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Comment What should really be of interest here (Score 2) 49

What should be of interest to slashdotters isn't the irony of someone associated with cryptography losing their private key, but that there exists an open source system to securely allow voting and also to absolutely verify that the vote was counted. All while still maintaining anonymity. Barring the issue of losing private keys on the part of those administering the vote, this sort of system is very interesting, and really could be used to promote voter engagement and democracy. I had heard of it before, but kind of forgot about it.

Comment Re:Good use. (Score 1) 74

Not anything. Especially when dealing with nuclear. There are some parts that once degraded cannot be safely replaced. For example, the containment unit. And others where making a new one makes more economic sense than replacing even when technically possible. What state this plant is in I have no idea, and am not qualified to have an opinion on. I just hope experts are making the decision based on economics and power requirements and not politics.

Comment Re:Good products (Score 1) 104

Netflix and YouTube both use AV1, which is royalty free.

You're right about YouTube. I was thinking HEVC was one of their delivery formats, but apparently not.

Netflix definitely did use HEVC for delivery of some of its high-end content at one time. Whether they still do or not, I have no idea.

Either way, the fact that people are running into error messages suggests that there is some actual customer impact.

Comment Re:Shit tier clickbait that answers in the end (Score 3, Insightful) 104

Smart. Instead of charging each customer an additional $0.04 per unit, or even eating those costs ($600k, in other word chump change), they use it as an excuse to upsell their product line.

Except that nobody who buys one of their machines is going to think, "I could pay an extra $100 and my machine would work better." They're going to think, "This piece of s**t can't even do things that my cell phone from eight years ago can do. Why did I buy this, and why should I ever buy anything from this manufacturer in the future?"

This level of penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior is a sure way to permanently lose customers.

Comment Re:More IBM vaporware (Score 2) 19

OS/2 had no security features needed for multiuser support. It might as well have been classic MacOS. Citrix had a multiuser version of OS/2 with security tacked on, but it wasn't a realistic solution and was never popular. Building an OS without security was the moronic decision that killed it. Plus IBM never did anything meaningful to promote it so nobody cared. That it was used anywhere (especially in ATMs) was a horrible decision itself because of the lack of security features and has created untold woes. Maybe nobody ever got fired because they bought IBM, but they should have.

Comment Re: Good products (Score 4, Insightful) 104

It is neither right or wrong

It's wrong. The processor has a feature. People will reasonably assume they can use that feature. Then they find out it's disabled.

assuming the features or lack thereof is declared upfront.

If that declaration is not in the largest font size used in the materials then it's hidden.

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