The problem with China is basically they are well known for cheap crap. That is crap. The only reason it exists is because it's cheap. AliExpress, Temu, Shein, etc. are all purveyors of cheap Chinese crap.

However, China can build quality stuff - if you ask for it, they can build very high quality products. But it will also cost more.

Of course, the Chinese also have the belief that Western products, because they haven't gone through the Chinese "cut corners to save pennies" thing, are better. Or generally better, because those western products have powerful regulators. Food regulations in China are basically nothing - given the availability of sewer oil (there are people who scoop oil out of the sewers and sell it as cooking oil). Thus, the Chinese flock to western brands where there is some regulation of the product they want (at higher costs).

But you can buy a product made in China that confirms to the local electrical code, or you can get that product made to the electrical code of the EU, US, etc.. The former probably won't pass UL certification, but the latter, which can even be made in the same factory by the same people, will easily pass.

China builds to the quality you want. However, a big problem in China is a lack of basic consumer protection laws and enforcement thereof. Thus it allows products made to conform to local laws to be horrendously deficient and unsafe.

Except the AI hype cycle pretty much demanded Apple talk about it. They were one of the last to join the AI bandwagon, and everyone roasted Apple for that.

So it's pretty much if Apple doesn't announce something, they believe Apple isn't working on it and thus going to be left behind in the AI hype.

Even when they announced the stuff, they got roasted for their late AI entry.

Apparently 8 lanes is sufficient. But it doesn't really matter anyways since Nvidia is likely not caring too much about the GPU crowd, given persistent shortages and well above MSRP pricing. Their moneymaker is datacenter cards, gaming cards is just a little cream on the top.

It's why their 5000 series midrange cards required reviewers to turn on AI frame generation in order to get review samples. Because just like the 5090 needs AI fake frames to show FPS gains, so do the 5000 series midrange cards.

No, the playable ads were just HTML5 ads that had an interactive element. Most ads are HTML these days, so it doesn't take much to add a little javascript to make them interactive.

Of course, it also raises the question of why there are so many fake ads for apps out there - since those ads already contain most of the game people were expecting.

Finally a movie that could be worth watching.

And it's a sequel.

(Everyone who complains about nothing Hollywood puts out is worth watching complains about the sequels, prequels, remakes and such...).

Recalls are safety issues, and it doesn't matter if the product is out of warranty or not - if the product is still out there and a safety issue a recall is issued.

Though rare, they can be issued long after a product has be obsoleted on the market if they still pose a safety hazard. Cars can have recalls years after discontinuation if some issue comes up later on.

The terms of the sale have to be approved by a bankruptcy judge. They can't just agree to whatever they want to agree to.

Except the bankruptcy judge's sole criteria is how much money they can get for the assets - their goal is to maximize the amount creditors get back.

So if someone is bidding on the data, the judge will pick whoever bids the highest. Now, your restrictions on the data sharing were between you and 23andMe - not with the eventual buyer of the data. The buyer is under no obligation to honor the contract because the buyer is not involved.

It's what made the whole Alex Jones and the Onion bankruptcy deal somewhat confusing - while it's true Alex Jones did offer more money, the Onion made a deal with the defendants which would give more money to more creditors and thus the actual worth of the bid was substantially higher - because just going by price would mean 90% of the sale went to the plaintiffs. But they agreed to waive most of their claims which allowed downstream creditors (including te other set of plaintiffs) to receive way more money with the Onion deal than with the Alex Jones deal.

The "phone SoC" is an Nvidia chip. if you haven't looked lately, Nvidia isn't that keen on making chips that aren't for the datacenter - even gaming PC GPUs are low priority for Nvidia. So Nvidia isn't making chips up the wazoo for Nintendo - likely they agreed to a certain amount of chips and Nvidia will make just that amount and nomore, preferring to make AI datacenter chips instead.

Usually things like that are safeguarded - the TSA obtained the data for specific purposes only and other purposes are disallowed. This is usually done by databases logging all accesses to the data so inappropriate accesses can be traced.

If they wanted to do things without logging then they have to buy that data to freely use it.

It's like how even if you work for the IRS you can't look up anyone's tax return unless you were working on something in their file. It's why no one leaked Trump's tax returns, because they couldn't.

It's why DOGE accesses to that data were fought against -

It's less about new drugs and really more about approving quack treatments for everything.

You might think the case for ivermectin is closed and gone, but new stories are coming up that more than a few states want to make it available OTC because "it can treat everything" and they "need to make it more available" for those treatments.

https://arstechnica.com/health...

Of course, ivermectin right now can't really be used for this, as it would be off-label. But hey, with an FDA AI, it'll be easily approved.

It takes years to get a new drug developed and approved, and the present government isn't thinking about that. It's thinking about getting everyone on things like ivermectin which can be done quickly.

Likewise, if they can get homeopathic "medications" through the FDA and other things as an "alternative to vaccines". It's less about new drugs and more about trying to get snake oil through to give them an air of legitimacy in the American market.

A drug company researching new drugs would've spent millions on it, and having it slap dash approved wouldn't fly with non-US regulators which would cut the new drug out of those markets where they want to recoup their R&D money.

The problem with WiFI on BSD is LInux.

First, practically all WiFi drivers are for Linux (when have you heard of WiFi not working on Linux?).

Second, the GPL is a huge issue, since Linux wireless got a head start from BSD wireless. The problem is, the GPL locks up BSD code like commercially licensed software does - so many of those wireless improvements cannot go back upstream because the Linux wireless code is GPL.

So BSD wireless is basically limited to what the BSD development team (much smaller than people working on Linux) can do independently, since they can't use Linux code. It's basically where Linux was 20 years ago - as a fringe OS that had to use various hacks to get WiFi working. Remember things like NDIS Wrapper that let Linux use Windows WiFi drivers?

Which for BSD is rather fine, since they generally concentrate on the big boxes that run the backbones of telecommunications rather than for desktop use.

That's the problem with cheap Chinese cameras. Not singling out the Chinese, but they're well known to take a camera design and making dozens of models based on the same model and software, and making them really, really, really cheap.

Meanwhile you can spend more money for cameras that can do local storage of video, some of which can optionally upload to the cloud, and there's plenty that do triple storage - local (on-camera), local NVR, and cloud storage. Recording in 3 places means if the camera is stolen, you still have video, or if the NVR is stolen, you also have video (get it from local storage). And cloud storage should the premises be completely destroyed. Or you can do your own offsite storage.

So that's generally been the problem - someone makes a camera in China, that design gets replicated a million times over in China, making really cheap, but really cloned cameras using ancient versions of software and not supported. But you can invest in better cameras.

The "Hyper" part of HyperCard is the same meaning as "HyperText" as in "HyperText Transfer Protocol" (aka HTTP).

Hyper in this context means links, and HyperCard is basically a stack of cards that are linked together in some fashion so clicking on something on one card can take you to another card. Just like with the web, clicking on a link can take you to another web page. That is what it is in a nutshell.

Now, HyperCard card links can do a lot of things, especially when you add a bit of code behind it. It can serve as a rudimentary database - except instead of the traditional MVC architecture, or forms, the data is basically stored in a card. You can create a new card with a template and use that to be a database record, the hyper part being what links the cards together or enables functionality to find a card in the stack.

Alternatively, it can be a stack of cards linked together like a game (say, Myst) where you click around and it whisks you away to another card representing another room in an adventure. The code lets you change the state of the cards so clicking a spot can link you to one card or another depending on the current state. Note that saving is bit tricky since you can't store the state in the stack (it's on a CD-ROM), so you have to manually save all the volatile state and the current card to a file.

Myst extended HyperCard to include lots of extra media - HyperCard had support for graphics and sound, but videos were an extension (using QuickTime), as was having color. I'm not familiar with Myst enough to know how it was ported to PC since there is no PC equivalent of HyperCard. However, there were many competitors, one of which was SuperCard that did what HyperCard did, though with better programming, support for color built in, etc., and the ability to run on Windows., But HyperCard itself was not ported to Windows.

Microsoft is doing the Sega play. Remember when Sega made hardware? Eventually they got out but gave Microsoft an "in" as the Dreamcast was heavily advertised in supporting Windows CE.

And the current console generation is basically a PC again - Sony and Microsoft are competing on what are basically the same CPU codes and GPUs.

Microsoft has also pivoted into "everything's an Xbox" mentality - you can play on a dedicated hardware box, but you can play on anything else - your PC, your PlayStation, your Nintendo, your phone, etc. Either through direct game ports, or via streaming.

And of course, by selling Game Pass subscriptions to help reinforce the revenue. Basically, Microsoft decided competing on custom hardware boxes that were really just PCs wasn't going to cut it anymore, so they decided to rewrite the rules and transform console gaming.

Given what's out there right now, a portable Xbox really doesn't make any market sense - why buy a portable Xbox, which would be a cut down locked down PC handheld which wouldn't be substantially cheaper than a Steam Deck or one of the many other PC handhelds out there. Just partner with one of those makers and create a special branding on it.

In other words, Xbox is everywhere. It's on your PC - you can get it rhrough various stores including Steam, it's on your console, it'll soon be on a handheld, but it's also on your phone, etc.

The games we play to get our cheese...

Yes, I've worked at a company that basically said you had to have 40 billable hours a week. That is, all hours had to be billable to a client.

Come performance review time, and hey, no charge code. No one did it unless they worked overtime, because it wasn't billable. They quickly relented and changed it to everything had to have a charge code. This meant every time someone worked on something new or novel, project managers had to scramble to create a charge code for it because it ended up being the first thing people asked.

I'm sure it was to fulfill some executive's wankery on the subjwct that everyone was working on billable things.

The next company I worked at, they still had timesheets, but it was far more general and used just to track R&D hours tor tax credits.

My current company, no timesheets at all. It feels weird.