* Posts by Mage

9252 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007

Raspberry Pi OS 5.2 is here, with pleasant tweaks to Wayland-based desktop

Mage Silver badge
Linux

Pi OS

Installs quickly

fast boots

Negative

Low compatibility (Wayland?)

Near zero theming and desktop customisation. Very like Windows 10 and the only advantage of Win 10 is running x86-64 Window programs.

Slow GUI

Slow Applications

So I installed the Ubuntu Mate ARM64 on a second SD card.

Not a fan of Ubuntu, though used it for years. Much longer to install and slower to boot. I was able to install debi and symantic package manager from the Software Boutique and then install ARM versions of Linux Mint + Mate applications I use and also ditch some of the Ubuntu specivfic stuff.

Fully customisable desktop

GUI faster

Applications faster

More compatible

Uses X rather than Wayland.

All on 2G RAM Raspberry Pi 4B I'd just bought and a Lexar 32 G micro SD card. Configuration of updates, kernels, installing packages etc all a bit iffy compared to Mint on Ubuntu PI, but better than Win10!

Wayland isn't ready and why try to imitate one MS worst GUIs (in terms of flexibility and usability) since Windows 2.x? Vista and XP could easily be made like Win2K / Win98. Win 7 isn't to bad.

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: there were the foxes, and horses, and camels, and...

Cane toad.

Hedgehogs in New Zealand from England!

Japanese Knotwood

Killarney: The great rhododendron disaster, also lilies. Ireland has 66 regulated Invasive Alien Species of special concern.

There is even an Irish island inhabited by wallabies.

North American Grey Squirrels in Britain.

Zebra mussels in loads of places.

I'm suspicious of slugs, snails, squid, octopus and horseshoe crabs. A passing Alien ship?

Nvidia rival Cerebras says it's revived Moore's Law with third-gen waferscale chips

Mage Silver badge

Ivor Catt

Ivor Catt developed and patented some ideas on Wafer Scale Integration (WSI) in 1972, and published his work in Wireless World in 1981, after his articles on the topic were rejected by academic journals.

I remember those articles. Also later ones about autorouting to avoid defects.

He's still alive.

Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0

Mage Silver badge

Re: It was very nearly ready

What this product shows is that strategy could have started some 3-5Y earlier, with Win3 as the low-end OS and OS/2 2 as the high-end OS.

But it would have made no difference to Apple, phones, Mp3 players, tablets etc, and eventually IBM & MS would have fallen out and there would have been NT, but delayed.

A better What if, is what if IBM had used DRDOS (CP/M 86), and eventually multidos and GEM?

Or if MS had never done Win9x, but a game console and NT 4.0 in 1995. Actaually there was MSX in 1983, but wasn't quite right. Win9x should never ever have been sold for business and it's why we ended up with NT security model getting broken, stupid programs that needed you to be admin etc.

I did use DRMultidos and serially connected PCs in early 1990s for computer lessons.

Mage Silver badge

Re: 8088 & 8086

Not proper 16 bit. Only 64 k segments. The 80186 was maybe Intel's first real 16 bit in that family? However the 80286 was a real 16 bit CPU (usable without 64 K segments) The 8088 and 8086 really only differed in I/O bus. There were real 16 bit cpus. IBM even had one (i.e. flat addressing without 64K boundaries). The 8088 & 8086 were closer to 8080 & 8085 than to a 80286.

Mage Silver badge
Pint

Re You forgot

Yes, SCO only bought the code MS added and an AT&T licence, which makes the SCO 2.0 litigation even crazier.

And BSD, GNU, Linux and actually everything after AT&T/Bell Labs UNIX was because AT&T pissed off all the Uni folk that did most of the work and said, "sorry folks, we entirely own it".

That's the big what if, not OS/2, but what if AT&T had admitted that too many people not paid by them had worked on it and so it should be "commons", belong to the Human Race, everyone, free. AT&T practically "stole" it.

MS did to a fair bit to Xenix* to make it run on the rubbish 8086. I'd only seen it on a 386, though I had a giant Wang box that was using a 286 and enormous cards and not the stupid ISA bus, designed for "proper" 16 bit Xenix. They had an extra board that was needed to run DOS and Win 2.x and maybe Win 3.0 in standard mode.

Have a virtual beer.

(* Xenix sale Karma? MS later paid out nearly $11 Billion to have a licence for Nokia brand for a year, and get ZERO IP. Then have the cost of shuttering the unwanted phone factories and distribution etc. Whose Trojan was Elop? TCL, who made all the Alcatel phones still has the Alcatel badge and has the Nokia one. Nokia is still there for Infrastructure, the ex-paper and welly boot maker that made TVs and Set Boxes. TCL was #2 in TVs not long ago, but other people's badges on them!).

Mage Silver badge
Windows

Re: Very Different

Sorry, win 3.x (the win 2.x was less use than DR GEM) and my 1987-1989 project had a pen.

Pens with digitisers are "in" again. Apple Pencil, Wacom's pen on Android, reMarkable & Kindle Scribe (not PC graphics tablets, though had been on a 1990s tablet), NTrig/MPP on MS Surface and some Kobos. The USI2.0 Pen on Android tablets.

Google's off-line Gpad handwriting conversion does work with a finger, but a pen is better.

All these things were envisaged and worked on before IBM even did one 8088 PC with Microsoft's "wide boy" bought in DOS. MS had made a success with BASIC ported from Dartmouth College. IBM only picked MS because they were not actually serious about the PC, almost built out of a catalogue and the 8088 barely more than an 8080, which is why it was so easy to port CP/M, Wordstar, Dbase, Supercalc etc. 64K segments and similar instruction set. The 8088 could even use the 8 bit 8085 bus/peripherals. IBM didn't use the more expensive 16 bit bus 8086.

So OS/2 was a belated IBM attempt to cash in on the unexpected PC success. Some good ideas, but too late. The 32 bit Intel 80386 launched in 1987 and crippled by legacy 8086 mode.

Intel had good manufacturing. But the x64 being from AMD, selling off their ARM portfolio (most from DEC), getting suckered into HP's Itanium all suggest Intel is living on past reputation. What happened to Optane?

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Very Different

There would never have been any 32-bit versions: no Windows NT, no Windows 95; no Explorer, no Start menu or taskbars. That, in turn, might well have killed off Apple as well. No iPod, no iPhone, no fondleslabs. Twenty-first century computers would be unimaginably different.

Interesting article, but this paragraph is hyperbolic nonsense.

Also Win95 was two years AFTER NT and should never have existed. The Explorer shell was separate and was on preview on NT 3.5x

It's got nothing to do with the Mac. Nothing to do with iPod, iPhone or Tablets and a Win 3.1 Tablet existed. (iOS, Linux, Android, Windows 10).

Lisa, precusor to Mac, was released on 19th January 1983. Development started earlier. This MS OS/2 SDK was 1990. I think there was an MS OS/2 from 1989.

CPUs with 32 bits and flat addressing meant OS for them would be developed. Intel was behind.

Most of the WIMP GUIs were inspired by 1970s Xerox.

Apple iPod succeeded because of iTunes 99c track deal. They were late into PMPs/MP3.

The iPhone a success due to the data contracts. It was 9 years after smart phones came out and 2 after Nokia politics killed their better than S60 GUI on Symbian.

MS was shipping Xenix in 1982. All internal Microsoft email transport was done on Xenix-based 68000 systems until 1995–1996, when the company moved to its own Exchange Server product.

MS doing NT was inevitable. The IBM - MS "partnership" on DOS and then OS/2 was never going to last.

Nokia switched from 486 to ARM for Communicator 9210 in 2001. The ARM CPU was first used in desktop Archimedes and also funded by Apple (and usein Newton, started in 1987 and released in 1992). Acorn's ARM made it possible to have decent battery life on PMPs, Smart phones and Tablets.

Acorn's Archimedes had RiscOS and Unix by 1988, running on ARM

Tablets:

Alan Kay's Dynabook "A personal computer for children of all ages (1972)"

PDAs were an early form of tablet and I was designing one in 1987-1989, with aspects inspired by Dynabook, Project Xanadu, Apple Hypercard, the digital cordless system that later became DECT, and DOS based FutureNet CAD/CAE (which used hyperlinks).

Hitachi patented a touchscreen tablet in 1979.

Atari 1992

EU / Acorn Newspad 1994-1997.

1992, IBM shipped the ThinkPad 700T running GO Corporation's PenPoint OS.

1992 MS also had a Pen version of Windows.

OS/2 was interesting. I did some support on MS OS/2 with LanManager server maybe 1992 and migrated IBM OS/2 Textmode applications for a Finance Dept to NT4.0 in 1998. I played with OS/2 Warp and the kids had Win9x for games consoles. We were installing NT 3.5 servers, then NT 3.51 after Win95 came out, migrations from Xenix or Netware. Installing WFWG 3.11 as workstations with Win32s till NT4.0 came out.

1993 AT&T's EO Personal Communicator on the Hobbit CPU

1993 launch of Apple Newton on ARM

Intel was behind on 32 bits and the 8088/8086 wasn't even a real 16 bit. That held PC OSes back for years. The 80286 was first real 16 bit PC, and 386 the 32 bit. But DOS, win3.x and Win9x started them in 8086 mode. Win95 executed older code natively, but NT, already 2 years old, used a VM for 8086 code (pseudo 16bits because segments). It ran only 32 bit. Win9x killed the Pentium Pro because it had no simple switch back to native 8086 mode.

IBM was caught out with PCs being successful, but the PS/2 and OS/2 were typical IBM dead ends. They were selling AS/400 computers shrunk to a PC Tower format when OS/2 and PS/2 were both essentially dead.

The MS OS/2 with Lanmanager was probably always going to be a stop gap as servers for Win 2.x. They obviously decided Xenix was never going to be what they wanted as they sold it to the original SCO (I installed that once!). Not the later litigating SCO.

Venturing beyond the default OS on Raspberry Pi 5

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

Wayland!

Wayland is likely to join Unity, died in 2017. It's stupid and essentially beta.

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

Mage Silver badge

switch your account to Ireland if you want to keep an English language

No.

Malta also officially uses English.

Also the language you use is likely irrelevant.

Lawsuit claims gift card fraud is the gift that keeps on giving, to Google

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

"DO NOT ALLOW GIFT CARD PURCHASES"

The problem is that in fact the opposite. Google refuses to redeem valid cards.

Also Google treats your payment method like a Direct Debit. You have to go to web page, not playstore, to end it and also get the payment provider to remove Google. Also it's suggested in T&C that they may then block gift cards if you cancel a payment method. Yet, Gift cards are suggested by Google as the sole cash payment method.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

How much fraud by who?

Get the sales receipt and the validation receipt from the gift card giver or you can never redeem it.

In 2015, Google was sued for allegedly refusing to redeem Google Play gift cards once the balance dropped below $10. That case appears to have been settled…

They won't say why an account is blocked once they admit the card is valid. It looks like they still block redemption for any account with no other payment method, or no balance. Four accounts tried. Eventually Google unblocked one, but never explained what the issue was. You need to email everyday for a few weeks and send photos of receipts and card.

Microsoft: Copyright law didn't stop the VCR and shouldn't stop the LLM

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

VCR?

Selling your VCR recordings was copyright violation, or giving away multiple copies. That was never permitted.

MS Lawyers are deluded if they think a corporate scrape is comparable to VCR use on TV broadcasts which was mostly personal time-shifting. Anything else was quickly stamped on.

Meta's pay-or-consent model hides 'massive illegal data processing ops': lawsuit

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Pay for Meta vs free

You can't offer free and insist on tracking.

They are indeed welcome to make it a pay only site. And then the only "tracking" that can be imposed is the log-in cookie.

It's not about the adverts or being a pay walled site as such.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Re:numerous websites in France that follow this model

Which is illegal.

Other people breaking the law doesn't make it OK for Meta.

Apple's Titan(ic) iCar project is dead as self-driving dream fails to materialize

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Was it ever serious?

I'd always assumed this was a combination of PR, and that really rare thing, actual serious Apple research.

Not cancelled because it needs windows, but likely too much competition and probably was never a serious product development.

Telsa will have problems as traditional car makers produce more electric cars and stop buyying carbon credits from them.

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

Mage Silver badge

LO Writer will only re-open a document .. at the beginning

Not if you use ODT format and put a name into Tools-> Options -> User Data.

Though some recent versions of LO Writer have a bug and you need to press F5 to jump to last position.

We do need a concept of documents as well. See project Xanadu, Apple Hypercard and also the Nebo App on iOS and Android.

A document should have a history axis, different kinds of objects (text, images, data, audio, video etc), parents, children and siblings and metadata. Tradition file systems are too limited, See also having a reading library via a Kobo or Kindle ereader with the metadata interface vs trying to organise books, collections, tags, subtitles, genres, series, authors, translators and editions via simply files and directories. Or Calibre on Mac/Windows/Linux

See any professional document management system. The user can more easily create / find / edit information via metadata. Win10 with it's reliance on search is a failure for accessing programs or information.

Mage Silver badge
Thumb Up

cut Oberon down into a monolithic, net-bootable binary, and run Squeak

Great idea and great article.

But OTOH, I wrote C++, C, and VB6 as if I was writing Modula-2 with co-routines, generic typed functions and opaque modules.

Mage Silver badge
Coat

NV RAM never entirely went away & predates Optane

Even in 1980s we had NV RAM / PRAM. It was static memory with a lithium coin cell. Microcontrollers could be powered off and resume. Some could "sleep" due to having a static design. You could literally stop the CPU external clock to pause execution.

Also magnetic core memory was non-volatile.

Mine's the one with the 8K RAM cartridges in the pocket.

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Windows NT

It did have a method of treating files as a memory array, but hardly anyone used that. Something like 16 exabytes of virtual memory. The Windows on DOS (win 3.x, 9x & ME) couldn't do that, nor even create named pipes. Win9x/ME didn't have much more 32 bit NT compatibility than Win 3.x with Win32s installed.

Google releases Gemma – LLMs small enough to run on your computer

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Interesting

But is it much better than Eliza?

Inside of Emacs, type M-x doctor to launch Eliza. For those of you like me from a Vim background who have no idea what this means, just hit escape, type x and then type doctor.

Is it a toy or really useful?

How do we know it wasn't partially trained on copyright material, which I regard as plagiarism and unethical, not fair use?

What does it tell Google?

The successor to Research Unix was Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Mage Silver badge

Re: Take the small example of MeDearOldMum

There are two kinds of multi-user.

1) Different user accounts and only one user is logged in

2) Multiple users at the same time.

UNIX systems did both, Non-NT "windows shell" barely did (1) as you could simply access with no login, the log in was only for network. NT for years only had sense 1.

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: little to no _technical_ resemblance between them

I didn't imagine there would be. I was thinking generally. I did look at Oberon OS and decided it was educational. I did manage to write DLLs in Modula2 for VB6 programs that ran on NT 4.0, Win2K and XP. One had to assign a VB string to a desired length string before passing, or "Bang!". I spent slightly less time on Oberon OS than Minix in maybe 1992, as I considered Minix for a course, but decided against it.

And Linux succeeded in the sectors where it's a success because of compatibility and similarity and free, not because it's hugely better than UNIX or XENIX would be today if Linux hadn't existed. Likely some BSD + GNU would have replaced the commercial expensive Unixes for servers, routers, eink ereaders etc if Linux had never existed.

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

So...

How does Plan 9 / 9Front / Inferno compare to Oberon?

Applications are the thing. Gradually migrating to non-MS applications on Windows available on Linux allowed me to entirely switch to Linux in 2017. But I'd used UNIX first in about 1986, NT in 1994, Linux in 1998. It took a long time.

Android succeed for two reasons, one was Google and the other was Java. It leveraged all the programmers and apps on Symbian which due initially to resources and at the end due to stupid Sun licencing couldn't run full Java, but the cut down mobile version. Lack of applications and compatibility has hampered ARM versions of MS Windows. Apple switched 68000, Power PC, x86-32 and then x86-64 only and has more control than MS, so was able to switch to ARM Mac.

And Android is terrible.

Maybe it doesn't matter how good Plan 9 / 9 Front / Inferno or any other OS is, it's a nearly impossible task to dent the dominance of existing platforms. Servers & gadgets & chrome books have linux, TVs, tablets and phones have Android. Phones and tablets have Android and iOS. MS couldn't save Windows phone and Nokia knew the phone division was a millstone, there was no MS Trojan; Nokia got 11 Billion from MS for something worthless, now rents phone brand to TCL and has other businesses. They were successful before the did phones and still are. Amazon Fire is Android.

Where is Sailfish, OS/2, RiscOS today? MS once had PDAs, set-boxes (a load were changed to Linux OTA), phones and Servers. Inertia and corporate compatibility leaves them dominant on desktop and nowhere else. How long did Xbox make a loss?

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Mage Silver badge
Pint

Re: Ummm Wayland...

Perhaps, if we are lucky, Wayland will, like Unity, get scrapped (happened to Unity in 2017).

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

Did I blink and miss it?

One of the reasons for GNU, BSD etc was conflict between AT& T / Bell and the Universities. A lot was done by universities and others and wasn't an AT&T contract or paid for them. But Bell/AT&T turned round and said that AT&T owned it all.

Linux is strictly speaking just the Kernel and lots of the OS are GNU family tools. Simply reinventing, rebuilding what AT&T said was theirs. Very sad.

However, great article.

Out with the old, in with the new as 100 Starlink satellites take atmospheric exit

Mage Silver badge

Re: are some places on earth that will never get a fibre link

And Starlink is only one service. There are others, not just Geostationary either. Also less well known ones that Inmarsat and Iridium (bought by US Military when it went bust) as well as regional services.

Mage Silver badge

Disposible like BIC or Gillette razors

Would the money be better spent on fibre in most places, with some masts and higher orbit or fixed geo sats (Yes, the latency is rubbish) for extremely remote areas?

What is the environmental cost?

Anywhere with mains gas, sewage, water or electricity can have fibre cheaply.

Is there sufficient oversight if they are having to junk 100 due to a design flaw?

Apple Vision Pro units returned as folks just can't see themselves using it

Mage Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re:

Or are they going to sue you afterwards if you disparage it later?

Mage Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: smart watch the benefits are:

Don't need any of those.

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Eye-watering?

$3,500 plus tax is an eye-watering price. Most places have Sales tax or VAT. I'd expect it to be €3500 plus VAT here.

Might make your eyes water even if a present!

For that I can get a 65" 4K HDR screen, paper-like colour screen 11" Android tablet with pen (128 G + 256 G SD Card), decent laptop (SSD + HDD) and an 8" eink with note taking, new glasses, new coffee machine and still have change.

Worried about the impending demise of Windows 10? Google wants you to give ChromeOS Flex a try

Mage Silver badge

Re: ChromeOS Flex does not support Android apps or Google Play

So might as well install Linux Mint with Mate desktop. As indeed some windows 7 users with 64 bit CPUs are doing. 2G RAM works, though 4G is better. Also 80 G HDD and no GPU is feasible. Legacy BIOS or UEFI installs.

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

Mage Silver badge
Linux

Feel of NT 4 to 5

Or run Linux Mint, Mate desktop and suitable themes.

Microsoft might have just pulled support for very old PCs in Windows 11 24H2

Mage Silver badge

Re: all the commands you frequently use

What about the ones you need once or twice a year? A good menu system is important.

Then the frequently used buttons on one or two tool windows

The ribbon, hiding active scroll bars, removing least used commands from menus, flat, text that might be button or a browser link or open a window or a setting or text, slide switches in stead of a checkbox, etc are all retrograde UI UX decisions. Vista "aero" was one kind of stupid. Win8 "Phone GUI for a Desktop" a third and Win1x with only really a totally flat dark or totally flat light theme with only one accent colour is ghastly. Like Window 2.0 on a Hercules mono card or CGA Mono. Sack all the so called "graphic designers" that think they are designing corporate laser printed stationary and know nothing about GUI design.

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: running actual Windows is easier.

Sadly sometimes that's true like if most of your day job uses SW with no Linux equivalent.

Plenty of my Windows programs don't run on Win10, there will be no new version and in some cases the developer is dead.. That's why Win10 comes with a VM option.

Run the OS that runs most of your programs. I've not used Dual boot either since 2016. At worst I only need to run one XP program every 11 days. My weather station program that saves the actual weather station data to Access.

Mage Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: thoroughly embedded in school IT classrooms

Unlike Android, which is only sort of using Linux Kernel, Chromebooks are basically a Linux Distro.

Some schools entirely use iPads instead of text books.

Other schools use Chromebooks.

The School IT teaching MS Stuff was always pretty useless and wasn't universal. Mainstream education isn't dominated by Apple Mac in US and MS on PC in UK and Ireland today.

Home use of PCs/Laptops has collapsed due to phones, tablets and consoles, esp. Nintendo Switch, Xbox and Playstation. PC gaming is a niche now. A lot of the corporate stuff is now practically using laptop as a terminal.

Mage Silver badge
Linux

Re: Linux's moment

No, the best way to use Linux is without WINE. Need Accounts or Payroll that's only on Windows? Use a VM. MS on Windows 10 & Win11 recommends the SAME VM as Linux commonly uses for all those XP or Win7 or 32 bit programs that won't run on Win10 or Win11

Mage Silver badge
Windows

What's the value of Win11

Win11 is doing far less well than Win10 dis at this stage.

Too many more restrictions

Little or no advantages.

Can't run on quite decent PCs

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Stainless?

Also very weird, there are magnetic and non-magnetic in the sense of will a magnet stick to it versions.

Austenitic stainless steel is non-magnetic.

There are five basic families of "stainless steel" and without a proper description and specification "stainless steel" on its own means very little. All kinds rust. At least it's less stupid than the DeLorean, which was an under-powered fibreglass body sports car with a dangerous door design that only had a stainless steel skin. That would come loose with vibration. So the only thing the DeLorean was any good for was as a film prop in "Back to the Future".

I wonder is the Cybertruck also a bit of a gimmick?

RIP John Walker, software and hardware hacker extraordinaire

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

Sad

Sad to lose another pioneer.

250 million-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released – but the internet isn’t built to use them

Mage Silver badge

Re:IPv6-only devices

How much use are they for the Internet generally? Only any good for a totally stand-alone system (LAN or specialist system using the Internet). Many ISPs still don't even do IP6 at all.

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Cover them all

Also the giant blocks handed at the start to some USA companies, USA Universities and USA Government. Dwarfs what Radio Amateurs got, and who exactly had the authority to sell those?

Related: You can't buy a domain name. Only rent it. That needs fixed too,

Amazon overcharges shoppers with Buy Box algorithm, fresh lawsuit claims

Mage Silver badge
Alert

Re: Best avoided IMHO.

Still far better than ebay or Google's retail shop Paystore credits/gift cards they'll insist are fraudulent, and then when proved they are not, they claim there is a 'problem with your account' and thus the gift card should be discussed with retailer.

Which large international (mostly USA) sellers are not arrogant chancers that ignore the local laws?

Mitchell Baker logs off for good as CEO of Firefox maker Mozilla

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Well at least we have Waterfox etc

We don't really since he abandoned Waterfox Classic. I can't see the point of the current fork.

Mage Silver badge
FAIL

Not just the big Corps

Mozilla has really messed up Thunderbird and Firefox desktop appearance compatibility, plug-ins, usability by chasing Chrome features and appearance. The arrogant removal of a Primary (previously Master) password on Mobile. Inability to easily resize and reflow Mobile browser content where zoom behaves like a a PDF.

No wonder they have lost share. It's not just the way Google, Apple and MS run their platforms, though that's bad. MS is doing with Edge what they were forbidden with Explorer. Aspects of Windows only work with Edge and aspects of Android or Playstore web links only work with Chrome/default Android Browser.

Apple and Samsung tussle over whose gizmos are hardest to fix

Mage Silver badge
Linux

PIRG recently petitioned Microsoft to extend the life of Windows 10 to avoid millions of perfectly functional devices being sacrificed on the altar of the Windows 11 hardware requirements

Windows 11 also seems a bit pointless. MS would be better off offering a Win10 with fully themeable desktop and consistent settings in one edition (all the variations are obscene), A Windows Classic with all the best of NT 4.0/ Win2K/XP/2003/Win7 and Win98. Kill crippled "Home Editions" with free pro upgrade. Kill all the nags and dark UI to use an online MS account, the telemetry, adverts, junk (only some removable) that should be an option such as news, weather, xbox, copilot, cortana, outlook, etc.

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

Mage Silver badge

Resold subspec chips

Sinclair started that way with transistors and then had the IC10 (a Plessey) and IC12 (Texas) with higher powers in his ads, but they were actually sub-spec but working amps.

Raspberry Pi Pico cracks BitLocker in under a minute

Mage Silver badge
Devil

"provided you have physical access to the device."

In general, good security is only possible on remote access.

There are so many routes for the "Evil Maid" or "Untrustworthy Butler". Even a present of a USB mouse or keyboard that installs malware/trojan after the user logs in.

Or Intel Management Engine or others via JTAG over USB.

That's not the web you're browsing, Microsoft. That's our data

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Keeps one on Edge.

I wonder why anyone installs Edge on Linux?

Microsoft Edge browser is now based on the open source Chromium browser and available on Linux. Learn how to download and install it on Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux distributions using .deb or .rpm files, or via command line. Find out the advantages and benefits of using Edge on Linux.

I use Chromium if Firefox doesn't work.

Affordable, self-healing power grids are closer than you think

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Ukraine

Self healing power grids sound like fantasy. You'd need multiple redundant routes and spare capacity.