Posts by doublelayer

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

Re: Opening up the M1

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

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

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

Re: Speedbump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Speedbump

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

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

Re: Speedbump

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

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

Workplace surveillance booming during pandemic, destroying trust in employers

Re: As opposed to???

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

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

Re: Send fair

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

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

Re: Yeah that's not cool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: get kids hooked on Microsoft 365 for life

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

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

Re: get kids hooked on Microsoft 365 for life

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

Re: I bet...

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

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

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

Re: another wealth transfer under the cover of good intensions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surprised?

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

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

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

Re: Reinventing the wheel takes you nowhere different

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

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

Re: Wait...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Good idea

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

Re: Open Connect

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

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

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

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

Re: Open Connect

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

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

This isn't the metaverse

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

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

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

Re: Can you just turn it off?

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

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

Re: What we have come to

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

Re: What we have come to

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

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

Re: 99% agree

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

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

Re: Great....

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

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

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

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

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

How often do they expect replacement

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

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

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

Re: Some potting processes must be flawed

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

Re: Sim-swapping

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

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

Re: Who is this 'third party'?

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

BlackMatter ransomware gang says it's disbanding – again – after Ukraine arrests

Re: "prompting the decision to reform under a new name"

I don't think the cybercrime community cared all that much. They want to avoid a situation that seems dangerous, but a delay might be all they need to forget about that danger, assume it has gone back down, or remember that more ransomware operators means more chance that they'll get to collect part of the proceeds.

Love or hate your IT dept, money talks – and tech workers are getting more of it

Re: Laugh

I don't know as I'm not in the UK. I was using the numbers the article talked about as quoted in your original comment. Even with the lower range, it's still somewhat to significantly more than the £20k-£30k range with which you've equated it.

IR35 sounds restrictive to contracting roles, but starting a business doesn't just mean taking contract work. If you want to take the risk related to a business, you could make a business that sells products or services in a more general way--as I understand it, if a business buys your service rather than you tailoring your service to their contract, IR35 isn't related. It sounds as if you only plan to start a business in order to take a contract role, which is fine, but then your complaint is squarely on IR35 and not on the level of pay.

Re: Laugh

Your numbers don't really work, and your conclusions are extreme. If you're in the £100,000 to £150,000 range, you earn a lot more than £30k. It's not just filling up pensions, which those earning £30k will not be able to do so well, but all the extra you have afterward. That is the kind of money many will never get, and I'm guessing you haven't lived on lower wages for a while.

As for starting your own business, you have options other than contracting. If you open a business that does something other than look for contracting roles, IR35 won't restrict you. Your savings from the higher salary should help ease the start of such a business. I'm not in the UK, so I'll leave the discussion of how restrictive IR35 is to others. You have the freedom to change roles whenever you want, the money to make changes in circumstances easier to handle, and skills which earn you in a high income bracket. Whether or not you feel the large and wealthy employers are paying you enough, you have a lot of power that others don't have and you could use to your benefit.

Apple's anti-ad-tracking iPhone feature took a '$10bn' chunk out of social network revenues

Re: No need to use F.c.book

That is only creating a false equivalence between three options which in all respects are very different from one another. Apps which do not currently track their users could be sold, but not all of them will be. WhatsApp was built for easy communication, not privacy and security. Signal was built for privacy and security. Therefore, it's much less surprising to see WhatsApp sold than it would be to see Signal sold. Facebook and Signal, although both being apps, have very different privacy records and are likely to have different futures.

As for decentralized methods, you're correct about some of them being too technical for the average user, but not always. The average user knows how to email, and from a phone too. They can also download a frontend and log in; when using decentralized Jitsi as a videochat platform, people didn't have a problem searching for Jitsi Meet and logging in. Not all alternatives will be unfriendly to users.

Re: No need to use F.c.book

The history issue is why I prefer to use apps that don't store history. I don't think Signal, which was founded by people interested in privacy, is about to sell out to Facebook or someone like them. If they do, I will drop the app. For a similar reason, I dropped WhatsApp when Facebook started announcing their plans to take it over (though I didn't use it very much beforehand).

There's other options which can't be taken over. Email, for example, is just a set of protocols. You can communicate worldwide using it and Facebook can't buy the system. Facebook is in no way required to communicate internationally.

Latest Loongson chip is another step in China's long road to semiconductor freedom

Re: "CPU architectures as a means of control"

It's context: evil was the shorthand for being risky to use. It isn't risky to use for the reasons I explained in my post. Your idea that the U.S. might use it for extortion doesn't make any sense; if they deny exports of chips, then all China needs to do is start using their own manufactured chips (or those manufactured in countries other than the U.S.). Which ISA is used is of no importance in it. Encouraging local chip production because the U.S. could make chips more expensive is at least a logical plan which they have done. Invent a new ISA because somehow the U.S. will restrict them from understanding or implementing X86 is poor reasoning.

Re: "CPU architectures as a means of control"

"The US is restricting technology exports to China, so I'd say "CPU architecture as a means of control" is a completely accurate statement."

And how did you get from accurate clause 1 to proving opinion clause 2? Because they're really not all that related. They're not related for a few reasons. First, if the U.S.'s architectures are evil, then what's so wrong with ARM, designed in the UK (and a lot of other places)? Chinese manufacturers have been designing and using ARM chips for years without the U.S. controlling them.

But that's assuming there's something wrong with X86, which there isn't. The U.S. has been denying various technology exports, but chips are not among them. China can buy all the X86 chips they want. The export restrictions have not at all slowed the Chinese implementation of X86, most notably the efforts of Zhaoxin. Other companies can also do that. The U.S.'s export controls have had an effect on China's chips, but it's been in getting chips manufactured, not in their design. That issue is just as limiting for a Chinese-built architecture as any other.

The existing ISAs are basically open. While there is a technical license requirement for X86 and ARM, it can be violated without much difficulty; nothing blocked the use of MIPS in this architecture, after all. It's as if China tried to develop their own programming language because using C was too American; they can do it if they want, and it promotes competition so there's a mild benefit there, but their reasoning doesn't make sense.

Honeymoons last a couple of weeks – the same goes for any love for the IT department

Re: My Wife

I wouldn't count on engineering getting long-lasting credit for things. Especially if the people telling engineering what to do aren't engineers themselves, because they don't know when something the engineers have succeeded in doing was a real accomplishment obligatory XKCD. Some may be able to frequently remind others of an achievement and turn that into lasting reward, but let's face it, doing that is boring and most of us would rather do good work or interesting work than spend time and effort trying to remind others of good work we once did.

Google's 'Be Evil' business transformation is complete: Time for the end game

Re: Wishful thinking

Oh, April days can be cold in the northern hemisphere too. Especially since the date isn't specified, so April 1 is entirely possible. A lot of places haven't really gotten into spring by then.

If you're asking though, it's the opening sentence of 1984. Not a very illustrative sentence for the rest of the book, but famous enough that people recognize it.

Re: Once upon a time...

I think it was less obvious at the beginning. With their successful search engine, a non-evil advertising concept was available to them: target advertising to the search query, collect lots of data about how ads appeal to different types of searchers, and make money from that. Without having to collect the personal information or histories from people, they could still have used it to their benefit. I don't know whether they were hiding that from everybody or if it was their intent at one point, but an observer could expect them to take that approach until they unveiled their more invasive version.

Re: A Third Way

I'd like to believe that, but there are three major objections to it working.

First, companies are often quick to ignore whether what they think works actually works. A lot of this data goes into advertising. Well, if we give them junk data, their advertising should be less successful, right? They will run a study and find this out. Except companies mostly don't like to do that and when they do, the advertising they already get loses a lot. If you like podcasts or are willing to read transcripts, these might be of interest. It demonstrates what happens when researchers try to analyze the success of advertising. Part 1: television advertising, Part 2: Online advertising

Second, creating fake data isn't easy. In order to have a fake location report, you have to set up several things on a device which ordinarily tracks location, then set up tracking, then hide other information which can show that you lied. If you report a fake location in Michigan but you're actually in the UK, your local time zone, IP address, and path you took to the reporting server will all indicate the data's wrong. Fixing that is expensive and complicated. And that's if they don't think about the fact that a device generally moves and your fake location probably doesn't. Getting your fake location tracker to make the reporting device appear to move without phasing through Michiganian walls is quite a bit harder.

Third, while the results of the data collection may be unreliable, the companies have an interest in collecting it for some reason. I don't know if they have found an evil plan that really benefits from having it, but if they haven't, they're working on it. They can hire some people to clean the junk out of the system. Unless everyone is doing it, there will be signatures they can follow and a lot of software can ignore the small amount of noise we can create for them. They probably won't be courteous enough to tell us that our fake data has been rejected, so we continue to use methods they can filter. Doing it in the hopes of slowly bringing their data collection down is probably a waste of our time and resources.

The pandemic improved the status of IT workers … forever

Re: For or against... what?

In fairness to them, these for/against labels don't always work very well for the statement. In this case, the opposite statement appears to be "The pandemic improved the status of IT workers, but only while the pandemic stresses continue". However, other possible opposing statements are available, including "The pandemic did not improve the status of IT workers" or the much less interesting "The pandemic improved the status of IT workers for a moderately long time but not forever".

Other debates using this structure have at times either posed a statement that the debaters didn't argue, or used a compound sentence only part of which was covered. The poster is not the first to have found them vague.

Re: Nah, not for me.

"That was their point. What's yours?"

As both of the original posts have now been deleted, I can only guess at the differences. From context, I'm guessing their point was that, as a contractor, the poster should expect temporary work and therefore that losing the position when a task was complete is not reflecting disrespect on them, but rather a typical contract expectation. If the contract was dropped at a renewal point, as opposed to being terminated unexpectedly, it is an easy point of separation for all parties which they can all expect and plan for.

Shrootless: Microsoft found a way to evade Apple's SIP macOS filesystem protection

And system state files which the system needs to modify during operation would go where? And updated images would be installed how? If this bug was in place, it wouldn't mind about signing because the script that was executed would be signed, the payload would not be in the signed image but would get executed anyway, and once executed it could disable the signing check because it has control over the system image.

Zuckerberg wants to create a make-believe world in which you can hide from all the damage Facebook has done

Re: Niantic's Version

In fairness, those are two different things. VR is taking a videoconference, making it full screen, and blocking out the rest of your vision. AR is keeping your vision but adding stuff. I can see a few potential uses of AR to add information to a physical location, whereas VR is just a screen in a different shape which doesn't sound very useful to me.