The PROBLEM, is that "We will use a 4 year degree as a proxy for being able to be trusted to wear clean underwear and show up to work on time", is that it imposes a lot of logistical burden on the university system, which was never intended to supply that kind of volume.

That logistical burden is what has been driving student tuitions into the stratosphere, which in turn causes the issue with student debts, which in turn is what is driving the anti-college trend.

The "But we've been doing it for DECADES!" mantra, is just "Yes-- Yes you have! This problem has been snowballing FOR DECADES! *IMAGINE THAT!*" writ large.

I am actually eagerly awaiting the "OH NOEZ! NOWHERE NEAR ENOUGH 'QUALIFIED APPLICANTS!'" tears, when Gen-Z's anti-college trend fully manifests, and this "But we've been demanding it for decades! WHAA!" shit has the bottom fall out.

They do NOT need a 4 year degree to use a fucking stapler, or collate documents.

This is not true, silvergun.

NYT (paywalled) ran a piece on that. Only in increasingly small and narrow parameters does the debt shell-game get made up for with the higher earnings potential.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/0...

The real problem, is demanding 4yr college degree to use a stapler. It has compounding, knock-on effects.

What I am decoding from this is:

Decades of 'I NEED ACCESS TO ALL THE DATA, ALL THE TIME, EVERYWHERE!' from the csuite, (with resulting attack surface and single point of failure when credentials get stolen. (Not if, when. It's a matter of time before mr big and important csuite guy who's idea of password rotation is to change the last two digits in his password, and who just cant wrap his head around the idea of 'attack surface', to have his credentials stolen through credential re-use, or a phishing attack.) With '*IT* IS WHO'S INCOMPETENT!' (Despite being shown the reality of attack surface, and the needs for actual secure access, which of necessity are 'onerous' to 'ease of access' due to being mutually exclusive concepts, but oh, it's never the csuite's impossible demands at fault, no sir! 'The experts are just wrong, and will be replaced with new experts until we get one that tells us what we want to hear!') And 'IGNORING IT HAS NEVER BEEN A PROBLEM BEFORE!' has reached a critical breaking point, and the csuite is desperate to look for people to throw under that bus.

Hard pass. They can call me to help secure their clusterfucks when they learn their lesson, and are willing to engage in best practices.

We can discuss the pros and cons of keeping huge, concentrated stockpiles of user information, and its supposed financial value, AFTER we cut outside access to it from insecure networks (and they learn what an insecure network actually is, and why.)

Until then, they NEED to be hacked, then sued, until they come to their senses.

Not exactly.

It is possible that the CPU_CHECK was bypassed on win11 install (you can do that with Rufus when creating USB bootable install media).

Microsoft insists that you need at least Gen8 Intel silicon (forget what family for AMD).

Aside from pipeline improvements, nothing new (security featureset wise) was added to Gen8 vs Gen7 (I have a laptop with Gen7 intel silicon), that I am aware of. As such, a lot of devices with Gen7 silicon have been coaxed into running win11, with no real issues. (again, because there is nothing particularly deal-breaking about doing so. that I am aware of, or that anyone who has done this has reported.)

This is just Microsoft being real butthurt about people doing that, and turned the thumbscrews by hard checking the identity string of the processor against a cutoff value.

As far as I know, there is not truly security-related reason for doing this, and quite likely, not even a performance reason for doing this. If somebody was trying to run on Gen6 or older silicon, yeah-- there were security extensions additions to the newer processors that such old ones would not have, and it would make sense to deny them, but I'd bet you dollars to doughnuts that the Gen8 minspec's being "wholly artificial" is what's at fault here.

Sorry AC, but at the risk of sounding like an elitist ass--

Your lack of a robust education is not my problem; In this amazing and information dense era, you practically have to go out of your way to avoid information. I learned about helminths (parasitic roundworms) quite accidentally.

I've known about their use in experimental therapies for such conditions for several years now, and every time the news comes up, I make note of it. The clinical term for such therapies is "Hemlinthic therapy", since it works by adding helminths to a human host, specifically to get a ready and inexpensive supply of biologic (a class of drugs that are produced by a living organism-- usually extremely expensive to get, talking millions of dollars a year to keep prescribed) immunoregulators (drugs that regulate immune system response).

See for instance, this man:
https://www.propublica.org/art...

There is evidence to suggest that having a few helminths in his digestive tract could save this man a fortune in medical costs, with a minimum of life upset from having them; easily made up for just by eating a bit more.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go...

The issue at hand, is that there is an uphill battle in gaining support for the more widespread use of helminths as a serious treatment option, due to the outstanding issues if prejudice against the treatment, because "They are PARASITES!"

Nevermind that by definition, once they start conferring a benefit to the host (which in this case, they most certainly would), they stop being "Parasites" and become "Symbiotes".

The more you know. (Star flies over.)

Helminths also secrete a cornucopia of bioregulatory hormones (to prevent the host's immune system from going bonkers on them) which have been shown to do a wide amount of positive effects for human health, not limited to such things as moderating inflammatory bowel disease, moderating asthma in extreme sufferers, moderating allergies in extreme sufferers, and a bunch of others.

the issue, is that "they are parasitic worms" has stuck since the 19th century, when it was vogue as an idea to eradicate all germs, and all parasites.

Treating them as potentially valuable endosymbionts instead might be therapeutic, which is where helminthic therapy (such as this one) comes into play.

The idea with the addendum, is that if a tool that could easily produce human-readable code (and not just raw disassembly, with obtuse and difficult to tease out structure of "what it's doing"), it would make many hardware vendors "Very Upset."

See for instance, nVidia, and their binary blob drivers, or Broadcom with their binary blob radio firmware.

Being able to generate human-readable code using an AI assistive tool (assuming it's worth a shit-- which is a whole other ball of wax), means also being able to easily produce human-readable documentation about a binary blob, and what it's doing.

That means trade secrets and other things that are obfuscated inside such a blob could be revealed and disseminated quickly.

Hence the note about reaching for C&Ds.

(Additionally, this toolkit would make a lot of closed source software vendors shit solid gold bricks, and reach impulsively for their lawyers and cease-and-desist orders, like Catholics reaching for a crucifix when they catch even the faintest hint of something 'satanic')

Since compilers strip out "unnecessary" data, like comments, or the names of variables (because they mean nothing to a computer), recovery of all that missing, and often essential metadata has long been a niggly, prickly, and pernicious obstacle with disassembling binary or object code back into assembler, (and in some cases, back into "something that resembles C")

Short of having some kind of AI that "knows" about commonly used interfaces/libraries, and which can identify the compiled code's disassembly and pair it up, there is no easy way to revert it back to something genuinely human-readable.

Even then, there's situations where the code never really was "human readable", such as hand-assembled performance-focused code, where attempting this kind of operation on it will seriously degrade its value-- or software that real-time modifies itself in memory (like SecuRom)

I wish DARPA all the luck in the world, but this is something that people have been wanting to do for aaaaages.

ChromeOS isn't but linux is.

See also, Mrchromebox.tech and the coreboot based UEFI alternative firmware they roll there.

Any intel chip newer than a Brasswell has Vulkan support on Linux, and can "Sorta" do DX12, with hardware acceleration.

A surprising number of games can be convinced to play using Lutris this way.

(Windows drivers for those chips are purposefully crippled, because Intel does **NOT** want to release new ones, go through the onerous MS HWQL vetting process for them, tell OEMs to update their driver archives, et al-- for products that Intel no longer sells. Linux on the other hand, has a fucking army of people bolting and or shoehorning support on this older hardware, and it works surprisingly well. For this reason, Linux really is the preferred OS for a chromebook.)

Any modern chromebook, even one with otherwise milquetoast specs, should be able to smoothly play anything up to about 2010 release date via Lutris or Steam (under actual Linux.)

Indeed. All of those can be convinced to work with Lutris + GE wine proton.

I have a Celes (samsung chromebook 3), and it can run stuff from the early 2000s just fine. Considering the fact that this model has 'numerous known issues', and has the 'avoid' verbiage with it, and can STILL do light gaming, --THAT ISN'T SOLITAIRE-- (talking more Stalker, tes 4 oblivion, openmw, systemshock 2, and pals), I'd say you are barking more about chromeos's lack of exposing vulkan on hardware that supports it, than about the hardware itself.

A 20$ cable and mrchromebox firmware will set you on the path to enlightenment.

Most of the problem is actually chromeos itself.

Modern chromebooks can have fairly midrange components inside them, and even today, can still be liberated from the great google mothership with mrchromebox uefi firmware.

In terms of 'gaming' on one...

Once you get onto a REAL operating system, they can do a surprising amount for how little they cost. Is your money better spent elsewhere? Absolutely.

But if you got one 'for free'?

A 20$ 'suzy-q' cable, and about 20min, will get you out of the google tractorbeam, and off on a milquetoast midrange laptop experience instead.

https://www.frontshort.com/ind...

Any intel igpu newer than brasswell supports vulkan api under linux. You can play a surprising number of games with lutris or steam for linux this way.

Again, only for those 'free' chromebooks.

Let me put this as genteelly and carefully as I can.

The desire to make an "Official" linux, is a very bad desire. It should always be shouted down.

Please allow me to explain why.

The desire is intrinsically incompatible with the philosophy of open source software, and intrinsically incompatible with the *nix philosophy, of doing one thing, and doing it well. The standardization of *nix software is not at the OS level. It is at the application and interface level. This allows maximal flexibility for configuration and deployment, for specific use-case scenarios, which is precisely when, where, and how Linux deployments excel.

It is this conflict with philosophy and use-case that drives the conflict about system-d, snaps vs Flatpak (vs APT / package manager), and numerous others.

Slashdot is infamous for the dreaded car analogy, so here it is, pre-emptively.

"Should there be a standardized automobile? Imagine if all cars on the highway were exactly the same, with exactly the same parts, and nobody had to look up makes, model, year or manufacture-- and all vehicles came stock with automatic transmission! Getting your vehicle serviced would be so much easier!"

For basically all of the same reasons why with Linux, the answer is, and should always be a resounding NO, the answer to the above is and should always be a resounding NO.

There are different kinds of consumer vehicle for a reason, even though all of them (for the most part) are internal combustion engines, and operate on the same basic principles. Some people live out in rural environments, and greatly benefit from having manual transmissions. Having one, requires you to learn how to drive with one, and when and how one should shift gears for maximum utility to gain that advantage on those kinds of road surfaces. Enforcing this kind of ideology basically takes this kind of control away from people that have a legitimate need for it, and makes the world worse, not better.

The same is true in the computing world with bespoke servers that need to have very fine tuned performance parameters, in which small things like the logging system can have small but meaningful performance penalties (and when one might not want to have everything managed all at once by something like system-d, no matter how much the distro wants to force it.

The concept of "OFFICIAL!", implies that those situations that are not adherent to "WHAT WE SAY", are de-facto "Un-Official." This is wrong-headed, and foolish. That's like saying a manual transmission vehicle is "NON-OFFICIAL."

This then gets into the "God, I cannot believe how big of a pretentious asshole you are!" rhetoric starts.

Just like there are people that select for manual transmission vehicles, and do so for very specific reasons, which know about, and care about things like spark-advance, or fuel-mix ratios that most other drivers would not care about at all, (as long as the vehicle drives), there are people that profit, make use of, and are reliant on, the ability to take that level of control over a computer for such bespoke server applications.

I refer to the taking away, or obfuscation of such controls, as "Putting mittens on the user," because that is essentially what it is.

There are already operating systems that do this, and do so to a very shameful degree, such as Windows (which goes to great lengths to redact which programs you have associated with what tasks, just because microsoft REALLY wants you to use Edge, and not Chrome or Firefox, etc) or OSX (which goes to great lengths to prevent you from running it on non-blessed hardware.)

Both of those operating systems exist with the "Official!" mindset, and as a consequence, put the end user's hands inside mittens. (and then enforce the mittens with duct tape.) This makes them "Easier to use" for people that do not want to or have no need of such deep or fine control, but makes life very difficult indeed for the people that DO.

Linux is about the only remaining holdout for people that want or need to have that level of control, and removing the option from them, out of a misguided desire for "Standardization" (where there is already standardization on a different level, and where this kind of standardization being suggested, is not needed nor wanted) is really a very dickish thing to demand.

Please be more considerate of other people that have a legitimate need to have full, robust control over their computers.

Even in the linux world, there are distributions that cater to desktop end users, vs such "every cycle must count, so I must configure every aspect of the system, exactly as it has to be to attain that, and the system must not alter it "For me" out of "Convenience" or "Official policy."" use cases, which is why we have both Ubuntu, and Arch, respectively.

Requesting that this arrangement not be effaced is not dickish; Demanding that it be effaced, IS.

don't forget the ongoing child slavery, child prostitution rings, and the government complicity that enable it--

The UK's Tory party has a LONG track record with this.

(I can provide links again, if slashdot wants, but I posted this shit the LAST time the UK Tories were squealing about unfettered access to data FOR THE CHILDREN.)