* Posts by doublelayer

7579 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2018

Persistent memory to replace DRAM, but it could take a decade

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: Its gonna be hard to supplant DRAM

They can do that, but it won't change how mass storage is used. For example, when a file needs to be expanded, it's still going to be fragmented rather than treated as a big string in memory, and to manage that, they'll still need to track which areas of mass storage can be written to across programs. And we've reinvented the filesystem.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: And security?

The problem with that is that there isn't a great place to do that. If this hardware takes the place of your main RAM, it's not like decrypting disk data and caching it in part of RAM. You can decrypt it as it goes from RAM to cache, but you'll find yourself using a lot of processing time just encrypting and decrypting over and over again since your CPU cache is really small in comparison. If you had an encryption coprocessor doing that, maybe it would work a bit better, but we're getting to a point where I have to ask what benefit will justify the price of adding those things and taking the performance hit. I'm not sure what you get by going to that effort, and if the buyers aren't either, it won't sell.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: Its gonna be hard to supplant DRAM

It would be faster, but the same could be accomplished by building a faster SSD with the same stuff. Basically, it's Optane again. You could save a bit of time by changing the executable format you're using from one that loads itself into memory and does a bunch of initialization to one that has already initialized and just stores and loads that state, but the programs will still have to load any configurable state from somewhere persistent which will likely still involve loading files from some kind of storage and processing their contents. I'm not sure loading speed would be different enough for people to care if the price is much higher.

Duo face 20 years in prison over counterfeit iPhone scam

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Re: A bit harsh?

They probably won't get that. Maximum sentences are rarely given unless it's an extreme offense or the criminals concerned have done this many times before. People charged with this who stole orders of magnitude more don't get that sentence, so I doubt these guys will either.

Cutting kids off from the dark web – the solution can only ever be social

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Re: Chilling Effects

"If phones were age restricted parents would not be handing adult phones down to their children."

Yes, they would. They would not be supposed to, but they would still do it because their old phone is free, a child phone is not, and a lot of parents today don't see any reason to bother adding restrictions to devices they give their children. Unless there was someone to check what phones a child was carrying, banning that would not prevent parents from handing them down. This is a reality which will affect any attempt to restrict what devices are used, should anyone try to enact one.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: Chilling Effects

During my childhood, many people my age had access to alcohol. This increased exponentially with age (I don't know anyone who had a lot of access at 12, for example). I did not consume it, but I know some did, and there was likely some harm as a result. So yes, it does fit the pattern in that there's some effort to prevent it but it is not that successful and it is not treated the same way as murder or any other violent crime. So if the law was written to do it, expect a lot of leakage. In fact, expect even more access than with alcohol because there's an important factor. When an adult uses some alcohol, it's gone and children can't have it. When a parent uses a phone and replaces it, they may have an old phone that they plan to give to the child. That's going to introduce many adult phones to children.

This is all assuming that you want that. I do not. I don't want there to be a law requiring locked-down devices to exist, nor one that restricts what technology children can have access to. If that happened, something as simple as a Raspberry Pi would probably have to be denied to children since it is capable of accessing Tor, and neither denying it to children nor restricting it are acceptable options in my mind. So even if you can find a way to make this work, I will still oppose it.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: Chilling Effects

A flip phone (yes, they still exist, they still work, they're pretty cheap) can also be used to just call and send messages. I don't see many parents equipping their children with those nowadays. Maybe they actually don't mind that they can run other applications.

As for updates, they bring security fixes. If you're intent on tracking your children now that the technology can manage it, you might value not having, for example, one of the many devices covered here where "you can track your kids" turns into "anyone can track your kids and listen to them at all hours". So by all means be one of the people who uses an insecure system to creepily track your children, after all there must be someone or even the weird brands wouldn't exist, but that's your choice to make for you, not for anyone else.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: The law is not everything

You are right that there is no parental control that can't be bypassed if you assume the child trying to bypass it is perfectly knowledgeable and has unlimited resources, but they usually are not. You can try to parent in a number of ways, and one of the ones you can choose is to only provide hardware that you have first configured to restrict the access provided to the child. There are lots of options out there for how to do it, from the manufacturers and from third party companies you can pay. Or you can try telling the child not to do something even though they have the ability to, which can work but not always. Or you can try explaining to the child why they should not do something they have the ability to and relying on them not to do it. Each has its positives and negatives and none is perfect. There is a reason why being a parent is hard. The best approach probably combines multiple options, but expecting that there is a perfect answer that will prevent anything bad from happening if only all of technology and society were bent to your will is not going to work and is going to cause more problems.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: Root causes?

I wasn't referring to violence in media. I was referring to this:

"The fundamental question we need to answer is "why are torture and murder sites interesting to kids?", and then find a fix for that."

There is a difference between a crime show where somebody gets murdered in the first scene and then the rest of the episode involves finding the one who did it, conveniently ending in their capture after forty minutes of magical computers, and a site that shows actual or realistic torture. A lot more people watch the former. You cannot assume that people liking the former leads to people liking the latter, nor that the existence of the former makes the latter anything near a widespread phenomenon. Nor have you really demonstrated any change, given that entertainment depicting violence is not at all new.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: Chilling Effects

Of course, there are already phones intended specifically for children out there. I wouldn't recommend you buy one. The ones I've seen are cheap Android devices that have been locked down with some unverified tracking and blocking software, never get updates, and have terrible specs. They're locked down so installing applications is either difficult or impossible (without bypassing their protection which isn't always hard if you know how Android images are built). Maybe one reason they're all sold by companies nobody's ever heard of is that nobody actually buys them.

It is up to parents to decide whether they'll buy something of the kind, not the rest of us to either make them better or add software to everything else so they can be switched into that locked mode. If parents don't take action, then I have no reason to do it for them.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: Root causes?

The fundamental assumption in your statement is that torture and murder sites are interesting to a lot of kids. While there are undoubtedly some, you and the campaigners here are alleging that it's a large group, whereas I've seen evidence so far that it was what, three of them? There are certainly more, but you can't paint this as an epidemic from one data point. Before we declare something a societal scourge that needs tremendous effort, significant changes, and plenty of side-effects to resolve, it is fair to ask how widespread the problem we're trying to solve really is.

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

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Re: Game Theoretic Analysis

"[leaving the button disconnected] the one tiny -- yet potentially, oh, so far-reaching -- act of spiteful disobedience within their power that is certain to go undetected, let alone punished."

That's not true either. People check those. Unless everyone involved thinks exactly as you do, someone will notice that, whenever you have checked the button, it's inoperable. That's called sabotage and it is punished rather severely when what you're sabotaging is sensitive military equipment. You might be able to get away with it the first time with people assuming you were incompetent in repairing it, or even that you were incompetent and didn't notice the fault when someone else created it. They'll teach you how to fix it and watch that you fix it. It won't work the second time. At best, they'll decide you're incapable of doing what you're supposed to and fire you. There are worse options available. So practically, it still won't work.

By the way, there is not one button, but a bunch of launch controls. The place that fits your description is the launch controls on a missile or on the warhead itself. The warhead is likely not something you can sabotage because they're manufactured in the same place and at least one will be investigated, so you can't successfully sabotage all of them by working at the factory. Your best bet is to prevent a missile from firing, prevent the missile from activating the warheads on it, or make them fail in some other way. Even if the military doesn't check things, you can only do it to the subset of missiles you maintain, not all of them. It could make the attack weaker, but unless you've got a large group of people who all think the same, it's not going to prevent it from working. Whether someone tries or not, it's not going to work as well as you think it is.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: Game Theoretic Analysis

That analysis only works if the main, and likely only, thing you care about is whether people think you are the baddie or not. There are lots of other ways to run it, not necessarily correct, but plausible enough that someone might. For example, a few options include:

Option 1:

* If the other side has already fired, and their launch was successful, what remains of your country will likely be conquered. You don't want them to conquer you. You want them to be unable to do it, so attack now.

* If the other side has already fired, and their launch was unsuccessful, then they started a war and you should defend yourself from their next attempt. Also, they were willing to kill lots of people, so they deserve whatever they get.

Option 2:

* If the other side has already fired, and their launch was successful, I'm dead. What do I care what history thinks?

Option 3:

* If the other side has already fired, and their launch was successful, then they might try the same thing on others. If they are unable to do it because you counterattacked, others will be safer. It might even convince someone else not to launch an attack because they can see that nobody wins when you do.

In any of these options, it is easy to justify a retaliatory attack. Justifying a preemptive attack is harder, but there are ways that people have done it. I'm not asking you to agree with any of these, just to recognize that others could easily believe them. If they do, then you have a risk.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: That was my thought, too.

So you took something which means this:

"Basically, everyone who signed a treaty that said they were going to protect Ukraine have decided to ignore that, including one who decided to destroy it. Looks like that treaty is void now."

And turned it into this:

"Let's make nuclear weapons!"

It is true that the treaty said they would not have them, and that treaty being void means they are allowed to make them if they want, but it doesn't automatically follow that because their legal impediments have been removed that they necessarily will. I have a lot of rights to do things I don't intend to do. Then again, if they did decide to try, I won't be surprised. The work would be difficult to build up an arsenal, but I can't blame any Ukrainian from thinking that the treaty was useless anyway, which it was, and deciding that nukes are the solution. I hope they don't decide that, but it isn't that illogical.

Euro shoppers popping more and more premium phones in the basket

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Re: “it's very difficult to measure the replacement cycle at any given point.”

They don't have to be, but if you want to install apps, then you'll have to sign in at least to the app store. That may change now that the EU's DMA restrictions are coming, but until now, a phone without an Apple account was limited to the builtin apps. Those probably do enough for many users since it would include phone, SMS, email, navigation, calendar, camera, and a notes app, but I expect that most users had some app they wanted and signed in to get it.

doublelayer Silver badge

I would say you're being charitable to the point of incorrectness there. Project Treble didn't do a whole lot. They have modular security updates now, but that doesn't help you if the manufacturer doesn't push them. You can't go and install them on the main image yourself. You are still at the whim of the manufacturer on whether and when you'll get those patches, let alone actual feature updates, and the only change there is that some, and only some, manufacturers have started to realize that people want them. So if you buy a Samsung device, you can get 4-5 years of security updates but that doesn't apply to most others.

As for Lineage OS, it will certainly make the software life of a supported phone nearly infinite, at least so long that the phone is likely to have some serious hardware problem by the time that Lineage no longer supports it. The problem is that your S10 is one of the few devices that will get it. You can't install it on the S20 or any later flagship, and if you bought an A-series budget or midrange device, you're almost guaranteed not to have support. You can try to build it yourself or use an unsupported version built by someone on XDA, but that's not guaranteed either and it doesn't necessarily give you what you wanted. I'd actually say that the custom ROM scene for Android today is weaker than it was ten years ago. The one you get with the device is a bit better, which softens that blow a little, but someone used to the active community will probably be a bit disappointed with the options they have today; a bunch of great projects that would provide what they're looking for which don't run on any device they have.

doublelayer Silver badge

It's worth checking, but don't get your hopes up. Unless it's a Fairphone or Pixel, it's likely not supported. They still have builds for many old phones (the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is still on the supported list even though it's over a decade old), but most things you would have bought in the last four years are not on the list. Even modern Pixels aren't on the list, but there's a reasonable chance they might be added.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: Unscientific anecdotal sample

From my experience, using iPhones to stretch the time between having to buy new ones, I haven't noticed this too much. The newer operating system versions usually don't task the hardware too much, but one reason they might is Apple's CPU throttling when the battery gets old (yes, they're still doing it, it's just that they admit it now). That can show a noticeable decrease in performance, though for my use cases, it hasn't been a problem, but my uses are relatively light on CPU usage.

As for apps requiring the latest version, I have seen it but quite rarely. It is not like Mac OS, where basically everything does that, especially everything from Apple, but it can happen. This is slightly mitigated by the fact that, if there is a new version out, the iPhone I already have is almost certainly capable of running it because they get the update at the same time as every other supported model. If someone is intentionally trying not to install a new version, though, I could conceive of this being an annoyance though not a widespread one.

Apple makes it official: No Home Screen web apps in European Union

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Re: Did anyone ....

It depends what the courts think "service" means. If it's PWAs only, then your logic works. If it's the operating system in general, not so much. They can point to the fact that PWAs are still supported outside the EU, not inside the EU, and say that the operating system's compatibility has been degraded. I don't know that they will, but if we're working on literal meanings, that one fits as well.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: No problem

Think less a supervillain laughing uproariously about how the EU will rue the day they tried to meddle, which is not what anyone was saying, and more a boring legal meeting that sounds like the boring technical meetings. I've been in the boring technical meetings where the discussion is how we're going to get around the performance bottleneck without introducing too much technical debt. This one was probably how they're going to get around the new requirements. As with the technical meeting, there's usually a nice option which could be but isn't taken:

Technical: "In order to improve performance, we're going to rewrite the module from scratch to run faster. It will take a month for a few people."

Legal: "We're going to comply with the requirements by doing exactly what the law intends here. It may cost us some control and therefore some money."

And the actual solution:

Technical: "We're going to get around the performance issue by using a solution that's more time efficient but very space inefficient. It will only take a week to write, but every user will find half a gigabyte more RAM used than before and a bunch of cache files so it doesn't have to be recomputed every time. A few months from now, we may have to have another meeting about cleaning those up, but maybe we'll ignore it."

Legal: "We're going to comply with the law, maybe, by just dropping stuff. Either they'll change the law or we'll never have to deal with PWAs again. In a couple months, we may have to have another meeting about what to do about the complaints from business customers who want their PWAs and security updates, but maybe we'll ignore it."

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: I

This will take a bit of clarification. Let's start with the PWA and update issue. You are correct that there is no contract between Apple and PWA developers. This has no relevance to my point. The reason I pointed out that PWA developers cannot update their applications is because you claimed that Apple isn't deleting data related to PWAs because it's like any other time when an update is incompatible. It is not. If I write a native application that runs on IOS 17 and someone updates to IOS 18 and Apple has made a change meaning they will refuse to run my application, I can fix it by updating my application. The user's files are restored. If I wrote a PWA, I do not have any way to update it to get the user's data back. The article alleges that, even if I could, the files won't exist. Even if they do, I can't write a native app that would access them. Their restriction on those developers, even though there is no contract between them, means that they have effectively deleted the user's data which they used my app to access. The harm is to the developers, but Apple doesn't have to care, but there is also harm to users which they should care about and may be legally required to. Other commenters have suggested this might be a violation of both computer misuse legislation and clauses of the DMA.

Me: “Existing PWAs could run in WebKit because that is what they're already set to run in”

You: "No they shouldn’t, Apple does *not* have that legal freedom. The EU made it a legal requirement that the user be allowed to opt out of using WebKit. This is what that looks like in practice."

No, that is not what it looks like. Opting out does not mean that I will never use WebKit. It's already installed on my phone. I can use it or, and the or is crucial here, something else. That means that I could choose to use a non-WebKit browser as a browser but still use Safari when I want. It means that I could set one PWA to try to open in Firefox, and assuming that it doesn't work properly right now, set it back to Safari until Firefox fixes their bugs. Nowhere in the law does it say that Apple must remove WebKit from availability, and they haven't done so since there will still be a Safari and WebKit in system UI components in all devices. They have complete legal freedom to continue to offer PWA support through WebKit and allow other browser engines to do the same. They have removed that option without a legal or technical need to do so, which is where their other motives become more obvious.

And by the way, intent does tend to matter a lot in whether they're allowed to do that. The law has many parts that explicitly prohibit intentional degradation of features when a user uses something Apple doesn't like. They don't specifically list possible degradations. This is not necessarily going to go Apple's way.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: I

App developers cannot release a new version of their PWA which works because Apple has blocked all of them. They cannot make a native app that inherits the data. If the complaint from the article is correct, the data will actually be deleted, not hidden, from the devices because the apps that read it no longer exist, and even if it is incorrect, the data will be unavailable until Apple restores PWAs to their OS, which they have no announced intention to do unless their actions are actually ruled illegal. That is not what you are describing with an app that doesn't start due to changes in an update.

Using your sausage analogy, it is not simply that the sausage maker chose to go vegan only. It is that they have also entered the houses of everyone who bought their sausages and removed them, even though they had no need to do so. They aren't doing that because the sausages are too expensive to make. They are doing that to try to punish the regulators for having made the change that they don't like. This is not supposition no matter how you intend to characterize it. It is clear that Apple doesn't like the law given how much they have fought against it specifically and every other similar law or legal dispute. It is also clear that they were not required to make this specific action. Your incorrect characterization of the law suggests you are unwilling to accept these statements. The complaint is not about system design (slice the architecture the same as Android). It is about their arbitrary restrictions on what they allow users to run. They could have allowed other browser engines, and those engines are capable of running PWAs inside themselves. Those engines probably would need to have code added to interact with some of the hardware, but that's the job of the people writing those engines, not Apple. Existing PWAs could run in WebKit because that is what they're already set to run in, and the other engines could be used when a user chooses to do so. This does not require significant changes from Apple.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: Yes, you really are the product

Ah, so you don't need to replace your Mac but the Windows one has lost support? So what version of Mac OS are you stuck on? No 2012 model has software support. Just to let you know, pretty much all computers from 2012, including your 2012-era Mac, are supported using Windows 10 until 2025. So I'm curious if you could name a single "drop off" that actually exists. It might be that your corporate laptop is replaced more often than necessary or that they buy underpowered equipment that needs faster replacement, but neither speaks badly of Windows, but instead your employer's equipment acquisition plan.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: I

I disagree with two of your points. The first is that there's no moral angle to it, although that's not the way I'd deal with it. One aspect to this is that data associated with those applications is to be automatically deleted from users' devices. That's a pretty immoral act in my mind. It is not Apple's data to delete. It is not Apple's device to delete it from. Someone has already argued that it could be criminal to delete it, and whether it is or not, I don't think that's a moral stance at all.

The second is with this bit:

"In fact, it falls under “ensuring that groups who took a decision, suffer the consequences of their own decision”, which is a highly moral position. It’s the opposite of Moral Hazard. Unless you enforce that, the world becomes a worse place, and surprisingly fast. Cf Banks being rescued in 2008."

It is not the inexorable result of the regulations. It is the result that Apple prefers. They are capable of allowing PWAs to use other engines, but they don't want to do the work. They are capable of asking for an exception to give them time to add that, but they don't want to. They are intentionally trying to break things because they don't like the law. Since intentionally breaking things is specifically named in the law as something you're not supposed to do, that's already legally risky. Even if it were not, it should be obvious that having multiple choices and intentionally picking the one likely to anger someone is not making them "suffer the consequences of their own decision". It is making them suffer the consequences of your decision.

For example, let's say that someone who asked for a reference from me has annoyed me. I might choose in that case to decline to give them a reference, or I might choose to describe during the reference why they annoyed me. I might decide that, even though they annoyed me, I will give an honest reference. Or I might take the petty route and lie that they were guilty of misconduct so severe that I was going to call the police but they had successfully hidden the evidence even when none of that was true. All of those things are things I could say, but the choice to harm them by lies is not a consequence of them annoying me, but is my deliberate act to punish them. Apple is trying to punish EU users for EU regulations.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: I

You are welcome to that opinion. I do not share it. As things stand now, however, the law has already been passed and the question is whether their actions comply with it or not. You can try to convince the EU to repeal the law and I'm sure Apple will be happy to add their voice there. For now, though, we're discussing what their requirements are under that law, not what the law would ideally be.

Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: What happened to the server?

However, the information from the person who stole the server indicating that the people were engaging in two illegal activities, selling illegal substances and receiving stolen goods, would probably make it much easier to obtain the warrants necessary to search. Moving the server would help the criminals in this case, but that relies on them having another place for it to go because I doubt they could have found a buyer quickly enough to not have it at all.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: What happened to the server?

If the company knew where it was, it would not have been a selling situation. I wouldn't be surprised if the negotiation went something like "You give us that right now, and you tell us anything you know related to it, and we leave here and conveniently forget your address". That's if they didn't just call the police to retrieve the server and let the police deal with any other aspects.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: So, he was just fired ?

"The owner of the other company will most likely feel sorry for the uncle."

While I agree with many of your points, this conclusion is not something I would rely on. A lot of people would take a mistake like this much harder, whether it was about the risk to business data, the delay in getting their equipment, or someone's opinion, justified or not, that the situation should have been predicted. I wouldn't guarantee that clients will always take the "nothing too bad happened, so it's all good" route. I'm not even convinced that they should always do so.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: It's a shame

Obviously, that wouldn't have been better. I think they're opining on whether that was likely to happen without an addiction, although as a hypothetical there's no certain answer.

Google open sources file-identifying Magika AI for malware hunters and others

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If you don't publish your defense tool, it becomes less useful at defending anybody except you. It's also not something you'd use as a single line of defense, but one part of it. Someone who knows why to use this is probably using a variety of tools with this serving to improve performance and results but not necessarily bypassing their other tools.

FTC asks normal folks if they'd like AI impersonation scam protection, too

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Re: Trust someone to turn a problem into a business opportunity

"Apart from buying groceries and the like there is absolutely no need for any payments to be Right Now."

Depending on what can happen between right now and when the payment does complete, there can be a good reason to want it to be fast, and not just so that we don't have to wait forever for things to complete. The reason is to avoid scams of another type. For example, if I am buying something from you online, send you a payment, and ask you to send the item, you probably want to be pretty sure that the payment is going to be available before you ship it and I probably don't want to wait a long time for you to start the delivery process until you're sure. Both of us have the possibility that, during that waiting process, either I will find a way to take back the money after you have sent me the item or you end up not sending the item.

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

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Re: So, even Apple can't get it right

I'll confess. Though I wasn't posting here at the time, I was unimpressed when the iPad was released. Admittedly, I'm still not that impressed and don't use one myself, but I expected that others would not either and they do. Tablets are still not for me, but I've been shown that there are people for which they are the preferred option.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: Killer App & Price

When they're going for the consumer market, a lot of those apps aren't worth the effort of Apple writing them. Someone else writing them, sure, but not for Apple to do the work before launch as an advertisement. For example:

"Link up with Boeing or Airbus and have an app that shows all of the parts & part numbers of, say, a fuselage listed in front of you as you look at it, along with possible diagnostics, numbers of spares in local warehouse?"

To the typical user, this is something they'll think about for about ten seconds: "Cool, an aircraft mechanic is using these", then ignore. It could be useful to the aircraft maintenance industry, but there's no reason for Apple to write that instead of providing encouragement and support to that industry to do it.

"Or an app for a surgeon that lists detailed anatomy of a patient opened up for surgery along with possible noteworthy points about what is on screen?"

I don't think that's going to work with current technology. It isn't a part that has a deterministic appearance which can be identified quickly. And if anything goes wrong, the press will be a lot worse than any benefit from advertising it in the first place.

"Or an app that shows you, step by step iFixit-style how to repair, say, a bike, a dishwasher and the like?"

If they could get this one, that would actually be a great advertisement. The trouble is that they can't, nobody can, and I think you know that. They don't have the software to identify automatically which model of bicycle I have when that model could easily be decades old from any country and then identify the problem with it from a glance, then automatically provide me a useful solution when one might not exist. They don't have anywhere near the staff necessary to manually accumulate that data either. There is a reason why there are only iFixit guides for the most common devices. If you bought a cheap phone instead of a flagship, you likely have to do the dismantling yourself to figure out what's in there and whether you can fix it.

"Or an app that shows you how to cook an elaborate meal along with hints, suggestions and instructions while you are doing it'"

I suppose that one is a bit more realistic, but it's not really any more than a video that starts and stops. Watching you do it and determining whether you've made mistakes is trickier and not very useful, since anyone who wants to do this can probably follow along with a video unless they're intentionally trying to test the error recognition system.

"Or an app that explains how to solve, say, the maths problem in front of you using a variety of different ways?"

Why do they need this? There are already programs out there for teaching and solving mathematics and they don't really benefit from AR.

"Or an app for farmers looking to buy cattle at a cattle mart: display details of the animal in front of you, [...]"

Again, something a small set of users would use and everyone else wouldn't care about, and in order to build it, they would need to get access to all that data. Every place with livestock displayed would need to put those details somewhere the app could get it and tag things so the equipment could pick it up. I'm sure there are multiple competing databases where some of that is stored while some others simply write it down or have someone tell you with words. Apple trying to produce an iTunes livestock store and get everyone to use it doesn't seem worth it.

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

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Re: We need a new Unix

I'll have to read what they want to do instead, but while DLLs can cause a lot of problems, there's a reason they're often used. Nobody has to use one. You can statically link everything, or you can implement every library as its own program and communicate between it and something else. Each approach fixes some problems introduced by the concept, although usually opposing ones. They introduce new problems instead. Maybe those problems are easier to deal with or just better, but that is not guaranteed and it depends a lot on how you use your computer.

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

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Re: THIS!!!

You know that a lot of instructions are burned waiting for data to get to the CPU just from RAM, and that you have to put a lot of data into RAM from the disk which takes even more instructions, and that read speeds are reported for large, continuous reads, not reads of small files? I don't want to state the obvious if I'm missing a rhetorical question here.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: Swings and roundabouts.

"This removes a reliable, in situ communications network that could easily have been developed and repurposed - perhaps as an internet for kids with whitelisted content."

I can't say I like that idea. You want an internet for kids, you build one, but you don't need your own wires for it. What would be the point of that? Just to make your new internet tremendously more expensive and unavailable than using the same wires the normal internet uses? Don't expect me to embrace any part of the idea, either. I don't see trying to slice the network into pieces as going anywhere useful.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: THIS!!!

"If CPU's are so fast why does it take 10 mins to log into windows 10? What is it doing? Nothing useful, trust me I've looked into it."

Probably nothing useful, because my computer can manage it in about two seconds. My really cheap computer can manage it in about two seconds. My old computer that shouldn't be running Windows 11 according to Microsoft can manage it in about...2.5 seconds. So if your computer takes ten minutes, one of two things is the case:

1. It's not Windows. It's something that's starting at login and doing so badly, which might be something you intend to start or a big stack of malware.

2. Your computer has a problem, probably a disk problem.

Look into those.

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Re: THIS!!!

They did not say that and you just made that up. The point of increasing CPU speed is to get the right answer faster, not any answer faster. If the code is producing incorrect answers, nothing about the CPU's speed will fix it.

'Scandal-plagued' data broker tracked visits to '600 Planned Parenthood locations'

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Re: altars of greed and pridefulness

Of course they do. At a basic level, who you're supposed to pray to and what kinds of praying are really bad. The Greek gods said that killing a cow in their name was a great thing to do. Hindu gods take that very differently. If you're going to interact with cattle, figure out which if either of those sets you're dealing with, or more likely which set of believers are watching you, because if either set of gods exist, they don't seem to be doing anything about the issue.

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I don't think those advertisements were about buying things. For example, this paper and others have frequently described how they intentionally put in ads claiming to offer services they oppose so that people seeking those services get confused and go to them. What happens after that may depend on the group, but at the very least, they have the name of the person and they've wasted the person's time. There are worse options available.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

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Re: Question is...

The advertisers probably don't care that 3% of the visitors don't see their ads because they won't end up paying much if anything for those people, so it's all the same to them. The publisher sees 3% of the people using their service with the costs associated with delivering it and would like to try getting that revenue back, because what do they care if none of those people buy the advertised stuff? From the publisher's perspective, either that person starts earning them some revenue or that person goes away and they no longer have the costs of providing the service to them. This makes more sense when it's something like YouTube because it's a lot more expensive to send videos to people than to send a text article. That's from the perspective of a person who has done neither, but I'm pretty sure that is what they're thinking.

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Re: Question is...

That looks like the limit for those who don't have a Prime subscription, so that wouldn't be unlimited. If you do have one, maybe their UI is bad and it just won't count up if you upload stuff. Either way, that's not an intentional limit on Prime users.

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Re: Question is...

The question is how large the group of advert-antagonistic are and how strong their antagonistic reaction is. I am probably in the group, but through a combination of blocking most ads and being able to ignore them more than some people I know, an ad really has to work at it to annoy me enough to get me to dislike its origin. I doubt you're keeping a full list of all the ads you've seen so you can avoid the businesses, especially as many of those would probably either be something you were never going to buy or something you have no choice about because it's the only supplier that offers an acceptable choice when you need the thing they're selling. So if the group is relatively small, those who push the adverts may view it as unimportant, and if the group is small enough, they could even be right that annoying those people and losing their business is cheaper than figuring out who they are and leaving them alone.

Meta says risk of account theft after phone number recycling isn't its problem to solve

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Re: Well if Meta are going to get roasted for this one

And, with a protocol like TOTP, you don't have to. Do you think Google and Microsoft are doing something nefarious in their apps? Okay, use a different one. It even works to use a non-Microsoft authenticator on your Microsoft accounts and a non-Google one on your Google accounts. The recommendations of these are because they're available, likely to be supported for some time, known to come from secure sources, and believed to be trustworthy. You are free to disagree with these assumptions, although I don't, and having an open protocol means you can manage with that easily.

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

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You might want to reconsider this site then. This is for profit, after all. Not all sites intended to make money are the same. I block ads as well, but I don't object to sites that exist to make money for their writers, including ones that require payment to use them. I only pay if I know I value the site that much, but it's a perfectly normal way to run a business.

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Re: I see a serious issue with the idea

The protocol isn't as simple as load page, send money automatically. There are manual controls on this and it's being run in the browser, meaning there will be even more settings. Most of it is probably manually pressing a button, so loading a hundred times will do nothing. The people writing this aren't complete idiots, so they'll also know to put some kind of cap on it to prevent the headlines of a massive macropayment. That won't prevent there being other problems with it, but it won't be something that basic.

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Re: What's the first word you think of when someone says "Amazon"?

Books are one of the main things I think of, not because Amazon's still mostly books, but that's one of the things I used it for. When I was a student and needed textbooks, I could buy them new from my university for way too much or buy used copies, and those copies were usually easiest to find on Amazon. A typical book shop wouldn't have them, other online sites would make it hard to determine whether I was getting the right thing and wouldn't necessarily have what I was looking for. Amazon was a reliable source. And when I was done with them and the new ones I had to purchase, I could sell them back on Amazon to next year's students. I'm not sure either works well anymore, but this was well after they expanded into a market with things other than books. Amazon still recommends textbooks to me on occasion, so you can see how much I used that.

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The theory of micropayments is not a method of charging people for subscriptions, but quite literally "people being nice and tossing a few pennies to sites they like". That's why it doesn't work. Still, if that's what they're building, then it will be the not working version rather than the empty your wallet automatically version.

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Re: Good luck

I agree on the first, disagree on the second. I have a few places on YouTube which I enjoy, although not very frequently, but most other times I end up there or get links to it, I'm disappointed. Whenever I do a search for something and get YouTube links, I mentally sigh because I know the chances are high that this video will take five minutes, even at the fastest speed, for me to realize that they know nothing more than I did before I did the web search. I've been recommended videos when watching one that was interesting to me, but those recommendations have rarely if ever proven even slightly as interesting. So I agree that there's plenty to like, but I don't think it's that easy to avoid the rest.

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Re: Good luck

Sure, you can try that, but nobody will do it. In return for watching ads, you get whatever site you chose to visit that has the ads. That's their theory, anyway, and it works for most people, so they'll keep using it for you as well.