Posts by doublelayer

Record labels gang up to sue AI music generator duo into utter oblivion

Re: All your tunes belong to us

Sometimes, but many such cases have failed because the thing that was "copied" was so small or so common that it did not deserve protection. Each time, it's just an experiment to see what the jury thinks. There are also distinctions depending on what exactly was copied. For example, a sample of a recording is considered copyrighted, while a note is not. While they might seem similar as they take about as much time (fractions of a second) to play, they should be and are treated differently. What I was trying to point out is that releasing a pattern of notes will not invalidate copyright on a subsequent song that also plays that pattern.

Re: All your tunes belong to us

The problem with that is that it's similar to taking a dictionary, making all possible sets of eight words, then claiming that no book can be copyrighted anymore because I've copyrighted every sequence of words. It's been clear from the start that copyright is based on originality of the whole thing, not tiny parts. I can't write "The world was" (copyright me, you have to pay me to use it), but neither can I invalidate your copyright even though you said "the world was" and I said it earlier.

A lot of music copyright cases are unconvincing to me, because they focus on exactly this kind of tiny thing and try to claim ownership of it. Usually, when I read about one musician suing another (or usually a company or family rather than the musician themselves), I think they're making a stupid argument and deserve to lose. This case does not follow that rule. This is not someone with a similar chorus. This is someone taking whole sets of files, in their entirety, and using them wholesale to make money. If these companies had their models stolen, I would not be permitted to use them at my leisure because they are copyrighted. That applies equally well to their training data. I often disagree with RIAA actions and statements, but once again, this is an exception.

Julian Assange to go free in guilty plea deal with US

Re: Not been said yet

The how and why are both covered under extradition legislation. It has been described, specific to this case, and in general, several times. It is the job of the court to read those laws, interpret the situation, and determine, then explain, why it applies. If you're looking for the legal explanation, it makes sense to get it in its full details from there, which is why others have suggested that you do so.

In short, the United States does not have any special consideration in the process, and any country could make a similar claim if they can claim and prove that they were the victim of a crime. To use your own example, Russia can and has used these requests numerous times. Sometimes, they have done it to get actual criminals. Sometimes, they have done it to try to get noncriminals, and the countries often reject those requests. In neither case would extrajudicial killings be permissible, and when countries do that, as many have done, it is a crime and could, depending on the methods and purposes, be considered an act of war. Often, the consequences for doing it are not as strong as I would like them to be, but that is not comparable at any level to the normal, legal process of extradition. If you want to know more, many good textbooks on international law and law enforcement are available for your perusal. If you want to know more specific to this case, many court decisions and applications from lawyers are similarly available.

Re: Sweden

Those charges no longer apply. Why they no longer apply is something that people with strong views about him like to fight about, and I don't have those strong views so I'm not going to go into any more detail about that. However, Sweden no longer has an extradition request for him so, once the US court work is done, he would be free to go to Australia.

Linux geeks cheer as Arm wrestles x86

Re: ARM needs to standardize

That wouldn't have fixed the problem they're talking about. It wouldn't have done anything at all for any other ARM equipment. They're talking about standardizing the firmware on ARM boards, which would mean not only that I would have a chance of booting a Linux image on any one of them, but that, with minor changes, you could do exactly the same with Risc OS. Instead of being Raspberry Pi only (some models not supported), it might boot on all of the ARM SBCs out there.

Meanwhile, Raspberry Pi trying to push Risc OS instead of Linux would have doomed their boards. An operating system that might be nostalgic for you to use, but by your own admission, crashes frequently, doesn't have any modern applications, doesn't allow the use of pretty much any commonly used programming languages nowadays, and would have been attached to some slow hardware. That would mean that educational buyers who wanted their students to learn any language they could ever use elsewhere wouldn't buy it. Individual enthusiasts who wanted to use them as networking equipment, media servers, home automation boxes, or almost all the popular uses except a desktop wouldn't have bought one. Industrial users who need something stable to control their equipment wouldn't have bought one. That means there would be very little money for the next version, so we might not have seen any hardware improvements. I'm quite glad that they did not try to force Risc OS as the standard. Risc OS can and has improved only because enough Pis were made that they are good experimentation targets, and they would be in an even better situation had the recommendations made in the original comment been carried out.

Re: What are the odds...

Exactly, which the board I linked can maybe do, but probably not. If it has to read some bits out of RAM and shove them at your link, maybe, though you'll have to connect your own because the NICs they built in are only 1 GBPS. If you have to do something to the data first, you'll probably find four A76s and four A55s to be a bit anemic. Even if you don't, there's still the question of why buy that board when you could have a better one for the same price if you switched architecture. That way, you have room to expand.

Re: What are the odds...

Yes, such a thing does exist. For example, this one. The question, however, is whether you will want that when you have to deal with comparatively weak performance. I'm guessing you would like something similar to Apple's processors or the competitors intended to run Windows, so the specific SoC on this board may be underwhelming. It's pretty good at raw compute in comparison to a Raspberry Pi, but not so good compared to low-end X86 CPUs, and it's priced a lot more like those than a Pi.

NASA ought to pay up after space debris punched a hole in my roof, homeowner says

"Does it apply to military kit? If a US shell casing or drop tank lands on you does that get you compensation, does you have to be a citizen / ally / not-a-target ?"

Yes, although you have to be not a target because if you are the target and you are able to sue, they'll just try again. Still, militaries have been sued for damage before and have had to compensate for it. Expect that they'll have lawyers to argue that it shouldn't apply this time.

"Does it apply to pollution? Is NASA responsible for emissions from its rocket launches ?"

I would think so, but the good news for them is that the people who write the pollution laws can also exempt things from them if they want. If we decided that we want them to be exempt from this, we could make that happen.

"Are US merchant vessels responsible for CO2 emissions in the same way as they are for pollution ?"

To the extent that it is regulated, yes, although there are complications related to where the ship is registered and located which may allow a ship operated primarily by and for Americans to avoid having those laws apply some or all of the time.

Re: Sounds fair

It was comparing the way that contracts can use vague language so they can include or exclude almost anything while not looking as if they do. Of course, the definition of "reasonable" or similar words is not whatever the drafter was thinking, but to get a ruling on it, you have to get a judge to decide what it meant. That takes a long time, potentially a lot of money, and can still be pretty random.

Y Combinator, startups funnily enough aren't fans of draft California AI safety law

"Just make it vlear that legal responsibility for the "decisions" of an AI rests with the last person in the chain of developing it training it and finally letting it loose in control of something that causes harm."

Bad plan. That's exactly what the companies making this stuff want to happen. They build a crap model, collecting lots of money from investors to do so, then they send people to sell it to someone else by promising things it can't do, collecting more money from them, and when it finally blows up, it's all the user's fault. After all, they were the ones to turn it on. The initial responsibility should rest with the user, but that user should be able to pursue the creators of the thing if it was their fault.

You know, the way that anything else works. If my car blows up, I should consider the manufacturer responsible and liable and they are. However, if it turns out that the explosion was due to parts made by a different company, the car manufacturer should be able to hold the manufacturer of those parts responsible. If those parts were dangerous because the raw materials were improperly provided, the manufacturer of the parts should be able to hold the supplier of those materials liable. By making the entire chain responsible, as long as each link in the chain actually did something wrong, you might actually fix the problem. If you only make the last person responsible, then all the other links will continue to do whatever they want because they'll never have any consequences.

Apple Intelligence won't be available in Europe because Tim's terrified of watchdogs

Re: This makes perfect sense

"to have a capability at all, however rarely enabled, requires the architecture to support it. And the test infrastructure. If it doesn’t, natively, you have to *change your entire software architecture*."

They have the capability. When you install something from the App Store, there is a program that creates the environment for the app and installs the image in it. When you upload code from XCode, it creates the package and installs it. When you have a corporate profile and a non-store app, it obtains the package and installs it. When you use beta-testing through profiles or TestFlight, it gets a package and installs it. When you restore from a local backup when offline, it takes the app packages that iTunes has collected (at least it once did) and installs them. All they need to do to have sideloading is have one more avenue for calling this package installer. They don't need to change the architecture, they don't need it to run Android applications, they don't need to change or eliminate sandboxing, they take a package, without checking for their signature which is not required in the installer anyway, and run the same install procedure they already have.

How Europe can force Apple to support competition

Re: EU: DON'T KILL iOS SECURITY!

I have news for you: the walled garden is fine. All this law requires is that, if I want to walk outside that garden and brave the dangerous woods, I can. You can remain in that garden, with the gates closed, all you want. If something bad happens to me in the woods, that's on me.

You don't need me to be unable to do something just because you don't want to do that thing.

Since joining NATO, Sweden claims Russia has been borking Nordic satellites

From most points of view, you are absolutely correct. The average Russian citizen suffers from corruption. Their institutions suffer. Some of their larger projects, like the invasion, suffer. However, from the dictator's point of view, corruption that leads to them is what they want. A less corrupt system is one where Russia as a whole might be doing much better, but Putin would probably be doing not as well. From that point of view, that is control. Sure, it might mean that when he tells people to invade Ukraine, a lot of them die while not moving as quickly as they otherwise could, but in a non-corrupt system, they might not invade it at all and that would mean he has less power.

Who would have thought it: when you're at war with a country, they tend to get a short stick in media. If you consider when they were an ally against Napoleonic France or Germany in the first world war, the stories will probably look a little different. There are people who understand the Crimean War, but if you're expecting me to say that there was a clear good and bad side, you'll be waiting a long time. That is not the same as saying it was all evil Western aggressors against innocent Russians, because it was more four countries wanting to control part of the map, none caring about the people in the middle. This doesn't change what they are doing today, and it's not about Russian people being bad guys who want to mess with us, but with dictators wanting to increase their power. There are lots of Russians who don't want this, but their government cares about them only as much as it takes to imprison them.

Do they have to care? Yes, Russia is smaller than the USSR was, but it's still quite large and Putin is working on fixing that problem. In addition to trying to add territory from countries that tried to go away from them, Ukraine and Georgia, he has several countries which frequently go along with him, most famously Belarus. They have tons of resources, and even though it is a smaller amount than the USSR had, they are better at extracting and selling them. More rotten and corrupt? Debatable, but the people deciding what Russia is going to do are the people who are rotten and corrupt, so your sentence can be rephrased from their point of view as "more in our control and for our benefit", so they don't have a problem with that.

T-Mobile US drags New Jersey borough to court over school cell tower permit denial

Re: TMobile is correct, but...

"But "the council isn't allowed to take that into consideration"? Are you even being serious right now? The council, which is elected, isn't allowed to ask the questions that a lot of its voters want asked?"

There is a reason it's not a local issue and why there are legal limits to it. If I convince someone that something which we all know isn't dangerous is dangerous, does it automatically become their right to do what they want about it? Stupidity has to be limited in a variety of ways. That means that the rules of what constitutes water safety is made at a higher level, so that neither the chemical company saying "let us dump or we'll fire you all" and the person saying "someone told me that dehydrogen monoxide is deadly so we must get all of it out of our pipes" get to decide what they want to do. It means that what is a crime gets defined at a higher level, so a group of sufficiently motivated neighbors can't define insufficient yard maintenance as a felony (sadly, there are some people who might want to). And it means that electrical safety is defined at a higher level and that if you think that it's wrong, you don't get to redefine something safe as dangerous, even in your local town. If you want to redefine that, go get a job at the FCC, but expect that people will prevent someone as ignorant as that from getting there because they have actual work to do.

Samsung Korea warns many apps won't run on its Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ PCs

Re: Broken

You know what was meant, though. It allows running a user-mode application. It doesn't allow device drivers. If the application has specifically written code (DRM) that doesn't work with it, that's not the fault of the emulation. Such things break in VMs all the time, or sometimes just because it was feeling like it one day. The main possible problem with this emulation is its speed.

I don't have firsthand experience with how good it is because I have not been convinced to want an ARM laptop. I have continued to assume that the emulation wouldn't be fast enough, even despite Apple's success with their similar emulation. I do know one person who has experience to the contrary, but they are running software that controls scientific equipment, which is probably not the most CPU-intensive program out there. Those who play a lot of games may have a different opinion.

Re: Charlie at Semiaccurate

It doesn't mean he's wrong, and because I haven't heard him speak, I can't say what I think about him specifically. However, the tone and the universality described can be a pretty big reason that someone might not be trusted. I'm thinking here of a reviewer of some niche devices I am interested in who can be counted on, whenever a new one is released, to tell you that it's crap and that nothing released after his favorite one from about 1997 was good. As it happens, I have used that one from 1997, and I wasn't that impressed. Several of the devices he reviews are actually crap, but because he approaches every review that way, the reader can't know whether this one is or not. If the reviewer doesn't try to be objective, including showing what things the subject does do well, and always treats the subject with negativity, then it can dissuade viewers from believing him or even reading the reviews.

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever's new startup aims to create 'safe superintelligence'

Re: Risk versus preparedness

It's not that you're wrong, but that nothing you said is very connected to anything they said. When they say "safety", they don't automatically mean avoiding any negative or toxic uses for the technology. Of course, getting a clear definition out of them tends to be hard, but when they've spoken, it often includes a couple basic things, such as use directly in weapons systems, and a few extreme things, like it spontaneously taking over the nuclear arsenals because that's what the sci-fi greats wrote about. I have little reason to think that a different AI company will want to or be able to deal with the more annoying uses, such as auto-generated spam clogging up the internet or not stealing all the training data. Sutskever complained about many things that OpenAI did, and when he did I often thought he made more sense than Altman did, but he didn't, as far as I know, express an objection to the kinds of things you're talking about.

Satellite phone service could soon become the norm

I'll believe it when I can use it

I have seen lots of satellite connection mechanisms and two things unite them all:

1. They take a lot of power.

2. They are so expensive, even to use a small amount of it, that they're not worth buying unless you use them a lot or need them to make a lot of money.

I doubt that these LEO satellites, cheaper though they may be, will change either. If people are charged per SMS message, they're likely not to send any unless it's a major emergency. Businesses that need satellite connections have already found many services, and they may adopt these as well, but there is not as much room in that market to expand. The individual consumer market won't buy if the price is too high. My guess is that LEO from phones won't end up being affordable to the average consumer, and someone will eventually notice how unsuccessful the thing will be.

That PowerShell 'fix' for your root cert 'problem' is a malware loader in disguise

Oh good, that means you know of an operating system that would prevent someone knowingly pasting code into an admin or root CLI from causing damage. Please tell me what it is. I've got a couple versions of Windows, Mac OS, about a dozen Linuxes, and a few BSDs and none of them can do it, so I'm always interested in an idiot-proof and even a malice-proof OS. Of course, your critique means you have such a thing, right? Not that you have no clue what you're talking about and want to castigate someone you dislike for something that everything would be vulnerable to?

US Surgeon General wants cigarette-style health warning labels on social networks

Re: Questions

"So you condemn peer pressure to get people to quit, but you're quite on-board with peer pressure to get people to start,"

Did they say that? I'm not them, but as I agree with some of what they said, I'll try to defend them.

I take a negative view toward anyone who believes they should chide someone for not being on social media, but that view is not much different if they're chiding them to not be on social media. Consider for the moment someone chiding you for posting to the El Reg forums. It would be annoying. It wouldn't make you like them. Perhaps most importantly, it wouldn't change your mind, would it? If they were more extreme, you might stop to get them to stop, but it wouldn't be because you understood why or even that they were necessarily correct.

Pew: Quarter of web pages vanished in past decade

How many boxes of paper have been tossed out because they're big, heavy, and easily recycled? How many more boxes of paper have been destroyed because they were put in a place where they could burn, rot, or be eaten by something? The existence of old paper does not prove that it is better than alternatives. It only proves that it is older than alternatives.

You can preserve information in lots of formats if you try to do it. The compactness and ease of reproduction are advantages for digital data, but neither will it continue to exist if nobody goes to the effort of doing it. Paper does not remove either of those requirements from the archival process and it makes some tasks more difficult. For instance, if I had found that box of race results in my house, I wouldn't have scanned them. I wouldn't have retained them. I would probably have asked the one person I know who cares about races if he wanted them, then when he said no, into the recycling bin. Unless I could find an easy race archives that wanted paper and was willing to come get and process it, it wouldn't have been preserved.

McDonald's not lovin' its AI drive-thru experiment with IBM

Re: The concept of automated voice ordering at a drive-thru doesn't make any sense to me

If you're going to do that, have some UI testers and give them lots of time and budget for users to test with. Those screens often seem to confuse people when they're looking for some menu item that isn't there, want a specific customization option, etc. Meanwhile, if you make the most simplified interface possible, anyone who can find what they want will be delayed as they have to tap through things they aren't interested in. If they're not careful, they may find fiddling with the interface reduces the speed and their revenue.

That might be true, but the franchisees won't buy them unless either they're forced to or it provides them a benefit. If it ends up being more expensive than having a human doing it and they have a choice, they'll employ humans to do it. So while there's an indirection in the middle, it still mostly comes down to cost and whether they can keep a reasonable level of quality while doing it.

Re: Incoherent Customers

I think their supposition wasn't about the language processing capabilities, but instead the speech recognition capabilities. A cheap microphone in an area next to a running car and a customer talking in whatever direction they want can make for a challenging recording experience, and software that's been trained on good recordings can make mistakes even without that.

"Why spend shedloads of time and money trying to get a machine to do something that a kid with a headset can do moderately well on their first day in the job?"

The only reason is if the machine can be cheaper, and there are times where I would prefer it. For example, the service I canceled today is something I'd have much rather done by clicking a cancel button on a website, but I had to call and talk to a person to do it (I'm guessing money was behind that one too). I imagine that successfully turning natural language into the correct restaurant order is a greater challenge than giving me a cancel button, though, so the chances of doing it with acceptable quality and still ending up cheaper are not as good.

Meta accused of trying to discredit ad researchers

Re: I have a browser without adblock...

Those ads can be basically free, whenever someone else didn't buy space. Their divisions may not have to pay much if anything to put it there, and anyone who decides to enroll is more money for the company. The main cost they have to factor in is how likely someone is to get so annoyed by the advertising that they stop using the service altogether, but I doubt it's many people, including us. Those who get the most annoyed can install an ad blocker instead. I have a feeling that people who stopped using Amazon had other reasons to do so, and someone who liked the service and wanted to continue using it but didn't like the ads likely found a solution they're willing to put up with. Then again, if I am wrong and people did stop using Amazon only to get away from Prime and Audible ads, they probably wouldn't know it, so they don't see a reason to stop.

Re: It's as if advertisers no longer care

The app creator doesn't care whether you buy the things in the ads or not as long as the people buying them are still willing to pay. I'm convinced that someone at the buyer thinks that ads work. I am less convinced that they are correct about this.

Tesla shareholders agree to pay Musk staggering sum of $48B

"if this thing was such a problem it should have been addressed at the time it was signed. I am not qualified to judge if it was outrageous, illegal or whatever - all I see from where I'm sitting is that it became a problem only after it became clear the goals stipulated in the agreement (goals which were, at the time of their signing, at least as outlandish and unrealistic as the rewards promised if said goals were achieved) will be met."

The problem is that "addressing" it is not free. It's not just saying that I object. It takes a court case, which requires hiring lots of lawyers. That means that, for someone who owns a small amount of Tesla, the amount you lose from a biased and illegal deal (let's assume for now that it was one) is less than it would cost to register your objection. Uniting with other small investors would deal with the cost, but now it requires a significant amount of organization and labor on your part. The difficulty in registering complaints does not prevent those complaints from being valid. Even in a situation where I am wealthy enough to hire those lawyers myself and focused enough to know instantly whenever a board decision is made, then immediately contest them, my case would not be heard for months, if not years.

I think we've identified our point of disagreement. I think that investor protections exist for a good reason and are not limited to immediately after an action is taken for another good reason. I do not see any problem in the objections raised to Musk's reward having come later. That doesn't mean that it's still unfair now and needs to be reversed, but that they had the right to raise the objection and the judge reason to deny it based on the way it was set up in the first place.

You have raised two points and treated them as one.

"Kinda prevents me nowadays from opining on who should own what,"

It seems pretty clear that he is going to get his reward now. I don't see that many people here calling for a law to be passed taking it away. They just think that the people who agreed to give it to him are stupid.

"and whether signed agreements should bring holy outrage when the clauses are met."

Not the same thing. Signed agreements that agree to give away your money should raise a bit more outrage if you weren't the one who signed them. After all, the laws in dictatorships which take away money were perfectly legal documents, signed by the duly elected politicians, so why complain about them being carried out to the letter, right? Such laws were unjust and a contract signed only by biased parties is as well. That's why it was valid to consider it in a court and to cancel it. Now, he has gotten the people who will have to pay to weigh in, as they should, and enough of them are evidently happy with it for some reason.

I'm not sure what you think payout means, but to me, it means getting something in exchange for having done something. Whether I think it's a good deal or not (no), he did something and now, he has the authorization needed to get rewarded for doing that. That's a payout by the definition I'm familiar with. It doesn't matter that it's in options instead of cash. I've gotten stock awards before. Those were payouts in my mind.

"Why do people here assume he just gets money sent into his bank accounts because of that compensation agreement?"

Because of simplifying statements which, in many discussions, aren't that important. He isn't getting cash, but he is getting something of value. So yes, he's getting something which can be converted to cash and something (votes in the next meeting) that he wants. There are cases where the specific form is important, but when you're asking the basic questions (did he get something, was it massive), it's not.

I see your pedantry though and I raise you another bit:

"Each option has a strike price of about $23 a share [...] So in order to get all of the options, Musk still needs to shelf out roughly $6.4 billion that will go into Tesla accounts and he's prohibited to sell those shares for another 5 years."

Not exactly. He can have the options for free. To exercise them, he needs to contribute that money. That money does go to Tesla, but then they need to get him some shares. They have a few mechanisms to do it. Some of those cost money directly. Others weaken the position of shareholders. Either way, while he has to put some money into their accounts, they have to do something as well. That money is not free to them when he exercises.

World's first RISC-V laptop with Ubuntu preloaded touts AI smarts and octa-core chip

Re: Banana Pi BPI-F3 RISC-V SBC

There isn't a firm one, but to me, something I can give to a relative, then leave for another city, confident that anything that breaks is user error that I can talk them through on the phone. That means any of the following things would exclude it from the list.

1. GUI doesn't work.

2. GUI sometimes doesn't work.

3. Driver problems for any of the important hardware in the unit.

4. Spontaneous reboots of any kind.

5. Missing hardware support that should be there by the design of the hardware (E.G. some classes of USB device not supported).

6. Lack of battery management (if there is a battery).

7. Typical software cannot run quickly enough for average home use.

8. Updates frequently change something 1-7.

9. Updates aren't supported at all.

Sadly, there are various pieces of open hardware that miss one or more of these points. Those are things I'll occasionally consider buying, but I would not give to anyone else.

Pretty much where it stood before: in the middle, with lots of people on every side who think they're better and might be, but all kind of relying on that middle bit for something. The point of supporting Ubuntu is that it means the things it derived from will probably work and the things that derive from it can probably be made to run on it somewhat easily.

Re: There may be trouble ahead.

"Just get on and release a Pi PC, without any AI BS wasting cycles/amps. It may well be the PC replacement that people want."

It's not. The people who wanted and were able to replace their PC with a Raspberry Pi have done it. A few of them tried to do it with the first few versions. Having used the same models, I doubt it worked very well. As of the Pi 4, it works much better. With the Pi 5, it should be even better. Nobody who wants to do that is incapable of installing that as their PC. I'm not even sure what other steps you think need to be taken to go from where we are now to having "a Pi PC", because it's likely to be a Pi in a box, and people are pretty capable of putting those together.

Meanwhile, the issues for everyone else will not be fixed by a Pi. There are some people who need more performance than that in their desktop. The Pi won't do it. There are some people who must have Windows. It can do that, but not very well, and not without some tweaking. There are some people who don't like some of the compatibility issues that the Pi has, and they'll find that running Linux on something else avoids some of them. Anyone who would know to buy a Pi PC either has considered using a Pi as a desktop or easily could, and having considered it, they either can replace it already or have a technical issue that will prevent them from making that choice.

Rivals and legal action cast shadows over Windows on Arm market

Re: Windows ARM applications

"I can't believe that I'm the only one who runs more than a browser and an office suite on their computer."

You're not, and I never said either that you wouldn't nor that I don't. However, a lot of people do. There are billions of Windows computers in offices, homes, and schools which run a small number of basic applications. For that reason, it is worth considering whether they can use an ARM-based Windows computer. In nearly all cases, yes.

I specifically mentioned several of the types of software you name. For example, the ones that involve custom drivers likely won't work on an ARM machine. Firmware updaters that use standard protocols probably will because you need very little processing power to run a serial connection and send over a file. Software like Adobe's products probably wouldn't have worked well at the beginning because, while they have emulation now, it's not the fastest. For a while, Adobe would have been a good reason not to buy one. A month ago, Adobe started making ARM versions. DaVinci Resolve has an ARM Windows build too. I'm expecting that "old version of MS Streets and Trips" will run acceptably under emulation.

I don't have some of the software you have, but I have my own collection of tools that I couldn't do without. As I stated, I haven't bothered to get an ARM device for various reasons, but I have reason to believe that, if I did, several of those pieces of software would either have an ARM build or would run well enough under emulation. It might negate the point of buying one, but it would be possible for me to use it. I think a lot of what you named is in the same category.

Re: crippled with Windows

Except that most of those applications will work the same. If they want local Office, there's been an ARM build for that for years. More and more tools that have Windows builds have started to have ARM binaries, and for anything open source, you can compile it yourself. Their emulation for X64 is also markedly improved, so if you need an old application that isn't being compiled the chances are high that you can run it in emulation with less battery life, but otherwise little difficulty.

There are a few situations where it won't work. If you need a driver for some old hardware, emulation won't do it for you, so you won't see Windows on ARM devices taking over for old X86 machines attached to even older hardware. If you need a lot of performance out of an application that isn't compiled for ARM, that won't work well either. There will undoubtedly be some people whose use cases would not be possible to run with an ARM machine, but that number is lower than you'd imagine.

I haven't bought any Windows on ARM machines and I don't really want to right now. They have an advantage in battery life, but sometimes I need higher performance than the high-end ARM laptops can provide and don't want to achieve it with a remote connection. I also value being able to run Linux on my hardware, and when I say that, I mean any version I want, not the one that might support my hardware.

I think that's what ARM's been hoping for. Qualcomm is getting a lot out of those designs, so if ARM's license complaints have merit, it wouldn't be surprising for Qualcomm to pay them to let them keep their designs. Qualcomm must either think that they can defend against those license problems more easily than ARM thinks, or they're banking on ARM choosing to give up at the last minute rather than suing a large source of revenue.

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Re: Strawman Arguments always win...

And if one doesn't bother to read the counterarguments, one fails to convince anyone that one is correct after all. We've had the "if it didn't work, you didn't apply the magic right" people already.

A lot of the comments here point out actual objections to Agile, as in limited issues that apply in particular situations. Maybe you could explain why those are incorrect? Crazy as it seems, a lot of us have read the manifesto and the list of principles and have a real basis for our critiques. I think many of the bad uses that claim to be Agile are doing things that you and the other authors did not intend. That is not the case for all of the bad applications. Even when it does apply, that doesn't automatically mean they weren't doing Agile. There are many things you wouldn't like which your manifesto does not recommend against.

Raspberry Pi stock surges after London IPO

The foundation's goals are not necessarily the same as the company's goals, and depending on the shares it holds, it may not be able to have as much of an effect as you consider. Many large charities have business holdings, but that does not oblige the businesses to act as a charity. In fact, if they did, all other shareholders would have a reason to complain and possibly sue to change it. This doesn't mean that they are legally barred from acting this way, but that in practice many companies in such a position cannot realistically do so without incurring legal risks or, if they try for long enough, shareholder-required changes in management.

Consider as an example Twitter, the old one. The Twitter board of directors and executives did not want to sell to Musk and tried several ways to make Musk go away. They were in charge at the time, and that's perfectly within their rights. There was nothing illegal about taking that attitude, even though it would mean less short-term money for the shareholders, as they could easily argue that they were doing it for better long-term success. Yet, enough of the shareholders made it clear that they would rather have the short term cash, and the directors were then required to change their policy and sell if they could. If the directors did not, the shareholders could sue the company and have the directors replaced. The Twitter board chose to skip that long process and just go along with what they knew the result would be, and the shareholders likely benefited from that decision because Musk ended up paying them more than their shares would have gained for quite a while without him. Nothing prevents Raspberry Pi from continuing to focus on low prices and for the community's benefit, but nor is there a guarantee that they will, even if Mr. Upton would prefer it.

Uber ex-CSO Joe Sullivan: We need security leaders running to work, not giving up

I'm not sure this is worth arguing, but I'll try at least once.

For starters, you claim that I am misrepresenting you when I said "If you go to jail if anything bad happens, why should you sign up to be responsible for security?"

I got this from this statement from you:

"We also need to make them REALLY respinsible for breaches. If they are the cause of WHY a breach happened because they are clueless idiots, they need to goto jail for a long time."

That seems like a clear call for punishing them with prison time. In my opinion, that is a serious enough punishment that people won't want to be in that position if they know what they're doing. The CSO is, by definition, responsible for the company's security state, and they will inevitably get blamed, at least in part, for any negative event that occurs while they're there. That's not necessarily the wrong thing to do, as quite often, they do have some responsibility. They are not omnipotent, however, and anyone with skills will understand that no level of competence on their part will eliminate the risks. You need a lot to outweigh the risks of "go[ing ]to jail for a long time", and a lot of people who know what they're doing won't take that risk.

"the medical industry and pilots are examples where credentials and skills are checked. Sure they arent perfect but they are a lot better than the zero we get from cxx."

Neither demonstrate the point. Pilots have to be licensed. Doctors have to be licensed. The person who tells the pilots where and when to go does not need to be a pilot. Hospital administrators don't need to be doctors. It's also irrelevant to the point about punishments and responsibility. If you're calling for a licensing test for security workers, that's a separate issue that we could discuss, but using your examples, the person managing the pilot generally isn't the one punished if a pilot flies incorrectly and crashes, nor are they if the finance department has cut down on maintenance to the extent that the plane crashes. If that guy was the one to be punished in both scenarios, you wouldn't find many people willing to be that guy, and the problem would not be solved because bad pilots and bad maintenance would both be very cheap to everyone doing it, because all the cost is paid by that guy. If you want these to stop, you have to actually figure out who is responsible with the chance that's it is a small amount each for lots of people. A license check won't do it,. Lots of punishments when you find a scapegoat you're happy enough with won't do it either.

That is how you guarantee that you won't get someone with technical skills. If you go to jail if anything bad happens, why should you sign up to be responsible for security? Much better to be the person below that, who actually tries to work on security, but make sure you have a scapegoat as the boss in case you fail. You might fail because you don't have the budget. You might fail because your subordinates aren't capable. You might fail because you, personally, are incompetent. But as long as there's a scapegoat above you, who cares?

In any disaster, people rush to find who is to blame. They don't want to go through the long process to figure out what should have been done differently at any level. They just want one person who can get all the responsibility and to see them punished. They most importantly want to make sure it's not them, so they set one up. That's what you have just called for as well.

The problem is that you won't fix anything if you do that. One CSO who doesn't know what they're doing goes to prison (by the way, the reason he was charged isn't exactly this, so I'm speaking in general). The people who didn't secure it are still there. The people who didn't support them are still there. You've removed one link in the middle, a link that was at most incompetent, and you think that will help. They'll find someone else to be a link in the middle in case it happens again, or they'll just continue on without one. Anyone who knows what they're doing won't volunteer to be that link, so there won't be any benefit during that period before the next breech. But people will feel nice that someone was punished.

Re: What Caused the Uber Data Breach in 2022?

It's a good question, but probably not one we can guarantee getting an answer to. It could have been password reuse, and because the email ended in @uber.com the person with the database sold it as having access (tested or not). It could have been a computer with malware on it which keylogged someone as they logged in. It could even be the employee selling it themselves or a colleague selling their coworker's credentials that they shoulder-surfed. The problem is that, although maybe we could figure out the answer in this case, there are lots of cases possibly including this one where that answer has been lost and was never known by any of the people who might want to prevent such a thing happening again.

Fragile Agile development model is a symptom, not a source, of project failure

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Which, to me, means it is better to spend time on making more value, that is, time spent making software work than on documentation no one is going to look at.

I'm afraid this is one of the parts of the manifesto that I take the most issue with, and I'm going to have to use you as an example why. There are many people who interpret that line in the same way. I'm not sure whether that's the same way the manifesto's writers were thinking when they wrote it. I hope not, and I think there's a reason that it might not have been, but as I've said to other defenses of the manifesto, they didn't bother explaining what they meant, so they're either in agreement with or responsible for this attitude when people use the manifesto as justification.

A lot of developers don't like writing documentation. They start finding reasons why they shouldn't have to. Managers also don't particularly want to do it, because it would seem to add time to the development process without making the software any more capable, and if the developers aren't going to do it, then you'd have to hire other people to do it, and that's expensive. Too bad for both groups because it is needed, and they should both know that. I'll tell you who suffers when the documentation's insufficient:

1. The users who read the documentation in order to use the software and get their job done.

2. The users who don't read it, but when they screw something up, can be referred to it, read what they should have done, and use it properly next time.

3. The trainers who need to learn how to use the software in order to teach users, but don't use it themselves. Winging it means training people in at best an inefficient and at worst a wrong way.

4. The support staff, if you're lucky enough to have them, who explain to users how something works even if they don't use it full time themselves. This also includes the tech-savvy colleague who gets a lot of routine questions from the less knowledgeable users.

5. Developers in general when they need to know what behavior is expected, so they know whether a certain change needs to be written differently, communicated to users, or expanded with multiple options.

6. New developers who need some way to learn what this project does and how it does it that's a little faster and more reliable than figuring out where the main function is and trying to read it like a compiler.

7. Me, as an established developer, when I want to help the new developers learn but don't have enough time to hold a complete course on it.

8. Me, as an established developer, when I need to teach someone in great detail or they'll be unproductive and our manager gets unhappy, but the lack of documentation means I have to spend a long time doing this, which means my code production decreases, which means my manager gets unhappy.

Re: Straw Man Argument

"I've skim read the objections in the comments and they don't represent the values and principles in the agile manifesto. I really do wish people would read it."

A lot of us have read it. There are two problems related to it which mean that arguments such as the ones you've made are not convincing:

1. People follow the manifesto in a lot of different ways. They take a lot of the principles to extremes, even when they cause problems. They read "working software over documentation" as "working software, and documentation only if there is spare time", and then apply the continuous development principles in such a way that there almost never is any spare time.

2. The manifesto doesn't prevent them from doing so. I can't point to one of the principles that explains that they've misinterpreted it. I can't prove in any way that their misapplication is not what the Agile creators intended. I can prove that their misapplication is causing problems, but they don't care.

In the last topic on this issue, a couple people started responding to any criticism with "if it didn't work, it wasn't Agile", and this almost religious attitude puts people off because it can be quite clear that sometimes, it doesn't work even though it was Agile, and sometimes, it doesn't work because it is Agile. In my comments, I have tried to point out the benefits of Agile, when it is a good plan, and when it needs alteration, but when people have seen supporters who are unwilling to accept any criticism, blame any failures on others, and adhere to a very short and mostly content-free manifesto as if it answers questions that it either doesn't consider or answers badly, it shouldn't be surprising that they react with hostility. This is especially true if one of those adherents was their boss and applied it, correctly or not, in a destructive way. The manifesto is not blameless in this, nor is the boss, and both will have to be fixed if you want to see attitudes changed.

Re: Study has been debunked.

"For people saying Agile does not work, then you need to abandon some of the solid Agile Engineering Practices created by Agile Manifesto authors. Such as TDD, Pair Programming, Technical Debt, and so on."

No, I don't, and you already know it. For one thing, just because I reject a philosophy doesn't mean that I have to oppose every thing a supporter ever said. That would make for some very odd worlds (let's see, I don't agree with religion X, religion X says murder is wrong, therefore I must become a murderer). Fortunately for me, as I don't want to murder people, that's not how anything works.

Your examples are bad as well. People have been pair programming longer than the Agile Manifesto has existed. Not to mention that it has many limitations and is another one of those things where, if you do it all the time when you don't need to, you are decreasing productivity and irritating the programmers. Technical debt is not a practice, it's a term, and it will exist no matter what you do. You can keep using those words for the concept without adopting the rest of it. As for TDD (test-driven development in case the acronym isn't known), it's not original to Agile either, can easily be used without it, and has been blamed, sometimes unfairly, for quality issues as it means fewer or no people specifically testing rather than developing. That is one which, given the number of times I've seen it done badly, I wouldn't mind abandoning or overhauling.

Re: What I Have Never Understood About Agile.........

It doesn't necessarily mean updating what people use every month, but having more stuff for them to look at every month. For some types of software, this can produce good results. I've worked on these before and kind of have one now. I make a version, send it to some users, and they tell me what they like or dislike about it. It doesn't do everything because the project's not complete, but I have a list of things that do work and a list of recent changes so they can direct their attention. That lets me fix things more quickly, which means I also have time to deal with opinions that aren't necessarily bug reports. The software won't be put into production until it's all complete, but the intermediate versions show the progress and get user input.

If the software isn't as user-facing, this doesn't work. If there aren't any users willing to keep testing intermediate versions, it doesn't work. Sometimes, this is a great method for getting good stuff fast, which is why people have called for it, but they should, and not enough do, consider where it doesn't apply before trying to apply it to everything.

Original: My experience is that when allowed to figure it out for themselves, competent people will evolve a system that works quite well for their project

Reply: This is agile. Not a set of defined processes/outcomes, but a team working to work better for the customer.

No, it's not Agile in the sense of the manifesto. What they could come up with might be similar, but it could be diametrically opposed: "We team members have decided that this won't work well unless we write a full plan and specification right at the start. That's what we intend to do. Then we can build this without getting in people's way". Some projects work best with that. Some projects work terribly with it and can use Agile-type methods. People selecting to do something different than the manifesto are not being Agile, they're making their own decision.

Spam blocklist SORBS closed by its owner, Proofpoint

Re: Double opt-in demands

"So your issue is with amateur admins, and not SORBS."

As they clearly stated, their issues are with both. Their issue with admins was taking a report in an extreme way, and their issue with SORBS was creating a report with insufficient justification, which they allege other lists did not do.