The dark side of an open device being that because you can use Steam to launch Origin to launch Mass Effect, they force you to do it.

(The first 2 do appear to launch directly from Steam, but the finale and the recent 4K remaster require an additional account and hoop)

It's particularly odd for technology companies to oppose an energy project, even more so in an area where it looks like there would be a lack of demand. You would think areas will low land values and over-provisioned electricity are prime data center territory.

The free software movement takes pains to point out that the English word "free" doesn't do a great job distinguishing between software which is provided at zero cost and software you can use and modify as you wish. Likewise, there is a big difference between what happened here, a private enterprise giving the equipment to the public by their own choice, and a socialist system which would take the equipment at the discretion of government officials.

That said, the government is using money taken by taxation (ie, unwillingly) from the people and using it (via their electricity bill) to speculate in an unregulated sort-of security market. I'm not sure if they're doing it for their own gain or if they're just dumb, but it's certainly not for good. Perhaps in addition to liberal/conservative and libertarian/statist, we need to add a third axis of idiotic/klepocratic to the political spectrum.

Student loan rates, mortgage rates, credit card rates, all of the interest rates that the average person might pay aren't what's being talked about here. The "fed rate" that they manipulate is the rate that giant banks and corporations pay when they need money to cover short-term gaps (wouldn't it be nice if we all had a buddy who bailed us out when we were short at the end of the night). While ordinarily this might ripple down to consumer rates, the fed rate has been held so low for so long that there's plenty of headroom before a consumer loan feels it. I mean, how much did you student loan rate go down when Bernanke crashed the rate back in '08?

That's kind of like saying the Arc de Triomphe was built by bricklayers, and thus cannot possibly be an artistic object. Setting aside the crass assumption that a bricklayer couldn't possibly have interests or talent beyond masonry, there was a whole team including artists involved.

Yes, the people writing the code are engineers, and the people developing the algorithms they're implementing are scientists. But, again, it's a team sport, and there are people in the loop with knowledge of culture and philosophy providing feedback to the algorithms to make this work.

Mirrorless cameras were actually the enabling technology for me to get into astrophotography (10 years ago, with Sony's first generation of APS-C mirrorless). The biggest advantage over SLR is the much shorter flange height, so you don't need a scope with as much back focus. The lower weight was also a plus (I started on a Newtonian, so both the back focus and weight were key concerns).

Regarding your specific concern of focusing, I found the electronic viewfinder equal or better to optical. Because an SLR's viewfinder has a diffusing screen in it to simulate the focal plane, you're only getting a fraction of the light from the scope to your eye that you would with an eyepiece. There's a decent advantage in the gain and edge enhancement that the electronic finder provides.

Where I've gone in the past couple of years, though, is to ZWO's line of astro-specific cameras. They're similar sensors to what you would get on a normal photography camera (no low-pass or Bayer filters), but packaged up in a form factor and with electronic interfaces that are optimized for astrophotography.

The UK plug is a (sovereign!) UK thing. While European plugs also have design features to prevent unintentional contact with the conductors, the shutter system on the UK design provides more protection against intentional contact.

I mean, the GDPR still assigns a certain level of risk to holding any personal data (such as the games you play or the books you borrow from the library). There's a point where the cost-benefit between liability and customer service complaints says that at some point you nuke the account and eat the angry blog posts. This is like the blackouts in California after the state made the power company liable for wildfires: tilt the tables too far and at some point people stop playing.

And actually, since kernel code kind of needs its own runtime anyway (Linux's C code is built with -nostdlib), there's an opportunity to sync the Rust and C parts up on a common runtime.

Even between compiled languages, there is still overhead to translate calling conventions when calling a language A function from language B. Fortunately, C is so dominant that many compiled languages either simply use the C convention or, like Rust, allow calling convention to be configured to work like C.

I'm not sure you can characterize "fatal if caught late" as less serious. Covid is bad, but it's far from the only thing that can get you. No measure is zero-cost, and no measure should be treated as such.

Actually in my (relatively highly vaccinated) area, the hospitals are near capacity with people who are very sick, not with covid, but with other conditions that would have been much easier to treat if they had been detected earlier. Taking a year where everyone was strongly discouraged from leaving their house in general and utilizing medical resources in particular is going to have a massive toll in the long run. Now that we have better data on how the disease spreads and the relative costs and effects of various measures, I think that any sort of "lock down" needs to be thought over very carefully.

Came here to say this. Running the math, 9, 1 hour episodes is just over 32k seconds of video. The best quote I could find for Netflix' bitrate was around 16Mb/s for action scenes. That's just over 64GB for the series, or about what someone is going to need to download when they buy a new AAA game on Steam.

This study by Cisco (https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/m/en_us/solutions/service-provider/vni-forecast-highlights/pdf/United_States_2021_Forecast_Highlights.pdf) shows the average US household transferring 237GB per month, so in the month since the show came out that would have been a 27% increase, assuming that it didn't displace some other consumption. Except that it almost certainly did, as "watching TV" was already a thing people were doing.

Have you ever actually tried to administer an SELinux system? The system for altering rules is so byzantine that Red Hat won't actually support RHEL installs with custom rules (https://access.redhat.com/support/offerings/production/soc/).

The universal solution to "allow user X access to resource Y" seems to be audit2allow, but since every regular user runs in the same context, the rules it produces are essentially "chmod 777". I'm sure some madman out there has a "correctly configured" instance, but for 99% of use cases you're going to have an easier time and a better chance of coming up with an actually secure solution with traditional users and groups.

Probably not far from the truth. For a workload like highly optimized image processing code, the simpler ARM instruction set does less work per instruction than modern x86. For a similarly-clocked M1 to beat out an i7, there's some amount of co-processor in there accelerating things. Either there's a fixed set of functions that M1 is faster at (like an old fixed-pipeline GPU), or the co-processor is closer to being a CISC processor with really deep sleep states.

Not that an i7 "coprocessor" would be a bad thing. We already down clock cores to save power; why not have a blend of i7 cores that turn all the way off until needed and some power-sipping ARM cores to do email.