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Comment Swap to SODIMM (Score 1) 218

I dont see a sane path to getting pluggable ram back without backtracking on the main selling point of the 'apple silicon' range, which is to gain performance by putting it all on the same die.

Mount the SODIMM as a RAM disk and have the operating system swap to it instead of swapping to the SLC intake buffer of the SSD. Main RAM stays on package; SSD sees less wear.

Comment Re:Should walk before you run. (Score 1) 29

That would be pointless, though.

Doing something that another country has already done long ago, doesn't impress anyone. If they want to be perceived as advanced leaders in scientific research, they have to do something that has NOT already been done decades ago by other countries, especially hated Western countries.

If there were any conceivable way they could send a manned mission to Mars, that's what they'd be doing. The dark side of the moon, is the loftiest space-exploration goal they thought they had any realistic chance of achieving.

Comment Re:Whatever happened to Windows 10 being the last (Score 1) 155

> Whatever happened to the goal of Windows 10 being the last version of Windows

That was never intended to actually be true. They said that because IT people with actual discernment were looking at Windows Ten and going "Eh, this version is pants, I think we're gonna stick with Seven for now and see if Microsoft can get their act together for the *next* release." And that would be a disaster, because then they (and more importantly their companies) might not pay Microsoft any money for upgrade licenses for Ten.

Once just about everyone who ever pays for software upgrades let go of Seven and upgraded, the "Ten is the last version" line was promptly dropped, because it was no longer needed.

There is one significant way in which Eleven is better than Ten: the "is your PC ready for the upgrade" check is significantly more realistic about system requirements. Ten will happily install on a system with 8 GB of RAM, which is less than a quarter of what is needed to run it at an even vaguely acceptable level of performance, and it doesn't even *warn* you that there might be a problem. The result, is that the system can't be used for anything because it's too busy swapping, because the core of the OS doesn't fit in physical RAM, let alone any applications (and the Eight/Ten/Eleven virtual memory subsystem is even more pants than the NT/XP/Vista/Seven one). Eleven doesn't have this problem: it actually tells you your PC isn't good enough.

I still say Seven is the best operating system Microsoft has ever produced. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it ends up being the best one Microsoft *will* ever produce.

Comment Re:"secure platform" (Score 1) 25

WhatsApp is owned by the same company as Facebook.

There has never been another company in the entire history of the Earth, that has been caught violating its own stated privacy policy and doing things with user data that it had specifically promised *not* to do, more times than this company.

I'm not saying they're the most evil company ever. They're not. There have been companies that have done worse things to people. Like, participating in genocide, for example. And there are companies that are in bed with totalitarian governments and directly exploit user data for Orwellian surveillance purposes (*cough* ByteDance *cough*). Which is not great.

But when we're talking specifically about whether the company will distribute your data to various third parties after promising that they wouldn't do that, *nobody* has ever had a worse track record for that, than Facebook/Meta. In particular, if a company comes along and offers them money for some user data, for marketing purposes, the only reason the deal would ever break down would be if they don't offer *enough* money. A little thing like "our privacy policy says we won't do that" would never get in the way.

Comment Re:SystemdOS (Score 1) 319

I actually wrote my own text editor, in Emacs lisp. Unfortunately it was pretty much the first thing I wrote for Emacs back in the late nineties when I was a rank newb, so the code is absolutely terrible, and so I have never distributed it. But I do still use it. Maybe someday I'll do a proper rewrite and make the code available.

Comment Re:Pot. Kettle. Black. (Score 1) 319

That's Poettering for you. His lack of self-awareness is legendary.

This is why I use Devuan.

When Poettering wrote code for Avahi, I didn't notice any problems, because absolutely nothing relies on the protocol Avahi implements, for any purpose whatsoever, so if it doesn't work, the situation is exactly the same as it would be if Avahi worked perfectly. There's no way to notice the difference, without actually attempting to use wireless zeroconf for something, which as far as I am aware not one person in the entire history of computing has ever tried to do. So if he'd stuck to working on that, we wouldn't have a problem.

But after the pulseaudio debacle (in which Poettering's software screwed up the sound my system so badly, I wasn't able to get it working again even after completely uninstalling the package that caused the problem and reverting to my former configuation, and so I ended up reinstalling the entire operating system distribution from scratch), I swore off ever installing any software written by Poettering on any computer ever again. And then somebody decided to let him rewrite the init daemon, which is *kind* of important. Nope. Hard pass. That is NOT going to be a thing on any of my computers, or any of my employer's computers, or any other computer that I ever have to touch.

Comment Re: As long as sudo still works ... (Score 0) 319

That was a deliberate choice.

Slashdot was always intended to be an American site for technically-inclined people who are comfortable conversing in ASCII. After it became popular, lots and lots of Europeans started reading it, and commenting, and stuff; and many of them started asking for better foreign language support, which at that time probably would have meant ISO-8859-1. (This was a while ago; almost nothing supported Unicode at the time.) Slashdot said no, and has continued to stick to that answer decade after decade, because we don't *want* junk like Microsoft SmartQuotes, and foreign languages, and dumb emoji, and all the other things that Unicode support enables. Do Not Want.

DO. NOT. WANT.

Take your weird characters to Reddit. We don't want them here.

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