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Comment Re: €0.5B (Score 1) 214

Please, he is the reincarnation of Crassus. Bad guy of Spartacus fame, became filthy rich speculating on real estate by highly corrupt means, was eventually killed off the first time he led an army into battle against a real enemy, and executed by pouring molten gold in his throat (likely inspiration for Viserys Targaryen).

Comment 50 years of evil (Score 4, Informative) 38

The only time - briefly - when Microsoft was ever the good guys is when they coded early basics for early machines. Then Bill Gates shat the bed and it's been a terrible company ever since: they've been consistently technically incompetent, incredibly aggressive,hostile, monopolizing and always ready to do whatever it takes to earn money and principles be damned.

People usually get better with age. Not Microsoft. Fuck Microsoft. I hate them every bit as much now that they reinvented themselves as an invasive Big Data company as when they were an aggressive OS and software vendor.

As for Bill Gates, the sonofabitch has been working hard for years since he retired from being an evil CEO to clean up his image. But reality is, his foundation is just a tax avoidance vehicle and he's just as evil as he's ever been, But somehow people think he and Balmer are nice retired billionaires now. No they're not. Fuck Bill Gates too.

Nothing and nobody good ever came out of Microsoft.

Comment 5045M (Score 1) 30

by Penguinoflight (#65265261) Attached to: Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop Graphics Benchmarks Revealed

Given the 5090 has over 21000 cuda cores this is more like a 5045 with half the compute capacity, a quarter of the power limits and around 70% the memory/bus.

I guess on the plus side there's no 12v high fire connector to worry about because these chips are mb integrated and wouldn't draw enough power to worry about anyway.

Submission + - Trump Admin Used Signal for War Plans and Included Journalist (theatlantic.com) 1

Submitted by josmar52789
josmar52789 writes: âoeThe world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I [Jeff Goldberg], however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.â

Submission + - Another large Black hole in "our" Galaxy (arxiv.org)

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy.

Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness.

This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.)

The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone.

This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.")

Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery.

As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.

Submission + - Surado, formerly Slashdot Japan, is closing at the end of the month. (srad.jp) 1

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Slashdot Japan was launched on May 28, 2001. On 2025/03/31, it will finally close. Since starting the site separated from the main Slashdot one, and eventually rebranded as "Surado", which was it's Japanese nickname.

Last year the site stopped posting new stories, and was subsequently unable to find a buyer. In a final story announcing the end, many users expressed their sadness and gratitude for all the years of service.

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