Nope I didn't get it straight. That's not the basis of this particular threat. Sorry for the noise.

Let me get this straight. They develop open source software, later relicense the code under proprietary terms, pull all the former code from the internet, and then start suing people for using the open-source code downloaded earlier. As proof of wrong-doing they simply show their relicensed code which is, surprise, identical to the open source code. I sure hope any judge would immediately see the dishonesty. Maybe they are hoping scare tactics will be sufficient. This is certainly an interesting strategy by HashiCorp. Sadly I'm sure a lot of companies are going to be following their example.

Asahi Linux is the only game in town and itst pretty good. In fact it runs better than Linux does on any other ARM computer or there.

I assume a large percentage of would-be M4 customers are going to be existing Mac users, so we might see an increase in used M1,2, and 3 machines on the market. These machines run Asahi Linux fairly well. In fact they are the only Linux ARM computers on the market I would ever consider buying (sorry Pine64), outside of IoT with a Pi.

They honestly wonder why they didn't get any community engagement? The way they license it I get the feeling they were hoping people would simply do VMS's documentation and QA work for them. I understand VMS is an extremely niche system now, with minimal interest at all, commercial or not. But honestly if they ever wanted any sort of community at all, it's going to have to be open source.

The problem with health care insurance vs say fire insurance is that while in both cases you normally don't need to exercise it, in the case of health care, when you do need it, you typically need a lot of it, for long periods of time. This is very different than property insurance where it may pay out from time to time to cover storms, etc, or a big payment of the value of the home when a home is destroyed. At the latter case, the insurance policy is generally done; the building the insurance covered is now gone. If you get cancer, insurance starts paying large amounts and that will continue over long periods of time, perhaps until you eventually die. Even the normal aging process guarantees you'll need more health insurance payouts as you age. Another difference is that if property insurance is too expensive, you can always sell and move to a better, more insurable place. Can't do that with your body, although people try.

I have no problem with the idea of insurance in general. It's a brilliant solution to a costly problem. I do have issue with the fact that a large, for-profit industry has arisen around it.

You've never tried to use one of the many Arm SoCs with Linux? Windows on Arm is nonexistent thus far. Linux on Arm is a horrible experience frankly except for a very few number of devices such as the Pi, but even there, there are proprietary bits. Every device requires a distro and kernel fork for the particular chipset. Like I said, no standardization of the platform at all. I cannot just download a standard, generic distro and run it on any Arm device. This is quite different from the Intel world.

If MS wants to do what Android does and rely the vendors to provide crappy interfaces to the hardware, they sure could. But we all know how well Windows RT worked out for them.

I guess I agree with you that I'm highly skeptical of MS's ability to succeed in Arm.

Depends on the measure of success. In the wasteland that is the Android phone, yes Arm is truly successful, and that's really all they care about, honestly. And if MS wants to do it that way, they probably will find some success, but not a lot. Windows RT was their last foray into this world, and it was majorly unsuccessful.

If we ever have general-purpose Arm laptops and desktops, it will absolutely require some standardization. Linux on Arm totally sucks rocks. Which is sad, because a lot of Arm systems, even SoCs, are really capable. We keep talking on slashdot about Arm taking on Intel, but unless there are major changes it's just never going to happen. And I'm okay with that. But sadly it seems like RISC V is going down the same path as Arm. So We'll never really see RISC V linux laptops that compete with Intel.

This totally. Totally baffles me why such fundamental usability features are missing from macOS. And to a lesser extent, Windows also. I suspect it is because the UI toolkits on both platforms are very inflexible and rely on fixed layouts.

Even zooming the whole screen is difficult in macOS. Since the monitor is HiDPI, macOS presents very limited choices for "screen resolution." I found a third-party utility that creates a virtual screen of any size and then you mirror that into your primary screen which sort of works, but it has many many drawback (sucks basically).

Arm's biggest problem for decades has been the general lack of a standardized platform. Every implementation (mainly SoCs) so far is different and incompatible with each other as far as hardware trees, booting, and so forth. Linux support is awful, frankly, because vendors fork distros and also the kernel, release it with some binary driver blobs for a while, then loose interest long before anything gets merged into the mainline kernel. Honestly at the moment, Linux on Apple M1 and M2 is probably your best Linux experience out there, partly because Apple has defined a consistent platform.

If MS can define a standard Arm platform that all vendors must follow, complete with something like UEFI, then hopefully we'll have something that Linux distros can build on as well. Then finally I can just download an install image from Fedora, Debian, Mint, etc, and install the same distro from the same source on all Arm hardware. Then there will be almost zero reason to buy x86 hardware (or a Mac M series).

Again, no, sorry, like the others explained. Orbital mechanics again.

Also have you seen a Soyuz capsule? Even if it had been possible, that thing barely fits three humans. It's tiny. I saw one in a museum in Seattle. Each person had to have a custom seat insert to cushion their bodies on landing.

Unfortunately no. That's not how orbital mechanics work (it's counter-intuitive stuff that I don't understand very well). If you're interested, Scott Manley on youtube has done a few videos on orbital mechanics.

Besides that, the heat shield was damaged, so skipping off the atmosphere wasn't possible.

I guess there's a reason the guy was history professor and not a rocket scientist. Columbia was too heavy to reach the orbit the ISS was in. That's why it was never used in the construction of the ISS. Besides that, Columbia was in a completely different orbital plane. I'm sure there many things that could have and should have been done, as is always the case when looking backwards. But refuge at the ISS was certainly not one of them. I realize orbital mechanics involve math, but this guy really should have at least asked some questions before spouting off.

Subsidy for NASA? NASA is a federal, funded agency, just like the FAA. How does requiring NASA to pay this tax make any sense?

Minor correction. It is Congress' poor record in micromanaging NASA and legislated pork-barrel restrictions on what NASA can do that has finally led to the push for taxpayer money to fund private launch companies for designing and operating new launch vehicles. Way more bang for the pork buck than the old incumbents were providing.

LDAP is but one component of ActiveDirectory. A specialized version of Kerberos forms another part of the puzzle.

Samba 4 implements ActiveDirectory including LDAP and the modified version of Kerberos Windows uses. Last I heard, it did not support the notion of a backup domain controller (replication and all that). But it does work as a primary domain controller. In fact I think you can even use MS GUI tools to administer it.