Posts by doublelayer

Heads to roll at Lenovo amid 'severe downturn' in PC sales

Re: Perceptiveness

"I think AMD with Zen 3 have put a lot of pressure on Intel, in some ways Intel probably needs to discontinue their bottom-end processor ranges..."

I doubt it. AMD's lower-end CPUs aren't that plentiful, whereas the former Celerons can be found anywhere you want them. For many cases, this isn't that interesting, but it does mean that Intel can get almost total market share in low-power, cheap CPUs that can run Windows and generic X86 Linux. Not only can you get a bunch of cheap small desktops using such chips, but they're also very popular for people building custom systems that use an AMD64 processor as the main chip but don't need fast performance. They're also capable for basic desktop use (as long as you're careful not to skimp on the RAM as well if you're running Windows), which can open an area of cheap computers for users that don't need too much.

In fact, the higher-end Intel parts are the ones that interest me less. Sure, a 24-core chip with heterogeneous core types can get some nice benchmark numbers and would probably be nice for parallelized compile runs, but I don't spend much of my day doing those and the rest of the time, the chip consumes a lot of power. They're also quite expensive. I bet they sell more chips like the Pentium N6005 than the I9-13900K.

Re: Renewal are due about now

"Most of the customers I deal with replace their kit when the warranty expires."

They are not like the people I deal with. I probably deal with far fewer organizations than you do since you describe them as customers and I just do it to volunteer for a couple charities. In the set of companies I know about, including those charities and companies that have employed me, all of them replace laptops only when they don't turn on or there are bits dangling off them on wires. I do some repairs when possible when it's a charity and my employer tends not to bother for some reason, but none will discard a computer that's working and none of them cares about it not being on warranty.

I can answer that one: not at all. Windows 11 is basically irrelevant to most device purchases. It won't encourage anyone at least until 2025 and probably not much then either, and it won't dissuade them. It won't even dissuade people who hate Windows, because they don't care whether it's Windows 10 or 11 they wipe out before installing the thing they're interested in.

The reason for the decline isn't Windows 11. It's because coincidentally, a while before Windows 11 came out, people had to buy a ton of laptops to deal with pandemic situations that required them, and all of those work just fine. A lot of demand got consolidated from last year and this year and dumped onto 2020. All those are capable of running Windows 11 for those who want it, although the last time this paper had an adoption statistics article, that wasn't a lot of people. Combine that with the fact that an old laptop is usually fine and you have a recipe for falling demand no matter what the software is.

The quest to make Linux bulletproof

Re: probably involves a web browser for some reason no one seems to be able to adequately explain.

No, by "not install" they mean to have no persistence. Pulling down a bunch of JS can, if it doesn't use some of the new filesystem APIs that are in browsers for some reason it's better not to think about, run an application while not having any permanent effect on the system after the application closes. There are times when that is desirable. There are a lot of times where it isn't, which is useful to keep in mind, but not every web-based application would be better as a client program.

More victims of fake crypto investor scam speak to The Register

Re: A fool and his money, indeed...

This is unfortunately a hubris I've seen far too often from technical people. The number of technical people who assume that they will never fall for a scam is surprisingly high. People complain when somebody sends out a phishing test that doesn't have all the words misspelled because you know all scammers do that, and they assume that they'd always check every possible indicator. It's the same problem that results in programmers who are good at writing code that achieves the goal in an efficient way assuming that it's necessarily the secure way, often reacting with outrage if anyone suggests that a vulnerability could exist.

I work in security, which means I have seen more attempts at attacks but I've also seen enough smart people be successfully conned that I am not confident that I can spot one. All I can say is that I'm reasonably confident that it hasn't happened yet. It can happen to anybody (you, me, the best programmer you can think of) because it already has happened to someone like you. Finding a reason that you sort above whatever victim you recently heard about will not protect you. It didn't happen because they're stupid. It happened because their defenses failed, but that's not the same thing.

Tesla fires gigafactory staff after someone made the mistake of mentioning unions

Re: policy

The policy is set up so they can have someone say something like "If you do anything like that you will be fired immediately and we have the ability to alter your performance history to indicate misconduct then have lawyers pursue you for it", or likely a less intense version of the above threat. Employee-hostile companies have perfected the art of threatening people without making it too obvious that's what they're doing. Nobody can get evidence of that statement, so in the NLRB meeting they can say that the reporting employee (fired by now, of course) was just making it up. It wouldn't stop me from recording anyway if I thought such a statement would be made, but if they announce a policy like this, people may think it's legally binding.

99 year old man says cryptocurrency is for idiots

It's sometimes fun to watch the ravings of a supporter of the Chinese government's system. Kind of like how entertaining one flat Earth guy can be, or better yet, two of them who can't agree on things like how exactly the sun's movement works with time zones. That is until you remember that, unless they're just trolling, they actually believe this crap. The post isn't annoying enough to definitely be a troll, so I'm afraid there's another person who thinks that the individual citizens get to choose their local leaders, and that the local leaders have any choice who is going to run the country. Not that it would be a good system if it worked like that, but it certainly doesn't work like that.

Re: Value

It's not helping your point, if I can even correctly assume your point, that you don't know the country. The country you were trying to name is Costa Rica, and it's not them. It's El Salvador, and although the president is an adherent, Salvadoran citizens not so much. It has caused a number of problems just getting started, and is in low usage despite the Salvadoran government wasting lots of money on the project.

"He didn't say China was perfect, just that they're better at protecting democracy than other countries."

I don't think he said that, which is good because it would be ridiculously wrong. He doesn't like cryptocurrency, China banned cryptocurrency, he doesn't really understand the actual state of cryptocurrency in China so he thinks the ban is total, and he thinks such a ban is a good thing. That's not the same as saying China protects democracy, which they obviously do not seeing as they don't give their citizens any rights and have worked to erode democracy elsewhere.

Re: Value

"In fact, there are concepts for economic systems that manage without money and replace it with a distribution of resources and goods according to base-democratic principles, by agreement. At least they are conceivable."

They are conceivable, but my conception of them doesn't involve them working very well. In fact, my conception involves people hiding things so they're not distributed, getting into fights about who needs what and whether they deserve it, finding people they don't like and voting for them to lose all they have and get nothing more ... maybe I'm just too cynical for these concepts.

It might be. Salt has been used for money in a number of places for that reason alone. The reason I'm not sure about it in a post-apocalypse situation is that, depending on what happened to cause the apocalypse, you can probably go get the salt that has already been made. It is very cheap and shelf-stable, and I bet you'll think to do it before many others do. Others might raid the food stores for stuff they can eat today, but the salt shelf will probably be fine.

I stand corrected, but not by much. I don't count the internal alpha version of TCP/IP though, since a non-research user would not be using it. My point stands that fourteen years from the start of something that, if it's going to continue, would be a large change is not a lot of years.

When cars were 14 years old, they were still very new. For context, I'm using 1888 as the starting year where there was commercial production and sale of some automobiles, so we're talking about 1902. Cars weren't mass market items at that point, and plenty of the panic about them was still in the future. Fourteen years from the introduction of the telephones, there weren't many telephones around. Fourteen years after the invention of the internet, we still didn't have TCP/IP yet and they were just getting past manually making hosts files. Fourteen years after the invention of the computer, it was mostly being talked about by science fiction writers, several of which kept sticking -ac on the end of the computer names because they'd only heard of ENIAC and UNIVAC. For something that radically changes a large part of how people can do things, such as transportation or finances, it takes longer for the effects to become known and the novelty to end. This doesn't mean that pointing out that cryptocurrency frequently fails at its goals and doesn't try on our goals is wrong; it's worth considering all its faults of which it has so many I don't recommend you use it. That doesn't stop it still being novel at this point.

Outage-ous: Twitter OKs cannabis ads, then goes up in smoke

Re: decriminalisation

"Decriminalization means it’s not legal, but if you get found with a joint in your pocket you’ll get a court summons and a fine. Like a parking ticket."

This is incorrect. In order for the government to assess a fine, the action must be recorded as illegal, I.E. a crime. It can be downgraded from a crime that earns a prison sentence to one that earns a fine, but it's still a crime in that case. Parking tickets are crimes, although the word is often not used because it sounds too severe. While less negative words like "infraction" or "offense" may be used, the law says you shouldn't do it and can be punished for it.

The word is used instead of legalization in this case because it is not legal by federal rules, which apply anywhere in the country, and thus any user is still committing a crime as far as the federal government is concerned. Some have also used "decriminalization" to mean "a relaxation of restrictions", but this usually doesn't make sense because the thing is still a crime but people are just punished less often.

Re: Toxic

Just as "intoxication" doesn't mean "toxic", it also doesn't mean "not possible to obtain toxic level of". It is basically unrelated to toxic levels. It is true that, if you can become intoxicated by something, you can probably die from consuming too much of it that's a smaller quantity than for things that don't intoxicate you, but as I noted, this is not always the case for poisons that don't affect mental function before they kill you.

Re: Toxic

I am not arguing for or against alcohol or cannabis. I am stating the definition of intoxication and of toxicity, noting that they are different, and stopping there. The rest of the argument is up to you.

Re: decriminalisation

Part of the distinction is due to the multiple levels of US government. States can remove cannabis use from their list of crimes, which means that state law enforcement won't arrest you for having or selling it, which is what decriminalization has come to mean. The federal government still prohibits it and could arrest you if they wanted, but most of the time they would expect state law enforcement to do that and don't do anything if they're not. This leaves cannabis in a weird place where the state says it's allowed and may in fact have regulations that say that outright while the federal government says its illegal and can change its mind about ignoring the use any time it likes.

From a strict definition of the terms, decriminalization and legalization are the same, and you can say that the state government has legalized it and the federal government has not.

Re: Toxic

And if we're having a contest of what people should do, you should read the definition for "intoxication" and compare it to the definition for "toxic". You can become intoxicated, I.E. with mental effects usually with decrease in mental function, including a temporary decrease, from consumption of a substance, using a variety of things including many prescribed for medical use and some allowed for recreational use. Alcohol, for example, is also intoxicating. It does not mean poisonous, although some poisons will produce intoxication before they produce death (notably, not all do).

Also, it's worth keeping in mind that this was likely quoted from Google's restrictions, but using only a few words instead of quoting the whole sentence.

Meta cranks Zuckerberg's personal security budget to $14m while cutting everything else

Re: how about

I like the idea, but if you were still a nice person but with tons of money, there still might be a need for security. I don't have a bunch of money, so I don't know this personally, but I can imagine the possible rewards drawing in risks from people who wouldn't target a normal person. Either that or all the rich people are just paranoid.

This app could block text-to-image AI models from ripping off artists

Re: A potential wokable solution?

The first suggestion is already illegal as fraud (except possibly the corner case where the person named was the one operating the software to produce the image, but if it was just "in the style of X" then selling it as by X would certainly be fraud).

The other two sound good, but may not be enough to ease the fears of the people who created the works in the first place. I don't have a solution to that, so for now I suggest we use yours and see what happens, but people may still object to the use of images generated from their work even if no copyright is claimed. For example, such images could still be used in advertising of something else or could be put on sale with the assumption that buyers will assume they're copyrighted while never actually saying they are, and both approaches could still generate a profit.

Re: Perforce, old assumptions must be discarded

"Each instance [of a physical medium] exists uniquely in time and place. The number of instances created is finite (e.g. printed copies of a book). These substrates can be construed as property"

Except, of course, the the number of instances isn't finite because anyone can make a copy of a book. Even three centuries ago, if I owned printing equipment, I could get someone else's book and churn out more copies. The laws weren't applied because I couldn't make another copy, but because it wasn't good for me to be able to make copies of someone else's work without allowing the person who created the work to profit from their work. Copyright exists to protect the creative person's effort from someone who can just copy.

"There is but one valid economic model encompassing monetisation of idea creation. That consists of a market made up from creative individuals and groups (plus requisite skills) competing for attention from prospective sources of funding for their next project. The underlying source of funding is voluntary patronage."

Yes, that's always nice, but it won't go very far when the only way to do anything expensive is to find people who give out donations. I have a project I want to build because it's useful. Does anyone want to just hand me their money without getting any back? Usually, the answer is no, and especially when the project concerned generates a profit anyway. Incidentally, there's another market for at least some copyrighted works, which is an increasing effort spent on DRM technology. If it's legal for you to take the data I made for any purpose and I can't penalize you for doing so, then I'm incentivized to make it hard for you to copy it successfully. For the same reason, if it was legal for anyone to come attack you if they felt like it, you'd probably invest more in making it hard for people to break into your house, but if an attacker would go to jail for doing it, you may not need a fortress to protect yourself.

Uncle Sam backs right-to-repair battle against Big Ag's John Deere

Re: It’s about increased profits, of course

"Wouldn’t you sell more base units if they could be repaired by anyone?"

If there are only a few manufacturers of such things anyway, you're likely to sell a lot of units whatever you do. Unlike cars where you have a bunch of choices if you decide a specific company's not good enough, there aren't so many options when you need a specific piece of agricultural equipment, especially if finances aren't unlimited and you need to care about which one is cheaper or better supported in the short term. It's when they already have this barrier to losing sales that they start to expand where they hope to get profit from the buyers.

"Didn't immediately" is not the same as "did, but not immediately". It is also compatible with "didn't" and "hasn't yet", which are the available options in this situation. Other options that could happen are "won't" and "won't and they say so". Time will tell which one it is.

Gen Z lingo and search engines: A Millennial Odyssey

Re: Baseline

Seems obvious. Just take all these wonderful examples we've been given and mix them together, aiming to never use any noun more than once (and not even once if you can). That way, GPT won't have a clue what you're saying, and as a bonus, your writing will be indistinguishable from output from a crazed chatbot anyway so nobody will have to know a human wrote it.

Musk's view count antics are perfect cover for Twitter's paid API failure

Re: Algorithms

Well corrected. I'm tempted to claim that my poor formatting is because it can help when hiding code to give the reviewer something else to correct, but in fact I just typed it quickly. Have an upvote. And if anyone wants the better-formatted version, it's as follows:

MuskImpressionCount = (RealImpressionCount * 1000000) + (DaysSinceTweet * 100000) + (SecondsSinceTweet % 86400)

Re: Algorithms

That would never work. The correct algorithm is

MuskImpressionCount = RealImpressionCount*1000000+DaysSinceTweet*100000+SecondsSinceTweet%86400

It doesn't work unless he can watch the numbers tick up, and anyone knows that a number with a lot of zeros at the end is either rounded too much or made up completely. The question is whether any of Twitter's engineers has participated in the underhanded C contest and can hide this from the other engineers when they make some unrelated changes.

Make Linux safer… or die trying

And if it's a closed-source commercial application, they can do that. If it's an open source application, they may not want to build their own repository system for every distribution that has ever existed, but they still might want the nontechnical user to be able to install it on everything. Portability isn't just on the developer; it can also be on the OS provider.

The last thing I want to say to someone I've introduced to Linux is "yes I know you can download basically any Windows or Mac OS application off the internet and just run it, but for that one you want I'll need to repackage it because it wasn't built for your distro. Yes, your distro, it's a collection of components around Linux. Yes, you're running Linux but not all Linux systems are the same. No, there's not a true Linux that has the right version of everything, it's just lots of choices and they don't always work together. Yes, if you were still using Windows you could download that Windows file and just click on it. Never touch your computer again? If you say so." That doesn't instill confidence, and Linux doesn't deserve that when it can be solved. Again, if you don't want to use any of these packaging systems, feel free not to, but they do solve a problem for some people.

The alternative in the closed Windows or Mac environments is essentially "Throw away your equipment and buy new stuff".

No it isn't, and you know that. The alternative in the Windows world is "bring your DLLs with you and don't put them in C:\Windows anymore". Programs were terrible for violating that a couple decades ago. Not so much now (yes, there are always exceptions, but it's a lot more common to have self-contained program directories now). Apple has the same thing in the form of app bundles, which works better for GUI applications than for CLI ones. The point is that if some application needs a specific version of something and can't accept the OS-provided one, it brings that version and it stores it in such a way that it won't override anyone else's copy.

I don't know where you got the "throw away your equipment" part of this, as even the most polluted Windows or Mac OS installation, and for that matter Linux or BSD installation, can be wiped and reinstalled from scratch without having to do anything to the hardware. The benefit of packaging things with lots of dependencies is that that pollution is harder to build up.

Re: without the dependency snarl

Of course they have dependencies, just like anything else. The benefit is that, if you already have them, you can avoid other dependency problems. As for walled gardens, it's only one of those if I'm required to use these packaging systems. I'm not. If I want to build something from source and run it, I can with no difficulty. That some other components have been packaged that way does nothing to prevent me using an unpackaged binary, not that building a package is a particularly challenging task compared to building from source (I wouldn't, but generally because if I've built from source then I'm not trying to distribute the binary I just made).

"as you demonstrated there are other ways to solve the problem that still leave you in control of your systems."

I thought what I demonstrated was obvious but evidently not. What I demonstrated was that there was a problem requiring manual effort to build a fragile set of files to run something on a specific system, effort that would need to be repeated if the environment changed, effort requiring modification of source code (limited, but some) that not everyone knows how to do quickly or at all if we're including nontechnical users. That work was only possible because I had the source for everything, and if it was so easy, maybe the admin who wanted the software could have built this himself instead of having me do it for him.

Do you want a year of the Linux desktop, whether it's likely or not, because sometimes, people want to install some software and it's not going to sound good when the instructions say either "build the dependencies from source which you can find yourself then modify the build scripts to link to those instead of the system ones that won't work" or "not everything in here's open source so your tech guy probably wouldn't run it, but if you want to, you can try building a chroot and getting libraries from some other distro and maybe that will work". Having a pre-built file that contains the dependencies makes that kind of instruction unnecessary, and it means someone who doesn't know how to or someone who doesn't want to go to that effort can still run the software.

Not that they always do it well, but they allow people who aren't as familiar with administration as you or I (and sometimes us too) to use programs without the dependency snarl that arises whenever you can't find it in your repositories or you don't want to use the one in there.

I had a program I wanted to use. It needed a recent LTS version of OpenSSL. I wanted to use it on an OpenSUSE system that didn't provide that version of OpenSSL (they were on an older stable version). The program concerned wasn't in the repositories at all because it was a new project. Incidentally, if you downloaded the binary the author made, it wouldn't run either because it expected a later version of glibc; the author had compiled for an older version to have compatibility with an older version of Debian, but not so old that it worked with the version the user was on. To get this to run, I had to compile several things from source, including OpenSSL, then modify the makefiles to point to my portable versions of the libraries, then tell the admin who wanted to run it to make sure not to jumble these libraries with any of the other copies around the system. I should point out that the OpenSUSE version being used was still supported at the time and I didn't have the authority to make anyone update distros. This is what can cause problems and why a system for packaging dependencies when the repositories don't have them has been needed. If you don't need it, feel free not to use it, but people wrote it because it was solving a problem.

Re: Chrome OS?

That is one drawback worth duplicating, but I have more if you're looking for a longer list:

3) The fact that it doesn't allow the extent of tasks that other things with the kernel in them do. You have to hack your way in to replace Chrome OS with something else, using device-based methods, in order to get the kind of access that comes as standard with everything else. This alone is enough for it to lose the Linux brand in my mind.

4) That the security updates that you do get will end at some arbitrary point for no good technical reason. Done to sell more hardware that will be just as capable as this was. On Linux, if your distro ends support for your version, you update to the next version and your support comes back. The ability to do this lasts until a technical reason makes your hardware obsolete, which is measured in multiple decades.

5) The baked-in connection to everything Google, from closed-source browsers to single-provider services for backup. If you don't like one service on any other Linux, you replace it. Not so much with Chrome OS.

6) All the unremovable snooping baked into it. (worth mentioning as many times as necessary)

Crypto mixer Sinbad looks uncannily like a remix of North Korea's notorious Blender

That depends. If people can still buy and sell the crypto that exists, then the miners would just keep moving. China was a massive source of miners until they shut it down. The big miners went to other countries with cheap power, especially in central Asia and North America, and started it up again. If those countries also banned it, they'd look around for the next cheapest place and try it there. As long as people want to have the cryptocurrency, miners will put their mining machines wherever it's legal* and cheap.

If all of cryptocurrency was banned, including all transactions, then it would probably die, but there would be a lot of complaining first. It's not useful if people stop agreeing to exchange it for money or goods, and most of that activity is in the legal market so would stop if it was illegal.

* And some will just leave their equipment where it isn't legal and see if they get caught. China banned mining, but there's still mining there.

Re: No legitimate use

On a public platform where everyone can see transactions, hiding that information is reasonable. It is also not money laundering unless the money that you're moving around is illegally possessed; if you have a right to the money then it's just being moved a lot. I don't know how often people use tumblers for that purpose, but it doesn't automatically mean they stole it and are laundering it.

Re: Waste of effort

Because there are some people who will give you real money for it? I don't have any cryptocurrency, but if someone decided to give me some, I'd accept it because I can quickly turn it into money that's more useful to me. It doesn't matter that it's falling as long as someone else has it when it falls, and there are people who are willing to be that person.

US defense forces no match for the unstoppable fiend known as Reply-All

Re: When it all started

I think most if not all servers support distribution lists that only send messages from a specific set of authorized senders, but the problem is that you have to turn that on. Someone has to populate the list, and there is no way to set the default programmatically so the default is everyone. It's easy to set it up correctly, but easier to not bother, so plenty of people don't bother.

Microsoft's AI Bing also factually wrong, fabricated text during launch demo

Re: Errmm....

This depends on your critic. A pedantic poetry critic (and they can be very pedantic indeed) would point out that the bot has violated the rhyming rules of sonnets*, appears to be writing in iambic pentameter but if it is it got it wrong, and has scansion problems. These don't necessarily detract from the quality of a poem, but if those who taught me to write poems saw this, they'd fail the student (they would correct anything I turned in and make me rewrite it while telling me that any poem by a respected poet that I didn't like was wonderful and proved my stupidity, which might be why I don't like poetry so much).

* The sonnet rhyming rules are ABABCDCDEFEFGG, but this did ABABCDCDEEFGGF. I think the FGGF part actually sounds nicer, but it's not a sonnet.

Re: Hype, Hype and yet more Hype

So your plan is have a program write code and then have that program also write the tests for the code, both without having any clue what it's doing. Unit tests are easy if they just have to pass. The trick to writing them well is testing that what does happen is what should happen. People who write them badly or programs that don't have a clue just test that what does happen is what does happen, and unsurprisingly all those pass.

Re: Hype, Hype and yet more Hype

"The Chat GPT algorithm is a compiler, and the training data is the code."

When I write some code, and the compiler compiles it to a binary that doesn't do the right thing, I have to ask myself whether the code is wrong or the compiler is wrong. The chances are high that my code's at fault, but it is possible for the compiler to have a bug. We fix those bugs. This compiler produces results of such randomness that there will always be problems in the output, and just fixing the training data won't help with that. This is not a compiler. It's a random phrase generator that you can seed with information to make it look less random.

ChromeOS now runs on top of Linux and, er, Zephyr ...

Re: More data raping

It's licensed under Apache 2.0. Even if it was GPL, there's no guarantee you'd get to see the real source used (all those kernel modifications from Android phones that never got released even though the licenses require it, for example). With Apache, there's not even a need to. They've pointed out why they use it: they work with so many different boards that don't use a standard firmware (thanks ARM, really appreciated) that they have to modify the source. This means that, although the core of Zephyr which I can read is almost certainly in there, the chances are good that the version to be found in the chip has received several changes and I'm never going to see the code that implements them. Those changes may just be functional, and I think it's likely that most manufacturers' are benign, but I can't prove that.

Microsoft switches Edge’s PDF reader to pay-to-play Adobe Acrobat

To be fair, the PDF tools that are the most important are built in to Windows too. Print to PDF is probably the most useful because you can save PDFs from any application that doesn't already support it, and they've had that in Windows, not Edge, so Adobe shouldn't get to poison that at least for now. It doesn't have a PDF editor built in like the Mac's Preview. Previous topics on PDF have indicated that others here like PDF a lot more than I do, so maybe this will make more sense to them.

Amazon convinces FCC it can avoid space junk chaos

"Icon since the aliens won’t be able to visit either."

That depends on why the aliens want to visit. If they're the type who doesn't like competition, they can probably just travel on by, laugh about how we couldn't even manage to get off our planet without messing it up, then fire into our junk cloud to expand it and destroy anything that still works. While we're busy dodging falling internet pieces and trying to debug the network drops, they can cheerfully blow us up whenever is convenient. If they're friendly, then they probably have some methods of interfering with junk and might helpfully remove enough of it to land something, then give us some tools to finish the rest of it. I think the scenario most likely to cause them problems (assuming basic sci-fi alien tactics and drives) is if we're tasty, in which case they don't want to pollute their food supply but it's probably not worth the slow cleanup process.

"Related to that, if the FCC refused, what would stop a fully owned Amazon company based in the small country of Togreenze doing the launch instead?"

This is the only part that has a satisfactory answer. Nothing would prevent them launching the satellites from Togreenze, but they would then be prohibited from selling communications with the satellites in the U.S., where they're presumably looking for customers. The FCC regulates any communications equipment in the U.S., so if they say no to the uplinks to the satellites, the entire domestic service would be cut off and no profit for Amazon. If they're hoping to make profits there, they'll get that approval before the expensive launches. If they don't intend to sell the service to anybody in the U.S., they're free to ignore the FCC as they like.

The fact that this is the only restriction that affects these companies is not good. The FCC is not an expert on whether something is a bad idea in space, and it obviously has no jurisdiction over international activities or input from international governments.

Re: The end of space

The concern is that while you're waiting a twentieth of a long lifetime for the satellites to come down, they might hit something, possibly another dead satellite. All those pieces generated by the collision will have decaying orbits too. Just five years to clean up all that rubbish, except that each of those pieces now gets its chance to hit something, and that would generate more pieces. Waiting five years before more space systems can be set up is a problem.

This problem gets harder to handle as we throw more stuff up there. The U.S. has already authorized two companies to put up tens of thousands of things each, each company hoping to make billions in profits. The UK has a company of their own that is planning to set up a constellation, though they kept changing their minds on how big and what for. What stops other countries from deciding to do the same? Russia has plenty of space that's poorly cabled. They could benefit from a satellite network, but it obviously can't be a U.S.-based one. Why don't they find a couple of their companies to put up thousands. India's got ambitions to expand their space program, mobile-only internet coverage for some parts of their country, and poor environmental regulations on the surface let alone kilometers away. See if they can make a partnership to set up their own. If India did it, China will want to do it, and in any case it could be handy for the military bases they're building in far away places without great communication links. The EU, not to be left out of the sovereign internet game, might want their own program. All these people launching things will reduce prices, so more countries or companies would have the ability to start launching now and worry about whether there's a management problem later. Perhaps it's worth worrying about how we're going to deal with the problem before all that happens, which does not include giving some head starts to someone now so they get the first mover advantage while we've frozen everyone else.

Apple complains UK watchdog wants to make iOS a 'clone' of Android

Re: @Ken Hagan

Oh yes, I can. Monopoly power doesn't just switch on when you pass a certain market share. A combination of "really big" and "not many alternative options" gets you there. In the case of Microsoft, there were plenty of other choices. Nobody made you buy a Windows box in the 90s. You could buy a Mac, from Apple or from one of the other manufacturers who made authorized clones at that time. You could buy something that ran Solaris or a few other Unix variants. There was even a new choice making waves in the technical community called Linux that would run if you got an Intel processor, and the classic BSD was out there if you wanted it. Want more support, how about BeOS or RiscOS (both were going to die, but that wasn't guaranteed yet)? Plenty of choices. That didn't stop Microsoft having a position in the market strong enough to have anticompetitive effects.

Apple is in a stronger position in the mobile market. Its market share is lower, but it's not tiny. In developed countries, Apple's market share ranges between 63% (Japan) and 29% (Germany). In some countries that host a lot of readers that is 47% (UK), 49% (Canada), 59% (US) and 41% (Australia). In the market, there's basically one alternative, which is also being investigated. Oligopolies, especially one with the chance of tacit collusion, can have similar effects to complete monopolies. The laws that deal with them, unsurprisingly, allow market regulators to pursue them as well.

Re: Clone of Android

I didn't write nor do I entirely agree with the comment, but if you limit it to mobile developer, people who mostly write apps for Android and/or IOS will likely have heard of those things. Kotlin's a popular language for Android apps (because it uses many of the Java-based components) that can also be built for IOS. Xamarin is Microsoft's C# stack for multiplatform including mobile. MAUI is a .NET-based UI system. I don't do any mobile development and I've heard of all three. You don't have to use them and if you don't work in mobile you don't have to know about them, but not having heard of them if you work in that area is like writing backend software without knowing what Postgresql is (you may use other databases, but it's bound to have come up some time with how common it is).

The original comment, however, is wrong. The things they listed mean that you don't have to write IOS apps in Swift or Objective C (mostly), but they don't prevent you having to use a Mac. You can write a cross-platform application, but unless you're willing to send the IOS branch in completely untested, you will need at least one Mac to use things like the IOS device simulator or to send it to an IOS device to test. You can try to hack your way around that by using others' IOS simulators, for example, but it's going to take a lot more effort and be less reliable than doing that work on a Mac would be. This is probably one reason why there are more applications written for Android than IOS.

And a stock Android is what? Google's devices only? I'll point out that, while Google's security and feature update record is better than average and that their phones are more likely to get support from AOSP-based solutions, there are manufacturers that provide security updates for longer than Google does. Even if Google was longest on such things, I don't consider that acceptable. After all, how would you react if Microsoft announced tomorrow that Surface users will have security bugs patched immediately, but people using a different manufacturer's devices will just get them some time, later but who knows how later, and to head off the required joke still with no guarantee they won't break something?

I support the ending of Apple's restrictions, but it is undeniable that their software and security support record is better than any Android manufacturer, and I do mean every single one in existence with the possible exception of Fairphone, but probably not even them. I prefer my operating systems more open, and that sometimes takes precedence over support lifetimes, but I will acknowledge Apple's credentials in that area.

The Balthazar laptop: An all-European RISC-V Free Hardware computer

"Thing about Pine is that they don't do software, like at all. They depend on the community, so unless some user decides to fix the issues nobody will."

Yes, that is the issue. For me, that's acceptable if I'm using the device for entertainment, and for me playing with tech and fixing things can sometimes be entertainment, but I tend not to spend much money on things for that. I can't buy such a device for work where its reliability is important, and I can't suggest anyone else do so.

Open source software is in the state it is because I feel comfortable giving someone a Linux installation on normal hardware and expecting that they will be able to use it (maybe after a tutorial) without it breaking on them. Maybe it won't have all the applications they want, or they'll have to get used to LibreOffice having its options in menus instead of a ribbon, but it's not going to fail outright. I don't have that confidence in open hardware projects given the history they've had, and I alone don't have the ability to fix that. The community's efforts in getting there are slow and while I support them, I can't and don't count on them. This may change in years to come, for example I'm happier giving someone a Raspberry Pi as a production machine than I would have been when those were newer, but it's not in that state yet.

Importantly, it's not just Pine64 doing this. It's all the open hardware projects based on nonstandard hardware. Even the Raspberry Pi has been missing hardware video acceleration in things like Firefox, and they're by far the best out there. Every open hardware device in my experience requires its own custom operating systems with weird patches, none of which I'm familiar with because I didn't build them, and maintaining that is possible if you do a lot of research, but not really what I plan to spend a lot of time doing.

"It's probably just me, but I do wish there was an open hardware laptop for the high end."

I can explain why there isn't. The problem with all these completely open projects is that things don't work. Every one that shows up has a few missing features in hardware or software that someone has to get around. Take Pine64's PineBook Pro. I want one of these. It looks cool, it's low-power, reasonably fast processor. Yet even though it's existed for years, there are still lots of notes about which software will just not run and which software has to be compiled with some patch on an anonymous git repository, that even when using the manufacturer's own docking station, not all the ports function correctly, and hardware-specific operating systems with unclear maintenance. I still want one, but I can't pretend that I could give this to anyone nontechnical and expect them to use it. This project will have similar problems.

For something I expect to tinker with, a cheap device can be explained away as a toy that doesn't have to work and can require more manual maintenance. If I'm spending a lot on it, I expect more things to work. Theoretically, a company could charge more for something and use that money to do the work that the cheap open platforms didn't, and Liam's suggestion of the Framework laptop is such a project, but it's worth keeping in mind that that's just a good laptop with relatively open hardware, not a ground up redesign. That project is a good one, and I'm happily typing this message on the one I bought, but it's not in the same realm as projects like these designed for completely open hardware and software.

What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage

The way I use it, it's an adjective. Maybe we're using it in different ways.