A big target of esims is the embedded device (IoT) market.

It allows an embedded device to provision as part of the standard programming configuration process, devices can be reconfigured remotely, and you don't have to worry about the user messing around with fragile card trays.

There's also new systems being proposed which allow the sim to be integrated into the secure area of an ARM processor, so no extra hardware would be required.

All mobile phone traffic is packetized, has been for forever.

Previously (2G/3G/4G) there were voice packets, SMS packets, and data packets with IP addresses.

Now they have tweaked the layering so they are all data IP packets, those packets contain voice, SMS and data.

There are some changes on the provider/tower side, different routing etc.

There is no impact to the user, the phone attaches the required packetization and the provider handles them, whatever G is used.

While it is Voice data over IP which technically means it is VoIP it isn't VoIP as most people understand it, calls are transparently handled by the phone network.

Given the goal of the PIP process is to lay off the workforce, having a subjective unachievable target is the way to do it.

One of the crap parts about this is that it undermines the standard performance improvement process. Managers should be able to go to employees, tell them that they aren't performing and that they need to do better. However if this is done in a formal way most employees will leave (as they should, in the current abuse of PIP I would too).

This seems a really odd line of argument to take.

What if the government had done something they didn't do, and never will, that would have made me unhappy.

So now I'm going to be unhappy, or "torn".

What if they legislated that all phones had to be purple, with sparkles? What if they said we were only allowed to dial with our feet? What if they didn't allow phones at all?

I get it, you decided you wanted to be unhappy and are desperately grasping for a reason why.

How about, why should the EU require phones to certify with a USB-IF approved test lab and lodge a trademark agreement with the USB-IF. Why are they ceding their sovereignty to a USA headquartered organisation run by a conglomerate of predominantly USA based companies?

(Not that I think relying on the USB-IF is actually bad, but it's at least real).

How many pedestrians and other cars are unwittingly taking part in this live beta test?

How can the regulators allow 160,000 of these to cars drive around, running software that even the manufacturer says isn't ready, with no warning signs on the cars, no formal training for the supervising drivers and seemingly no oversight?

All security is a series of trade offs. For IT security access in the obvious (but not only) one,.

Security professionals focus on one side of these trade offs, they are professionally paranoid and provide a very valuable voice in the room. But there is a reason they are just one voice.

Am I shocked that twitter isn't performing national security level background checks into all their staff? And subsequently someone with strong links or loyalty to a government got employed? No. I'd be appalled if they were. They are essentially a giant public message board not part of any countries national security function.

My takeaways. Twitter collects information, mostly web server log files. Half of twitter's staff have access to that information so that they can potentially use it. Security dude was security dude and tried to restrict access to that information. Company said no. Security dude got annoyed and quit. Security dude decided to play vindictive child filing whistleblower complaints and testifying to the Senate committee and courts.

"He accused leadership of prioritizing business over security" It is a loss making company. If they were prioritizing security over the business that would actually be a newsworthy scandal.

> There are some things that the architecture of Perl 5 makes very hard to do that are dead easy in Python, threads for instance.

LOL. CPython, the standard one everyone uses, still has the GIL - The Global Interpreter Lock

That is, Python doesn't support proper threading. Some libraries, such as numpy, manually release this lock allowing a degree of threading during a numpy calculation. Understanding this isn't simple, and requires a deep dive into the documentation of any computation library you are considering using.

Commonly the threading is said to provide advantages to IO bound operations, sockets, files etc. It does... unless you mix it with a moderate CPU based load. Then the next socket operation is blocked from starting until the CPU operation release the lock. This particularly hits network operations like a server with lots of socket openings.

So threaded multiprocessing in Python is very easy. Mostly because it doesn't actually run multiprocessing.

(Why was this not the big feature they fixed in Python 3?)

Which is why Ubuntu is so successful.

Debian GNU/Linux cares about software freedom, fanatically so.

Interesting to see how well this performs against the ESP32.

Raspberry has a solid brand name, but the ESP32 seems to perform significantly better, particularly floating point operations, and has been in the market for years now.

The article taps around the issues, while still making it clear that this change is at best superficial.

In October 2019 Microsoft made a change to the licence for their consumer products which is very hard to interpret as anything but blatantly anti competitive. Any software such as Microsoft Office or Microsoft Windows (but not Microsoft Windows Server, which is why it and only it is available on AWS) purchased after that date cannot be run on a hosted cloud service. Azure then has special licences not available to anyone else to allow the software to run there.

This is a completely blatant use of their dominant market position in products such as Microsoft Office to push customers to Azure.

The statement from Brad Smith "Microsoft had overlooked the effects some of its business terms were having on its cloud provider clients." Is total bullshit, this was a significant and deliberate change designed to achieve exactly what it achieves. The only gray area is around what gets caught up in the definition of a hosted cloud service.

The proposed change is to remove the terms added in 2019. But only for European based businesses.

This is a transparent attempt to dodge the EU antitrust investigation and should be a huge red flag for every other antitrust group around the world.

It isn't lazy, it is appropriately reoptimizing for the changing conditions.

And yes, if launch costs come down significantly you will definitely see that. For example we will probably see more radiation shielding, radiation shielding is expensive you essentially have to surround the thing you shield with mass - the mass provides the interception of incoming radiation. Currently we do a lot of work hardening chips, testing hardware, fault tolerant designs, a lot of this work very very expensive. If launch costs come down significantly it would be cheaper to use standard earth chips and add several kilos of shielding material like water.

While you could argue that shifting from very complex radiation hardened designs to a tub of water was lazy, I would present it as correctly optimizing for the requirements at hand, which is what an engineer is meant to do.

The Unreal Engine supports Linux and MacOS, I believe it always has.

Unreal Tournament 1 used the Unreal Engine 1 and ran on Linux.

There are a bunch of UE4 games on Linux. Epic has announced that UE5 improves Linux support.

Many of the developers, including Epic, don't release their games on Linux for various reasons. However those reasons aren't because the engine doesn't support it.

This is coming out of a political announcement, Australia is having a grand budget spendathon in the lead up to an election which will be called next week.
And this particular article pretends analysis but simply provides the government press release and talking points.

The expenditure is mostly loaded into the last six years, often viewed as the political never-never. Forecasts are performed over the next four years, revenue, deficient etc. By putting the expenditure outside of that period they get to claim spending big without being accountable for it. Additionally, four years is two elections, the current leader and ministers won't be around by then to be held accountable in any way.

The fine print also shows that the funding includes money already allocated to the Defence Integrated Investment Program. That is, money that has already been allocated to be spent has been counted twice, it is not a new "bolstering" of anything except electoral fortunes.

Actual analysts are suggesting a new expenditure of $588.7M AUD over the next four years. Which is 147M AUD / year, or roughly 150M AUD / year.

The other huge asterisk is that the current government is predicted to lose, the opposition and probable incoming government has already said that they will immediately redo the budget. So in three months it will probably all change anyway.

I administer remote systems. If I could buy a lower end Xeon core for lower end prices and then remotely upgrade it if required... I would totally buy that.

Perversely for Intel, I'd probably despec machines to go cheaper, no need for the CPU headroom if I can trivially upgrade it later.

My first reflex was to be hugely opposed. But honestly, I think I would want this.

Because it is so easy and very effective.

The JS community has streamlined and simplified pulling packages from a remote repo and automatically incorporating them into your build.
The community has also encouraged a strong reliance on using libraries as the first answer to solving a problem (see left-pad).

There is no review or verification process for these remote packages. NPM provides no quality feedback mechanisms like an issue count or comment facility, just a report malware button.

From the outside, the management of NPM has historically been bad. Such as the kik/left-pad issue.

This management doesn't seem to have improved. During the acquisition one of the few things Github said that they wanted to do was introduce 2FA to NPM.
Their response to these security issues eighteen months later is that they intend to introduce 2FA.

This isn't unique to Javascript/NPM, Python has many of the same issues but to a lesser extend. I think the library culture actually started with Perl and CPAN.