I'm not defending AI, but it's interesting to compare the price to other machines released long before AI existed.

Adjusted for inflation, the 2TB model is a bit cheaper than a Panasonic 3DO or a Neo Geo was at launch. But a lot more than any Playstation ever had been.

Consoles generally punch above their weight because games can be specifically optimized for them, compared to on PC where a compatibility is the most important thing. It will be interesting to see if developers optimize for this thing.

It did mention they were a junior, so yes probably greatly reduced fees. This would have been County Court too, Small Claims Track, so in theory you don't even need a legal rep. For £7k you might want one anyway, especially if the case is complex.

That's how much PS5 controllers are as well. The Steam one looks better though.

Could be an interesting use for old phones. I've got a couple. I looked at using them as CCTV cameras, but the software is kinda crap. If they could run a more generic Linux distro they might be useful, low power servers.

That depends on your definition of "Linux". On my Gentoo desktop [OpenRC + MATE], TigerVNC no longer works, because recent versions require Gnome and Gnome requires SystemD.

There was definitely some bullshit in the arguments. One was that systemd could bring up network interfaces much faster, but when you dig into it, that speed "improvement" was largely due to not running the "arping" command to check for duplicate devices already on the network.

It's all up in the air now. Starmer resigned, and it looks like Burnham will run unopposed. He may keep the social media ban, as that has happened in other countries and seems to be reasonably popular and sensible. Should extend it to over 65s as well.

But the VPN ban I can see being walked back quickly as unworkable and unpopular. A pointless fight to have before the social media ban has even been tested.

I do remember that, but the counter argument which seemed persuasive was that the simplifications to the init system and other apps (not just GNOME) was compelling.

And don't they all use systemd? They must have a good reason for it.

Yeah, but to facilitate you continuing to use your familiar commands, the maintainers of the distro have to forego the convenience of systemd. Clearly it offers a lot to them, which is why the vast majority adopted it.

Is there any info on how this location tracking would work? GPS isn't going to cut it, it needs a battery and world wide cellular/satellite connection to track things being shipped, and once installed will be in a Faraday cage (the server enclosure/rack/datacentre).

Are they going to rely on it detecting when it is in a Chinese server somehow? Try to get an external IP address? Something in the driver?

It seems doomed to fail and easily bypassed. I'm sure it will spur further investment in Chinese AI chip manufacturing too, which is already progressing at a very rapid pace.

UTF-8 was a mistake. I get that they wanted to make string handling with existing code as painless as possible, and for most Latin derived languages a 32 bit char is approaching 75% wasted space, but the issues introduced by UTF-8 are far worse. UTF-16 doesn't have enough code points. You could argue for 24 bit.

Cylindrical cells are not the future though, they are older tech and have proven to be largely inferior to prismatic and blade batteries. Prismatic cells for lower cost and higher energy density, blade batteries for extreme performance. Tesla is using older chemistry too.

You botched copy/pasting the quite. I fixed it for you:

That makes complete sense and is in fact how all major operating systems optimize boot times, and how software developers often optimize performance in general. Do as little as possible, and do as much of it in parallel as possible.

Tricky to do with init scripts because there are a lot of dependencies to manage and checks that need to be done for timing and sequencing. systemd makes it easy and I've used it extensively for building a custom OS for embedded systems where hardware init and configuration has to happen in specific sequences, but can be parallel with other parts of the OS starting.