Posts by doublelayer

Big Tech is building the metaverse of its own dreams. You don't want to go there

Re: Apples "Envisioning"

The point is not that Apple created products where nothing similar existed, but that they created innovations on existing ideas that made people want to buy them. The iPod was not the first digital audio player, but it made major improvements on the product which were later emulated and improved by competitors. The iPhone did not invent the smartphone, but it did invent the multitouch touchscreen phone at least to the extent that previous attempts had almost no market penetration.

There's a reason the iPod was so popular and that all modern smartphones look like the iPhone. Apple didn't invent products that made people say "I've never seen anything like that before", but they did find a few that made people want them over the competition. I don't mean to suggest that they did that with every product they made, but they have had a few of those over the decades.

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Re: Bank Accounts

Except that's 750 in a month, and the longest months (31 days and an extra hour for a DST switch) have 745 hours in them. The only way I could make that number work was concurrent calls, but it sounds like that's not an option, so I can't explain that choice.

Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

I admit I've never understood pre-decimalization currency, but I don't think your division is accurate at the lower levels. I've lined your list up with the number of pence in each one. If I'm proving my ignorance of the subject, I'm curious where I went wrong.

one pound, 240 pence

ten shillings, 120 pence

five shillings, 60 pence

two shillings and sixpence, 30 pence

one shilling and threepence, 15 pence

ninepence, I have 7.5 pence

four and a half pence, I have 3.75, and this would be the last division, but assuming this is accurate

two and a quarter, half of 4.5

one and a half, that's not half of two and a quarter

If it's about dividing in two and it goes down to a quarter of a penny, it still only looks like you can do it six times, ending at three and three quarters. Of course, this is only relevant as long as a quarter of a penny is important to anyone, which if the pound retained its value today is doubtful. If you can buy something for 0.1p, then I stand corrected, but most countries haven't bothered keeping around units of money that tiny. In another thread, someone quoted a modern price of £1.30 to buy the same as two pence, meaning that in precision terms, the smallest amount of money available to someone then would be worth about 16p today anyway, so they weren't keeping around currency that was a lot more precise.

Re: Bank Accounts

"I am not permitted to make more than 750h of calls in any calendar month (uh, whut?!)."

My guess is that your line can make simultaneous calls, and spamming that for multiple callers is how scam calls get started. So to either protect themselves from charges of helping a scammer or to ensure you pay more if you want to do it, they're putting on a restriction that's meaningless for a single person but would affect multiple people using the same line. Of course, if it turns out you can't place multiple calls at the same time, then I don't have a clue.

Microsoft looks beyond the US with Windows Subsystem for Android

Re: It's about time

Admittedly, it's not available to the average user in the U.S. either, only those who enrolled in their beta test. Maybe at that point it's not seen as worth much time to expand, but when it's about to get released as a feature in production, they'll expand faster.

GitHub Copilot may be perfect for cheating CompSci programming exercises

Re: There are anti-copilot techniques...

Only if you have good solutions. Otherwise, it teaches people a lot of bad habits. If you learn from a lot of people who weren't able to write good code in the first place, then you'll end up basing your knowledge on what's by definition the wrong way. Yes, some of that would be remembered as the bad way to do things and you wouldn't reproduce it, but other bad practices would probably still get through.

Re: Not in academia

You can make a case for a lot of things being critical knowledge that everyone should learn, but for most things, it's not true. We would probably get many benefits from teaching everyone medicine. I'm not talking first aid and biology. I'm talking about proper medical school training including basic surgery, including practical application as early residents. We also live in a society where laws and contracts are important, so let's give everyone at least a year or two worth of legal training. We live in a world of many cultures, so you'll have to be fluent in at least four languages from different language families. We don't have an extra few years to have everyone do that, so we don't. I'm guessing that, like me, you don't have a medical or legal degree.

We live in a world with a lot of computers. That doesn't mean everyone has to program them. Programming is one of the things that's easier to self-train, and I know many good self-taught programmers out there. By all means we should have resources available for those who want to learn it. I'd even be happy with a mandatory small chunk in the curriculum that introduces everyone to the idea, and they can decide from that taste whether they want to continue on to more advanced work. Training everyone to be good programmers by the age of twelve, on the other hand, is elevating what we like over a lot of more important things for little benefit.

Re: There are anti-copilot techniques...

No, you wouldn't, at least not until you could prove they did so well. If, for example, they had you fixing bugs that were all a bit obvious, all revolved around incorrect behavior, etc, you're not competent for most programming tasks. One of the frequent requests of a programmer to modify existing code isn't to fix a bug, but have it do this stuff but faster than it's doing it now. That takes understanding of how the code interacts with the systems and how performance is affected. Many others are about adding features. Some even need functionality started from scratch. They want to test that you know how to do all of that, and if you only know how to fix someone else's bug, they might be able to find better people. If they can't even prove you know that, you're not a good candidate.

Re: Not in academia

"The world could be very different today if every child was competent at programming by age ten or twelve. But I digress."

Right, good luck getting that going. While you're at it, I have several other skills that could be handy if everyone knew it by age 12 instead of some people knowing it in adulthood. I learned it relatively early as well, but not everyone has the interest to do the work required to have that experience, and some people would prefer to spend their time learning something else by then. If you have a miraculous invention that enables everyone to know a lot more than they already do, by all means let's train everyone to write code. If not, let's not force people to do it if they don't want to and are planning to use their time doing something different.

Re: So why exactly do you need to train people to do programming at all?

Spin it up and give it a try. I haven't tested it myself, but having seen a few examples, I'm pretty sure it won't be able to read a spec and spit out a program any time soon. It probably will choke pretty quickly on most assignments after introductory courses. We have to train people to write programs because this tool isn't an AI programmer with perfect knowledge, and we need to start by training them on the basics that this one can do because they need the easy building blocks to get started. If we want people to self-train the introductory steps, this is no problem. If we want to use the traditional get-taught-and-tested method, we'll need at least a few occasions where they don't have this to make sure they have a good starting position.

I think this is most useful in the introductory courses. When you're teaching someone how to write really basic functions because they don't understand all the concepts they'll need to implement a solution, you can't just keep adding complexity. You can find simple examples that aren't in common use yet, but eventually you'll run out of good ones. There's a reason that Fibonacci and factorial are always the first two examples of a simple recursive algorithm, because they're easy to understand and write without needing extra knowledge.

If you're making good software developers, you need more than understanding someone else's code. At some point, they'll have to write their own code and it will be in the next class when the problems are harder. They should start writing stuff now, even if the answers are kind of basic.

Re: What is the problem here?

For most courses, you're right. For introductory courses, the first step probably should be teaching the inexperienced student how to use a tool. Their solution to each problem will be built from language concepts that they have to understand, so it makes sense for the first introductory class to test their ability to use a language. If you don't understand how a loop works, your solution to a problem, if you have one at all, will be hideously unmaintainable, so it's important that everyone learn quickly what loops are and how they're used.

Re: Not in academia

I don't think that will be a problem. In most courses, the first exam is at least a month if not two into the term, so you'd have lots of practice before it gets to the test. Referring to the old homework when doing the next one wouldn't be a problem under any course conditions I've experienced. By the time you get to the test, hopefully the experience of having done what would probably be ten to twenty of those tasks has helped you to understand the structure of a chunk of code so you can reproduce it.

Re: Not in academia

I don't think it is a daft idea. This is a problem for introductory assignments sent out as homework where you can't add complexity because the students don't know enough yet. It's the kind of thing that we can write in two minutes today, so there's only so much you can do to prevent someone getting a simple solution. Even plagiarism without being detected would be pretty easy with this kind of question.

My answer to this problem is like yours: put out those homeworks, perhaps give students a small grade for having turned something in, and give them feedback on how well it worked, but don't grade it. People who want to learn will do them anyway and get good results. People who cheat will get only a few points. Then, give everyone a test on restricted computers or even on paper (though I don't much like coding on paper, it can be done), and grade that. Someone who learned with the homework will do it again and score well. Someone who cheated will probably look at the questions and panic because their cheating tool isn't available. This also gives any student who wants a dry run in case they don't understand a concept, so they can learn it in time. The homework can be treated as a practice with feedback, and the test can be secured from cheating more easily.

Musk tries to sell Tesla's Optimus robot butler to China

Just saw the first links have typos. I was trying to link to these ways of making robots break themselves, already tested by the BOFH and PFY:

First method

Second method

Before you do that, check what they're made of so your shots don't end up hitting something too solid and going somewhere else. Also check how good it is at detecting other obstacles that could disable it. Instead of creating a potential safety risk to yourself or nearby people or walls, you could first see if the BOFH's a robot crash still work. Although if you need ways to destroy one that do cause safety risks, the BOFH has some of those too.

Ex-HP finance manager jailed after going on $5m spending spree using company plastic

Re: so many mistakes...

There are a few we know of who didn't do something stupid, well not stupid enough that it resulted in their capture. Those people are probably still enjoying their luxurious lifestyle on someone else's money, though, and one part of that is avoiding having us know where they are. The whole fake identity thing probably gets boring after a while, but there are people who do it successfully.

Re: Addiction?

I guess so, as why else would you buy 16 of the things? There's no logical reason why, even if you liked them and wanted some backups, you'd need anywhere near that many. It's not hard to imagine that someone buying that shopping list might not be thinking very clearly, although that's not going to change the consequences of their actions.

We were promised integrated packages. Instead we got disintegrated apps

Re: When?

Pretty early in the personal computing era. Programs have been called "applications" for quite a while. They even got called that in the days of the Apple II, so the late 1970s works. Shortening that may have taken a few years more, but come on, if you're posting here you're probably in either IT or programming, and you already know how much we like to abbreviate things. We talk about comms, OSes, docs, VMs, configs, and apps. It's a normal term and it's existed for decades. It's just a good thing we're not calling them progs.

Re: program efficiency / small, single-purpose tools

"Some programs have more than one of those, and since piping around directories requires standardization we don't have, they don't get used." I'm sorry, I don't quite understand what you meant here. "Piping around directories" -- meaning, lists of subdirectories and their files?

What I was trying to say there is that, if a program reads more than one input stream, for example consuming a directory and all the files in it, you can't simply pipe in it's input because the structure of the files is almost certainly important to the task. If it was critical, you could do something like piping in a tarball, but that would require the program to untar everything which they virtually never do. Similarly, if a program produces more than one output file, you can't just pipe its output to another program because it too wouldn't know in advance how to extract the data it wants.

In either case, the program is going to end up using the filesystem for input and output, leading to a performance hit over having that program integrated with another function which can receive the data as a memory structure that doesn't need copying and probably in that case doesn't even need serialization. Doing one thing well could have a downside to doing two things in the same program, eliminating the need for temporary data on disk.

Re: program efficiency / small, single-purpose tools

I get the philosophy, and I've written lots of CLI programs myself that run in just this way. However, the problem in many cases is that those programs don't always work in the ideal way, making some of your comments optimistic.

"Re: "writing temporary data to a disk": we're no longer in the days of CP/M. Windows, OS X, and *nix implement pipes internally, without resorting to temporary disc files."

And some programs use them, with just one input file and one output file. Some programs have more than one of those, and since piping around directories requires standardization we don't have, they don't get used. Sure, we could write a program that opens several pipes and another program that expects to read from that many, but the point is that we'd have to write both programs to expect a situation that's not always applicable. Also, there are programs that don't follow that rule. I'm using one now: it takes a file and you have to give it a path, it writes a much larger file to a path, not including standard output, and in my case, I immediately take that file and throw away most of its contents. That program could be implemented so I could pipe data through, but it's not. I get around the inefficiencies by using a ramdisk to store the temporary file, which is fast but still not ideal.

"You seem to be expecting/hoping that MegaApp X will have all the specific functionality which you desire"

Well more suggesting it's possible than expecting them to do it automatically, but sort of. Having to export a file from one application to another, possibly multiple times, can be inefficient if the original application could add a feature to do the action. For example, printing a file probably should be done by the same program that displays it, rather than having a system-level print application and making that understand every file format you might use. That doesn't mean the application needs to connect directly to every printer, but it can collect information needed to convert the file to a printable version and call the system print handler which only has to know how to pass a standardized file to the hardware.

Or take another example: you could have an email program and a calendar program, and you do the connections yourself. For people who know how to script both, maybe you can get it to automatically do things based on emailed information related to meetings. However, not everyone will do that correctly if at all, and those actions are very likely to be connected. A program which does both of those and understands how to automatically consume responses to meetings, meeting request emails, and the other messages likely to be of use is likely to save more time than two very good programs that only do one of those things.

"Further, MegaApp X likely will not be ported to non-mainstream operating systems. Likely it will be a Windows-only app, and even then, might not work on older OS versions."

That's not really a problem with the size or structure of the application. You can have platform-independent massive GUIs and you can have OS-specific programs that are twenty lines long. Take the program I mentioned that writes a big temporary file. Why don't I just edit the code to fix it? Even assuming it would be that easy, I don't have the code. It's provided by a place which doesn't want to give me the code and hasn't made the format the code reads open, so I have little choice but to use their utility as it is. It's a pretty basic command line program, but if I want to run it on a non-AMD64 Linux or one that doesn't have a new enough glibc, I'm out of luck. Windows is right out with this thing. Anyone can have that problem, and anyone can avoid it.

Re: Rocker switch and finger

The examples aren't the same though. Sure, maybe there is someone who has a reason for turning their light on or off from elsewhere, but nobody's even tried explaining why while I'm in earshot and everyone I've talked with doesn't see a benefit in it. I think that's a pretty common view. Self-driving cars, on the other hand, would have benefits for many if we could get it done.

If you could safely sit in a car while it gets you to your destination, you could do things that are now unavailable to drivers because it would impair or prevent their concentration on driving. People could even sleep on their commute. You could also send your car somewhere without you, for example having it pick you up at a convenient location without having to park it there beforehand or go get someone else without having to go with it. The existence of those benefits doesn't mean it will be feasible to make the product, but if you drive, I can almost guarantee you've had occasions where you didn't want to be driving and could have used the features as I described them. The concept still has problems, but it's not as laughably useless as the smart light bulbs.

Re: "where it works well."

I'm not them, but I don't think they were suggesting that you prevent that. I think they only meant to suggest that individual tools that do one task may not always be the most efficient way to do something under modern resource limits. An application that uses more resources but can accomplish a task without repeatedly calling programs and writing temporary data to disk may have advantages in some workflows. It's less that you should be unable to chain programs, but that you choose not to write your new tools in a way that requires that approach.

Not only is that common to most DEs for Linux/BSD, but for Windows and Mac OS as well. Using the system UI controls or path system so remote paths can be treated like local ones is pretty standard providing the application developers use them, which is the usual problem. When an application reimplements the edit control, it's not because they didn't have the system one to extend. They just chose to reinvent that wheel. Whether there was a point depends on the application and what they wanted to do with that control.

The truth about that draft law banning Uncle Sam buying insecure software

That would be nice, but it wouldn't fix the problem about security. You can build insecure stuff out of open source components. Quite frequently, the problem addressed in the SBOM requirements is that third-party dependencies, often open source ones, have vulnerabilities and the user of those dependencies didn't update their product. Sometimes, those dependencies have vulnerabilities but nobody bothered to fix them, including the original maintainers. Just making everything open source won't fix any of that stuff.

Re: Imagine the scenario

If you don't trust the kind of governments that can pay virtually any amount of money, then that's a problem but not one a lot of people share. If the government really wants ten thousand licenses, they're likely to pay for them and possibly use the larger contract to get other stuff they want, such as priority for bug fixes and feature requests. They do have some pretty good reasons not to want their computers connected to the public internet so your license server, which they haven't audited, can accept a key and potentially log information about where that license the government bought is being used.

LibreOffice improves Microsoft compatibility with version 7.4

Re: Sharing documents

Well of course if you treat them as images, they can be edited. I don't generally treat a picture as an editable file format if it contains a document, because instead of opening it and typing in some text, I have to manually typeset things. You can use other tools to interact with the text layer of a PDF and insert content without having to redo the entire document, which is what I was referring to. A PDF is less editable than a text or ODT file, more editable than a PNG of the document, and a lot more editable than a recording of someone reading it out.

Re: Sharing documents

You'll reject files for having security issues in favor of a different format that also has them. Brilliant. PDFs can be edited too, albeit much more painfully, so I'm not sure why a document format that can be both read and edited is such a problem even if you don't intend to edit it. Do you have the same problem when they send you a readme file that's in a format (text, markdown, or HTML being the most popular) which can be changed just by opening it in a text editor? Perhaps you would prefer a bitmap from a screenshot? At least that would be guaranteed not to have security issues if we use a completely uncompressed raw image format.

Mouse hiding in cable tray cheesed off its bemused user

Re: Happens with cheap Bluetooth mice and keyboards still

I wonder if those aren't using Bluetooth after all. That's common on the cheap ones that built their own RF system because they often don't bother with any system to reject commands from other devices using the same channel, but that's part of the Bluetooth spec so anything that does use Bluetooth shouldn't accept packets from other devices. Those commands could cause problems with getting the real packets through if they're located too close together, but that would result in real keystrokes not being recognized, not incorrect ones. The downside to using proper Bluetooth keyboards is that they require the Bluetooth connection to be set up beforehand and if that's your only keyboard, it can be annoying to do it. I think that's why the USB dongle custom RF design is more common.

"you're left with a perfectly good but useless keyboard in 5 months when the "rechargeable" batteries die."

I'm not following this. Not only do I infrequently see wireless keyboards with rechargeable batteries, but when I do, they last a lot longer than five months because you can recharge them. What are you doing that causes them to die so quickly? Is there something wrong with the recharging system? I'd be surprised if you had to recharge more than once a month for those, and the only one like that that I've used lasted about three months before needing a recharge.

This tiny Intel Xeon-toting PC board can take your Raspberry Pi any day

Re: Not the same.

That's a complicated question. For one thing, there are a lot of appropriate jobs to compare it to. Since you're using a networked cluster of Pis, this means your task has to be very parallelizable to run on 80 cores and probably not dependent on real-time coordination between cores so they don't slow down to check on other nodes too often. Even with that, you can get into different situations.

For example, you have memory to consider. If your nodes are 1 GB Pis, then they'll probably spend more time loading stuff into memory because each core (assuming they're doing broadly the same task and running independently) has at most 256 MB not including the kernel before it starts impeding another core's operations. If your task is light on memory, usage, this is no problem. If each core is working on large objects or generating lots of temporary data, memory could quickly become your bottleneck. You also have different memory speeds because the Pi's RAM is slower than the bus available on the Intel chip. Similarly, if you're storing a lot of data on nonvolatile drives, that probably isn't great for your cluster either. You're either using SD cards (not speed demons) or more likely a networked device serving as common storage which is probably faster but is serving all twenty nodes over a network link. Come to think of it, the speed of your network device might become a factor too.

Now that I've talked for too long and probably got very boring, here are some basic numbers that might provide an answer you're interested in. I found some benchmark numbers for the Pi and the I7 included on this board (I couldn't find the Xeon, and these aren't the most reliable of figures). Assuming these correctly describe the relation between the core speeds, a core from the I7 is about 7.63 times as fast as a core from the Pi. You've got 8 cores in the I7, 80 in your cluster, so if only raw compute off the CPU matters and you have no bottlenecks on anything else (that would be nice, but it's not true), your cluster would be 31% faster. Taking this to an even more inaccurate level, I found a different benchmark that compares the Xeon to the I7, and says that a core from the Xeon is about 3.1% faster than with the I7. So if we add on that benchmark, the cluster would be 27% faster.

I want to reiterate that this is not how you'd do that comparison in real life. Your performance depends very heavily on exactly what you want the board to do. You can get the idea here: although the combined CPU power of 20 Pis is a match for the power of a single Xeon of this level, and if that's literally all you care about it could be superior, the difference is enough that for a task that's more dependent on memory or can't be as easily separated into parallel tasks, the Xeon probably wins.

Not exactly. It's a 3% extra, which is probably a 2% premium over the one that uses a board which can paint pixels just fine but doesn't have a processor much more powerful than a passive display needs. That doesn't mean it won't sell, but buyers who want just one of those are likely price sensitive, and buyers who want to buy a ton of these things will see that premium add up to a significant extra. The manufacturers of such things also wouldn't get to mark their products up a lot for having an unnecessary Xeon in it, so their desire to keep the profit margin high will probably encourage them not to use more computer than they need.

The GPU in the Pi already can run a 4k display at 60 Hz assuming the data it receives can be decoded in hardware, and that's not the only SBC with a suitable GPU. If your board needs 8k, then you'll need something larger, but otherwise, there are lots of choices. At that point, reliability and ease of administration are more important than CPU speed.

Re: Not the same.

No you couldn't. In order to build that cluster, you'll need a bunch of power supplies, enough cabling to get them all talking which would probably end up being a big network switch, some structure for holding them all so their heat doesn't slow down the nearby nodes, and at least one device with sufficient storage so that all nodes can boot from it and store data on it. Factor in those costs and the number of nodes you can get in it will drop. It still might be more useful for whatever your purposes are by that point, but know what you'll get for the budget you have.

Googlers demand abortion searches ‘never be saved or treated as a crime’

Re: Since when does big tech have the luxury to make moral desicions?

We all have the luxury to make moral decisions at several levels. We can choose to accept consequences if we simply disobey laws we don't like. However, the proposed actions wouldn't involve doing that. Instead, they're suggesting that Google not store the data that law enforcement would request, thus not having to decide whether to break the law or not. Anyone can do that entirely legally: you have the choice to store data that police could want and decide when they ask whether you'll give it to them or break that law, but you can avoid having to make that decision by not storing it so the police cannot get it from you. Not collecting data is allowed at all levels, even if it makes it harder for police to find it when they want it.

At another level, though, we all have the ability to make moral decisions about laws. Which will we accept, which will we protest but follow, which will we avoid (when possible), which will we disobey at our own risk? People have been making moral decisions about which laws they consider just for a long time. When there has been injustice severe enough, there have been people who peacefully disobeyed the unjust laws, even when doing so caused problems for them. You can do that too if you want.

Re: Laws

That one was, but that was because the precedent at the time that law was created was that abortion could not be prohibited by states. That precedent has been revoked, so laws allowing the government to go after those who seek the operation directly are now allowed. This is more relevant against that style of law, because police forces can demand data from companies and enforce penalties if the company could comply but chooses not to. In addition, a person can sue on the basis of other evidence and, if the court allows them, extract other information from a company during the discovery phase. That's not guaranteed, but could still be used in the special case.

Airbnb turns its anti-partying tech on American lodgers

It's providing a service that isn't already available: staying somewhere for longer than a short tourist vacation but less than a permanent residency. If you want to live somewhere for a month or more, the prices of short-term accommodations are likely prohibitive, so people find something cheaper. I'm not sure why that service is worrying to you, but I can certainly understand why people want it sometimes.

Dinobabies latest: IBM settles with widow of exec who killed himself after layoff

And today, you'll find that people who want to commit atrocities use computers and software to measure it. I'm sure the Russian military has several Excel spreadsheets detailing people to receive more than the standard level of war crimes. North Korea prefers Linux to Windows, so they're using a different system to store their records, but I can virtually guarantee they've got one. The point is that you can't blame a spreadsheet for a genocide. IBM sold equipment to evil people. There's no question about that. The machinery was used to implement a wave of death and destruction, again undeniable. Had they not done so, things would have been less efficient, but the genocidal goals of the Nazis would not have changed. This is also irrelevant to charges of age discrimination today because the people running the company, the things the company does, and the allegations are in all cases different.

Philippines orders fraud probe after paying MacBook prices for slow Celeron laptops

Re: celeron

That's still often the case for modern ones. The processors in that range aren't going to win any speed awards, but unless they're paired with something else like significantly less RAM than you need or a bunch of background bloat, they'll be acceptable for office-style tasks. The other side of that is that they should be very cheap compared to better processors and they're not good enough for compute-intensive tasks, so probably not a great choice for the machines they intended to buy.

CIA accused of illegally spying on Americans visiting Assange in embassy

Re: Publicity seeking bullshit

U.S. laws apply to American government entities, including when they operate in other locations. American citizens retain certain rights from the U.S. government even when outside the country. If they can prove their allegations, the actions would be the fault of the CIA and U.S. federal courts would be able to rule on the action. They could similarly sue the company who performed the action in Ecuadorian courts using Ecuadorian laws about access to computers you don't own or attempt to pursue Spain-resident people who knew about the plan in Spanish courts on charges that they conspired to break those same laws. Judges may not permit all those actions, but they could be attempted.

Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine

Re: So many questions

The tensile strength of a lot of cables at once can end up failing to pull out or break just the cable. Even one cable with a secure enough mechanism (E.G. the ones with extra pins just to keep the plug connected) can transfer a lot of the stress to the thing it's connected to. In addition, the strength of someone pulling with their leg is a lot higher than with their arm, meaning the stress on the backplane would have been one quick pull, whereas pulling the cables with your arm would have taken longer and given some of the cables a chance to break off and transfer the strength to others.

Our software is perfect. If something has gone wrong, it must be YOUR fault

Re: "Just be like me"

This is a perfect example of why I think those comments are not helpful. You've stated some problems with inkkjets. They're probably entirely true (I try to avoid printers because I've never found a printer I didn't have to fight at some point). If you've already got one and it's functioning, using it to print something is not a sunk cost. Buying a laser model or going to a shop would be more expensive, unless the printer is broken or the ink needs replacing (though depending on the model and the user's prediction of how they'll use it later, it might still be cheaper in this situation). The things you've mentioned are very useful to a person who asked "Should I buy an inkjet or a laser to replace this broken inkjet", but not one who is looking for help with their currently functioning inkjet.

And you have the same problem with the browser example: "The browser situation is easier - just install several." I don't want to install Chrome. Being told to do that because you can't be bothered to make a site work in Firefox is not fun, but being told to do so even when Firefox probably would work is even more annoying. I do have several, but I shouldn't need them when a proper site works in all of them.

Re: UX Designer?

"Wikipedia, for example, insist that George Washington was born in the United States of America, which I am sure would have been news to him."

No, they don't. Here's the sentence discussing his place of birth:

George Washington was born on February 22, 1732,[b] at Popes Creek in Westmoreland County, in the British colony of Virginia,[17] and was the first of six children of Augustine and Mary Ball Washington.

And here's the short summary in the table:

Born

February 22, 1732 [O.S. February 11, 1731]

Popes Creek, Virginia, British America

Died

December 14, 1799 (aged 67)

Mount Vernon, Virginia, U.S.

Re: "Just be like me"

If they're really in a situation where the inkjet is either completely incapable of it or cannot do it well enough, then the "switch to laser" reply can be of use, but I'd add a "because" in there. If an inkjet can manage the task, but you don't like them (I've heard many reasons to dislike inkjets, but they do manage to put ink on paper), then the user probably wants to use what they've got, not buy another thing that might also have problems.

I see this as the same problem we see with browsers. Being told to use Chrome when we'd prefer to use Firefox is annoying and often unnecessary, so unless the situation is that Firefox truly can't do what we need, telling us to use Chrome doesn't get us anywhere. Printers have the added difficulty that switching to a laser costs money and takes time, so people may have stronger reasons to want to accomplish their task with what's already available if they can. Adding "You might get better results from a laser printer" at the end is helpful if they do replace it.

Re: Not just cloud-based software.

Unless the carrier was responsible for the phone's software, which is sometimes but not often the case, it really isn't their fault. You are paying them frequently, but to provide the connection. I'm assuming your Android devices could still access mobile data, voice, and SMS after the update to Android 12, so they're providing the thing you pay for.

The only way they'd be responsible is if this was a carrier-specific device with their software installed on it. Even if they sold you a device to keep you on a contract, they're not responsible for what runs on it unless it's custom to them. It is, in fact, the manufacturer who you need to complain to or request support from.

Security needs to learn from the aviation biz to avoid crashing

It's not supposed to be comforting. It's supposed to be accurate. When something bad happens, the comforting thing might be to blame everyone, or shallow assurances that it won't happen again, but neither are the correct way to deal with a situation. The correct way is to really understand what happened and how it can be recovered from.

Sometimes, the best approach is not to blame anyone or to give consequences lighter than those harmed might want. This isn't comforting to them, but if we allowed emotion to dictate what happens to someone who is only partially at fault, we'd have a lot more feuding. When there is blame to go around, it's important that the people truly responsible get it, or we'll just get a bunch of angry people unjustly punished for something that's not their fault and people who are at fault happily proceeding to their next mistake.

Let there be ambient light sensing, without fear of data theft

If you just flash up a couple of colors, it could probably send a few bits in a second. The user wouldn't react fast enough to stop that upload. You could also design something that would explain frequent color switches, such as a game. That would probably hurt your upload speed, but it could allow you more time to send something. Is this required for an attack? Probably not, but it could be useful for fingerprinting devices if it's good enough, which is already undesirable. It's not a large risk, but the risk exists.

That was a proof of concept, not an exploit in use. Proving that it can be used to exfiltrate data means that an attacker can extract something of use that requires fewer screen changes and find a way to send that. If it's a few bits to be sent, they could quickly run through those screens while the user is confused. If it's longer, they would probably have to disguise their system so the user doesn't interrupt it. Both those are operational questions that can be solved if an attacker is motivated enough.

Whether or not this proves useful enough that attackers start to use it, it is available to them. We have to weigh that admittedly small risk against whatever benefits there are from exposing that sensor to web scripts.

Re: What POSSIBLE use

No, but he easily could have asked it. He could go to someone and have this conversation:

Gates: We don't currently support more than 640 kilobytes of memory. Why would we need to support it?

Employee: Because the memory prices have been coming down, people want to store larger data structures in memory, and if our OS can't do it, then a different company will be used. If we want people to use DOS in five years, we should support that by then.

Gates: Sounds good. Is there a reason we wouldn't want to?

Employee: It will take a redesign. Like I said, if we don't incur these costs, we'll probably have angry users.

Gates: Sounds like we should have it then.

The answer to "Why?" is clear. Asking it determines the benefit side of the calculation. Asking that to determine whether it's worth the risks and costs to do something is well worth the exercise.

FCC decides against giving Starlink $1b in rural broadband subsidies

Re: Puzzling

"Someone makes a point about scaling the service from a few scattered individuals to entire remote communities, but surely some level of access _now_ is better than no access at all?"

Yes, if you're making your own decision. Not if someone else is paying for the long-term infrastructure. If they're doing that, they would much prefer good access for the long-term future, albeit one that requires a longer time to get started, to working access as quickly as possible that will soon be degraded and have nothing to switch to because all the money went on that.

Or at least, they should. If you focus on infrastructure you can verify will work long-term, you solve the problem in an area. If you spend it on something that might fail to scale, you could easily end up with the same problem a decade later and need to do another investment.

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

Re: Amazing... But also a bit stupid

"It doesn't seem like it would have taken too much effort to create a filesystem abstraction over a portion of the memory map to provide a "known" interface."

It wouldn't have been a problem at all. We already have ramdisks, and since this one is nonvolatile, we just have to properly mark it so the disk comes back when it's booted. No problem with backward compatibility at all. That ended up being what Optane did in most cases: act as secondary storage.

The problems arise when we're told that we should forget about having secondary storage or filesystems, but no clear reason that they're no longer needed. Just as we have ways of using primary memory like secondary, we have that for using secondary like primary. This includes swapfiles, but also transparent writing through to storage devices without swapping in (which for most devices has a bad speed result but probably works pretty well for Optane if you're not in need of the fastest speeds available. Mapping Optane like a lot of RAM, then putting a disk on part of it ends up working like mapping it as a disk, then using part of that as RAM. Both are supported by current operating systems with relatively little effort, and it seems most users didn't consider the benefits to be worth the increased cost of the hardware.