Posts by doublelayer

Had enough of Android? First 'Focal' based Ubuntu Touch is out

Re: It's a phone

I am referring to the general case. You still could make calls with a headset. If the phone call system doesn't work because of a software problem, it's not that easy to solve. Hence, if it's your microphone failing then it's a problem to be handled by you personally, and you can decide whether you want to buy a replacement, try to fix the mic, or not call people very often. If it's a software problem, it now affects every user and, unless they are good at fixing things the original developers couldn't, they likely can do nothing about this problem. If UB has a telephony problem, and I don't have any information that suggests they do, it is not a good idea to downplay it the way you have done, even if it's not that important to you.

Re: It's a phone

I agree with you that writing off an operating system because of a bad device isn't a great policy. However, I think this part might be correct:

"And your Android had a tiny amount of RAM and storage vs iPhone? I simply don't believe you if you're comparing similarly priced phones."

From the original comment, this was in the relatively early days of Android phones. Back then, I still had a flip phone, but I remember the specs of some of those early devices and I've seen some after they were decommissioned and they could be terrible. For example, I was asked to erase a bunch of Android 2.3 phones for a charity which came equipped with 256 MB of internal storage. That's inconceivable these days when an Android image regularly takes up over 10 GB of space on the internal flash. Even then, most of that space was reserved for the OS, so every one of the phones had a 2 GB Micro SD card for the user's files. I know that because I still have the things here. I erased them and I now have as many 2 GB cards as I'm likely to use for the next decade assuming they don't go bad.

Sadly, I don't know what specific phones these were, but I found a lot of early Android phones with such specs. I have found models from 2011 from at least four manufacturers with 150-400 MB of internal storage. I don't know how painful those were to use, but it can't have been good. They were probably cheaper than iPhones, but if you had a discount from a provider or were buying older models, maybe they were more directly comparable. For example, the iPhone 3GS released in 2009 originally had a base storage version of 16 GB. A year later, they added an 8 GB version. It's true that the 3GS had 256 MB of RAM as well, but I'm more prepared to assume that Apple optimized their OS for that amount of memory than to believe that the consistently memory-hungry Android did so well.

Re: Disingenuous

If your modem doesn't work well, it's not just the phone call feature you're losing. That's why those who never make calls should still probably care about whether their software can support that relatively basic functionality. And if by some miracle that's not the reason it doesn't make phone calls, then it would have to be related to the audio hardware which means that you probably can't use VoIP services either and you may lack, for instance, sound in recorded videos. Since I don't take many videos, this isn't that important to me, but it's still a core feature for any device where the manufacturer put a camera and a microphone in it, so it's not impressive if something that basic fails to work.

However, it was the recommendation to just buy a dumb phone that I thought was the disingenuous part of that. Software which cannot do a relatively simple task isn't good software. It might be flawed software that won't affect your use case, although for the reasons expressed above I doubt that's the case this time, but it is still very flawed. If desktop Linux crashed if you used a trackpad or connected more than one screen, you could still use it, but it wouldn't impress people and we shouldn't expect it to. If mobile Linux can't do something as simple as make a phone call, it's similarly porous. We're talking about an activity that is so easy that basically no review has to talk about it because every device they're reviewing does it just fine. I don't know how well UB handles phone calls because I don't have hardware that can run it. From at least one review, it does have the software to make calls. Rather than refer to that or better yet, find information on whether it works well, the author chose to defend it by basically saying that, even if it didn't support the feature, who cares. That's what I found disingenuous.

Re: It's a phone

We all have different requirements. I would really like to run Linux on my phone, but I have never had a device that is supported by one of those projects. Maybe not buying flagship phones is incompatible with getting much hope of porting. The last time I attempted to port myself, it didn't work and I broke things quickly. Fortunately it wasn't permanent, but it was a complete failure to get things running. Maybe I should try again. I've been toying with the idea of buying a PinePhone which I know will support a lot of variants so I could find one that's good and support it. It is going to have to work at some things though.

Is it? Good heavens. I make calls a few times a year. I dislike phoning people.

Well there are still plain old dumbphones if that's what you want.

I think that's disingenuous. I like calling people a lot more than you do, but a phone that is incapable of making phone calls means that, even if you have to call someone in an unusual situation, you can't. Whether or not you use it often, it's a core feature. After all, you still call sometimes, so if I told you that beginning tomorrow, your phones would never make voice calls again, I'm guessing you wouldn't just shrug it off.

It's also indicative of other functions. If the device doesn't make calls well, it's probably not that they couldn't figure out the microphone; that's pretty basic. It's probably a symptom of support for the modem, and if the modem isn't working optimally, you'll also have problems with SMS and mobile data. I'm assuming that your pocket computer usage does make use of mobile data, and you're not just looking for a pocket WiFi-only computer?

Re: Renaming and discontinuing

I think renaming is sometimes advisable because the projects aren't run from the same group. For example, the Lomiri devs aren't the same group as those developing previous versions of Unity, they may not be maintaining compatibility with old versions of Unity, and they're making a different product. For example, distros that are still shipping the Unity desktop are using older versions of the software, built with the desktop in mind, and this version is intended more for a small touchscreen interface. Not that you can't use this version on a desktop, but there's probably a reason people aren't.

When a big enough change is made, it makes sense to not have multiple projects with the same or similar names. In an ideal world for me, the name would be meaningfully changed if the project isn't trying to upstream their changes to the original thing by that name (the reason why neither WebKit nor Blink are called KHTML even though they both started there). It helps someone know which project is the original and which one took a different path, especially when they have diverged enough that the two pieces of software aren't compatible with one another anymore.

I'm afraid I agree with you about the reliability of Linux-based smartphones. I'd like them to get here, but I wouldn't count on it happening. It's a slow process, and a process that may not be able to get fast enough to ever become useful the way Linux on a desktop or server is. Even the technical user sometimes wants to use a phone to call people, and if it isn't reliable, they'll become annoyed.

FTC urged to freeze OpenAI's 'biased, deceptive' GPT-4

Re: It is singularity already

"Brains cannot be magic. They must be statistical machines."

Not everyone will agree, but we can forget them for a moment, because I do agree. Brains are statistical machines connected to some pretty good biological sensor arrays.

The problem with this argument is in the next, unstated part. Basically, you're implying that since brains are statistical machines, then a statistical machine should be able to emulate a brain if it's big enough. No, not necessarily. If you build a statistical machine to do something other than what a brain does, you'll get different results. If you build one to do something much more limited than a brain does, you'll get a much more limited thing out of it. We have a machine built to emit some text, not one intended to understand the text it's emitting. Similarly with other famous systems that make pictures or music. They weren't built to come up with ideas for written or drawn things then make the results. They were written to guess at the wanted response from an input phrase and spit it out. Scale them up and they will find more pictures with more comments or more answers posted online by humans who knew what they were talking about, but they won't get creative. This is not because a computer is incapable of creativity; that's again a thing on which people will differ but I think a computer could do it eventually. It's not going to be creative because it was written not to be. You can't build a brain that way.

Re: Late to the party?

Some regulations of that kind exist in law and you take them for granted. Other such regulations were loudly supported, but didn't get passed. The degree of regulation will depend on the country and may strengthen, weaken, or do both in parallel. I'm guessing that, based on other posts you have made where you indicate that you view your employer and every employer as an enemy always diametrically opposed to your welfare, you don't think there is enough regulation out there. I will agree as far as that there are regulations that should exist but don't, but don't let that make you think that no beneficial regulations have come to exist from the advocacy of the past.

EU mandated messaging platform love-in is easier said than done: Cambridge boffins

Re: Not sure it is such a complex task...

"I don't think the issues are technical at all."

I'm afraid you're mistaken. Let's take a few examples as challenges.

First, build me a system that encrypts a video call among multiple parties using PGP. Can you do it? Sure, eventually you can, but it will take some effort. Are you going to use a centralized server to distribute the video or will you run decentralized. The former has the advantage of not overburdening the clients that might be mobile phones. The latter has the advantage of not requiring the server to operate and facilitating self-hosting. If you're not using the server, how do you identify the users you want to send the keys to. This is why apps with video call features, which all the things mentioned in the article have don't operate together.

Now show me how you plan to get keys around. I've done PGP email. I have my key, and I have to give it to everyone I know. I could always use the PGP business cards that some people had, but I never did. I could arrange with a friend to introduce us on a channel somewhere with their keys serving as a secure exchange, which means that we will need a mutual friend every time we meet someone new. Or I can do what I actually did, which was to send my key in an unencrypted email and just hope that nobody intercepted things until after we had set it up. I just sent a message on Signal to someone I know personally, but not well enough that we've pre-exchanged keys. I could do that because I knew her phone number. If I had to deal with keys first, how would the nontechnical user do so? For that matter, how would I do so even when I know what the keys are for, because I'd have to first set up an insecure communication path to provide my key and get hers, and any attacker could pose as me to do that.

There will always be technical tradeoffs between a very secure system and one to which the average user can simply log in and they're there. Signal and most similar apps chose the latter using verified phone numbers as authentication tokens, and PGP is the former. There are some improvements we can make to both of them, but we cannot just combine the approaches.

Your examples aren't interoperable for the same reasons that these apps are not. I can't call your email address from my phone. I can't email you a voicemail. Sending an audio file as an attachment isn't the same. If I encrypt a message and send it to you as an SMS, your email client won't decrypt it. The things you mention aren't interoperable; they're decentralized. I'd be much more interested in decentralized communication apps than in enforced interoperability.

If you're using any of these apps, whatever one it is, it means you have a phone capable of running the apps (or you found a way to make them work on a computer without one, something I'd also like to see more work on). That means that you can have any number of alternatives there as well. On my phone, for example, you can find Signal and Jitsi icons. I can't group together people in video calls placed on both of them, but I can call people on either of them as I choose just by opening a different application. This means that, should Signal break because their centralized system goes down, it doesn't break my self-hosted Jitsi installation or the app that connects to it. If the two had to interoperate, then either Signal would have to connect to a self-hosted version and deal with possible problems or attacks raised by that or that Jitsi would have to drop support for self-hosted versions. Neither option appeals to me.

Re: What a load of bollox

"All they need to do is use a genuinely secure standard and compete on their interfaces."

Yes, but the problem is that the interfaces we had were not secure. Phone calls, SMS, and email were the main standards when these apps started showing up. The former two have no cryptography unless you cobble your own together, and PGP on email isn't understood by several clients and can be confusing to nontechnical users. The next apps to come along happened to include security, but it wasn't the point. WhatsApp was popular at first not because it was encrypted, in fact for a while it wasn't, but because it made communication cheaper in a land of paying per message, especially for those who send messages internationally. By the time that Signal showed up, WhatsApp was being eyed a bit too closely by Facebook, so even though it had become encrypted, people who cared about their security were edging away from it. There isn't a standard that all of these apps speak because many of them were designed in a time where they needed to fulfill a requirement that, in their mind, the existing options had failed to meet. Each new feature that needed to be added would require adjusting the standard, which isn't feasible if every other app has to support them immediately.

If we're adopting a standard, I suggest we make an easier to use wrapper around email; it's already decentralized, so if we add some cryptographic validation, that should handle text messaging. Except we also want secure audio and video calls, so email is out. So maybe we can use something like Jitsi's protocol except that's self-hosted and doesn't have a global network. So maybe we should use the Signal protocol like WhatsApp also does, except that will use different keys if you're sending through Signal-run or Facebook-run servers, and you only know which key to use based on which app you're employing and maintaining a centralized database of keys would introduce privacy risks. So it looks like we might have to take some of the underpinnings and make a completely new one so that apps we trust and apps we don't are all part of one network. Maybe there's a benefit to having disconnected ones for people to choose from after all. I'm all for standards, but not single mandatory standards for something as simple as text communication.

Judge grants subpoena to ID Twitter source code leaker

Re: Say 'cheese'

You could do that, but if my employer or any other employers I've worked for wanted to, they'd have to change the way they operate. Every employer I've been at has either had source control using git or something equivalent or, in one case many years ago, didn't have anything and when I said that we should be using source control, they said I could use whatever I wanted. This means that I can rewind through all the changes out there, so if I wanted to hide that it was mine, I could artificially discard some commits to make the point harder to identify. Git's commit system is also not going to natively handle watermarks because each modification would change the structures in an obvious way. They would have to patch it to handle them silently and could easily find it hard to do so without breaking things unexpectedly. It could still be done, but it's not going to be a turnkey solution.

Amazon opens its ad-hoc Wi-Fi-sipping Sidewalk mesh to all manner of gadgets

Re: Chuck everything Amazon in the bin

I assume this isn't an automated bot just yet, so could you please stop this? Whether your username is apt in suggesting you're posting chatbot responses or you're just pasting statements from the internet, it isn't helping the conversation.

Re: USA Only?

So far, it appears to be limited there probably because they haven't figured out the regulatory details for other countries and possibly because they haven't spammed out enough Ring and Echo devices in other countries for the geographic coverage. It will come sometime.

Re: a limit of 500MB a month

It's not your PII. Any of that would be sent by your devices and isn't subject to this limit. This limit is for how much of someone else's data can be sent via your network, data that will be sent by their devices somehow. This mesh network doesn't increase the amount of PII sent out, and if we want to fight that (and I am happy to participate), we have to fight the source of the privacy losses, most importantly Ring cameras but other Amazon IoT junk is also included.

Re: Otherwise One Would Never Know

Having heard stories of people who went on vacation and came home to the impact of a leak that had been undiscovered for days, I think they would disagree. One of the stories told to me concerned people who lived in a place with cold winters such that it also involved a lot of ice having formed afterward. Of course, my guess is that detectors for that are probably not installed unless you've already experienced it (I certainly don't have them). That doesn't justify Amazon's system here, just the leak detectors that can notify absent owners.

FTX cryptovillain Sam Bankman-Fried charged with bribing Chinese officials

I guess you can always use the forgot your password system on the login page to do it, but they really should have an internal method for known password changes. I also don't remember hearing about a breech and a quick search didn't tell me about it. I visit this site a lot. I'd assume the chances of seeing a report if they posted it here would be high. Did your password manager have more information about when and how the breech happened and how they know about it?

"The whole 155 years nonsense just translates to 'life' so I don't know why they bother."

Usually because the crimes in question don't allow for life sentences or place restrictions on when you can have them, but when you add up all the fixed terms that the crimes do call for, you get a big number. It still has meaning, because if you only did one of them, you could get a 5-15 year sentence which is not life and the effective life sentence only comes when you have a bunch of them. Also, there are regulations that apply to fixed-term sentences that don't apply to indefinite ones, which is another reason why indefinite terms have to be authorized in the statutes.

They tend to run as many charges in one trial as they can, so if the jury finds him guilty on all of the counts, the sentence can be a very high number, but if they acquit him on some of the charges, it would be much shorter. At the rate he's going, they're going to have to get him off of most of the charges for it not to be an effective life sentence.

Google again accused of willfully destroying evidence in Android antitrust battle

Re: Destroying evidence

It's a pretty easy distinction:

Not keeping evidence: Sorry, we didn't store that.

Destroying evidence: Sorry, we didn't store that even though we had a legal requirement to do so, the people involved knew about that requirement, and the system was already set up to store it by default and had to be deliberately altered in order not to.

It's the second one.

Investment bank forecasts LLMs could put 300 million jobs at risk

Re: they revel in it

Well, since the job losses they expect are not going to happen, I'm not sure it's worth worrying about. They just assume that something will follow the trend of another thing despite the fact that they don't understand either of the things involved. However, let's take your hypothetical and run with it anyway.

"I mean what would happen if everyone in the World just turned around and said, we're not going ot buy anything but food..no flights, no money in the banks, no cars, no computers, nothing....what would these fools [investment bankers, presumably] do?"

That's not going to happen either. It's almost definitionally impossible. So everyone decides not to buy anything. The premise already holds that none of us have jobs, so I'm not sure how we would be paying for the things if we bought them, but fortunately, we're not buying them so this isn't a problem. It will soon be a problem when we can't do any of the things that require these objects. Old computers are fine for a while, but eventually they break and if we're refusing to buy things, we can't buy replacement parts. Getting everyone to agree to live a spartan (as in ascetic) life to stick it to some annoying fictional bankers is not very palatable to the general public. Should it happen, I'd put money on the actual response being screaming and minor violence (hopefully not to the level of the other Spartan).

But if we all agree to live our ascetic lives of eating and basically nothing else, then the people with all the money can do whatever they want. They own the places that make food and they own the companies that own the real estate in which we live, so they have a source of any money we pay for those things. Since we're not buying anything else, they can have their pick of any item we didn't ask for. Basically, if your theory happened, it would create a perfect world for any materialist with money out there.

For whom the bell polls: Twitter voting is for Blue users only now

"They [non-paying users] [...] don't appeal much to advertisers. Whereas a smaller group of verified users requires less resources, is easier to control, and might well be very attractive to advertisers."

I'm not sure the advertising industry works the way you describe. Sure, a smaller set of targets you already know don't mind wasting a subscription payment is more valuable than a bunch of randoms, but that's the case because, if you can pay for number of ads delivered, you benefit by sending them to good targets alone. If you can't target them, however, you want as many impressions as you can get; a lot of them will ignore it, but the more people see the ad, the more recognition your name has. Cutting the number of users won't lead to celebration in advertising departments. Those who target already have or think they have better ways to identify good prospects than just the people who pay Twitter, and those that don't target appreciate that millions of people see their advert.

Fresh models of Framework modular laptops in the works

Re: Not aimed at business then?

I can see that some people would think the single 13-inch model is too small, but I don't understand why the 16-inch model they've just introduced doesn't solve that problem. How specific do the sizes have to be to handle people who want a small one and someone who wants a big one? Incidentally, in case it helps, the 13-inch screen actually measures 13.5 inches diagonally. That seems to me like a small difference, but so does 13.5-14 so maybe it's more relevant to you.

Re: Half-Sized Function Keys

I can't say I understand this. I would agree with you if they had taken the keys away, the way Apple did when they thought a strip of touchscreen would be better (I still don't get it). That has very little muscle memory potential, assuming that the touch positions are static and don't use the screen part. However, with half-height keys, there is still tactile indications where the keys are, they're still the same length across, and they work identically. I also can't think of any laptops that don't make those keys a bit shorter, so part of the problem may be that I've gotten used to that and don't notice any problem. I'm also a heavy user of keyboard commands and I don't find the shorter function keys causing any problem as I use them.

Since the keyboard is removable, it should be possible to make a different layout that also fits into the case. I'm not sure if you'd have to redesign the input cover (the part with the keyboard, power button, and trackpad, or if you'd accept a keyboard the same size as the original keyboard but with the keys positioned differently. Either way, it wouldn't require changing the computer to make this alternative keyboard. Unfortunately, you're the only person I've heard express this preference, so that is probably not enough demand to have Framework do it themselves.

Lebanon's IT folks face double trouble as leaders delayed Daylight Savings Time

Re: keep days short???

I assumed the change was from someone who sleeps later such that when they wake up, the sun has already risen. If they move the clocks back, that's one hour more of the sun being up where they would be awake to meet a work schedule aligned with the clock. For anyone who wakes up before sunrise, this isn't important. In fact, for anyone who doesn't, it's still pathetic to play around with clocks instead of just doing whatever religious rituals you decided you want to.

Publishers land killer punch on Internet Archive in book copyright court battle

Re: Puzzled.

For the record, they mostly did that but did try lending out unlimited copies before. They thought it made sense in the early days of the pandemic in 2020, and it didn't take long for a lot of publishers to get even more angry than they are today.

This might be one reason publishers aren't willing to settle the matter with the IA, although being publishers, they might have enough profit motive not to settle in any case. The publishers might think that doing something more obviously against copyright law might help their argument that the IA isn't working in good faith, and since the publishers can't point to a specific part of the law that makes the controlled one copy per physical book lending explicitly illegal, they might try using that argument instead.

"Transformative" in the case of fair use doesn't refer to the transformation the reproduction can make on society or the reader of the content, but what happened to the copyrighted work. It's meant to indicate the difference between copying the entire thing and quoting a section, starting with two pages then making up a new story for the rest of it and swapping some commas to make it not exactly the same. It's attempting to codify common sense into law, which never works as you'd want. In short, to argue fair use, you have to prove that you're making something different. Pointing out that your non-transformative use has a lot of benefits for people is not part of the law and a judge won't accept that as justifying a fair use defense.

Re: "Killer punch"? - no, gasoline for self-immolation by copyright 'rentiers'

"What better than to offer the Archive protection within Russia?"

Many things would be better than placing such a wonderful resource under the control of a dictatorship. I'm not particularly interested in watching Russia's censorship organizations loose on the IA.

"The transition from rentier (monopoly) economics to a proper market-driven set of business models truly compatible with market-capitalism, I have sketched elsewhere."

And when you have, I have objected to the unworkable dream you've sketched out. The dream where people continue to make stuff and give it away for free because a bunch of nice rich people pay for it out of the goodness of their hearts. If I can write any utopian idea and pretend it's a plan, it would be great, but it's usually better if we stick to the bounds of realism.

"Law lacking power to enforce is nothing more than recommendation."

This law has the power to enforce by massive fines with a government that has the ability to collect those fines. The Archive follows the laws; they're not about to go underground. I don't like the decision either, which is why I'm hoping that they can find a path out of the penalties.

"Just possibly, the Archive shall be obliged to close down. Yet, that would be a terrible outcome for the rentiers. Widely, they would be perceived as having destroyed a noble effort to share knowledge/culture fairly."

Maybe, but that wouldn't be a big blow to them. It would be a much bigger blow to me and a significantly larger one to the operators of the organization. The general public isn't going to stop buying books just because some publishers sued a site they haven't used. I get that you'd like this success to spell the death knell for copyright, but the facts don't work with that interpretation. I disagree with you that doing that would be a good thing, but regardless, this case will not get us closer to that world.

Re: Puzzled.

Most library ebook systems use a different mechanism where the libraries purchase ebook licenses from the publishers. Those licenses have a variety of terms and probably vary a lot by publisher and country. For example, the license can limit how long or how many times the library can lend the book before needing to buy a new license, how many copies can be lent simultaneously, and when the license becomes available. I have heard, for instance, that publishers sometimes don't agree to sell any ebook lending licenses for new releases until the book has been on the market for a while. Therefore, anyone who wanted a copy when it was new would have to buy one. Meanwhile, a library lending out copies on paper could just go and buy some as soon as they hit the shelves.

The Internet Archive is trying to lend out digital copies of the book without getting a license to do so first. The publishers are trying to argue that owning a paper book doesn't give them the right to do that. Unlike software, it's not as if the publishers put in a EULA before you could buy a book, so whether or not the right exists will depend on laws that were written well before this was conceived by publishers or libraries. The law doesn't say whether that's allowed or not, so both sides are resorting to legal arguments that are tangentially related to the case and hoping a judge will decide one sounds convincing. Maybe at some point a law will be passed to clarify what rights exist and what rights don't, but I wouldn't count on it being soon.

Re: History

"archive.org is useful to preserve things that might otherwise fall into the bit bucket. To keep things from being "erased from history" use archive.today or archive.is instead."

If you really want something archived, archive it on all of them. That way, if something happens to one of them, even something as basic as a database not syncing properly, there are backups. I don't know about how often the IA removes data, but they must face a lot of copyright claims and having seen some of the stuff that's uploaded there, some of those claims are entirely valid. I'm curious what examples you would provide that aren't legitimate copyright claims. Like it or not, even if it's being done to scrub something from the record, if it's the copyright holder who wants it scrubbed and they didn't use a license that explicitly waived that right, they have the right to have it taken down.

They're not responsible for ensuring you followed the law. The publishers are arguing here that, since it's hard to confirm that you're not breaking the law, therefore you shouldn't be allowed to do something that makes breaking the law possible. I don't think that particular argument is very strong. Sadly, neither was the Internet Archive's attempt to claim that copying a paper book into a digital file is a transformative activity covered under fair use, which normally involves much smaller uses like posting quotes in a review or making a parody. I'm not an expert in copyright law, and both sides are going to need one to have a chance of resolving this in the way they want. I'm hoping the IA can find a way to continue, or at least can escape large penalties, but they will probably need to drop some of their more expansive arguments to do that.

RIP Gordon Moore: Intel co-founder dies, aged 94

Re: And I had just bought some more Xeons, too…

Might I suggest that you haven't done any calculations on this?

"In the UK the official year-on-year inflation rate is said to be around 10.4%. In reality it seems to have been a weekly 10% increase on food, sometimes 50% overnight."

Do you know what that would actually look like? People have really experienced that, but I can guarantee that you have not. If there was an average weekly inflation rate of 10%, then something that cost £1 a year ago would now cost £142.04. Has that happened? To anything?

"Supermarkets say it's because of inflation. I am more inclined to believe it's their price gouging which is driving inflation."

There's some of each, but you can see some of the causes in the increase of raw commodities. For example, at the beginning of 2022 wheat cost on average $7.58 US per bushel. When 2023 started, that had risen to $8.95, about 18% up. The destruction of Ukraine's wheat industry didn't help with this. That increases the price for items made from wheat without the retail outlets having to do it. Not to mention that, if you're in the mood to assume that every price increase is due to someone's greed, you are ignoring all the links in the chain at which a price increase can be inserted and putting it all on the one link you have direct contact with. It wouldn't be that hard to trace the price increases through the chain, but you need to acknowledge what the real increase has been before you can take that step.

Also, you don't appear to understand how such stores work:

"it looks more like they are doing everything possible to maximise profit": They would be, since they really like profit, but let's look at what you think they're doing to do so.

"removing own and 'no-name' brands,": Nope. The ones they make themselves mean they get to have a higher profit margin on them and they make more profit. The no-name brands they don't make also tend to be from places that cannot command customer demand and thus the stores get better profit margins from the sale of those as well. This change decreases their profitability, and it might have something to do with the fact that larger companies with their own brands may be better able to obtain resources when there is a shortage.

"keeping shelf stock low,": Sometimes this helps, but mostly when they would waste some by keeping more. If you would stock up if they had more available, they'd make more profit.

"limiting choice,": I can't argue with this one in general, but as we've already covered the choices they removed, I'm not sure I need to.

Re: Has anyone ever wondered

Even if the music was better and the people were kinder, why do you assume that it's the computer's fault? Maybe you're unhappy about changes that have happened during your lifetime, but people always have some changes they wish hadn't happened, and it's not the fault of every other change. For example, I'm guessing you're not old enough to have lived before cars, but some people were, and they blamed cars for the ills they saw when your generation was younger. Does that sound reasonable to you?

Computers have brought us a lot of positives. We can communicate over long distances much faster and cheaper than we ever could before. People have been raised from poverty with this global communication capability. Personal ties have been strengthened by simple changes like the fact that I can call my family or friends that live in a different country, time zone, or continent without getting a massive bill. People's lives have been improved because they can look up important information rather than hoping that their nearest library had a book on the topic (for those fortunate to have a local library at all). Some jobs of pointless drudgery have been replaced by twenty-line scripts. Computers gave us all that. They also gave us internet trolls to annoy us, but before they gave us those, they gave us internet communities where we can talk to one another, something we both appear to enjoy since we're posting here. Computers have not just given us good things, and there are places where their effect has caused problems, but before you jump to blaming every ill you see with the present on that change, account for all the things you take for granted now that you did not have back then and attribute to computers the positive and negative things they actually caused.

Re: I am not fan of corporate cultures...

his so-called "law" was in reality just used as a "licence to bloat" by his company, Micro$oft(sic)

He didn't make Microsoft, nor did he work there. I don't know what you have to do to somehow decide that Microsoft was his company. His "law" was about hardware improvements, whatever you choose to do with those improvements. You can use a doubling in processing speed to do your previous calculations twice as fast or to do twice as many things, including operating systems.

I'm guessing that, given the level of understanding you've demonstrated this far, that it's worthless explaining what that "bloat" actually means. I might point out that, for the extra CPU time operating systems use today compared to the 1970s, you get a lot of features that you count on every day. I might also point out that you're free to write your own operating system that ignores all of that and will run at impressive speeds, except it won't have such things as multiprocessing, which is probably for the best because it will also lack inter-process security. There's a reason that every operating system used today on general-purpose computers wouldn't run on a 1970s-era CPU: we value the features those operating systems provide more than the speed benefits of dropping them.

The most bizarre online replacement items in your delivered shopping?

Some cats will eat dog food. A cat I had as a child didn't complain when we spilled some extra dog food and she got to snack on it. However, it would not be healthy for the cat to eat only dog food because it has a lot less protein which is necessary for the feline digestive system. Even if you have a cat that isn't picky about what kind of food it eats, you should use food intended for cats to ensure it contains necessary nutrients.

How Arm aims to squeeze device makers for cash rather than pocket pennies for cores

Re: Licencing Per-Device

Those modules aren't standardized. You could build a socket into which you can place an RP2040, but it would only let you swap in a different RP2040 at the moment. Other chips could be designed with the same set of pins, but they'd have to make sure their chip had the same peripherals as the RP2040 or it wouldn't work. Since it's not a standardized socket, I'm not sure it would count for their complaint.

Re: Licencing Per-Device

I would think that they would recognize how much they'd lose if they did that to the people using microcontrollers. If I worked at ARM and was pushing this policy, I would have applied it to the Cortex A series but would leave the Cortex M one alone. It's a lot harder to change out the higher performance cores that have been optimized whereas swapping to a new ISA for a cheap microcontroller that doesn't have to be too fast or efficient is easier, especially because manufacturers can continue to use old chips that are covered by the previous license while they test on the new ones. This is one reason why I'm not sure we have all the details, including a possibility that they're not going to do all the things the rumor suggests they might. Then again, there are many choices I would make based on a programmer's understanding of what would make money which professional managers don't do, so just because something seems stupid to me doesn't mean they won't still do it.

Re: Let's see how strong Arm's ARM is... Will they have much power to strong arm?

"So it seems that Qualcomm were right about what Arm are intending to do."

This adds a bit more to suggest it's probably true, but it's not yet confirmed. Basically, it's another rumor that's effectively the same as the rumor Qualcomm alleged last year. If, for the sake of argument, Qualcomm made it up, then seeing it again from someone who could have just heard it from Qualcomm wouldn't confirm it. I don't have any reason to think that Qualcomm made it up from nothing; I used the unlikely statement to demonstrate that we couldn't disprove something as absolutely opposite as that.

The ARM employee's statement, similarly, doesn't confirm that this change will come. It could be their complaint about what they see as a lack of technical development and would apply just as well if ARM intended to ask for a higher per-core price rather than changing the model this radically.

These statements aren't to say that I think the rumors are false. I have no special knowledge that would confirm or refute the rumor. It's certainly possible and could generate more profit, so there's reason not to reject the rumor out of hand. Still, at the moment, it's a rumor, not a forgone conclusion.

Re: Licencing Per-Device

This only applies if Intel and AMD decide to adopt the same policy. It's not inconceivable that an ARM chip could be socketted, and I'm sure it's been done at some point in the past, but none of the boards with ARM processors in common use have that setup. I've not seen a single SBC, let alone phone, tablet, or device using an ARM microcontroller somewhere, that has it socketted like that. The closest that I've seen are SOMs like the Raspberry Pi's Compute Module. That wouldn't be prohibited by this design, since the SOM maker sells those modules directly and doesn't necessarily make the hardware they're installed in.

IT depts struggle with skills shortages despite Big Tech layoffs

Re: This is where you realise that knocking up a webpage in Dreamweaver*

If you're using PHP to do something local, such as a backend to a form that's only running on the content, you can set up a local HTTP server with PHP pretty easily. This gets more complex if you also have other components, such as a database which you'd have to clone or a cluster you have to interact with. Depending on your server, you could mount the directory on your local machine and do all the editing directly on the remote files such that saving is as good as uploading, but this depends on having enough access to set it up for the server concerned.

Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools

"What are you even talking about here?"

I'm saying that you made up a lot of suggestions. All your suggestions sound basically Nazi-ish, so clearly that's either the example or similar to the example you were going for. None of them came from what they said; you invented all of them. As such, you made up a fake story about what they wanted not based on anything they said and attempted to use that fake story to discredit them.

I can interpret this in two ways: you didn't like their views and resorted to making up a story to make them sound bad, or you really don't understand how what you said and what they said don't line up. Neither option is good.

Re: In a word...

But in the world we live in, that didn't happen why? If you're saying that domestic protests about the war prevented the military from being as effective as they could be, that's obviously wrong. If you're instead saying that, given more time, the war could have been won by the American military, that may be true but it proves the original point. The war might have gone longer if the protests had not happened, whatever the results of that longer war would have been. You can think that that war would have been better or worse if extended, but what's undeniable is that, without domestic protest, it would have been extended. Domestic protest against wars tends to end them faster, though a dictatorship tends to have more resistance to doing things just because most of their citizens think that's the best plan.

"Does this sound anything similar to another situation that has happened historically in the world that you may have learnt about in school?"

What? Making up a story about what someone wants that isn't backed up by anything they said and was written entirely by those who opposed them, then using that fake story to discredit them? Yes, I learned about that kind of thing. It's not great for you to use that tactic. More people will recognize when it's being employed so flagrantly. There are better propagandists out there. You might want to learn from them if actual debate is beneath you.

Re: Typical Russian whining

It would be very dangerous to put anti-Russia comments on your LinkedIn page if you were living in Russia. That is not what I or the person who originally checked it expect to see. However, what is not at all dangerous is to post nothing there, either nothing at all or nothing political. Nobody would be arrested for being silent on LinkedIn. Similarly, nobody would need to prove themselves by posting pro-war material there. The fact that he did suggests that he had a reason to, either he believes it himself or he wants others to believe he does. Well, no matter which of those it is, I believe he does, so objective achieved.

That depends where the code is being used. For example, they're blocking contributions that would add support for the hardware they produce in the mainline Linux kernel. That means that they can't sell the hardware as compatible with mainline and have to patch themselves. Fewer people will buy their hardware if it has that limitation. In other cases, there is probably much less effect on them, but it happens automatically because the people have been sanctioned. GitHub doesn't have an office of people discussing whether a certain person being banned will affect Russia's electronics industry. They have a list of sanctioned organizations and they push the button to ban people connected to them. They assume the people who made the sanctions list know what they're doing.

Tails 5.11: Secure-surfing 'amnesiac' live distro arrives

Re: I high tailed it out ...

I didn't just mean that you wouldn't be using Tails much in your life. Your points are good, but even if you use Tails every day, you'll still not experience that much of Gnome. You'll see it when you start up, you'll click on some icons to open the applications you're going to use, and that's basically the end of your interaction with the desktop. Since there aren't any files and few programs, the desktop is basically just a collection of icons for the few choices and most use time will be inside one of those applications.

Re: I high tailed it out ...

It's not really meant for your everyday use, so the choice of desktop is not as important. Unlike a system where you're going to run a lot of applications and store all your work, this system has a few included applications and, while you can install some others, they are reinstalled on each boot. If you object to Gnome because it makes your computer blow up, good to stay away. If it's just because you don't like the experience, you'll experience very little of it if you're using Tails the normal way.

Attackers hit Bitcoin ATMs to steal $1.5 million in crypto cash

Re: A more general cloud computing reminder

Of course there is. This isn't an indictment of cloud. It's an indictment of their security and their ability to build a system. Anyone run a VPN endpoint, including one that operates from on prem hardware? How about a public service? A server that accepts SSH connections without going through that VPN endpoint first? All these things are "a system granting access to multiple operators at the same time where some of them are bad actors", no matter who owns the box on which the service runs.

These operators screwed up their own security by insufficiently checking the authorization of people uploading code. It would not have mattered if they bought their own servers to run that code, because just by putting their insecure system on the public internet, they made the problem happen. There are two solutions to this problem: make a proper system that has security planned in and tested or operate the insecure junk in a closed network with no public access. Either could have worked. Both would probably be best for something this sensitive. They chose neither. Anyone who thinks this is a reflection on cloud, including the designers of the system themselves, does not understand cloud or security.

B-List celebs including Lindsay Lohan fined after crypto shill probe

Re: I can't wait till they hammer Brady and Matt Damon.

I know at least one of those was in an FTX advertisement, in which case they probably followed the rules which basically say that you can hire any actor to say that your company is great, but making them hide information as was done here is the problem. If the actor just read lines that the company wrote, then the company can be at fault for the lines but the actor isn't expected to check their legality, and if the company had the actor read the required lines while still conducting fraud elsewhere, then the actor's definitely not at fault for what the company did. I don't know if both of them did that or if the other one did something different, so this wouldn't always apply.

Unknown actors deploy malware to steal data in occupied regions of Ukraine

"In a war, i'd assume that ad-hoc hackers will be defacto working for the state and would be going for information with some form of useful application just based on "what would I do?"."

I had to think about what I would do, but assuming I turned to hacking systems as a way of helping out, I would not do it this way because, having obtained useful information, I wouldn't know who I could give that information to. If I've discovered useful information about Russian troop movements but I don't know someone high enough in military command that can use it, then what good is it that I know it? If I already had some, I'd try passing things around in the hopes that it gets somewhere useful, but if I had to pick a target, I would pick one that can be affected without having to have connections. The alternative is making the information public in the hope that the Ukrainian military will find and act on it before the Russian military found it and changed their plan, but the risk is that someone else would impersonate me and post false information, so that method has risks too.

Re: Powershell ?

They target Windows because the people they want to get information about are using Windows. If the people were all using Linux, they would target Linux. Malware that does target Linux has been successfully written and deployed against Linux systems, including many strains of ransomware. Did you also think that Macs don't get viruses a while ago? Do you think that now?

Stanford sends 'hallucinating' Alpaca AI model out to pasture over safety, cost

Re: "safety"

If those rude things consisted of "[Insert name of group] are murderous evil people who can never be trusted, here are some invented examples, why don't we oppress or kill them", that could lead to some unsafe conditions. Chatbots lack the filter that most humans have against saying things that extreme, but unfortunately there are humans who would have that filter about saying it but lack the filter about not believing it. Even if it hasn't said things of that nature as many other chatbots have, if they can't stop it from saying something more minor that they see as offensive or unwanted, should they have hope that it never will say something dangerous? I wouldn't.