meanwhile... true seamless open source solutions
Actually work, and are being deployed today, without licensing fees.
Not posting links, you can find them easily enough.
Posts by totaam
9 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jul 2013
Linux on the desktop is so hot there's now a fight over it
Nvidia reveals CUDA 6, joins CPU-GPU shared memory party
Saturday 16th November 2013 02:23 GMT
download where?
Unless I am missing something obvious, I've signed up (something I rarely do), waited to be approved, and now that I am approved there is still nothing for me to download.. (just harvesting email addresses?)
Seems that this unified memory is a response to what AMD has been talking about. (hard to tell who planned it first since this is all behind closed doors but at least AMD was talking about it first)
It makes sense because it is a PITA to upload/download explicitly to/from the device.
Boffins agree: Yes we have had an atmospheric warming pause
Tuesday 12th November 2013 04:05 GMT
good news everyone
"slightly slower warming rate", no, not that. That's still bad.
The fact that a concerted international effort managed to reverse the disastrous effects of CFCs on the environment on a such a short timescale shows that we can make a difference - and quickly too.
Another interesting thing is that by fixing the ozone layer, we also had positive effects in other areas. It's quite likely that "fixing" CO2 emissions will have other positive effects too (beyond warming, cancers and other little details we already know about)
Now, giving up CO2 emissions entirely is not possible unfortunately, but whatever we choose to do can have a big impact!
AMD avoids a red-ink-stained quarter for once, market says 'meh'
Friday 18th October 2013 07:01 GMT
AMD is competitive at a lower price point, which is where we're heading
Intel rules the high performance chips ($200 and up), but AMD does offer very good bang for the buck below $200.
I suspect that as computing component prices continue to fall inexorably, it will become harder and harder to justify spending more than $200 on a CPU, especially as most people don't really need all that CPU power right now anyway (and they will get it for that price a year later).
Thai kids find free tablets hard to swallow as govt scheme hits trouble
Wednesday 9th October 2013 16:51 GMT
Re: some background from someone who lives there and followed this from the day it was announced
> So, for once, the government is rewarding the poor (as well of course themselves, that is a given) instead of just rewarding Bangkok.
Sure, and what they're doing is not all bad. The massive 50 year loan is pretty scary and soon ripe for looting, but the intent (improving infrastructure) is a worthy goal.
> And let's not pretend that TS is ruling secretively.
No one is, I'm just giving some background for those who read this article.
> And please point me to the alternative honest politicians..
I don't need to name good politicians to point out that this lot really is terrible, do I?
What good would that do to el reg readers?
Wednesday 9th October 2013 10:43 GMT
some background from someone who lives there and followed this from the day it was announced
This was one of the major populist campaign promises they made for the 2011 general elections.
"They" being the populist PT party, effectively run by the exiled convicted felon Thaksin Shinawatra.
Reminder: him and his party got barred, which didn't stop him from getting his brother in law elected as PM, and now his little sister. The latest rumours (vigorously denied) are that his son will enter politics to succeed him, sorry her. Never mind that, they are passing a budget to allow 2 trillion bhat (about 80 billion USD) of borrowing for infrastructure investment to be repaid over 50 years.. Anyone want to guess where 10% to 30% of this money is going to end up?
Other policies they put in place where "first time car buyer tax discount" - put that in the same manifesto as "solving horrendous congestion in Bangkok" for a laugh (TS said he was going to solve this within 6 months when he got elected... 8 years ago now), the "rice price pledging scheme" which basically buys/rewards the loyal north-eastern farmers' vote. (more legal way of buying vote than outright payoffs, though those are also well documented).
Now, corruption is endemic Thailand (and pretty much everywhere in SE Asia except Singapore), and from the onset it was pretty clear that the procurement of the tablet devices (the dodgy bidding process, use of intermediaries, etc), the allocation of the funds for training, etc. that it was going to be just another of these big projects where politicians are guaranteed some new luxury cars and condominiums before anything gets signed. First the tablets were meant for Prathom-1 students (7 year olds) then they decided to change that, ... And now they've cancelled them for the southern regions (those that do not vote for PT).
Another funny thing was when they had delays (backhanders not paid yet?) and had to spend some of the school funds buying the books that the tablets were meant to replace...
Summary: shambolic project designed to win votes and steal funds, not designed to improve education standards. And guess what, the educational standards will remain abysmal.
Torvalds shoots down call to yank 'backdoored' Intel RdRand in Linux crypto
Dell juices Latitude line with Haswell Ultrabook, skinny lappies
EU competition inspectors RAID European telcos
Friday 12th July 2013 09:14 GMT
they have done just that
They've capped european roaming fees a number of times, both for voice and data.
Everytime they've done that, the telco lobby came out saying: "we're disappointed at this decision, we've always been trying very hard to provide good value for our customers, this will impact our ability to invest and provide better service" - lies basically.
They've been mugging us for years and if it wasn't for the EU, they would have continued to charge us 100,000 times more than it costs them (give or take), now it's only in the hundreds or thousands... progress of sorts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
