Unfortunately, there is another possible explanation for the emphasis on TPM that is much more sinister. It's possible that Microsoft and its allies are making a concerted effort to lock down desktop clients in the same way that the two major mobile ecosystems are locked down, to kill off general purpose computing and reduce the desktop PC to a machine that can only run approved apps and consume approved content. It already happens with things like banking apps that you can't run if you choose to root your phone to arrange the privacy and security according to your wishes instead of the vendor's or OS developer's. It already happens on open source desktops, where streaming services will deliberately downgrade the quality of the content they serve you when on the same plan you're already paying for they'd serve higher quality streams to approved (read: more DRM-friendly) devices, and where a few games won't run because their anti-cheat software behaves like malware and the free platforms treat it accordingly.

I am worried that we may be entering a make-or-break period for the survival of general purpose computing with the artificial demise of Windows 10. If the slow transition to Windows 11 as people replace their hardware in the coming years means almost everyone ends up running Windows or macOS on desktops and Android or iOS on mobile devices, there won't be enough incentive for developers of apps and creative content to support any other platform, and all the older versions that didn't have as much built-in junk and all the free alternatives will be reduced to irrelevant background noise because they won't support things that users want to do any more. Your own devices will force updates, ads, reboots, AI-driven "help", covert monitoring and telemetry, any other user-hostile junk their true masters wish upon you, and there will be nothing you can do about it.

Governments should be intervening on behalf of their people at this point because the whole system is blatantly anti-competitive and user-hostile, but most of the Western nations are either relying on the absurd valuations in the tech sector to prop up their otherwise precarious economies or watching with envy while their more economically successful allies do that. So our best hope is probably for the legacy platforms to hold out long enough for some free platform(s) to reach critical mass. And frankly, there aren't many realistic paths to get there. Our best hope might be for Valve/Steam to show that many of those Windows 10 boxes in people's homes can now play most of the same games if they shift to Linux and possibly run some of them better than on Windows as well.

> This allows for reduced thickness and reduced cost, which is what most people want

Reduced thickness? No, I think pretty much everyone agrees laptops are as thin as they need to be. Any thinner and they'll slip when you're typing on them, and we want some thickness to keep them robust.

Which also raises another problem with the "thinness" fetish promoted only by laptop marketdroids and the morons who work as reviewers for so-called "tech" websites like Engadget et al: the keyboards on most modern laptops are literally unusable. They're worse than ZX Spectrum+ and maybe on a part with the older rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum. They. Are. Fucking. Awful. And keyboards are one of the major reasons you use a computer rather than a tablet. So what the fuck is the point with these things?

People talk about how sales of laptops are declining and tablets increasing, but maybe if you actually cripple the major advantage a laptop has over a tablet, that's inevitable?

Cheaper, sure, but how much does it cost to add two dimm slots and to use mass produced commodity DIMMs? It's not even as if there isn't a cost to designing a motherboard so it only works with specific memory chips.

I hate this timeline. It's all going to shit.

They're not.

Liberals defend mainstream Muslims from attacks on their freedom of religion and from smears related to their religion. Because conservatives do not understand nuance they decide this means Liberals love Islam and think its the best and want to marry it, despite those same liberals doing the same for pretty much any religious group that's under attack, as Muslims were after 9/11. See also Gaza where RWNJs assume all liberals hate Jews and worship Allah, or think Hamas is great, because they don't want to see innocent Palestinians killed.

I've only come across one "liberal woman" who actually suggested life might be better, in some limited ways, in countries like Iran, and she was a nutcase, not representative of liberals in general.

You need to get out more and realize there's more to life than cheering or booing every identifiable group of people like a fucking football team.

The context of this is Microsoft changing software the person has already bought. It was something wanted and needed in its original form, it's not wanted in its modified form.

Did you mean to write "free"? I'm pretty sure it's included in the cost, rather than free in any meaningful sense. Perhaps you meant to write "Unwanted", or "forced"?

No, because experience isn't a protected category. Age is, but only in certain cases mostly dealing with existing employees. Youth isn't protected at all:

https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discr...

"The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the age of 40, although some states have laws that protect younger workers from age discrimination. It is not illegal for an employer or other covered entity to favor an older worker over a younger one, even if both workers are age 40 or older."

We don't have a problem with teens viewing porn in the UK. It just doesn't happen any more. In fact, we've been remarkably effective at stopping it compared to half the other countries in Europe, which have seen a recent surge in porn viewing for reasons no-one can identify.

Me too, though of course in our day, the world was much less connected and much less reliant on the technology. The worst we could have done after getting root access to the entire IT infrastructure at my school would have been look at what our classmates had been drawing in Paint or something. Today these systems host much more important and sensitive information and security breaches would be a much bigger deal.

And on that note, am I the only one less concerned by the behaviour of an impressively curious seven-year-old and more concerned by an official, professionally-managed system holding potentially sensitive data that is so insecure that even a seven-year-old could hack it?!

Well the point was more "We're not talking random access media here where seek times are really really important."

With a tape, even right now with some of the faster seek time devices, you wouldn't use it as random access media. That's not what it's good for. The fastest tapes with non-trivial storage capacities (ie not talking about stringy floppy or Sinclair microdrive type systems) still have a seek time poorer than the slowest floppy drives.

That narrows the scope of what concerns we should have. If it takes winding through tape for 60 minutes to get to the back-up, does anyone care?

They do, but I'm pretty sure you can write more than a thousand times to an SSD, so 1000T isn't going to be enough storage for a lifetime write log for a 1T SSD alas if it's based upon the media lifetime. What I've read is that modern SSDs tend to be rated for 100,000 writes per sector. That's a little more than 36Pb, but it's not unreasonable.

OTOH the point you raise suggests a combination approach might work pretty well, just write changed sectors but perhaps delay the write to deal with the inevitable "Update the sector at the end of a file" and "Create temporary file, delete it" stuff that goes on all the time and possibly makes up the bulk of writes in a file system. That would easily extend the capacity for backing up a 36Pb system could have.

That's terrific, but probably not something you should brag about on a tech website.

Not all of us watch videos only if we're watching some ad-infested cloud based service.

Why am I not surprised?

Overheard in an office at RedHat:

"OK, we've been working on Wayland for 15 years and it still doesn't work. What should we do?"

"Well, it is better than X11?"

"Not even slightly. It's even slower, and critical functionality is missing."

"Hmm, OK, well why don't we just force it on everyone? We'll claim X11 is "inefficient" because of issues that were literally fixed in 1991, and claim it doesn't have key functionality and is insecure because of issues we could have spent the last 15 years fixing instead. Then everyone will rewrite their programs to run under Wayland, which they'll do because of the propaganda we'll drop."

"OK, but what if someone who likes X11 points out all of our justifications are outright lies?"

"Well, we'll say we're the experts, because we're the people currently in charge of Xorg. Just like RFK Jr is an expert in health because he's the head of the US Department of Health."

"Brilliant!"

Nobody's talking about it as a random access media. LTO, which is what AmiMojo referred to, is a common standard tape back-up system. You'd use this kind of media to back up data.

At those kinds of capacities, if priced cheaply enough, it'd be possible to create a sealed, permanently installed, box that periodically snapshots your PC, allowing you to go back in history to any point and retrieve files from that date. 36 petabytes could snapshot 1Tb of uncompressed hard disk space once a day for 100 years. Yes, eventually larger capacity random access storage (eg SSDs/HDDs) might become common in home PCs, but even a 20 fold increase would mean it'd last more than the lifetime of a regular PC, and SSDs/HDDs installed into new PCs aren't really growing in size that quickly.

(Cue people who'll miss the point and say "Well this'll be useless for me as I have a 100Tb NAS!" - you're not the typical user I'm talking about, and a 100Tb NAS isn't the storage in your PC anyway...)

Slashdot is owned by people who boost the most ridiculous shit. If it isn't AI, it's cryptocurrencies. And they persist in doing so to the actual people who know it's a con. It's so pathetic.

Hey, Slashdot, ACTUAL DEVELOPERS were not making jokes about coding like cavemen. We were doing our work and didn't notice any outages. "Vibe coders", maybe, but vibe coders aren't actual developers, they're con-artists.

The eSIM is such a backward step. I'm surprised the 3GPP allowed it. GSM pioneered some amazing features, SIM cards is one of the best.