Posts by doublelayer 9378 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2018
"But gosh, doesn't "non-fungible" mean "cannot be turned into cash"?"
No. Non-fungible means that individual tokens are not identical to one another. If both of us have one and we exchange them, we each leave with different things. It is different from cash because cash is fungible, but nothing prevents you selling a non-fungible item for fungible cash. We do that all the time and people do that with these as well. They're mostly worthless, but you have the reason wrong.
And if they said uint64 instead of uint32, the system would have worked. Or if they used one of the many languages which have an integer class which can resize itself when it needs to. Or if they tested some big numbers, because this is not really that big a number. Cobol also has big integer functionality, but so does basically everything in existence today. You still have to remember to use it or work in a language which doesn't give you a choice not to. Cobol isn't a panacea to this problem.
That's never going to happen. If you're faced with a criminal who is willing to cut your finger off, they can also just use the cutting implement to threaten you until you use the fingerprint to unlock the system. Then they're in. Or they can similarly threaten you until you give them the backup password, which basically everything has, and they've achieved the same. If the theoretical criminal wants access to something, they will be satisfied with a password because nobody wants to carry around a dismembered finger unless they absolutely have to. Even if the finger would work, if there's an alternative which there is, they'll use that.
If they're threatening you with violence, just give them the pin anyway. I haven't seen a device which accepts fingerprints and doesn't have a backup pin for when you've recently washed your hands thoroughly or are wearing gloves. If they want it unlocked, that's more reliable and less painful for you.
Some of that is due to cheap touch elements. I have that problem, and I'm quite young. I only have it on a old and very cheap device I keep around for ... actually I don't know why I keep it around as it does nothing useful and is a pain to use. Well anyway it's here. The older and cheaper panels can lack precision which means they don't frequently register finer movements. For example, on this one, it will register taps well enough but it is not very good at registering movement of the finger. Scrolling frequently doesn't work because it thinks I'm just tapping on something.
Only some of the time. As a developer, there are plenty of cases where I would like to collect some telemetry about use. That's not just bug reports, but also information about how it is used. For example, I have a project where I'd really like to know how many people are using old versions and not updating, because that would give me some information about how important it is that I maintain compatibility with older versions. I don't think that particular datum is going to provoke many negative reactions.
Still, I don't collect it unless someone has opted in, and I don't use any third-party system to collect the data. I don't do those things because I respect my users. While it's not harmful for me to collect versions, it may be for me to collect metadata such as the IP address they used to tell me. There's lots of other information that would be more sensitive. It should be the user's choice whether they are comfortable sending that to me, and it is my responsibility to ensure that they can do that without my divulging data to others. I don't object to opt-in data collection if it's done clearly and by a responsible organization. I view the use of Google and Yandex as the actions of an irresponsible organization, and the change in ownership makes me believe that the process will become unclear in the future. Therefore, I do not like this.
"Here's a suggestion to ISPs: supply non-configurable routers."
They already do that. It doesn't fix anything, but it does have the extra feature of making me sad when I see it. For example, the one supplied to my parents wouldn't let me change the DNS servers to a pihole, or set firewall rules, or actually do very much at all. Fortunately, the advanced section (three options) contained the UPNP off setting, so it wasn't a total loss. I could have turned off its WiFi and used a downstream router (fortunately it doesn't redirect DNS queries) but that would have been another possible point of failure that I couldn't easily fix since I don't live nearby.
The problem is that the BBC headline, though somewhat misleading, is completely factual. Here's the relevant portion of the Register article:
However, the Oversight Board criticised the extraordinary nature of the ban, which was not rooted in precedent, but rather a reaction to the events happening in Washington D.C.
“It was not appropriate for Facebook to impose the indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension. Facebook’s normal penalties include removing the violating content, imposing a time-bound period of suspension, or permanently disabling the page and account,” it said.
It has ordered Facebook to revisit the decision within the next six months and re-issue a penalty that’s based on ”the gravity of the violation and the prospect of future harm,” as well as precedent.
So it did order Facebook to rethink the decision, but specifically to decide on a different penalty. Of course, from their list of accepted options, it seems Facebook could just suspend for a fixed length period of sixteen centuries and that would meet the requirements.
Maybe you like privacy? Or maybe you are a criminal of the type that asks for democracy in a country which doesn't like when people do that. Various reasons for wanting privacy in financial transactions exist which aren't just committing crimes. A lot of them aren't allowed under the current system to make committing those crimes more difficult, but they do exist. You can easily argue that they are insufficient reasons to have anonymous transactions and shouldn't be permitted, but you'll need to recognize what they are first.
It's deflationary so far in dollars (and everything except maybe Venezuelan bolivares). Since it is limited, that's likely to remain a factor of it. Just like lots of other limited things frequently used to invest. Gold is a great example. Usually deflationary though not as volatile since it's much older.
There are people who will tell you that investing in gold is an example of investors being fools. There are people who will say the same of cryptocurrencies. Those people are sometimes correct and sometimes not, but at least make sure you know why they're saying what they are. If it's a simple "don't trust" without details, from either side, they likely don't understand what they're talking about.
Also, it's frequent that things will be cited in dollars. Bitcoin is quoted in dollars. Euros are quoted in dollars. Oil is quoted in dollars. Australian dollars are quoted in dollars [U.S. kind]. This isn't something unusual about bitcoin. There are just a lot of dollars and it's currently used by default when talking about global prices of things. You can use pounds or Korean won or any other currency you like instead just by changing the setting at the bottom of any price page.
"Cash allows me to convert my work to a universal token recognised in all shops. What has crypto currency got to do with any of that?"
You already know that. Cryptocurrency is a suggested replacement to cash. It would be a token. If people agreed to accept it and you agreed to receive it from your employer, then that's the token. Or maybe one of those happens and you agree to convert between two tokens for different purposes. If you like the pound, then that's your token. If you decided you prefer the yen, then that becomes your token. If you want to use slivers of valuable metals, then those become your token (there are people who do this despite the inconvenience of trying it). You have choices and it is one. Whether it's a good one is another question, but you didn't ask that so I'll stop here.
"Serious question - are there any published cases of a company using ordinary bank transfer to payoff ransomware? If $crypto were not an option, would ransomware be severely crimped?"
That is going to depend on how technical we want to be. Yes, there have been bank-based ransomware attacks, mostly in the past. The first noted case of ransomware was in 1989 and requested a bank transfer. If we're using that example though, the malware didn't work very well and the perpetrator was arrested.
In principle, it's not very difficult to use a bank-based system to operate ransomware businesses. Note here that I'm not referring to using anonymous payments in cash, which would also work. There are scams that use the banking system against someone to steal their money, and criminals frequently operate those scams alone. It wouldn't be difficult to use them in conjunction with ransomware. A simple such scam is sending someone a counterfeit transfer which the bank initially acknowledges then requesting the recipient to transfer cash to the criminal. The second payment succeeds, the first fails, and thus the criminal has stolen money. If the criminals can do that, it's not difficult to imagine they just use the same transfer system to receive payments for encryption keys.
Cryptocurrency is more often used today for that extra level of anonymity, but it is not in any way required. If it wasn't available, most of the organized groups would find a new way to accept payment. For example, if targeting relatively wealthy businesses, they could reduce the ransom from $currency 150000 to $currency 147000 and someone to fly somewhere safer with cash. It would make things harder for individuals, but others would figure it out.
"Nope. Gold has always and will always have a relatively high value because [...]"
I disagree. It will continue to hold value because it is rare and that's it. Most of the gold currently available is stored in vaults where it can be bought or sold without ever leaving the vault. Most which does leave the vault goes to another one. The amount of gold in use for electronics or jewelry is dwarfed by that held in reserve by central banks and private investors. Also, some of the jewelry using gold has included more or purer forms of gold just so they are worth more financially, usually so the jeweler can charge a higher profit margin on the piece.
If a magic switch were thrown and all those using gold to store value decided it was worthless for that purpose, the price of gold would drop precipitously. It would continue to hold value, just as many other metals hold value, for its industrial and artistic uses, but that would be significantly lower. It would, for example, be a long time before gold mines started up again if ever. It is of course possible that, with gold being cheap enough to use a lot of it in industrial areas, new use cases would be developed causing more demand for it, but that cannot be guaranteed.
I wonder about this. Apple hasn't been getting very much money from me even though I still have an IOS device. All the apps I bought were purchased years ago. I don't use them for subscriptions. Most apps I have downloaded recently are free apps for some service I'm using. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that app revenues are concentrated on a small group of people who play a lot of mobile games and frequently buy things in them, which would mean that most users are not providing them very much at all.
"And honestly, when buying something which is 50% cheaper, do you really expect to get the same level of after-support service? The money for that support has to come from somewhere..."
You are correct. No, I don't, at least I wouldn't if the ones that cost the same or more had comparable lifetimes. They don't, so this particular argument doesn't work very well. If the Android ecosystem consisted of the landfill devices which wouldn't get support, the mid-range ones with three years, and the flagships with six or more years, then the comparison would work. Otherwise, if Android devices were all much cheaper than Apple devices with the difference in price accounting for the difference in support time, that would make some sense too. As ridiculous as Apple's prices are, Android manufacturers have prices in the same ranges.
I can take this one:
"Your 5+ year old iPhone,"
SE, 2016.
"With the latest software update does the phone still perform nicely or has it slowed down considerably?"
That's not a problem here. The performance is reasonable on the most complex tasks I run. Admittedly, there are even more complex tasks I don't run, so I could see it being a problem, but for my usage, including navigation and a variety of apps, performance is fine.
"Does the battery still reasonably work and hold a decent charge?"
This is the big problem. The battery is inconsistent. Sometimes, it will hold a charge for two days. Other times, it will fail in five hours. I attempted to have Apple replace it but they have refused due to the age, so I will be trying to replace it myself and see if that fixes things.
However, hardware reliability isn't the full story. If the battery replacement fixes things, I have a device running the latest OS version including security updates. If I have an Android device of a similar age with a new battery, I still have a compromised device. Whether Apple is perfect is not really the question (they're not even close). The question is where they stand compared to the competition. They stand ahead of it.
In addition to being more expensive, you don't really know the motherboards will be better. I can go get a motherboard from a variety of sources from companies that nobody's heard of because they started up last year. You have to trust that your technicians aren't just doing that. That's not the main issue though. Self-building works fine for desktops, but a lot of buyers and users don't want desktops. Laptops have a lot of convenience, and now that their processors aren't hampered compared to the needed office workloads, they're quite suitable. I have rarely seen a successful self-built laptop, let alone one that people would really want to carry.
I like Python, but there are several issues that at least have to be acknowledged, even if we're going to decide we can deal with them.
The syntactic whitespace got us here, so let's start with that. It's annoying because the boundaries of control flow are no longer clear. An expression could be inside or outside a block just because someone forgot to change the indentation. In languages which use braces to mark blocks, that will result in a compiler error under most cases. This makes errors more likely. It also makes copying and pasting code harder, because there's a chance the person re-indenting something which does not originally align will make a mistake which won't be caught until runtime starts to go surreal. I don't exactly mind syntactic whitespace if only because it makes others indent properly, but that's not usually a good enough excuse for it.
There are a few other design decisions of Python which can be counterproductive. It has almost completely eliminated pre-runtime checks of any kind. That makes the interpreter simpler, but it makes simple typos or incorrect thinking harder to resolve. A few language features complement this problem. For example, the fact that objects and classes are completely open and that variable creation and variable binding (assignment) are syntactically identical. This opens new classes of typos because nobody will check that the variable you want exists until right when you ask for it. Fuzzing is therefore more important in Python just to catch things another language would get during compilation.
These issues are not shallow, but nor do they eliminate Python as a useful language. I think it's great for prototypes or for various tasks which other languages make painful. I would much rather use Python to do string parsing than most other languages. And a well-tested Python program can be a core component in something without problems. Still, it's imperfect in various ways.
"I don't now, and never have, understood why these things have to be text files in the first place."
Because, as annoying as the formats can be, it is significantly more annoying to go to configure a program only to find that its configuration file contains large chunks of nonprintable characters interspersed with strings that look significant. Of course some programs can get around this by having a full-featured configuration system in their GUI, but there will be programs which don't, especially those core system components which don't live inside a window on the user's desktop. This is a lot more important if there is ever more than one of them. If the user needs to change configuration options or debug something breaking, a text-based format for inputs is going to make a lot more sense to someone willing to go to the effort than a binary replacement.
"Just where do Epic et al think that support comes from, and do they not recognise that it contributes to the large size of the iOS app market?"
Well, I was thinking it came from the purchases of IOS devices because people know they last longer so Apple can market them that way. After all, an individual app developer doesn't much care if my old device runs IOS 14 or 10. If I buy a new one, that doesn't harm them. If I don't buy a new one, they usually support several older versions because they don't always need the latest version, so they don't notice. If I don't upgrade for long enough that the versions slip, I continue to use the old version. The person who mostly cares about the support for the old device is the owner of the old device, which is also the person who paid for the old device. I think that's where it comes from.
Care to elaborate? Maybe this time with actual rebuttals?
"After reading all the comments I'm blown away at the ignorance represented by the comments. This is Alex Russell of Dojo and other Javascript and code accomplishments. Innuendo as reward for some 20 years of actual benefits to you? Shame on you."
So because he wrote some code which got used, his opinion is correct and must not be opposed? The discussions have often referenced some of Google's APIs which we think aren't necessary or are actively harmful. He thinks they are useful, so he must be right? What is it that we're ignorant about? If we're ignorant because we have the gall to disagree with someone you appear to venerate, you should learn that we also disagree with a bunch of other famous people who did things and they aren't suffering from our opposition.
Oh, no. A website was a collection of independent documents, sometimes with scripts which were there to allow the documents to change in some limited ways. A web app is a monstrous blob of script which nobody can understand or comb through, built from components that not even the developers know what they're for, and with access to lots of things about you and your hardware that you never thought about.
"That's rule 1 in the book: Greed, What could be more evil than their breathtaking mark up!"
Oh, there are a lot of things more evil than greed. A greedy person who expects you to pay a lot for something is annoying, but the kind of evil you can opt out of (some exceptions apply depending on what they're selling). A person who intends to harm you without any type of agreement easily beats that evil score. The world has a lot of that kind of evil. I don't think greed is in the top ten if you allow me to start listing more specific categories of that.
Philosophical point over. I'll get back on the technical ones later.
No, that's wrong. The sandbox is a security layer, but the code is native, I.E. compiled to bytecode which is run directly. The interface code for Android is likely running in a JVM, but the stuff that has to run fast is compiled to ARM machine code. There will be binaries in there. That's what native is. Javascript or even WASM is a lot less native.
It doesn't differ. It was really annoying in the Internet Explorer days. I can't say I noticed anything when classic Edge was going on, but then again I wasn't using it often (at all mostly). And now they use Chromium so it's very much dead now. Google doing the same is still the same tactic and therefore annoying. Microsoft has stopped, Google has continued, so my annoyance on this score has shifted to Google.
I can only sort of agree to this. Google has spent a lot of time on development, but some of the things they developed during that time are horrific. They have been shoving all sorts of OS stuff into the browser and most of the time, it's only useful to tracking or outright malware. The idea of a method for a site to find and control USB devices, for example. The OS already handles IO devices and drives. A website should not be capable of sending arbitrary commands to them when it will detect my key presses and receive a file the same way those things have always worked.
"People complain that Apple sees someone have success with an app like Spotify and then "copy" it with their own app (as if music streaming was some sort of amazing invention that should have been patentable or something)"
I don't, at least. I complain that Apple used a monopoly power to advantage their service over competitors. It's not at all innovative and they can copy at will, but using such tactics to advantage it is illegal for a reason.
"If "selling products on Apple's platform" is an Apple "monopoly" in some people's minds, then how "selling products inside of Walmart stores / on Walmart's web site" not also a Walmart "monopoly"?"
Not yet. At the moment, if you don't like Walmart's offer, you can go sell it in a different store. Apple doesn't have that option. If, at some point, Walmart were to buy most of the competing stores, then they would have a monopoly or oligopoly position and would be similarly subject to regulation. For example, Amazon's large position in online shopping is already leading to it having antitrust investigations. It can happen there too.
"Monopoly of what? iPhone users?"
Yes, that's right.
"Does Ford have a monopoly over Ford drivers?"
Excellent parallel. No, they don't. If you buy a Ford car, you can install equipment made by other manufacturers. You can put any brand of tires on it as long as they fit. You can put anything you want into the car. They don't have exclusivity deals by which they charge people for the right to use items with the car.
"And it still allows Spotify et al a free ride on the iOS platform Apple has spend untold billions of dollars developing."
No it doesn't. People paid for that, by buying IOS devices. In fact, Spotify has increased the value of IOS by being available on it, which means people who want Spotify won't leave. The developers of apps don't care about and don't benefit from a lot of the stuff Apple writes for IOS. The users do, and the users are the ones who pay the money for it.
I agree that IDs are needed at times. I think, however, that there are many cases where they are not needed where governments would nonetheless like to have them. Two factors are relevant here. First, private ID should not be the same as government ID. My employer requires me to use a card they issued to enter areas with their equipment in them. That makes sense, but it would make less sense to use a government-issued ID for the same thing.
Second, the number of times where government ID is required should be minimized. For example, I don't think it's good for a compulsory ID check to purchase mobile phone service, which many countries mandate. Basically, I think an ID should only be needed when they have to actively certify something, such as my having crossed an international border. Not as a policing measure.
You are the one with the logic problems. The conversation into which you've inserted your comment surrounds a particular quote. You might have seen it in the original post as well as quoted in most replies. For all I know, you might have written it. It has a similar tone to the rest of your writing, though you're both ACs. Here it is, in case you didn't:
"And just how long will I be refused entry to locations because I don't want to get vaccinated?"
The key words are "don't want to get vaccinated". That's quite different to "got vaccinated and have privacy concerns". So do I. It doesn't change the fact that people who don't want to get vaccinated are putting others at risk. Your response doesn't even try to argue against that. So, I see three options:
1. You wrote the original quote, but you don't have any good arguments for it so you've switched your argument from "don't want" to "privacy concerns".
2. You didn't write the original quote, but you wanted to support it but don't have any good arguments for it, etc.
3. You didn't read the quote, decided to argue against a point without paying attention to what they said or what the person who they're arguing with said, and ended up out of context.
"I genuinely do not understand the opposition to being able to prove that you've had the vaccination."
I don't oppose that. What I oppose is a centrally-controlled register of identification to which data can be added. If they produced a card which had my picture and said I was vaccinated, and people looked at it and thought it was probably me, then handed it back, that would be ... well not great but we could talk. They're more likely to have a card with some codes on it which get scanned by a device which promptly uploads it to the internet where a server records where I've been. Why does the government care where I've been enough to store a history of it? They probably have no reason to want it. They probably won't do anything malicious with it. They'll let the person who breaks in and steals the data figure out the malicious use for it. Unless there's someone specific with access who wants to be malicious to a specific person, in which case they now can.
Meanwhile, having that card as a requirement to enter places has problems other than privacy. It makes any type of interaction less efficient while people scan the cards. It means that, should someone lose the card or forget to take it with them, they can't do anything. And perhaps most importantly, it isn't very useful right now. Just taking the time to issue cards to all those with a vaccination will take a long time. Eventually, the vaccination rates will increase such that pretty much everyone has one. If time B is less than time A, then the entire project is a waste of resources. Even if it's the other way around, it's not really that valuable when we already have a mechanism to protect ourselves when in public. When you also consider that the resources being spent on the massive checkpoint database could be spent on getting vaccinations to people faster, that seems like the better use of the resources.
It's Intercity Express, a series of trains operating in Germany which includes the infrastructure needed to run them, hence the overhead utilities.
I read the headline and assumed this would be an access point which allows devices to connect, then uses them to mine crypto. I had my "That's a security disaster and nobody will use it" comment all ready to go. Then I read the article. Now I have no clue what the device actually does.
It still sounds like the number of devices connected is important to how much crypto you mine, given that the article says "We expect that people living in highly trafficked, urban areas (like cities) should be able to make about 50 cents for every 1Gb of cellular data they transfer." Given that mining efficiency is based on processing power, this implies that having connections means you are using some of theirs. In which case, it's a security disaster and nobody will use it.
Except the article never expressly says that the client devices do the mining. It does say "FreedomFi yesterday announced it has buddied up with Helium Network to mine the latter's native crypto-coin on Magma-based 5G gateway devices in return for dispensing signal." Also, I'm not even sure how they would plan to make the clients mine for them unless they had previously installed software, which would dramatically limit the number of clients available. But in that case, why does it matter how many clients you have--the CPU in the access point can mine as fast as before.
So maybe I'm just not reading this right. If what is going on is obvious, I didn't get enough sleep and I'll stick to that story.
"Imagine what computers would be like if "ease of ownership" had kept pace with memory, CPU power, or network bandwidth."
It did. However, computers also gained extra functionality. You can have a really simple computer if you only want it to do a few things. If you're interested in it doing lots of different ones, things get more complicated. Just like you can have a car which is easy to drive, but if they made one that could also fly and sail on water, you'd expect some more buttons on the dashboard and items sticking out the sides.
"Of course, if that happened, we wouldn't have "dumb users" to kick around, and where would the fun be in that? And I know all you IT admins, jealously hoarding your hard-won knowledge like dragons sitting on your treasure,"
Now really? I'm not in IT (programmer), but I have done my share of admin and support and I don't want to guard my knowledge. If people stopped coming to me and asking me to fix their broken stuff, that would be great. If there was a miraculous way to never have problems so I could just write my code, I would really like that. There isn't. There won't ever be, because when people try too hard to get it, they break things silently and then the users come to the technical to fix it. For example, Apple really likes hiding information from users to make things easier. This meant that, when they changed the filesystem they wanted to use and their computers didn't complete the change correctly, the users had no clue what had happened or why. They brought them all to me for me to fix the partition disaster and perform reinstallations as needed. By the way, I would be very happy if Apple didn't make any mistakes and I didn't have to do that.
"ultimately wouldn't you rather live in a world where you didn't have to deal with all that crap and could focus on challenging, interesting, and high-value stuff instead (or just have a lot more free time for play, whatever)?"
Yes, I would. And when you have a way to get there, let me know. Until you have that though, there will be a need to keep users from making security holes or operating critical activities on unreliable systems.
"It would be our fault for failing to implement a viable alternative to IPv4 over a decade after its limitations started hobbling the Internet."
Wrong. The Chinese proposal doesn't supplant IPV4. Also, we have a replacement for that: IPV6. Despite some issues with backward compatibility due to more IPV4 design mistakes, it's gaining usage. China's proposal replaces TCP, not IPV4. Try again.
"The big commute is something we've done to ourselves. For excellent and well founded reasons no doubt, but still fundamentally self inflicted."
No, it wasn't. I say this as someone who has a short commute, but still. The big commute is a result of companies putting the offices in a place where people can't live nearby. The companies have their reasons, that they want to have lots of possible workers and clients in close proximity. The people who live far away have their reasons, usually that they can't afford to live closer. If you don't have in-demand skills that make your wages relatively high, then you will have to choose a place to live where you can afford it. That's unlikely to be in the big city.
Meanwhile, the company is the one making most of these decisions. It's not exactly their fault, because they also have to do that in order to work well. If a company requires a hundred workers with a certain skill to come to the office, they're unlikely to put that office in a small town where they would have trouble finding those hundred or replacing someone who leaves. Still, they're choosing the predictable expense of expensive real estate rather than the unpredictable one of having trouble finding workers, meaning the workers have to choose the long commute. Rarely is it the employee's choice.
"Which? said: The biggest reason for not reporting adverts that caused a scam to Facebook was that victims didn't think the platform would do anything about it or take it down – this was the response from nearly a third (31 per cent) of victims."
Most online platforms don't bother doing much about fraud or abuse on their platform, to the extent that it's basically pointless trying to point out problems. Take a recent attempt I made to take down a phishing site. It used an obviously malicious domain name purchased from a registrar and also hosted the server on resources from that registrar. I sent a message to their abuse system notifying them of this. After two days of silence, I received a message informing me that the server they hosted with the registrar redirected the link to a server run elsewhere, so they could do nothing. Yes, the company which could revoke the domain name and thus disable all links going to it or revoke the server doing the redirection and obtain the same outcome could do nothing. If they don't want to do anything to save their income stream, why do they bother spending money on people to come up with excuses for why they're not going to take down fraudulent things? A bot which just says "We reviewed and think it is legitimate" is much cheaper.
That helps, but it isn't sufficient to make the astronomers concede that it's fine now. Everyone has a different opinion as to how they value each group who wants to do something. You could easily argue that you don't care about the astronomers' complaints. Arguing that the astronomers have dropped their complaints, however, is not going to work.
"The M1 has a dedicated x86 interpretation chip, so the performance should be pretty much there except for higher-end applications which are utilising the more powerful assembler instruction sets for x86/64 chips."
Misleading or wrong. The M1 has extra functionality to improve the process, but it doesn't have a separate chip for X64 operations. That would essentially be a dual-processor system. It doesn't have that.
"Unsure what you mean by the Samsung A11 comment, Samsung do not make CPUs."
Now here I'm torn. I also don't know what they mean, but you're wrong here. Samsung do make CPUs. The Exynos range of ARM SoCs. They aren't the fastest out there, but they're still making them. So probably the original comment about them "throwing in the towel" is wrong too unless it was referring to something minor I don't know about.
I generally agree, but I suppose we all have different requirements. For example, I don't want an optical drive. I'm not sure what you're doing that requires one so often, but I have only used one occasionally and the cheap USB one I have is sufficient for the task. I don't find disks around so often these days. I would like some USB-A ports for flash drives, but I'm sure there are people who rarely use those too. I'm entirely with you on the desire for a large and replaceable battery.
"Customers would know when a new product was going to be announced because a successful product would be nearing its mandated end of life, so would hold off buying the latest version of fondleslablet* knowing that a new release would basically have to be around by a certain date."
I don't think that's a problem. If the guaranteed support lifespan was five years, that's already much longer than the typical cycle. IPhones are good examples of this--they already have about 5-7 years of support, yet they make a new one every year. People tend to buy new ones for the features or because their previous one broke. Most people either buy one when they decide it's good enough or keep their old one until it doesn't work anymore. They do tend to wait until October to see whether the new one is interesting, but they won't wait the full five if they're considering a purchase already.
This is exactly correct. It's a deliberate antitheft measure. Sure, it can be annoying if you don't know the details to unlock something, but I think most nontechnical and some technical people would prefer the +-
protection against theft given that someone with the proper details can erase and reuse the device. Android with Google's services does the same thing.
"I’ve worked for organisations with “secure facilities” in rural areas miles off main roads and have procured diverse data circuits along with diverse power to ensure their ongoing operations,"
Very nice. Not very useful though. You can do lots of things to improve a network connection. All are expensive and in this case, none are needed. The server concerned is required for operations inside the building. It is not required for operations outside the building. Why should they spend on lots of network links just to show they can put the machine outside the building anyway?
If you want, you can buy a refrigerated vehicle and hire a full-time driver for it, just so they can go retrieve chilled food and bring it back to you. Or, you can have a refrigerator in the kitchen. If the only person eating the food is you, it's a lot cheaper and faster to chill the food in the kitchen. That doesn't make the vehicle idea bad in all cases--you might operate a business where you have to bring chilled food to lots of different people. Still, you probably don't own such a vehicle and you have a good reason not to.
Exactly. The question is not detecting a single malicious commit, but instead identifying how bugs happen. Whether deliberate or accidental, the goal is not to have them. So look at how they came to be and see what patterns there are. Is there a type of bug that doesn't get caught often? If so, can testing or review be improved to detect it? Is there something that reviewers consistently fail to catch? What is it and can something be done to draw their attention to it? That's real effective research.
"Isn't there now a risk of a Streisand effect, where lots of other people will try & sneak code in 'for fun", since it's been proved to be possible."
I doubt it. It's not very easy to introduce something just for fun. Submitting a basic patch allows people to say they did something and not have someone angry at them.
"Might have been better for the kernel folks to have just had a quiet word with the Uni, while improving the processes which allowed this to happen."
Oh no it wouldn't. If people were going to tamper with the code, the research paper itself made that idea public. Keeping this quiet would have left that paper as the last word. What the Linux kernel community has done now is to demonstrate that maybe you can insert useless or dangerous code into the kernel, but if you get caught, they will target you with all the power they have. They have established a deterrent to people contemplating pulling the same kind of stunt.
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