Posts by Crypto Monad

"The price cut to Cloud Foundation subs was unexpected"

Probably means most people aren't taking the full stack.

Before: "Cloud Foundation costs 3 times more than we're currently paying! We're not even going to look at that, especially since we won't be using most of the features"

After: "Cloud Foundation only costs 50% more than we're currently paying. Maybe we should take a look at it and see if we can use some of those features?"

Once locked into the new license and features, annual rises will get the price back to where it was reasonably quickly.

Re: McDonnell Douglas DC-X

The video said that the oxygen tank was made "using the lightest of metals, lithium".

Wikipedia says it was actually an aluminium-lithium alloy. Phew!

Re: Cost as reviewed?

15" M2 Macbook Air with 24GB RAM and 512GB SSD is £1999. Since the author opted for maxed-out 24GB RAM, I don't imagine they took the 256GB SSD option.

However there's an elephant in the room. Apple now have a 14" M3 "Macbook Air": it's just they called it the Macbook Pro with M3 processor (as opposed to M3 Pro or M3 Max). It's basically identical spec to the Macbook air:

- base 8GB RAM: check

- two thunderbolt 3 ports: check

- 8 cores (4 performance + 4 efficiency): check

- 100GB/sec RAM bandwdith: check

- single external monitor: check

- weight: roughly same as 15" MBA (1.51kg - 1.55kg)

The 14" Macbook Pro M3 once you've upped it to 24GB RAM with 512GB SSD costs £2099. Advantages over the 15" MBA apart from the newer processor include HDMI, SDXC, a higher resolution screen, and Wifi 6E.

However, for the same price you could get the 14" Macbook Pro with M3 Pro processor and 18GB RAM. In effect, you trade 6GB of RAM for:

- three thunderbolt 4 ports, including one on the right

- 11 cores (5 performance + 6 efficiency)

- 150GB/sec RAM bandwidth

- support for dual external monitors

- better speakers, using the space around the keyboard

- headphone jack on the left-hand side, where it belongs

This also happens to be an off-the-shelf configuration, so you can pick one up in-store. I have it. I am very happy and I expect it to last me at least 5 or 6 years.

P.S. I agree the Framework with Ryzen processor is awesome, if you are happy with Windows or Linux as your OS

Re: KVM on linux works nicely...

KVM supports live migration (= VMotion) just fine. Live migration of block storage too.

KVM is just the hypervisor: it's more a question of what tooling you're using to manage it. However, even libvirt + virt-manager can do live migration.

For most people, Proxmox is a good place to start. You get a web interface, clustering, containers, ZFS, bundled Ceph, and a whole bunch of other stuff. You can apt install it on top of Debian, or you can just install their ISO image.

Re: Nice! Too bad about the price.

No it's not. Apple doesn't allow you to swap parts from second-hand devices, because they're ID-locked to the original phone. You need to be an authorized service center to have the tools to pair the parts.

Re: Not So Big a Deal Here

An AI which can rationally *explain* and *justify* its thought process would be a good start. Especially if it's making life-affecting decisions such as whether you should be granted a mortgage or not.

Re: MISRA Compliance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MISRA_C

"While there exist many software tools that claim to check code for "MISRA conformance", there is no MISRA certification process."

It seems all they need to do is to claim it's MISRA-compliant, and wait for someone to come along and challenge that claim. A bit like the validity of a US patent.

Re: Brit?

That would be headlinese for "[a] British Borough Council". Not the Borough of Brit.

GPL doesn't have any restrictions on how you can *use* the software, or what you can use it *for*. The BSL and FSL do.

See OSD criterion 6, or the FSF freedom 0.

Re: Mmmmmm....

You forget that there is competition. Starlink is well-established, and Amazon will have enough trouble catching up on the customer base without actively modify the content.

Amazon *could* offer a reduced monthly rental in return for accepting injected adverts, as indeed could any other ISP (terrestrial or otherwise), but it's been tried and failed.

More likely they'll offer Prime Video streaming which doesn't count towards your monthly bandwidth cap, or something like that.

Yes, but that sort of commercially-produced H₂ is completely useless(*) from a decarbonization point of view.

The only valid approach is green hydrogen, in which case, conversion to something easier to handle makes sense.

(*) If you're going to do "blue hydrogen" and capture the generated CO₂ at the point of production, that's not really much different to capturing exhaust CO₂ at point of use. Or you might as well just sequester an equivalent amount of CO₂ directly from the atmosphere.

But where's the blockchain??

700 charge/discharge cycles doesn't sound great for a home battery - a lifetime of 2 years.

The ones I have (Pylontech US3000C) are rated for 6000 cycles. Unless these ones are 10 times cheaper, it doesn't make much sense.

A UPS, which stays charged most of the time and is rarely cycled, is a different matter.

For comparison, a Macbook Air M2 weighs 1.24kg and has a 2560x1664 screen (13.6"). Maybe just carry a pair of reading glasses to deal with the smaller screen?

Re: It wasn't a bad idea

It was because of the butterfly keyboard that when I bought a brand new Macbook Pro in 2017, I bought the 2015 model (which was still fortunately available).

That, plus the fact that the 2015 model still had Magsafe and USB A ports.

Re: Shocked?

This page claims that Facebook has annual revenues of $116.8bn (in 2022), of which $54.5 billion is generated in US & Canada, despite only 13% of users being based in that region.

This page says there are 208.6m active users in North America (*)

That implies the value of each North American user is 54.5bn / 208.6m = $206 per year.

If Europe is similar, then €120 per year seems quite reasonable to displace that revenue.

Of course, another question is whether it *costs* anything like €120 per user per year to provide the service - and I'd guess the profit margin is substantial (compared to the cost of running, say, a shared Mastodon server - although content moderation costs are hard to estimate)

(*) However I also see it claimed that there are 3bn active users worldwide, and 13% of that is 390 million. If true, that brings the revenue down to $140 per user per year.

Re: Cloud providers and open source is the problem…

> From my, albeit limited, reading, the issue is cloud vendors who have made great use of open source in their cloud platforms and because of the nature of the product they sell have been able to avoid the contribution back to the open source project

I don't think Elasticorp wanted AWS to contribute their improvements to the software (which maybe they already did). They wanted AWS to pay money.

Aside: for me, Open Source is about three things:

1. Not having to worry about licensing or infringment risks, activation keys, different levels of feature sets, invoicing, dealing with salespeople etc.

2. Having the ability to answer my own questions and fix my own problems by working directly with the source code

3. Being able to engage with like-minded people to improve each other's understanding, and the software itself, cooperatively

Re: Electricity for heat pumps

Possibly because of wishful thinking that nuclear fusion would be cheap, clean, and available in 20 years.

Re: Is the message

No, but it could lead to more creative ways to persuade people to buy licenses and/or sign up for developer accounts - for example if they decide to lock that RSS feed down to people with valid subscriptions.

Re: Jam tomorrow

It's the lesser of two evils.

Right now, what they've given is a notification to the bad guys that there's exploitable code somewhere in curl, which means they can start hunting more carefully for it, but it's still a tough find (they've been hunting for this sort of stuff themselves for a long time).

However, if they didn't say anything prior to release of the patch, they'd be giving the bad guys exactly what they need: they can examine the patch and start exploiting it almost immediately. Meanwhile, half the world is still in bed or on the train, and the other half are in meetings, and would be caught off-guard.

I don't think they could avoid saying "it's in curl", because you need *some* indication of whether it's relevant to your environment or not. Plus, it gives people a hint that running curl as root really *isn't* a good idea right now.

Re: Nice little bit of ambiguity in TFA

It's clearly the former. Apple doesn't give a support cutoff date in advance for any hardware; instead, when a new version of macOS comes out, it has a compatibility list and you can see whether your model has been left out.

They do continue to support the previous two versions of macOS though, so in effect you get 2 years notice, as long as you can live without the shiny features in the new version - which in general, I can. (Of course, sometimes a new version of macOS removes useful things, like running 32-bit applications)

Clearly, x86 versions of macOS will cease to be released at some point, just as PowerPC and 68k support were dropped previously.

No.

https://frame.work/gb/en/marketplace/memory-storage

Re: Why?

It's not hard to find, and it has consequences for the whole world if it passes.

https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3137/publications -> https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/52368/documents/3841

An order requires the provider to:

(i) use accredited technology to identify terrorism content communicated publicly by means of the service and to swiftly take down that content;

(b) to use the provider’s best endeavours to develop or source technology for use on or in relation to the service or part of the service, which [achieves those purposes]

"Accreditation" of the technology is punted to the Secretary of State in 126(12) and (13):

(12) For the purposes of this Chapter, technology is “accredited” if it is accredited (by OFCOM or another person appointed by OFCOM) as meeting minimum standards of accuracy in the detection of terrorism content or CSEA content (as the case may be).

(13) Those minimum standards of accuracy must be such standards as are for the time being approved and published by the Secretary of State, following advice from OFCOM.

So at least the standards have to be published, and are not kept secret. It's unclear to me whether the notices themselves will be published, and/or whether the recipients of such notices will be able to publish their existence.

However, note also 126(5):

A notice given to a provider of a Part 3 service requiring the use of accredited technology is to be taken to require the provider to make such changes to the design or operation of the service as are necessary for the technology to be used effectively [my emphasis]

That is: not only could WhatsApp be required to implement client-side scanning, they could even be told to stop using end-to-end encryption, if that were to interfere with the government order.

Re: While the world slowly turns n burns.

I didn't downvote you, but when did it last get an Android security update?

Re: Insanet only selling to Western nations?

it is also the fact we now allow arbitrary code to run on our machines in the form of Javascript, etc.

I won't argue with that, not to mention Word macros, Excel macros, WASM etc.

However, even just opening an image can be enough, for example when there are bugs in image decoding libraries. There's no separation between "program" and "data", and the complexity is mind-blowing.

Re: An interesting experiment

> even the A380 production line came out of retirement.

Citation needed? Existing planes are coming out of mothballs, but I haven't seen an announcement about production restarting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380#End_of_production

Re: Am I surprised?

> I wouldn't do that. I would not name an aircraft company "Kaboom!" or "Oopsidaisy Aircraft".

Or a parcel delivery company called "oops", I mean, "ups"?

I once saw a car from a driving school called Impact School of Motoring. It had a large dent in the back. (I promise it's true, but I wish I had taken a photo)