Posts by doublelayer

Well that escalated quickly: India demos homebrew mobile OS

Let's see images or code

This looks interesting, but I'm going to wait until the source (or since that seems unlikely a system image) becomes available. People have talked about custom operating systems before with generous praise of its independence, security, and openness only to turn out to be a copy of something with the names hurriedly swapped. If it turns out that this is Android, Firefox OS (for the third time), or even a variant of Salefish, they'll lose the points they got for actually following through on a plan I thought would just be posturing.

Windows 10 paid downloads end but buyers need not fear ISO-lation

Re: Just Today I Bought A "Refurbished" Workstation With Windows 10.......

Part of my comparison was thinking about Android from which Google Play Services has been removed, which I didn't mention. Even with those, though, there are a few features that people like which are unavailable without signing in, such as location or management of a lost or stolen device. I'm unaware of any third-party methods you could use to get that back and given Android's security model where you have to break your system to give an app root privileges, I can't imagine one working with certainty. I've decided just to live with the risk that if I lose my device, the most I can do about it is to send a SMS so anyone who picks it up can call me, but when I've listed features that people will lose without giving Google device access, this has been one of the least popular. There are also some applications that use the device's Google account as an identifier, either for antipiracy or just because the app forgot to delete that from the template. I choose not to use such apps, but it's annoying that they don't support an alternative identification method.

If you use a version of Android without Google's extra libraries of undisclosed code with every permission possible, you lose even more. Prepare for most of your Aurora-installed apps to crash on startup or worse, at some point after you've used them for a bit. FDroid-installed ones tend not to use those APIs, which helps a lot with general functions, but not so well with anything specific to a service or some more niche requirements (I looked for a while for an FDroid app that could use an IR blaster before the friend who asked me went to the Play Store and found one in thirty seconds).

Re: 500+ million PC's obsolete in 2025 unable to run Windows 11, 2026 might just be year of Linux

I'm not missing it; I'm disagreeing with you about how it will go. I think a lot of those machines won't go to landfill or use Linux because the users will be using them without security patches, the way they did with earlier versions. I won't do that, and I would advocate for an alternative path, but people don't automatically listen when I say "Try Linux. It's great" or "Stop using Windows 7 already because there are zero-days in it". I've even received complaints about that latter one here, where you'd think more people are familiar with computer security.

Similarly, I expect a large chunk of the machines owned by businesses to go to landfill before the switchover anyway simply because businesses replace machines more frequently and break them. Again, something I would prefer they not do, as repair is often worth it and recycling is better than trashing, but they do it anyway.

People have had lots of chances to adopt Linux and it hasn't been considered by many of them. I think the above two reasons will mean that this cliff won't be as convincing to Windows 10 users as you or I would like it to be.

Re: Just Today I Bought A "Refurbished" Workstation With Windows 10.......

It still works for 11 Pro, Enterprise, or Education, but no longer on 11 Home. I have heard of some hacks to get around it, but no guarantee that any of them work. This annoys me, but given how few people operate Mac OS, IOS, or Android without signing in and how many features the latter two drop when you don't, I doubt it will be resisted much by the general public.

If you can get this guy to help you out, your limiting factor would become the speed of picking up the floppies and stacking them in the right order. That is always assuming that you have a computer that doesn't have a problem addressing 512 separate drives simultaneously. Maybe get a group to spread the work out.

Re: 500+ million PC's obsolete in 2025 unable to run Windows 11, 2026 might just be year of Linux

I don't think that's going to happen. How many places still used XP or 7 machines after those versions went out of support? Of those who care about software support, how many will balk at buying replacements for computers, which while quite useful, will be at least seven years old at that point? I keep mine around longer than that, but think of how many broken computers are replaced frequently by IT departments and that many of them will have machines from the 2020 pandemic laptop purchase extravaganza which will all run 11. It probably won't be any easier to just swap Linux for Windows in 2025 than it is now, and companies that were willing to try it have had a lot of chances already.

ChatGPT talks its way through Wharton MBA, medical exams

Knowing how to search for information online is a needed skill. Yet we don't let people use that skill to get out of having any real abilities. It may occasionally be necessary for your doctor to go to Google to solve a medical problem, but I think we can agree that someone who does that every time is probably doing something wrong and we wouldn't feel so confident if our airline pilot typed "How do you fly this aircraft again" into a chatbot or search engine when told they have permission to take off. I use web searches frequently, but it doesn't replace the skills I studied and can use even if the internet's down.

That's not true. A computer could pass mathematics exams decades ago. We still make people do them. Not because you'll frequently need to perform complex computations without a computer, which is why advanced tests now tend to allow a basic calculator to be used, but to verify that the student has the understanding of the concepts which are applicable in courses that cannot be automated or at least not yet.

Similarly, introductory computer science exams are trivially easy to solve with a computer, and nobody cares if you can pass one of them. It's still useful because it verifies that a student has the grounding necessary to take on more advanced courses, the solutions to which are not so easily automated. Other tests involve knowing a lot of facts that could easily be retrieved from a database or parsed from an encyclopedia, which are of use for future applications. If you were taking geography just to memorize where each country is, you could just as well look up a map, but if you're going to use that knowledge to do things like predict weather patterns, anticipate problems in international disputes, or arrange for transportation, knowing nothing and having to constantly refer to an atlas would make you much less efficient.

In some ways, it would be best if we could make exams a way for people to establish their skill level without having an effect on their credentials so there's no incentive to cheat. This isn't easy to do, though, since academic credentials have attained quite a large part in getting jobs and proving one's abilities. Condensing all of education into a small number of standardized tests could have other detrimental effects as well.

World of Warcraft Classic lead dev resigns to protest 'stack ranking'

Re: Microsoft killing stack ranking

According to Nadella's speeches, he encountered a lot of problems trying to build functioning cloud teams with this ranking system due to the internal competition. It's not surprising that, having taken over and elevated the cloud to one of their more profitable products, he would have actually tried to improve the system. I doubt your urge to assume Microsoft has to fail at everything is true in this case.

Re: I wonder

I'm guessing there were five slides as follows:

Slide 1: Graph of GE's market cap by year, ending before it had that whole economic collapse deal. Caption: "Would you like this?" Hidden note to presenter: "Stopped ranking in 2016 after these people graduated management classes that could tell them why"

Slide 2: Graph of big companies in the stock market showing Microsoft as biggest or second biggest. Caption: "Learn how they got this way" Note to presenter: "Hope these people don't know that Microsoft stopped doing this a decade ago."

Slide 3: Diagram of stack ranking of a large team with extra notes, for example "Sold 50% above average" for the high person and "set building on fire" for the lowest.

Slide 4: List of platitudes about "Move into the future with the best of your business and constantly strive to hire the best people".

Slide 5: We at WeCanUsePowerPoint Consulting Group are proud to serve your company by providing you the best employee management services. That will be $8 million please. Comment from supervisor: don't include the bill in the presentation. Comment from writer: I will make that change before presenting this to the client. Comment from supervisor: we should have a spot in this presentation where we put the client's name so it doesn't look like we just send this to everybody. Hidden note to presenter: "You should distract participants until someone figures out how to delete these comments from the presentation."

British monarchy goes after Twitter, alleges rent not paid for UK base

Re: The fundamental problem with the business

"Can anyone explain to me why a company like Twitter needs pricey digs in the center of London? Or any other big city?"

They don't. Until recently, Twitter was one of the companies most enthusiastic about remote working, and their workforce was choosing to work from a lot of places. They'd likely have cut some of their expensive real estate had that policy remained.

Now that work from the office has been decreed, it makes a bit more sense to have expensive office locations, but not entirely. If you're looking to attract top talent, it doesn't always work to put the office in the cheapest location. The cheapest place in the country is likely to be the place where people don't want to live, which hurts when you're trying to attract people who have the choice to work for a lot of companies that might be available in a nicer place. The cheapest part of a metropolitan area, while better than a random place in the country, is still likely inconvenient for transport and may be unsafe or perceived as such. There's also an advantage in putting your office nearby offices of other companies because it makes it easier to hire people away from those companies when you don't have to ask anyone to relocate, and when companies have done this for a few decades cities start to become associated with the industries that have clustered there. If you're willing to compromise on some of that, you can probably get lower costs in various other places at the cost of more difficulty in hiring.

WFH can get you 40% salary boost in UK and US tech jobs

Re: Alright for now, but...

Remote working doesn't prevent any of the "that's not the way things are done round here" culture. In fact, I think it's slightly more likely to kill suggested improvements, because there is less of an opportunity to suggest the improvement casually to individual colleagues to get their thoughts before bringing it up to everyone in a larger team meeting. No matter where people are working, a workplace that doesn't want to change won't.

Bill shock? The red ink of web services doesn’t come out of the blue

The same is true of people who don't pay sufficient attention to backups. Nothing is immune to something catastrophically collapsing, and it is the job of the administrators to have a method of recovering from a situation like that. Whether that's using multiple datacenters in a cloud array or having physical servers in multiple places, it involves extra expense for the benefit of resiliency. There are many actions OVH customers could have taken which would have survived the loss of the datacenter, many of which wouldn't even require downtime. OVH's example demonstrates that the cloud goes wrong, but not that on prem is better.

A lot of things were different in the 1960s, not universally for the better and most of which is not coming back.

"it's worth remembering that back then almost everyone created open-source software code to help other users get things working. And everyone could read the source and update their own work without having to panic about what might happen."

That's a bit charitable. Since people were writing in assembly quite frequently, the programs people received could be more easily edited. You can theoretically modify the binaries we receive today, but it's harder because they're compiled from more complex languages and tend to be much bigger. A lot of software wasn't open source just in the sense that it wasn't published for anyone's use, but kept restricted to the organization that wrote it or to people who bought it. Those people would have access to the code, but it wasn't like modern open source is where any person who wants can get a copy for free in a few minutes and with clearly defined rights to copy, modify, and distribute.

"CP/M and MSDOS were created and while they made a few people get a decent payroll, neither operating system generated millions"

Millions of what? Of dollars or pounds, yes they did. Digital Research had revenue of $45M in 1983. We all know how profitable Microsoft was. Some of that came from other software like compilers for DR or productivity software from MS, but a lot of that relied on the operating systems that software ran on. Millions of computers? I'm not sure, but I think DOS did have millions of installs eventually. CP/M came along too early to get mass adoption because computers weren't mainstream in the 1974-1983 period.

"But now Twitter is worth 41 billion dollars"

No, somebody paid $44B for it. That doesn't mean it was worth that much, and now that that person has spent a few months smashing it, it's worth less than it used to be.

"where did all that money come from,"

From the people who thought that Musk-owned companies are a lot better than anyone else making similar products and thus valued them very highly, from cryptocurrency speculation, and banks who are now regretting that they put up cash when a billionaire decided to make an impulse buy. But if you're meaning companies other than Twitter, such as modern operating systems, it came from the fact that billions of people are using computers today who had never thought of doing so in the 1980s.

"and where is it going? Is everyone happy or just in debt?"

Everyone isn't happy, but I'm not sure that's ever an option. If we're specifically speaking of Twitter, then some people don't use it (myself included), so my happiness level hasn't changed as it's been damaged. If we're talking large corporations in general, we had large corporations before; they were just different names. It causes problems now for the same reason that it did before, and we'll have to deal with that, but it's not always on the top of my list of problems I need to solve.

India uses emergency powers to order takedown of BBC documentary

Re: Unforgivable!

Ah, this accusation again. As with the last time someone said this, I've hopped onto a UK endpoint I have access to, typed in the URL, and got their website immediately. Possibly some ISPs have put in a DNS modification on their server, but it's not all of them, it's not legally mandated, and if you don't understand the difference, you need to learn some basic IT.

Intel: Please buy these new 13th-Gen CPUs, now with 24 cores

"And again, there are going to be 5, not 32 of them."

This is incorrect. There are going to be five lines of parts serving different power levels, each containing at least one but probably more individual choices. You could argue that Intel has only five lines (I9, I7, I5, I3, and the thing that used to have the Celeron/Pentium name but now they just call Processor). The 32 mobile choices are variants of these five lines, as AMD's choices will be. Either way, there are lots of choices and you have to figure it out.

Hundreds of Spotify staff stream out the door in latest layoffs

A global streaming business which needs infrastructure maintained in multiple places and monitored for scaling as well as functionality, working with artists and recording companies requiring salespeople and contract lawyers, makes money from advertising and thus needs people to work with advertisers in all the major markets, and also owns a lot of podcasts which involves the work of a media company as well. Yes, you end up finding new tasks to do which requires hiring more people to get them done. Writing an app that can play some audio files off this server over here takes a single person or more likely a small team. Scaling it up to the level described is another problem. Doing that while making money is even more challenging, and from the sound of it they haven't figured that part out.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: Gammon's

I don't think 1947 is an accurate cut-off for this. I too wouldn't go as far as Hong Kong, but I would definitely extend it through the 1950s when independence movements in several African colonies were being repressed by the colonial administrations, at least into the 1960s when those places received independence. I'm making exceptions for places with small land areas or populations*, but with places like Nigeria (1961), Kenya (1963), or Botswana (1966), I think they should undoubtedly be included. It's not just Africa, either. Other colonies were granted independence only after struggles and around the same time. Some examples: Malaysia in 1957, Cyprus in 1960, Jamaica in 1962, Yemen in 1967.

* Not that the smaller colonies or countries aren't important as well, both to their residents and to history, but if we're talking about the strength of the empire as an idea in British politics then large numbers of people or chunks of the planet are more in the spirit of things.

Re: Learn both? It's all in the mind

Amusingly, half a degree in Celsius is equal to 0.9 degrees in Fahrenheit, so it's the Celsius thermostats that have more granularity.

Re: The amount of times...

"Fahrenheit's scale was 0F being the coldest achievable temperature with water ice and NaCl, with 100F being core body temperature."

Wrong on both counts. On Fahrenheit's original scale, 0 was the freezing point of a solution of ammonium chloride (NH4Cl), not table salt (NaCl). As neither compound is used directly on roads, the point at which it is not useful depends on which specific salt is being used in the area, and more importantly on where the compound has been applied and whether it has been moved or not. The temperature of the human body was not 100. It was 96. Of course, neither value is considered average for body temperature (and body temperature is incredibly variable in any case, whereas boiling points of things at a specific fixed pressure is stable). This is because the modern scale abandoned both limits by instead fixing 32 and 212 as the values for water freezing and boiling, moving both of the original bounds slightly and making use of the original scale inaccurate to modern users.

Re: Hexidecimalization

Yes, 12 is a great base, which is why the imperial system of length makes so much sense: 12 inches to the foot, 12 feet to the yard, 12 yards to the rod, and 12 rods to the mile which as we all know is 1728 feet. 16 is also a nice base, hence why the weight system of 16 ounces to the pound, 16 pounds to the stone, 16 stone to the ton (256 pounds) is so logical.

Oh, wait a minute. I think I made a typo somewhere.

We use decimal numbers. Maybe things would have been more logical if we used a different base, but we did not. Unless you want to switch to using base 12 for everything, get used to using base 10. We don't say that something weighs 13A pounds, so while we're using decimal numbers to express the number of the units we're using, we should also use decimal to divide the units.

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

"As George Orwell wrote in his dystopian 1984, half a litre of beer is not enough, a full litre is too much. A pint of real ale is spot on and no free publican in the UK would dare challenge that."

And you've missed the point of the line. The person who was complaining about the units used was an elderly man that the protagonist, Winston Smith, was attempting to question about the past. Smith has lived almost his entire life in a place where whatever the government says is accepted and he can't tell whether it's true or not, and he wants to learn what life before that was like. He finds an old person who isn't a party member and hopes that this guy can provide him that knowledge, but all this man can do is complain or babble about small and unimportant details, such as whether top hats are in fashion, the details of a fight he got into in the 1920s, or the units in which alcohol is sold. The person arguing about units wasn't Orwell saying that metric units are bad or the sign of despotism; it was a man failing to care about important details while being consumed by trivialities.

Elsewhere in his writings, Orwell argued for both systems. I don't know that his opinions on these matters are much more important than the average person, but you can consider those as his true beliefs if you want.

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

"Floppy disks were sold in inches - first,"

The writing on the package was in inches. The generally used term was in inches. The standard for how to make them was in metric; the 3.5 inch disk is in a case that measures 90 by 94 mm. 3.5 inches would have been 88.9 mm, but that's not how wide the disk is, either the rectangular case or the circular media inside it.

Universities offered software to sniff out ChatGPT-written essays

Re: Just expell anyone caught

One problem is that a tool like this will only give you a prediction of whether GPT was used. It can say that such a thing is probable, but not that it is certain. If a student denies it and you have a tool which says "computer says yes" but you can't verify it, what will you do? If you catch someone using it to generate work or can prove it with certainty, then treating it as a violation of policies against cheating makes sense, but there will have to be some plan for cases where it's in doubt whether it happened.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is a morally corrupting influence

GPT, meet BOFH

Because this is The Register, I felt the need to test out GPT on one of the more popular parts of this paper. I don't think GPT's been reading our posts, or if it has, it doesn't understand the way we view things.

What is the BOFH?

BOFH stands for "Bastard Operator From Hell." It is a fictional character and archetype that is often used in the IT industry to describe a system administrator or network administrator who uses their position of power to inflict misery on those who they perceive as being less knowledgeable or less skilled than themselves. The BOFH character is often portrayed as being arrogant, lazy, and abusive, and is often used as a cautionary tale to illustrate the dangers of giving too much power to a single individual.

Nice try, GPT.

This is a perfect example of a question you should not ask GPT. GPT does not understand the concepts of "out of date" and it doesn't get updated learning data until they make GPT4. This leads to two problems: if interest rates have changed, it won't tell you that, and if something used to be good but no longer is, it won't know that as well. There's also the problem that not all the data GPT was trained on in 2021 was fresh in 2021. There's a chance you'll get data from 2013 presented as if it is accurate today. If you verify the answer, you'll just have wasted some time on an answer you throw away, but if you don't verify the answer, you'll be acting on completely useless information.

New IT boss decided to 'audit everything you guys are doing wrong'. Which went wrong

Re: Sometimes people being stingy with the cash works in your favour

Because, in English, "meet" and "meet with" are different terms. If I say I met Alice, the implication is that I did not know Alice before, but now we do know each other, whereas if I say "I met with Alice", the implication is that we organized a meeting and have now conducted that meeting. There are extra definitions, for example "meet" can also mean that we happened to be in the same place, but it usually doesn't have the indications of a planned meeting for a specific purpose that "meet with" tends to. Sometimes terms are created by combining existing words, such as back up, write off, or call out. You know what all of those things mean, but if I say that I backed the disk, wrote the broken server, and called the bad maintenance that led to this situation, I sound wrong.

Re: Eejit

The way I try to do it is that I give my personal number to a few people, and every one of them is a person I trust to only call me if it's absolutely necessary. If my boss isn't one of those people, then they'll just have to explain the problem to my colleagues who will either fix it or relay the message to me. This probably doesn't work for everyone, but it's worth trying if it sounds feasible.

I don't like the phrase because I've seen it used for completely different things. I've heard people describe what "quiet quitting" means to them which has covered everything from "I'll work exactly the hours they said on the right tasks at my normal level of productivity, but no overtime" to "I'll sit at my work desk and do literally nothing", with multiple intermediate levels. Choice 1 is being a good employee, and for many people the managers wouldn't know you were doing anything different. Choice 2 is something where being fired should be expected. It's hard to tell what any person means when they say it when there are this many options.

"There is a 24/7 aspect to a (real) leadership role that perhaps needs to be recognised in some way"

That depends heavily on whether people are in fact ringing that number. I'm not 24/7 on call anymore, but people at work know my personal number, and if something sufficiently bad happens at night and only I can fix it, then they'll use it. Should that count as 24/7 because people could call at any time, not because my contract doesn't say it is, or not because people don't in practice find any issues requiring them to call so my evenings remain relatively undisturbed? How about in my previous job, where we were assigned to week-long on call shifts where we were responsible to handle incidents at any time of the day or night, but still in practice no sufficiently bad incidents happened after 20:00 or so. If anyone opened one, I'd have gotten a call, so was that 24/7?

Unless this person was dealing with such incidents at night all the time, and I seriously hope this isn't the case, maybe it wasn't really a 24/7 position. There's a difference between doing something at all hours and having the chance of an emergency at any time.

If your DNS queries LoOk liKE tHIs, it's not a ransom note, it's a security improvement

Re: Am I being Dense?

"surely the workaround for the workaround is to poison with all the variants."

Yes, but that's a lot harder. I calculated the effect on www.theregister.com in a different comment, but it requires you to be able to send 64 GiB of packets to the server before the real packet comes back from the resolver, which is a neon sign indicating you're doing something bad and giving any sufficiently-motivated defender information about your malicious systems, and in addition it would be pretty hard to manage even if they had all the alarms turned off.

"isn't there still only one cache entry for the domain even though there are many possible case variants?"

Probably, assuming the cache is being run correctly. This would be a bit of extra assurance that that cache line is valid and can be trusted by the next system to receive the answer if it's also randomizing and checking case. If the cache isn't doing that, then this is likely to lead to frequent cache evictions and reduced performance until someone changes the code.

Re: An end-run around DNS based ad blockers??

Any DNS filter worth using understood that domain names are case insensitive a long time ago, hopefully as of version 1, and blocks anyway. If yours doesn't, find a better one.

Re: Am I being Dense?

In this example, there are 17 characters that can be either case, so 2^17 or 131072 combinations you'd have to spam. For each of these, you have to send 65536 packets with different IDs to avoid being filtered, which comes to a total of 2^31 packets. Each DNS response packet will have at least 32 bytes and likely more like 50 depending on whether they compress the name, have multiple addresses, or use IPV4 or IPV6 addresses. Even if they managed to compress it to 32, which I don't think is possible, that's 64 GiB in spam packets that has to be sent to the resolver before the real result comes in. In order to manage that, you'll need a really fast network connection, and their firewall is going to start sending alarms about the DoS they think is going on. Compared to the 3.125 MiB needed to attempt the same attack on a resolver that always uses lowercase, it's much harder to pull off.

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

Re: Oh for the love of kittens

The difference, which I think you probably already know, is that if a person is smoking next to me, I'll be breathing in some level of smoke from them unless I set up a barrier or leave. If someone is eating next to me, I do not eat any of what they're eating by my proximity. There may be other problems, but it's much easier for me to breath something in the air that I don't want to than for me to put something I don't want to into my mouth and swallow it.

Re: What a load of cobblers

I can't say I've had that experience; while I've occasionally had someone bring around stuff, they have always accepted a polite refusal and more often just left the food somewhere and told us about it. I know my experience doesn't work everywhere, but I hope it's more common than yours. If someone did that to me frequently enough, I'd either play a game of counting how many refusals it took to make them stop or I'd just accept something and discard it, depending on how comfortable I was with the way they were doing it.

Mentally scarred: Kenyan workers taught ChatGPT to recognize offensive text

It wouldn't work. Instead of directly hiring people in a different country, the company in whatever developed country would contract with a subsidiary if allowed, local company if not, to provide a service for a certain amount, and that local company would pay the people who provided it. If this was audited very much, the employing company could provide services like obfuscating how many people did the work and how long it took, because they're providing a service, not the labor. Contracts that pay for tasks completed instead of hours worked are common.

We blew too much money hiring like crazy so we gave you the boot – Amazon

Unemployment information not a surprise

These job cuts haven't yet led to a surge in US unemployment insurance claims. According to the Department of Labor, for the week ending January 14, preliminary figures indicate there were 190,000 claims for unemployment insurance, a decrease of 15,000 from the previous week's unrevised level of 205,000.

This isn't surprising; the job losses that were announced this week haven't taken effect yet. They wouldn't be reflected in these numbers until the people concerned have finished their notice period and are no longer employed, and that's definitely a few weeks away if not spread out over several weeks. The people who lost their jobs this week won't be reflected in this data until some time in February or March. The filings from Amazon indicate March 3 for at least some of them.

FTX audit finds $415m in crypto mysteriously vanished

Re: So someone steals something that doesnt exactly exist

The inherent value of a lot of things are overstated. Sure, you can make jewelry out of gold, but if that's the only reason people were using gold, we'd do a lot less mining for gold. If everyone decided tomorrow that gold only has value for the stuff we're going to make out of it, like many other metals, the price would fall quickly. Gold wasn't used as a medium of exchange because there was a lot of demand for jewelry manufacture, but because it was hard to counterfeit, relatively portable, and barter got too complicated. Similarly, fiat currency's value isn't just taxes, but that you can use it to pay people for stuff that you want. In situations where you can't do that, it stops being valuable, even when you can still pay the taxes with it. Countries where the currency has collapsed see the use of other currencies because they're more useful in obtaining needed commodities even when taxes can't be paid in those currencies.

Bitcoin's not being used as a currency, but not because it doesn't have value. It's not being used as a currency because it's crap at being a currency. It is not accepted in many places, so you can't use it exclusively. Typical transactions are costly and slow, which doesn't apply to used payment methods. The value jumps around all the time, which while better than something that's always inflating, means that people can't be sure of price stability. For these reasons, those who have Bitcoin tend to treat it more as an investment commodity than as cash, which exacerbates a few of these problems.

Re: These massive loss figures just roll off the tongue

This is like saying that the Madoff scheme didn't put people off the stock market. There are a lot of reasons not to like cryptocurrency in general, but the FTX debacle doesn't prove it; it proves that investing in something that's even worse than a cryptocurrency (a centralized token that a company just makes up instead of a decentralized one that you can audit if you want to) is a bad idea. It also indicates that giving your money to people who are going to steal it is bad, but this one is less surprising. But for instance, it doesn't say much about Bitcoin, because FTX's crimes didn't rely on anything unusual about Bitcoin any more than it relied on peculiarities of dollars.

It's not hard to have real reasons to distrust or dislike cryptocurrency. Attempting to expand any event into an "all cryptocurrency is bad" message risks making arguments that are inaccurate or difficult to defend in detail.

Bringing the first native OS for Arm back from the brink

Re: Closed source private software to Open Source public software

There isn't much profit in Risc OS. You can't sell it to most people who want any level of app compatibility, and the people who understand its limitations and still like it also know that you can get it for free if it's open source. Some of the skills required to get it and maintain it are skills that someone would pay for, but they would be paying someone to use the skills on something unrelated, the same way that if all the developers currently working on Android ROMs for mobile phone manufacturers turned their attention to mobile Linux we'd have a great product that runs on everything, but those people are either not interested or too busy doing work that actually makes money.

Wyoming's would-be ban on sale of electric vehicles veers off road

Re: Just a symptom...

The hypothetical appears to include a lot of being cut off, because the other states are not going to provide power or equipment and Wyoming isn't going to provide agricultural or mineral products, which is a bit stronger than sanctions placed on Russia these days. I don't see why the states that are refusing to power or supply the state would still provide transport, but as I say, it's not at all realistic that any of this would happen so maybe establishing the specific rules isn't very important.

Re: Just a symptom...

"They could sell their coal to China in return for batteries and solar panels."

If I'm being faithful to this crazy hypothetical where Wyoming is basically cut off by everything around it and vice versa, good luck shipping the coal to China without using the train lines that go to other parts of the US first. I don't think flying it there (assuming there's an exception for flights over the rest of the country) will be very efficient. Then again, it's a pretty ridiculous hypothetical, so I'm joining in just for fun.

Re: I just had to do it...

Admittedly, in the very hypothetical situation described, where all the Amish move to Wyoming, there would be changes. I'm not sure what they would be, but if you take 300k people and put them in a place that only has 500k people in it, there are going to be changes. Whether that's 500k people who decide they don't like the newcomers who take up plenty of space, the existing population deciding they really do like them and will start adopting more of their culture, or someone in the community who realizes that they now make up 37% of the state population and probably majorities in many places and can therefore wield a lot more political power than they could when they were more spread out, there would be some knock-on effects. With any realistic movement pattern, where smaller numbers take a long time to decide on a new location for a community, you're likely to be right about the level of change.

University of Texas latest US school to ban TikTok

Re: "School"

Because it's where people who used to be and sometimes still act like children are educated? The only leap you have to make is from "place of education for this specific group" to "place of education", which isn't very far. They do other things there, which is why they get to be called universities, but a rather important part of their existence is education.

Indian official reveals 'plan' to build a national mobile OS

You realize you're listing OSes that almost universally already tried being mobile OSes with the backing of large hardware manufacturers and failed? Maemo is the only one that you can argue wasn't tried enough because Nokia was bought to bolster Windows Phone, but Samsung tried several Tizen smartphones before sending it to watches and TVs before retiring their Tizen watches as well (they're back to the Android-based Wear OS now on those). QNX was tried repeatedly and it failed on each iteration to get people to switch over. Maybe because it took a long time to get Android compatibility, and incidentally I think it's likely they'd need a lot of updating to get the layer they eventually developed working well with modern apps again.

Sailfish exists, and they could use it if they wanted, but I doubt it's going to take anything over because it's had a while to gain general support and it hasn't accomplished that goal. You still need to use a Sony device, and it's not any Sony device but a particularly small list of compatible models. Could someone buy it and build it into something great? Yes, just as someone could build an OS from scratch and grow it to eclipse Android. Both are possible and both are fiendishly difficult. I don't think India or anybody else has the motivation, resources, and tenacity to make that happen. I have slightly higher hopes for the open-source mobile Linux projects because they allow people to drop out and be replaced by others and people who want something and can build it can be rather intense, but even that has a pretty steep climb to get anywhere.

That's quite likely. Even when Huawei wanted to indicate that they've invented a completely new OS, with a Harmony-specific app format and everything, it turned out to be Android with the labels in the UI but nothing else filed off. Their new app format turned out to be a different extension and a few changes to make the files incompatible. India's attempt, if it ever starts*, will also recognize that there are a lot of Android smartphones in India and that you need app compatibility with those. They'll consider this problem and come up with three solutions:

1. Convince every developer to port to their new OS. This will probably be the government's position, and either some person will inform them that it's never going to happen or just change the specs so they don't have to try to make it happen.

2. Make their own custom OS with an Android compatibility manager, perhaps building it off the mobile Linux projects and something like Waydroid. This would be my favorite because we could take chunks of their stuff and include it in the existing mobile Linuxes, which are not very good right now but I'd like to see improve. It is also a lot of work for an OS the people won't buy, so I doubt they're going to waste their time doing it.

3. Why reinvent the wheel? Just use Android and call it something else. You wouldn't be the first, second, or ninth group to do that. Nobody would know except the technical writers who would write a full description of the OS a week after the first beta was leaked, but only other tech people will read that.

* I think what is most likely is that India makes a lot of noise about doing this and contacts a few places to begin work on their new project. A few months from now, they drop it after being told what actually doing it would cost and what the product would be like, change the spec so that someone makes a mobile app for something they want, call it by the same name, and then try not to mention it again.

Time to buy a phone as shops use discounts to clear out inventories

Re: A maze of twisty little phones ... all alike

"but I can't justify the expense of a top-end model so if there's any recommendations for a phone I should look at, let me know."

I don't know your preferences, so it's hard to recommend something. I would need to know what features are important to you and what you're willing to compromise on. I can recommend this database to allow you to perform a detailed search on your own, but you could also clarify what would constitute the ideal feature set.

Tesla faked self-driving demo, Autopilot engineer testifies

Re: Everybody knew this is a tech demo

"It is a demo what their target is, what they want, not of what is possible"

We know what "car driving correctly without person operating it" looks like. We don't need a video to show us that, and if you wanted to make one, you could always cut out the driver in editing. The point of a tech demo is to demonstrate the technology, and they specifically failed to show what the technology is capable of to mislead people who would be paying for it. If I showed you a device doing something which turned out to be a faked demo of a feature that might be added in a decade or so if I get around to it, you'd return the product and demand a refund and you'd be right to do so.

Nearly 300 MSI motherboards will run any old code in Secure Boot, no questions asked

Re: devices boot only software trusted by the maker of the hardware.

"Who are MS to decide which OS gets keys?"

They're not. They don't have that authority and never had. The user of the hardware does though. The firmware wasn't written by them in the first place, though they do support it. But it's good to know you know what you're complaining about.

I was reasonable to ask to WFH in early days of COVID, says fired engineer

Re: I'm not torn at all

"The employer is placing unreasonable burdens on the employee, without any evidence of necessity."

From the limited details in the article, all of which comes from this guy's side of the argument, we don't have enough information to know whether they had necessity or not. In March of 2020, the danger level of the disease was less well-understood, and plenty of places thought that it was less dangerous than it turned out to be. Making a bad call in March with basically no data to go on is a lot more reasonable than making the same decision in August when things had become clearer.

I have no idea what the situation is, and therefore I can't decide who has the better argument. For example, there are people who can't do their job either at all or well outside the workplace, for example if it requires physically accessing certain equipment or facilities. I don't know if his job had such requirements. Whether it did or not is very important in determining whether the request was reasonable. I don't find it hard to believe that an employer would say WFH was impractical when it wasn't to get rid of someone they didn't like, and I wouldn't find it hard to believe that someone would ask for WFH when it actually was incompatible with their position, but only one of them can be true about this job. Do you have sufficient evidence to indicate which one it is, or are you just picking the one that seems more likely and assuming it must be true?