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Comment Wine doesn't run drivers (Score 1) 126

Perhaps this is a golden opportunity for civic minded programmers to spend some time getting WINE to the point where most users can comfortably run WINE instead of Windows XX.

Wine runs in user space. I don't see how Wine could ever run drivers, such as peripheral drivers required by things like the iPhone sync functionality of iTunes or kernel-level anti-cheat required by major online games supporting pickup matches with strangers.

Comment Re:Wrong again, idiot. You're really good at that. (Score 1) 126

Once again drinkypoo goes to great lengths to expose his stupidity for the world to see with another uninformed, idiotic Slashdot post.

Oh look, whoever you are. Nobody knows you.

The 90s and early 2000s was the peak of automotive engineering in the USA

And American cars were still shit. If you RTFA I linked you'll see that the best of the 90s and 2000s were not what was destroyed.

Now go off to cry to someone else about your tiny penis, you will not be missed.

Comment Re:A life of 8500 hours? (Score 1) 23

For those keeping score at home, 8500 hours is just over 354 days.

(a) The Sun doesn't shine 24 hours/day. (On on spot on the Earth /pedantic :-) ) (b) It's still projected to last 5.6x longer than the current petroleum-based coating.

... the CNF-ROE filter could extend a solar cell's lifetime to roughly 8,500 hours. The PET-based filter? Just 1,500 hours.

Just a guess here, and I could easily be wrong. But maybe that's 8500 hours of direct and strong sunlight?

I mention that because solar panels also produce low-but-still-useful levels of power when it's cloudy, as well as during early morning and late afternoon. In those cases of lower levels of sunlight, I suspect that that the UV levels are disproportionately lower; witness the reduced incidence and severity of sunburn on cloudy days and in the early morning and late afternoon.

Comment Bootstrapping with stage0 and Mes (Score 1) 16

Start with stage0 (whose binary seed is about 1 KiB) and GNU Mes. Use mescc to build tinycc, then GCC 2.95, then GCC 4.7, then fairly modern GCC, and then use mrustc to build some version of Rust. The time-consuming part is that each version of the Rust toolchain uses fairly new features in the Rust language, so yes, you'll probably have to build the world a couple dozen times starting with the most recent version supported by mrustc.

Comment Re:Workers still at the company claim they are inc (Score 1) 33

The fact that they're training AI with another AI would point towards them getting high on their own supply. So high they forgot about GIGO, so this probably isn't being pushed by engineers.

You'd think that even the suits would be familiar with the phrase "model collapse" though. It's new and cool.

Comment Re:King George the Third... (Score 1) 250

We're already in a second civil war. It was started by the left years ago.

We never finished the first one. The losers were allowed to keep their flags and their guns. Instead of trying to be one big happy country we should have freed all the Africans and enslaved the Southerners, since they love slavery so much. Then we could have them picking fruit right now.

Comment Kellogg v. Nabisco; Dastar v. TCF (Score 1) 81

So what's the basis of the lawsuit against Disney? There's no damages, so equitable relief? Of what?

You probably guessed correctly: equitable relief in the form of an injunction against Disney bringing a trademark lawsuit. I haven't read the complaint, but I'd be surprised if it didn't cite Kellogg and Dastar.

The Supreme Court of the United States has decided a few cases about the interaction between the Lanham Act, which inclues trademark law, and exclusive rights pursuant to the Copyright Clause. Key cases includes Kellogg Co. v. National Biscuit Co., 305 U.S. 111 (1938), and Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003). In both cases, the Court ruled that the Lanham Act cannot be used to extend the effective term of exclusive rights in an invention whose patent has expired or a work whose copyright has expired. Disney's legal counsel ought to be familiar with the latter case, seeing as it involved a company that is now a subsidiary of Disney.

Comment Trusting trust when bootstrapping a compiler (Score 1) 16

From the article:

The Go project recently arranged for Go itself to be completely reproducible given only the source code, meaning that although a build needs some computer running some operating system and some earlier Go toolchain, none of those choices matters."

[...]

The Multics review is famous for pointing out the possibility of adding a back door to a compiler to insert back doors in critical system programs during compilation [...]. Reading the report inspired Ken Thompson to implement exactly that attack on an early Unix system, probably in early 1975. He later explained the attack in his 1983 Turing Award lecture, published in Communications as "Reflections on Trusting Trust."

David A. Wheeler described a defense against a back door that propagates through the compiler in a 2009 PhD dissertation titled Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling . Diverse double-compiling (DDC) involves choosing two or more other independently developed compilers A and B for a language, bootstrapping compiler C from source code through each of them (building C with A or B and then building C with itself), and ensuring that the output is byte-identical. This relies on previous effort to make builds reproducible.

However, DDC also relies on having more than one implementation of a particular language. Go and Rust each have only one widely used implementation. This means someone trying to wrangle a supply chain has to do one of three things: trust a particular old version of a compiler not to have a back door, compile every version since the dawn of the language (such as when Rust was prototyped in OCaml), or implement a usable subset of the language in a more widely implemented language. This is why mrustc is so important, as it's a way to skip forward by several years' worth of versions when bootstrapping a Rust compiler.

Comment It always comes back to key distribution (Score 2) 16

From the article: "The only problem left is key distribution: The verifier must know who should have signed the code. [...] To the extent that questions of identity can be solved, having authors sign their software can provide even stronger guarantees." It goes on to describe how Debian and Go package repositories include the expected hash value of a package, so that package downloading tools can reject a package that has been replaced.

However, the approach used by Debian to verify developers' identity, that of new developers physically meeting existing trusted developers at key signing parties to exchange OpenPGP public keys, doesn't scale very well. A lot of contributors are disconnected from the strongly connected set of the web of trust because they cannot travel to key signing parties. This can be because of cost, work or child care scheduling, regulatory restrictions related to geopolitics, or regulatory restrictions related to public health (most recently during 2020-2021). These disconnected contributors must forever rely on the bottleneck of "sponsors" (trusted developers who forward packages from the maintainer to the distribution) to get their work into a distribution.

And sponsors are indeed a bottleneck. From the article: "And then you need to be ready to update to a fixed version of that dependency." When a package's upstream maintainer releases an updated version of a package, the package's sponsor in a particular distribution may be too busy with other tasks to handle it the same day. This can mean that there is no available labor to forward the update to the rolling distribution and backport the fix to the version of the package in a stable distribution.

Comment Re:Astonishing one company can do this (Score 1) 126

In fact, a significant percentage of them will probably get Windows 11 installed on them using the bypasses...

If that's the case, why won't the current owners just do that? Are we too stupid/lazy/rich to do that

Mostly too rich. There are potential problems we don't want to deal with, and will pay to avoid it.

so they can be used by people that get their power from coal-fired power plants and run native language OS versions with English keyboards?

They can probably get local character set equipped key caps from China.

Comment Re:Growing body of evidence of damage to humans (Score 1) 17

China has been cultivating markets in the past few decades, but with the type of heavy control people typically describe as "Communist", especially when anyone suggests a similar arrangement be implemented in the US.

Capitalism didn't fix Russia either. It was a very bleak place in the 90s, having a Pizza Hut did not improve their lives much. An oil boom provided a bit of enrichment for them in the 2000s, but there was a dictatorship and oligarchy in place, which clawed all that back from the people within a decade.

Reconstruction in the US was at the very beginning of the first Industrial Revolution and I'm not sure anything from that era is relevant to an industrialized economy.

"Socialism" just seems to mean whatever you want it to mean, but always something scary and very bad.

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