Posts by doublelayer

Sam Altman's basic income experiment finds that money can indeed buy happiness

Re: we have mass underemployment now

In what sense? There are lots of ways to quantify what ideal employment numbers might be, and there are lots of ways to calculate unemployment. I assume that the "flaw" you're referring to is that the denominator is often the number of people in work or actively looking for work, so it doesn't count those who are not trying to get jobs. Maybe you're instead thinking that the flaw is in data collection which can fail to identify some types of people because they don't appear in employment records. However, neither of those flaws is very relevant to the discussion of whether technology has reached a point where we could continue our current lifestyle with significantly lower amounts of labor or when and what level of technology would be needed to get us there. Even that would probably need a better definition of "significant", which I defined at random as 5% of humans of working age needing to work, but you could easily make an argument that this is too strict a threshold.

When you say "I 'invented' UBI back in the 90s", what do you mean by that? Because you definitely didn't invent the concept. People have been discussing, recommending, and in some cases implementing something like that for centuries. While I'm not sure about the specific term because it's hard to get a search engine to find the first use of it, I also have references to "basic income" and "universal income" from the 1960s, so I don't think you invented the term either.

Re: How would this affect the wider economy?

That's an optimistic picture you have painted, but you're leaving out a lot of things which will probably block you from getting there.

For example, what are the jobs that so many people want to do that they will pay nothing and people will be happy? Remember that many of the jobs that lots of people want now are jobs that pay lots of money; many people don't want to do what a CFO does but plenty of them would be willing to try for the CFO's paycheck. There are some other jobs which are popular enough that you could pay little and still fill them, but those are very limited in supply (often meaning that the people selected end up being paid well anyway).

Now let's consider the jobs that nobody wants. Like, for instance, agricultural work. There are lots of unpleasant jobs there, so the wages for that job would rise significantly. As you said yourself, that means the prices for the products would rise, which in this case is food, which is one of the things the income is supposed to cover. That means the UBI level will have to go up, not down.

The combination of this means that the staples are the most likely to increase in price, and I'm not sure whether anything would decrease, but if it did, it would probably be a luxury good or service. If you don't plan for handling this, the program might fail quickly, which would probably be more risky for future implementation than if it was never tried.

Re: Nice to see these tech types...

I don't think mass unemployment is going to happen as quickly as the predictions have made out. If we get tech developed even more, it could eventually happen, but we have many tasks that have proven difficult to automate. General-purpose robots that can serve as drop-in replacements for humans basically aren't available, and more customized ones that do one job are quite expensive, so while they're common in things like manufacturing, they're less common when tasks vary too much or are intermittent.

Theorizing about what we should do in that circumstance isn't bad, but it may be premature in the same way that theorizing about how to run a society across solar systems is. It may not happen for many generations, meaning that when our descendants need to answer the questions, our answers won't be very useful to them. Meanwhile, there are lots of intermediate stages which are going to happen during our lifetimes, and if we've spent our effort thinking about the far-out future, we may have planned insufficiently for those.

How did a CrowdStrike file crash millions of Windows computers? We take a closer look at the code

Several things in your comment are wrong or misleading:

"The issue here is why a vulnerability tool has to go in the kernel. Something like that should only be running in user space: no ifs or buts."

It goes in the kernel so that it has more visibility and control over what happens. There are some things that can't be done from user space at all, for perfectly good security reasons, and others which can't be done efficiently from there.

Next, the Microsoft is to blame for putting it in. They didn't. CroudStrike is not a Microsoft product or dependency. People install it. Just as if I write a kernel module, I didn't ask for or get Linus's sign-off before running it. People are able to install things at kernel level, and they make the choice whether to do so or not. It is not Microsoft's decision to permit it, and if it was, we would be rightly complaining about the level of authority they claim to have to make that choice for us. They should not and do not deny people the right to do something potentially damaging with their own computers.

This article explains, if you didn't already know, why Windows has to go down when code which is running as part of the kernel breaks this badly. Guess what would happen if a kernel module I loaded into Linux, Mac OS, or any other operating system had a memory violation. That's right, it would panic. It is required to panic. If it did not panic, that kernel has a serious reliability problem.

Until people understand that, the attempts to find a reason why Microsoft is to blame here will not work. Maybe you or someone else can actually find a thing that Microsoft should be doing differently related to this, but while people continue to post comments trying to blame it for doing something both standard and necessary, you will fail to make any case because it appears that you have a gap in important systems knowledge.

Cellebrite got into Trump shooter's Samsung device in just 40 minutes

Re: You know...

I don't agree. Whenever I've seen someone try that, they take a relatively basic approach, one which I don't think gets anywhere. Basically, they follow this plan:

1. Read something the killer wrote. If it's a manifesto, that. If it's not a manifesto, something they posted to social media. If they didn't post on social media, a message sent to someone picked at random.

2. Decide on some opinion that they seem to hold strongly. If this is an opinion you dislike, go to 3. If not, go to 4.

3. Breathless announcement: people who think [opinion] are killers. We should do something about that kind of person.

4. Is there another opinion, one you dislike this time? If so, go to 3. Otherwise, go to 5.

5. Wait for next killer.

Opinions that you can actually make that case about are pretty obvious, because such things often take the form of "I dislike [x] and would like to kill people who, in my mind at least, represent [x]". You don't need much to figure out that a person who says that is potentially murderous. Even then, you have a lot of people who may say that and never actually do anything. If you get any broader, your correlations will be worthless and lead to harmful stereotypes, for instance "The guy who killed people was a soldier, it is not the first time a soldier was responsible for a mass killing of innocent people, that means soldiers are killers". Simplistic to the point of inaccuracy and not something you can do anything about.

Re: You know...

I'm sometimes curious to understand the motivations of crazy people to commit murders, but let's call that what it is, curiosity. If we knew that, what would be different at all? Nothing. The victims would be no less dead. Future victims of other people would be no more safe. Maybe, if this was an organized event with other participants, some of them might have been tracked down, but that's not really what you were talking about. Whatever the logic was, we already know that it wouldn't actually make sense to anybody, and unless someone has a stereotype they want to uphold, it would not apply in the same way to anybody else.

That makes it hard to argue for the release of manifestos or the like from murderers when we have them, and it makes it really hard to justify going to the effort to try to break in in the thought that one might exist or be reconstituted from other data. Basically, calls to do so sound to me like "Let's go to significant effort and expense to guess the content of something that might not exist and wouldn't be useful even if we got it".

HCL's back-to-office plan: Come in three days a week, or forget about holidays

Why this method

This seems like a really bad method to get people into the office, even if we assume that we want the goal. For a moment, skip whether getting people into the office is a good thing and just assume that you're in management and for some good reason, you want the people there and you're going to get it. The workers probably don't have a contract that states they can work remotely for as long as they want, meaning that management can, by fiat, just tell them that they have to be in the office. This might not apply to certain groups, for instance if they hired remotely during the pandemic and hired some people in a place where they don't have offices, but anyone who was in an office before the pandemic or could get to one now probably would be subject to such an order. Anyone who refuses can be penalized for not doing what they were told to, up to and including firings. If the company doesn't want to fire them, they can also use a number of smaller sticks against them. Why, when all those levers are available, would they pursue something complicated and potentially illegal with the leave policy?

CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor also linked to Linux kernel panics and crashes

Re: The problem is operational

Often, it is considered the OS's job to execute the software provided, and if you've chosen to let that software run at kernel level because you want it to have access to everything, that means it can mess up the kernel. An operating system that allows you to install software at that level is not compatible with one that can prevent errors executed at that level from having deleterious effects.

So we move on to your next suggestion, which is more plausible, of automatic recovery. That one can work. Have a versioned filesystem, and whenever you have a kernel panic, rewind to an older version and boot that. Of course, if the panic happened because some hardware failure triggered a kernel bug, then you'll end up rewinding yourself to the earliest version available as it panics every time, and it might provide a method for an attacker to remove recent updates in order to reactivate a vulnerability, but in principle the idea would work and those additional dangers could be mitigated by other protections. We would have to figure out what those protections should be and design them, but your second suggestion is possible.

Re: And this, ladies & gentlemen, is how you DDoS the entire world.

And all you have to do is get it to run at kernel-level permissions. If you have the kind of access needed to install this file to break a computer, you don't need it. If you have that access, you could obtain a similar, if not more severe, action just by deleting files at random until you are no longer able to delete files. That computer is not booting without a reinstall. No booting to recovery and deleting a file will fix it. The benefit to the hacking community, any section, is zero.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Re: The fault's with Microsoft

Basically, no. If I put in a program which works at kernel level, configure that program to start early in the boot process, and then do something in that process which takes down the kernel, having a Linux kernel instead of an NT kernel won't prevent that from crashing the system nor from making the recovery process annoying. There are some differences meaning that I might not have to run at kernel level for the same purposes, and then maybe my mistake will happen at a higher level and the boot will complete, but there is no guarantee that this will happen. Linux gives the user the ability to run software with very elevated permissions, enough to cause serious faults if that software is badly written.

Re: The fault's with Microsoft

Yes, like that. If my laptop was like a non-smart phone, as in it can run the three programs that the manufacturer came up with, with the small subset of supported protocols that they chose to put in, and if I needed anything else at all I had to buy new hardware to get it, it would be a pretty bad laptop.

That if there are repeated instances of this assumption that turn out to be wrong, then the assumption is probably bad and people are sticking with it out of habit and getting themselves into error? Isn't that what you do with assumptions which are repeatedly wrong?

"If it were an attack, it would be CrowdStrike's data that leaked, they would be the ones suffering the continued problems."

Supply chain attacks don't work like that. If it had been one, and it wasn't, then customer data would be at risk.

"Was this due to an attack on CrowdStrike or "merely" their incompetence? Who gives a damn?!"

Me. If the data I'm responsible for has been copied to an attacker's systems, I need to start dealing with it, and I need to start doing that right now. If it hasn't, then someone else needs to clean up the systems, and I would likely pitch in to help. Depending on whether it's an attack or a malfunction, my next steps are different, the situation for the users and customers is different, the likelihood of substantial damage to my employer is different, so I care. If you work in any area related to this, you should care too.

No, you would not be correct. Read again. It's not Defender. It wasn't pulled through Microsoft. The central fact, and one that's usually in the second paragraph of most stories, is that if CroudStrike was not installed, you don't have a problem.

I'm not sure if this is another attempt to find a reason why this is actually Microsoft's fault or not, but you have critical facts missing from your model.

Sure, apart from the active attacker having copies of the data and continuing to do even more damage. Not all bad incidents are the same, and this is different from a cyberattack in several ways. That doesn't make it good, but it's akin to saying that a car crash is exactly the same thing as falling down the stairs, because the injuries you received are basically the same.

FTC grabs controller as Microsoft jacks up Game Pass price by 81%

Re: I’m shocked.

The US regulators didn't "cave in", they tried to block it repeatedly and a judge wouldn't let them block it indefinitely. That's why they're still appealing it. The EU agreed to the merger after getting some promises from Microsoft, promises that haven't yet been broken, but the US and UK regulators hung on for longer. While the UK eventually agreed to the merger, the US's regulator has never approved it and is still trying to retroactively disassemble the two.

Big Music reprises classic hit 'ISPs need to stop their customers torrenting or we'll sue'

Re: Did they actually look at what was being torrented?

Yes, the detection based on hashes alone would fail. They would have to download the file to check its content. There are several problems with the suggestion from the perspective of someone wanting to pirate and allow others to pirate without getting caught:

1. You can't do that with a torrent. Torrents only work when they can deliver identical, byte-for-byte copies. Deliver ones with additional noise that's different per user and all your seeds will stop being able to deliver the content anymore. You can do that if you're operating a central server that hosts the pirated content, but now you're incurring a lot more bandwidth usage to deliver the same number of copies.

2. The copyright owners can still download the file and identify that it's their music in there. Just having someone listen would be enough, and there are also pieces of software intended to detect similarity between audio files of different encodings or qualities which would instantly figure it out from a downloaded file.

At the end of the day, it wouldn't be effective enough to produce any notable change.

Re: Did they actually look at what was being torrented?

You do realize that they can download the file, which they have reason to believe is their copyrighted content, because they own the copyright? It is not infringement to download an illegally distributed copy of something you have the right to. From a technical perspective, they don't have to seed the file, because just downloading proves both what is in it and who sent the data. They have no need and no reason to upload. They might not even have to download to figure out what is in it because, with a torrent, they have both the file names and, crucially, the hashes of the chunks of the file. If those hashes match an illegal encoding they already have, that will be clear enough to stand as evidence, at least enough that the person charged will have to show their file that just happens to have a hash collision for every 2 MB chunk if they want to disprove it.

I get it. You're looking for some reason why their legal actions should be invalid. I think you'll find one for the ones mentioned in the article where they try to have automatic rights over everyone's network connection. There's no law giving them that power. However, when it comes to torrents, your excuses for why their legal arguments won't work are getting both the technology and the law wrong. No matter how annoying I find their actions, I can't just decide that it isn't legal. Courts do not work that literally and if they did, the law is specific enough that it would still work.

Re: Whack-A-File

They wouldn't, so if you're going to send some copyrighted content, that will probably work. Not many torrents are done that way, though, because it makes it really hard for anyone else to find the stuff they want. You can easily hide what you're transmitting by doing that, but only if you've somehow told anyone else who might want the content you're hiding that it can be found there. Meanwhile, if you have a pirate site that just calls every torrent "LibreOffice_24.2.5_MacOS_x86-64.dmg.torrent", it won't have any protective effect at all because those trying to find torrents will start on that site that has the real names, and if they own the copyright to the content, they have committed no crime by downloading it to verify what is there.

Re: Did they actually look at what was being torrented?

I think what they meant to say but didn't is that you just have to find an existing torrent and, without needing to actually download any chunks, log the address of anyone who offers a chunk. You don't need to send the file, or even have the file, in order to do it.

Google to kill off URL shortener once and for all

Re: Good riddance

I think there are several more problems with bidirectional links and they basically only worked in TBL's internal data system which had a, compared to the internet, very small scope of data to be catalogued. With anything too large, links tend to make sense only in one direction. If my project links to a library I used, that makes sense, because someone modifying my project might want to find the canonical source of the component. If the library links back to my project, it makes much less sense, because that library does not use my project, so at best it can be an example of something you can do with their library and it might not be a good one.

"I think there is a potential role for something between a link shortener and a URN: a service owned by an identifiable authority, with established criteria for cataloguing resources that could issue permanent "handles" for resources whose actual target could be transparently changed to match their present physical location."

I'm not sure when that would be more useful than a more efficient alternative. For instance, we could do that for scientific journal articles, which are relatively easy to name uniquely, and the trusted authority could index them and keep a database of the URLs where you can find the paper. Fine, but nothing prevents someone who operates the server it's pointing to from accidentally shutting it down and disconnecting access. Presumably, the cataloguing authority has to detect that and get the server to come back or find another source. In comparison, if they just copied the thing, then they just have to keep some disk space around and stay online themselves. Less administrative effort and therefore expense means they're more likely to do something like that. That applies as well, if not better, to something that's less organized than scientific papers, because unless the files are very big, the administrative effort of keeping track of their locations is likely higher than the disk space needed to store them.

Re: Good riddance

There are times when a shortened link is either necessary altogether or necessary given the constraints of the control over the system. For instance, when someone has decreed the use of a certain CMS on a website which generates long links and might be changed in the future, but the link has to be read out and typed in manually because someone's going to mention it in a speech, video, or advertisement. However, my solution when this has proven necessary is to build my own link shortener. At least then, the domain name is the same and the user can know which organization created the link. It also makes them easier to maintain in the future because no external organization can shut them down and, if the destination moves, the shortened link can be updated.

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

I used to work in a corner of an office where the sensors weren't very good. They did not detect my normal movements and would switch off if I was the only one there. If they did this and I simply raised my arms and waved them, that wasn't enough movement to register from the corner, so they'd stay off. If I wanted them to go back on, I had to stand up and walk away from my desk, then walk back. While it was a good reminder when alone to stand up sometimes, there were other times when the thing I was debugging had gotten enough of my attention that I just lived with the darkness.

UK comms watchdog banning inflation-linked mid-contract price rises

Re: Prospects

Which they can do just fine, but it also means that, if they choose to put the prices up, customers can leave them almost immediately. That is why a lot of places that actually do month-to-month contracts don't mess with the prices too often. They know that doing that will cause people to leave and that they often attract their customers with simple and stable prices because their customers are those who shopped around to find them and can shop around again if they don't like them.

Firms skip security reviews of major app updates about half the time

Re: Why security reviews are so time and money-consuming :o

No, that's not it, or at least that's not the major reason. It's because security and vulnerabilities are such large sets that there's no simple formal method of defining something secure. Take the operation of opening a file and writing something to it. The OS doesn't make that insecure. While you might find a filesystem bug that makes that operation vulnerable or a bug in a kernel or process that can be invoked by doing so, those aren't that common. Yet there are still lots of possible vulnerabilities any time that is done, most of them intra-program. The file could be subject to a deserialization attack when it's read back in later. It could be used to use up some resources and provide a DoS method. It could be used to inhibit performance. If the program mishandles paths, it could be used in a directory traversal attack. There are some inter-program methods as well, or at least inter-process. None of these things are due to the platform and tend to be as available on any operating system, but they're down to practices during development of that application. Many of them won't apply just because of the way the program is designed. If you don't let the user name the created file, that excludes some classes of possible vulnerabilities right there. That's not a universal rule that the user must never supply file names, but one consideration among others when making implementation decisions.

A security review is supposed to identify risks like this, but only some of those are easily detected by an automated tool. Tools are improving, but there are still many that will be difficult or impossible to detect that way. Often, vulnerabilities in a piece of software are not carried over from its platform, but come from that software itself. Blaming the platform when bugs are found elsewhere is just going to let writers of insecure code off the hook.

Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

Re: The more process you have the less agile you are.

And that's great right up until the point where that team doesn't want to do something, so they just don't. The typical example is documentation. I know a lot of developers who don't want to write it. I know a lot of companies that don't want to employ someone else to write it, and if they did, the developers don't want to tell those people the kind of stuff necessary to write it. I've seen both those groups use the line about valuing working software over documentation in the Agile Manifesto as an excuse for why their stump of a readme and error messages is enough documentation. It isn't.

There are a lot of good processes that come about organically from a team just trying to get something done, but sometimes, that team needs to get a very specific thing done, the kind of thing that no team just decides they want to do. Few or no people have gotten together with the dream that, if they put in some time, they could build a really nice web interface for forms and processes of a local bureaucracy, but someone eventually has to write the software that does that. The processes that work for one do not necessarily work well for the other, because the bureaucracy in question doesn't understand the technical reality of what they need, the devs don't understand the processes the code is supposed to deal with, the customer does not have the time or inclination to test a gazillion intermediate versions that don't do anything of use because not everything is connected up yet, and the local government has fixed budgets and timelines because they are required to do so. That can be resolved in a variety of ways, and in some of them, the more Agile approach is the better one. However, the completely Agile approach, where the customer's whim is sufficient to change things at the last minute and there will be lots of those because nobody planned out all the needed functionality at the start, is bound to create chaos when the scope has changed but the timelines have not.

Because, when originally published, it started conversations here about whether Agile is a good thing. Not because the report was any good. If you review the comments when it was originally talked about here, you'll see many people making the same points about the uselessness of the report and you'll notice that few if any of the criticisms of Agile are related to the content of that report, but are instead about our experience of Agile, its theory, its execution, and its results.

In short, nobody is talking about the report except for the Agile promoters who, wanting to argue against those of us who have problems with the manifesto, have started with the obvious. They have correctly pointed out problems with a report that none of us care about, but they have not responded to any of the criticisms raised in the comments. Only one of the creators has actually joined a conversation here, and only to say that he didn't bother reading most of the discussion but was sure that whatever we were complaining about wasn't Agile anyway. Not that they need to, but if you want to complain about the people still referencing the report, those are the people you should look at.

Re: I love it !!!

In fairness to Agile (I'm not an adherent as you can see from my comment above), communication with the customer is one of the things it calls for. I think that would have been better if they made it explicit that the customer is the user, not the person paying, but still, they agree with you there. It is also one of the reasons I say that Agile only works in some cases. If you can frequently bring things to the user and get their reaction, then it works as an approach and is, I think, similar to what you're suggesting. If the users are giving you good feedback during development, you can head off usability problems and stop working on things that nobody wants.

The problem with this is that there are times where the work that is necessary is not something users can comment on throughout development and that sometimes, they won't even when they can. If this applies to a project, then something needs to be done to accommodate for that lack. You should communicate often except when you can't, but those two alternatives need to be handled quite differently.

Even simpler, the answer to any critique of Agile is "if it didn't work, it wasn't Agile". Handily unprovable and tautological. It means that no criticism is considered valid; if they don't like the thing that you don't like, then it was never a part of Agile, even if it's written right there. If they do like the thing you don't like, then clearly you weren't doing it right, so that's why you are wrong.

There are times when an Agile-like approach is the best one. Knowing when to apply that is important. It is not all the time, and it would do its adherents well to at least understand why we say that rather than try to dismiss immediately every time something is questioned.

The graying open source community needs fresh blood

Re: Realization

"Nothing, but arguably as someone who believes in open source you wouldn't do that anyway. Neither would anyone else."

Yes, as someone who believes in actual open source, I wouldn't. The people who mandate payment don't, hence why they violate every definition and tradition of open source, and they easily could. Why wouldn't they when they could theoretically get more money by doing so? The companies that switched from open source licenses to faux-open ones didn't universally limit the "who has to pay" set to big cloud providers. Some of them changed it to all commercial use at all. They did this, taking the work of all the independent contributors for free and making a profit from it. The thing you're accusing the big companies of doing actually applies better to people who switch the licenses.

"In this case corporations making billions in profit from open source projects and generating more work for the project but not giving them any money causes harm."

There's a great thing to do about this: don't do the extra work they generate. They want a feature added and have requested it but nobody else needs it? Hey guys, how about you find a programmer to write it or you pay us to do it. And if you do get a programmer to write it and it requires a lot of reviewing, we might not do that either unless you pay us, so choose between having your own version with your feature or donating some cash so it can be upstreamed and you have less maintenance work in your future. There, you have a method of getting resources from any person or company that is actually increasing the workload, but you're not doing that by abandoning the freedoms.

People use all sorts of licenses with random or counterproductive terms. Someone writes some software, but they have a bone to pick with the UK, so they state that UK-based individuals or companies are forbidden from using it. Yes, the UK is not the most common country subjected to this, but the point remains. There is a reason why we have made clear that that is not open source. Similar modifications aren't either. You can do anything you want, but I prefer to use, write, and contribute with money, code, or other support to projects where those freedoms remain, and I am well aware that if you start taking them away from someone, you will eventually take them away from someone I care about.

Re: Realization

Yes, it is taking it to extremes to point out why open source and free software forbid it. There is a reason why the definitions do not allow for discrimination against fields of endeavor or permit mandatory payment no matter where the software came from. They forbid this to protect important freedoms.

If you agree that a mandatory payment from anyone full stop is not open source, then even when that payment is mandatory on a smaller set of users that doesn't include you, it is doing the same thing. It should also be clear that, if we let any author set their own terms for who has to pay, that group can grow to include you at the whim of the author. What stops me, as an author of open source software, from deciding that you should be paying as well. After all, you're not the proverbial resident of the third world earning $2 per day, so you could afford to toss some money my way and I'm going to make sure you do. The truth is that you probably could give me some money, and that's why there is a donation button, but that if I wanted to be able to require you to pay me for my work, I would have sold this software as a product. There is a fundamental disconnect between an open source project, which anyone can develop and distribute, and something that a single person or organization can own and sell. Open source software has been dealing with this problem for decades, and it has been important to clarify that it is not the same as big companies who release some source, but if you so much as look at it without permission, they'll try to charge you license payments. That difference is as important, if not more, if some authors of formerly open source change to that model.

This implies that you've had success explaining the benefits to older people. Have you really?

In my experience, explaining the benefits of open source tends to fail with people of all ages if they don't write code or do something very similar themselves. Some people grasp the idea of "you could theoretically fix it yourself", more people grasp the idea of "you don't have to pay for it", but I have had little success explaining why the freedom to modify and distribute at will is important to me. Unfortunately, given some conversations elsewhere in this thread, I think I'm failing to explain that to someone who presumably has technical knowledge already. I have not noticed this being any harder to explain to young people. I know many young programmers who understand and agree with the goals of open source and many old non-developers who think it's really cute how I'm into this open free thing I just made up, but it surely could never go anywhere because all the software running the internet is owned by big businesses, right.

Re: Realization

Would it be open source if I wrote a license that says the following:

In order to use this at all, no matter where you got it, you must pay me all the money in your bank account.

In order to distribute modifications, you must charge everyone who receives it, whether from you directly or not, and send the money to me?

Hey, the source is still there for you to read. You can still modify it. Isn't that open source by your definition?

By the definition we have used, there are important freedoms that are lost. The freedom to modify and distribute without seeking permission from the original author being an important one. The problem of companies not donating to projects they use does not change the fact that, if you fix it by removing the freedoms, you have done a lot of harm to those who benefited from those freedoms and made yourself not unlike those companies, because you have taken the contributions of others in order to make a profit from the users without giving anything to them.

If you don't want users to have those freedoms, you have the choice not to give them those freedoms. Proprietary software is not evil. However, don't take them away and try to pretend that you have not. There is a reason that open source software is often preferable to proprietary, but proprietary software masquerading as open source is not.

Re: Realization

Open source has come to mean something, and it is not that the author simply decides on a license cost and gets to impose it. That's fine as well, but it is different. All I am asking here is for open source to continue to mean what it has meant before, which does not allow for mandatory payment for everyone who uses the software. People who don't write it should not claim to do so.

Otherwise, I must make the following decision. If open source can be redefined to allow anyone to impose restrictive license terms and mandatory payment, then Windows is the most successful open source operating system in existence. By the definitions we have used for decades, this is not true. By the one that lets "open source" mandate payments from users, it is.

Re: Realization

And anybody can write basically any license terms they want. Just don't write license terms that boil down to "I own it. If you want it, you have to pay me, unless you're suitably small in which case I'll give you a limited noncommercial license" and call it open source. Lots of tech companies have that license. We call it yet another proprietary license. I've agreed to that license many times. It is not what open source means, and anyone using similar terms while trying to claim credit as an open source contributor is being dishonest.

Re: Realization

The licenses differ on who exactly has to pay, and while Perens's license does have a revenue cap, many of them don't. Many of them don't even define their terms sufficiently so that you know immediately whether something counts. You get vague terms like "commercial use", and if you want to figure out what it means, you have to contact a license person who may not respond and doesn't have any reason to want to give someone the right to use it for free when they might get some money for not doing so.

Or in other words, it's very similar to Oracle. Individual developers and educational programs aren't being asked to pay for Oracle Java. They're the people that Oracle want to use it so that it gets more use afterward and they can start charging everybody else. Their arguments about why are exactly the same as yours.

I would like open source projects to get financial and code donations from companies and individuals who use it, but it is important to me that these be voluntary. Otherwise, the freedoms that are present will necessarily be weakened or discarded. If we make a list of people who can probably pay for their usage, so why not mandate it, it is not hard to find a reason to put you on that list. You have disposable income, I assume. Why shouldn't you pay for all of the stuff you use individually, whatever level the authors, or whichever one gets to decide think is the right value? That's a fine business model, but it's not open source.

"It's [a phone] not meant for learning or "what if" experimenting or general-purpose duties."

It is absolutely meant for general purpose duties. That's why it can run lots of types of applications and has plenty of hardware that's not needed for the basics. As for learning, I can kind of agree there, as both IOS and Android make it difficult or impossible to write programs for them on them directly, so experimenting with a phone usually means using a desktop or laptop to write the code, then running it on the phone.

However, most computers were not built for learning. The BBC Micro or the Raspberry Pi had that goal in mind, but a lot of computers were built to do computing, and then people who wanted to learn used them to learn. The people who made the computer on which I wrote my first line of code didn't do that to teach kids how to program. They did it to sell a box with a processor in it, mostly so that people could run existing programs. I learned anyway.

Re: Realization

Except that most attempts to encode that into a license get something very similar to proprietary. Sure, you can see the source, but we reserve the right to charge you for using it and if you don't pay us, you're breaking a contract. That sounds a lot like what anyone using Oracle Java, or anyone who Oracle thinks might be using Oracle Java, are hearing. Part of open source is that the users are free to use, modify, and redistribute, and they don't have to ask for permission. Yes, there are a few licenses such as the new one that Bruce Perens has been working on which claim to keep those freedoms while still requiring payment, but they're contradictory; either I can redistribute modifications and therefore avoid any requirement to pay, or I can't because it would avoid the requirement to pay. You can't have both.

If it has failed so badly, then stop doing it. I'd be sorry to see that happen, but I can't claim to be a full-time open source dev. I write proprietary for my employer to get money, and then write open source in my free time with the knowledge that I will get little or no money from doing so. But don't tell me you're writing open source then deny users the freedoms that used to provide.

Your stereotype might not be helping. I'm a relatively young (adult, working in industry for a while) programmer, and yes, I too was taught C and assembly and systems programming in general. I don't use the assembler now because my code runs on servers, and if it switches from X64 to ARM servers we don't want to have to compile it again, but I can, have, do, and will write C programs whenever it is useful. If I switch to somewhere where writing in assembler has a point, I know the concepts involved, and while I won't start as quickly as those who already do it, I can do that as well.

I also know enough not to assume that C is always the right hammer for any nail that comes along. Obviously for things like the Linux kernel, you will need a language that compiles to efficient machine code, and there are other areas where that is of paramount importance. Even there, C is not the only such language. However, a lot of software, if written in C, will run in less CPU time and take a lot more development time, and in many cases, CPU time is so cheap that the improvement is irrelevant. People who make assumptions that those who choose to use something other than C do so because they are not smart or knowledgeable enough to use that tool can often be wrong.

"Digital native" never meant "knowledgeable assembly language programmer". It only meant "can probably use a computer successfully without needing support". Don't assume that the people saying it are attributing skills they probably don't understand themselves.

Your next datacenter could be in the middle of nowhere

Re: I'd take a daytime-only datacentre

I don't think the problem is lack of demand. I think the problem is that, if you only run the expensive hardware half the day, and you have to charge less for it because it's only running half the day, then you're making a lot less on that equipment than you could if you ran it all the time. Normal spot instances just fill in gaps between users who are paying full price, not periods where nobody is paying at all. I would also work with that service, but I doubt many are eager to provide it.

With users mostly happy to keep older kit, Macs just ain't selling like they used to

Re: The no upgrade gamble [Actually ...]

I'm curious how else you thought that would work on a laptop. Doing that allows them to update CPUs even when sockets change, or to offer both Intel and AMD (and now RISC-V for some reason) options. Even if they had tried to have a socketed CPU on one board, you would have to change that board whenever the CPU manufacturer changed their socket design. It's not that different from a desktop. Sure, I can replace my AM4 CPU for another AM4 one, but if I buy a newer AMD chip, it won't fit in the AM4 socket, and I can't find any Intel chip at all that fits in that. I can still replace the CPU in it, though.

As for GPUs, the larger version with dedicated GPUs have those as a separate unit, so they can be replaced without having to replace the motherboard. However, that version is quite new, so there aren't as many options as I might like.

Re: The no upgrade gamble

As it happens, I do. I can upgrade the RAM and storage as well, just as on many other laptops.

The throttling thing is for iPhones, not, as far as I know, Macs, and even on iPhones it tends not to be a significant decrease in CPU speed. They generally get about seven years of software support, which while worse than Windows or Linux, is significantly higher than your number. For now, OpenCore Patcher does a pretty good job of letting users ignore the cut in support, but that may not work as well for ARM devices and almost certainly will not be able to do a thing when the latest Intel models run out of OS support. I have a Mac that Apple decided to cut off at Mac OS 11. It's running Mac OS 14 fine, though the battery has seen better days.

It is fair to say, however, that people who don't use OCLP to do what I've done see a significant degradation when their OS support lapses. It's not just not getting feature updates. It's not even the worsening record of security updates quantity or speed. Many applications drop support for Mac OS releases quickly, especially including anything that Apple wrote.

PowerToys bring fun tweaks to Windows 10 and 11

I think the "preparing" message comes when the process is still recursively listing all the files. It should and probably does copy the first few while searching, but it doesn't even know how many files there are yet. Since the next version will count the number and size of files remaining to copy since the time estimate is so frequently wrong, it would be annoying if the files left box kept going up.

Stop installing that software – you may have just died

Re: How did you get into this room?

Probably some education consisted of the line "Now that you can plug in inside this area, we want you to always plug in here and have that door closed while cleaning this area. Yes, we know that wasn't an option before, but now it's important."

Singapore's banks to ditch texted one-time passwords

Most of the time, they're using one of a few standard and open protocols, so they can run on desktops. All you have to do is identify the protocol in use and get one of the many open source implementations that has a desktop client. There are a few reasons why people generally don't, and that also explains why the most used authenticator apps from large tech companies don't have desktop versions, but you have about ten options with a quick search of GitHub. Finding one you trust can be trickier, but if you want a desktop version, you can have it.

There is a chance that some business will build their own authentication protocol which is not a standard, and if they do that and force its use, then you will be limited to whatever they allow. However, they often outsource this to something which supports those open protocols and you can use them even if they have a proprietary version.

Smartphone is already many folks' only computer – say hi to optional desktop mode in Android 15 beta

There are a few legitimate reasons:

1. The USB port requires support for displays and some don't have them.

2. The SoC may have limitations on screen size and refuse to support something larger.

And the ones that will actually matter a lot of the time, but not so legitimate:

3. If you don't let one phone do it, then maybe people will choose to buy the more expensive one that can.

4. The hardware can, the software can, but you need something like a kernel update and nobody is going to rebuild a newer kernel for this phone. Why not, they don't take too long to build, and there are phones with the same chip that already run the latest kernel so you don't need to wait for the SoC manufacturer to do something? If this operating system had been built competently, this process could almost be automatic. Nobody knows, but the manufacturers just won't do it. You can sit there explaining all the reasons why this should be no problem, but no matter how much you do so, the new component will never arrive.