Flash memory is dirt cheap. Optical media are more expensive

Flash media is cheap if bought blank. It's expensive if you have to program it.

Optical media is expensive individually, but dirt cheap when you can press them by the thousands per hour.

That's why optical media hangs around - a CD can be stamped in about a second - it's basically just a more precise form of injection molding. The same applies for DVDs and Blu-Rays - they can stamped out in seconds.

But flash memory cannot. If you go with the cheap flash memory devices, programming 1GB will take about a minute. You can make it go faster by parallelizing the operation but approaching the speed of a single CD stamper is very expensive. The more expensive flash memory that's faster can probably do it in a few seconds, but then the media costs jump dramatically - it's why you can buy 128GB thumbdrives for a couple of bucks, but a 1TB SSD costs hundreds.

Plus, flash memory has power off lifetimes - if you don't use it, it gradually forgets over a period of a few years. CDs generally last as long as the coating doesn't rot.

Honestly, AI is useful here for a lot of the mechanical bits.

Darwin is BSD userland so most of the porting for the NetBSD would be just mechanical bits of changing Makefiles and other things. And AI is really, really, really good at that. Anything that really is just a mechanical transformation is a good candidate for AI assistance. It can mean you can easily port most of the Darwin userspace over with very little effort.

And the parts that aren't so easy can be assisted or done by humans. If you have 1000 packages that need to be ported over, AI can probably help you doing 950 of them in a few hours. The remaining 50 are ones a human probably can do in a few days, so you can have something up and running quick.

Or you can force a human to do 1000 packages, and they can probably do it in a couple of weeks but likely will run out of steam by the first week because it's boring work.

I'm no AI promoter, but I can see when tools are well, tools. Let AI do the boring stuff while you work on the stuff that scratches your itch. Isn't that what open-source was supposed to be about?

It sounds a lot like putting speakers in EVs to make vroom vroom noises. Whatever affection people have to it, the manual gearbox worked around a technical problem with engines and isn't in any way superior for driving. Yes having control over the engine is important, but the best option for that is pedal shifters. This seems like Ferrari chasing a nostalgia market rather than developing a performance car.

But then this is the same Ferrari that just released the Luce so that would track.

No, it makes complete sense.

You can't have your traditional H shifter anymore - it's just too impractical because honestly the modern engine and gearbox has 8+ gears to deal with. Sure truckers have dealt with it with their 10 to 18 speed gearboxes, though usually the 10 speed is a 5 speed with a high and low lever, while the 18 speed is a 6 speed with a 3 speed tied together so you have multiple shifters. It's just a lot of manual hand flailing.

Modern race vehicles know shift speeds are basically it, and the manual gearbox is no more for them - it's all computer controlled shifting and the driver paddle shifts because that's really the only way you can go between gears in sub-100ms.

For today's cars, automatics have basically taken over because 6 speed autos are basically standard, and many now coming with 8, 10 or 12 gears. Some can still be bought with a manual option, but compressing 10 gears down to 6 means very tall gears and basically lousier gas mileage because your gears are not ideal.

So basically getting it to an automatic gearbox - be it a standard automatic, or a dual clutch standard box with a computer controlled shifting that can be controlled from paddles is basically the way to go.

Ferrari is not doing it for nostalgia - they have to do paddle shifters because a 12 speed gearbox cannot be shifted traditionally with an H shifter. Meanwhile having the control paddles affords can avoid a lot of the guessing. While modern computer controlled transmissions are very good at picking the right gear, there are still some circumstances that it's not as ideal so a way to manually control the transmission can help (usually during extreme weather - snow, heavy rain, etc).

That is the way the industry has to go - Ferrari is showing you cannot take advantage of their cars unless you let the computer do the shift, while the logic of when to shift remains with you the driver. And that's perfectly fine, though purists probably won't call it a "manual transmission". But it's what the industry recognizes is happening.

Heck, even in trucking many new trucks are coming with automatic transmissions - likely with some sort of manual up/down in case you need to pick a better gear. More gears makes the engine more efficient and fast computer shifts mean very smooth rides. In a modern luxury vehicle you cannot feel it shifting - it's so silky smooth the only thing you notice is the tachometer needle moved.

It's likely irreversible in that there wasn't a way to recover it. Chances are the only reason the data still exists is because of... backups. You know, the things companies do.

It's why things like GPDR make it hard because you can ask them to delete all your data just fine - they can delete it from the databases they have and it's irrecoverable.

But the problem is your data exists on backup tapes - likely on daily and weekly sets maintained on-prem and cycled monthly to offsite storage. Chances are there are transaction logs as well that can be used to bring those backups up to date.

It's why deleting data is often quite hard - and once it hits backup it's basically impossible.

The data was irrecoverable - just like deleting a file off an SSD is nowadays (it gets TRIMmed so even data recovery tools cannot get it back the SSD will return zeroes). To get it back they likely had to send for a backup tape and then manually restore it and extract his record out. Of course it costs money to do since the tape has to be retrieved, restored to a spare and the database record exported so it can be re-imported, and they don't want it to be a regular thing.

Of course, going forward the "deleted" flag is likely going to just be another database flag so you can "delete" an account, but it'll still be hanging around to save the need to restore from backup.

Doesn't matter that you don't "own" the Whitehouse, a con artist once sold the Eiffel Tower, and almost got away with selling it twice. Just say you're authorized to sell the Whitehouse because Trump doesn't like it anymore and the ballroom costs too much, and someone will believe you and buy it because at this point why wouldn't they.

What do you think happened to the East Wing? He sold the lawn as well (his birthday bash ruined it, of course, a no-bid got the contract to re-sod it).

At this point the only reason he hasn't sold the rest of the White House is he's living in it and worried whoever buys it might kick him out.

The next guy might find it cheaper to ask the Canadians to burn it down again so tit can be rebuilt than to try to fix whatever's left.

I regret to inform you that you have woefully underestimated it. The actual retail rate offered to consumers is closer to $2200 US per gallon. Sources: internet-ink.com, cbc.ca. This $14 million fine is only worth like, seven thousand gallons, or less than 200 oil barrels of ink.

That puts it among the most expensive liquids around. It beats things like Dom Perignon (champagne), human blood, spider and snake venom (used in making anti-venom), and horseshoe crab blood (blue blood) which is used in medicine.

Printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids out there, beating out many liquids used to create lifesaving medications.

Maybe it is the push off the cliff that Paypal needs.

Not likely. Because PayPal still does one thing no one else does - which is allow two random people to accept credit card as a payment option. In other words, the recipient does not need to have a merchant account.

While PayPal does more than this nowadays, that is still one thing that no other system does. There are alternative systems but they generally are very limited (I think Visa has one that allows random people to take Visa payment).

Sure there are private networks that do the same thing if people are both members of it, but you'll find they're US only and generally hijack through a bank account to get the transfers done. But if you just wanted to do a random payment not using cash, PayPal is surprisingly your only option.

All other options require both sides to have an account - PayPal only requires the recipient to have an account - the sender being charged does not need one.

For instance, they created the SMB file protocol not from computer science first principles, but as a hack. And so everyone who wants to interoperate with it (e.g. Samba) is then locked in a decade long attempt to reproduce every single bug in their own code.

Incorrect. SMB was created by IBM to share printers and files in the PC-DOS (and likely token ring) days.

Microsoft adapted it for their Windows networking product in Windows NT as an alternative to the IPX/SPX protocol that Novell had.

Andrew Tridge then realized his SMB client/server project would work not just for IBM, but for Microsoft networks as well with a few slight adaptations to evolve the protocol (especially since it wasn't running on TCP/IP in the early days).

Microsoft later adapted it for Windows Vista in SMB 2 and Windows 7 as SMB 3. But SMB 1 still remains a deprecated option because many Linux based NAS devices, in an attempt to skirt the GPLv3, still use an ancient version of Samba that only supports SMB1. (Samba went to GPLv3 about 3 weeks before it released support for SMB2). This is why many routers and cheap NAS boxes still require you to install SMB1 support.

(NAS providers like QNAP, Synology and vendors like Apple chose not to use the GPlv3 Samba after this, and wrote their own SMB2+ implementation). The need for SMB1 should decrease further because the Linux kernel itself has SMB2+ support inside it.

At which point we can truly ditch the nightmare that is SMB1, which is kept around less for Windows and more for devices running Linux. (You need SMB1 for Windows XP and lower and those haven't been supported in over a decade)

The other thing is SMB was for file and print sharing, and Microsoft did the EEE thing with it once IBM was no longer interested in it which Samba had to follow faithfully to be completely compatible.

Correct. SS7 is ancient, and was never created with security in mind. Bell created it in the 1970s, and very idea that security was needed would not even have been in the engineers' world view.

This is a protocol only meant for phone companies, and Bell was still a monolith back then. Similar to the early internet in the 1970s where only the military and a few computer scientists even had access.

Exactly. It was created for a world where only phone companies were to connect to it and those connections were vetted basically by government people in suits who establish diplomatic relations who then let the telecom systems interconnect. And since you can manually route calls, those diplomatic relations generally interconnected the world because every link was trusted. Other than maybe a few countries (e.g., US and Canada, where Bell generally interconnected them together in whatever way made sense from a geographical sense).

These days anyone with a couple thousand dollars a month can get an SS7 connection and route a phone call through it, be it VoIP, POTS, or other thing.

And yes, old cellular network protocols are vulnerable - LTE and below use SS7. 5G uses a much more secure networking system.

Screenless is stupid. Screens are cheap now. By all means make it audio centric but if I just have to get out my phone to get any info that isn't convenient to get via audio, then I might as well just use my phone for the audio stuff too.

Why is it stupid? Your Amazon, Google and Apple all have screenless speakers that do what this does. You might even remember when Burger King triggered a bunch of them with an ad on purpose. (Apple processes their audio stream to avoid triggering their devices so anytime someone at Apple does "Hey Siri" it doesn't trigger your unit at home).

They are likely still very popular devices and people seem willing to put in such spy gadgets in their home that can listen to them 24/7.

Granted Amazon did start offering units with screens. But the general consensus is it's more to show you ads rather than the few times when you need a screen.

But yes, just another "smart" spy-speaker in the end.

So the Billionaire can leave, but he'll end up controlling his company remotely from out of state unless he can do everything with AI or make do with mediocre employees or use AI and have a few less-than-stellar employees for grunt tasks.

And then wait for California to introduce a law that if the CEO works remotely from the company, then workers are allowed to work remotely as well. And by remotely, I mean the CEO lives in a place where no substantial office of the company exists. So if they live in Florida, they will need to set up an office in Florida where the CEO will go to and staffed with a certain number of people who also come in to work daily. Say, 10 to 20 people must work in the same office as the CEO to be not considered working remote. And those 10 to 20 people must regularly come into the office.

And said office must in a properly zoned for business. So no inviting 10 family members for an in-home office.

If nothing else, Florida and Texas now see a boom in CEOs having to open offices and hire people.

So it turns out politicians can pass legislation that helps people.

Mamdani has been doing a lot of it.

Of course, it was too hard for the "other" politicians because they were being paid off. Mamdani ran on a platform that those other politicians were describing as something that would destroy the state.

Finding a new encrypted filesystem must be upsetting you.

Apple's official method is multi-step.

First, you decrypt the volume - you control-click the disk and click Decrypt. Wait for it to decrypt (takes hours).

Then you convert it to APFS, the current filesystem Apple uses.

Then you enable encryption on APFS and wait for it to encrypt.

Chances are the HFS+ encryption is likely outdated and weak and sometimes it's better to not pretend. Or it was a hacked addon to HFS+ which didn't support it initially. Like how fscrypt is on Linux where support is added to ext filesystems. APFS natively supports encryption and getting rid of a filesystem layer to simplify things would add security.

Yes, but you have to have a magnetic field to push against.

In Earth orbit the device can interact with the Earth's magnetic field, but propulsion to the moon or Mars?

What will it push against? How powerful is the sun's magnetic field at that distance?

Maybe it's just for Earth's orbital use? The key reason satellites age out in orbit right now is because they run out of fuel to keep them in orbit. So they have to have a reserve amount for a burn to deorbit or to enter a parking orbit.

If this means satellites have basically unlimited fuel as long as they have power, this could mean satellites are smaller, lighter and last basically forever. It certainly removes the main reason a satellite has to be decommissioned.

The ISS gets routine fuel shipments so it can stay in orbit. But satellites don't and various ideas have been proposed to refuel satellites so we don't have to junk otherwise working equipment.

Why would this be surprising? They know if is or has been registered right?

Exactly - how else would Microsoft be doing it? I would say this started in the Windows XP era where they tied your Windows activation key to the hardware IDs. Change your CPU and you might have to re-activate Windows. Or change your motherboard. Or change your network card.

Microsoft always hashed your hardware IDs to form a unique hardware ID they used to tie to your activation key. If you tried to install Windows XP on multiple PCs and use the same key Microsoft would notice and disable your key.