Posts by doublelayer

Do not try this at home: Man spends $5,000 on a 48TB Raspberry Pi storage server

Re: Not surprised

I have lots of Pis here, recommend them to others, and think they're great. I don't think I hid that fact, and I'm not sure it makes me "inherently negative". I was simply making the same point you did: "Nobody expects it to do everything, it's £35 FFS."

While you object to my pointing out the negatives, I don't think they're incorrect. You've pointed out that you can plug in something else to do your ML experimentation faster, which you can also do to anything else. And you can also use the Pi to control an external server running your real computation, but the end result is that you are using some other device to do the heavy lifting. Nor did I say that you couldn't do any ML; something small can definitely be run. However, the larger models one might want to experiment with do often require more processing than the Pi can perform in a reasonable length of time. This isn't a problem; the Pi wasn't designed for lots of raw computation. I think that's important to acknowledge when people point out they have difficulties because it doesn't have enough performance.

"The original dream wasn't for a low maintenance desktop in schools. That's BS. The idea is for a device where you can switch out an SD card. It is totally successful at that."

Yes, switching out the SD card, thus easier to maintain. And they really did intend them for schools. If you look at the projects the Pi foundation was excited about in 2012, you can see the kind of thing they had in mind, and they also stated it outright. They didn't create the Pi to run digital signage, nor really for us to use it as a cheap platform for automation. Their goal was use in education, with others' benefits being a bonus. That's still their goal, and the Pi 4 is a lot more capable of the task than a Pi 1B was. Just not every educational use you could consider.

Re: Not surprised

Educational/experimental could mean a lot of different things. For example, educational system could mean the Pi foundation's original dream of a desktop used in a school for ease of maintenance. The original Pi was almost entirely incapable of that, and the newer Pi, while it can do most of the tasks you might expect of a school computer, isn't always capable (running some bloated online learning platform which is a memory hog on a 4B 1GB, for instance). Experimental system is even more vague, as you can experiment with a lot of different things. Experimentation with administering a system, using a lot of server-style software, etc.: a Pi is great for that. Experimenting with machine learning where the instructions recommend a minimum spec for the GPU: think again. Therefore, it still depends on the use case, and a quite detailed one.

Re: Not surprised

"It's as strong as it needs to be for an educational/experimental system, and that's pretty strong."

This depends heavily on the goals you have in mind. If, as the original post suggests, it is meant to represent the power that Linux brings, there are several places where it really isn't there, especially for a nontechnical user. For example, put any nontechnical user in front of a Pi running a desktop environment and they'll quickly notice a few problems. For example, they might try to watch a video online using Firefox, something the cheapest of machines can do easily, and the Pi won't handle it. We as technical users familiar with the Pi understand that Firefox doesn't have hardware video acceleration support enabled by default, it doesn't work that well when turned on anyway, and that, if you want to use it, you have to use Chromium. The average user doesn't already know this and might well ask why that problem hasn't been fixed.

The Raspberry Pi is a great machine, and in comparison to the original comment's old processor, it is much more efficient. It must however be acknowledged that while what it does is more efficient, it also does less. Someone who used the resources of a desktop processor may find that the Pi's IoT-class SoC is not sufficient for their needs. Nobody expects to make an urgent cross-continent trip on a bicycle, and nobody expects to use a Pi for something processing-heavy.

Munich mk2? Germany's Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

Re: Not saving money?

"Potentially, MS could increase their subscription fees by 35% a year every year for 20 years, and those users who are locked in would have no choice other than to pay up."

How do you plan for that to happen? Let's assume for the moment that Microsoft would want to do something that stupid. They currently have standalone licenses, so I'm assuming this requires that they stop selling those first. With subscriptions, they do have a method of cutting people off if they stop paying, but they don't have a method of locking them in. The customers could choose to stop buying a subscription as soon as they were ready to use something else, and Microsoft wouldn't have any leverage over them. The data would still be available, in an open format, and can be downloaded off Microsoft's cloud storage if they put it up there in the first place which is unlikely for government documents. LibreOffice supports the current and older formats used by MS Office, so it can be dropped in for most users.

If Microsoft did use the license inflation algorithm you suggested, people would switch somewhat quickly-. By ten years in, the licenses would cost twenty times as much, and that would be all the price shock a lot of users would need, many of them having jumped ship long before that.

Web trust dies in darkness: Hidden Certificate Authorities undermine public crypto infrastructure

Re: self-signed CA

As it's not one vulnerability, the answers to your questions can vary.

"What can actually happen to me or my system and how?"

The standard risk is that a certificate that your system trusts can be used to impersonate something else, either breaking encryption on a connection of yours or diverting that traffic. This requires that the attacker has malware on your system or controls a link in your network. Malware is the more likely option here, though it must be noted that local malware could do nasty things to ongoing connections anyway. Such certificates could also theoretically be used to make your system trust a binary that isn't signed with a key your OS provider normally would trust, although the paper is talking mostly about network certificates here so that's probably not the risk they have in mind.

"How can I protect against such 'bad' events?"

You could analyze a lot of your typical traffic and see if anything unexpected happens, but that will likely take a long time. Since the primary risk is malware, scan your system frequently to eliminate it should it become known.

"How can I check my systems to see if they are vulnerable and/or compromised already?"

Most things that have root certificates stored somewhere will allow you to view and edit the list. You could go into your network configuration (search for the instructions for your OS) and start auditing your certificates. The problem here is that, when you find something in there that doesn't appear on a list of trusted certs, you may not know where that came from. You could look for some of the red flags discussed in the article such as long cert lifetimes or you could delete the cert (keeping a backup copy) and see if things break. This takes a lot of time and effort and may not be needed in many cases.

Apple is beginning to undo decades of Intel, x86 dominance in PC market

Re: Speedbump

That is the point that started the thread. The person has a Mac from 2011, which is fast enough to run modern XCode but for OS reasons cannot, and they think that speaks ill of Apple because they can run modern tools on Windows or Linux on a machine of the same age. They are saying that Apple's support lifetimes are shorter than everyone else's, and you decided to respond by denying the truth of that.

You've admitted it now. In order to run the latest developer tools, your Mac needs to be from 2015 (proviso about the Mac Pro excepted). We agree on the facts. Would you like to provide a reason they shouldn't care, because so far, you haven't.

Re: Speedbump

No, you couldn't rebut the point because you have ignored the one I used. I said outright that this user had the ability to update to Catalina and hadn't yet used it. However, there are OS releases where some hardware is cut off, and XCode doesn't keep compatibility with the old release then either. Whenever OS releases stop for some hardware, XCode releases stop too. In other words, exactly what the original complaint said: some hardware still works but can no longer run the latest XCode.

You can easily argue that this doesn't matter. You could argue that the support lifetime for feature updates (which is what you need for the latest dev tools) is long enough. You chose to argue that they were wrong. They weren't wrong.

Re: Speedbump

"Google for Xcode MacOS compatibility."

Why not? Let's see what pops up. I'll start with DuckDuckGo, though, using your suggested search term.

First result is a person who can't compile for IOS 14.2 because the XCode that can do that requires Catalina and they're on Mojave. I.E. a required Mac OS update in order to support something which is entirely ordinary for a different platform. True, in this case, they can update, but they could have the same situation and be unable. Your score: 0/1.

Second result doesn't really mention it, so we'll call that a draw.

Third result is a user who doesn't understand how this works, and the answer to their question includes this statement: "Basically, there is no current Xcode that will work on your mac and know what to do with your phone." Sorry, 0/2.

Fourth result is the Wikipedia page for XCode. It has this sentence in it: "the latest stable release is version 13.1, released on October 25, 2021, and is available via the Mac App Store free of charge for macOS Monterey users." This means that non-Monterey users can't install it. 0/3.

Do we really have to continue? Apple cuts support for XCode to their latest OS, and that is required to compile for modern mobile devices. They don't want the support costs; I get it. However, it does allow them to be compared unfavorably with Android, which doesn't do that.

Re: Speedbump

"I don't think it's feasible to develop anything Apple related on gear older than 4 years"

Oh come on. A lot of these developers are building apps for IOS or Mac OS which do one thing and are smaller. They're not building the kernel. If they were, something five years old would be slower, but they could wait that out. However, they're probably building something which can be fully compiled in a matter of minutes and their changes can be compiled and linked for testing in seconds. The newest machines could perhaps do that in fewer minutes and fewer seconds, but it would still be the same order of magnitude.

Re: Opening up the M1

You're correct that Apple won't give others the designs for the M1, but why should they? The original point is that the ISA executed by the M1 is known, so other manufacturers have the choice to design and manufacture a chip of similar specification and therefore similar performance. Apple doesn't have to give up all their work for ARM to be open. Some work on a standard bootloader would be appreciated, but I wouldn't expect them to do that either.

"Apple only uses ARM ISA (which ARM has developed for Apple specifically),"

I'm not sure if I'm understanding this phrase correctly, but if it's what I think it is, no they didn't. ARM designed it in many steps, some of which were before Apple was using it, and they designed it for licensees including many who compete against Apple.

Re: Speedbump

You are missing or misconstruing a few of their points and drawing incorrect conclusions from them.

Them: "Which contains workarounds for at least some of the bugs in its processors."

You: "So having "some" workarounds is supported or not supported?"

The thing here is that the OS provider, Microsoft, is not the processor provider, Intel. Microsoft made some fixes to Intel's problems, but they cannot make Intel change the firmware. Intel has done that in hardware back to the sandy bridge models. Microsoft has used software to deal with those Intel chose not to do.

Them: "Even Windows 11 installs fine on older PCs (the oldest one I have it running is from 2012, and that's only because I have no PC that is older to try) without any hacks."

You: "So if it installs but does not meet ms minimum requirements, and MS says they do not support it, is it supported or not?"

Good question, and it's subjective. I would say it is not supported. However, it's not supported under Windows 11. It almost certainly is supported under Windows 10 (yes, the latest version of it), so it counts until 2025.

Them: "Pretty much everything starting from Sandy Bridge and later has seen fixes for these issues"

You: "Sandy bridge is 10 years old, so older processors are thus not supported. This is from your statement. This means the oldest supported PC would have to be *at most* 10 years. [And Apple has ten years also]"

Wrong. Intel has fixed a security vulnerability in their hardware for ten-year-old chips. Microsoft has patched it in software for older machines, thus supporting them. If we say that support must include fixing hardware security vulnerabilities, then Apple has a zero-year support lifetime because they have not made any effort to fix their T2 security problems. And that chip, they made themselves. Blaming Microsoft for a thing they had to work around because Intel chose not to fix it is a very different proposal and much less reasonable, most particularly because Microsoft's fixed theirs and Apple's done nothing. In addition, you have AMD chips which didn't have Intel's problems, and they're also supported.

You: "Intel themselves declare EoL for their products well before 10 years.. [reference link] So how is your PC "supported" after Intel has declared EOL?"

The OS is supported because it can run and it provides security fixes for OS problems. The same reason I don't automatically count an Apple machine as unsupported when they say they won't fix some problem as long as they do continue to provide updates.

You: "What you really are saying is that on PC you can run newer OS even if you end up with a buggy/insecure system that has actively exploited and publicised vulnerabilities. This I agree, it is more difficult with a mac, as Apple clearly state that they do not support the HW, as for eg, Intel has stopped support. You as a mac user are informed of the EoL and can choose to run older HW, with awareness, rather than the PC world through ignorance."

Rubbish. If I run the latest Windows on insecure hardware, I have my hardware's security problems, which I can look up, but I don't have the security problems fixed recently by MS. If I was forced to use an older version of Windows, I would still have my hardware problems but now I'd have the OS bugs too. That is the difference. Apple does continue supporting the OS, but not as long as Microsoft does.

Re: Speedbump

There are some systems that stall on Windows updates for some hardware reason, but that's really not that many. Until Microsoft decided to change their policy with Windows 11, you could try to run the latest Windows 10 on basically anything, and most of the time, it would work. In order to prove that, people have been bypassing the system checks on Windows 11 and showing it running on really ancient things. While some computers from 2014 have had drivers dropped, there are a lot of machines from 2008 which indeed can run 21h1 Windows 10 (21h2 is Windows 11) and are being used that way right now. Those will continue to get security updates until 2025.

Apple has entirely earned praise on software support for their mobile devices, as they have supported their devices much longer than any competitor, even as some Android manufacturers have been extending theirs. They do not have the same credentials when it comes to desktops. They support their desktops for a moderate time, less than Windows is supported (unless MS's Windows 11 policy continues to obsolete more things, in which case they could pass them in the race). This is entirely without considering Linux which leaves both well behind. Apple still has a large edge over Chromebooks, but unfortunately, they have not earned the praise you are giving them.

Re: Speedbump

"Let me know when Dell, HP, Lenovo, or another big name comes out with a non-x86 based PC, as THAT would be big news."

Just one? Because all of those places make ARM Chromebooks and some of them have also made some Windows on ARM machines. They're still primarily X86, but they have tried out the idea too.

US states' antitrust lawsuit against Google's advertising business keeps growing

The Oracle-Google spat is settled. They've had their last hearing. Oracle does have copyright rights over APIs but Google's use is permitted. It's done now. They'll find new things to fight about but it's not that.

Tech bro CEOs claim their crowns because they fix problems. Why shirk the biggest one?

"Are you serious about Android phones need to be replaced often?"

Yes, very much so, and you seem to misunderstand why, including getting some facts wrong.

"I am using Samsung S7 Edge from 2016 that is more than five years. Works perfectly fine. Survived several "drop tests"."

And 2016 is really not that old for competing devices. A laptop from 2016 still works, yeah, most of them do. When Microsoft denied the Windows 11 updates to computers of that age, we called it terrible (and it is), but MS still plans to update Windows 10 until 2025. Does your old phone still get Android updates? From a search online, it looks like the latest update was Android 8 (we're on 12) and security patch of December 2019. That is far far worse than any other type of product, including Windows. And including Apple, but that's another of your sentences.

"It is the iPhone that needs to be replaced every other year for more or less the "same" iPhone with a bumped up iOS version number."

Wrong. IPhones from 2015 are running IOS 15. If an Android device from 2015 runs Android 12 (fine, I'll give you credit if you find one running 11), it's because someone has painstakingly broken through the locks and compiled it. You won't even find many such devices available. Apple doesn't make that process difficult for their old devices. This is not secret and it's not news. Your claims here suggest you are lying to advance your point.

"And on top of it, Apple won't even allows recycling the old iPhones. They pay you the money only to have it dismantled, so that no body will be able to refurbish it."

They don't use refurbished parts from them, but others do. Until recently, nothing prevented you from sending your old phone to someone else who would use the parts. I do not like that they have started blocking this, and others don't like it to the extent that Apple's had to slightly back off.

What do you mean, 'Microsoft doesn't care about Windows on Arm'? Here's a cheap, underpowered test rig

Re: Seems like an afterthought

"Didn't Apple buy those Dev Kits back so the users effectively had them at almost zero cost before the real M1 hardware came out?"

No. Not that this makes Microsoft better, but in fact, they said the devs would have them for a year, asked for them back several months earlier than that, offered a credit that paid for a quarter of the cheapest M1 Mac available, and timed the credit so it was released after many devs already bought one and would expire before they bought another one. This made the devs who rented the transition devices quite grumpy. Source article.

Microsoft admits Samsung phones under Intune mobile device management are dropping out of compliance

Say what

"The company [Microsoft] faces stiff competition in the MDM arena, not least from Apple and Jamf, making the issue all the more awkward."

They do face competition, but neither of these companies are competing in a way that they avoided this problem. That's because both products only work on Apple devices. Jamf's is even partnered with Microsoft so they can be used together. Apple didn't have that many MDM functions until announcing some new ones recently, and even those only work on Apple products. In short, neither named competitor even runs on Android, where Microsoft's product has the problem. There are other MDM competitors who can operate on Android and therefore claim superiority on the basis of this bug. Why were Apple and Jamf called out here when they're unrelated to the issue?

Microsoft engineer fixes enterprise-level Chromium bug students could exploit to cheat in online tests

Re: (sigh)

If you're joining your computer to an external management system, which you have to do for this to work, then you're giving up control over some aspects of your system. People have to understand what power they're giving administrators and whether they're comfortable doing so. If you do that, I think you have basically consented to having such a minor thing done.

The better response would be not to include the answers in the source, and then there wouldn't be a problem. They have to be checked in at some point anyway, so the place that stores the grades can also do the grading.

Workplace surveillance booming during pandemic, destroying trust in employers

Re: As opposed to???

Yes, it's different. If someone was coming by, that was limited monitoring by someone who could at least determine whether what they saw was productive. Software has no way of knowing whether you're productive, but it generates so many numbers that people trust that they mean something. Therefore, the software's decisions are more arbitrary and likely to be wrong. At the same time, your boss coming by was certainly annoying, but it was only a few times per day and the state of your workspace that can be seen at a glance. The monitoring software is watching your activities all the time and accesses lower-level details like how you're typing, so it's more invasive.

What, Uber charges disabled people fees for taking a while to get into their ride? Doesn't seem fair, says Uncle Sam

Re: Send fair

That logic has been used for nearly every discriminatory or uncaring reaction to people with disabilities, and it's been wrong every time. If you can't climb stairs, then choose to work somewhere that already has ramps. If you can't see the screen of this visual application, find a different program for the purpose because why should we follow the various OS or window system accessibility systems?

People with disabilities have lots of things they can't do already. We shouldn't be so uncaring as to add to that list simply because we're lazy about doing that little bit of extra work. In addition to it being ethically wrong to do that, we benefit from providing all of society the ability to contribute--many very skilled people also have physical problems and can do great work when not limited by someone's laziness.

Re: Yeah that's not cool

"I'd hope if someone had that much trouble that it takes over 2 minutes to get in the car that the driver would offer to help, but I do realize maybe they won't."

From the sound of it, they did help but they couldn't tell the driver app that they had done so. The driver app only sees a delay between the driver pushing the "I'm here now" button and then the "We're going to start driving now" button, and billed the passenger accordingly. They could add a control for the passenger shouldn't be charged, but they didn't bother. Even with a driver's help, I'd imagine that loading a wheelchair into a car can take a while. Without the driver's help, I would think it very difficult at all.

UK Treasury and Bank of England starting to sound serious about 'Britcoin'

Re: No

"Anyone the point of the CBDC isn't just electronic cash. It will bypass banks and enable the Central Bank to have full control."

You say this as if it's a good thing. I assure you, if they started doing these things, they would have a really big problem.

"(for example if you have a lot of cash saved they could offer a negative rate to encourage you to spend or even set an expiry date)."

Step 1: money leaves their bank and enters other investments. Step 2: investors leave country. Step 3: money goes to other country. Step 4: money doesn't come back.

"Lending could be targeted much more finely."

How finely do you need it targeted? Will this allow people to do things they couldn't already do? If so, will that be accomplished by taking on more risk? What lending do the existing lots of banks not know how to do that just putting all the money in one place makes possible?

"They would also have intelligence on every single transaction taking place in the economy which would give them better intel to set policy."

Run away. Run away now.

Re: Reinventing the wheel takes you nowhere different

It's not really called BritCoin. As the article said, "Wags quickly labelled the currency "Britcoin". Not much has been heard since." It hasn't got a name yet, and they're unlikely to do something so simple. Especially if whatever the original BritCoin is has trademarked it. My guess is that it will have two names: the long technical name (Digital British Pound Blockchain Currency System or DBPBCS), the official product name which will sound stupid and have been purchased at great expense from a consultant, and it will actually be called the pound when not called "that new system that keeps breaking".

Microsoft touts Windows 11 SE: A locked-down OS to give Chromebooks a run for their money in schools

Re: Device vendors and sofware providers in an unholy mix?

"Conceivably, 'consumer' devices shipped with Windows 11+ will for all intents and purposes be locked into Windows products for all users apart from the technically savvy."

As opposed to? Because they're no worse than the devices that came before. With an updated TPM module and secure boot, when you want to boot to a Linux install disk, you select it in the boot list same as always. The TPM could be used to implement something that would block you, but it hasn't. Secure Boot could deny non-Windows the right to boot, but it hasn't. If it did, you could turn it off, but you don't have to. Nothing Microsoft has done here has made it any the harder to boot to something else which can then replace Windows for you. They haven't even announced that they're going to take any action that could lead to that.

Re: Microsoft 365 changes the cost of Windows 11 SE for individuals / Connect to Ethernet?

I don't think they expect non-school users to be running 11 SE. And I'm certain you can use an Ethernet cable with an adapter, as long as you don't need some custom driver for the adapter. It's a basic driver and Windows has supported it for a decade, so it'll work fine on this too. They still have all of Windows in there.

Re: get kids hooked on Microsoft 365 for life

This isn't much different from when they were using desktops. It works fine for most situations as long as you don't have stuff that doesn't run well under Linux. Admin requirements are similar. Repair is easy. However, you still have desktops at the end of it. Schools and a lot of people tend to prefer laptops because they really do have a versatility bonus, can be moved to other places, can be loaned out for children to take home if necessary, etc. That's why schools have been buying Chromebooks instead of Pis.

Also, whatever solution you use, you still have to lock the machines down to some extent. I assume your proposed Pi solution wasn't going to give the students sudo rights. You might even have intended not to let them execute binaries from their home directories for a similar reason.

Re: get kids hooked on Microsoft 365 for life

This complaint is a little weak. The computers aren't locked down because MS is evil and wants to jail all its users; their normal Windows machines don't restrict installations at all. These are locked down because they're being used by children and provided by schools. The schools want to ensure the children don't install untrusted software onto the school machines, everybody wants to ensure that the students don't get malware or something creepy on the machine, so they lock them down. For the same reason, a lot of business machines operated by people outside IT have restrictions on what can be done with them. If students do decide that, because the school had Windows, they too will have Windows, they will leave school to an open environment on which they can install whatever they like. If Microsoft changes normal Windows to remove that, I'll join you and we can complain about it for hours, but until then, your attack is basically incorrect.

Re: I bet...

I think you probably can. They're X86 machines for now, which means it's probably a pretty standard firmware. I'm sure the default configuration will include Secure Boot, but that probably can be turned off so the device can be reflashed.

As for installing a compiler on the locked-down Windows, I don't think they'll have included a full toolchain in their list of allowed software, but they probably will have some dev environments for people studying programming. They could probably also use VSCode, as it's an MS product. Not at all enough for a serious user, but it will all come down to whether the school admins want software which isn't on the Microsoft allowlist.

Billion-dollar US broadband bonanza awaits Biden's blessing – what you need to know

Re: another wealth transfer under the cover of good intensions

Out of curiosity, why did you do that to the URL? We can have valid URLs in our comments here. We can even have clickable links here. No need to do that unless you have some secret plan I am not understanding.

Why machine-learning chatbots find it difficult to respond to idioms, metaphors, rhetorical questions, sarcasm

Re: Changed Days Require and Deliver Novel Ways and Means and Advanced IntelAIgent Memes ‽ .

My point regarding dolphins is that you assume their communication is either perfect or nearly so, when it almost certainly isn't but we can't really know. Survival is a low bar for communication quality, as lots of species that don't often communicate still live. Human communication is the most advanced we know about, and yet even we have difficulties in communication all the time, whether that's a translation problem or failing to understand figurative language (or for that matter misinterpreting literal language as figurative language). For all we know, dolphins are a lot better than we are at communicating, but I think they would act differently in that case and we don't have enough data to prove it.

Re: Changed Days Require and Deliver Novel Ways and Means and Advanced IntelAIgent Memes ‽ .

"Why would you think he's a bot?"

Because the sentences never make sense, and they always use the same Markov chain-like structure from the feed material. At least when it's not just copying others' posts, which is often the case when it makes sense.

As for your dolphin comment, you're assuming many things about dolphin communication which could be false. We know that dolphins communicate, but since we can't translate it, we don't know that "they are more than capable of communicating amongst themselves everything that they need to to live in their world". In fact, it's probably not possible for dolphins to communicate everything they could need simply because they need a lot of things and if they had the ability to, for example, give each other perfectly accurate navigation instructions and information on avoiding dangerous situations, that would be more evident in their behavior. You have assumed that, since we can't understand their communications, it must include everything.

Re: Changed Days Require and Deliver Novel Ways and Means and Advanced IntelAIgent Memes ‽ .

I would be in favor. I don't know how the moderators view just being really annoying as a bannable offense, but if they do, then this bot's overdue for a shutdown. Since its author has continued to let it go wild, they might also be the kind of person who sets up a new account for it afterward. If not though, it would be helpful not to have to skip over comments when I recognize how scrambled it is.

Surprised?

Who would have thought it? I wonder what other things they have discovered that we had no clue about. Take any of these sentences to an AI to watch it fall over.

Not to knock the paper's authors, but this isn't a very earthshaking revelation given we've seen the mangled nonsense churned out by these programs. We know they're just chopping up sentences and looking for the text that is closest to them in order to steal a response from someone who was talking about something else. Could one write an AI that could understand a subset of a language and make a response? I don't know, but I do know that if you can, it's not that way.

Oh, Comcast. An Xfinity customer and working from home? Maybe not this morning

Re: Wait...

Well, there's a logical part and an illogical part. They tweet to people so that people will see it on their mobile connection, which is probably still up when their home connection isn't. That is a perfectly acceptable way to send out a low-importance message to people when the cable connection is down.

The illogical part is this: who calls emergency services when their connection isn't working. The ISP support/worst hold loop in the world, yes. Some other ISP because you're hoping they won't do this all the time, maybe. Emergency services should never be called. It's not illogical for them to tweet; it's illogical that they have to.

Super-rare wooden Apple 1 hand built by Jobs and Wozniak goes to auction

"I suppose for that price, the thing will rest inside a glass box for the rest of its life, and will never be powered on, lest one of those original "rare" capacitors fail and decrease its value by $1k. A bit sad, really. Those things were made to be used."

I'm not troubled by that, especially if the glass case was visible to the public (it probably won't be). There's nothing you can do with a 1976-era Apple I which can't be done with greater ease on something everyone already has. If you really like the computer and you want to spend money, run an emulator on some hardware you've put into a wooden box and you get the same experience. While I'm no collector, I would find it a little sad that a piece of computing history was destroyed after its importance was known just because someone wanted to try their hand at 1976-era basic.

Netflix shows South Korea a rerun of 'We Won't Pay Your Telcos For Bandwidth'

Re: Good idea

That requires you prove that they have anticompetitive practices. Sending big files over a wire isn't anticompetitive. Netflix doesn't operate an ISP. In fact, you could argue that it's SK acting in an anticompetitive way, as they run television services which compete with Netflix and are trying to disadvantage Netflix whereas Netflix did nothing to SK's TV company. While you could make that argument, I don't think it's true; SK just sees a place they can try to get money from and is going for the opportunity.

Re: Open Connect

"This is a simple private peering agreement where Netflix pays for the private circuits and in return gets transit for free (can send and receive traffic to the ISP's customers over these circuits for free)."

No it's not. It is a server, a physical metal one, which is placed on the ISP's network to serve content from inside it. It reduces the amount of data the ISP sends through peers because it caches that data within the ISP's network. It reduces the amount of data that Netflix has to send too, so they pay less and are happy. A cache is not a peering agreement.

"They would like Netflix to pay for the transit which despite every mentioning of it being heavily downvoted here is a standard negotiation item among service providers. For example, the big 3 cloud providers not only charge for server resources (e.g. VM instances) but also for transiting traffic across their infrastructure to the Internet"

That is not the same thing. If you operate a server, your ISP charges you for the bandwidth you use from the connection. The cloud providers pass that along (yes, with a large markup). That is your bandwidth, and Netflix pays for that when they send the video off their servers to the customer. The cloud providers do not charge you for your users' connection, nor do they pay for it in any way. The user pays for that. SK only provides user connections in Netflix's case because Netflix's servers aren't on SK's network. Therefore, they're only paid by the user. They are unhappy that their users are using more data than they want to pay to transmit, so they're trying to change the policy that everybody else uses (including cloud providers).

Re: Open Connect

Yes, the ISP has to pay for the bandwidth to their users. However, that's the inexpensive bit (they're moving data across the wires they already built and paid for). The expensive bit for them on an ongoing basis is peering with another network, so if they cache the data in their network, they don't have to pay so much in peering. That's how the ISP can benefit from having Netflix's box on their network, although if they don't think it will help, they're free to not install it and move traffic like they do with everyone else.

Reg scribe spends 80 hours in actual metaverse … and plans to keep visiting

This isn't the metaverse

Using the basic definition (metaverse = video which changes based on your actions), maybe this counts as one. However, I don't think it really does. You're using this game in order to cycle, but you're not doing anything else in this environment. The video of a landscape as you move through it makes it entertaining I'm sure, but until this is an open environment in which you can perform lots of interactions other than climbing hills, it's at most a metatrail.

Other people may be visible in this game, but they're also visible in a video meeting. It still doesn't have the lifelike quality that VR implies. Whether it would be popular if it did is another question, but we at least have to get that before we can find out. One major problem with VR is that the hardware can present a visual and audible environment, but it can't simulate tactile information. That's a lot of stuff we use for sensing our environment, from detecting heat and airflow to holding or manipulating objects. However, it doesn't seem like this game really makes much of an effort to handle the two senses it can do, and only for one type of action. You may enjoy cycling using this game to simulate things, but it doesn't follow that you'll like an open virtual environment.

The return of the turbo button: New Intel hotness causes an old friend to reappear

Re: Can you just turn it off?

From the sound of it, if there wasn't before, you can enable this feature and keep it enabled, so there is now. However, I must ask why you would buy a processor with extra cores only to disable them. Unless the OS really can't put processes on the right cores, the extra ones can't hurt. Linux has been handling ARM's big/little for years, Windows on ARM has had some experience, and Intel has been testing these probably with OS devs' assistance, so I wouldn't expect that to be a problem.

Don't worry, the halo won't fade from the IT dept when this pandemic is over – because it was never there

Re: What we have come to

I don't think that's true. Each field has its own hiring requirements. Tech people need to demonstrate skills, including occasionally skills they won't need to use in the position, which makes it a longer process than interviewing for an unskilled labor position. It's not all that unusual though, as people interviewing for other kinds of skilled jobs also need to do various things to demonstrate they can do what is needed. Interviews for medical jobs seem to be significantly more complicated, which is possibly justified given the risks to patient safety of someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

Re: What we have come to

"Engineers have become a disposable commodity, just like ditch diggers,"

This has basically always been true. We get paid more, but we're hired like anyone else and if the company decides they don't need our work anymore, they'll send us away. In the meantime, we earn more money and have a better time finding a new job because there's still a more restricted supply of us. Why do you treat this disposableness as something new? Employers have done this since the employer/employee setup started.

Re: 99% agree

I think some of the problem is due to the voting mechanism. On all of the other comments sections, at least one person has posted that they find the poll confusing. One reason might be that the against arguments don't agree (Tuesday's says the extra credit will die down while Thursday's says there wasn't any). I agree with Tuesday's, whereas I think today's is a little too negative. I still would vote against, but if I read the vote as whether there was any increase in status without that "forever" on the end, I'd probably vote in favor.

Teams has a mute button all of its own in taskbar of latest Windows 11 preview build

Re: Great....

From the sound of it, this isn't another mute button that could mess things up, but instead just another control which activates the old Teams control. If that's true, it probably reduces the annoyance because they don't have to bring the Teams window back into focus to mute or unmute themselves.

Microsoft: Many workers are stuck on old computers and should probably upgrade

I really doubt that. Even companies that don't have a secure system where bringing your own device is forbidden tend to supply their employees with computers because it means they don't have to deal with the technical problems of others' equipment. I've seen bring your own phone setups, but rarely a mandatory bring your own computer.

I've seen several of your posts recently on this topic and this week's poll. You seem to have a very ill opinion of ... well basically everything work-related. I can see how some of that is true, but I think you may be overeager in stating objections to the point that they're sometimes incorrect.

I agree with you. I don't know anyone who would do that, unless the computer was so broken they couldn't do their job and they thought they'd be fired for it. I'd like to see the survey that gave us that statistic. The other numbers reported I can accept; Microsoft's just drawing conclusions from it that I wouldn't draw. That is the only number I flatly don't believe is real.

How often do they expect replacement

The report has said that people are using "the same kit they had at the start of the pandemic". Yeah, me too and it's fine. Does Microsoft really think computers should be refreshed every year and a half? Especially as a lot of people got replaced hardware then when businesses bought every laptop on the planet in order to allow working from home without having to clean out all the equipment from the offices.

Replacing old hardware eventually makes sense, but that's far too fast to do so. IT and finance should work together to make sure users won't be stuck with a machine that's hampering productivity, but if a machine purchased since 2017 is doing that, it is either broken or was a poor purchase choice in the first place (write that down, learn why it was bad, don't buy things like it again). If Microsoft wants a misleading report, they could have made a better point by focusing on the places still using computers from 2008; if you replace the drive with an SSD and use Linux or a clean install of Windows 10, they can be fine, but with their original spinning disk and Windows 10 upgraded from Windows 7 possibly spending some time on Windows 8 in between, they're not so much fun.

22-year-old Brit accused of Twitter SIM-swap heists charged with $784k cryptocurrency theft

Re: Some potting processes must be flawed

SIM swapping attacks don't use the porting system. They stay on the same network you're already on and just try to change the SIM card the number is connected to. What does the process look like if you've lost your phone and you're switching your number to a backup device? That's the system they have to sneak through.

Re: Sim-swapping

You're at times confusing SIM swapping with phone theft. If someone successfully SIM swaps you, they just get to send and receive calls and SMS as if they had your phone. They would not have access to other data on the phone. Having or not having banking apps on the phone makes no difference to the effectiveness, but if you use SMS to log in, then it could. SIM swapping is almost always used when they already have passwords to things and they need SMS for a second factor (including a fallback). The other use is intercepting other communications going to you, E.G. a verification request from someone else. That's all it does.

Locked up: UK's Labour Party data 'rendered inaccessible' on third-party systems after cyber attack

Re: Who is this 'third party'?

That's probably Office365 running that part of their email system, not the part that got attacked. It sounds like the database was on a separate system which is the only part known to have been taken down.