Posts by doublelayer

Intel plans to cut products — we guess where they’ll happen

Re: NUCs

Intel is pushing you to other vendors exactly how? The article suggested cutting NUCs, but Intel didn't say anything of the kind, so if it's about wanting future supplies, you have no reason to think you won't be able to get more. In addition, the benefit of using a NUC-style device using X86 is that, if they did cancel them tomorrow, you only have ten other companies making small devices that can boot the same OSes and run the same programs.

You also suggest that you don't have much experience with alternatives. For example, considering Raspberry Pis for, in your words, "running VMware and any other Hypervisor solutions". That's not a workload for which the Pi's going to shine. And that's if I'm charitable and assume that the VMs you want are light on resources and don't have any CPU emulation required.

Qualcomm: Arm threatens to end CPU licensing, charge device makers instead

Re: Put an End to the Shenanigans

You can think that, but it won't be right. Contracts are complex things. Signing a contract that has a non-transferable clause means that, if you want to transfer it, you're going to pay some more. Double payment isn't in the law as forbidden, especially as any lawyer could easily argue that it's not double payment, Nuvia paid for the restricted license and Qualcomm has to pay to remove those restrictions. Similarly, if the judge decides that ARM's in the wrong, the judgement would be that Qualcomm gets to use their license and likely that ARM has to pay for Qualcomm's legal bills, not that ARM's IP is stripped from them and their business model is now effectively illegal. Courts and contract law don't work like that and they never will, no matter how much you might like the outcomes if they were.

Re: Cause for concern

"Qualcomm are alleging that Arm are intending to change the way they do business. That's got to have been a decision made by Rene Haas. Why would that be a difficult thing to admit or deny?"

Maybe because they're big complex contracts tailored to the specific parties each time. They probably change them often in negotiations whenever they expire or need adjustment because a signatory wants to do something the contract didn't cover. If ARM made a statement like "Yes, we are going to change the contracts, but not like this", someone would be there to argue that they're clearly planning to do exactly that. If they say "No, we're not going to modify the contracts in that way", then when they make some other alteration, people would accuse them of the same thing. They have to respond quite specifically to the things they're accused of, and since their response is to a document submitted as part of a legal case they're in, they're not likely to be quick and careless with that response.

Re: ARM isn't the only game in town

The ESP32 is a SoC, not an architecture. Even if you meant Tensilica Xtensa, the architecture used in that SoC's CPU, it's not in the same realm as ARM or RISC-V. It's also not trying to be. Xtensa is designed for microcontrollers, especially DSP units, and it does very well there. It could attack the ARM or RISC-V microcontrollers used in embedded systems or as components in hardware, and there are certain types of chips where Xtensa is already commonly used.

As the main processor for phones or computers, though, not happening. The architecture is from 2004 and limited to 32-bit instructions. There's a reason all the main ISAs used for central processors are 64-bit now, and people aren't likely to go back to something restricted. RISC-V already supports that, but Xtensa would need a seventh release to add it, and that would be an ISA redesign. Since they haven't released a redesign in eighteen years and they would have to make other changes to switch from something optimized for signal processing to something designed for fast general computing, it's unlikely they will want to give up their market in a speculative attempt to enter one with entrenched competitors and where even the nascent RISC-V would have an advantage on them.

Re: Non-transferable license ?

That's part of the problem. Qualcomm didn't isolate Nuvia as a subsidiary but integrated them into the rest of Qualcomm's design business, trying to apply their license to the larger organization or to apply their existing license to the Nuvia designs. That does count as a transfer, so if the license requires negotiation, ARM has a chance of winning that case. I don't know the contracts, so a judge will eventually make the final decision. Qualcomm might have escaped such a requirement if they kept Nuvia as a separate entity which didn't share licenses or designs, but that's not efficient when you already have designs going on elsewhere which could benefit from cross-pollination.

Watchdog urged to sniff out any collusion, deception in rent-setting algorithms

Re: Let's think out side the algorithm....

I like the idea, but the risk is that people start trying to claim that reward for things that don't deserve it. These incentives have gone wrong before, so you have to have a measured and well-tested approach before you do it. Also, you need to assess enough fines that there is something to reward them with.

For an example of the way this ends badly, several religious trial systems, where people weren't guilty of any real provable crimes (witchcraft, a religion the government didn't approve of, etc.) were run on the basis that the accuser would get some of the property of the victim if they were proven guilty. Since such trials were performed using the "torture them until they confess or die" tactic, they got a lot of guilty verdicts which meant that accusing someone who didn't have an unusual way to hit back at you was likely to earn you a chunk of their property after they'd been tortured. When this incentive was removed, there were a lot fewer accusations. I don't expect governments to run reports of criminal activity like that, but still where there is an incentive, someone will try to get it without having the requirements and the system will have to plan for them.

Why I love my Chromebook: Reason 1, it's a Linux desktop

Re: “Cloud” means “somebody else’s computer”

I'll bite.

"It's not 'spyware', they're completely open about their data gathering."

No, they're not. They're completely open that they collect data, but what and how and what you get a choice about, they're not clear at all. They've gone to lengths to hide their data collection and circumvent or ignore methods users use to block them, including methods Google put in. For example, the fact that they included switches for location tracking to imply you could turn it off but only respected them if you turned off all the ones in different places.

"And, obviously, there's nothing wrong with giving them the data that means you get a much better experience."

What better experience? I don't get more useful search results. I do get ads tailored to something they think I want, which just means that I get the same unwanted advert instead of different ones. The only thing I can claim to get is free or cheaper software, and I don't buy that in many cases, such as when they put Android on phones and get paid well by the manufacturer for their API licenses.

"What on earth is the downside?"

The downside is that I don't want them to have and sell it and I don't want others to. These are separate issues. If they have it, there is the possibility for them to get breached and then others have data I didn't want to have. Not giving it to them prevents that option. I also don't appreciate information about me being sold to other companies who might have other motives for having it, and none of which I agreed to. Even if they don't use it at all, I just don't want them to have all this information they don't need, for the same reason that you'd probably get a bit annoyed if I stood in front of your house filming it and taking pictures of you every time you left the front door. Sure, it's not doing any harm as far as you know, but it's creepy.

"It's a bit like complaining about your accountant wanting all the details of your earnings and expenses: they can't do the job you employ them for without it."

No, because as you pointed out, they need that to do what I asked them to do. Google does not need my browsing history to perform searches and show me ads, but nevertheless they will collect it if I let them. Since I don't even use Google search, they don't need my data for anything, but nevertheless they try to collect it.

Re: Windows machines lifespan

I didn't vote on your comment, and your approach is valid for work machines in many cases, but I don't think your comment makes a valid response for two reasons. The first is that they were talking about other users' machines, with the heavy implication that they were in fact home machines. You already mentioned in your comment that home machines would be an exception to your policy, so since that's what they were talking about, it sounds like you already agree.

On another note, not every company does everything on a nicely synced roaming profile, and some people store information on their local disk. That may not be anyone who works with you, in which case it's fine, but I'd generally check first. For example, in my job as a programmer, I have a bunch of data on my local disk that's not synced. The important stuff (the code, mostly) is in version control and I have it set up so that, if my disk fails, I won't have lost anything important. Still, I have bunches of temporary or test data there for caching. I don't put it on network drives as it's gigabytes of junk that most people don't need, and I can recreate it in a few hours if I need to, but if I have a choice, I'd rather not rebuild. If IT wiped my disk when they didn't have to, it would be a little annoying.

"You should check the security of Chromebooks. You just can't have that with Windows. Chromebooks' security goes down to the hardware."

You are exactly right. Chromebooks' security goes down to the hardware in the sense that, if the hardware's past its expiration date, you don't have security. You can't get that with Windows (yet, but that may change in 2025).

"Plus, Windows can't synchronize sh*t. When you have two Chromebooks you can logout from one, login to the other and continue working there. Then you can go back to the first one."

If you're using only online services, yes. And if you're only using online services, you can do that on any machine using any browser. You just have to have logged into the same things on both machines, and since so many things use a Google account, that works on anything. Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Chrome OS, you get the same restrictions and the same continuity. The only difference is that three of those can do other things as well. If, on the other hand, you store some data offline on Chrome OS outside the specific Google services, it doesn't autosync.

"Windows don't do that. You're mixing backups with true synchronization."

Yes, it actually does. I don't suggest using it, but I don't suggest using Chromebooks either. They have integrated synchronization into a lot of their applications and parts of their OS. I know this because, when you don't want it, having that option defaulted everywhere can be annoying and you notice it a lot.

Manufacturers have been cranking out cheap ARM-based Chromebooks for some time now and they're still doing it. The MT8183 is a popular SoC to put in it. This is often for the cheapest devices out there, but that was supposed to be the goal of Chrome OS, so that you could use low-end low-power hardware and still get a good experience. I still find it weird to see Chromebooks with 10-core 12th generation I5s in them, selling for as much if not more as a comparable Windows laptop (with less work required to install a Linux of your choice) and significantly more storage.

"You might not like Google's privacy policies, but I think you have to give them credit for creating a computer desktop with such superior continuity."

No I don't. You can do that with Windows and Microsoft services. Turn on Windows, use browser of choice to open Office 365, write documents. Don't store anything on your disk. Yay, same result. In fact, with their integration of OneDrive and automatic backup, you can do a lot more with their system just by signing into a Microsoft account when you set up, and they can restore all your files and programs to allow you an offline version. I don't do those things because I value my privacy, but if I wanted it, Windows would be better than Chrome OS at doing it whether I wanted browser-only or not.

Re: offer to install Linux

I think you're right, as long as the same people take a polite refusal when they expect a technical person to fix their equipment. I say that as a person who not only accepts the task, but does so with whatever software the user is happy with. Still, some users can be unreasonable with what they expect a person to fix, leading to similarly unreasonable rejoinders from people who no longer want to put up with that. The people whose equipment I fix understand that I'll fix their equipment in the way they want and are polite and grateful when I do so. I won't do it for people who are rude while making the request or come back to blame me later, and I've not only experienced that before but have heard many stories of it happening to others.

Re: Windows machines lifespan

"Have you had the sad misfortune of being asked to help a non El Reg reader's home machine that is a few years old?"

Yes, and the machines invariably get through it without replacement. They don't just go bad after three years. Some users can manage to screw them up, but those users can do that in two months, and they can do that to anything (yes, Linux is included for the most destructive users). I've fixed a lot of older Windows machines, and I rarely have to reinstall. When I do, it's usually because a hardware failure occurred, and you can't blame a broken hard drive on Windows. So in my experience, the allegation that Windows machines live for three years is complete rubbish, especially when used to justify devices that come with programmed-in software death dates. There are other reasons not to use Windows, but not every possible excuse is valid.

War declared on bosses using 'omnipresent surveillance' tools to quash union efforts

Re: NLRB one more reason voters in Muruca will crack down on UNION JOE

"Right to work" in the US is a legal phrase that actually means "right to fire you"

For example, Florida is a "right to work" state as well, meaning they can pretty much fire you at a whim, except for narrowly protected things like age/race/gender discrimination.

I think your mixing up two terms. Your definition applies to "at will employment", which means that there are fewer restrictions on why an employment contract can be terminated. "Right to work" isn't the same, and generally means that a company cannot require its employees to be members of or financially contribute to a union, as opposed to states where employees can choose not to participate in union activities but are still required to pay for union representation if they are employed at a unionized location. You can have one of these without the other, so it's useful to know where one ends and another begins.

China promises its digital currency will offer 'controllable anonymity'

Re: Use before date

The UK did not expire the money. They expired the banknotes. This is a critical difference, as anyone can take as many of the old banknotes as they have and convert them into valid banknotes. In India's case, this process was strictly time limited with a cap on quantity. In North Korea's case, it was similar but had more restrictions and a lot more surveillance. I could store my entire life savings in expired pound notes and not have lost anything (with some added inconvenience for getting them swapped out), something I would not have had if money expiration was in place.

Re: Use before date

I'm not sure how they implement it, but it might not be that easy to sell currency and buy it back somehow. You could probably buy items with currency and sell the items for new currency, but that has risks. The same applies to buying securities and immediately selling them. In either case, you could lose value or have trouble selling what you bought, and if they really wanted expiration, they could prohibit the activities or monitor for them and give you a shorter expiration time rather than fresh money with the original expiration.

All that said, I wouldn't expect anyone to implement money expiration like that, even them. It's happened before, for instance when India canceled out some of their banknotes and had a cap on how much cash people could deposit before it became worthless, but that was a more limited expiration, had an excuse for doing it, and still led to a lot of displeasure. Doing that on a larger scale is dangerous, and the only country I can think of that did such a thing was North Korea, but they're in a position where they can pretty much do whatever they like to their citizens whereas China is trying to run a country where their citizens occasionally do things without state micromanagement.

Is it any surprise that 'permacrisis' is the word of the year?

Re: Why do tax cuts have to be funded?

They could cut costs, but generally, they don't want to or they pick something you don't want them to. They could probably make some improvements that wouldn't harm the people they're serving, but that doesn't happen very often. Austerity policies don't always focus on the money that's most wasted, and there are a lot of government-funded things which someone will miss if they get cut.

As to why tax cuts have to be funded, they don't if you're willing to borrow or print money to make up the shortfall. Printing the money ends badly, and many countries have, either by legislation or by custom, prohibited or at least limited using that for the budget and delegated the authority to some other group. Borrowing it can work, but depending on what country it is and how the people with the money are feeling, it can cause a lack of confidence in the nation's economy which, if not corrected quickly, can be an enduring problem.

I've heard "splooting" a few times, but mostly because a friend has a dog that always does it. She also has a few other names for the position which usually replace "dog" with "frog". The others you've never heard I haven't either. I can also add "warm bank" to the list of terms I learned today.

Re: You know where you are with an omnishambles

"it's oxymoronic to be permanently in a crisis."

Sadly, it's not oxymoronic to be permanently in a state where, when one crisis stops being a crisis, we get another one. Not that we can do much about it, but the crises we've seen over the past haven't stayed crises for long, just upgraded themselves to enduring problems, thereby leaving room for another crisis to turn up for its chance to shine.

Unofficial fix emerges for Windows bug abused to infect home PCs with ransomware

Re: Assession VB code

At least it was explicitly set in VB so you knew whether to have hope. I had similar problems when reading C code, but it only became clear after reading a chunk to see if this was the kind of user who checked whether the return codes for system calls were valid or just put in the calls and trusted that it would all be fine. Unfortunately, even when a user tended to do that, they could still miss one by mistake and end up having a bug related to missing a necessary error check. There's something to be said for exceptions that require an interruption. Although a poor coder can still silently catch and drop them, this is easier to spot.

German cops arrest student suspected of running infamous dark-web souk

Re: Registered users?

How did you expect it to work? Somehow, you have to identify yourself to the site so that you can post adverts for illegal stuff and people can send money to you to receive them. A site could be set up where people contact you directly, but that wouldn't make the admins any money so they are unlikely to do it and just because you're selling drugs doesn't mean you know how to correctly organize your own anonymous communication and payment systems.

It doesn't mean they gave the site a lot of useful information, but they would have had to set up an account of some kind to sell things.

Russia says Starlink satellites could become military targets

Re: Russia is bluffing

Yes, unless they can unmythify the communication between satellites for more remote ones, they'll still need local uplinks. If you wanted to take out Ukraine's ability to use Starlink, it would be easier to attack those uplinks which don't move than satellites which not only are moving but have replacements earlier in the orbit. Unfortunately for Russia, the uplinks they'd need to go after are in some cases on the soil of NATO members and bombing things there can be dangerous.

Re: Seems reasonable and fair

The Starlink satellites are located in international space. Buildings on Ukrainian soil are not the same in international law. Not to mention that the restaurants you mention are probably franchised to a local owner so can't be claimed as owned by the U.S. parent organizations anyway. Treaties on causes of war would indicate the destruction of Starlink satellites as an act of war against the US and the destruction of the restaurants as one against Ukraine but not the US. Of course, the US isn't prevented from deciding they're going to take it as one anyway (and if they wanted to join the war and have it be legal, all they have to do is get Ukraine to invite their assistance which would probably be pretty easy).

Re: Seems reasonable and fair

Funnily enough, 13th-century common law has been superseded these days. You don't own the skies above your house. Your country can fly any aircraft they want to over it and you're out of luck. You may also not own the stuff below your house, as there are laws about things such as underground water resources and restrictions on mining. And, to the point, there are treaties about satellites and the use of space, so it doesn't apply there either.

You're right about acts of war though. Flying military aircraft over another country's territory without permission wasn't allowed and could have led to war, just as shooting a Starlink or other civilian satellite could. The USSR decided it wasn't worth attacking that time, and the US may make a similar decision if Russia tries it this time. There's a chance they won't, so I wouldn't advocate putting it to the test.

Re: Seems reasonable and fair

Probably not, because the car is most likely located on the soil of a different country, so a military attack on the car would be an act of war against whatever country the car was sitting on at the time. If the U.S. citizen was in it, the U.S. might still take it as assassination of their citizen, which is also an act of war, so you have the potential to get a response from two countries. Military attacks on something the other country claims when they're not in your country can be interpreted as acts of war easily. The primary reason that doesn't lead to war is that countries usually don't want to go to that effort for a small attack. The question is not whether destruction of Starlink satellites would be grounds for retaliation; it would. The question is whether the U.S. would bother doing something about it.

The boss worked in a fishbowl, so office tricks were a treat

Re: Pranks and things

Some people may not appreciate some of this stuff. I would have taken a few of these, but for others, I'd have been quite unhappy to have them done to me. For instance, this one:

"At uni we blew flour under another students door and coated everything in there white."

That could damage things and would require a serious amount of cleaning depending on how vigorously they propelled it in there. I'm not sure if this predated computers, but if it didn't, blowing flour into a room with a computer that was turned on would at best require completely stripping down the machine to clean it and at worst could cause a fire (flour is more combustible than it looks). Although the risk is lower, it could even do that with electrical sockets meaning you have to be careful when cleaning those afterward. If someone did this to me, I wouldn't be viewing it as "you got me". My thoughts would be a bit more angry.

No, I will not pay the bill. Why? Because we pay you to fix things, not break them

I'll admit it's not as clear as my initial comment suggests, but your examples demonstrate part of the confusion. One of the problems is that there is no good adjective in English, so they do use "American". some of your examples do not include America as a noun but American as an adjective. I see why someone would see "American" used and assume that "America" must be the appropriate noun. When it is used as a noun, it's usually in colloquial or abbreviated speech, meaning you're a lot more likely to see it in a slogan or lyric than in general conversation, and more likely in general conversation than anything formal.

Having watched a lot of people from both places talking about their countries, I'd compare this to the use of the terms UK, Britain, and England. British is the general adjective I've seen most often, but Britain isn't generally considered the name of the country. Still, it's used often when a shortened name is wanted. While I have seen some British people refer to their country as England, however, I don't think that's generally accepted and probably annoys people from the other parts of the UK. Inside the U.S., using "America" is like using "Britain" I.E. it's a shortened form that is understood, although I'd say it's less common. Outside the U.S., especially in other countries in the Americas, it's like using "England" in that it's considered inaccurate and mildly annoying.

I don't get either Guy Fawkes or Halloween off of work, if that's what you meant, but they're both holidays in the sense that people treat them as special and celebrate them. If you don't think one is, I'm curious why you think the other is. If you don't think either is, then we fall back to the holidays we can agree on that I do get off work, Christmas and New Year's Day, each of which gets its special holiday capitalization. I'm not sure why people object to the existence of multiple holidays and treats it as insulting the one they care most about.

"So, following your logic. Since Halloween was probably closest (like your HP laptop) they should simply have referred to Halloween?"

Unless they wanted to refer to more than one holiday. This site gets readers from a lot of countries. If you allow me to use all of them, I can probably find you one every week for the rest of the year. As pointed out, if they meant Halloween to start the group, Guy Fawkes Night is less than a week from that, so once again, a logical group of holidays is created.

"Is this deliberate double-dipping or just house-standards-compliant US-centred poor geography?"

No, I think it's actually British poor geography. I find that regions often have unique ways of butchering geographical terms, and one thing that people in the UK do a lot is call the United States "America". This might be because there's no good adjective for people from there, so they tend to be called "Americans" (at least in English), but nobody in the Americas uses "America" as a noun for just the U.S. (the few who do are all in the U.S. and it's not the normal term there either) and, from my limited experience, a lot of other countries similarly don't make that mistake. They make different ones, allowing a general fingerprinting of where someone came from based on the incorrect or sometimes just inexact ways they refer to regions of the world. For Americans, the typical way to get it wrong is to call the UK "England", basically reversing the size mistake the UK people are doing.

Re: I have a problem..

I think they're probably interpreted like school marks. When I and almost certainly you were in school, 6/10 was not an acceptable result. Depending on the course, that was either the lowest passing result or a fail outright. I can't speak for your interpretation of the numbers, but when I was there, my parents viewed 100% as generally expected, 95% as fine, 90% as acceptable if it happened rarely, and 85% as you'd better not get any more of those. The grading system didn't use exactly the same levels, but they were also not keen on lower scores.

Adjusting from a scale like that to one where 5/10 is satisfactory may be difficult for people who are used to the old one, and people asked to give survey results can use whichever scale they're familiar with. That means that, if you get enough people using high numbers to denote good but not exceptional results, it makes anyone who gets a lower number for the same performance look bad. I therefore prefer surveys that use a smaller range of qualitative labels where there's less likelihood of statistical problems. Or surveys that just ask for text feedback, those can be even nicer if ignoring them is easy enough.

"(and why, oh why is my spell checker telling me it should be flavor)."

Because your browser is set that way? This site doesn't control your browser's spell checker. If you don't like it, you can change the dictionary set there and it will stop.

Christmas is called Christmas, and it's a holiday. If you have another holiday at a similar time and you want to refer to the group, you call it holidays. Just as if I want to refer to the computer in front of me, I call it "This HP laptop on my desk", and if I want to refer to the multiple computers over here, I call them "these computers". Failing to specifically name the HP in the group with all the machines present isn't insulting that laptop. As people point out, there is another recognized holiday (in most countries) for the start of the new year, and that's a week from Christmas, so they're often logically grouped together. Since this article was published in October, they may actually be referring to other less celebrated holidays closer to today, taking place in November. Depending on your country, you may have one or more of these.

Microsoft boss Nadella's compensation pack swells 10% to $55m

Microsoft matches charitable donations. So he gave $100k on his own to charities, and MS contributed another $100k to the same organizations. The round number suggests that was probably a cap on the amount they would match for him, so he may have given more in donations which weren't matched.

BOFH: I know of a small biz that could deliver nothing for a fraction of the cost

Re: When will the BOFH resign?

He's already a long-term contractor who gets paid an undisclosed large amount of money. Every time he gets fired, he gets a raise when he's hired back in a matter of days. I'm not sure he needs to do any corporate acrobatics to keep this going.

The GNOME Project is closing all its mailing lists

Re: Discourse is weird

And here we have the problem. We could put this on NNTP, but that too would mean switching off the mailing list. Unless you have something keeping them in sync, and if you do you could do that for a web forum if you were so inclined, you'll still have to decide what is the best solution. Some people would not want NNTP and say the email list is better. Some people would not like NNTP and say the web forum is better. Some would not like either and ask for NNTP. There is no objective answer.

Acknowledging the downsides of an email list, as I did, does not mean I hate email lists or support web forums. It's just a useful way to evaluate the advantages of one solution over another. Web forums have the advantage in searchability and archiving, whereas mail threads have the advantage of choice over how you handle incoming messages. These are useful comparisons to consider when you choose which method will be the primary channel for discussions.

Re: Discourse is weird

"Whether it's in a web forum or a mailing list, the data being processed is pretty much the same, so the issues you're encountering aren't to do with the medium of transmission, but with the client UI"

Some of the time, yes, but not always. For example, threading in a web forum versus in email means a pretty different experience. A thread in email probably has several copies of any search term due to replies containing previous messages or parts thereof, but you can't guarantee that someone's done that or uses any given format. It may fork repeatedly, but the subject line and structure will not clear this up. If you joined the group after the thread started, you may not have all the components even if you wrote a program capable of automatically disentangling these. For later finding information, a public forum that structures the thread and its child threads as they occurred is likely to make the process easier. Something akin to the nested thread display mode in these forums can make it clearer who said what and when.

Apple boosts bug bounties but may not fix some bugs in past operating systems

It's the second one. Someone at Apple looked at Microsoft's announcement that, in 2025, they'll obsolete hardware that's over seven years old at that point by denying security patches even though the new OS would run fine on it and said "We could do that right now, couldn't we". This is a shame because I used to be pleased with Apple's support lifetimes. Yes, they always cut off Mac OS releases at some point which was annoying, but when they blocked hardware from updating to a new version, they tended to keep security patches flowing for that latest one. It used to be that, as long as you updated when you could, you'd be patched for a while. They have stopped doing that and they dramatically shortened their major version support life, meaning that plenty of very serviceable Macs are being unnecessarily isolated for software support.

Just like with Windows 11, there are ways to force a newer OS release to install on hardware it's not supposed to support, at which point it runs fine. This requires effort and skill the average user won't want to do, but it functions. More proof as if we needed it that there is no technical reason for either Apple's or Microsoft's hardware requirements.

ISS dodges space junk from satellite Russia blew up

Re: Now wasnt there some reagan-esque starwars stuff ?

The SDI equipment was supposed to have satellites in orbit to destroy stuff that wasn't in orbit, not the other way around. We have the technology to fire a laser at the junk from down here, but leaving issues of power and targeting aside, what's the advantage of doing that? It's likely to just split up the junk into smaller and more plentiful junk in approximately the same place, which doesn't really do a lot. The SDI suggestions were just trying to break missiles or change their trajectory, not induce the precision control necessary to redirect them, but that precision is more important when dealing with space junk.

The sticky material suggestion won't be feasible either. The junk isn't in one compact place. You'd need a truly massive glue ball to envelop even a few pieces of it. If you have a substance that acts as an adhesive and is really light, you could use it to change the orbit of individual pieces, but not to collect all of them (and getting that material near the piece would require a lot of fuel from the controlling satellite).

Twitter's most valuable users are ghosting the platform

Re: Out of curiosity

"I don't think that choosing 3 things is a too unreasonable 'starting point' as it acts as an initial 'pump primer' so that you start seeing some things actually of interest to you in your feed after you have signed up,"

I think it is unreasonable for two reasons. First, the platform allows the user to follow specific sources. You don't need them to throw stuff at you. You can pick what you want manually. Second, requiring you to pick three items from a short list means you're very likely to get stuff you don't care about. These are like if you went into a library, and before you were allowed to look at any list, they required you to select three of their twelve categories and started choosing books from those sections and handing them to you whether you wanted them or not.

I don't have a problem with Twitter wanting to recommend things you didn't ask for (well that's not true as it would probably annoy me), but they can do that by looking at what you like. You'll be much better at recommending books to me if I give you a list of the last ten I enjoyed than if I pick from a short list of very broad topics.

For example, I like science fiction, but not all of it. I like science fiction where it doesn't make up too much, which means it usually occurs on earth in the present or near future with a few modifications. Hard sci-fi in space is good too. Fantasy in space with lasers instead of swords and aliens with way too many Xs in their names instead of dragons is often shoved in that section too, but I don't want to read it. Similarly, I know people who really like the other kind and don't enjoy books that spend chapters 4-6 explaining how the fusion reactors work including a discussion of required shielding materials and manufacturing, so if I'm recommending books to them, I can eliminate those from my list.

Re: He wouldn't have the userbase of Twitter

The budget was estimated at $221B, which includes all the research and development and 135 launches over three decades. So to simplify, you can have 26.8 shuttle launches for each Twitter.

Re: mDAU

There are a lot of accounts that are automated and designed to be that way. One avenue for delivering short amounts of public information from a program has been to tweet it, making a feed that other interested people or programs can parse without having to do the distribution (such as having an API to retrieve it or an RSS feed). Obviously you can't advertise to a bot and expect anything. Those would be most of the non-monetizable users. They may also include users in locations where they don't sell advertising yet or users attached to large institutions where showing an ad to the person who happens to be posting today might not be very useful, but I don't know how far they go to find who is truly monetizable.

Your next PC should be a desktop – maybe even this Chinese mini machine

Re: Home office

One difference is that you can simply close the laptop, sending it into a sleep mode with all your stuff still in place, and take it with you wherever you're going. There are modes you can use on the desktop, but if you put it into the analogous sleep mode and pull the power, it won't return as well. Even using those modes, it won't come up as quickly. There are other advantages to having a battery, such as resistance to power failures and additional portability, which is why I generally prefer to use laptops even if I'm using them in one location most often.

Cisco AnyConnect Windows client under active attack

I've used it (not chosen it), and in that case, the advantage was multi-factor authentication with hardware tokens which was mandatory for access to networks with sensitive systems. I think the native client doesn't support this, and in any case would have required more manual configuration as we were using a lot of different OSes (they also had a bunch of infrastructure for using Linux boxes with the same authentication systems). You could probably implement that behavior using a number of options for clients, but you're adding something in all cases.

Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel

Re: Lessons?

"Serious question: how much of this old equipment wants to have an upgrade, if its been running for decades how likely is it a new issue will raise its head rather than things just chugging along?"

I'm not sure whether I understand your question entirely, but most of the institutions running this stuff don't want new equipment, stating reasons you have. If they update things, maybe it won't work and it will be extra effort to fix all the problems involved. Using the older stuff will be just fine, because how likely is it to break if it's been running fine for decades?

This is classic failure to consider the costs, and it sometimes goes bad. For the same reason, the companies with the hardware often don't bother keeping spares or having any plan for problems. This means that when some part finally does let out the magic smoke, they don't have one and it's so old that you can't just go to the store and get a replacement. Let's say it's the hard drive. You can probably go find a hard drive with the required interface somewhere, but it will likely be used, no warranty, for significantly more cost than it should be, and you have to find it at the last minute. After you get that, do you have a full recent backup of the old disk, something that can write that backup to the new disk, a way to check the behavior when you put your imaged disk back into the equipment, and a guarantee that these things have been tested and work? Usually, the answers to most or all of these is no.

Upkeep of systems takes time, effort, and money. If you don't do it by having as portable a system as possible where you can use any modern hardware with minimal effort, you can also do it by having a resilient hardware setup with plans and preparations for everything that could fail. If you do neither, then you'll have lower costs if nothing goes wrong, and if something does then you could be stuck for a long time and end up with a much higher bill.

Re: No loss of hardware support

Outsource it. Go to archives of existing distros, get an old image, and find a mirror of the package repos that is still online. Clone the important files you want from that onto something else on your isolated network (because those distros don't get security updates anymore), and tell your distro where the new mirror is. If you rely on this old machine for production use rather than curiosity, keep that mirror on standby.

Re: Asking out of complete ignorance...

Some things in the kernel codebase aren't running and would give you no performance advantage. For example, if you strip out the 486 compatibility, your kernel will run at the same speed (unless they add something that they couldn't earlier, but if the only change is removing stuff, then no speedup). Some hardware support, drivers for instance, could be removed and make things a little more efficient, but mostly it would cut a little of the RAM usage rather than anything with CPU time.

If you have performance problems, the kernel is not likely to fix them. Tuning the kernel can produce some advantages, but what's likely using your resource is services and programs that run in the background. You can probably get faster by either disabling them in a distro that you're already using or by switching to a lighter one that doesn't have as many included by default. You could start analyzing what's using your resource by using resource monitoring tools and checking which services are enabled in systemd or init (also remembering to check tasks they might run such as cron jobs).

Microsoft ships non-Surface PC: a cheap Arm box for devs

Re: RaspberryPi is $200.

I think you're well aware that this box, in comparison to the Pi, has more RAM, faster RAM, more cores, faster cores, more storage (any storage), faster storage, and an NPU. They're not competing, and acting like they are is going to make the Pi look bad. Somehow, you missed both of these and wrote a comment like the Pi is actually better. They're not meant for the same uses, and they won't serve well in each others' ones.

Re: Windows RT 2?

I can confirm that it does run the emulation at least somewhat successfully, but this was when I tried it out on a Raspberry Pi (and it was a 3B). Unfortunately, that means I can't comment on how well it works, as any performance problems (and there were some) can be put down to using a low-end 2015-era processor and 1 GB of RAM to run Windows 10 which wouldn't enjoy that process. It booted, applications ran, X86 applications did too without crashing, but it was so slow that I ended the experiment and didn't try it again. It's probably better on modern hardware designed for it.

Luxury smartphone brand returns with $41,500 device

Re: It will become obsolete even faster

"If it was Android at least you might be able to hack the bootloader and install generic Linux on it when the vendor no longer supports it."

Right, because you can do that with all the phones out there. Why should it be any harder to do that with this device? They're probably using the same general firmware with the same lack of documentation and easy-brick locking systems as most Android devices. Don't assume Android will give you any OS freedom, because you'll have to fight for all of it and often it won't work.

There are lots of good reasons not to buy this ridiculous thing. In fact, the fact that they're trying an alternative OS is the only thing that has any positive attribute whatsoever and that could prove either to be a lie or to not mean anything in the long run. Still, the chances of getting generic Linux to run on any given Android phone are very low.