I, for one, am delighted that the least-patched general purpose computer in the house is getting a tighter interface between its most complex web-facing interpreter of untrusted and untrustworthy inputs and its biggest and most complex driver. Nothing could possibly go wrong here.

They generally seem to be better behaved than the software that runs on them; but computers absolutely aren't reliable(especially the ones that skip things like ECC and storage medium redundancy). What's even worse is that(unlike software, which at least in principle can be correct, even if it's generally uneconomic to write it at the level of formal verification and people don't bother) hardware fails unpredictably. Some particularly bad designs or defective components can make certain failures so overwhelmingly likely as to be good guesses(as during the capacitor plague era; or with certain laptops that are known to stress their internal display cables at the hinge); but sooner or later physical degradation catches up with them all in one way or another.

There will probably be Itanium users for a while; but only the ones who have some legacy workload that absolutely cannot be touched for some reason or another.

Some of those people will probably be willing to pay for careful security backports; some will just firewall it and roll the dice; but neither are really of any interest to the mainline kernel.

Worse, there's no incentive whatsoever to use it outside of that handful of legacy cases: it was produced in fairly modest quantities; and the last significant improvement in the architecture was with Poulson chips in late 2012(Kittson came in mid 2017 but was on the same process side and included no architectural improvements; the project was on life support at that point); and even at release Itanium was having a pretty good day when it traded blows with Xeons; so we're talking something between a Sandy Bridge Xeon on a bad day and maybe a Haswell one with a following wind; except really obscure. Also no afterlife as an embedded instruction set or other niche application; it was only ever one product line.

Vorbis was significantly better quality than MP3 and roughly on par with WMA and AAC. But yeah everything but MP3 had an uphill battle, and without a big company to push it, vorbis only ever had limited support on portable players.

FLAC was completely uncompetitive for portable players at the time because it uses like 5-10x the space than high quality AAC or Vorbis encoding that could not be distinguished in side-by-side listening tests with high quality audio equipment. FLAC was a good format for CD rips and online purchases because it was lossless, but if you wanted to take your music with you had to reencode with something else.

It was at least a decade after the first iPod until storage on portables became large enough that 5-10x wasn't worth worrying about and lossless encoding become obsoleted by convenience.

That computing power isn't 'backing'; it's a transaction cost. It may have taken a zillion hashing operations to bring a 'coin' to its current state; but it's not like you can convert it back into that amount of compute power for your use(even if it's one of the flavors that does something relatively general purpose; rather than one highly specific flavor of makework that has no other uses); it's all just expended.

It's like saying that a paper currency is 'backed by printing presses'. Do you need to do some printing to keep a supply of bills in decent condition in the field? Sure. Does that mean that bills are convertible into print services? Only very incidentally if there are printers who accept that currency as payment for jobs; the printing done to put the bills in circulation is just a sunk cost that cannot be converted into anything.

"On another level, however, it's a disaster for about 99 percent of releases, which stand absolutely no chance of garnering any attention, no matter their quality. The solution: human storefront curation, which Valve has never shown any intention of doing."

I'm not quite sure how this is intended to work: if "human storefront curation" is intended to provide better recommendations it's quite possible that it would be successful, though the automated similarity/people-like-you-bought ones already aren't terrible; but that wouldn't really change the fact that the majority of releases die in obscurity. There are just so many that they cannot all be visible at once; only some relatively more visible than others.

If "human storefront curation" is intended to mean tougher reviews; then isn't the effect the same? Roughly the same games that today languish in obscurity will instead just not get listed.

I don't mean to defend Steam's curation and discovery as the gold standard, there's definitely room for improvement; but I just don't see how even an arbitrarily good curation and discovery mechanism, with downright omniscient understanding of what each buyer wants and what each game delivers, will substantially change the fact that there aren't enough man hours available for 14,500 games/year to get enough attention to keep most of them from selling basically nothing. Especially when so many of them are just bad, or OK-ish but a direct clone of a strictly better game. There probably are some undiscovered gems that are tragically unknown and undersold because they fall into some sort of algorithmic blind spot; but there are also overdiscovered messes that probably deserve more obscurity than they get, so curation improvements would cut both ways.

If it actually works as advertised; that might be part of the appeal of the multichannel support:

Assuming that the link can fall back gracefully to a lower frequency when necessary, and remain reasonably stable, just slower; it becomes a lot easier to see the higher frequency bands as just a nice bandwidth bonus that you get when you happen to have decent line of sight on an AP; rather than something you simply cant' trust because having your link drop is deeply irksome.

It wouldn't be entirely surprising(though, given some of the...interesting...choices you get on Chinese phone vendor android skins, hardly assured) if a phone vendor can do a car infotainment system that at least comes out of the gate not feeling a decade old and badly broken; unlike some of the primarily car guys; but that doesn't really seem like it's going to cut it unless the implied plan is to change the lifecycle pretty radically.

It's a pretty major failure if a car doesn't last long enough that its embedded systems will be a decade+ old while it is still within its operating life; so (while, obviously, being broken from day 1 is not going to do you any favors) it seems like the problem you need to solve is ultimately one of compartmentalization rather than just freshening up: How are you going to keep the really low level stuff(motor controllers, random sensors and power windows and all the other CAN bus widgets) that is mostly fixed-function but probably not just a masterpiece of security that should be allowed near anything internet-connected suitably isolated? Is the user-facing UI intended to defer to external devices with shorter replacement cycles(android auto/carplay style)? Is it running under a hypervisor on reasonably overqualified hardware such that you'll be able to target generic OS updates at it with a minimum of fuss more or less indefinitely; rather than being left behind the second the low-bidder's BSP ages out? Is it a system-on-module that is intended to interface with the vehicle only at a few well defined and standardized connection points?

For some reason Microsoft did that thing they like do to and murdered the easy, user-visible, option in favor of a more cryptic thing aimed at IT. The https://learn.microsoft.com/en...â>User State Migration Tool. If memory serves the two have a lot in common(I think you can even get them to recognize one anotherâ(TM)s output files; but USMT is all command line and XML config and intended for bulk use.

Itâ(TM)s honestly kind of weird; sort of like the period where Time Machine was a gross, rather brittle, hack on top of HFS+; but at least it was there for users; while NTFS volume shadow copies were a robust feature; but one that was only ever used by IT or for the (always terrible) âsystem restore pointsâ(TM).

"It puts the mother to be at risk every time it's done"

It's invasive and risky by the standards of first-line contraception; but it has an enviable safety record compared to childbirth. Over a factor of ten lower mortality rate in US statistics; probably not quite as dramatic in places with lower maternal death rates.

So everyone is struggling to sell them; but there's so much demand that you won't stop making them? Tell me another.

I'm not expecting a PC OEM to like a product category that is basically tailor-made to be a low cost, low margin, comparatively heavily standardized platform for Google to sell services to institutional customers; but talking about a differentiation and margin problem as though it's a struggle-to-make-a-sale problem sounds like a combination of dishonest and confused.

It's extra funny when, in addition to a history of also generation-mixing, the entire "14th" gen is an extremely anemic rewarming of the 13th gen that exists because somebody's roadmap required that a refreshed lineup exist.

I'd be a trifle surprised if they outright lied about what happened on camera there; but they are certainly tailoring the implication. Picking what are two of the most iconic SMGs available for your photoshoot, including the Thompson to be big and mean looking and the MP5 for the tacticool cred, while sticking strictly to handgun cartridges, is someone doing a fairly careful job of extracting the maximum amount of apparent seriousness from the available bullet resistance.

No, adding friends is opt-in, but they changed what information is shared with friends, and that change was opt-out and done without notice.

This mission is part of a program that is all about low-cost projects that are willing to take on more risk. The total cost of the mission was $80 million including $20 million for launch. A Falcon 9 launch costs around $70 million, which would have been more expensive than all the other hardware and operations costs combined. So if it works NASA get a great bargain, and whether it works or not they are helping develop competition in the launch market.