Posts by doublelayer

Document Foundation starts charging €8.99 for 'free' LibreOffice

Re: Does that mean there's will be a version with proper accent entry?

I can too, at least I can type all the unusual letters for languages I speak, because I've set up keyboard layouts and know them well (I also know where they moved all the punctuation marks, because there appears to be a rule that no keyboard layout can leave them all in the same place). If I want to type one that's not in a language I speak, then it's a bit trickier, so I can see why someone who uses them rarely would do it that way.

Re: I'd pay

That may be, but the last time I was using Pages to edit a .docx file, I was going slowly mad because every time I pressed command+s to save, Pages put up a helpful box for saving in its proprietary format that nothing else reads. I could save to the original format, but only by using the export control and going through a manual process of choosing a file name and selecting to replace the old copy. I got used to computers which were less reliable, so I manually save somewhat frequently, and I'm used to software which doesn't put up any obstacles to doing what I asked.

Apple to raise App Store prices in 28 countries

Apple sets the levels at which you can charge, and you select which level you'll use. These are mostly done in U.S. dollars, so the lowest you can charge (not counting free) is $0.99. You may not charge $0.75 even if you want. For each value in dollars, they have a value in other currencies that they consider to be about the same, but sometimes it's not. Developers can change what price is charged depending on the country, and since Apple's just changed their arbitrary levels for currency movements, developers who don't want the price changes to be seen by users might do that for the countries where it's going up.

Warning: That new AMD Ryzen 7000 laptop may not be as fresh as you think

Re: A complete non-article

"They are using older architectures in their line-up - so what?"

Most of the time, nothing. These are probably just fine for most use cases, and anyone who truly understands CPUs will look for benchmarks and see whatever difference there is. They've also cleaned up their numbers so it's at least possible to identify this without having to search through hidden docs.

The risk more generally with a policy like this is user confusion, where a user assumes a CPU will be using more modern cores and can be mislead into buying something they wouldn't if they understood it. Intel's done that before, which is probably why, even though their modern Celeron chips are pretty good, they still feel they have to hide the name because of its history (when they started using stuff from the Atom line that didn't produce great results). It's also done in stuff other than CPUs to make something sound like it's worth a higher price than it really is. I don't think AMD has done that here, but the proof of that is in the benchmarks and I'm not in the market, so I'll skip the comparison shopping this time.

'Last man standing in the floppy disk business' reckons his company has 4 years left

Re: "Extinct media still in demand"

It depends how you define extinct. Usually for life forms, it's when they're all dead, but that's because life forms can take a few living ones and make more. If you only have sterile organisms, then you can pretty much call the species extinct as it will be shortly and there's nothing you can do about it. Using that definition, which admittedly I just made up, floppy disks become extinct when nobody has the capacity to make more. Since the manufacturing for them ended over a decade ago, I'm guessing the machines needed to do so have been scrapped. The inventory of these people probably means that nobody will put in the resources it would take to start it up again.

Stand back, the FTC is here to police gig work

Re: Employees

On the face of it, that would seem to be their model. That is if we use your assumptions for how they make money. They may not necessarily do all of that. For example, they could provide services to the contractors, such as handling billing. They could provide other services to the buyer, such as providing them with additional contractors in the case of an emergency or their original one becoming unavailable. All of those changes could be made without restricting the contractor's ability to set conditions on their work, but the company in the middle now becomes more of a service provider than just a talent agency. If a lawyer wanted to, they could attempt to claim that it was one in order to suggest that the person doing the tech work should be an employee, and they'd have to fight it out.

Re: Employees

You can be a company that sells IT services without IT employees doing the work. The way you do that is matching a contractor to a client, allowing the contractor to specify prices and details. Of course you can then argue whether that company is an IT provider or just a convenient way to find a contractor, but they're still focusing on IT. I still think the best way to decide if someone should be designated a contractor is the degree of independence they have in choosing and performing their tasks.

The legal definition takes up a lot more pages and varies between locations. For example, some American states use a three-question test to decide, but even they disagree about something as central as how many questions you have to answer yes to before a person becomes a contractor. One of the questions contains as a part "The work takes place outside the usual course of the business of the company", which can lead to many arguments about what the business is. For example, for the example above, is their main business a talent-finding company for IT people, or is their main business providing IT services?

Re: Employees

That's too absolute. For example if they contract out their IT to an external provider, then they may have no IT staff as employees, but their provider is still a contractor. The distinction is usually down to how much power the contractor has over their work, such as setting their prices, tasks they'll perform, hours they'll work, etc. Many companies with this business model do provide those doing the work with the power to select their hours, but often nothing else,, so they're in a middle area where laws or courts have to decide whether the people are employees or contractors.

Arm execs: We respect RISC-V but it's not a rival in the datacenter

Re: What goes around comes around

ARM was a RISC architecture processor. Since "reduced" and "complex" are vague terms, it's hard to define where the boundary is these days, but ARMV8A has about 1100 instructions (counting has to be done manually from a large set of docs that duplicate them sometimes) and they've been adding extensions for years. ARMV9A may have slightly reduced that by throwing away some 32-bit legacy instructions, but it also has extensions so they likely cancel out to a similar value.

Compared to the 50 core instructions mentioned in RISC-V, that makes ARM a lot more CISCy. I wouldn't expect real world usage of RISC-V to stay that way, at least excluding microcontrollers (ARM's most basic M0 cores also have fewer instructions). People will add extensions, software will come to expect them, and we will stick to a complex architecture.

I don't know how Windows on ARM is right now. The problem is that they've announced a lot of things that suggest that it could be pretty good by now: they've got 64-bit emulation, they've got multiple hardware manufacturers, and they have had several generations of software to iron out the bugs. It might work well enough for some use cases. I don't know that though because I don't have any reason to buy a machine. The processors they have from Qualcomm have raw performance better than the low-end laptop chips, but not for high-end machines. Claims of significant improvements in battery life don't appear to be as monumental as they say. I don't have any reason other than curiosity to consider one.

Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic

Re: Perhaps, but Shakespeare had other ideas …

That line probably doesn't mean what you think it does. Juliet is not asking "Where are you, Romeo?". She isn't expecting Romeo to be there. She doesn't expect him to come to her at any point. This is her talking to herself, and Romeo's location isn't what she's concerned with.

She is asking "Why are you Romeo", because she has fallen into Shakespearean love* with him but this is a problem for her. Her parents would presumably not be very happy with this love since they're feuding, they have a different idea as to who she should marry, and there would probably be problems if she even tried to approach Romeo to talk with him. As far as she knows, she can't do anything about her newfound love and is doomed to never spend time with the one she loves, assuming he returns her feelings. The sentence can more accurately be translated as "Why does it have to be Romeo", and she proceeds on to talk about the meanings of names in the famous "What's in a name" speech to describe how her love takes precedence over either of their names.

* Shakespearean love: a thing almost but not entirely unlike love, but don't let the sheer unrealisticness of this thing or how seriously people take something that took all of five seconds to happen distract you from the rest of the words, or you'll be thinking of nothing else for the rest of the play.

Don't say Pentium or Celeron anymore, it's just Processor now, says Intel

Re: trademarks

The term "window" for a box in a GUI displaying data predates the Windows brand name. For use as a name for an operating system, not so much. Microsoft's use of Windows for the whole system didn't prevent anyone else from saying that they were displaying an application in a window or even that their software was a window manager.

I'm not going to defend them over their trademark battles with other things with "Windows" in the name. How likely those projects were to cause confusion is subjective, and I expect Microsoft, especially 1990s Microsoft, was very lawyer-happy. Using a brand name related to a term is acceptable as long as it's not the term or likely to be confused with that term, and nobody before Microsoft launched Windows would have referred to their GUI operating system as a Windows.

Re: Too much choice

"Why does there ever need to be more than, say, 5 CPU models on the market, for any given generation?"

Well, there are at least that number of levels for power usage (very thin laptops 7-15 W, normal laptops 15-30 W, high-end laptops or compact desktops usually around 45 W, mid-range desktop parts often around 65 W, and workstations or gaming machines above 90 W). That's if I simplify quite a bit, because there's a lot of different levels in that "above 90" category, 15 and 28 produce very different laptop performance setups, and so on throughout the ranges. Having five units altogether would mean exactly one for each level. You want the AMD laptop processor, 6th gen? I hope you like it.

Even if we expand it to five per category, which is closer to what we actually have today, it's cost versus performance. If I'm going to buy a laptop for an office user, I don't want to give them a processor that'll produce awesome performance on complex games; in order to get that performance, it will cost double what the needed part costs and it will run down the battery faster unless they've markedly improved the firmware that scales down when the machine is idle. The packages we buy aren't even just a CPU. For example, you can have AMD processors with integrated graphics or without them. If you have GPU-intensive tasks so will be supplying a discrete graphics unit, skipping the lower-power included ones can allow you to get a cheaper or faster CPU-only device.

Comparison shopping between tons of models can be annoying, but there are benefits from not having to buy the top of the line because they didn't bother making anything else.

Re: Is an Intel Processor an IProcessor?

I think Apple started ditching the i prefix when they couldn't call Apple TV "ITV". They'd been buying trademarks from people for a while (even doing that deal with Cisco so they could both use iOS). Admittedly, they didn't bother keeping the iBook brand around earlier than that, so maybe someone figured out that it no longer meant much.

Re: trademarks

You can trademark a word for purposes it wasn't used for before. Windows brand operating system isn't confusing. Windows brand windows would be. Thus, if you want to trademark Processor as the name for your new restaurant, you'll likely be able to do it. Trademarking that for your processor will likely be denied. Snap (the Snapchat people) ran into this a while ago when trying to trademark "Spectacles" for a pair of glasses.

Intel might not even try that, given they're avoiding anything memorable here. They still have a trademark on Intel, so they're probably trying to hide the labels they think users associate with poor performance. Of course, I think if you ask a nontechnical person, they've probably never heard of either existing brand name and couldn't tell you where they are in the product line.

The funny thing about this branding push is that modern Celerons can be pretty good. As long as you don't get a 2016 one by mistake or skimp on the RAM, they're more than capable for many tasks.

California Governor signs child privacy law requiring online age checks

Re: Lovely.

Go through the post you replied to. Which of those things would you want to restrict? Marx? Mao? Maybe the recipes for explosives? Which things do you want removed because there are imperfect people you want to protect from them? The logical one is the explosives, except anyone sufficiently motivated will be taught in chemistry class how explosions start and can figure out the rest from there. The complex part of bombs isn't the boom part.

The points mentioned are suggestions on how you can handle those things if you want to. You can also do nothing. If you want something banned or restricted, you'll have to explain why it's dangerous enough that the restrictions have to apply to everyone, and that's often a high bar. The world's full of dangerous things that you're allowed to do, and we don't restrict them all on the basis that someone may choose to put themselves into danger. A large part of parenting is explaining to children that things are dangerous and how to avoid them or obtain goals more safely.

US border cops harvest info from citizens' phones, build massive database

Re: GDPR?

GDPR exempts government entities. Now I don't think they bothered to exempt non-EU governments, but if it really came to it, the U.S. government could say that the exceptions for governments applied to them anyway. The court could decide either way.

That is if it got there, which it wouldn't. In order to have GDPR consequences, a European data authority would have to investigate and fine the U.S. government, then sue them when the U.S. refused to pay. There's no chance they will investigate, assess a fine, or sue a government, and if they did all of that, the U.S. would say it wasn't chargeable under EU laws and refuse to do anything in that country. They'd have an argument under international law to back up that statement. Only if the entire government of some EU member was willing to start a diplomatic war over the issue could you get anywhere. They're not.

Arrest warrant issued for Do Kwon – the man blamed for 'crypto winter'

Re: Affordable home ownership

Nakamoto was a pseudonym. The actual nationality of the person or persons who took on that name are unknown. A few people have claimed to be that person, but so far none from Japan and none with much proof of their claims. I wouldn't guess from the pseudonym that Bitcoin's founding was necessarily linked to someone with experience of the modern Japanese economy; even if they were of Japanese ancestry, there is a large diaspora of people from Japan throughout the Pacific.

Re: "Obviously, [..] a lot of the beliefs and sort of the conjectures that I had made were wrong,"

Probably the same. Exactly how similar depends on when he realized his goals were not going to happen at all, and when he knew they weren't working yet. Holmes knew from the start that she was lying about her abilities and, from her actions, figured out eventually that it wasn't going to. He may have actually believed he was getting somewhere for longer. If he did, that just makes him marginally more sympathetic, not less culpable.

Backblaze thinks SSDs are more reliable than hard drives

Re: SSD Failure

The full dataset includes not only manufacturers but specific models. It can allow you to find out in great detail what would have been the best disks to have bought five years ago, and although the SSD data is not as expansive, it should eventually provide similar levels of data for that. This is only slightly useful in determining what disks to buy now, unfortunately.

Re: The choice isn't really about reliability

Depending on what you're doing with it, reliability can become more important and speed isn't always critical. Losing a disk doesn't just mean losing the data on it; I'm sure anyone running a storage business is aware of that and has redundancy. It means the cost in time and money to allocate a replacement disk and add that to the array holding the data. It means an eventual call to a technician to remove the failed hardware and replace it with fresh devices. It means buying replacements faster. There are reasons people care about that.

You don't always need speed, either. In my personal machines, the boot disk is always an SSD because speed is very important there. In my storage server, it's mechanical drives. I can deal with it taking a couple more milliseconds to fetch a file I've moved over there, and if I couldn't, I wouldn't be using a network link anyway. This allows me to have more storage in it than I could afford if it was an all-SSD setup (when I was buying disks, SSDs were running about 4-5 times as expensive per terabyte than HDDs). Although my primary consideration was financial cost, I'd definitely consider reliability more than speed.

Re: 'High-tech credibility' at risk here.

Do you want to back up your sentence with an explanation? Why are they certainly not, and what data do you base that on? Why does this hurt the credibility? Right now, I don't have a clue what point you were thinking of when you wrote that.

They're almost certainly not bothered about recovery. Their business is storing lots of data, so I'm sure they're aware that getting to the point of having to recover from failed hardware means they'd have completely failed the customer. It's not that useful even in personal usage, as there are a lot of failure modes where recovery from anything, mechanical or SSD, isn't possible. By all means recover if it looks possible and could help, but never count on having that option.

BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM

Re: We need to change the PFY

I checked, and I was wrong. It's actually been longer. The PFY was first introduced in 1996, and it was only the third episode that year, so he's now 26 years into his career.

Re: We need to change the PFY

No, it's been pretty clear that it's been the same one since he started in 1997. For one thing, whenever he leaves, it's unusual and causes problems until he's brought back (which the BOFH forces every time). For another thing, he often reminisces with the BOFH about stuff that happened decades ago. For example, they talk frequently about their robot wars, which occurred in 2010, so he's been the same one since then. Finally, if the PFY keeps getting replaced, the new one always seems to still be named Steven.

Sure, they've fought many times before, and the PFY did once try to kill the BOFH, but all was forgiven after quite a lot of retribution. We hear when the BOFH kills someone, and he's never mentioned doing that to the PFY or suggesting that he's had a different one before.

Re: ACRONYM is NOT an acronym

While it's not amusing, I think that was put in there as an attempt by whatever person got the task of assembling that list to include something slightly interesting or humorous. The over-acronymization of things somehow manages to make everything sound stupid or unpleasant.

I worked at a company which was very dependent on acronyms without reason. They had at least three acronyms for "when will it be done": ETA, EDA, and ECD, though I wouldn't be surprised that they had more which I either didn't see or have managed to forget. But that wasn't enough, because they also had the acronyms EDD and DFAD ("expected date for date" and "date for a date", because they found saying "When will you know the timeline" too difficult as well. These were just some of the stupidest ones they had, but they had a list of several hundred acronyms on a wiki page just in case you wanted to bore yourself into a coma.

DoJ charges pair over China-linked attempt to build semi-autonomous crypto haven on nuked Pacific atoll

Re: Music to ears

He probably was considering that, but it's also one of a few languages that fits in that line. To fit, the language name in English would have to be two syllables with the second accented. The only ones I can think of that have that pattern are Chinese, Burmese, Maltese, and Malay. Not a lot of choices. I suppose you could also manage with a three-syllable one accented on the second (Korean, Marathi, Norwegian, Swahili), but those aren't great either.

Re: Team America!

The U.S. alleges that they committed the crime using U.S.-based organizations and inside the U.S. If they're wrong about that, then they don't get to charge them. If they're right, they do. That works for other countries as well.

Re: "offers to connect and secure small island nations"

All you have to do is build a few naval bases on such islands so that, if you need to send a ship to one that doesn't have a base, there's one nearby. Countries like that idea because it enables them to send ships to places they don't have agreements with just as quickly, which is why the largest countries or ones that used to have empires have large collections of bases in other people's countries and in some cases, islands with little or no native population whose entire purpose is to be naval and air bases far from the country itself.

Asus packs 12-core Intel i7 into a Raspberry Pi-sized board

Re: A "teaser"...with just the opposite effect.

I agree on the pricing. If you sell something to individuals, or even to businesses who might buy one of them at a time, post the prices. Don't make me email you to ask how much the thing costs. Even if you don't sell that many of them, it suggests there's a reason to hide the prices, which dissuades me from sending an email I expect to be pointless but add me to a spam list.

The only reason not to post prices is if they intend on negotiating with every perspective buyer, which only makes sense for bulk orders. That's not the case here, and I'm prepared to guess they already have a price list they send to anyone who wants to buy less than a hundred units.

Microsoft warns of bugs after nation pushes back DST switchover

Re: https://www.southsoftware.com

I can't find confirmation, but maybe Guatemala gave more notice so that article could get written? Otherwise, maybe they decided asking every user in a country to manually edit registry values, at that article does, isn't a functional solution.

Re: Canada uses tzdata files with American city names

It depends on whether they use a database with a lot of copied zones or a simplified one that doesn't use duplicates. If you're using the more basic one, then except for the Atlantic provinces and Newfoundland, they use the largest cities (New York, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles). Anything that has hard-coded these labels will need updating. Probably most Linux installations use the full TZ database. Many embedded ones use the smaller one to save on storage, so they won't be as lucky.

Re: Hmmm...

Be careful. It's labeled by largest city, so it doesn't mean only Chile is in there. I think it is this time, but that doesn't always hold. For example, if the U.S.'s proposal to go to permanent summer time goes in, the tzdata is going to have to change because right now, Canada uses tzdata files with American city names, so unless they do the same, they'll need to change files and everyone in Canada has to start using the new Canadian files. If other countries were included in the America/Santiago file, they didn't make this choice and would have been affected as well.

Re: Hard Coding Ahoy

Updating the time zone is just a file, well actually not quite, but someone else has pointed out that Chile shares time zone data with other regions that didn't do this. Even if it was just them, though, there'd be problems. So Microsoft rushes out an update which updates just that file. Now everyone in Chile needs to install it. In two weeks. You don't get that universal response when it's an actively-exploited zero day. You're not going to get it here either.

So some machines have the patch and others don't. Say hello to lots of computers disagreeing about what time it is, and therefore what time any other reference is talking about. Systems that work by sending times between them will end up with answers that are an hour apart, and that's if the programmers have been careful only to ever use UTC for internal storage. If they ever use local time, even temporarily, except when processing user input, they can have even more bugs. This also makes Microsoft and everyone else release an emergency patch just to get into this state, which takes time and effort.

Open source biz sick of FOSS community exploitation overhauls software rights

Re: "the need and moral obligation to contribute"

Yes, they've got bills. When you start a project, you decide what you'll do about them. One possible decision is to go proprietary, as many have before. You get paid as soon as you find someone who wants your product. Another way is to use a license that says people can use it or even sell it for free, and you won't get paid automatically. You'll have to solicit donations or find a different way to make money, but you'll probably get more users and contributors. Then there's this way, where you start with open source without thinking about the consequences, then change the terms and take all the code written by others for your own and make a profit off them. You're allowed to do that, and I'm allowed to dislike you if you do. Just because you have bills to pay doesn't mean I should pay them if you're not making as much as you thought your "give this away for free" plan would generate.

Sure, in this case, those who have to pay are not that sympathetic. Who cares if a large corporation has to pay more money. The problem comes when they change the license in other ways. They could put the bar anywhere. They can make the source unavailable for future updates. They can charge for any production use if they want. One benefit of open source software was that they were suggesting they weren't going to do those things. They've abandoned that.

Re: I wonder if Lightbend as a company depends on FOSS

They didn't say absolutely that they're hypocritical. They suggested it's possible. The chances are very high that they do use open source software; they're employing devs who are probably using open source tooling, they probably have many Linux servers, and unless they forged the record just to mess with me, they're definitely using Nginx as their HTTP server. We don't know if they donate to all of those things, but if, and only if, they don't donate to at least one of them, they can be seen as hypocritical. I don't claim to have proof that they are, but it is not only possible but also wouldn't be surprising.

Absolutely, and they do. They buy proprietary stuff when they want it. They donate to open source when it benefits them. They don't pay for stuff they're given for free unless they see a benefit in it, which is the risk in giving stuff away for free. Everyone knows there's a risk that, if you make code available, someone will make money off it and not give it to you, but that's intrinsic when you go for a free or open source license which explicitly says so. You want proprietary, go proprietary. Don't act surprised when you don't get an open source community building around your proprietary thing. If it's good enough, you will still turn a profit. Thousands of software companies have succeeded by making proprietary software.

Google CEO Pichai: We need to up productivity by a fifth

Re: My thoughts

"There is nothing worse than a "standup call" for five people that's scheduled in for an hour only for most of it to be trivial personal banter (usually a repeat biography of someone's kids and how they're ill yet again) and the actual work talk takes less than 20 minutes once you finally get round to it."

That's bad, but I think there is one thing worse than it. At least with unimportant banter, there's a chance it's about something of interest to you, so you can have a fun unproductive meeting. What is worse is a meeting where you have to be there or someone will complain, but you don't have to know what they're talking about (bonus points if you don't even understand what they're talking about). Now, you're wasting the same amount of time, but there's no chance you're enjoying any of it. If you're me, then I'm sorry for you, but you would also get mildly annoyed at everyone in the meeting and ponder whether they'd notice if you had network failures about twenty minutes into each of these meetings.

I think the correlation probably does go the other way at least somewhat, combined with the fact that, if you waste half of everyone's week in meetings, then you may not be able to rely on single points of contact anymore because the chances are high that they'll be unavailable because they're in a meeting or too busy to deal with your request. It probably also puts off some people, resulting in a more mixed set of people to work on the product. Managers who set up all those meetings may also be managing badly in other ways as well, leading to inefficient team organization which also harms communication.

California passes bill requiring salary ranges on job listings

Re: Women v men

That's not what I suggest. I was pointing out that the cited figure is already overstating the difference, and that if you want to get a better picture, you can isolate the level of discrimination by controlling for the factors you name. If two people really do have the same abilities, experience, and goals, then we'd expect them to earn similar amounts. If they average out to different numbers, then there may be other things we didn't control for.

I'm not asking for equality of outcome. I point out that existing comparisons are often flawed and contain a lot of differences averaged together. Some of those differences are due to discrimination. Some are due to unintentional differences that are worth studying, but not always modifying. Some are simply due to choice. If you average them all together, you may overstate or understate the ones that are due to discrimination, which is a problem for making any argument based on the statistics.

Re: What are the downsides?

Nothing stops them, but if they tried that on me, that would get a "no, and don't ask anything else like that" response. I think they are aware that the candidate isn't pleased with such tactics, and if they're negotiating salary, they at least kind of want that candidate to join.

A candidate can overstate their previous salary, but what it boils down to is "You must pay me at least this much for me to join". They could come out and say that, which is basically their attitude anyway, but the more overt negotiation might annoy the negotiator for the company.

Re: Women v men

That's not the only thing the number means. There is a job-specific salary difference, which varies by industry but in almost all cases exists, and a difference in occupations in each group. If you want the number you've quoted to be 100%, there are two questions you need to answer:

1. Why are women paid less than men when doing the same job? (The obvious question)

2. Why do women on average have jobs that pay less than the jobs chosen on average by men? This is a combination of women choosing different jobs and being considered less often for certain jobs.

If you only solve the first question, there will probably still be a disparity seen in the average income comparison you've cited. Asking the second question is very important because the answer to it can often reveal other difficulties, such as societal expectations of occupations, imbalance in family work leading to different choices in which job to take, or sexism seen in who gets hired but not how much the person who gets hired is paid. If we want there to be equality, we need to know all the reasons why there is inequality.

Re: Will this actually help ?

What I dislike even more, if that's possible, is the recruiter who has a job they think I would be a good fit for, and their second question (after how are you) is how much money I want to make. If I took your call, I want to hear about what the job involves just in case my reaction is to run away. Then, you can tell me how much they want to pay for the person who fits their needs. I'm not doing salary negotiation the wrong way, on the wrong end of the interview process, and with a person who isn't equipped to accept or suggest terms.

No, Apple, you may not sell iPhones without chargers

Re: Simple Compromise?

Apple already make those and ship them to stores. Nobody buys that when another one is just fine, but you can. They have already incurred the impact in order to sell it to someone who doesn't have a block that works with the included cable, so the only risk is if a lot more people ask for them when they're free.

Re: The rest

One thing that may be considered here is that Apple's including a USB-C to Lightning cable in the box now, which means that to use that, you'll need a charger with a USB-C port. I have ten blocks with USB-A ports, and I have a USB-A to Lightning cable (my iPhone is old enough that they were still shipping those, and although the one they sent was damaged long ago, I replaced it with another). I don't have any wall adapters with a USB-C port on it. I'm sure they exist, but I've not seen them used by anything. I do have a laptop with a USB-C port, so I suppose I'd have to use that to charge if I only had the cable Apple includes available. I'm not sure why they felt it necessary to go that way instead of using USB-A on the power source end as pretty much everything else does.

All they'd have to do to both comply with Brazil's request and keep their environmental record is to allow people to present a receipt, serial number, or some other single-use validator for an iPhone to receive a free charging block. Those who have one don't ask and are fine. They could probably also get away with it by using USB-A cables instead of USB-C ones, as arguing that USB chargers are ubiquitous is easier than making the same argument with USB-C ones. I think either approach would end up working for them and having similar results.

G7 countries beat UK in worldwide broadband speed test again

Re: Interesting looking at the bottom country speeds

And what's worse is that these countries also tend to have limited access to any connection at all, meaning that advances in technology can quickly be absorbed by adding new users, whereas at least in developed countries, we're unlikely to find millions who just didn't have any connection before. However, one possible benefit is that many less developed countries that have poor infrastructure for wired internet have mobile networks that are far more advanced than running services to homes. People may have access to more mobile internet than these statistics take into account.

Unhappy about excluding nation-state attacks from cyberinsurance? Get ready to pay

Re: Self-Insuring

I'm not sure how long that would last, because one company might find that large savings account to be too tempting. Oh no, looks like some employee machines got ransomware. Let's file a claim and see if we can't turn a profit from other people's funds. You'd need some kind of contract allowing the other participants to audit claims, and they might not want to hire the people needed to do it.

Re: Who's the hacker?

There are various people that study malware and attack methods to attempt to guess who did it. They're not always correct, but they're usually able to identify useful patterns and can often be trusted. I'm guessing the bar for the insurance companies is "If we can find someone speculating that it could have been a state actor, then it was an act of war and you're out of luck". That wouldn't necessarily stand up in court, but they have a lot more lawyers than you do.

Of course, not every way a government could harm you is an act of war, but insurance companies are in the business of selling you a contract that looks like it'll cover something, then finding a reason that it really doesn't. They find the vaguest language they can which can cover a lot of unexpected things, then include as many as they can without causing the signer to become suspicious. They got a lot of mileage from the "act of God" provision, despite it not meaning anything. They found lots of reasons why the pandemic didn't count, sometimes with reasons but mostly without them. They'll do it with this as well. If you get cyber insurance, be very careful what you sign before you rely on it.

Salesperson's tech dream delivered by ill-equipped consultant who charged for the inevitable fix

How would it do that if it was set to interpret any incoming email as a request and bounce those that weren't valid? To handle this, it would have to cache invalid requests and deduplicate identical ones, which would have stopped the loop after two of the autoreplies to invalid messages but wouldn't have accomplished any other goal, such as actually working or not filling the queues with bounced messages and autoreplies for each new incorrect request. It just wouldn't have gotten into an exponential loop, but things still wouldn't be fine. If anything, the system that should have handled things differently is the system that sent automatic replies to a bounced message, as that's easier to figure out from the headers.