Computer Science is about the science of computing - algorithms and other things. It's the same as studying physics, chemistry, and other similar sciences - providing the future theoretical foundations. Here a Turing machine can exist properly.

Computer Engineering is the about application of science - and like other engineering like civil, mechanical, electrical, etc. You have to deal with real-world compromises - just like not all cows are perfect spheres, you have to consider actual aerodynamics of your bovine. You can't create a Turing machine here because you're dealing with real-world limitations. But you can come up with limited versions to do useful work.

Neither are vocational training - they are after all not trade courses. If you want programmers, you can go after the trade schools teaching programmers. These will be folks you can hand a requirement spec to and get code out.

Computer engineers generally tend to be people who can design systems - you hand them a product idea and they can break it down to stuff that programmers can code for, Computer scientists are the ones who you stuff into the R&D departments to produce the technology that the engineers will create and apply.

It's not just cheap cars. After all, in the 80s Hyundai released the Pony - a stupidly cheap car that sold big at the time. But anyone who's tried to start one on a rainy day knows, they weren't great.

Set back the Korean car industry for decades because everyone knows, knew, or had personal experience with the Pony.

BYD's cheap EVs, though, are really good. Quality is fantastic - something Tesla needs to take note of because there's no excuses for gap and paint issues on cars costing 5-10x more.

Even better - no spyware - BYD is too cheap to install a cellular modem in the car. So if you want infotainment, you have Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.

It should be telling that the Ford CEO refuses to return his Chinese made car because he's still learning things about it.

It's also not inherently safer. The problem with current Li-Ion isn't the chemistry - it's the charge density. That's why a discharged spicy pillow isn't. You can stab both a charged and a discharged battery, and only the charged one will catch fire. The discharged one does absolutely nothing.

The breakpoint is around 50% - below that and they're rather tame. Above that and they get spicy.

If the battery technology offers an equivalent charge density, well, it'll have the same problems. Storing that much energy results in fires. Doesn't matter if it's electrical, chemical or other - it's why batteries catch fire, gas-powered stuff catches fire, diesel, etc.

Yes, even LiFePO4 and sodium-ion batteries have been made to catch file as well. Same reason - it's not the chemistry, it's the stored energy.

Well, I'm sure governments get better rates. But yes, it's likely a nationalism thing. Stripe, being American and Adyen being European. People are dropping American tech when they can switch, and I'm guessing the UK contract was up.

And while they may be expensive, it's probably cheaper since they can handle card payments online without having to do all the PCI security stuff.

Not just that, but subscriptions have probably hurt as well because it's a lot harder to audit when everyone is subscribing and now you're paying per user, not per computer.

After all, you can buy Microsoft Office outright for $400, and it's good on one PC. Or you can subscribe to M365 and now you can use it on 5 PCs - 1 of which may be a user's personal home computer, and 5 mobile devices or tablets. And 4 PCs is basically an IT department's allocation of computers for a person - they can have a desktop and a laptop. Their next desktop and laptop on replacement will consume 4 licenses temporarily and they have their home PC license. Then when the user returns their old desktop and laptop, those licenses are recycled and that user has 2 free computer licenses again.

And yes, Trump basically screwed over the US tech companies again because until then, thoughts to switch to altenratives were just murmurs and no one really did anything for decades. But now in the space of a year, everyone is switching to sovereign systems, or even worse, open-source. Everyone threatened it to get better licensing, but now it's actually happening.

No, they are not too depleted. Cars are very power hungry - the average 4 banger with 150 horsepower has over 100kW on tap - which would drain the vast majority of EV batteries in somehwere between half an hour and an hour. Meanwhile, the average house consumes about 1-1.5kW on average per day.

Even the largest grid scale storage only really capable of doing 1MW. And those installations are much larger than 10 EV batteries.

Just because a used EV battery can't supply its 100kW peak doesn't mean it can't be remade as a grid scale pack where it can peak at 10kW. That's why used EV batteries are being reused as grid scale or home scale batteries - 10kW is plenty for peak household in many instances, and even home scale batteries are usually only 20kWh or so (which is less than 1/5th of a large EV battery pack).

Used EV batteries simply can't supply the peak power anymore - their internal impedance increases as they grow old. But they can supply lower power levels for a number of years after. This could mean an EV battery pack gets 30+ years of use - the first half as an EV, the second half as grid scale or home scale battery.

It's actually why battery recycling is in its infancy - there's simply very little in the way of getting sufficient batteries for recycling.

It's also that Texas has basically no worker protections at all, so anything scummy you want to do with your employees you can do. Too hot? You can force them to keep working. If they drop dead, well, a token amount.

You want to lay off half the workforce? Go right ahead, you don't have to do anything about it or even give any money. Just toss their ass onto the sidewalk and be done with it.

You know, got to avoid the whole situation that happened in Korea.

Usually the comparisons boil down to the screen and the build feel. The Dell is likely made of plastic - and probably will feel plasticky when handled. The MacBook Neo is made of metal, and it feels very nice indeed. Sure plastic probably has better qualities, but it'll just feel like cheap plastic which people dislike.

And then there's the screen - many comparisons show the Neo screen to be bright, vivid and all around something nice to look at. Most cheap laptop screen s are dim and not very stunning. It's a screen. Granted, the Neo loses a bit of battery life because the brighter screen can consume more power, but it's a screen that's probably going to be quite nice in the shade outside. (of course you can always dim it down as needed, but having excess brightness is a nicety).

The keyboards are typical - generally decent

Basically, the reason PC makers are fearing the Neo is because it's a $600 laptop that feels like a more expensive laptop. Apple could've cut corners and used plastic to cut down on costs, but they didn't so you end up with a laptop that feels solid.

What is the logic there? How do you get from "police have misused it" to "police should be banned from using it"? I feel a few steps are missing.

Easy - the justice system isn't doing the proper checks. Police use it, and it returns a list of names of people WHO LOOK NOTHING LIKE the person of interest. And police do not even perform a preliminary check of whether or not the person could have committed the crime (they may have an alibi). And the judges do not even take 5 seconds to look at the photos of the suspect or the person identified. And then you arrest a random stranger who is then locked up for several weeks, ruining their lives (lose their job, lose their house, etc).

No, they're not supposed to be using the software and going from "surveillance video" to "arrest"

It should not take a judge in a courtroom to have to dismiss the case for obvious "this guy should never have been arrested in the first place".

It's only a matter of time before facial recognition says a black guy did the crime when it was clearly a white guy in the surveillance video. Or vice-versa.

And as long as police do not use their tools properly they shouldn't have access to them. And using the tools properly means understanding the limitations of it. Facial recognition is not a magic box where you insert video on one end and it spits out the name of the culprit on the other.

No, facial recognition is a tool, and it can be used, when used responsibly. The problem is, the police have not shown to be responsible users of the technology.

Especially when they can ruin lives due to misidentification. Once arrested, it can take 2 or 3 weeks before anyone processes your case. Which means you're stuck in jail for 2-3 weeks. Your job will likely fire you for not showing up to work. And you can lose your house because without money, no job, there goes your rent or mortgage payment. 21 days later someone goes "Oops, you look nothing like the suspect, sorry!" and then they dump you on the street. You lost your job, your house, your family is likely somewhere where you don't know.

(And yes, ICE uses the same tactics for those people they wrongly arrest)

If you're lucky great, you can get a lawyer who can expedite matters - but that shouldn't be the determining factor on whether a false arrest ruins your life.

time_t has been 64 bit on Linux for a long time now (over a decade). You haven't needed a 64-bit system for 64-bit time_t.

x32 changes the model for 64-bit computing - these are the C semantics.

Remember in C, sizeof(int) = sizeof(long) = sizeof(long long)

You can have 32 bit ints, 64 bit longs (long longs are 64-bit), and 64 bit pointers - referred to as ILP64 (int, long, pointer). This is traditional in Linux and similar operating systems.

Or you can have 32-bit int, 32-bit long, and 64-bit long longs (and 64-bit pointers) - LLP64 (long long, pointer) - this is Windows where lots of code assumed ints and longs were 32 bit.

x32 is where int is 64-bits, longs are 64-bit, but pointers are 32-bit. The code runs in 64-bit mode (on amd64 systems, this has benefits because amd64 has access to many more registers than in ia32), but pointers and address space is 32-bits (4GiB max for the application - note the kernel does not have to live in the upper memory).

It's a weird mode of operation because it's based on something where having the extra wide register set but limited memory space is a benefit, or for some architectures like ARM where AArch64 is much more efficient. Likely this is for operations where the data to be worked on is wide but streamed - think DSP or other signal processing applications where you don't need 64-bit pointers because your code is tiny, your data is moved back and forth between several buffers, but would like 64-bit wide registers to process with and having a lot of them is useful. Having 64-bit pointers would just be a waste.

But it's really a niche application where you're having so many pointers it might have an impact on RAM usage if you needed to keep them 64-bit.

This round of consoles is an oddity - the PS5 and Xbox Series have upended the usual discounting rules, and they cost more now than they did in the past. Usually by this time the price of new consoles would've decreased by 50% or more (remember, we're 6 years into the console lifespan).

Now the Steam Deck costs more than what I paid for it.

Though, at least I can say, I got my money's worth of play out of the Steam Deck - it suits my needs for portable PC gaming very nicely.

Yeah, they should've started with something much more reasonable first - like an automated reader that catches people who drive past school buses that are stopped picking up or dropping off students.

Blowing past a school bus with its stop lights on and the sign out is illegal in most jurisdictions and can be implemented fairly easily.

You do that first, which gets the cameras mounted and recording continually standard on all school buses. Then you implement them to do all license plates later on once everyone is used to them.

That's how you do it - you get people onboard with it first then you expand its capabilities.

For space systems, there are a few choices.

For ground based gateways, there are a lot more choices.

For domestic flights, most in-flight WiFi is ground based (think a really sophisticated form of cellular technology). This is because you only need a few ground stations in various locations in the US for coverage. It's also much cheaper than space-based systems, which is why most domestic flights have made in-flight WiFi basically free.

It's also why international flights the in-flight WiFi is often horrendously expensive.

The real innovation here is that Starlink is relatively cheap enough that you can offer in-flight WiFi on domestic flights for basically free as well and be competitive with the ground based systems.

Trying to get the real table to update the ball at 20fps is proving insanely difficult.

Maybe on a 20Mhz 386, but by the time Windows XP was being tested, it would do over million FPS so the XP version was hard-limited to 120FPS, dropping the CPU to under 1%.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com...

Age-verification at OS levels was always a terrible idea. It's difficult to see under what rationale Linux should be granted an exception for this dumb idea. The solution is just to repeal the law and flog the sponsors.

Well, the problem is age verification to begin with. But since we have some states wanting age verification, it's a privacy nightmare. OS based age verification seems to solve the largest problem of all - needing to submit to a third party your ID information to confirm your age. Because they've all been hacked and that ID leaked But if you can embed that in the OS - and Apple and Microsoft know information about you to get a good estimate (e.g., if you have a credit card), then it can be used to attest your age instead of having to submit to the third party.

That's why they don't mind doing the Linux exception - because if the OS doesn't want to do it, then those users can rely on the third party services. Those third party services will exist anyways to handle the many OSes that won't work.

If you think the CloudFlare interrogation is bad now when you use a VPN...