You can get porn for free you know, there's no need to wait 5 years for your fridge to show it to you.

> The premise of a device having "one job" again is the position of a luddite.

No, it's the position of being anti-enshitification.

A refrigerator's main function is to keep food cold. That's the reason you buy a refrigerator. If putting a screen on a TV actually had a demonstrable benefit to that purpose then fine; but it doesn't. It actually has no objective benefit whatsoever, and the increased complexity not only increases cost but also reduces reliability. That's literally the definition of enshitification.

If having a computer screen in your kitchen, mounted to your fridge, is that useful... get a tablet and mount it to the fridge. Not only would that be cheaper, but if the tablet fails it doesn't make the refrigerator scrap metal and vice-versa and you can upgrade one without throwing out the other. Bonus is you can take the table off the fridge and put it where you need it.

I have a leatherman multitool that I keep on me whenever I'm out of the house. It does a lot of things, but it does none of those things as good as a dedicated single-purpose tool of the same kind. It's a good knife but it will never be as good as an actual knife. It's a good pair of pliers but it will never be as good as a proper pair of pliers. It's a decent screwdriver but I will always reach for a normal proper screwdriver if there's one available. Does it make me a luddite to not want a single item that does all things kinda shitty instead of many items that each do their one thing well?

=Smidge=

An exception is the Zeropatch technique where they dynamically update machine code of the OS in memory on the fly for folks who can't tolerate downtime.

It's certainly not common on unix systems.

Or an IoT device running a 2.6 kernel that is never going to be updated. :)

Then, considering that this is at the Swizz and German border,

A swiz is a swindle as any fule kno.

Did Dolby break any countermeasures of Snap's copyrighted code in what would appear to be a significant reverse-engineering effort to make this determination?

Or do they only have a suspicion?

This scenario reminds me of the SCO lawsuits when the progress of technology made that company obsolete.

and AAC is better than Ogg for the same bandwidth

Is it? When I followed such things that was the case for a while, but the encoders started getting better. Heck the MP3 encoders got so good they were surprisingly close. I thought all of the codecs of that later gen ended up basically on a par.

Anyway didn't Opus wipe the floor with all of them being better in every combo of bitrate and latency than the competition?

Yep.

But also I'm guessing they are suing Snap because they consider them to be a much softer target than, say, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Samsung or Tencent (like they'd care lol) who would likely kerb stomp them into the next millennium without even noticing.

Big enough to matter, not big or experienced enough to put up a good fight. And also holy shit they've been having a terrible time of it on the NYSE! Halved in value this year (and 1/10 from the covid peak). I expect they are perceived as not likely to want a protracted and expensive legal battle, and Dolby have identified the weakest zebra worth eating in the herd.

Patent troll fuckers.

For some reason the patent clock rarely starts the moment a technology is known. MPEG-1 was published in 1991, but patents on, for example, MPEG Audio Layer III didn't expire until 2012 in Europe, and 2017(!) in the United States, 21 and 26 years after the standard was released. While there's been some patent reform since then, it's still the case that a standard can be published in the middle of patent applications, and the 20 years doesn't start until the application is approved, which can be years after publication.

So don't count on any of this being OK in 2034.

It's a shame the expired codecs didn't have mechanisms for, say, HDR, as I suspect with bandwidth availability becoming so cheap, and CPU power better than ever before, it'd be nice to be able to switch back to a simpler, albeit less efficient, codec with no legitimate patents still applying like MPEG-2. Unfortunately even trying to graft HDR onto it would be a problem - the ITU did apparently add something in 2014, but that means you won't be able to trust it until the late 2030s...

I wish I could find the paper but someone did actually propose a SSTO spacecraft using Bussard's Polywell reactor.

General Protection Fault outranks Colonel Panic and says drop and give me 20 reboots.

Yeah that happened to me! Turns out the stuck was just a bit loose. After thoroughly cleaning it and reseating, the crashes vanished. Fortunately because DDR5 is stupid expensive now.

Nothing should have happened (except between Hillary and Bill if Hillary wanted it.) It was never any of our businesses.

But multiple people got their names dragged through the mud on it. So what you're saying is just absurd. Years of breathless commentary in the news, a pointless impeachment, and over what? A affair between two consenting adults where the only victim was Hillary?

Meanwhile Trump isn't even facing an investigation for half the shit he's doing, and was able to be re-elected despite constitutional provisions banning insurrectionists from being elected President.

I’m waiting for the day when they forget to renew a domain and porn ads start showing up.

Zero crashes on my Macs since 10 years or more.
5 blue screens on my Windows 11 acer last 28months.
Minimum 10 times "windows discovered a problem, and needs to reboot now", often by two or even three reboots in a row.
Not even telling what the problem is ... might be ... could be.

How do you come to 10x when you have on one side zero crashes and on the other side 2 dozens, depending how you count ... well, I guess someone rounded zero up to 2, or something.

Well, when I read it was all pounds, in Europe, I wondered how much that is in kg. As I am lazy, I just divided by 2 ... but the result was a kind of odd number, so I lost a few bits of accuracy.

Then, considering that this is at the Swizz and German border, I wondered if they used forced workers, like the many refugees to get the container on the truck!

I am relieved to read, they used a crane!!

Now I only have to figure what exactly -half a thousand degrees Fahrenheit is. I guess I can google for an AI to find that out.