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graymatters

64 karma · joined August 20, 2022

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graymatters··on Intel sells 51% stake in Altera to private equity firm on a $8.75B valuation
The business geniuses of intel bought Altera for nearly $17B in 2015. Now sold control at valuation barely half of that. After official inflation of over 30% during that time. Which means it lost over 2/3 of its value, (take into account also the lost interest on that money). Given that they gave up control for half the money, it’s effectively as if it was relinquished for 1/3 of what Intel paid for it. So far - no one of the responsible Intel execs paid any price for such atrocious loss of stakeholders’ value. They need to be in jail and lose their personal wealth to repay the stockholders.

The SEC should investigate them, see whether there was any inside trading to benefit from this horrible value loss.

This criminal lack of performance needs to be brought up during the upcoming shareholders meeting. Responsible must pay the price.

Would you hire again the Intel CEOs, head of Intel Capital, any members of Intel’s board of directors after such abysmal performance?

graymatters··on Z-Wave is remaking itself into an open source protocol
Making Z-Wave closed source in the beginning sealed its fate. All competing protocols were open source. Z-Wave failed and won’t recover.
graymatters··on US tax return filings drop by nearly 1M, extension requests rise
Yes. It is IRS is deliberately dragging its feet to make it a real option for millions and millions of Americans. So that the near monopoly Intuit can rake in billions in sales each year.
graymatters··on I'm manually transcribing the AltairBASIC source, ten lines a day starting today
Why?..
graymatters··on Accessible open textbooks in math-heavy disciplines
2053 is too far away indeed.

“It’s probably not hard…” - how many such wishful thinking statements were uttered by humanity.

graymatters··on Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week
Well, I hope that if they do so, the FSF and all copyright holders of the Open Source software used to make Android Great In-the-First-Place will sue their a$$e$ off.
graymatters··on How one of the world’s major money laundering networks operates
Very simple. 1. Orders of magnitude. Digital transactions can be billions in single transaction. While making large cash transactions in cumbersome and unrealistic. 2. Because they can. Regulating digital transactions is simple. Regulating cash - next to impossible.
graymatters··on Make Ubuntu packages 90% faster by rebuilding them
You are confusing randomization, a legitimate security mechanism, with security by obscurity. ASLR is not security by obscurity. Please spend the time on understanding the terminology rather than regurgitating buzz words.
graymatters··on McDonald's gives its restaurants an AI makeover
https://archive.ph/2025.03.11-045359/https://www.wsj.com/art...
graymatters··on Why cryptography is not based on NP-complete problems
The author should’ve stayed in the NP class and not drop out.
graymatters··on Residential Networking over Telephone
55-60Mbps is a reasonable expectation. Don’t get fooled by exuberant speeds advertised by the powerline equipment manufacturers. Lag can jump by ~25msec
graymatters··on Urban legend: I think there is a world market for maybe five computers
The premise of the article (if it can be called that) is incorrect. He made the statement about the 5 computers in a TV interview (and it was not related to business trip referred in the article). I saw the recording of the interview some 10-15 years ago. Don’t remember which network. Perhaps NBC?
graymatters··on Immorality Begins at 40 (2016)
Umm… the one good thing about the author - the author is soon to be 40+.
graymatters··on Mellanox magic: The secret behind Nvidia's meteoric trillion-dollar rise (2023)
Outside the techies and gamers circles, for the general public - it was fairly unknown. Today it’s known primarily due to its high stock valuation. Thus, don’t project your own bubble on everyone out there.
graymatters··on QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image
QNX is squeezed from above by Linux, especially as real time patches have finally been fully accepted. And from below by FreeRTOS and Zephyr. Current attempt to open source is a desperate move by QNX as their market share is disappearing. Why would anyone in their right mind step on the same landmine, called QNX, which already pulled a rug from under the developers feet once? Absolutely no trust in QNX ecosystem. Save yourself pain and aggregation. Don’t use QNX.
graymatters··on In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
Actually - “how many golf balls fit into a VW Beatle” is a better proxy.
graymatters··on Intel Honesty
Spoken like a true Marxist. The purpose of Marxism is to literally kill hundreds of millions of people who oppose the Marxist way. Like they did during the 20th century in the countries where Marxism prevailed (even briefly).
graymatters··on So you want to build an embedded Linux system?
Avoid nvidia if you can. Their attitude towards anything Open Source has been extremely unsupportive if not outright shitty. Part of company philosophy.
graymatters··on Linux Memory Overcommit (2007)
Doubt - based on what?
graymatters··on Evidence of price-fixing in the oil industry?
What to do about it - hit these oil companies, including the Saudi ones, with a huge class action law suit. Additionally US government must fine heavily instances of collusion and oligopoly so that others thinking of following path will be deterred.
graymatters··on 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza
82% of the so-called “Palestinians” approved of October 7th Massacre back in October. 75% approve of it in March 2024. For every armed terrorist there were 5-10 Gazans perpetrating the atrocities on October 7th. Every other house in Gaza is full of weapons. “There are no innocents in Dresden”, Winston Churchill
graymatters··on 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza
Well, October 7th Massacre wasn’t enough to wake you up from a 140 years long dream of peace. But some social lack of acceptance in January did. That’s telling. It is a zero sum game. It always was for the Arabs. Time to wake up and face the harsh reality, not invented idealistic dreams (that are admittedly much more comforting, but lead to massacres October 7th style).
graymatters··on 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza
Dresden rules should be applied to Gaza. Israel is way too considerate with Lavender. Every other house in Gaza is full of weapons.
graymatters··on Insecure world launches into rearmament with a 9% military spending boom in 2023
That’s simply a wrong set of assumptions that have no historical substantiation. Tolerance for casualties was at a different level during both WWs. It is only after the horrors of WW2 that the western world became fearful of casualties. And the Russians as well, who suffered the largest amount of casualties. That’s why the Cuban missile crisis did not turn into a nuclear war. This is why nuclear mutual deterrence worked.
graymatters··on Insecure world launches into rearmament with a 9% military spending boom in 2023
Yes, China has become a major problem.
graymatters··on Barrier: Open-Source KVM Software
Synergy was great and extremely useful. Had some pretty crazy setups working with it. Synergy, Barrier and forks are Not interesting till they support Wayland.
graymatters··on Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs
I’ve seen this sort of reaction quite often from people who are/were used to native (desktop) applications and grew professionally in that paradigm. What happened is that there was a paradigm shift to web programming model, where a server and a browser interact and each has a specific role and a well defined interface to interact. Then to address software compatibility/versioning/configuration/predictability came the paradigm of containerization. Both paradigms are dominant now and that’s how younger programmers grew and still are growing professionally. The overhead the paradigm introduces in terms of used resources is an acceptable and affordable price to use the paradigm but is likely to seem overpriced for people used to earlier paradigms. A 1960s programmer may be appalled that a larger COBOL compiled binary is taking several times more memory than a hand coded Assembly equivalent. Next generation of programmers may be doing everything with tell chatGPT a long story of what they want it to build in terms of code.

Point is - paradigms shift, unacceptable prices become affordable. Generational gaps manifest themselves not just between parents and children.

graymatters··on Ask HN: Questions for two 40 year IBM Mainframe repair and programmers
Given what they’ve seen almost 60 years ago and today - can they extrapolate what will the computing field look like in another 60 years? What tools/techniques/methods from the past do they miss the most? Which of these do they think could/should be adapted to current realities and used to greater effect? What are their top 3 do’s and don’ts from those times?
graymatters··on How eSIM Cards Are Connecting Palestinian Families
Do they also connect the hostages kidnapped and held in Gaza to heir families?
graymatters··on Humanitarian system in Gaza facing 'total collapse', says UN chief
Gazans shouldn’t have started the war, nor committed atrocities.
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