... protected from government censoring in the US.

Added some context.

Not only that, 0% of the effort has to do with the GNU part. The article title is accurate in using the term Linux. You get the kernel to run, then you grab a binary userspace from your favorite distro. Linux is what matters. The rest follows automatically because it is barely hardware specific if at all.

You only port GNU/Linux once to any given architecture. After that, all devices using the same architecture only require porting Linux to them.

Jesus, how did I manage to fuck up the links so badly. Link, link, link. And some bonus stuff.

Yes, because when I put Linux on a PS4 I certainly didn't spend several months figuring out how to write hardware-specific Linux components for the PS4.

Oh, wait, I did. I also happened to reverse engineer the Radeon GPU microcode instruction set. So now every AMD Radeon user can benefit from being able to understand what their GPU firmware is doing, which they couldn't in the past.

But hey, I guess GitHub is some shady website that serves shady black box binaries, and implementing kexec as a hot-patchable module for the FreeBSD kernel is a decidedly shady technique. Right.

Little ARM and AVR chips almost always have embedded Flash memory, and high-performance chips like x86 CPUs and mobile phone SoCs almost never do. It has to do with silicon technology. It is not practical to put Flash memory into a cutting edge silicon process for a bunch of technical reasons.

So yes, it's ROM. Mask ROM. Not writable.

IANAL, but as far as I know there is no such "exemption". You're probably thinking of Sega v. Accolade, where Sega used a trademark system to require games to have the string "SEGA" in them. That was chiefly about trademarks, not copyright. You're probably also thinking about the DMCA exemption for reverse engineering for interoperability purposes, but that is about anti-circumvention, it doesn't mean you get to distribute copyrighted data/code.

If you actually read the DMCA request, you'll see it's about data, not code. A game server needs data to know the allowed actions in the game, the entities in the game, the rules for interaction, the locations, etc, in order to maintain a common understanding of the world with the clients. It is this data that was copied from the WoW client and incorporated as a SQL database (into otherwise presumably bespoke server code).

You could make your own completely new game data (and somehow insert it into the Blizzard client too), but then the game wouldn't be WoW any more, just something else built on the same engine and with the same graphical assets.

That's because most Android phones do *not* do this and then succumb to the sudden death syndrome. That's what my Nexus 10 started doing after its battery went kaput. It would run for ages on standby or with the screen brightness on low and not doing much, but instantly die as soon as It tried to play back a video (but would boot right back up and the battery voltage shot up to near fully charged levels after shutdown). Internal resistance.

On the other hand, I have heard anecdotal reports from friends with some Xiaomi phones that the performance increased after a battery replacement, so I suspect those do in fact have this feature.

This isn't about making the battery last longer. It's about making the phone work at all. It has to do with battery chemistry.

Old batteries don't just "last less". They also have an increased internal series resistance. That resistance actually limits the amount of power you can pull out of it. The more current you draw, the more energy is wasted as heat, and the lower the output voltage. As internal series resistance increases, it becomes physically impossible to get more than a certain amount of power out of the battery, and this limit also decreases as the battery drains during a given discharge cycle. It's a hard physical limit. The I-V curve just never hits your power target. If you try, your voltage sags and then the phone shuts down. This is what triggers a common syndrome in old devices, where the battery meter shows 30% but then you try to open up a CPU-intensive app and the device immediately shuts down. Chances are that's not the battery meter being wrong or miscalibrated: there really was 30% charge remaining in the battery. It just wasn't capable of handling that much power draw at that charge level. There's 30% charge remaining and there's a hidden limit as to how fast you can drain it.

It's almost certain that what Apple did here was start throttling phone performance when battery voltage sags below a critical threshold, to prevent hard shutdowns. On older batteries, this would appear as a performance limit as the battery empties. But it was never about making the phone last longer. It's just a physical limitation. The alternative is your phone shuts down. That's obviously not good.

The right solution, of course, is to have a notification or something that tells users when this is happening. Something along the lines of "Your battery cannot supply enough power to keep your device working at full performance. To maintain optimum performance, a battery replacement is recommended.".

Meanwhile here I am, running Gentoo, with init scripts that have had real dependencies for over 15 years (as well as a bash-based but much nicer scaffolding to write them), with simple to use admin tools and fully based on text files, with cgroup-based process monitoring (these days), and I'm wondering why everyone else didn't get the memo and suddenly decided to switch to systemd instead and bring along all the other baggage it comes with. Debian and Ubuntu had garbage init systems, and yet it seems *nobody* ever took notice of how Gentoo has been doing things right for a decade and a half. You can also use systemd with Gentoo if you want, because user choice is a good thing.

Everyone* switched to systemd because everyone* was using something that was much, much worse. Traditional sysvinit is a joke for service startup, it can't even handle dependencies in a way that actually works reliably (sure, it works until a process fails to start or hangs, then all bets are off, and good luck keeping dependencies starting in the right order as the system changes). Upstart is a mess (with plenty of corner case bugs) and much harder to make sense of and use than systemd. I'm a much happier person writing systemd units than Upstart whatever-you-call-thems on the Ubuntu systems I have to maintain.

The problem with systemd is that although it does init systems *better* than everything else*, it's also trying to take over half a dozen more responsibilities that are none of its damn business. It's a monolithic repo, and it's trying as hard as it can to position itself as a hard dependency for every Linux system on the face of the planet. Distros needed* a new init system, and they got an attempt to take over the Linux ecosystem along with it.

* The exception is Gentoo, which for over 15 years has had an rc-script system (later rewritten as OpenRC) based on sysvinit as PID 1 but with real dependencies, easy to write initscripts, and all the features you might need in a server environment (works great for desktops too). It's the only distro that has had a truly server-worthy init system, with the right balance of features and understandability and ease of maintenance. Gentoo is the only major distro that hasn't switched to systemd, though it does offer systemd as an option for those who want it. OpenRC was proposed as a systemd alternative in the Debian talks, but Gentoo didn't advertise it, and nobody on the Debian side cared to give it a try. Interestingly Poettering seems to be *very* careful to *never, ever* mention OpenRC when he talks about how systemd is better than everything else. I wonder why. Gentoo developers have had to fork multiple things assimilated by systemd (like udev) in order to keep offering OpenRC as an option.

I agree that sucks, but that doesn't prove all languages that don't compile to native binaries are a recipe for failure.

Java and C#, for example, are excellent business software languages.

It's all about picking the right tool for the right job. There are no insta-fail languages.

Again, please explain. What, exactly, is the problem with languages that don't compile to native binaries?

What about languages that typically use runtimes but have options to build to a native binary anyway?

Also, if you aren't using a language that compiles to a natively executable binary then you have failed before even beginning.

You're either showing your age, your dogmatism, or your ignorance.

Or, prove me wrong and explain what you mean.

What matter are the circumstances behind the vote. If you boycott a perfectly legal, organized, supported referendum, then you're an idiot. But what people are "boycotting" here is a referendum that has been ruled illegal, that is being haphazardly organized, unilaterally pushed, and basically being used as a political weapon.