Posts by doublelayer

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

Re: Amazing... But also a bit stupid

"If you have, say, a terabyte of non-volatile RAM, why do you need disks or paging at all?"

Until you need more than a terabyte of stuff stored, you don't. One kind of storage is a lot like another, so a terabyte of optane will function just as well (no, better) than a terabyte of SSD. It will also cost more. The question is whether you need the speed of optane enough to justify its price. Either way, you'll be using it for the same purposes, whether you use a memory byte-mapped model or a filesystem block-model approach to organizing it.

"There was a time when RAMdisks made sense. When it was doable to have a meg of RAM in a computer whose OS used 5% of it, but you only had one floppy drive. That meant you could temporarily stick things in the RAMdrive and not need to switch disks to access it. Why do you want to emulate a 1980s version of a disk in memory?"

Because the filesystem is the way for me to move data from one program to another. I can't take a downloaded audio file from the browser's memory and tell my audio editor to edit this. If it makes the file bigger, the browser will get very confused about why the contiguous block of bits either became noncontiguous or moved. I can't even find that chunk of memory by its address without pulling out a debugger and mapping between the OS's memory regions. We could remove the isolation of processes' memory areas to let this happen, but meanwhile, I can use the filesystem to obtain a set of bits and point something at that set to change it, using a filename I provided for that set. Ramdisks are sometimes useful to keep that useful operation in the fastest memory available to me.

"No current OS organizes its RAM as a filesystem. Right now I am typing in a browser window. That browser has, no doubt, many allocated areas of RAM. They are not files. There is no directory."

They are already mapped objects, but there is an organizational structure. There are objects holding other objects as members in a hierarchical layout. The members have names. The members themselves have members. A member can refer to its parent. That's a lot like a filesystem, but since the type of each thing is known and only the browser's code is operating on them, they don't all have to be bit streams.

Re: "Windows, and many apps, still suffer from memory leaks."

"What would be in non-volatile memory is the application code - the usual RAM would be used for volatile data. You would be able to shutdown the system and restart it "clean" - it just means when it starts the code is already in memory, no need to load it again from disk. Volatile RAM would be initialized again."

That's not new and you don't need optane to do it. The concept of "cache this thing so you don't have to build it again" is well-known. So is "store the cached thing on a faster kind of memory so it's easier to get at it". Windows already shuts down by storing a memory image on the disk. What optane does to change this is provide a way to address the image as if it was RAM instead of requiring it to be copied to a disk. It speeds up what is already available and well understood.

Of course, the first thing that would happen when booting an image like this is that the OS would copy the most important things off of the optane image into normal RAM again because normal RAM is faster and the OS wants its frequently-used cached objects in fast memory. Optane can, in this case, become a mixture between disk and memory: you page to optane instead of disk because it's faster, you cache nonvolatile objects in optane instead of disk also because it's faster, and you store more objects in optane instead of memory because it's bigger. All sensible actions that can benefit from a suitable memory type, but actions you can do on an SSD if you have no optane at the cost of a slight increase in latency.

Re: "Write a memory contents file to whatever storage device you like [...] and restore it"

No, that's exactly what I said. Starting an application from disk requires initialization. You could take an image of it after initialization and store that, so next time you return to the program, it has an exact copy of its running memory state. You don't need optane to do that. All optane does is that, instead of copying from RAM to SSD, you worked in optane and left it there. There's a speed boost doing it that way, but it's not guaranteed to be useful.

In addition, unless you eliminated your RAM entirely and always worked from optane, you'd still have to occasionally copy the stuff from RAM over to it. Again, that's faster than copying down to disk, but is a necessary step if you want to freeze programs so they can be restored from persistent storage. Eliminating RAM would make a lot of things worse, and the article didn't suggest doing that, so your OS would end up looking very similar.

Re: One thing may be data files...

We have that. Write a memory contents file to whatever storage device you like, which can be optane, and restore it. In the older computers, it happened that that file was the only thing on the ROM chip and so you didn't have to use a filesystem to find it, but you can do the same with this if you want; have a partition at a specified offset and find it that way. If you want to use this as direct memory, that works too. The functionality to do that is already available and doesn't require but can use optane to accomplish the goal.

Nancy Pelosi ties Chinese cyber-attacks to need for Taiwan visit

Re: ... the likes of TSMC turned Taiwan into a vital source of technology

Yes, for several reasons. They have always wanted it because it was once conquered by China and they think it should be theirs. They like carving out pieces of land and calling it theirs on a tenuous historical basis, so for that reason alone they'd take it. It also provides them with a useful area for military installations to mess with east and southeast Asian trading and naval traffic and denies the same advantages to anyone else. They wanted it when it wasn't democratic or wealthy, and now that it is, they want it even more.

Bad news, older tech workers: Job advert language works against you

Re: So?

You can enjoy those things if you're older, too. So you don't want to go to another country, but most of the young people aren't going to anyway. I know old people who like rock climbing, other sports, and spending some time with colleagues. I know many older people who would quite like drinking. I am younger and I don't, so maybe I should suggest that that item is targeted at a different generation, but we both know it's targeted at people who want to spend more social time with their colleagues.

Re: Anon CVs

"Introduce yourself with a quick note about how you can help, that's all I need to decide if I'm going to follow up or not."

This isn't necessarily a bad approach, but it depends very heavily on how good your information is. I've applied to jobs that don't bother to give important details to deciding whether I'm interested or capable. They each have a list of qualifications and goals which I process (Using that language, check. You want performance increases, sure I can help. Secure design, fits very well). If those fit, I apply. I've had some come back later and mention requirements that aren't on their list or better characterize the thing I'd be working on which causes me to become less interested. Both our times could have been saved by providing better descriptions.

It goes the other way as well. You know what kind of experience you're looking for, and I don't. I can take a guess about it, but if I were getting this job by word of mouth, I'd ask a lot of questions to establish your situation before telling you how I could help, which I can't do with a job posting. Sending a longer resume is a way of telling you what I have done which should help you to decide if I have the profile you want. It will be more reliable than if I simply guess from the paragraph you wrote what you need, get it wrong, but actually have the kind of experience you want.

Re: Anon CVs

Not necessarily. If the job needs the qualifications of the person with two degrees and that much experience, then sure, the younger person isn't going to qualify. If the younger person would qualify, you might see the one with more experience as having more to bring to the role which could result in a faster or better solution to your problem. In many cases, what they did during the last few years might be more important than their degrees seeing how much technical skills can be gained while working. There are many jobs that could fit both suggested profiles.

Re: Not New News

I've been in the job market for significantly less time than you have, to the point that I just overlook that sentence as having no meaning. I see something like that on almost every job posting, whether their work-life balance is good or not. It feels to me that someone somehow convinced everyone writing these posts that if you don't have some adjectives like that, you're asking for someone who has no initiative. I'm still waiting for job descriptions that tell you exactly what thing you'll be working on, rather than being sort of vague with general concepts of what the company does. Invariably, my first question asked during a job interview is "What specifically would I be working on", and the interviewer always knows enough details that I can get a good picture with two or three questions, so they could put that in the description instead of some HR template.

Re: So?

I don't want to defend them, but it sounds like they just collected resumes. Having someone receive a copy of a file I already have then tell me to go away because it's research is a lot better than going through interviews when they don't want me. Neither feels good, but one wastes two minutes of my time, whereas the other can be significantly worse. I'm not sure if there is a way to do this ethically except surveying people about what they'd apply to, and I don't think you'd get valid results with a survey.

Yes, it's true: Hard drive failures creep up as disks age

Re: "their failure rate over the past four quarters [has] now reached 3.42 percent"

It doesn't look like they're trashing the lot just yet, but they are getting extra copies of the data on them in the expectation that they'll have several failures in the near future. They may be kept around for existing data, but I doubt they'll put new data on them and will be cycling them out as they start to fail.

Sage accused of misselling perpetual licenses it knew would soon be obsolete

I think it just means perpetual license, but support could end after fifteen years. The license would presumably still activate the product, but you might not get what you wanted from it. I have, for example, perpetual licenses for old versions of software which won't get updates unless I buy new licenses or their upgrade packages, but I can still use the old version. At least until that got updated to "perpetual license until we break it tomorrow".

Homes in London under threat as datacenters pull in all the power

Re: We all know why

Yeah, that's not it. It's going to happen around the largest or best connected cities, not necessarily the capitals. London is the largest metropolitan area in the UK. It has a lot of power and networking and technicians and companies in it. In the US, the Washington metropolitan area is the fourth largest. Yes, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago exceed it, but that still makes it kind of big. There are many DCs in those cities as well, but in some cases, people outsource to areas with good connections to those cities, which puts more pressure on the eastern US cloud regions.

In some other countries, the capital isn't as large and won't be the bottleneck. When we see a story about Canada, expect to hear about problems near Toronto, not in Ottawa. In Australia, it will be Sydney and eventually Melbourne, not Canberra. Germany has a few cities it could be first, but I'm betting on Frankfurt. It's about where everyone puts the servers, which doesn't have to be where the capital is. Even if surveillance consumed most of the resources, which it probably doesn't, that's not a latency-sensitive activity so it's likely they'd use resources in more remote parts over which they have more control, not rented facilities next door.

Chipmakers warned: US CHIPS Act funds are not for 'stock buybacks'

Re: Capitalism

You are aware that you can sell your share for a higher amount if the company does well and is generating more profits, and that they can pay you a higher dividend if they have more profits, right? This just says that they can't take a chunk of money and call it profit. They can still build something with it, generate a real profit from the use of that thing, and use that profit. They also won't have to pay as much in the construction costs for the thing that eventually generates the profit. Unless your theory is that they will fail to build the facilities they say they will, this should encourage you to hold their stock, all other things equal.

Linus Torvalds releases Linux 5.19 – using Asahi on an Arm-powered Mac

ARM itself already dropped most of the standards, which is why the teams getting Linux to run on it have to hack around with their firmware. To get Linux booting on an Intel-based Mac, you put in your disk and select it in the boot menu. One standard down. In addition, it's not just ARM64. It's ARM64 with Apple's extensions added, and they haven't documented everything they did. You can just ignore their extensions and compile for straight ARM64, at least for now, but it probably won't be as efficient. They don't follow standards when it suits them because they don't care about the limitations of not doing so. To be honest, I think a lot of their users don't care either, so maybe it's logical if annoying.

As for "very high" build quality, that's being charitable. They have acceptable build quality most of the time. Some models from the competition are clearly worse, but Apple's not perfect and the other manufacturers do it too. Apple has design defects, they have unrepairability issues, they have had model-specific problems and persistent ones. If you compare it to the cheapest Chromebook made by another manufacturer, Apple's looks better. If you compare it to a laptop of similar cost from another manufacturer, it's a toss-up who will end up with the better quality, design, or cost-efficiency.

Samsung adds 'repair mode' that hides data on Galaxy smartphones in South Korea

Re: How do you turn it off again?

It sounds like you might need more credentials to turn it off than you do to open the device. Perhaps the pin unlocks the device, but the user has to enter their account password to disable the feature. I wouldn't expect this to withstand an attack by someone with exploits, but hopefully it's at least a step above what we have now.

Tim Hortons offers free coffee and donut to settle data privacy invasion claims

Re: Why. RAR, particularly?

I think .zip files are almost always the first archive format to be decompressed by scanning or blocked outright. I know some email systems simply won't accept any .zip attachments at all. I don't know why .rar wins out in the other format wars, as I can say from experience that I've never found a mail system that rejects .7z files. Maybe because the format's not open source, attackers think scanning tools are less likely to implement decompression for it than for the other formats that are open, but I think the code to decompress has been written already, so I don't think that would be well-placed confidence if that's their reason.

Re: Why. RAR, particularly?

That can either go to a URL or to a local application, including arguments. It's likely that's either a way to launch a shell with a small script that pulls down other data or a way to send someone to a webpage without having a link in the email text. Don't click on one.

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

Re: freestanding!

Very good idea if you never use any symbols or language other than English. There's a reason we use Unicode now. Parsing the bytes and figuring out what they mean is a problem competent programmers have dealt with for a long time.

Re: freestanding!

"a. Sell one item with unlimited lifetime for an one-time fee (quaint old method)"

How many things can you think of that did that? I've seen many claims for unlimited things, and not one has really been unlimited. Some of them are limited at a level above what I'm going to do, so for me they end up working well, but they always have some restriction or expire. For example, you list smartphones as having a limited lifetime, which they do. How would a company be able to make that unlimited? They could make it longer by supporting updates and repairs, but eventually, the phone will get broken or the software will expand to use more resources than are available. Nothing lasts forever.

Re: freestanding!

And the beauty of our computing system is that, had you used SGML, or many of the alternative formats available, we could still read it. Not as conveniently as with TeX where the same software's still in active use, but many of the formats can still be converted. That doesn't mean someone will do it to all the files that ever came out, but if it's worth doing, the tools are available and someone with a little skill can do it without having to reverse-engineer the format.

Re: You know you're old when...

Yes, it is. The short version: a goblin made a sword, a person bought the sword, the person gave the sword to another person on his death, the goblins think it's their sword after the original buyer died and want it back. That's basically all the information provided on the disagreement, but it's implied it's caused other problems before.

Reg readers tell us what they wanted for SysAdmin Appreciation Day

Re: What do I want?

or to ask even the most basic diagnostic questions such as "What is the error message?"

This is the one I wish I didn't have to ask so often. People often come to me reporting either "It gives me an error", or with some inaccurate paraphrase of the error text. It's on your screen and you're calling me. Is it too much to ask that you call me before you dismiss the message? If you're calling me later, take a screenshot, write it down, copy it into an email, leave the box open, whatever you need to do so I get the text the computer wanted me to see.

Not long ago, a user translated "This site has an invalid security certificate because it has expired" into "My antivirus software wants to control my system's certificates". I'm not even a sysadmin or helpdesk person, but I still get this too often. My profound sympathies to those for whom this is an even more frequent experience.

BOFH: Selling the boss on a crypto startup

I don't think they need to worry. As long as they stay in different zones, they can work together when needed. The BOFH and PFY aren't large enough to take over Derek's zone and keep their own, and if Derek tried to take over theirs (assuming he even could which is doubtful), he'd find a lot of pitfalls they've already placed in the way. I think they both understand that there's nothing to be gained by attacking one another, and as long as Derek doesn't annoy them, he's probably safer and more useful as an ally. They've had people with similar attitudes before who they've worked with. Until they try unseating the BOFH, they generally survive the experience.

"You had the perfect setup to kill a guy who helped video cards become really expensive and everything."

I have this feeling that both crypto startups are going to be that kind that doesn't need a bunch of GPUs for mining. Instead of proof of work or stake, they're probably working on proof of cash. No need to kill a guy for scamming someone they weren't in a position to scam.

Also, Derek isn't trying to get their jobs. He made it clear that he's just hiding out and having fun until he goes back to his normal position, and he gave them a tested method of cashing in on stupidity. It sounds like he's an ally. If he comes back and tries to gain more power, I wouldn't expect that to stay the same.

Decentralized IPFS networks forming the 'hotbed of phishing'

Re: What about so-called "legitimate" uses of IPFS?

GDPR isn't a joke because people can ignore it. It's possible to ignore all the current laws if you like, and they only become weak if they're not enforced when you do. IPFS is not designed with the requirements of GDPR available to it. Specifically, auditing is a laborious task requiring tremendous amounts of wasted resources and deletion is supposed to be impossible, which would make it unsuitable for any processing of private information under the regulation. If you know of any company using it to store that, you can report it to an authority that can fine the user if they investigate, which I admit they aren't doing enough.

Re: Decentralised…

Yes, because the ipfs.io server is bridging the decentralized thing to a centralized mechanism. It's no surprise that, if you're using a centralized access method, it looks centralized. If you use IPFS directly, it's a lot less centralized (though not as much as the creators would like to claim).

Re: Easier to block...

You can put in an image tag that calls a server you control, so that the link the user clicks on is distributed and your server still gets called. If that server gets blocked, the user still sees the distributed page. They already need a server in most cases because they'll need to collect something from the user, so unless they're using this to drop malware, they're probably redirecting.

But I'll concede that you don't have to have your own server. It still doesn't prevent them uploading a lot of copies of their page with minor changes in a comment tag and the same number of copies of their malware with a padding change to prevent the blocking of one hash from taking down their campaign.

Re: Easier to block...

However, if the phishers have separate pages for each victim, which they typically do so they can identify who clicked the link even if that person doesn't enter information, the hashes will not be known and only one page will be blocked at a time. Given the speed of many campaigns, this is probably what's happening anyway, but still, it's no defense.

Re: Bit rich to blame ipfs

"If your users already know how to not be hit by phishing," then you don't have any users. Training is necessary because users, including technical ones, don't know how to avoid all phishing all the time. Almost all will avoid the most unrefined phishing, most will avoid basic attempts, but the success rates drop as the messages get better. Training is invaluable in this case, and you will fail without it, but automatic methods can still be useful in easing the difficulty for the users.

Re: safeguards?

It doesn't use HTTP underneath. It's its own protocol. Port assignments are probably random; I don't think they have any assigned port, though they may customarily use a small set of them. You could block all ipfs: URIs, but that would only work for programs that have native IPFS support, and doing so may be difficult depending on the functionality in your firewall.

These links appear to be using an HTTP client which retrieves the content over IPFS and displays it in a browser, so you'd have to block the commonly-used gateways to prevent it.

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

Re: Comments to On-Call articles

But then you don't get to write in your own story and seed the others even more. That's part of the fun, because you can come back and see what new stories are there. I'd target the comments when there are about 25 of them, but I don't always do so.

Chinese booster rocket tumbles back to Earth: 'Non-zero' chance of hitting populated area

Re: To quote Tom Lehrer

It seemed unlikely to me that you could make a good case for defamation on the lyrics, especially in the U.S. where both men were living, so I looked for details on the case. Lehrer denies it. Several articles call it a false rumor. I'm not finding a single source that has any proof about it. I'm afraid you may have been given unreliable information.

Meta proposes doing away with leap seconds

Re: In space, no-one can hear your alarm...

At that point, we will have a lot more things we have to do. My guess: you'll have a universal time counter, which may still be UTC but in any case it will work the same. Each planet will have its own seasonal calendar for things that are climate dependent. Anything without climate (E.G. closed space stations) will use the most common calendar, probably Earth's. Weekdays will be aligned. Planets that don't have a 24-hour sun cycle will have very annoyed inhabitants until we can figure out how to make our brains deal with the unbalanced sleep cycles. Of these predictions, the last is likely to cause the most problems, and is independent of what the clocks say. I think that, by the time we have working travel to these planets where the people can survive long-term, we'll have a better method of measuring time and keeping it coordinated across planets.

Re: Do we need leap seconds?

"Our months don't coincide with the phases of the moon, so why should our year coincide with the Earth's orbit around the Sun."

Because the sun controls the climate, and it's kind of useful to have data about times of year that don't change. We currently can look at climate data and know that July is a summer month in the northern hemisphere and a winter month in the southern, so we can add new data to an average for that month and have useful numbers. If we eventually have to calculate that July is now a spring month in the northern hemisphere but it used to be a summer one, so the data for this July should be averaged with the old data from May, at least until July 7th when we should start averaging it into the data for old June, that would be a bit annoying. Similarly for things that are scheduled in the year. If you want to have a scheduled summer holiday, it would be complicated to keep moving it as the calendar slid the months into times you didn't like.

We don't need to do that with the moon because the moon's control over conditions here is lower. Full moon versus new moon is, for most people, not really important. Those who do care about that can use calendars based on it, or more often have lunar information written on their calendars. If it was doing things everyone cared about, like the sun is, we'd probably still be using it with ours.

Re: Do we need leap seconds?

"And while we are at it, drop time zones and use CET everywhere. So what if school starts at 03:00 in some countries and at 17:00 in other countries?"

Well, it makes scheduling things harder. When you go to another country, you can calculate in your head to figure out when people normally wake up or eat lunch, instead of using the same numbers. If you want to describe how you were called at the middle of the night to an international audience, you can just say "I got a call at 20:30" and let them figure out where you probably were at the time. Not to mention that, for those fortunate enough to be in Europe or Africa, you get to be asleep when the days change, whereas those on other continents switch from Tuesday to Wednesday while they're in normal daylight hours. We have reasons to describe the time relative to a day, and the sun's out at different times for different places. Time zones work pretty well for that.

"So how many other software systems have fallen over on DST changes? Remember Windows 95 doing that?"

Although in this case, I think eliminating DST might work as a solution. Leap seconds are kind of annoying in the same way that leap year rules are; if we could ignore them, that would be convenient, but if we did, things would start getting a little messed up and we'd spend more time calculating for it than we did just designing the system to handle it.

Apple-1 prototype hand-soldered by Woz up for auction, bids expected to reach $500k

Re: I am the despair of the antique auction trade

"So I guess you're not interested in the second Antikythera mechanism I just found that I'm willing to sell you for $100, since like the first it is all rusted up and doesn't work?"

Other than for me to sell it instead of you and get the profit, no, not interested at all. I don't see much value in having a chunk of rusty metal sitting in my house. I'd consider buying a working Antikythera mechanism as a curiosity, but not for the price it would actually cost to build one. It's only about functional or artistic value to me, and although it has historical value, my stuff isn't a museum collection. In fact, when something has historical value, I want it less because having it makes it unavailable to a museum which can use it properly. I would score low on a sentimentality index.

T-Mobile US to cough up $550m after info stolen on 77m customers

Re: Maybe too common-sense an approach here, but...

I think some of that is for credit checks, because instead of asking people to pay for service and them deliver it, they want to play games by lending people a locked phone until they've paid it off. I'm not sure if you can easily sell a phone locked to a provider that the provider probably has all the details for, but since someone could try to take that before paying for it, the company collects data to see if they're likely to be able to pay. It could be done a lot more simply, but that's my guess as to the excuse they'd provide for having it.

I think the US still allows people to have a phone contract anonymously, but another reason could be registration of numbers. I know some countries are significantly stricter about having each phone number (and probably device too) associated with a verified person. Possibly they collect that data even if not required to in case such a restriction is added. Similar to the last one, I dislike this approach if it turns out to be their reasoning, but it wouldn't surprise me to hear them say it.

Cheap cellular data list is out: And US doesn't make top 200

Re: Poor basis for comparison.

"And yet, the US is in 202nd place."

That's what the exchange rate would imply, if that was an important factor. If the US plan cost $100 and the UK plan cost £70 last year, the report that year would have rated them as costing the same. If neither price changed, the US plan would still cost $100, but the UK plan would now cost $84.35. The UK's price would have decreased (using straight currency conversions), and therefore they'd look cheaper.

While this is true, it's not the largest factor behind the US having terrible prices. If they're just using exchange rates, it's not really helping the US's prices either.

Re: How??

"How can they compare packages that are, in effect, "infinite data" and for which, in theory, the per GB price is approaching zero?"

I haven't read their report yet, but I'd probably see if those packages eventually throttle speeds or give the provider the right to do so. That's been used in some countries and puts a flexible cap on some plans. Since they were focused on the median, they could have considered those that were really unlimited as infinitely cheap and pulled the median downward, but not to the extent that it made the median zero.

This credit card-sized PC board can use an Intel Core i7

Re: As a raspberry pi alternative…

I suppose that depends on your use case for the Pi. It's certainly going to use more power, but still below desktop-level power. If the Pi doesn't run fast enough for what you're doing, this might be useful. Since the Pi's power usage already basically prevents it working well with a battery (unless you want to carry around a battery that's a lot bigger and heavier than the computer it's powering), the likely setup for powering the boards will look similar. If speed is important, an extra 10-20 watts might be acceptable to users.

Re: Is this one of those machines...

I think the manufacturers of those often like to take all the parts from a board like this and solder them to a board of their own making so that, when something fails, you can't fix it without getting a replacement from them. The hardware's likely the same though, and since Raspberry Pis became so popular with signage companies, maybe it will end up being more common than I predicted.

My smartphone has wiped my microSD card again: Is it a conspiracy?

Re: About a billion web pages have been authored to help

Well corrected. I didn't consider that since the limited capabilities mean that it's rarely done, but it's still supported. I'd like to edit my sentence from "can't write to it" to "doesn't write to it in almost all cases".

Re: About a billion web pages have been authored to help

"Possibly, but I suspect unlikely. When did you last have a SIM card fail?"

I don't think that's as likely. Even though the contacts are similar, a SIM has very little data on it. A phone can read that when it first becomes available during boot, store the kilobyte at most it needs in memory, and never go back to it until the next boot. Nothing would happen if the card subsequently becomes unavailable, and since the phone can't write to it, there's no chance of a hardware problem during one of those. An SD card can both be read and written and does so periodically while the phone is on, so it has more chances to have a disconnect when needed. Combine that with poor handling in software and it could be part of the problem.

As I recall, it was an eMMC, so it didn't even have the advantage of being removable. At least if it was an SD card, a repair wouldn't require ripping out the single point of failure, sorry I meant car systems console. Still, they could have put two flash chips in there: one to store the system files that only gets rewritten with an update, and one for writing lots of stuff to. That way, if the one they're repeatedly writing fails, which is basically guaranteed), at least the system will still work for the safety equipment they chose to run through it.

My Big Coin founder is – you guessed it – a $6m crypto-fraudster

Re: Crypto currency - Eh?

As popular as your argument seems to be, you could use that to argue against basically every investment. Every time you turn cash into a paper commodity, you're getting "an IOU". If you buy a share of stock, you're getting a statement from a company that you own something, and that will become worthless if the company becomes bankrupt. If you buy a bond, it's basically the same except you're expecting money returned instead of owning something to resell. If you put it in a bank, you're getting a promise that it should be there possibly with interest when you come back. If you buy an option or other derivative, it's even more complex with more people involved. If you trade it for an international currency, you're trusting the government of that country not to crash it. If you buy gold, you're trusting that people will still want gold when you want to sell it (and with gold your chances are high, but other valuable commodities have become a lot cheaper and wouldn't have done so well). In each case, you've chosen to give some cash to someone else in the hopes of having more cash later, and you are trusting the processes that implement the security not to wipe out your investment.

You may well argue at this point that all those things are better than cryptocurrency, and in many ways you'd be absolutely right. However, the way you characterized cryptocurrency applies to a lot of other things, and I'm guessing you have put your cash into several of them already. If you want a reason not to like cryptocurrencies, there are hundreds to choose from. That wasn't it.

Re: "Is that illegal?"

The laws around what kind of information means you shouldn't trade and what things are covered are long and complex, and as a bonus, every country does it differently. However, whether you consider cryptocurrencies to have worth or not, there are people who buy and sell them with real money, thus there is a market and the possibility of insider trading. The defendants' lawyers can argue that cryptocurrency isn't included in the laws on trading if that's the case, but prosecutors usually check that before they file charges. I should note that securities aren't the only thing where there are prohibitions on insider trading. Commodities are covered by other such laws in many places.

I've been fired, says engineer who claimed Google chatbot was sentient

"whenever I type something into Google 99% of the time it comes up with EXACTLY what I was thinking about! How do you explain that then!"

Oh, that's easy. One of two options is true: 1) you only do relatively basic searches and things Google's parser already got manually written to handle or 2) you're magic. For the rest of us, if we're looking for something more obscure, it doesn't always work with a generic search term and it requires tailoring the query to get useful results.

Also, were you under the impression that Google search uses this chatbot to interpret search queries? If you were, that's wrong. Their search algorithm is a lot longer and contains more rules.

Your job was probably outsourced for exactly the reason you suspected

Re: “US tech companies are saying, …

I think, based on the averages, that's a fully loaded cost for the employee. Depending on the company, that might not only include benefits above the salary, but taxes paid by the company, office space or equipment for the employee, time to manage the employee, and other costs they think will grow by hiring another person. That said, if you have skills that are wanted and others don't, some companies do have a lot of money they don't mind throwing at someone who can solve their problems quickly. That average certainly gets pulled upward (and downward) by some outliers.