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Comment Build a house, go to jail (Score 1) 252

Housing prices are relatively higher, but not that much, not if you buy the size of house that people bought 50 years ago.

Changes to building and zoning codes over the past half century have made building "the size of house that people bought 50 years ago" illegal in many cases. You can't buy such a house if such a house isn't on the market, and you may not build a new one under current law.

See also "Why minimum lot size reform should be on every city’s housing agenda" by Patrick Tuohey.

Comment Torvalds was naturalized in 2010 (Score 1) 115

Linus Torvalds is a dual citizen. He was born a citizen of Finland and became a citizen of the United States in 2010. (Source: "Linus Torvalds, already an Oregonian, now a U.S. citizen" by Mike Rogoway, citing a post to LKML by Torvalds)

It'd be more interesting to count commits by nationality. I'm pretty sure Torvalds no longer has the lion's share of commits.

Comment Control of Secure Boot via the Windows copyright (Score 1) 102

Microsoft has no control over secure boot. You can even load your own custom keys for the Windows boot process

Microsoft has control over distribution of the copyrighted Windows operating system. It has used this control to dictate whether or not makers of devices that include Windows are allowed to let users load their own custom keys. For example, Microsoft required makers of devices that come with Windows RT (the port of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 to ARM architecture) to block end users from turning off Secure Boot and block end users from loading their own custom keys, as conditions for a license under copyright to distribute Windows RT on those devices.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Signal, Whatsapp, Telegraph 2

Is it just me or are these three platforms the arena of bad decision making in startup businesses? When somebody tries to lure me off of social media into one of these three platforms, alarm bells start ringing in my mind. If you're leading your business with communications on Signal or Whatsapp, just know that I for one will not be taking your business seriously.

Comment Samsung Messages? (Score 1) 79

As someone who's been using Samsung phones for about 15 years, I had no idea there was a thing called "Samsung Messages". I tend to tune out all the shovelware that phones come with (and take steps to remove or disable them).

I really like Samsung phones, but their software ecosystem is abysmal. Everything they provide is inferior to other options.

Comment Tap or click to view article (Score 1) 43

No video (or animated image) should ever load/autoplay unless the user interacts with that element, indicating he/she wants to play it.

How granular would the permission be? If web browsers start blocking all animation and post-load layout shifting by default, including CSS transitions and animations, this would encourage website operators to structure the page to coerce permission to animate in each document. For example, a website operator could make each page load blank other than a notice to the effect "Tap or click to view 'Title of Article' on Name of Site."

Comment You have no IP address. Your neighborhood does. (Score 0) 35

How are you going to host a game server on a home computer if you share your IPv4 address with other subscribers to the same ISP in the same neighborhood,[1] and the combined modem and router that your home ISP requires all subscribers to use lacks an option for port forwarding? Both of these are true, for example, of T-Mobile US Home Internet.

[1] Many home ISPs apply carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to conserve IPv4 addresses since the worldwide exhaustion.

Comment Re:They don't want to make other OSes more attract (Score 1) 118

> It was possible to run the entire Windows XP system plus user applications on 128MB of RAM... 256MB was a luxury.

I did an experiment once. Windows NT 3.5 could boot with 12MB of RAM. You really couldn't do anything with it, but it did boot up. As I recall, the whole OS only took up about 40MB of disk space.

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