Posts by doublelayer

Intel's 13th-gen CPUs are hot, hungry, loaded with cores

Re: i7... 253W TDP... nuts.

I don't think you'll be putting 24-core CPUs in most office desktops. A lot of office work can be comfortably run on a low-range laptop CPU, so even if you prefer desktops, you can find a more sane option. If you do need that performance, it might be worth considering whether you can do it on a server in a room with better temperature control with a weaker machine controlling it. By the point that you've restricted these parts to users who need that performance right next to them, your thermal requirements will be easier to manage.

Florida asks Supreme Court if it's OK to ban content moderation it doesn't like

Re: Would that apply to foreign companies?

There are two issues: does the law apply if upheld and will it be followed. My comment is just whether it applies (yes, though by the votes on this comment, this seems unpopular*). I doubt it would be used as actively as the state governments would want, because it's rather authoritarian. Many companies would probably try to ignore it, and depending on how willing the state government is to annoy the users of the service, they may not put the resources in to prosecutions.

* I'm curious why those who have downvoted my original post. I don't support these laws and I think they should obviously be dismissed by the courts. Do you think I got the hypothetical legal situation if they were upheld wrong? From the replies, I don't see what the disagreement is.

Re: Would that apply to foreign companies?

The government of the state would likely try to include it, but most likely, the bar would end up being higher. If they sell ads, charge users, or otherwise make a profit from activities in the state, have physical property (offices, data centers, CDN endpoints) in the state, or put any corporate entities in the state, the law probably can be applied on them.

Re: Free Speech

"Who should be the arbitrator of what speech is banned ?"

You're not getting the idea. There isn't an arbitrator and speech isn't banned. Each person decides on their own what they will and will not assist. If someone I don't like asks me to provide them a platform for getting a message out, I say no. It doesn't matter what it is they want to say; if I don't like people talking about rabbits, that's good enough. This doesn't prevent them from finding someone else who will provide them a platform. It just means I'm not doing it for them. If they can't find anyone who's willing to work for them, they haven't been banned. They just can't find assistance and will have to do the work themselves.

One side of free speech is making sure that, if I want to say something, I'm not going to be dragged off to prison just for saying it (if saying it is related to another crime, then I could be imprisoned for that crime). Another side is making sure I don't have to say things I don't like. The government can't force me to include praise of their actions every time I comment on them, for example.

Re: Would that apply to foreign companies?

A foreign government-owned news outlet also wants to take on the burden of running a social media system, including proper moderation, while a different government attempts legal action against them? Good luck finding that. If you do, it's likely a government that wants to push its own propaganda, which means its moderation is probably quite bad.

Re: You can either have Free Speech

"It's very common to confuse the concept of Free Speech with the text of the First Amendment."

But as this is a legal case in the United States, where the question is specifically whether the law conflicts with the text of that amendment, maybe the text is somewhat relevant to the discussion? Your idea of what free speech is or should be isn't what the court's thinking about.

If you think there should be more protections for those freedoms, and you live in the United States, feel free to suggest laws enacting those extra freedoms. If you feel that the existing protections are misaimed or excessive, for example by granting those rights to corporations (which is clearly supported), then you'll need to make a significantly larger change to remove them. This case is about the latter, so the text is more important.

Re: Sauce for the goose...

They will have planned for this. I'm not sure who can use these laws, but I would guess that it's limited to the state governments, meaning that, as long as they stay in power, they can bring actions against companies they don't like and completely ignore similar actions by companies they do. For this and other reasons, they're already taking steps to ensure they aren't removed as state governments.

Re: Would that apply to foreign companies?

Yes, if the law is upheld and foreign company operates in the state where the law is present, they would become subject to it. The state could charge them with violations and issue penalties. The company could get away with ignoring the law if they had nothing available for that state to seize (any money or business assets in U.S. jurisdiction, likely), but if that was the case, the company wouldn't be making any profit from the market and probably wouldn't enter it.

In summary, if this law gets upheld, it's bad news for everyone no matter what country the company's based in. That includes these forums, incidentally.

NSA super-leaker Edward Snowden granted Russian citizenship

Re: I wonder

There's no way Russia would ever allow him access to anything remotely sensitive, given his history. They're mostly allowing him to stay there just to annoy the U.S., but they wouldn't trust him. Also, I wouldn't count on the U.S. being in a forgiving mood no matter what he could do to help.

Girls Who Code books 'banned' in some US classrooms

Re: God botherers strike again!

I've long claimed that Bradbury got his message muddled, and his statements have in my mind confirmed it, but you're not correct. In the book, many things were blamed for the society's faults, including many bottom-up decisions to not care about books or anything else. All the things you mentioned were in there.

However, when the government goes around burning books, it's not because society doesn't care. If they're doing that, it's because they want the books burned. The book-burning part of the plot is organized by a specific group, not done by the general public, and treated as a matter of urgency. That's the government's doing. The society's failure here is that they don't care when it happens.

Fitbit users will have to sign into Google from 2023

Re: No idea why the surprise

You know the difference between track (to collect data so it can be known by the user) and mine (to take data from someone else and use it for other purposes). I'm pretty sure you understand that there are people who want to collect that data but don't want Google to have it.

Mozilla drags Microsoft, Google, Apple for obliterating any form of browser choice

Re: OS integration

Firefox OS? Yes, that was them. So? The problem is choice, or lack of it, and they have a case for that on some platforms (definitely for IOS, probably not for Windows, everything else they mentioned is in between). When they were trying OS development, they weren't attempting to limit choice. They were trying to make a better mobile operating system, and the one they had working on a few devices was more open than the alternatives available both at the time and today. It used the browser engine as the UI layer, but that's because they didn't have an alternative UI system and that was the one they came up with. It technically could have supported an alternative one, though nobody bothered to write one given the limited success of the project.

Re: Chrome on desktop

The bank would, in most cases, send them directly to the app they want them to install, so all they have to do is press the install button. Then it's an icon. Installing a browser isn't more difficult from the mechanics, but people have to know that a browser exists, that they want another one, then go search for it. There are many who miss one or more of those requirements.

In addition, I've seen many people who don't have banking access set up on their devices either. Some of them may use online banking with SMS for 2FA (if and only if the bank mandates it), and others may never have tried doing it that way. I wouldn't assume every user is using that or understands how to do so.

Billionaire CEO tells Googlers 'we shouldn’t always equate fun with money'

Re: Google, the little startup that could!

Work doesn't have to be fun. However, if you're my boss, it would probably be better for you if it was. The relatively small investment in making people enjoy work may save you from having to deal with a bunch of people who hate the job now. Sure, if you're employing people in an easy job market who are easy to replace, you can get away with that. Otherwise, you have costs when people leave for something that seems better.

How enjoyable a job is can be difficult to predict before taking one, so people who are more risk averse may want to stick with an enjoyable one they have rather than roll the dice on a new one. Also, if they're not doing the work at least partially because they enjoy it, then they're probably doing it just for the money so they'll be faster to leave when someone has more money. For those who are already financially stable, they may be willing to accept a lower compensation if the environment they've got now is bad enough. It's probably easier for you to make your job at least a bit enjoyable rather than have the highest salaries in the market.

BT CEO orders staff: Back to the office or risk 'disciplinary action'

"Does this mean it would be hard verging on impossible to develop something as complex as an entire OS working completely from home?"

No, because you didn't pay attention to their point. There are jobs it's impossible to do from home (operating large and dangerous equipment in a large group). There are ones that are very easy to do from home (solitary work where everyone you communicate with is in a different time zone). Now which of those better fits a development project that doesn't have an office or even a central company? So now that we've established that that can be easily done from home, it's time for you to learn that not every job is like that of a Linux developer. There are some jobs, including technical ones, where all the people you're interacting with are not working independently of you and may be located somewhat close to you, and in those cases, there can be advantages to working in person with them. In some cases, those advantages are so large as to become virtual requirements. In other cases, the advantages are small and don't overcome the costs to individuals of commuting.

You can't decide which applies to your job based only on what you'd like to do. It takes collection and analysis of productivity data, or failing that because it's rarely done, consideration of everyone involved and the costs and benefits of each model across the group. Insisting that there's nothing good about working in person can be as incorrect as the manager who insists everyone come in because that's what he wants, and that's all the reason you should need.

Document Foundation starts charging €8.99 for 'free' LibreOffice

Re: I'd pay

The problem is that people can always read .docx files, so I have a reason to want to open one of those, write something in it, save it, and have it in that format. I don't really like having to create an intermediate file with the admittedly low risk that I send an old copy by mistake. I don't know anything about the structure of the .pages format, but I haven't had any robustness problems with the .docx format, so I'm not motivated much by any benefits that may or may not exist.

Re: Didn't Netscape cost $300 for businesses?

I don't mind this at all, given that nothing prevents you from getting the free version if you don't want to pay (or if you do but don't want to have some of it go to Apple). I'm glad I read about it here though, because otherwise I'd have assumed that someone else just took their binary, put it on the store, and were waiting to see how much they could pull in from people who didn't know.

Re: Does that mean there's will be a version with proper accent entry?

I can too, at least I can type all the unusual letters for languages I speak, because I've set up keyboard layouts and know them well (I also know where they moved all the punctuation marks, because there appears to be a rule that no keyboard layout can leave them all in the same place). If I want to type one that's not in a language I speak, then it's a bit trickier, so I can see why someone who uses them rarely would do it that way.

Re: I'd pay

That may be, but the last time I was using Pages to edit a .docx file, I was going slowly mad because every time I pressed command+s to save, Pages put up a helpful box for saving in its proprietary format that nothing else reads. I could save to the original format, but only by using the export control and going through a manual process of choosing a file name and selecting to replace the old copy. I got used to computers which were less reliable, so I manually save somewhat frequently, and I'm used to software which doesn't put up any obstacles to doing what I asked.

Wearables sales slacken as the novelty wears off

Re: Even with the money available, I'll give them a miss

There are devices that, either by design or by hacking*, collect the data and send it to a phone app which just stores it locally. Those who care about the privacy of their fitness data will either use one of those or monitor the privacy agreements related to their data to find one that they're comfortable with. There are plenty of people who don't bother with that, though.

* If you want a local-only smartwatch, check out the Gadgetbridge app for Android, which has reverse engineered the protocols for several fitness trackers and also supports the PineTime smartwatch designed for that.

Re: An $800 watch

Your computer's clock set via NTP is probably more reliable than even a high-end precision watch. It all comes down to how often you want to know the time and whether you have a clock around then. I don't wear a watch because, when I want to know the time, I've usually got a clock available near me and I don't need it enough that taking out a phone to check its clock is a problem. Some others might feel similarly to me about knowing the time, but might value having speedy access to some other kind of information, where a smartwatch becomes useful.

Why don't you use a phone to read the time? From your comment, I'm guessing it's related to the speed of glancing at your wrist. If someone wants that speed advantage with information related to fitness or notifications, that's where a smartwatch does make sense. I don't know where the stated price came from, but there are cheaper ones and people spend ridiculous sums on time-only watches too.

Apple to raise App Store prices in 28 countries

Apple sets the levels at which you can charge, and you select which level you'll use. These are mostly done in U.S. dollars, so the lowest you can charge (not counting free) is $0.99. You may not charge $0.75 even if you want. For each value in dollars, they have a value in other currencies that they consider to be about the same, but sometimes it's not. Developers can change what price is charged depending on the country, and since Apple's just changed their arbitrary levels for currency movements, developers who don't want the price changes to be seen by users might do that for the countries where it's going up.

Warning: That new AMD Ryzen 7000 laptop may not be as fresh as you think

Re: A complete non-article

"They are using older architectures in their line-up - so what?"

Most of the time, nothing. These are probably just fine for most use cases, and anyone who truly understands CPUs will look for benchmarks and see whatever difference there is. They've also cleaned up their numbers so it's at least possible to identify this without having to search through hidden docs.

The risk more generally with a policy like this is user confusion, where a user assumes a CPU will be using more modern cores and can be mislead into buying something they wouldn't if they understood it. Intel's done that before, which is probably why, even though their modern Celeron chips are pretty good, they still feel they have to hide the name because of its history (when they started using stuff from the Atom line that didn't produce great results). It's also done in stuff other than CPUs to make something sound like it's worth a higher price than it really is. I don't think AMD has done that here, but the proof of that is in the benchmarks and I'm not in the market, so I'll skip the comparison shopping this time.

'Last man standing in the floppy disk business' reckons his company has 4 years left

Re: "Extinct media still in demand"

It depends how you define extinct. Usually for life forms, it's when they're all dead, but that's because life forms can take a few living ones and make more. If you only have sterile organisms, then you can pretty much call the species extinct as it will be shortly and there's nothing you can do about it. Using that definition, which admittedly I just made up, floppy disks become extinct when nobody has the capacity to make more. Since the manufacturing for them ended over a decade ago, I'm guessing the machines needed to do so have been scrapped. The inventory of these people probably means that nobody will put in the resources it would take to start it up again.

Stand back, the FTC is here to police gig work

Re: Employees

On the face of it, that would seem to be their model. That is if we use your assumptions for how they make money. They may not necessarily do all of that. For example, they could provide services to the contractors, such as handling billing. They could provide other services to the buyer, such as providing them with additional contractors in the case of an emergency or their original one becoming unavailable. All of those changes could be made without restricting the contractor's ability to set conditions on their work, but the company in the middle now becomes more of a service provider than just a talent agency. If a lawyer wanted to, they could attempt to claim that it was one in order to suggest that the person doing the tech work should be an employee, and they'd have to fight it out.

Re: Employees

You can be a company that sells IT services without IT employees doing the work. The way you do that is matching a contractor to a client, allowing the contractor to specify prices and details. Of course you can then argue whether that company is an IT provider or just a convenient way to find a contractor, but they're still focusing on IT. I still think the best way to decide if someone should be designated a contractor is the degree of independence they have in choosing and performing their tasks.

The legal definition takes up a lot more pages and varies between locations. For example, some American states use a three-question test to decide, but even they disagree about something as central as how many questions you have to answer yes to before a person becomes a contractor. One of the questions contains as a part "The work takes place outside the usual course of the business of the company", which can lead to many arguments about what the business is. For example, for the example above, is their main business a talent-finding company for IT people, or is their main business providing IT services?

Re: Employees

That's too absolute. For example if they contract out their IT to an external provider, then they may have no IT staff as employees, but their provider is still a contractor. The distinction is usually down to how much power the contractor has over their work, such as setting their prices, tasks they'll perform, hours they'll work, etc. Many companies with this business model do provide those doing the work with the power to select their hours, but often nothing else,, so they're in a middle area where laws or courts have to decide whether the people are employees or contractors.

Arm execs: We respect RISC-V but it's not a rival in the datacenter

Re: What goes around comes around

ARM was a RISC architecture processor. Since "reduced" and "complex" are vague terms, it's hard to define where the boundary is these days, but ARMV8A has about 1100 instructions (counting has to be done manually from a large set of docs that duplicate them sometimes) and they've been adding extensions for years. ARMV9A may have slightly reduced that by throwing away some 32-bit legacy instructions, but it also has extensions so they likely cancel out to a similar value.

Compared to the 50 core instructions mentioned in RISC-V, that makes ARM a lot more CISCy. I wouldn't expect real world usage of RISC-V to stay that way, at least excluding microcontrollers (ARM's most basic M0 cores also have fewer instructions). People will add extensions, software will come to expect them, and we will stick to a complex architecture.

I don't know how Windows on ARM is right now. The problem is that they've announced a lot of things that suggest that it could be pretty good by now: they've got 64-bit emulation, they've got multiple hardware manufacturers, and they have had several generations of software to iron out the bugs. It might work well enough for some use cases. I don't know that though because I don't have any reason to buy a machine. The processors they have from Qualcomm have raw performance better than the low-end laptop chips, but not for high-end machines. Claims of significant improvements in battery life don't appear to be as monumental as they say. I don't have any reason other than curiosity to consider one.

Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic

Re: Perhaps, but Shakespeare had other ideas …

That line probably doesn't mean what you think it does. Juliet is not asking "Where are you, Romeo?". She isn't expecting Romeo to be there. She doesn't expect him to come to her at any point. This is her talking to herself, and Romeo's location isn't what she's concerned with.

She is asking "Why are you Romeo", because she has fallen into Shakespearean love* with him but this is a problem for her. Her parents would presumably not be very happy with this love since they're feuding, they have a different idea as to who she should marry, and there would probably be problems if she even tried to approach Romeo to talk with him. As far as she knows, she can't do anything about her newfound love and is doomed to never spend time with the one she loves, assuming he returns her feelings. The sentence can more accurately be translated as "Why does it have to be Romeo", and she proceeds on to talk about the meanings of names in the famous "What's in a name" speech to describe how her love takes precedence over either of their names.

* Shakespearean love: a thing almost but not entirely unlike love, but don't let the sheer unrealisticness of this thing or how seriously people take something that took all of five seconds to happen distract you from the rest of the words, or you'll be thinking of nothing else for the rest of the play.

Don't say Pentium or Celeron anymore, it's just Processor now, says Intel

Re: trademarks

The term "window" for a box in a GUI displaying data predates the Windows brand name. For use as a name for an operating system, not so much. Microsoft's use of Windows for the whole system didn't prevent anyone else from saying that they were displaying an application in a window or even that their software was a window manager.

I'm not going to defend them over their trademark battles with other things with "Windows" in the name. How likely those projects were to cause confusion is subjective, and I expect Microsoft, especially 1990s Microsoft, was very lawyer-happy. Using a brand name related to a term is acceptable as long as it's not the term or likely to be confused with that term, and nobody before Microsoft launched Windows would have referred to their GUI operating system as a Windows.

Re: Too much choice

"Why does there ever need to be more than, say, 5 CPU models on the market, for any given generation?"

Well, there are at least that number of levels for power usage (very thin laptops 7-15 W, normal laptops 15-30 W, high-end laptops or compact desktops usually around 45 W, mid-range desktop parts often around 65 W, and workstations or gaming machines above 90 W). That's if I simplify quite a bit, because there's a lot of different levels in that "above 90" category, 15 and 28 produce very different laptop performance setups, and so on throughout the ranges. Having five units altogether would mean exactly one for each level. You want the AMD laptop processor, 6th gen? I hope you like it.

Even if we expand it to five per category, which is closer to what we actually have today, it's cost versus performance. If I'm going to buy a laptop for an office user, I don't want to give them a processor that'll produce awesome performance on complex games; in order to get that performance, it will cost double what the needed part costs and it will run down the battery faster unless they've markedly improved the firmware that scales down when the machine is idle. The packages we buy aren't even just a CPU. For example, you can have AMD processors with integrated graphics or without them. If you have GPU-intensive tasks so will be supplying a discrete graphics unit, skipping the lower-power included ones can allow you to get a cheaper or faster CPU-only device.

Comparison shopping between tons of models can be annoying, but there are benefits from not having to buy the top of the line because they didn't bother making anything else.

Re: Is an Intel Processor an IProcessor?

I think Apple started ditching the i prefix when they couldn't call Apple TV "ITV". They'd been buying trademarks from people for a while (even doing that deal with Cisco so they could both use iOS). Admittedly, they didn't bother keeping the iBook brand around earlier than that, so maybe someone figured out that it no longer meant much.

Re: trademarks

You can trademark a word for purposes it wasn't used for before. Windows brand operating system isn't confusing. Windows brand windows would be. Thus, if you want to trademark Processor as the name for your new restaurant, you'll likely be able to do it. Trademarking that for your processor will likely be denied. Snap (the Snapchat people) ran into this a while ago when trying to trademark "Spectacles" for a pair of glasses.

Intel might not even try that, given they're avoiding anything memorable here. They still have a trademark on Intel, so they're probably trying to hide the labels they think users associate with poor performance. Of course, I think if you ask a nontechnical person, they've probably never heard of either existing brand name and couldn't tell you where they are in the product line.

The funny thing about this branding push is that modern Celerons can be pretty good. As long as you don't get a 2016 one by mistake or skimp on the RAM, they're more than capable for many tasks.

California Governor signs child privacy law requiring online age checks

Re: Lovely.

Go through the post you replied to. Which of those things would you want to restrict? Marx? Mao? Maybe the recipes for explosives? Which things do you want removed because there are imperfect people you want to protect from them? The logical one is the explosives, except anyone sufficiently motivated will be taught in chemistry class how explosions start and can figure out the rest from there. The complex part of bombs isn't the boom part.

The points mentioned are suggestions on how you can handle those things if you want to. You can also do nothing. If you want something banned or restricted, you'll have to explain why it's dangerous enough that the restrictions have to apply to everyone, and that's often a high bar. The world's full of dangerous things that you're allowed to do, and we don't restrict them all on the basis that someone may choose to put themselves into danger. A large part of parenting is explaining to children that things are dangerous and how to avoid them or obtain goals more safely.

US border cops harvest info from citizens' phones, build massive database

Re: GDPR?

GDPR exempts government entities. Now I don't think they bothered to exempt non-EU governments, but if it really came to it, the U.S. government could say that the exceptions for governments applied to them anyway. The court could decide either way.

That is if it got there, which it wouldn't. In order to have GDPR consequences, a European data authority would have to investigate and fine the U.S. government, then sue them when the U.S. refused to pay. There's no chance they will investigate, assess a fine, or sue a government, and if they did all of that, the U.S. would say it wasn't chargeable under EU laws and refuse to do anything in that country. They'd have an argument under international law to back up that statement. Only if the entire government of some EU member was willing to start a diplomatic war over the issue could you get anywhere. They're not.

Arrest warrant issued for Do Kwon – the man blamed for 'crypto winter'

Re: Affordable home ownership

Nakamoto was a pseudonym. The actual nationality of the person or persons who took on that name are unknown. A few people have claimed to be that person, but so far none from Japan and none with much proof of their claims. I wouldn't guess from the pseudonym that Bitcoin's founding was necessarily linked to someone with experience of the modern Japanese economy; even if they were of Japanese ancestry, there is a large diaspora of people from Japan throughout the Pacific.

Re: "Obviously, [..] a lot of the beliefs and sort of the conjectures that I had made were wrong,"

Probably the same. Exactly how similar depends on when he realized his goals were not going to happen at all, and when he knew they weren't working yet. Holmes knew from the start that she was lying about her abilities and, from her actions, figured out eventually that it wasn't going to. He may have actually believed he was getting somewhere for longer. If he did, that just makes him marginally more sympathetic, not less culpable.

Backblaze thinks SSDs are more reliable than hard drives

Re: SSD Failure

The full dataset includes not only manufacturers but specific models. It can allow you to find out in great detail what would have been the best disks to have bought five years ago, and although the SSD data is not as expansive, it should eventually provide similar levels of data for that. This is only slightly useful in determining what disks to buy now, unfortunately.

Re: The choice isn't really about reliability

Depending on what you're doing with it, reliability can become more important and speed isn't always critical. Losing a disk doesn't just mean losing the data on it; I'm sure anyone running a storage business is aware of that and has redundancy. It means the cost in time and money to allocate a replacement disk and add that to the array holding the data. It means an eventual call to a technician to remove the failed hardware and replace it with fresh devices. It means buying replacements faster. There are reasons people care about that.

You don't always need speed, either. In my personal machines, the boot disk is always an SSD because speed is very important there. In my storage server, it's mechanical drives. I can deal with it taking a couple more milliseconds to fetch a file I've moved over there, and if I couldn't, I wouldn't be using a network link anyway. This allows me to have more storage in it than I could afford if it was an all-SSD setup (when I was buying disks, SSDs were running about 4-5 times as expensive per terabyte than HDDs). Although my primary consideration was financial cost, I'd definitely consider reliability more than speed.

Re: 'High-tech credibility' at risk here.

Do you want to back up your sentence with an explanation? Why are they certainly not, and what data do you base that on? Why does this hurt the credibility? Right now, I don't have a clue what point you were thinking of when you wrote that.

They're almost certainly not bothered about recovery. Their business is storing lots of data, so I'm sure they're aware that getting to the point of having to recover from failed hardware means they'd have completely failed the customer. It's not that useful even in personal usage, as there are a lot of failure modes where recovery from anything, mechanical or SSD, isn't possible. By all means recover if it looks possible and could help, but never count on having that option.

BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM

Re: We need to change the PFY

I checked, and I was wrong. It's actually been longer. The PFY was first introduced in 1996, and it was only the third episode that year, so he's now 26 years into his career.

Re: We need to change the PFY

No, it's been pretty clear that it's been the same one since he started in 1997. For one thing, whenever he leaves, it's unusual and causes problems until he's brought back (which the BOFH forces every time). For another thing, he often reminisces with the BOFH about stuff that happened decades ago. For example, they talk frequently about their robot wars, which occurred in 2010, so he's been the same one since then. Finally, if the PFY keeps getting replaced, the new one always seems to still be named Steven.

Sure, they've fought many times before, and the PFY did once try to kill the BOFH, but all was forgiven after quite a lot of retribution. We hear when the BOFH kills someone, and he's never mentioned doing that to the PFY or suggesting that he's had a different one before.

Re: ACRONYM is NOT an acronym

While it's not amusing, I think that was put in there as an attempt by whatever person got the task of assembling that list to include something slightly interesting or humorous. The over-acronymization of things somehow manages to make everything sound stupid or unpleasant.

I worked at a company which was very dependent on acronyms without reason. They had at least three acronyms for "when will it be done": ETA, EDA, and ECD, though I wouldn't be surprised that they had more which I either didn't see or have managed to forget. But that wasn't enough, because they also had the acronyms EDD and DFAD ("expected date for date" and "date for a date", because they found saying "When will you know the timeline" too difficult as well. These were just some of the stupidest ones they had, but they had a list of several hundred acronyms on a wiki page just in case you wanted to bore yourself into a coma.

DoJ charges pair over China-linked attempt to build semi-autonomous crypto haven on nuked Pacific atoll

Re: Music to ears

He probably was considering that, but it's also one of a few languages that fits in that line. To fit, the language name in English would have to be two syllables with the second accented. The only ones I can think of that have that pattern are Chinese, Burmese, Maltese, and Malay. Not a lot of choices. I suppose you could also manage with a three-syllable one accented on the second (Korean, Marathi, Norwegian, Swahili), but those aren't great either.

Re: Team America!

The U.S. alleges that they committed the crime using U.S.-based organizations and inside the U.S. If they're wrong about that, then they don't get to charge them. If they're right, they do. That works for other countries as well.

Re: "offers to connect and secure small island nations"

All you have to do is build a few naval bases on such islands so that, if you need to send a ship to one that doesn't have a base, there's one nearby. Countries like that idea because it enables them to send ships to places they don't have agreements with just as quickly, which is why the largest countries or ones that used to have empires have large collections of bases in other people's countries and in some cases, islands with little or no native population whose entire purpose is to be naval and air bases far from the country itself.

Asus packs 12-core Intel i7 into a Raspberry Pi-sized board

Re: A "teaser"...with just the opposite effect.

I agree on the pricing. If you sell something to individuals, or even to businesses who might buy one of them at a time, post the prices. Don't make me email you to ask how much the thing costs. Even if you don't sell that many of them, it suggests there's a reason to hide the prices, which dissuades me from sending an email I expect to be pointless but add me to a spam list.

The only reason not to post prices is if they intend on negotiating with every perspective buyer, which only makes sense for bulk orders. That's not the case here, and I'm prepared to guess they already have a price list they send to anyone who wants to buy less than a hundred units.

Microsoft warns of bugs after nation pushes back DST switchover

Re: https://www.southsoftware.com

I can't find confirmation, but maybe Guatemala gave more notice so that article could get written? Otherwise, maybe they decided asking every user in a country to manually edit registry values, at that article does, isn't a functional solution.