never get a decent job, not just IBM. After Britain becomes socialist in this manner, perhaps businesses in other countries will realize they have to behave better, or else.

Somehow, it needs to be very firmly impressed on the minds of all employers that their duty is to meekly submit to the orders of the legislature, the courts, and employment tribunals, and not attempt any sort of resistance (other than using a lawyer to defend themselves against false, groundless, and malicious accusations with the truth, but never to obfuscate the truth with false allegations, which would result also in the immediate disbarment of any lawyer who assisted in that) against them.

John Savard

Re: targeted by four managers within IBM

Maybe the managers lied to their superiors. After all, people get made managers for a reason, and it certainly is possible that a subordinate might lie about her managers in an attempt to get an undeserved promotion. So naturally the default is to take the manager's word over the subordinates.

That doesn't mean that IBM isn't at fault for not still investigating, just in case, and harshly disciplining any mangers who would think to behave in this manner.

If you think Mozilla pushed a broken Firefox Android build, good news: It didn't. Bad news: It's working as intended

John Savard

Astonished

I expect this kind of arrogant behavior by companies like Microsoft and Apple that can get away, at least for a while, with thinking that they have their customers over a barrel. Firefox is in no position to engage in such nonsense, and, as a result, is likely to be consigned to irrelevance on mobile phones.

One of China’s flagship 7nm foundries falls in a hole as funding flees

John Savard

Puzzling

If a lot of the most expensive part of the project, the actual equipment to make 7nm chips, is there, but now things have stopped so as to prevent a functioning facility from being built around the equipment... if China is serious about having the ability to make advanced chips itself, I expect the Chinese authorities to make short work of any local dispute that stands in the way of so important a national goal.

Of course, the possibility is that this project is actually a hoax, a scam, and it's been detected before more than $2 billion was wasted on it. So I presume the Chinese central authorities will investigate that possibility before intervening. But if it isn't a scam, it's unlikely to be allowed to die wastefully.

Money talks as Chinese chip foundries lure TSMC staff with massive salaries to fix the Middle Kingdom's tech gap

John Savard

Puzzled

It's hard for me to understand why people would think that any amount of money, however large, is enough to make it worth moving to a country that isn't free.

VMware discontinues Datrium hardware and hyperconverged OS, effective immediately

John Savard

New Laws Needed

Obviously what we need are stringent consumer protection laws that absolutely ensure that the only thing that can happen after a company is acquired is that the company's business is carried on as usual for years and years thereafter as if nothing had happened. After all, it's not as if people buying computer products can always be aware that the company they're buying from is a potential acquisition target. Thus, this potential source of risk when making a purchasing decision needs to be totally eliminated, without any half-measures.

Assimilation completed! HPE says it has finished the merger with Cray and unveils combo supercomputing lineup

John Savard

Re: How many floppy discs does it take to make an exaflop?

You are allowed to cheat and use GPUs for some of your floating-point operations.

John Savard

Re: Damn

I have heard that many past Hewlett-Packard acquisitions have been less than successful, and it would be very regrettable if any mis-steps by Hewlett-Packard led to the loss of an important American technological asset.

Lizards for lunch? Crazy tech? Aliens?! Dana Dash: First Girl on the Moon is perfect for the little boffin-to-be in your life

John Savard

Re: An interesting review

Or, rather, a substance that you put on the outside of the spaceship to prevent gravity from getting in to it? Yes, I remember Cavorite from H. G. Wells' First Men in the Moon.

The Iceman cometh, his smartwatch told the cops: Hitman jailed after gizmo links him to Brit gangland slayings

John Savard

Re: Whilst the UK has stabbings virtually every (other) day and acid attacks.

In Canada, at least, the police support gun control... not because it will disarm drug dealers and other real criminals, they know better... but because it will make it safer for the police when they do other tasks, like answering domestic violence complaints.

This isn't a bad thing, because making the police hesitant about addressing domestic violence complaints is bad for women... and making it necessary for them to respond like police in the U.S. to encounters could also be bad, even lethal, for women.

John Savard

Additional Charges

Making a throat-cutting gesture and mouthing the word 'grass' - that's witness tampering, and making death threats. He should be facing additional charges, and given a lengthy consecutive sentence for them, so that at least his first parole eligibility will be further delayed.

Microsoft wants to show enterprises that Edge means business, rather than the thing you use to download Chrome

John Savard

Wrong Use for Edge

Microsoft Edge, like Internet Explorer before it, to me is primarily the thing I use to download Firefox. If, some time later, I actually want Chrome on my computer as well, I'll download it with Firefox like everything else.

Here's why your Samsung Blu-ray player bricked itself: It downloaded an XML config file that broke the firmware

John Savard

A Solution Exists

Any device for which there is any risk whatsoever of a loss of functionality due to a remote software update should have a button on it with which the user can always restore it to its initial configuration. This would have helped solve the problem with the PlayStation 4, as a nice bonus, but that's an example that shows why manufacturers will resist it unless there is government legislation.

FYI Russia is totally hacking the West's labs in search of COVID-19 vaccine files, say UK, US, Canada cyber-spies

John Savard

It Could be Much Worse

When I first saw this news story, I breathed a sigh of relief. It's unfortunate that Russia is stealing other countries' intellectual property in this manner, and it's unclear why they're doing it, since despite the bad relations Russia has earned with the West, it's not as if the West would try charging them extortionate prices for a COVID-19 vaccine.

What would have had me very upset would have been if they were sabotaging the development of a COVID-19 vaccine in other countries. That would be a rea. disaster.

USA ends Hong Kong's special treatment, crimping flow of tech to territory

John Savard

Relocate?

Unfortunately, Cantonese isn't really spoken much in Taiwan. Otherwise, for banks in Hong Kong that need advanced security systems from the U.S. to operate, relocating to Taiwan would be an obvious move. Of course, there's always Singapore - or even the Cayman Islands, since many people in Hong Kong can speak English.

It's handbags at dawn: America to hit France with 25% tariffs on luxuries over digital tax on US tech titans

John Savard

California

A levy on French wine, of course, would benefit California... and California isn't exactly a Republican stronghold. So it's hardly surprising that Trump decided to keep that measure in reserve!

Digicert will shovel some 50,000 EV HTTPS certificates into the furnace this Saturday after audit bungle

John Savard

Distressing

It is distressing, whatever the cause, that innocent customers will suffer an inconvenience through no fault of their own. Hopefully, they will not also suffer an out-of-pocket expense, in that they will instead recieve full refunds for the certificates they purchased since they will have to pay for the new ones. Given the need to update certificates over the weekend, and the lack of a genuine security risk, while there are rules to be followed, there should also have been a centreal authority able to issue a waiver of those rules to accomodate the situation.

Hungry? Please enjoy this delicious NaN, courtesy of British Gas and Sainsbury's

John Savard

Re: I am NaN

You are number 83.

John Savard

Dimensional Analysis

The pudding was marked "2 x 150" rather than "2 x 150g", so apparently somebody didn't know the 150 meant 150 grams, failed to input the net weight of pudding in the product... and so, lo and behold, instead of 83 new pence per 100 grams (one third of 2.49 pounds) we get what was shown in the photo.

At least this shows that it isn't because decimalisation has made the arithmetic more complicated rather than less!