Posts by doublelayer

Here's something communism is good at: Making smartphones less annoying

Re: "but there is still a difference between a state that intends to organize itself to loo"

The difference isn't in how bad things can be. Some of the worst dictatorships have been communist, and some have not. The difference is only in the appearance and structure, with some related effects on exactly how badly it is run. One major appearance difference is in the structure of the economy, as communist countries tend to talk a lot more about the ostensible strength of the worker than non-communist dictatorships, organizations tend to be legally depowered instead of just practically depowered by government action, and many organizations would be state-owned instead of private. This doesn't make them better or worse. It's like the difference between desktop environments on Linux; they look different and have different effects on the user's workflow, but they all basically do the same thing.

China under Mao spouted a lot of the classic communism points and set up some of its trademark social programs [complete fiascos]. The Soviet Union codified a lot of those things originally. Cuba and North Korea still sound like that today. Non-communist dictatorships often sound very different, if no less menacing. China today, though, is not structured like it once was and no longer uses the classic indicators of communism. It has adopted a less communist appearance, but is no less authoritarian than it was. They switched off "communist theme" on the UI, that's all.

Re: Is it even Communism

There are differences between communism-themed dictatorships and other types of dictatorships, yes including fascism-themed ones. We've never seen a non-dictatorship communist state, and I think the evidence is clear that such a thing isn't possible, but there is still a difference between a state that intends to organize itself to look (or even to be) communist under the top echelons of the dictator and his supporters and those that don't. China used to look like the former, and it was really bad. They don't look much like that anymore, and it's still bad.

To protect its cloud, Microsoft bans crypto mining from its online services

Re: Over selling

"Not that I think it would be a sensible thing to do, of course - but bitcoin is just a compute load. How is it any different than someone who wants to compute Pi : it's the customer's decision as to whether the service is worth the cost. If the provider is making that decision then they've underpriced on the assumption you overprovisioned and they want to hide it."

Treating mining as any other workload seems to have been the policy for a while. That they've accepted people mining on provisioned resources for years suggests that it was probably fine. This means one of two things:

1. They didn't underprovision for years, but they decided to start doing it now. Doesn't seem likely they'd change now.

2. They have another reason. The article suggests one: they're seeing miners stop paying the bills because the value proposition has changed for them. As those miners would have rented some of the most expensive boxes available, those would be some large unpaid bills. I can see why taking some losses and looking at having to file a lot of claims to recover unpaid bills would convince someone in finance that maybe we should cut off this kind of work entirely.

"coin mining is hopelessly uneconomic on a general purpose CPU"

Correct. Basically anyone who is intentionally doing it is using the VMs they've got with lots of GPUs attached. Those cost more, which is probably why Azure has accepted miners before, but with the crash in prices, they've probably had some people not paying their bills as suggested in the article.

Meanwhile, if someone is doing CPU mining, then it's probably that someone is using unauthorized resources, from an external attacker having found a way in to an untrustworthy admin who thinks the increased CPU usage won't be noticed.

Apple preps for 'third-party iOS app stores' in Europe

Re: I hope there's an option to block this nonsense.

Someone doesn't know how to use a computer, but can make an appointment online, has a smartphone, and knows how to enable a different app store, even through Apple's security warnings, but can't read instructions? Those factors are mostly incompatible with each other. By the way, if they know how to mess with their app installation methods, they can also figure out how to use the browser that comes installed on every smartphone, so their lack of a computer is not a factor. This person would be confused how to do anything if they're unaware of computers and can't read the instructions they were sent. In this case, there is a big problem, but it's not where the app is listed. It's that someone incapable of following a process they need was sent only one option for doing so, an option that relied on them having hardware they might not have, which would be a problem. Fortunately, that's not how such things have been done, and this is a made up example you're using to make a flawed point.

Re: Apple could...

If your friend uses local backups, they might have an older version coincidentally backed up which they can add. I'm not sure if that is portable across devices (I'm assuming not), and few people bother with iTunes syncing or backups, but it could be worth a try.

Re: I hope there's an option to block this nonsense.

"Which app store do you think those daily-living apps will launch on within the EU? Apple Store? Or only on the “European competitor” App Store? You know the answer."

I do, but it's not your answer. Governments have been happy to put their apps in the normal stores forever. Let's look at Android. Which store has the government apps? Is it FDroid? No. Is it EUStore? No, that's not a thing. It is, in fact, the Play Store where they put them all. So I wouldn't expect them to want to build another.

Let's say they do anyway. Given the level of success such things have had before, I doubt that would ever happen. Let's assume, though, that I'm wrong. So what? If you find you need an app that's not in the normal store, you can either live without it or accept enabling that store just to download the app you need, then not using it for anything else. If it works anything like Android, you can enable the store for the app you decided you want, install that app, then disable the store and the app still works.

Re: I hope there's an option to block this nonsense.

I've got a magical solution for anyone who doesn't want to use third-party app stores. It's a bit complicated, but I think anyone reading here can manage it. Just follow these steps:

1. Don't turn it on.

Seriously, that's all that's involved. They're not mandating that every possible store is preinstalled. They're not providing for automatic installations. What they've asked for is a switch which Apple can bury in the settings, put scary security warnings around, and which you have the freedom to leave turned off. Nobody would be required to sideload or to use anything that Apple doesn't run.

Re: Thanks for nothing EU

Then don't list there. Problem solved. Everyone will have the Apple version preinstalled. Everyone who uses apps will have some that you can only get from there, so everyone who wants your app will check for it there. This is the same as on Android. I get a lot of apps from FDroid, but if I need something specific, I already know that you can only get it from the Play Store, so I get it from there (via an anonymized connection, but it still comes from there). People who don't want to release as open source don't have to use FDroid for me to know how to install their app.

The IT decision-maker that really matters? Your pet

Re: Why?

That's not it. The video vantage point from wherever a pet chooses to be isn't a great one, and our lives aren't interesting enough to justify the processing required to get anything from that. The amount of useful advertising information to be gained from the effort is too minimal.

The people making this product available aren't supervillains planning to sneakily bug your house. They're people saying things like "Hey sales, do you think you could convince someone rich who has a cat that they need extra sensors to indicate that their cat is sleeping on a soft surface in a sunbeam? How much do you think we can charge, and how quickly could we break it and have the customer want to come buy another one?". It works.

Voice assistants failed because they serve their makers more than they help users

Re: Business model is easily adaptable for Amazon

You missed a zero in that: it's $50 per speaker per year. Moreover, if they introduced a subscription, that's more people who will dump the thing in a drawer and not use it again, as now it's a brick unless they pay again. I'm not sure where the money went, but maybe they should start looking at the logs they undoubtedly have to answer the question "What is the stuff we spent a ton of money writing scripts for that nobody asks for".

Re: Not trusty

"If a machine pretending to be a human is to be successful, it should at least behave like the sort of human that people can trust"

I don't think this is their problem. Something that sounds like a human, could do things, but also slipped in some advertisements would probably do much better. Right now, the problem is that the machine isn't pretending to be a human. It refers to itself in the first person from time to time, but it acts robotic, doesn't remember anything, and gives the same scripted responses to almost everything you could say. Talk to one for three minutes and it becomes really obvious how not human it is, and talk for another five and you learn that it's not a robot that can actually do anything very useful. I'd like it if people automatically rejected such things on privacy grounds or even had a subconscious feeling that something's manipulative here, but in reality, I think they just discover that the device is a curiosity at best and that they don't need one after all.

I think you have a better idea of this than the article does. I don't have any devices intended for voice use, but I do occasionally use the voice interface on my phone. Here are the commands I issue:

1. Call [person].

2. Set a timer.

3. What will the weather be today.

4. (rarely) Send a message to [person].

The first one is designed to save time finding the person in my contact list. The second and third are similarly reducing the time and mostly used when I'm doing something else with my hands. And that's all I need it for, meaning a tiny model that recognizes pre-defined phrases would be just as capable as a conversational bot with thousands of scripts written.

There is one aspect where the obviousness of the manufacturer's influence might cause a problem. I know someone who has an Alexa device and occasionally asks it to play music, but they don't have whatever Amazon's best music service is. This means that, when they ask it to play something, the device usually responds by informing them that they can't get it, but they could if the user buys a subscription. It will then read out the standard information about the subscription, such as that there is a free trial, how long it lasts, that it would renew automatically, and what the cost of that is. You have to wait for its thirty-second speech to end before you can tell it no. I'm not surprised that this person has put the device in a drawer and never turns it on now.

Re: Alexa:

The phrase "pod bay doors" does not appear to be in my lexicon.

Fine, I had to modify the quote a bit, but it's a lot more likely to be what Alexa would say. It was originally "cargo bay doors". I'm going now.

Re: "... they serve their makers more than they help users"

"while having a conversation with my brother by phone, and without saying the key word to wake the darn device, 'Alexa' just chipped in with information about the topic of conversation without being prompted. So anyone who thinks these don't listen and process except to pick up the key word need a wakeup call: They're listening, processing, and can/will respond without the keyword ever being uttered."

I don't like or use these devices, but you've jumped to the conclusion that they're sneakily listening in when what actually happened is that something you said sounded like the wake word to the basic listening software. Sneaky listening devices don't start answering questions you didn't mean to ask, but devices that incorrectly think that you tried to activate them do. There are privacy concerns, and theoretically their manufacturers could turn them into bugs when they want (research has demonstrated that they're not doing so right now, but that's no guarantee of anything), but your experience has caused you to mistake a bug for evidence that it isn't.

"the one feature missed is the mic 'off' switch."

It's a button on the top of each device. Press that and the microphones are disabled. If you are afraid that Amazon's designed them to lie about it, then maybe you have a point (people have checked it in teardowns but I'm not one of them so won't promise anything), but if you distrust Amazon that much, maybe you shouldn't have them at all. I don't trust or have them, and yet I expect that the button to mute the microphones will do exactly that.

Raspberry Pi supply chain loosens just in time for the holiday season

Re: Would have preferred Pi 5 announcement

Yes, I am. The kind of semantics that are critical in tax and employment law. Whether someone is a contractor is a tricky issue that has caused problems in many countries. There are incentives for the company making the profit from the work, the worker and any instruments they've created, and the tax authorities to classify people as a contractor or an employee, and such incentives are often very confusing. It's how you can get two people doing the same thing under basically identical circumstances, one of whom insists they must be regarded as an employee while the other insists on being regarded as a contractor, and that's only the first of many disagreements. Complicated issue, that. Selling a physical item that's not even restricted (if I buy a bunch of BCM2711s from Broadcom, they'll be the same as what the Raspberry Pi people have) is a lot less complicated from all perspectives, and hence a comparison between them fails to make any point.

Re: Would have preferred Pi 5 announcement

I'm neither an expert on tax law nor work in the UK, but I'll point out that there is a legal difference between "provide service" (grey area), "work for" (what IR35 is ostensibly meant to deal with), and "sell goods to" (the situation between Broadcom and Raspberry Pi). I've heard enough to think that IR35 is wrong a lot, but the comparison you're making is still invalid.

Re: Would have preferred Pi 5 announcement

"Not long ago they had the best SOC for the money."

I'm not convinced about that. There have been more powerful chips used on SBCs for as long as it was obvious that people wanted to buy Raspberry Pis. I'm not sure how you decide what performance and price intersection is right, but their competition offered faster chips at all points. Until the Pi 4, their chips were pretty uncompetitive. Even when that was new, depending on workload, they were still uncompetitive (for example, RasPi's SoCs have always omitted encryption acceleration, but nearly everyone else's products support it). They have been more consistent about being inexpensive and easy to buy (supply chains excepted, but lots of local distributors and not having to pay half the price in shipping that takes a month).

Raspberry Pi has never really tried to be the fastest board out there, and it's served them well. I wouldn't expect them to change that just because some new boards show much better benchmark numbers. They can correctly point out that those boards tend to cost more and use more power than theirs, that the software landscape for them is more chaotic than the Pi's, and that they don't need to change their design in order to consistently sell out of the models they do make. I don't think they're aiming for the perfect board, so their next version is unlikely to meet all your or my expectations. Fortunately, we do have multiple other options to consider. My last SBC purchase three years ago wasn't a Raspberry Pi, but it still works.

Re: Would have preferred Pi 5 announcement

Raspberry Pi isn't going to adopt RK3588 just because it's faster and more efficient. Among other things, they want images to be compatible with every board, which is easier when using basically the same architecture and is not compatible with a SoC whose boot process is so different. Also, they've probably got a good relationship with Broadcom given that every board has had a Broadcom CPU and GPU on it. Abandoning that in favor of a competitor is not likely. It's also worth keeping in mind that the Pi has never aimed for the fastest chip out there and has frequently lagged other companies on raw performance. I don't know when the next Pi comes out although I wouldn't expect it to be soon given the production difficulties, but it's not likely to give you every feature you want.

If you want the RK3588, there are several companies who build SBCs around it, some explicitly designed to be similar in size and peripherals to the Pi. You can have those now and many have more availability. Don't hold your breath for the Pi 5 being announced when you want it or having every feature you think it should.

OK, we know iPhones are expensive but... $11 a month for Twitter Blue on iOS?

Re: Apple users can afford it

"Rhe original example was £200 for 8GB of Apple storage. Some rip-offs are bigger than others."

Read again. That was for 8 GB of RAM, whereas this was for 256 GB of storage. RAM costs more per GB than storage does, whether marked up or not. Not comparable. Their mobile devices don't offer different RAM options in any case, and I'll admit I've seen some laptop companies with similar crazy markups on RAM and some that appear to use numbers closer to real market prices for the stuff. Apple does have crazy markup for both upgrades, but they're far from the only ones.

San Francisco investigates Hotel Twitter, Musk might pack up and leave

Re: Not unusual

"We don't know what their schedule consists of or what their arrangements are (at least I don't)"

I don't know the specifics, but I don't think it's that hard to connect Musk's vague statement of "long hours at high intensity" and the fact that they brought in beds to arrive at a rather grim picture.

"They might be putting in more hours and getting paid more"

They might, but I'm pretty sure they're not getting paid more, given how eager management have been to fire everyone else. These workers are mostly earning salaries, which means no overtime. I haven't seen any reports of a round of raises or bonuses. Have you?

"they might be working more productively,": I wouldn't count on that. Denying people work-life balance tends not to end that way.

"or they might be accumulating their time off and taking longer weekends,": Again, salaried workers don't get time off in compensation for long hours. I'm sure they are saving up what they normally get because they have no other choice, at least until the company switches to a model where they can no longer accumulate any (just a prediction, as I haven't heard them plan this yet).

"And if they are putting in more hours, they must have some incentive to do so, otherwise why would you do it?"

I don't expect many to keep doing it for long. As for why you would do it, you would do it if the job is necessary for something you rely on until such a time as you get another, hence why many of the employees are on visas that make it difficult to simply switch jobs.

"I'm sure you wouldn't mind offering appropriate references to back up these assertions:"

It's not like every plan of Musk's is fully documented in public. Most of it has been leaked in vague terms. I can't give you a direct citation for each thing, and you know that well.

* That's not why the beds are there

Derived from the demand for long hours, which is compatible with having someone working all day and sleeping at the office to make sure they're working when they would have been commuting, but less compatible with letting employees take a nap during a normal work day.

* They're there because Musk thinks coding volume is his problem

Musk wants developers to work much harder than they are because he thinks that will solve problems. This despite the fact that Twitter's problems are not due to missing features or the like. It's pretty clear he doesn't have a great understanding of what caused Twitter not to make a large profit, as focusing on things that generate revenue would do more than insisting on more code written.

* doesn't care about the long-term viability of the people he wants to build the systems

Long hours at high intensity does bad things to people. It's called burn out. Anyone who actually goes along with the demands for a long time is likely to find this out. He has the intelligence necessary to understand this relatively basic concept, but he doesn't care.

Re: Working, eating, and sleeping in the same building?

"The thing is, you don't spend eight hours every day writing software, do you?"

In general, yes. Or tasks related to the software, such as writing documentation, reading bug reports and support requests, planning or architecture meetings, code reviews, etc. That's why I'm employed and it's what I spend my time on. Sometimes, when things are important, I work more than eight hours in a day. I won't pretend that every day I'm perfectly productive, but there's not a lot of slack time where there's no software work to be done.

"Everybody has downtime, and during that downtime you could be doing something different."

Only if the downtime is planned or very common. If, for example, I had a task which involves being available in case something happens, I would be able to plan some time where it's likely I won't have work to do. The only time I don't have anything to do is when something breaks like the internet going down (my code gets built and run on servers, so only some things can be done locally), but such events are both rare (one this calendar year lasting about twenty minutes) and unplanned.

Re: Not unusual

If you have other disagreements, I'd be happy to discuss them. As for your current points:

"I have the impression we haven't seen the last of [Twitter]"

I wouldn't bet on that, given how much damage has been done, but let's assume you're right. The newly slimmed company manages to make a fantastic new product, get revenues up, pay off their massive debt and gain in value so it's worth what Musk paid for it, yay. I, as an employee who built all that, get exactly what from that? I continued to get a salary, which was the same thing I got when I was working a normal full-time set of hours instead of no breaks startup-style work. Unlike in a startup, I don't own any of the new Twitter, because Musk took it private. Maybe he'll start giving out bonuses because it's been so successful, but he hasn't even promised that (and if he did, given how quickly he's broken all the other promises, I wouldn't count on it). Twitter's success is not the employees' success as it would be in a startup.

"I understand the rents are prohibitive and I don't know how much of a misery commutes might be. In that context, I think I'd be happy to have the option to test at work for 2 or 3 days a week."

There are some benefits to having the option, certainly. The problem is being forced into a situation where it's needed. If your schedule consists only of work and sleeping, that's not a good sign. If the beds were there for people to take some naps, that would be a perk that some people would enjoy and most others would ignore. That's not why the beds are there. They're there because Musk thinks coding volume is his problem (it's not) and doesn't care about the long-term viability of the people he wants to build the systems he will benefit from.

Re: Working, eating, and sleeping in the same building?

It's not usually about being too important to do those things. It's about being too busy. If you hired me to do a full-time job at what I normally do, writing software, then by default I will give you a normal full-time amount of hours of the software you asked for. If you come to me and tell me that you also want the building cleaned (very different from my desk and local area cleaned, which I would have done by default), and that takes eight hours per week for each of us, I'll have some questions. Questions like whether you want me to work eight fewer hours on writing software, or if there's some benefit to me for working the extra eight hours. In most cases when such requests are made, there is no benefit to anyone doing the extra work and the person asking finds a reason why they don't have to be part of the group.

And yes, depending on what you want me to do, I might also decline the task. I like writing software a lot more than I would like scrubbing bricks twenty stories above street level, so if you want the outside of a skyscraper washed, it makes more sense to hire someone who is capable of doing it quickly and has that as their business rather than demand I do it, at least if you want me to continue working there. I know that there are places where they just want me to write software and skyscraper maintenance is given to someone else, so I have an incentive to work there.

Re: Working, eating, and sleeping in the same building?

And are any managers going to do that? There's a difference between expecting a basic level of cleanliness from all employees, which is entirely reasonable, and making the few people you're willing to hire do all the work because the employer is too cheap to recognize what they want to have done and how much it costs to do so. If you put admin tasks on the people who are building your core products, you will find that they either let some of that slide when they're short on time, or they spend time doing tasks for which you could pay someone less and you start to lose productivity. Decide what you're willing to give up, and if the answer is nothing, congratulations on learning why businesses hire admin staff. Fair warning: if the thing you're willing to give up is not something your employees are willing to put up with, that may not work too well for you either.

Re: Not unusual

The people who work long hours at a startup are doing so for a reason. Maybe they believe heavily in the potential of the product. Maybe they really want it for their own use. Or of course the most common: they aren't paid a lot in cash but if the company proves to be a commercial success, their stock options will make them really wealthy, and that won't happen unless they can get to market right now. In each case, the individual employee has some pretty good reasons to want to go above and beyond to the point of working ridiculous hours for a while. That's also a good point: it's just for a while. After the IPO or the next round of hires or the results come in about what they're going to focus on, the constant marathon sessions are expected to calm down, as well as the rewards.

If you were employed by Twitter, why would you expect any of this? Other than continuing to get a salary, do you expect to gain from a company that already has its market established, isn't launching anything speculative that is likely to make a lot of money quickly, and of which you don't own any stock? Do you even expect bonuses or raises given that a lot of people have been fired in order to avoid paying them even the same as they were making? Do you expect anything to compensate you for having to work twice as much (if not more) than you were working before? Do you see any horizon after which this all goes back to normal working hours? I think any employee who isn't crazy would answer all those questions in the negative. Employees who are in this for a job paying for their lifestyle where they don't want to work that much would be disappointed. Any employee who is willing to subordinate their life for speculative large rewards, as in a startup, would be disappointed. They're left with people who don't have a choice, and those people will start to react as soon as they can find one.

Re: Makes me wonder...

And, under this theory, why would he need anyone, especially readers of newspapers, distracted from his theoretical plans to move? What problem would there be if he announced the plan? And, if we're assuming that he does want to distract people, how does constantly doing stupid things that get regulators, reporters, and readers to pay attention to his moves accomplish that? If he was being boring before announcing a move, it would still get covered, but fewer people would care about a corporation being moved geographically than about the entertainment the Twitter chaos has generated.

If he is playing a more complicated game, it's not that one.

If today's tech gets you down, remember supercomputers are still being used for scientific progress

Re: How will this help?

The simulation can indicate whether you are likely to get somewhere with your theory. For example, you simulate the laws that you know about how a protein folds, model a protein, and see what the simulation makes of it. If it differs from reality, your simulation needs to be changed. If it doesn't differ from reality, then you can use the simulation to guess at things that haven't been built. Once you find a simulated result that looks interesting, you leave simulation and try to duplicate it in the real world again. That's a biology example as I'm marginally more familiar with those than physics (I've done neither), but the reasoning is basically the same. It's a way of speeding up experiments such that you don't have to apply for time on the supercollider or spend months on painstaking manual calculations every time a theoretical physicist says "what if". Those things will eventually be necessary, but certain things can be eliminated without going that far.

Google's Dart language soon won't take null for an answer

Re: Economics

"I do not believe in communism."

Cool. That's related to the thing you replied to how, exactly? If you're equating free open source languages to communism (either the concept or the execution), you are demonstrating a lack of understanding of both concepts. Their complaint wasn't just that it costs money, although that's been a problem for language creators repeatedly, but also the lack of the other benefits of open source languages such as the auditing of the source for security vulnerabilities or the decreased need to deal with legal factors such as defining who needs a license in a company of multiple developers and multiple non-developer people with different jobs, using multiple systems for build and test. These are not intractable problems, but preferring open source code is in no way communist.

I do try to get things fixed at all levels, such as having a form that enforces restrictions on provided values or having larger constraints on database types than just not being null. The problem is not solved by blocking nulls, but it is enabled by allowing them unless there is a plan (and in most cases, there is not). The database-specific benefit of not allowing nulls is usually to deal with automatically-imported data which was imported incorrectly. When someone tries it and doesn't prepare their data, I'd much prefer that their database transaction is rejected and they have to fix it or ask for my help than that it gets accepted and someone has to clean up after the mess when it's discovered six months later.

If I'm designing the database, a lot of my columns are restricted to being not null for exactly this reason. The problem is when people design a system without considering these things and whether nulls will be a problem, and the dataset arrives with a lot of missing data and no information about why it's missing. Someone assigned to do something with the system has to go find someone who can answer a question like "What do we do with user accounts that exist in the database as verified but have a null email address", when a proper system could have made such a situation impossible if that was desired. Given how many of the questions are answered with "I don't know" and that some of them have important consequences, there are reasons to want that fixed.

"Specifially a database would be useless if every record and every field must have value, even if it's meaningless."

I disagree. Databases with lots of nulls often have a lot less meaning than ones where the designer thought of the problem and fixed the representation of the data so they would not need null. When I see a null in a row, what does that mean? Does it mean "answer unknown", "answer not written down", "there is no answer", "answer incompatible with the format", "not applicable to this data", or something else? These are different cases. If I request all records with a value greater than 100, then results that lack a value because they're not applicable probably shouldn't be included, but unknown values could be desired because they're possibly over 100. Differing values allows the query to specify exactly how the different kinds of exceptions should be handled. Throwing everything in as null fails to provide that power. If you're willing to accept data not existing, you should probably have a way to handle the reasons it doesn't exist.

Re: NULL is just the pointer analog to NaN

"what is wrong with nulls in db tables?"

In my experience, the problem is not directly technical, but in any system that says "The database will take a null, so I won't bother to make the user specify a valid value here". Someone comes back later and finds that the database has missing data replaced by a bunch of nulls and has to figure out what should be done with each bit of stuff that, in many cases, was data they expected to have at one point.

Re: "And addressesare integers"

Semantically, an address is an address as long as the format the code uses and the format the CPU uses are compatible. That means, if they agree to interpret it as a 30-bit (or 62-bit or 14-bit or n-2-bit) value which is to be shifted left by two to get the location, packed with a two-bit field which could be CPU-parsed or could be internal to the program, then that is an acceptable method to store an address. It's up to the user to understand and not mess with the values they're using, and making every pointer have two unused bits, though it will prevent one class of errors, will not automatically fix things. It will not, for example, fix a user who doesn't understand that they can't use nonaligned addresses and tries to do manual pointer arithmetic without taking that into account.

This ransomware gang is a right Royal pain in the AES for healthcare orgs

Re: We need a malware vaccine environment.

"would [...] making everyone's PC run a full anti-virus check on the disks, every time they open an email while slowing network access down to 1200baud until they are seen as clean, be like getting a vaccine?"

No. It might be a good idea for secure environments with some modifications, but it doesn't make sense to use vaccines as an analogy. Vaccines are preventative. Antivirus is reactive. If we're getting very pedantic, the vaccines are causing the immune system to be reactive like the antivirus software would be, but your immune system, if functioning well, doesn't interrupt things until it's pretty sure the antigen is dangerous (those with allergies see that going wrong). My recommendation is that we proceed with cybersecurity recommendations but drop the analogy.

As for checking every email and dropping the network until it scans clean, that would sometimes help, as would blocking infection vectors of many kinds. There are two general problems that come up. The first is that many organizations don't have admins capable of setting up and administering the systems, which is a bit tricky to fix en masse. The second is that a lot of these organizations operate in such a way that being too secure hampers their productivity. People who, for example, process many attached PDFs won't work as quickly if you take enough actions to be certain that no PDF-based malware is possible, and until you actually get infected, the bosses care more about speed and efficiency of the revenue-generating activities than the security risk described by people like me who are dismissed as paranoid. Those organizations that have admins capable of setting up a secure environment are frequently told that the recommendations are unnecessary and unproductive by people who have the ability to prevent their installation and who don't at all understand the risks.

BOFH: Come back to the office. Your hotdesk is nice and warm

Re: Real Life

I'd think that there are some even more basic rules, such as not using a username that's at all connected to you. Also, it would be worth doing something to hide what they were--if I go to secondhand websites, I can't easily tell a stolen laptop from a laptop of the same build being sold legally, but evidently finding the servers from this case didn't take very long. That's at least three really basic stupid decisions made by the thief.

Re: My eyes have been

Even if you're in a location where they can do that (such things are explicitly illegal in many places and legally dubious in most others), it wouldn't stop people who want to obey the letter of the contract from telling you about their bonus. "I have more money now than I expected to have, but I didn't take on a different job or receive a gift from anyone" would be a valid way to communicate the information that the no bonuses claim isn't true.

Europe's USB-C deadline: Lightning must be struck from iPhone by December, 2024

Re: Lowest common denominator

Could you clarify this? The iPhone 8 is still supported on the latest IOS and should also continue to install apps when it loses OS updates. I have an original SE which is older than the 8 (any 8, as I bought it before the 8 was released in 2017) which is still operating. The problem you are having may not be designed in.

The only item on your list that could be a problem for Apple is number 1. As for number 2, they've already put wireless charging hardware in all their modern phones, which is a larger set than would need USB-C anyway, so they wouldn't have to make any changes to the plans. If it also means that their users have to buy wireless chargers, many of which Apple will sell, that's extra revenue (the main reason they've kept Lightning around anyway).

I don't think they will, but those reasons don't limit them very much.

Re: Site radios?

This is something I have enjoyed seeing as companies have adopted it, and I hope it becomes even more common later. I dislike having a collection of barrel adapters at different voltages, maximum currents, and polarities with little hand-made labels trying to tell people what each one should be used for. Labels fall off, or people don't read them (someone managed to connect a cable of a similar size to a device that needed a different one and fried it, so that was fun to replace), or the cables themselves break and I have to go through the box of ones I kept from stuff that broke in the hope that one of those will match (spoiler: they won't, but finding out will take twenty minutes). Bring on universal charging ports that figure out what voltage is needed.

It depends what chain of adapters you've got, but either it will all support the PD signals and negotiate voltage, or some link will not support them and it will be restricted to 5V with the maximum power output determined by the source device and the actual used current determined by physics. An adapter can prevent charging if it doesn't support it, but it can't choose to overvolt unless someone's deliberately made it to ignore the standard (in which case that's a problem you could have with anything).

Boss installed software from behind the Iron Curtain, techies ended up Putin things back together

It's worth keeping in mind that, if a boss needs to be killed, that's work for the BOFH. If the boss has to pay the BOFH and go away, that's not work. It's logical to encourage not having to use violence just for laziness. As for the fear levels, I don't think there's any way for them to fall low enough for any risk to arise; the duo have already destroyed so many people that it's hard to imagine how people could forget.

North Korea using freelance techies to fund missiles and nukes

Oops, someone's missed how they've been focusing on technology as a weapon for over a decade, how two of their top universities are almost entirely technology-focused, how they have acted when they want certain skills (you wouldn't think such an education system would produce people capable of making a nuclear arsenal either, because you forgot that they study physics there as well), and how, a few years ago when they were trying to look more open, there were companies explicitly outsourcing technical work to North Korean companies.

Your summary is accurate for a lot of people, because they don't focus on giving good educations to people they won't trust and they have a large list of people who are to be denied trust, but when someone is found in the trusted group who demonstrates skill with computers, which they have imported and set up in many schools, that person gets doomed to a life of technology-themed slavery instead of the farming or construction-themed slavery a lot of others find themselves in. The country doesn't have millions of skilled IT people, but thousands of people skilled enough to pass an interview and start collecting paychecks, some of whom are actually capable of doing the job, that they have.

A dip in Alder Lake with an HP Elitebook is spoiled by avoidable mistakes

Re: Another another bad point

What's wrong with those? I've got that, the port works with all cables without an adapter, it allows the computer to be a little thinner in case that's important, and the only downside I can think of is that it feels about the size of a USB port and could lead to someone plugging a cable in there if they didn't notice the cut-out on one side. If that's a way to get RJ-45 ports onto laptops that's more widely adopted, it works fine for me.

Re: Photos

"I'd also prefer it if the bloody function keys' primary function was the function key,"

There's almost always a key command you can use to make that happen. Try fn+esc or fn+shift in my experience. They probably do it by default because every manufacturer has removed dedicated volume buttons in favor of fn commands, and those are two keys people are likely to use somewhat frequently. The fact that the other ten consist of maybe three that are sometimes activated and seven that are never used except by mistake doesn't come across.

Re: Bother

Define "better". Both companies have chips that exceed the M1 and variants in benchmarks. AMD has chips that exceed the M1 in benchmark performance per TDP watt*. Both companies have chips for situations where less compute than an M1 is needed and the user values decreased power usage. So do any of these count as better than the M1? I'm guessing you will say they don't, but what is the objective challenge that could be met in order for you to agree that you're willing to accept them?

* That's only one way to calculate performance divided by power, and there aren't great numbers on, for example, sometimes idle and sometimes stressed power consumption for standardized workloads on all chips.

Raspberry Pi hires former spy gadget-maker who baked devices into surveillance ops

Re: Whats the point

Has the news of blocked supply chains not gotten to you yet? They're in high demand and a lot of people have precedence over them when it comes to getting components or manufacturing capacity. I have not purchased a new one in three years due to this shortage, but nevertheless I have a few hanging around. One of them is a 4 (with 2 GB RAM), but all the others are less powerful. I'm not the reason you can't get one, nor really are the foundation that would probably be happy to produce more if it was feasible.

San Francisco terminates explosive killer cop bots

The comic is clearly referring to those laws, including the firm order as set forth in the stories. I don't remember the stories showing what happens in the preserve robot > preserve humans scenario, perhaps because the answer is so obviously bad for humans that it's not worth investigating. Many of the stories also called attention to the weakness of the laws, one which becomes all the more obvious when dealing with either human-like AIs or something with limitations (either technical or artificial) as would be seen if we built robots today. I don't feel XKCD's quick joke either mistreats the original stories or is even all that redundant to them.

Longstanding bug in Linux kernel floppy handling fixed

"It would also mean that the disks would be the same dimensions as regular disks which was handy for storing them."

I really hope they were still easily distinguished, because otherwise that sounds like a recipe for getting confused why this floppy doesn't work in that older standard-only drive. It reminds me of a time when someone mixed a stack of blank CDs with some ones that had been written to, requiring me to insert each one to find the ones with actual data on them. Although I arrived too late to prevent that, I did get there in time to prevent them mixing in the blank DVDs too.

They'll keep making those external drives for a while, I'm sure. I value not having to carry it around or integrated into every machine, though. While they still make laptops with optical drives, every model ends up being a lot bigger and heavier than one that ditches it. I don't use the media enough that going to my closet and retrieving the USB one is a problem.