Posts by doublelayer

OpenAI's ChatGPT crawler can be tricked into DDoSing sites, answering your queries

Re: All hail to the AI. May the AI kill us all.

Tell me, how does a load balancer make one domain name point to multiple websites? As I'm sure you know, what it does is allow that website to be hosted on multiple servers. It does not change the fact that both of those addresses are going to be handled by the same cluster, at least at first. A flood of requests can swamp a load balancer just as much as they can swamp a single server. If you have a load balancer, chances are that you have more resources so you need a bigger flood to disrupt you. Otherwise, there is no difference and no inaccuracy in the statement.

Clock ticking for TikTok as US Supreme Court upholds ban

Re: Impossible to ban?

You haven't been near many of them, have you? The amount of effort they put into things they care about is a lot higher than the amount they put into things they should care about but don't. That describes a lot of adults too. Keep in mind that, within a couple days of a shutdown, there will be several Youtube videos giving step-by-step instructions for using a VPN to access TikTok, whichever one sponsored that video, and that makes the effort very small as there's no research or testing required.

Re: Inquiring minds want to know

The money problem is definitely real, and it's the main reason why most of it will shut down in the US. The servers are not a problem. Canada has lots of places where you can rent or place servers. Canada also uses TikTok, and it has not banned it. If, for some reason, TikTok was willing to continue operating in the US market without getting advertisers to pay them, they would do it from Canadian and possibly Mexican servers and responsiveness would not be the problem. I don't think they're going to try because:

1. They would have no reason to do it. They want to make money, and they wouldn't be.

2. They probably still think that Trump's going to reverse this shortly, and if they're right, effort spent moving resources would be wasted.

3. If that doesn't happen, they probably think they stand a better chance at having it reversed by actually shutting down and having the most determined users complain loudly than by providing them a less functional version and letting those users gradually become bored with the service.

Raspberry Pi hands out prizes to all in the RP2350 Hacking Challenge

Re: Transparency

Neither description of the results is entirely correct. The attacks were successful, and they did reveal things that are useful to an attacker. If, for example, someone built a system out of these but stored an encryption key in them so the communication couldn't be spoofed, these attacks would be sufficient to retrieve the key. That makes "they weren't able to do so in a way that exposed anything useful" wrong. Depending on what you were doing, though, that doesn't make all the security features ineffective. Injecting new code is not easy compared to retrieving that data, meaning that not every desired exploit is equally feasible with these methods.

Nor is this something unique to this chip. While there are some chips that are produced with the intent that it be even more difficult to break into them, a lot of embedded parts with similar security methods wouldn't stand up to people with lasers either. They're just not offering any money to the people who can use them. There is a limited number of devices which need to remain impenetrable when you have access to the hardware, expensive tools, and the willingness to destroy it. Many of the devices that would benefit from that level of security don't get it anyway. Therefore, although it is fair to call this a security failure on Raspberry Pi's fault, it is not a failure that should cause much concern for most users, including industrial users, especially as they're going to change the design to make the methods stop working*.

* The primary method that is of concern is the one that messes with the power supply. Not that this would be particularly easy to abuse either, but it is simpler than lasers or ion beams and it's the one they have the most likelihood of fixing in the design.

Parallels brings back the magic that was waiting seven minutes for Windows to boot

You can still run Windows, just ARM Windows. From reviews I've seen of people doing that, AMD64 applications run better under virtualized ARM Windows than trying to virtualize the AMD64 Windows and run it natively.

But what the platform is good for is running Mac OS, which is what most people buying Macs want to run. It is very snappy, the battery life is impressive, and a lot of the applications available have native builds. I liked it when Macs could run any operating system of my choice, but if I didn't want to run Mac OS at least some of the time, I still wouldn't have bought one back then.

Re: Windows boot time is about two to seven minutes, based on your hardware,

Interesting. I wonder which subset of people I've annoyed here. It could be people who dislike my calling Apple's hardware easily broken (it is) or people who don't like that my laptop can boot Windows 11 in 15 seconds (okay, I was lying, it took 17 seconds from pushing the power button to login screen in my test).

Re: Windows boot time is about two to seven minutes, based on your hardware,

All the hardware they're talking about is Apple M* hardware, so no, not like that. That hardware is expensive and easily broken, but the compensation and excuse for that is that it's got remarkably fast RAM and storage, by far the biggest bottlenecks in boot times, and even the M1 processor was quite powerful for a laptop chip. Since Windows 11 can boot in about 10-15 seconds on my computer with completely standard DDR4 and a cheap SSD, it means that emulation cost is the limiting factor here, as they admit, and it means that it is adding a lot of overhead.

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

Re: At least Ronnie backed up the NAS.

"In Ronnie's case one has to wonder why anyone, professor or not, is running computational workloads on a file server."

My guess is that it was intended as a general-purpose server which was being used by this organization as a file server because they didn't have one or the ability to administer one. The professor probably didn't have access to anything more powerful, including their office computer, so they used the best option available. Or perhaps the professor used something with larger disks because their workload generated more data than they could fit on their personal computer.

Re: Universities are the absolute worst for shadow IT

I sympathize with the IT department. It's hard to determine where your responsibilities lie when it's a separate organization that is sharing some resources. Making sure they have network connections sounds like IT's job. Fixing their computers sounds like the organization's job. From the incident described, the problem was not the resources provided by the university going wrong. Of course, IT's insistence on preapproving the hardware they connected suggests that these lines weren't as clear as they should have been, because in my suggested arrangement, university IT would have provided them with a network where the organization could connect whatever they bought. Still, I've been in too many situations where I was expected to support computers that I had nothing to do with to blame all of this on the university's IT department when the users were not university staff.

Given that the IT department in question were either unable or unwilling to put in the most basic of controls that would tell them when unusual devices were connected to their network or block those devices from working until they got approved, I'm guessing that they never found out. I'm surprised they decided to forbid it in the first place rather than taking a "you try it and any problems are not our problem" policy.

UK businesses eye AI as the cheaper, non-whining alternative to actual staff

Re: @wolfetone

I think there are two points where we see this differently.

"If the gov minimum wage did not exceed the market minimum then it wouldnt exist."

Minimum wages were created for a reason, but they don't necessarily adjust what people are willing to do. There are places that have not increased their minimum wage where it effectively doesn't matter because nobody gets paid near that anyway. However, in a world where there are income-limited support programs, a minimum wage is partially there to avoid situations where the needs people are paying for come from that support program rather than the work they are doing. Doing without one in an anarcho-capitalist world where there is no support for anyone might work with the rest of the philosophy, but otherwise, it creates conflicts with any program with an income or resources test attached unless you have something else that replaces it. For instance, although you're right that countries like Norway don't have a single minimum wage, they do have some sector-specific minimum wages, they have intense support for unions which set wage agreements (which comes with its own problems), and abuses can be challenged in court. I don't want to live in an anarcho-capitalist world, nor do most people, but even if you support such a philosophy, you can't build it in little pieces and trying will just break existing systems without moving closer.

I've seen complaints from employers who cannot find people willing to work for what they want to pay. Some of them try to blame minimum wage laws; if they weren't restricted, then surely they'd find workers who would agree to be paid less. A lot of them can't do that because they are offering above the minimum wage and they still can't find people. I've seen similar complaints about things other than workers, such as why they can't find a high-end laptop for £100. They have their people to blame for that too, Linux, for no longer fitting on a floppy, Microsoft, for charging £800 per laptop for the Windows license, Taiwan, because most laptop manufacturers are based there so surely they must work together. In both cases, their complaints about what they think they ought to find are wrong. I've seen calls for the minimum to be ridiculously high, suggested by people who appear to assume that businesses have unlimited funds and could already pay that much, and that will not work if it is implemented. Proving that it is takes more than alleging that it must be by definition of the thing existing.

Re: @wolfetone

Part, but only part, of codejunky's comment is correct. It's true that there are jobs where, if the price of workers increases too much, the amount you have to pay to hire someone is less than the amount the business can make from their labor, and that means the employees concerned will lose their jobs and the businesses will shut down, either that element of their business, or just in general. If the minimum wage is increased, some of that will happen.

Where codejunky is wrong is thinking that this is something we can control or choose not to do, at least in our current environment. Whether or not there is an explicit minimum wage, employees cost because they have costs they have to pay, and those costs are increasing. Just as it can be too expensive to hire someone at a wage, it can be too expensive to live for a worker to accept a low enough wage. The chaos at the bottom of the wage scale is papered over by minimum wage and government assistance programs, which makes this more confusing, but whether those are present or not, the same market forces apply there. If you eliminated a minimum wage number, an unofficial one would be created based on available assistance programs and their eligibility requirements.

We can't help people in an unlimited way by increasing minimum wages drastically. However, when employees are more expensive to hire, it often just means that the business concerned needs to do something different. If your business model needs to hire people at below what those people need to live, then your business model will fail just as much as my business model which requires me to have a reliable and cheap supply of pure gold. I need to find a cheaper material to do it, and you need to find a way of having fewer workers which you can pay sufficiently to get them, or we need to have a lot more money, or we have to find a different business. In many cases, the government-set wage is not outlandish to the extent that it's making that happen when it otherwise would not.

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

Re: Just a thought

There are some people in India who have a lot more skills. Just because a lot of people thought they could outsource to any company with some people who had computer skills, defined as they've seen a computer before, doesn't mean that you can't find knowledgeable people there and hire them. All the first wave proved is that there are some people who want to save money so much that they don't bother testing whether the people they hired on the cheap had the skills they needed.

However, even if we assume that everyone in India with skills moved, or at least that it's too hard to find those who remain, you have the option of "outsourcing" to someone who lives in the same country. If your employer is based in London, and they used to make you come to the office in London to do your work but now don't need you to, then the person in Belfast who doesn't want to leave Belfast wasn't an option before but now is. They are also fluent English speakers. They'll work in the same time zone that you would, meaning no changes necessary to how this will be managed. They had similar educational opportunities that you did and may have done the same things. As with any employee change, there will be inertia as they are added and your experience of processes will take some time to reproduce, but you managed to learn that and so can the Belfast person.

Re: Just a thought

And, depending on the employer, that can be relatively easy after all. An employer that is large enough may already have local offices. Sure, they originally only did local sales and a little basic support, but that's enough legal entity to hire programmers and IT. That is also something that can be built without a lot of effort; while they do incur more paperwork to do it, a lot of people manage to open a small business without it taking forever and those companies can as well.

However, there was a reason that I provided the same continent or same country as alternatives. If they are hiring in the same country, for example anywhere in the UK but not outside it, the amount of necessary paperwork goes down so much that the company often doesn't notice. Some countries will require different arrangements per region, but those differences tend to be smaller and, if the company doesn't want to manage it, there are plenty of companies with the experience who will do it for them. In the approach of staying within a continent or comparable region, you have to do a little more work but not as much. For example, a UK business could open an EU-based subsidiary, which would involve doing that work, and use that subsidiary to add people in that labor market. A US or Canada based business could add the other. For the cost of setting up one additional entity, they add a large pool of available workers who are in similar time zones and quite likely speak the same languages.

Re: I wonder if this could become an election issue eventually

I seriously doubt it. They're not going to ban remote working. At most, they're going to make the people who work for the government and the companies they own work from offices. That's far fewer people, and it's much easier to get someone angry about what you did to them than what you did to someone else. It's also worth considering how limited the remote working thing has been. On a site like this, it feels like pretty much everyone could at least try to work remotely because we're biased to a small number of jobs, nearly all quite connected to computers. Most people don't have that. Since you're hoping for or at least predicting a US effect here, consider the industry sector sizes in the US labor market. Information workers, that is most of us, is 1.8% of total employment. Some of the other sectors on that list could also try, but some of them, such as financial services, have had significantly stronger returns to offices, and some others, for example state government employees, are so variable that not all of the people categorized there will be able to. Remote working and attempts to end it are a much bigger part of our experiences than they are for most people.

Re: Just a thought

That is true, but the original point is still valid. Wherever the most talented people are, remote working makes it easier to hire people who are not willing to go to the office or to move to where the employer has offices. That means it is easier for someone, formerly hired because they would go to the office, to be replaced. I think people supporting remote working understand that in theory, and it's not like they get a choice about this, but it is one risk of that arrangement which is lower if an office is involved. Whether that skilled person is in India, Canada, or Italy, they can be hired by a company that's embraced global remote working. Even if they're restricting it to the same continent or country, the number of available workers makes it easier for them to try to search for someone with better skills or one with similar skills willing to work for less.

That's not always the case. Sometimes, you're just looking to see if there is a better option out there. Not everyone is passionate about their work, and even though I can get really into work at times, I keep in mind that it is not supposed to be the central thing in my life. That means that I don't need to love everything about it to continue doing it, and I don't need to hate it to stop doing it. The external factors involved in the decision shouldn't be discounted.

Megan, AI recruiting agent, is on the job, giving bosses fewer reasons to hire in HR

They don't have to have a dedicated HR person to theoretically save time and money with software that could do the work of one. If they didn't, someone would still have to do those tasks, it'd just be someone who does non-HR things some of the time. At the high end, a company with thirty employees probably does have someone who could be called an HR person, someone who mostly spends their time with administrative work related to the employees. It depends a lot on what that company does, but I don't think it's that unreasonable. If they don't, they will often contract with an agency which will do some of that for them when needed. That is probably more expensive than this is.

Of course, that probably doesn't go hilariously off the rails, well hilariously if you don't have any stake in it going properly. I'm not convinced that this software can do very much. So far, the two features I'm confident that it has are filtering resumes, which I doubt it can do properly, and communicating with candidates, which really shouldn't be difficult. You could communicate perfectly well with candidates with pre-written mails which get sent when predefined events occur, such as inviting them for an interview or telling them they are no longer in consideration. Companies who can't be bothered to send that latter message probably don't want a program, since it would have taken them about five seconds to do manually.

The bell tolls for TikTok as lifelines to avoid January 19 US ban vanish

Re: Free Speech

Being banned and voluntarily shutting down because everyone hates you and won't agree to buy your product are two separate things. Even if the end of publication had been because the business was fined so much for breaking the laws they broke and couldn't afford to continue, that would be different. I am no fan of TikTok. I have not used it and will not change that. If a law was passed making something that TikTok did criminal, and TikTok refused to stop doing it, I would not object (I suppose it depends on whether I agreed that the thing in question was a problem). However, that didn't happen. Instead, a law was passed simply declaring that TikTok is not allowed. I have concerns about that kind of law even if I don't care for the target of this one.

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Re: A novice does not know the difference between RAM and disk, and they should not have to

Ah, so a RAM dump. We've had that for ages. Of course, it does mean that if your program ever goes wrong, then all your data is lost. If you saved it somewhere, be that a file or a database, you could get that back and start again. It's not hard to take the data you have now and snapshot it so that you can restore it later. It is very hard to take that data and do anything else with it. It also makes it virtually impossible to change your code without starting from scratch.

I'm guessing that's not what you're going for. The problem is that it sounds like you're asking for magic. The same way that some users want a computer to just solve their problem without having to explain what their problem is or work on data without having to find and import it, you sometimes have to define what your storage is supposed to do. You can do less work, but if you do, you will get less power.

Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well

Re: and most of them do because they don't know how to use it anyway.

I like having the option, not being required to use it. There are some people, a small number but I have met some, who pretend that GUIs are bad and that all that matters is having a CLI. I don't believe them because of the number of tasks where a GUI is clearly better, sometimes significantly better. There is a reason why all my computers boot into a GUI first, but there is also a reason why there's often a terminal window or five up, because there are times where a CLI is more efficient or useful. Having both options is what I want, not picking a single winner.

One of the reasons for that in my case is that I'm a programmer and I often solve my problems by writing small programs. A CLI is one of the simplest ways of going from having some code that fixes a problem to executing that code. I don't need to write much in order to get some inputs and print progress reports. I have at times made some basic GUI libraries so I could do those simple things in a GUI, but often less flexibly than a CLI would. It also means that my various CLIs are not the same. A zsh or bash session, a Python REPL, and an R window may look similar, but they're quite different in what they do well and what their limitations are.

Re: macOS Terminal Pedantry Ahoy

I must also disagree with that line, because you can ignore the terminal on pretty much anything with a GUI. Windows and Linux users manage to do without the terminal as well. I don't, because I want to use the terminal, because there are some things that are a lot faster through one and some things that haven't bothered to write a GUI so I don't have a choice. People who want to ignore a terminal can, and most of them do because they don't know how to use it anyway.

Re: vendors

But why should they? Like Linux, they assume, and correctly, that people who want it are fully capable of installing exactly what they want rather than using the manufacturer's image. Unlike Linux, it doesn't sound like it's at a stage where it's reasonable to give it to a nontechnical user. So with both of those, it sounds like you just want them to help with the Haiku development efforts to make sure any bugs getting it to work on their hardware are fixed, which is great, but there are a lot of operating systems they could do that with so why should they prefer Haiku.

Re: I really like this a lot

But then they have maintenance cost for both versions. If they dropped one of them, you could still get the code and work with it, but the core developers wouldn't have to try to keep them both in sync. For something as small as this, that could be the difference between having a next version and it stagnating.

I think having a 64-bit version is probably going to work better than having a 32-bit only version for old software. If the old software is important enough, a compatibility layer is probably better than making everything else change so they run natively. I imagine that most of the software written for BeOS is not so useful nowadays, and the ones that would still work, like word processors, can be replaced by LibreOffice which the article says is supported.

WordPress drama latest: Leader Matt Mullenweg exiles five contributors

Re: Pocket Casts

On IOS, I have been happily using the Downcast podcast player for many years. I'm still looking for things on Android that are as conveniently configurable, though.

Devs sent into security panic by 'feature that was helpful … until it wasn't'

Re: Settings

I guess you could still tip the laptop on its side so the screen is in portrait orientation. Not sure why you would want to, but you could definitely do it. I could see it being used if the laptop could unfold 360°, even without a touch screen as a small additional screen for desktop use, but I'm guessing yours doesn't do that, so propping it up on its side might be your only option.

Re: Instead of disabling translation

Basically, just stop guessing at things and present users with choices. At most, guess at things to set which one you put first in the list.

A non-language version of this happened to me a while ago when I was trying to help someone install Microsoft Office on their Mac. Step 1: download the installer. But for some reason, they couldn't find it, so I had to go get it for them. I didn't have a Mac with me. Microsoft insisted on giving me the Windows installer and having no option for a Mac version. Their site didn't even seem to acknowledge that they had a Mac OS version. Once I changed my user agent to identify Firefox as Safari on a Mac, then they didn't acknowledge that they had a Windows version and gave me the file I needed, but it would have been easier for me and much easier for the average person if they could just have a button that says "If for some reason you need a file for a different kind of computer, those do exist".

Re: Google Chrome auto translate PITA

Firefox's offer to translate only works if the page has been labeled. For example, if it has a <html lang="cz">, it will offer to translate from Czech. If the person who wrote the page didn't label it, which is quite common, or if they or something automatic labeled it as a language it's not, which is unfortunately at least as common, then it won't offer to translate. Fortunately, there is now a button in the menu* that can be used to manually request translation though you have to know what language it is and select that from the list.

* Note: As far as I know, that is only in the single browser menu, not the menu bar menus. I looked through those and I couldn't find it there.

Pastor's divine 'dream' crypto scheme indicted by Uncle Sam

To be entirely fair to him, he's only an idiot on the first point, namely that a vault that nobody can open and may not exist is not at all useful. Not being on the gold standard doesn't prevent you from making an investment based on an openable vault containing gold, and there are several places that do exactly that. It just means that you wouldn't be able to exchange your government-issued cash for gold at a fixed rate. There are many types of investments that base their value on a specific location containing things of value. While people generally want it, shares of the investment change in price. If people all decide they don't want it, someone is going to have to go in there and take some of the stuff out so it can be sold.

Now Trump's import tariffs could raise the cost of a laptop for Americans by 68%

Re: Eh?

"The other side that cant sell to this protectionist market still has domestic and the rest of the trading globe."

That is true. Depending on the markets they have, that may give the supplier the easier side. That is not guaranteed. If a Chinese company specialized in manufacturing things that are mostly used by US consumers and they invested a lot in partners selling in the US, then they still have to change a lot to sell to other countries and may fail if their product was more popular there than it would be in other countries. Generally speaking, the smaller the protectionist market, the more the suffering will hit that market versus the suppliers. The US is quite a large market, meaning that loss of it can be painful. That doesn't alleviate the pain experienced by the consumers there, but tariffs do hurt both sides with the only question being who suffers more.

"Ok so assume the US put tariffs against the UK as an example. How are we better off by making our economy suffer because the US chooses to make its economy suffer?"

It's the age-old problem of active versus passive response to a negative situation which we make every day. I do it and I imagine you do too. If something I don't like happens, I have to decide whether it will be more trouble to argue about it or accept it. If I argue about it, maybe the person doing it will stop, and then I don't have any problem, but maybe the person doing it will just get angry and do something else I don't like. If I do nothing, maybe the problem will go away, maybe I'll get used to it, or maybe the person doing the thing I don't like will decide that they can do more of that because I must be fine with it. Retaliatory tariffs are the active option, used in the hope that the protectionist guy will stop. They are considered worth doing because tariffs on UK producers do hurt those producers, especially those that mostly exported to the United States. If you don't work at one of those, you may not really notice, but people who lose their jobs or profits will notice and they can complain really loudly.

Re: Eh?

In a way, but a lot of this argument has boiled down to trying to say that only one side pays for the tariffs. Pro-tariff people shout "China will pay for the tariff". They are wrong. Anti-tariff people have at times reversed this and say things along the lines of "only we are paying for the tariff". They are also wrong, or rather, they are simplifying so much that they're lying, because they know that, in reality, both trading parties to a tariff suffer. Only the government in the middle stands to gain some revenue, and even it may not get as much as it was planning when it all resolves.

The point of all of this is that, when a retaliatory tariff is put in place, it's not really seen as shooting yourself in the foot. It's seen as shooting the other guy, who recently shot at you without provocation. You won't benefit from that, which is why most of the retaliatory tariffs are put in place with the idea that they should be removed as soon as possible, but the diplomatic equivalent of a fist fight where one party is hoping that the other fighter will back down isn't going to work in a painless way. The question you can consider is what you would do to someone who started making things worse for your economy. Would you accept their penalty because any action you take in revenge will also harm you, or would you take some revenge in the hope that it makes them reverse course? Neither answer is always right. With hindsight on how long the tariff was in place can let you calculate which was the best option in each case, but you don't have any of that at the beginning because it revolves around what a diplomat or executive in this case was thinking.

Re: Eh?

"However since we are smart enough to realise tariffs are bad then why would we retaliate by making our own shopping more expensive?"

Generally, because they're hoping the tariffs will be dismantled. What they're trying there is basically "See how much this tariff isn't helping you? We don't like yours either. Why don't we call this whole thing off?", and it works. When Trump tried some of his tariffs the first time, for example ones on Canada and Mexico, those countries responded with targeted tariffs, ones that would hurt industries in areas represented by Trump's allies. Many of the tariffs concerned were removed, with the retaliatory ones going too. The challenge is what you do when you try that method and the other side doesn't turn off theirs. You don't really want to keep yours, but if you eliminate them too quickly, people learn that they can put unilateral tariffs on you and you'll cave quickly. That's when an otherwise tariff-reluctant government can find that they don't have much of a choice and why more generalized anti-tariff agreements have been set up.

"And also why do we make things more expensive anyway with the tariffs we already have?"

Either those diplomatic reasons, they think some kind of malfeasance is going on, or some local industry has succeeded in getting protection for themselves. Those are the general reasons, and it's not as if the people of opposite opinions on the effectiveness of tariffs disagree on the reasons. They just disagree on whether that is a good thing.

Free-software warriors celebrate landmark case that enforced GNU LGPL

Re: Stretching

We have different opinions on most of the things where the issue is an opinion. We also appear to have different opinions on some parts that are more factual. I'm not sure we will get anywhere by debating it, but I would suggest that your reading of the facts is not what courts have decided, and my reading of the facts does correspond to what courts have allowed and forbidden. That includes the statements in the article you linked. That may mean that courts are generally stupid; I've seen evidence to assume so now and again, but it also determines what I expect to happen if I try to assert rights that don't appear to be there.

If we read things into a license based on an assumption of what the writer must have put there, using the logic that they wanted it, so surely they wrote it, we expose ourselves to risk. Contracts are a lot like programs. The program doesn't care what you wanted. The program only cares what you said. Also like programs, contracts are exposed to attack from people who will find gaps in what was written so they can do things that they want. By all means argue about what you think they should say, although I caution you that attacking people who disagree with the vehemence you have is unlikely to convince people and may annoy those who already agree with you, but be careful that your desire for them to do something doesn't cause you to believe that they already do. If it turns out you're wrong, you've shot your own goals in the foot because, if you had realized what they didn't do, you could have made one that does do those things.

Re: Germany

I'm pretty certain that the list is European Union members (list of 27). That doesn't make it right. German court decisions do not automatically apply in other EU states. EU-wide courts did not consider this matter. It probably will work in those other states, as well as many other countries, for the reason that the license isn't exactly unclear about having to do this. It mostly comes down to how much you're willing to argue for it. Cases affirming the GPL and LGPL are not new and not unique to Germany or Europe. There are probably some corner cases for when some company has come up with a new technical or legal loophole and they're trying that, but most people who violate those licenses take the "just do it and see if anyone actually sues us" plan.

Re: Stretching

Your reading is not correct. Scripts needed to install the software is not the same as access to the environment where the software is installed. The part in the GPL v2 means that I can't provide you some mangled source and tell you that I run a script to assemble this to something useful so it runs but I won't give you that. It was a loophole that they considered at the time, but they either did not consider or didn't object to unreplaceable embedded software. I have a feeling that it was that they didn't think about it back in 1991. However, following the addition of those terms in version 3.0, there are some who do not approve of that term and opt to license their software under V2 alone. Such people include Linus, who could not have relicensed Linux unilaterally but could have supported a change (he expressed support for V2 only), the people who make Busybox (who are no traitors to open source as they've probably sued more license violators than almost any other project), and plenty of others.

Re: Stretching

I'm surprised someone hasn't provided this answer yet, but the important part is LGPL 2.1. You are right that the typical GPL and LGPL version 2 does not require that you be able to install modified software on hardware that ran the original. This meant that lots of people made embedded Linux devices where you couldn't replace it, and the FSF hated that. Around 2006, they decided to change it, so they added provisions requiring that you can do that to version 3.0 of the GPL and 2.1 of the LGPL. The debate went under the term "tivoization", named after a company, TiVo, that had an embedded Linux box. Since Linux remains GPL 2 only, you can still do that, but you aren't supposed to do it with GPL3 or LGPL2.1 components. People do it all the time, but they can lose in court.

Here is some of the relevant text from the GPL. The LGPL refers to the GPL for a lot of this and says you have to use it, so I have to quote from the GPL to demonstrate:

“Installation Information” for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.

If you convey an object code work under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product, and the conveying occurs as part of a transaction in which the right of possession and use of the User Product is transferred to the recipient in perpetuity or for a fixed term (regardless of how the transaction is characterized), the Corresponding Source conveyed under this section must be accompanied by the Installation Information. But this requirement does not apply if neither you nor any third party retains the ability to install modified object code on the User Product (for example, the work has been installed in ROM).

Can 4G feature phones rise again on the back of QVGA, thin clients, and remote browsers?

Re: Linux

I don't think we're talking about the same thing. A tarball is an archive. It takes multiple files and puts them together and makes them smaller. It does literally nothing to deal with different processor architectures. It does nothing to deal with systems where you have a library installed and want to use one, ones where you don't have a library installed but want to install one, and ones where you don't have a library installed and want the program to bring its libraries with it. It does nothing to deal with different dependencies you might have. That is why multiple files get produced. What do you think a tarball does to fix any of this? Because unless you're planning to put all eight of those files into one archive so you have to download all of them in order to select the one you'll actually use, I don't think it will.

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

Re: Am I only the only one....

"Put it this way, RPi the company seem to know what they're doing, and they've clearly come to the conclusion that releasing this variant makes sense. So anyone questioning this really needs to take a step back and ask themselves why they've come to a different conclusion than the people who make the things and probably know rather more about the market for RPis than anyone else."

I think this explains why we view those comments differently. I do see some people making those statements who should consider the question you stated. However, many of those comments don't seem to be saying "Why would they make that?" but rather "Why would I or someone like me buy that?". They're not buying them for embedded purposes, so they're not saying that a secondhand computer is suitable for every case where a Pi is. They're saying that larger machines could do the same things they'd do with a Pi and they assume it is for most others posting here, which based on the comments is not an unfair assumption in general.

I don't agree with them when they're comparing it to secondhand devices. I find that most of the ones that are available have much higher power usage or some kind of damage, and also the people who make that comparison seem better than I am at finding secondhand machines with impressive specifications at really low prices; the ones I see are less impressive. However, I do acknowledge that for them and for many of us, the Raspberry Pis we buy are used in a way that a larger computer could fill in for. Therefore, when they express a view about the price of one, I can understand why they're thinking that. It's the same way that I might call out a restaurant for being ridiculously expensive. Maybe you have a client who loves that restaurant and always buys something expensive from you if you take them to lunch there, and that would justify nearly any price, but you know that I'm thinking of the average customer when I make my comparison. I don't have to agree with them to understand why they're making the comparison and how it could apply to plenty of other perspective buyers.

Re: Am I only the only one....

Except that their comments are a closer analogy to "for the price of a new motorbike, I can buy a secondhand car". The thing they're comparing it to tends to be faster and more expandable at the cost of higher power usage and being secondhand. I don't consider most of these comparisons very useful, but your analogy misses their point by a wide margin. From their perspective, they are getting more for their money because the systems they're buying can deliver computation faster, and computation speed is one of the most commonly used metrics when assessing computers. We can argue why this comparison is not good enough for us, but arguing that they're wrong for making it in the first place doesn't make sense to me.

Re: Holding my breath a bit

I'd bet against it. They are not building the x00 models to be the highest-end computers they can imagine. If they were, they would have put a connector for NVME drives into the 500 they actually made, since that is useful to making the desktop substantially faster. They decided that wasn't what they were going for, which probably means that 16 GB is also not what they're going for.

I am curious though, why do you want one? What is the value to you of having an upgraded 500 over just having a Pi 5 attached to a keyboard of your choice? I ask because they don't look very different to me and thus the 500 and 400 were never very appealing to me, but enough people seem to like them that I'd like to know why.

Re: Context...

The thing Apple is selling at a much higher price is also at a much higher speed. You might or might not care about that, but they're really not the same. Otherwise, I have 16 GB of DDR3, and it's really cheap.

You might be right that demand for the 16 GB model will be lower than demand for the lower-spec versions. That would just mean that they make fewer production runs of that version. It wouldn't really change what price they can charge for either of them or whether they have enough buyers to make the 16 GB version profitably. I'm guessing that there are enough people who want to use the Pi 5 as a desktop or have a memory-hungry process they already run on Pi 5s who will buy a 16 GB version, so they won't be losing the money for this production run.

"The Pi also does not have a GPU and the processor is rather limited, so it's not ideal for that application in many ways."

I have to correct you there. The Pi does have a GPU and you can use it through a few interfaces. OpenGL and Vulkan are available, and some of the boards support OpenCL 1.2 at least. It's true that most normal acceleration systems will not support this, but that is a very different thing than the board not having a GPU at all. I wouldn't recommend it for running an LLM, but you have the ability to do so if you don't mind slow output.

Re: Viable as a desktop replacement?

Most of that should work. The only thing I'd be concerned about is Zoom. The Pi is capable of all the other tasks as a low-end desktop, and if you use an NVME drive, load times are significantly reduced.

Zoom, however, is making me nervous. It doesn't look like they have native support for ARM Linux for their native app (using this system requirements page). That means you'll have to use Zoom from a browser. Browsers and graphics have always been a weak spot for the Pi. For a long time, Chromium was the only browser that could use hardware video anything on the Pi. Theoretically, Firefox can do it now. That wasn't necessarily a problem when playing streaming low-resolution video, but it will likely be a much bigger problem when handling multiple input streams, an output stream if you're on camera, and screen sharing. If you need Zoom for lots of video, this would be worth testing. Maybe you can find someone with a Pi 5 already who can report on this.

Re: Just sayin' 'no'

I'm not sure why you even considered the Pi for that use case in the first place. If you need 64 GB, and I'm not sure why you do but I'll take your word for it, it seems obvious that a board with a maximum of 8 GB until today, which has only been available for a couple years, wasn't going to do it. You're comparing two very different types of computer, as you've described in detail, which are suitable and realistic for completely different uses.

Re: At that price...

Tell me, what is the Pi about?

Because for me, my massive collection of Pis is not about ARM. ARM is how they were able to make such a thing, but I did not buy a Raspberry Pi because I was annoyed with Intel and had some objection to running my workload on those. I bought mine for the following reasons:

1. Cheap, but powerful enough to run a non-stripped OS.

2. No noise, low power, and low heat during operation.

3. Compatibility with Linux with sufficient support that I don't have to go to weird efforts to make things keep working or replace the box if this one breaks.

And the Pi does all of those things very well. A couple minor glitches on number 3 because of nonstandard kernels for the Pi, but those are mostly erased because the Raspberry Pi people have done a fantastic job at maintaining support for all their variants, something other ARM-based SBCs don't do. However, benefit 3 is also available on X86. Benefit 2 is available with small Intel-powered boxes. And that means that, for me and many others who have used Pis over lots of cases, a 16 GB Pi and a 16 GB Intel box may end up looking more similar after all. The Pi has GPIO support that the Intel box doesn't have, but I do not have any use cases that need 16 GB of RAM and the GPIO at the same time, and I could always buy a Pico or Zero and use it to drive GPIO devices for me.

I do want to know what the Pi is about for you, though. There are many use cases where the Intel boxes we're comparing with wouldn't be the best option, but that's not what you said. If there's some other important distinguishing factor, I am curious what you had in mind.

Microsoft trims jobs as new year begins

Re: Windows is now a sideshow for MS

Dropping their browser engine for Chromium reduced the amount of work they had to do because websites already worked in Chromium. Dropping the Windows kernel for Linux would increase the work they had to do because binaries don't just transfer over.

I don't know why this idea crops up so often. When Windows dies, it will just die, and given its market share, I don't think that will be soon. Microsoft may make more money by renting out servers, but just because Windows revenue is a smaller chunk of their pretty big company than it was ten years ago doesn't stop it from being a large number of dollars that they're quite happy to keep having.

Tesla, Musk double down on $56B payday appeal

Re: A deal is a deal.

I made a deal with my friend over here that I get your money. Pay up. Or read up on what this case is about.

Boffins carve up C so code can be converted to Rust

Re: Why?

"What happens if the memory access is live, IE an array overrun from a user or database entered value. This cannot be detected at compile time, so what happens in the production system?"

You get a runtime error. When the compiler can detect it, for instance array_of_length_10[100], it won't compile. If you try it by getting 100 into a variable and then using it on the array, you get an error and you can handle it, as opposed to C, where you get undefined behavior based on what is in that memory location and whether you're supposed to have access to it. You are right that you can't prevent that at compile time, but by failing the operation immediately, you prevent classes of bugs and make recovery from the error feasible. For example, it is now possible to abort whatever operation involved that mistaken access and log the error rather than waiting for the process to topple over.

And in many production systems, that's already what happened. If you got an index that might be in your array, it wasn't atypical to have some code that looked like

if (index >= array_len) {

log_error("Requested bad index %i from array with %i elements", index, array_len);

return clean_and_abort(&context);

}

The only difference is that this is made a bit more automatic, with a more immediate and clean failure if you forget to do this.

AI can improve on code it writes, but you have to know how to ask

Re: Await Fix

I disagree there. The AI did almost the same kind of thing that I would have done. I wouldn't have done the first step, because my bias is always to do things incrementally when possible to avoid wasting space, but the rest of the steps match my typical workflow:

Stage 1: You want a solution to your problem. Write some code that solves the problem.

Stage 2: You want the code to run faster. Identify the simplest bottleneck in the code I wrote and fix it, again as quickly as possible.

Stage 3: Improve the tools I'm using to speed it up.

Stage 4: Can I parallelize?

The code didn't bother with stage 5: try to find ingenious mathematical solutions to get it done faster, and it probably couldn't find any. It instead used a different stage 5: add extra stuff nobody asked for. However, the progression otherwise makes sense. I also tend to try to get some information before starting this process on how fast the code needs to be so if you need stage 3 performance, I don't bother with the first two. Since many problems are just fine with stage 1 performance*, it isn't automatically bad to start there.

* For example, if they're going to run a script automatically once a week and the simple version takes ten minutes to run. I could spend three hours writing new code and the script would now take eight minutes to run. The time savings would take two years to equal out, so they don't care. But I could also take an extra eight hours and the script would take ten seconds to run, so now the time savings equal out in less than a year. They still don't care, because for something that runs only once a week and doesn't need human attention, nobody cares that the computer does it for ten minutes. If they run it every hour or if it's going to need to scale to millions of requests or entries, I would speed it up. Otherwise, they want lowest maintenance costs and time to write it, with execution speed a sacrifice they don't even notice they've made.