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Comment Is it really used by Apple? Not so sure. (Score 3, Informative) 221

This anti-repair mechanism is called "parts pairing," and is a common frustration for farmers who want to repair their John Deere tractors without authorization from the company. It's also used by Apple to prevent independent repair of iPhones.

Me - Took nephew's iPhone 13 to UBreakIFix, a national chain of computer/phone repair shops. Them - Replaced broken screen on said iPhone. iPhone worked like a champ afterward. Maybe Apple did that kind of thing in the past, but I just don't know about claiming they still do that. The price was far lower than what Apple wanted to fix it so I'm not sure at all that they used Apple parts, but it worked fine after they repaired it. It's still good like 8 months later.

Comment Re:Henry the K Se Fué (Score 1) 155

What did he do exactly to put him on that level?

He conspired with Nixon to sabotage the Vietnam peace process in 1968 to help Nixon win the election.

He planned the disastrous invasion of Cambodia.

[ I deleted many other things listed ]

I'm not disputing what you say, but I find it interesting that in all such similar posts, nobody blames Presidents Nixon and Ford for anything. Somehow everything was all Henry K's fault. I guess there is no need to actually be president when you are believed to have more power than the actual president does.

Comment My Gen X take on this (Score 4, Insightful) 32

When 500 Zoomers and Millennials threaten to quit a tech company that let the CEO go unless he is brought back, that CEO is actually a cult leader. Let's be clear here. If the choice came down to Altman losing his job or those 500 employees losing their jobs, my money is that Altman stays and they are let go. The minute the company feels it will be in better financial shape to not have those 500 employees around, they're gone. I thought the whole thing about Zoomers and Millennials was that they supposedly didn't trust companies like "everybody else does" and that they won't be stupid enough to believe that a company has their best interests at heart. I guess that just goes out the winder if your CEO is charismatic. I'm warning you all - A guy with this kind of cult like following is going to run for President someday.

Is Altman really all that smart? I read about his background and he got started on his journey into the world of wealth and fame by founding a company nobody has ever heard of that took on Facebook, he sold it for a fortune before it collapsed and get this - he got scurvy because his dumb ass didn't know you needed to eat fruits and veggies . I'm kind of skeptical that he a genius who must be saved at all costs, but hey, half the country worships Donald Trump as their god, so I guess I should have seen this one coming.

Comment Re:What's With 10 Tries? (Score 1) 61

I just want to point out how ridiculous it is to build a device that destroys it's contents after 10 failed attempts. They could increase it to 100 without decreasing the security by a meaningful amount but it would give the owner a lot more breathing room to access their data.

Their target customer isn't IT people. I'm sure this device is targeted at people who know next to nothing about IT like doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc. Also it might be targeted at companies who are off the charts risk averse.

Comment Re:Well, that's barbaric (Score 2) 265

First, a disposable society filled with disposable good. Now we have the advent of disposable people. What is this world coming to?

Just wanted to point out that an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation specifically covered the possibility of disposable people in "The Measure Of A Man" although it had nothing to do with state assisted suicide.

Comment Re:Unprecedented? (Score 1) 102

For decades the claim has been that China steals all IP, everything China ever invented was actually stolen, if you do any business with China they own all your IP, every hack is some Chinese government operation to steal your IP, China doesn't have any IP protections, your product will be instantly cloned and the market flooded with knock offs...

Not too long ago I worked for a Fortune 500 company in the USA. My severance agreement restricts for a while what I can say about them on social media, so I am not going to give you their name. I can tell you that they are in the bottom half of the Fortune 500 and North America is their largest market for what they do and while they are truly an international company, if they lost every bit of their business outside of the USA and Canada they would survive fine although they would have to do lay offs.

Apparently some time in the late 2000s we bought a Chinese company that sort of did for the Chinese market some SAAS stuff that we did in other markets. The idea was that we would use this Chinese company which we now owned to enter the marketplace in China. It never happened. Every year we had to take pretty hard core training on anti-bribery and the main point they drove home to us employees was that our company would rather not do business somewhere than break the law to get the business. "The law" can be US law here as the US doesn't allow bribery in foreign markets and you can be prosecuted in the US for doing that. They drilled it into us that you can't even do favors to friends and family of foreigners to get business. We used to have company meetings where our CEO and top execs would spesk and we did it via an online internal meeting website. At those meetings our India based staff appeared, as did our South East Asia based staff. Our top office in South America would join as did some of our European offices. You know who never joined? China. Never heard of any Chinese employees of our company ever being asked to work on any products we sold in North America. There seemed to be a huge fire wall between us and whatever the heck it was that they did in China. I don't know why we didn't just sell the company and get out, but I definitely got the impression that we couldn't break into the Chinese marketplace without bribery and we definitely couldn't trust our employees who worked in China.

Comment Re:Epic Fail? (Score 1) 61

If you fire half of the staff, the rest will want to get another job as well. This is just bleeding Bandcamp out.

As a long time IT worker, I can assure that this is not correct. While most may now want to leave, there will always be people who will not leave no matter how bad it gets and how many get laid off. Some employees are terrified of leaving their jobs and will stay until they also get laid off, ignoring all the warning signs. I'll give you an example, although it's not the only one I know. About a decade ago, I worked for a Fortune 500 company and we needed another system admin guy and we hired one from a bank. I never heard of the bank that he worked for, so they were some kind of regional bank with an HQ very far away in a distant other state. He told us that the IT department for the bank in our state consisted of him and one other guy. All the IT functions were otherwise at HQ in that other state. His co-worker continued to work for the bank but now as a 1 person IT team. After about 1 year, we had an opening for another IT guy and we asked him if his friend was interested. He asked and his friend said no. Well, about 1 year later, distant HQ closed the one person IT department and moved all functions to their state and offered the guy no choice to go there. He was laid off. Now suddenly he is interested in our job, but we filled it a year earlier and had no more openings. I remember talking with my co-worker and I said something like "He had to know the job was going to end, right? Why did he stay?" And my co-worker said that the guy knew, but he couldn't make himself leave it. So yes, some people will stay to the bitter end and get laid off despite all the warnings that eventually the lay off will come for them too.

Comment Re:remember folks (Score 1) 71

I don't care what media people use.

My question is: Where's your backup?

When DVD players aren't available any more, when the service goes offline, when the rights-holder removes that movie... where is YOUR backup of it?

I understand the concern, but you will die before DVD players go away. CD discs and players are still with us, approximately 40 years after CDs became hugely available to the public. VHS was a dead format and nobody wanted to make the media or the players. There are still manufacturers of blank CD, DVD and BD media and burners/readers for PCs and players for the home. That isn't going to change. DVD and BD players may get harder to find and more expensive, but they will never disappear, just like you can still buy a record turntable. When's the last time you actually bought a new record?

Comment Re:Will she step down? (Score 1) 386

Do you think this at last will persuade her to step down?

I'm pretty sure it won't. You can ask her about her health or whether she should voluntarily step down and going forward all we're going to get out of her is silence on every question she is asked. Hell, I bet she's going to stop going to the Senate as well.

Comment Re: Snowden is a hero (Score 1) 151

The understanding is that he destroyed his access to the data before it got into the hands of any hostile power. He gave full copies only to media organizations that he trusted. This may, of course, be a lie, however I haven't seen any evidence of that.

It's cute that you actually believe that. There are lots of convicted criminals who swore they are totally innocent too. First of all, no way would Russia let him stay, basically forever, without some "cooperation" from Snowden. Once Putin dies if a friendly government ever takes over, don't be surprised when they release FSB files that show that Snowden willingly cooperated with the Russians. It's possible that he technically didn't decrypt the data for them, but let's say he encoded it with a 6 letter key, let's say "xzfajk". He could tell the Russians "It's encoded with a 6 letter key, all letters are from the English alphabet and lower case, no letter is used more than once and the first 3 letters in order are x, z and f." That way he could somewhat honestly say he never gave up the (full) key but the Russians got enough to decrypt it by brute force. I guarantee you the Russians and probably the Chinese have read a decrypted version of everything he took years ago.

Comment Re:For what reason? (Score 4, Interesting) 357

Reading Slashdot these days is a weird and surreal experience. Are most of the users here Americans living in the U.S., and do you all get your news exclusively from U.S. mainstream media?

I'm a foreigner living on the other side of the Atlantic, but even I know that money flowed from NIH (run by Anthony Fauci) to the Wuhan Institute of Virology via EcoHealth Alliance (run by Peter Daszak). I've also read that Wuhan lab performed Gain of Function research, funded indirectly by the NIH, at a point when that type of research was outlawed in the U.S. Does that not give the NIH an incentive to deflect attention away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

I'm puzzled that you are puzzled because yes, most Slashdot users are and always have been Americans living in the USA, and yes, most Americans (which would include Slashdotters) get their news exclusively from US mainstream media.

Honestly, some of what you posted as "facts" is kind of whacko in my opinion and probably not correct. I find it interesting that you don't list your source of information but instead tell people to Google it. Lots of people do dumb Google searches and just get back information that confirms their pre-existing biases. I'm a career IT guy and one of my IT friends is the worst guy I've ever seen at doing Google or similar searches and all I can tell you is that you'd be best off to not believe anything he finds as a "fact". He believes in all kinds of kooky "health" things he found via Google searches that most people would never believe in. And I want to point out to you that if you are using something like The Telegraph as your source of truth and facts that you should be aware that they are all over the map on everything and are both for and against everything at the same time.

Comment Zara? Literally never heard of them. (Score 1) 97

So I did a web search and now I know why I have never heard of them. I live in a large metropolitan area in the southern USA. It's big enough to have professional sports teams in multiple leagues. We have a whopping 2 Zara stores in my entire metro area, both located in areas I basically never get to. Good luck, Zara. I hope you're still in business if I ever get to one of your stores, although since you couldn't be bothered to place one anywhere in my country, which is quite large and populous, it may be a while.

Comment The "canon decision" has been made (Score 3, Interesting) 60

The Animated Series is canon. The people who run Star Trek now have made this clear.

Why is this a question? Well, back in the 1970s, some guy worked for Gene Roddenberry and he wanted a raise. Gene, who was notoriously cheap, didn't want to give the guy a raise but also didn't want to lose him, so instead Gene gave the guy some kind of title that suggested the guy was the person who made decisions on what was and wasn't canon. This guy hated The Animated Series, so he said "It's not canon". Gene is long dead, the guy is either dead or not part of Star Trek any more, so the validity of the "not canon" decision has been questioned and now it's canon.

Comment Re:ok i wanna hear from wordpad users if they exis (Score -1) 120

Last time I checked, Wordpad would correctly autodetect and display text files with Unix line breaks on Windows, and Notepad wouldn't.

I have to ask - If you actually know that there is a difference between Unix and Windows line breaks, that suggests you at least have some kind of minimal knowledge of Unix. Why. are you not just using dos2unix or unix2dos to deal with the line breaks, with said programs being installed via Cygwin on a Windows box? Makes me think you've never heard of Cygwin either.

Comment It's alleged they shot themselves in the foot (Score 2) 173

OK, I know it's fun to say big mean corporation (Paramount) loves to screw over the fans because they just don't get fandom, but it's being alleged elsewhere that there is a very good reason why Paramount went after this website. As stated above, Paramount came out with some pretty draconian rules for Star Trek fan films. This was because one very successful fan film had its producers decide to leverage the success they had raising money into starting a production house that would produce more things in the future, not necessarily Star Trek related. They got sued because they sold coffee mugs, t-shirts and so on with logos from their Trek project, so essentially they were making money off Trek, if somewhat indirectly. It's worth noting that the main guy behind this fan film ended up publicly admitting he was in the wrong as part of a settlement with Paramount.

So why would Paramount go after this "free" book? It's being alleged on Reddit that the website had a Google form asking people if they would be interested in paying for a print copy of the book. That is what got them the takedown notice.

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