> The EU cannot produce a modern homegrown CPU that does not have US technology embedded in it.

ARM was produced in the UK at the time the UK was part of the EC/EU. And a quick looksee at CPU development over the decades shows there's no US monopoly in producing CPUs.

As for GNU/Linux, sure, GNU is American, but it's free, why not use it if it's not there free for the taking. But at the time GNU/Linux was released, Minix was virtually as functional - had Tanenbaum released it under the GPL or a more permissive license, there's a good chance - given Linux's history - we'd be using Minix with the Linux kernel today.

Meanwhile if you're watching TV or listening to music today, you're using technology primarily designed in Europe - just ask the Fraunhoffer institute how much they've raked in in royalties over the years. If you're using a web browser, congrats, that started as a European project. Using a 4G phone? You're using LTE, the latest version of GSM, and guess where that started.

Nothing you're saying seems to be based upon anything logical or sane beyond "Rah rah Americans superior, Euros suck". It doesn't make any sense. Technology development is world wide, your PC is made up of technologies developed in the US, in Europe, in China, in Japan, in Taiwan, all over the word.

And China, the EU, and the US, are large enough that they can build the entire stack at home if they want.

No, it sounds like TFA is inaccurate. Bricking software with a perpetual license would guarantee class action lawsuits and lost trust with people who bought the software.

Others are speculating what's actually been "bricked" are Office 365 clients. Which makes far more sense. Microsoft wouldn't want to support older clients for Office 365 for rather obvious reasons, and the upgrade is free if available. The only people left in the lurch would be those whose OSes don't support the newer versions and which cannot be upgraded due to the age of their Macs, which sucks, but is also true of, say, web browsers.

This article is likely ragebait. I'd ignore it unless major news outlets are making the same claims by the end of the week. And they will... if it's true.

Nukes aren't really easy to contain. If Russia launches Nukes, that's the end of Russia, one way or another. There is absolutely no chance whatsoever the rest of the world wouldn't intervene at that point.

> Four years ago the situation was the complete opposite, it was unthinkable that Ukraine might not win the war.

This is completely untrue. When the war started pretty much everyone assumed it'd be a Russian walkover. It was a massive, and positive, surprise when Putin's jackboots turned out to be inadequate for the task of invading a mostly defenseless country, even more so given it was given very little help to defend itself outside of some donations of largely obsolete weaponry from sympathetic countries who were too scared of Putin's nukes to get themselves directly involved.

Literally everyone was surprised. On all sides of the conflict. Even three months in, with it becoming clear Putin's half-swastika waving thugs weren't going to do a walkover, the discussion was whether Russia could politically afford to draw out the war long enough to win it (with Ukraine's chances being based not on might, but the political ramifications of a long drawn out war for the chinless fascist shitwaffle that, for some reason, Russia's somewhat pathetic populace looks up to.)

The question has always been whether Putin has the stamina, not whether Russia is able to beat Ukraine if it just fights for long enough.

Now it's starting to look like Ukraine can probably hold its own indefinitely. That's a big change.

Ukraine has famously been using old obsolete equipment cast off from NATO, not the latest greatest of anything beyond their own home grown stuff.

What is it with the pro-Russia position of the first two posts in this thread? Oh, wait, we know...

Slashdot, maybe it's time to block Russian IP addresses?

> With the separation of L1 cache into data cache and instruction cache, every modern CPU is effectively Harvard architecture.

The CPU itself is still using a model that combines data and instructions, it's just caches are introduced with a lot of intermediate logic so that the performance takes advantage of HA. That's not the same as being HA, any more than having VLIWs in microcode makes something RISC. (Cue thousands responding with "Nu-uh!" despite this being actually how CPUs have pretty much always worked, or at least since the 1960s, the only difference being in the mid-1990s they changed from an interpreter model for microcode to more of a compiler-with-optimizer model.)

Anyway, I'm struggling actually to figure out what the OP would think would be the advantages of an actual HA CPU. Are we really talking about something that wouldn't even be able to load code into memory without the support of separate hardware? There's a reason von Neuman architecture is the standard, even if we now have caches that make things a little more HA-like.

It's a shame finding news articles relevant to a story was impossible prior to now. All those years wasted unable to find a cite with no tools available to help us search the Internet.

That surely wouldn't count as ambient noise nor as something an app would collect though?

Or are apps allowed to listen in to, and transmit to their creator, phone conversations now? (For context, most users wouldn't even expect or agree to the Phone app sending "ambient noise" to Google)

Linux did not ban "ethnic Russians", he banned Russian nationals. He made it clear at the time they were welcome to rejoin if they could provide documentation proving they aren't a legal problem - ie do not have Russian citizenship and aren't employed by a Russian entity.

Russia is under sanctions by most of the world after they unilaterally and without provocation invaded Ukraine and murdered large numbers of its citizens, kidnapping huge numbers more. This war is ongoing, and unsurprisingly Russia is considered a Pariah by most of the world with the noteable exception of the Trump regime. Even the US however is participating in sanctions, and the Linux foundation would be in violation of those sanctions if they allowed Russian legal entities including citizens to participate in Linux development.

I don't know where you get "Ethnic Russian" from, but that's absurd.
 

(Good points, and I mostly agree with you on this.)

I'm kinda surprised to be honest that language creators haven't moved in the direction of 32 bit chars, given that would mean the same level of complexity handling Unicode as handling ASCII. And given most CPU's caches are bigger than the maximum likely RAM on a computer back when UTF-8 was invented, probably not significantly less performant or a problem memory-wise. Obviously not as memory efficient, but a bare bones Windows PC today comes with 4Gb of RAM, and that's a level most of the people here would wince at and consider well below usable - when was the last time you had to deal with text that was gigabyte in size? And by "deal" with, I mean load into memory? And if we recompiled every tool Debian supplied using a 32 bit character size, would it add more than a few megabytes in total to the size of the distribution?

You ask if there's a better option in general, and I accept the above will have some people absolutely convinced it's from the Devil. So... my other solution would be to completely abstract strings. Let the String object type determine the best way to store the string while retaining some level of efficiency. If a dev actually needs a UTF-8 string, have a kind of "strcpy" method that copies from the abstracted string to a memory buffer in the wanted format. With Rust there'd be limitations due to the lack of a mark and sweep GGC process, but I'm sure there are ways to be flexible here.

But that's a complicated solution. I don't necessarily disagree with Rust's over-all approach here, although I think letting programmers use a string as if it's a byte array is an unforced mistake and is out of step with the idea of Rust trying its best to prevent devs from writing bad code.

Massively worse. The dot com boom didn't hurt existing businesses except maybe the occasional telco that saw a drop in subscribers to T1 lines.

Major businesses have restructured themselves around AI and essentially started losing control of their business knowledge. They have CEOs that have gone all in on AI thanks to slick marketing and dopamine-based AI design, and will now have to admit they made terrible errors of judgement, which is something most aren't even going to admit to themselves, in doing so. The cost of the clean up will be astronomical. Bail outs aren't going to even be an option, most of these companies will need to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Absolute fucking insanity. And all because management never listens to the actual experts.

Not sure what you mean by the last sentence. Acceptable to whom? It makes it sound like it's a great matter of principle. But I don't think there is one here.

An overly hyped technology, promoted using lies and exaggerations about its capabilities, built through fraud and IP theft, designed to be addictive by carefully crafting its output to stimulate dopamine production, marketed to CEOs who use it in place of cocaine of yore and believe the hype because of an inability to listen to those warning them, imposed by those self same CEOs on the rest of us, and under heavy subsidy, is now having its prices increased to be slightly more in line with the costs of providing the service.

Is that acceptable? No, because the entire thing is unacceptable. We're literally on the verge of companies suddenly realizing they don't understand their own business any more, and are now tied to a company that's charging them more to "understand for them" than they will ever be able to afford, realizing their only choice is to completely rebuild themselves from the ground up or declare bankruptcy - and in the majority of cases, the latter will be the easier option for a board that doesn't want to be sued by its own shareholders for getting addicted to a technology provided by frauds when they were warned would end this way.

>> If C and C++ natively did UTF-8

> You mean, what Rust does.

Rust doesn't really do "native" UTF-8 any more than C does. Try getting a substring of characters 5 through 10 of a Rust String not knowing if some of the characters before the tenth are non-ASCII unicode codepoints.

I was a little surprised by how bad it is in that area. I know they're going for "As efficient as C", but cmon man, strings using byte indexing?

Also: Rust's unicode support is... dubious. Just like C handling UTF-8, trying to measure length or work out what the 5th character is in a string that might contain UTF-8 code points that aren't less than 127 is not a simple thing.