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Comment My suspicion (Score 2) 45

At least some of this will be stress. If you're enjoying something, then you won't be stressed. If you're feeling positive and delighting in what you do, then you won't be stressed in unhealthy ways. This looks similar to the Mozart Effect, which turned out to be that if you liked something, your brain functioned better.

Yes, charging around the stage playing rock music isn't exactly gentle, but it IS extremely good exercise for the heart and the rest of the body. Again, that's going to have positive effects.

(We can ignore Keith Richards in this model, as he's older than the universe and only created it as a place to store his guitars.)

Comment "Amateur city"? (Score 1, Interesting) 20

I'm...curious...if Nadella's assessment of the board had to do with some deficiency in keeping minutes; or if he's just shocked into incomprehension by the idea that the board would fire you for anything aside from failing to make line go up or some really sordid sex thing that is going to reach public knowledge real soon.

For basically any employee "is lying snake who none of us can trust about anything he says" would seem like it does the job, especially with the fairly limited US requirements for firing people; so it's hard for me to see that as an obviously amateur move unless they were either chaotic in some visibly horrifying way about it; or he is just applying his own theory of what the board should and shouldn't fire you for (and to what, at least theoretically, is a nonprofit board that was supposed to be keeping the c-suite on-mission; not just appeasing the shareholders).

Comment Re:and the question everyone is asking is (Score 1) 26

It's worth figuring out what your threat model is. There probably are ways that some government agencies can get into iPhones or decrypt these messages, and they probably are collecting all the encrypted data in case quantum computers can decrypt it later.

But are they going to waste any of that on you? Unless you are a high value target for them, and unless they intend to avoid any judicial process where their capabilities might become public, they probably aren't going to use their best tools to help the local cops break into your phone.

Comment Re:Another reason for CarPlay (Score 3, Insightful) 38

Why do we need CarPlay anymore?

Because automakers stopped giving car buyers some variant of the single-DIN/double-DIN dash cutout with standardized wire colors for a wire harness, so owners could put whatever they want into the dash if they didn't like the OEM offering. Carplay/AA was the loose successor to that; users had some agency with app selection, but GM has famously torpedoed that solution. Their arguments were so bad that it was almost transparent that they did it just so they could try and get subscription revenue from customers for functions Carplay provides out of the box.

Now, you might reasonably argue that a means of returning to user-replaceable infotainment head units is basically what you were getting at with "secure mount"...but my point is that these shouldn't be mutually exclusive. A stock stereo *should* have Carplay/AA, along with a means of replacing it if the user deems fit...but i do think it's reasonable to ask for both - base trims of econobox cars include Carplay; it shouldn't require aftermarket hardware to implement, and the owner shouldn't have to be stuck with a panhandling screen if they *don't* buy an aftermarket stereo.

Comment Re:Pare down the bloat (Score 1) 90

I suspect that it depends on how strongly or weakly the 'bloat' is connected to other things; and what supporting them involves.

Something like not having TSC (which itself comes in several variants depending on whether it's from the era where you actually had 'a' CPU that just ran at a speed, or if it's one of the ones that tries to compensate for the complications of variable clocks and multiple cores) presumably comes up in a variety of nasty places related to the bad things that happen when things are not done in the expected order.

Just some random PCI device that nobody developing actually owns anymore is presumably at risk of unnoticed regressions; but (especially with the amount of PCI DNA that got carried over into PCIe or was used for the software-visible interface of some system on chip that skipped the cost of actually implementing a 32 bit parallel multidrop bus out to the PCB but either specifically sought compatibility or couldn't justify cooking up something custom when the peripherals they were integrating were all derivatives of PCI designs) it's not necessarily much maintenance overhead for it to just exist on a 'cool if it works for you' basis as a module that you probably don't need.

There's also the secondary matter of the fact that 'the kernel' has a limited number of people directly focused on its interests in the abstract; rather than some hardware vendor, distro, enthusiast, or hyperscaler's interests. If preserving hardware compatibility is directly contrary to the interests of supporting the major contemporary use case of fairly large 64 bit x86 servers and embedded ARM widgets (as 486 and pre-TSC 685-ish likely was) it's going to have relatively few friends among the people actually doing the work. If someone wants to maintain some weirdo HAM radio interface card that merely assumes the existence of PCI it's not clear anyone will go out of their way to help if they need to update something to cope with a change elsewhere; but it's not like the Ministry of Kernel is going to order them to go find bugs in the implementation of CXL memory because that's where the money is.

Comment Re:Symptomatic of US decline (Score 3, Informative) 208

In Europe, Ford is not a prestige badge. They are competing with the likes of Renault, VW, Nissan, and Honda. And now of course the Chinese brands like MG, BYD, Jaecoo, Sonoda, Cherry, Omoda, and others.

They just aren't offering much for the European market. We aren't keen on light trucks, and most of their EVs are shitty fossil conversions. That just leaves the dwindling fossil market for them.

Comment This should go well. (Score 3, Insightful) 99

If these guys are actually treating a user agent string as an authentication mechanism I'm honestly surprised that being on the public internet hasn't already eaten them alive purely because of the supply of malicious opportunists; and I'll be even more surprised if it continues to work out for them now that they've drawn a fair amount of attention to it.

Comment Ho hum. (Score 1) 72

Most posters seem to be assuming it's a scam. I can't possibly think of a reason why they might think that. (A few million, yes, but getting it down to one is hard.)

However, that's almost by the by. It's rated for 5G. 5G is old. 6G is the new standard and WiFi 6 has been around for a while now. If you're actually serious about designing a new phone from scratch, and have not yet released it, you'd almost certainly want it to be 6G-capable. Nobody in their right minds designs for yesterday's standards, when they're going to be competing with tomorrow's products.

This, to me, is far far more important than whether or not it is real. If you're designing a product for a market that's on its way out, you've got a serious problem. If you're clamouring for a product that's designed for a standard that could be phased out by the time you see it, then you're not thinking straight.

Why does this matter, if the product isn't real anyway? First, we don't know it's not real, we shouldn't assume that. But, second, it means that nobody thought it was worth bothering with taking the potential customers seriously. The customers are merely meat with cash. That's not an attitude I can respect. Whichever vendor is making these phones is worthy only of my utmost contempt.

Comment Re:I'm curious what the response will be. (Score 1) 28

If the 'AI' guys are anything to go by; probably get increasingly elaborate with their attempts to bypass whatever rate limiting is put in place. It's honestly sort of wild seeing the hottest, most heavily capitalized, elements of 'tech' wrap around so rapidly and with so little concern toward the sort of traffic patterns you normally associate with criminals as soon as it's in their interests. At one time I would have been surprised.

Comment Re: Yeah. It will (Score 1) 72

There is an intermediate situation that that case arguably illustrated:

Using violence against harder targets is more of an organizational problem; and solving that problem potentially skews your candidate pool; but what's very curious(particularly for a society whose overall violence numbers are very much on the high side by developed world standards) is how safe it apparently is to be widely notorious and a fairly soft target. Thompson was just walking down the sidewalk alone at a predictable time and location. Zero precautions. Something like the Sacklers were a household name for over a decade, with strong cases for culpability in at least low 6 figures worth of deaths sprinkled across a variety of walks of life; even the ones you suspect might be risky like deer hunters with dead kids and members of criminal organizations where internecine homicide is routine, and what came of it? Nothing. Not even any 'foiled at a late stage'/'shot and missed' level stuff.

That's the genuinely puzzling bit to me: not that there's nobody going after people who take the sort of precautions that would probably require one of the old-school 80s red army faction types to deal with; but that it's apparently really safe to be widely loathed and not do much about it in a country where 20k firearms homicides a year isn't considers terribly exceptional. If the people who can actually afford guard labor were having to make the onerous lifestyle commitments to living like someone's out to get them it would be relatively unsurprising that being able to afford competent professionals puts you ahead of angry amateurs much of the time. What is surprising is how often there's apparently no downside to not even bothering. We even have to import the lurid stories of 'crypto kidnapping' by purely financial opportunists from overseas to obtain them in any quantity.

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