Apple has been steadily moving their hardware into Vintage and Obsolete over the last SEVERAL decades. When a device hits 5 years old, it turns Vintage, which basically means they don't promise to have all parts available anymore, and some may be restricted to "repairs only, not stocking". At 7 years they turn Obsolete, and Apple sells off their entire inventory of parts. In both cases, Apple retains a small number of parts for repairs in places like California, where manufacturers are legally required to carry parts for longer. (10 years in cali?)

So I don't know if I'd classify this as "news", more like a minor update in an ongoing process. "City fixes another pothole, news at 10." I assume most manufacturers have similar policies, but a lot of them are either secretive or aren't so consistently applied. If anything, Apple's doing a much better job for the consumer, with their very public and consistent policy. Now go and try to find out how long Whirlpool is going to carry parts for your dish washer.

Sidenote: I recall a few rare cases where someone REALLY wanted their old mac repaired, and I asked "do you know anyone in California?" I suggested they ship it to their friend and have them take it to a local apple store to get it fixed. AFAIK that plan worked.

I was also known to, from time to time, order a bunch of a part that was prone to failure just before it crossed into Vintage territory. That way we had parts on-hand to repair a common issue when nobody else did. There were a few parts we never ended up selling, but there were also a few that were like gold, with people driving klong distances to come pick up a part not even Apple had anymore. It was a bit of a guessing game. My manager questioned my stocking the last 23 iMac G5 power supplies Apple was willing to sell us, and it took several years, but we sold our last two to an APPLE STORE 100 miles south of here. We probably should have started marking them up, but we never did.

The first rule of security is usually "don't make your own". In other words, use existing, tested, verified, trusted code, protocols, and processes. Now if your INTENT is to roll your own, you really do need a lot of peer review. Even if you have a Ph.D in cyber-security and secure coding, you really still need others to take a look at it to see if you missed something. Because EVERYBODY misses something. The attack surface is just too broad to catch every subtle thing on the first run though.

And if some 3rd party hops in and IMMEDIATELY finds a hole (without the benefit of the source to look through) it's virtually guaranteed to have a lot more holes in it just waiting to be zero-day'd.

That's what API's are for. You can run amuk all you want on the outside, then you ask the kernel for information or to take action by calling an API. There the system's code runs, which we expect will already be carefully tested and validated before it momentarily elevates privileges to do the work. If you made a stupid request, it gets ignored and control returned to you instead of crashing the kernel space. Then do whatever stupid things you like after the API return. At that point the system doesn't really care if you blow up because life will go on without you.

API's allow for "compartmentalization" of execution, and keep the dirty little fingers of random developers out of sensitive areas.

"why was it in the kernel to begin with?"

kernel changes should be tightly controlled. Not pushed out anytime a vendor has a (poorly tested) update they want to blast to the masses.

Keep outside party code out of the kernel !

Not sure how this story cleared that bar. Nothing techie for the nerds, and not a name anyone here recognizes.

TL;DR: Some rich guy you've never heard of died when his superyacht sank.

This whole presidency has just been one big grift. Being a US senator has been widely understood to be a very profitable position, but this is really the first time we've seen the oval office get turned into a money-printing machine for the sitting president.

Other presidents have suspended control of their businesses while in office to eliminate even the appearance of conflict of interest. But this one, every decision he make seems to revolve around figuring out how to funnel more money into his family and businesses.

Unfortunately, it doesn't do any good to try to "expose" him on it, he has NO shame and doesn't care what anyone sees since his appointed buddies aren't going to hinder him. He's just going to keep doing it and throw a tantrum anytime he gets blocked. And that isn't happening nearly as much as it should, since in the past even the congress-critters maintain very relaxed laws to give themselves a wide berth to grab some money. But he's just going all-in on those weak laws (and lack of willingness to enforce them) and is going to wring every penny he can out of the country and its taxpayers.

On the bright side, he's made American History class a lot more interesting. And I'm taking bets that we get a whole rack of new laws on limiting presidential abuse as soon as he gets done robbing the bank.

so now we're going to go through that again? I know, change can be good, but sometimes Apple just seems to want to change things "just because they can".

I just don't think APFS has had enough time to "stew" in the field to get a proper large list of changes and enhancements to make for it yet. They need to sit on this a few more years before making us all reformat our drives again. I want more "bang for the buck" when it comes to inconveniencing me.

Also totally OT, slashdot scrolling my window up and down while I'm typing a reply (because it wants to load a new ad) is SUPER obnoxious behavior. We spend less than 1% of our time on the Reply Composition screen - you don't HAVE to display an ad there, nobody's going to click it.

Existing energy infrastructure already pays for "capacity" thats not being used, to older systems like natural gas and coal. This is necessary because energy production MUST match energy demand or someone's lights are going out. When an energy source (power plant) on a reasonably big grid suddenly goes offline ("trips out"), the grid can tolerate it but drops dangerously low. Other plants that are only putting out say 70% of their capacity quickly spin up to max production to cover this shortfall and bring the grid back up to a safe level. (usually in terms of grid frequency)

These plants don't want to just sit at 70% production most of the time, that costs money to have capacity and not be SELLING it. So the grid pays them a percentage of the going rate for their unused capacity, because the grid MUST have some reserve in case of the previously described situation. They're being paid to have (but not USE) capacity. ie be a "safety net". If we weren't willing to pay them something for this unused reserve, then they'd have no reason to invest in having it in the first place.

Renewable energy sources (like wind and solar) are in similar situations. When its windy and sunny, they produce plentiful, cheap energy. During those times, non-renewable plants can shut down or throttle back, saving consumers a lot of money with their cheap energy. But sometimes production exceeds demand. It depends on the time of day or day of week. (and even time of year) Solar and wind aren't just "on" or "off". Once you get enough of them online, there's going to be periods of time where more energy can be produced than can be used. (and storing energy is hard - we're just getting going with grid batteries) But if you want all that delicious cheap power during the peak use, you've got to give them something for the times they have more power than you need.

So there's nothing new about "paying for capacity", we've been doing that for decades. It IS slightly more annoying though, since this is "leaving money on the table" since that capacity is essentially "free" power not being used. (no coal or natural gas required) That's just the thing with most renewables, they produce power on their own schedule, not when it's convenient for us. We need to improve our energy storage infrastructure. I'm not sure why this is only "becoming obvious" now, it's been a known issue for decades. Maybe it's just been a matter of waiting for better energy storage technology, or maybe it's a "we'll bring up this added expense after we're done paying for the wind and solar plants"?

All this means that just like the hydrocarbon plants, renewable plants need to get paid something for the time they spend not being fully used, because other times we NEED them to run at full capacity.

This isn't a problem that's going to go away on its own. We've got A LOT more ways to make power than to store it. Batteries are probably the best solution in the short term, but they're relatively large for what they store and are expensive. Pumped storage (dams) are the grand-daddies of energy storage, but have very specific geographic requirements. Molten salt is often considered (especially for solar) but has technical challenges and limited capacity. We really haven't found anything so far that works better than batteries, and it's not for lack of trying. So for now you can expect we're just going to have to keep paying energy plants (of all types) for unused capacity.

We seen to be littering the moon with quite a bit of trash recently. I think we have a better record of landing on Venus than the moon right now, which is saying something!

I suspect it's a matter of cost and convenience. "it's closer and easier" seems to be leading to lower quality landers. No redundancy, simple things breaking, fragile designs, lax testing, no way to fix problems that come up, anything goes wrong and it's a complete mission fail.

We're launching so many landers lately that either totally fail or provide a pittance of science before dying. It's embarrassing. What are these, K-Mart blue light specials?

That may be more to do with the fragility and isolation of Ercott. And batteries are probably the most cold-tolerant source of power in Texas. They pair well with solar that way. Can make it and store it even when the temps are well below freezing.

Texas looks to me like the IDEAL state for solar. So much of their land is essentially unusable above-ground. This may be another big contributing factor to the solar there, all that cheap land for installations. And all those oil wells don't mind sharing space with solar.

AI is almost never given an option to respond with "you didn't give me enough information", "that question was ambiguous" or "can you be more specific about...." Instead it's usually programmed to give the best answer it can, with the information you've provided, and to sound very confident about it.

So yes, provide the agent with as much information as you have the first time you ask the question. Otherwise it's going to make lots of assumptions, some of which will be be wrong, and will very confidently give you the wrong answer.

I studied AI *decades* ago, and we never once considered adding "E) None of the Above" sorts of options in our output network. This isn't a new problem, it's one of the oldest in AI. Unfortunately, it's probably going to require some fundamental changes in how we train our agents to fix it so they have the capacity to confidently say "I don't know".

Imagine an AI that's being made to analyze a photo to decide if it's a picture of a cat. It will get trained on 100,000 photos that are either a cat or not a cat, and it can only say YES or NO. That's how it's been done for years. There aren't any pictures that are too dark to identify the animal, there aren't any pictures where that might be a cat but maybe it's a dog or a possum, and there's no "I can't tell" option in the output net to train it on. So this "problem of hallucinations" isn't the agent's fault, it's just being trained wrong. Too many geeks stuck in "binary mode", all they know is "yes" and "no", with no concept of "maybe". (currently, the only way they can "fake" a Maybe is to take a look at the strength of the option chosen, and if it's not above a certain threshhold then they MIGHT do something to indicate "low confidence", but if you dig into how the network and the training work, that actually isn't a good indication of uncertainty, especially where lack of information is concerned.

all you have to do is stop keeping track of the weather and sing happy songs and everything will be just fine!

followup: It looks like they're not going to refund OR try to steal the money, they're just going to move it: "After May 5th, you can use your credit within the Skype web portal or in Microsoft Teams using the Skype dial pad. "

Though I have no idea what I can USE it for. Something in there must be pay-to-play.

it's now against federal law to pull that crap. It's basically a "gift card". Several years ago the feds got involved with all the gift card places charging "inactivity fees" and "expiring" people's credit. The feds realized that gift cards were paid up front in cash, and that taxes were only getting collected when the money was SPENT. So the money companies were taking from customers via the fees and expirations were "pre-tax". And NOTHING gets the govt panties in a twist like cheating on your taxes.

So legislation was passed to make that illegal. Now, you can't levee inactivity fees and you can't just zero (confiscate) someone's balance if they don't use it for awhile. Skype's credit should work the same way. They can't claim it was taxed because when you deposited $10 you only paid $10 and $10 showed up on your account.

probably started with Windows ME