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Comment Re:Reaping what they sow during the Wintel era (Score 2) 17

Despite what the unbelievably pushy marketing campaign from Qualcomm last year would mislead you to believe in Windows world ARM is still an unbelievably tiny niche. It's a tiny minority where they even offer devices at all, that is for relatively expensive light laptops (and a handful of Windows tablets, which are mostly used with a keyboard too, and very often called "laptops" too). Even there they're barely fit for purpose, with basic, consumer software dragging its fit to deliver something usable, like a Google Drive client took 5 years to appear. And for the rest they just don't exist, even if people somehow would fancy some idea of buying some.

So as long as there is Windows we're talking about regular x86-64 CPUs. Now that Microsoft is doing all their best to bury Windows, starting with a nearly impossible OOBE, is pushing ads even in the Enterprise editions and so on, that's another story. But most likely Windows is another from the "too big to fail" things.

Comment Mining+power (Score 1) 25

I guess the logical next step is to capture the heat output as hot water, concentrate the heat somehow (or heat the water a bit more) and use steam to drive a turbine producing electricity. Ye cannae break the laws of physics, but it should be possible for a datacentre to recoup at least part of its electricity costs this way? Essentially a steam-driven power station where the heating element is a bank of GPUs with water running over them.

Comment Re:Lifespan of cars in the future (Score 1) 24

If it's a model that's kind of popular for the region I don't see this problem in practice. Once it's a few years old there are tons of third party making parts for things that break with any frequency, including quite specialized parts. And of course lots of parts that are still good coming from totaled cars (which is a very low bar nowadays too, sadly). There MIGHT be some kind of "part locking" Apple-style but I haven't seen it, and mechanics are still just "black box" troubleshooting for everything that seems too complex, just replacing some subsystem and seeing if the problem moves with it or not.

The whole situation is certainly influenced by a HUGE inertia. It's absolutely unreal, I looked at the motor compartment for a small (full) electric Skoda - it was the same as for the regular ICE car! There was no big engine but all the (non-existent ICE) engine (and other unnecessary) mounts were there, plus other design choices that only someone doing some "at-home" hobby ICE-electric conversion would do, not someone mass assembling a small electric car where every "cut corner" (in a good sense, if it isn't necessary) would help! It even has in the same place and of the same size the freaking' LEAD ACID BATTERY! Of course it wasn't a starter battery but more like a backup battery - I HOPE, I hope it isn't just because they were so daft to design whatever system controlling the "serious" batteries to give them in some situations blackouts. Now we need to change from this or that mode and need to reboot for 20s and you get only backup power for that time :-) .

Comment Re:How to loose your ... (Score 1) 106

Companies like Amazon seem to be betting on the AI taking over theory. It's probably the only explanation that makes sense now, because their reputation among skilled technical people will be permanently damaged by moves like this. It won't suddenly repair itself whenever the pendulum swings back to being an employee's market, if the great AI revolution turns out to be just another hype cycle after all.

Working at a FAANG used to be attractive to a lot of highly skilled technical people and having employment history inside that bubble used to be a positive thing on your resume. I'm not sure how true either of those things is any more. Maybe those who are still there and making premium TC in a big US city are still getting a decent deal out of it. For others, most of those big brands seem to be increasingly unattractive, and having history there seems to be increasingly regarded as neutral or even negative when employers outside that bubble are hiring.

Comment Re:WTF? (Score 1) 50

FWIW, I'm a little more optimistic. In the UK, we don't have the kind of pork barrel politics that is endemic to some other western democracies. The ICO are, like many government regulators, under-resourced, but they are basically trying to do a decent job and I think moves like the one we're discussing here today are going in the right direction.

Comment Re:WTF? (Score 1) 50

And most people will roll over, or bend over, for this shit - either because they feel they have no choice, or because they're incapable of grasping the implications and consequences.

Which is exactly why it's vital for governments and their regulatory bodies to step in and protect the ordinary citizen who isn't an expert on these things from the abuse that the big companies who are will otherwise commit in the name of profit, just as they already do with financial services, caterers, healthcare providers, and so on.

Comment Re:"The ICO warned manufacturers it stands ready t (Score 2) 50

Then you'd see no air fryers, smart TV's or smart speakers being sold in the UK for a reasonable price.

Fantastic. Then we can go back to having dumb devices that just do their jobs and don't have all the other junk attached competing for the market instead. That worked for a few generations before all the 1984 stuff. I'm betting it will work just fine for generations after it too.

And please spare us the rhetoric about how nothing could possibly be affordable if it doesn't violate our privacy to help pay for itself. The difference in pricing in a competitive market is likely to be pretty small. The only reason they can get away with intruding as much as they do right now is that market competition has failed because everyone is lapping up the free money. I, for one, am glad the ICO has other ideas about how things should be .

Comment Feels like nothing new really? (Score 1) 100

Yes, I have to confess I let YouTube autoplay me in whatever echo chamber it wanted from clicking on two related videos. I eagerly watched the documentary as someone recommended it and couldn't find anything, ANYTHING new. I'm sure they might have this or that snippet or old picture or interview that was never presented before but nothing I could pinpoint, certainly nothing groundbreaking.

Comment Re:Sounds like a good lawsuit (Score 1) 60

You are right, get legal advice, the cost can be passed on to them anyway.

AIUI, your costs can't (or couldn't) generally be passed on when using the small claims system. Has that changed? It's been a while since I went through the process, so it's possible that my information here is out of date.

Comment Re:Sounds like a good lawsuit (Score 3, Informative) 60

There is obviously a personal data angle here. There might also be a defamation angle if the system works as implied by TFS, since it appears that someone's reputation has been affected because someone else lied about them and this has demonstrably caused harm? If there was more than one relevant incident then there might also be a harassment angle.

Please be careful with that advice about requesting compensation in a Letter Before Action, though. There are fairly specific rules for what you can and can't claim under our system and just going in with claiming some arbitrary figure of a few thousand pounds in "compensation" for vague damages is far from guaranteed to get the result you're hoping for. If someone were serious about challenging this kind of behaviour, they might do better to consult with a real lawyer initially to understand what they might realistically achieve and what kinds of costs and risks would be involved.

Comment Re:What about backups? (Score 1) 36

You can't multiply THESE (Apple) passkeys, but otherwise nothing stops you, they're just some certificates, or if you want some large numbers. There are plenty password managers that handle (completely, as in presenting them to web sites, etc.) passkeys on your machine, under your control. I presume the GP has such control as he says specifically the passkeys are backed up already in a flat text file.

Comment Re:What about backups? (Score 1) 36

Keep it encrypted on your $MEDIA. You keep multiple Yubis for access.

That's a solution looking for a problem, or more for creating a problem. It's a very common use case for people who want to stay sane enough while trying to unnecessarily shoehorn Yubikeys in their workflows, but these really aren't made to just keep a regular secret symmetrical encryption key to your backups or password manager. You CAN use some feature to achieve that but it's pointless as the host machine sees the secret data and is doing all the decryption. You are better all around by just using a regular password here.

The whole point of these cryptographic tokens is that they're themselves different machines, air gapped (or if you want connected through a dedicated and very limited interface) from the computer/phone that runs a general purpose OS that can be compromised. This comes with great inconveniences, like you can't multiply them (so you need to register multiple keys separately on all your services, and some don't accept multiple passkeys/FIDO - PayPal I'm looking at you), you can't back them up, they have limited capacity and so on. But once you go "darn it, I'll just do everything on my computer in a password manager" you can't roll that back by putting some access control based on Yubikeys, it does nothing, it's still everything done on your computer.

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