tal

It might be nice if auto reviewers included a “privacy rating” for a vehicle based OK whether it broadcasts anything via radio (e.g. cell or tire-pressure systems can be used to identify someone). It’s not just auto manufacturers, but anyone who wants to set up a radio monitoring network, if there are unique IDs being broadcast.

I don’t know how a reviewer could know whether there’s a way for a manufacturer to gather logs during maintenance.

AGI is not a new term. It’s been in use since the 90s and the concept has been around for much longer.

It’s not new today, but it post-dates “AI” and hit the same problem then.

VS Code is going to require a newer version of glibc than Ubuntu 18.04 comes with. One does not simply upgrade glibc.

One might have an application-private newer build of glibc and set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the directory containing it prior to launching VS Code.

It depends on the definition of “support ended”. Like, there are various forms of extended support that you can pay for for versions of Windows, and some companies do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP#Support_lifecycle

Support for the original release of Windows XP (without a service pack) ended on August 30, 2005.[4] Both Windows XP Service Pack 1 and 1a were retired on October 10, 2006,[4] and both Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2 reached their end of support on July 13, 2010, about 24 months after the launch of Windows XP Service Pack 3.[4] The company stopped general licensing of Windows XP to OEMs and terminated retail sales of the operating system on June 30, 2008, 17 months after the release of Windows Vista.[114] However, an exception was announced on April 3, 2008, for OEMs producing what it defined as “ultra low-cost personal computers”, particularly netbooks, until one year after the availability of Windows 7 on October 22, 2009. Analysts felt that the move was primarily intended to compete against Linux-based netbooks, although Microsoft’s Kevin Hutz stated that the decision was due to apparent market demand for low-end computers with Windows.[115]

So for those, we’re all definitely a decade past the end of normal support. However, they have their extended support packages that can be purchased, and we aren’t a decade past the end of those…but most users probably aren’t actually getting those:

On April 14, 2009, Windows XP exited mainstream support and entered the extended support phase; Microsoft continued to provide security updates every month for Windows XP, however, free technical support, warranty claims, and design changes were no longer being offered. Extended support ended on April 8, 2014, over 12 years after the release of Windows XP; normally Microsoft products have a support life cycle of only 10 years.[118] Beyond the final security updates released on April 8, no more security patches or support information are provided for XP free-of-charge; “critical patches” will still be created, and made available only to customers subscribing to a paid “Custom Support” plan.[119] As it is a Windows component, all versions of Internet Explorer for Windows XP also became unsupported.[120]

In January 2014, it was estimated that more than 95% of the 3 million automated teller machines in the world were still running Windows XP (which largely replaced IBM’s OS/2 as the predominant operating system on ATMs); ATMs have an average lifecycle of between seven and ten years, but some have had lifecycles as long as 15. Plans were being made by several ATM vendors and their customers to migrate to Windows 7-based systems over the course of 2014, while vendors have also considered the possibility of using Linux-based platforms in the future to give them more flexibility for support lifecycles, and the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA) has since endorsed Windows 10 as a further replacement.[121] However, ATMs typically run the embedded variant of Windows XP, which was supported through January 2016.[122] As of May 2017, around 60% of the 220,000 ATMs in India still run Windows XP.[123]

Furthermore, at least 49% of all computers in China still ran XP at the beginning of 2014. These holdouts were influenced by several factors; prices of genuine copies of later versions of Windows in the country are high, while Ni Guangnan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences warned that Windows 8 could allegedly expose users to surveillance by the United States government,[124] and the Chinese government banned the purchase of Windows 8 products for government use in May 2014 in protest of Microsoft’s inability to provide “guaranteed” support.[125] The government also had concerns that the impending end of support could affect their anti-piracy initiatives with Microsoft, as users would simply pirate newer versions rather than purchasing them legally. As such, government officials formally requested that Microsoft extend the support period for XP for these reasons. While Microsoft did not comply with their requests, a number of major Chinese software developers, such as Lenovo, Kingsoft and Tencent, will provide free support and resources for Chinese users migrating from XP.[126] Several governments, in particular those of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, elected to negotiate “Custom Support” plans with Microsoft for their continued, internal use of Windows XP; the British government’s deal lasted for a year, and also covered support for Office 2003 (which reached end-of-life the same day) and cost £5.5 million.[127]

For the typical, individual end user, one probably wants to have been off Windows XP by 2008.

I use these tools.

That being said, I think that a lot of the value of knowing them comes specifically from their ability to let one cobble together things to automate the broader Unix environment, for which they are invaluable.

If one’s goal is specifically exploratory data analysis, I think that one probably gets more bang-for-the-buck in learning GNU R or something like that.

I don’t think that there’s an immediate application for specifically making carrots, because I doubt that the economics work, but I can imagine a world where we manufacture a lot more food than we do today.

Ehh…Not really a mechanism for that that I can see. I mean, say that there’s demand for that, which I can believe. Do I go to a given distro and buy a “security hardened” version? I don’t see how that would work. Is the distro going to refrain from incorporating security fixes into the “non-hardened” free version?

Well, you’ve got Ardour. But I suspect that there are people who do want this software package.

I don’t know, the camera formatted them, but I highly doubt that it is NTFS. So propably exFAT…

If you have the filesystem mounted, I believe you can see in /proc/mounts.

Reddit had the ability to have a per-subreddit wiki. I never dug into it on the moderator side, but it was useful for some things like setting up pages with subreddit rules and the like. I think that moderators had some level of control over it, at least to allow non-moderator edits or not, maybe on a per-page basis.

That could be a useful option for communities; I think that in general, there is more utility for per-community than per-instance wiki spaces, though I know that you admin a server with one major community which you also moderate, so in your case, there may not be much difference.

I don’t know how amenable django-wiki is to partitioning things up like that, though.

EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/wiki/ has a brief summary.

the Pixels are actually worth it and very very good phones.

Not the longest-battery-life devices.

The EU is preventing price discrimination within the EU.

They do have that requirement as part of the Digital Markets Act, but I don’t believe that that’s what the case here is addressing. That is not what the article OP posted or the article I linked to is saying: they are specifically saying that what is at issue is sales outside Europe.

EDIT: I am thinking that maybe the article is just in error. I mean, just from an economic standpoint, the EU doing this would create a major mess for international companies.

EDIT2: Okay, here’s an archive.ph link of the original Bloomberg article:

https://archive.ph/JuM0z#selection-4849.212-4863.277

In the contested arrangement with Valve, users were left unable to access some games that were available in other EU nations.

Yeah, so it’s just that these “mezha.media” guys mis-summarized the Bloomberg article.

But retail law attaches to a location, not to citizenship. Why would the EU be mandating sale of things in other regions? I mean, it’s not like the US says “if an American citizen is living in the EU, then vendors operating in the EU must follow American retail law when selling to him”.

EDIT: Okay, I went looking for another article.

https://www.gearrice.com/update/steam-cannot-block-the-activation-of-a-game-depending-on-the-country-of-purchase-europe-confirms/

Steam specifies in its terms of use that it is prohibited to use a VPN or equivalent to change your location on the platform. Except that it takes the case of the activation of a game given to you by someone and sent to your account. Following Europe’s decision, this should technically change and it would be possible to change region in Steam directly to buy a game then activate it in France. Valve has not made a comment at this time.

Hmm. Okay, if that is an accurate summary – and I am not sure that it is – that seems like the EU is saying “you must be able to use a VPN to buy something anywhere in the world, then activate it in Europe”. Yeah, I can definitely see Valve objecting to that, because that’d kill their ability to have one price in the (wealthy) EU and one in (poor) Eritrea, say. Someone in France would just VPN to Eritrea, buy at Eritrean prices, and then use it in France. The ability to have region-specific pricing is significant for digital goods, where almost all the costs are the fixed development costs.

thinks

If that is an accurate representation of the situation, that seems like it’d be pretty problematic for not just Valve, but also other digital vendors, since it’d basically force EU prices to be the same as the lowest prices that they could sell a digital product at in the world. I don’t know how one would deal with that. I guess that they could make an EU-based company (“Valve Germany”) or something that sells in the EU, and have a separate company that does international sales and does not sell in the EU.

I mean, otherwise a vendor is either going to not be able to offer something in Eritrea (using it as a stand-in for random poor countries), is going to have to sell it at a price that is going to be completely unaffordable to Eritreans, or is going to have to take a huge hit on pricing in the EU.

I’m a little suspicious that this isn’t a complete summary of the situation, though; that seems like it’d create too many issues.

EDIT2: Though looking at my linked-to article, it seems to be that the author is saying that that’s exactly what the situation is.

Valve was fined €1.6 million ($1.7 million) for obstructing the sale of certain PC video games outside Europe. However, the company pleaded not guilty.

Wait, outside Europe?

Some countries make it illegal to buy certain video games. If Valve can’t geoblock sale of them outside Europe, how are they supposed to conform with both sets of laws?

I remember that the EU didn’t want country-specific pricing inside the EU, and had some case over that. That I get, because I can see the EU having an interest in not wanting it creating problems for mobility around the EU. But I hadn’t heard about the EU going after vendors for not selling things outside Europe.

They may not want their configuration stored in $HOME, for example:

they’re on a machine that isn’t under their physical control and ~/.config is mounted over the network from their personal machine;

That sounds like it’s a bad way to handle configuration, since among many other problems, it won’t work with the many programs that do have dotfiles in home directory, but even if that happened, you could just symlink it.

they prefer to version control their configuration files using git, with a configuration directory managed over different branches;

I do that. I symlink that config into a git-controlled directory. If OP plans to put his entire ~/.config in git, he is doing things wrong, because some of that needs to be machine-local.

the user simply wants to have a clean and consistent $HOME directory and filesystem

If whatever program you are using to view your home directory cannot hide those files, it is broken, as it does not work with a whole lot of existing software.

less secure,

If your home directory is “not secure”, you’re probably in trouble already.

Like, there are reasons you may not want to put dotfiles in a homedir, but none of the arguments in the article are them.

EDIT: I will ask developers to stop dumping directories and files that don’t start with a dot in people’s home directories, though. I gave up over twenty years ago and put my actual stuff under ~/m just to keep it from being polluted with all the other things that dump non-dotfiles/-dotdirs in a home directory. Looking at my current system, I have:

• A number of directories containing video game saves and configuration. I am pretty sure that these are mostly bad Windows ports or possibly Windows programs under WINE that just dump stuff into a user’s home directory there (not even good on Windows). Some are Windows Steam games.

• WINE apparently has decided that it’s a good idea to default to sticking the Windows home directory and all of its directories in there.

• Apparently some webcam software that I used at one point.

• A few logfiles

we’re going to ringfence all of the Raspberry Pi 5s we sell until at least the end of the year for single-unit sales to individuals, so you get the first bite of the cherry.

I mean, if you have USB, for a non-mobile platform, it doesn’t really matter. It’s not hard to get a USB audio interface.

For cell phones or laptops, I can understand not wanting another thing to plug in, but for something like a Raspberry Pi…shrugs

https://moneyinc.com/linus-torvalds-net-worth/

How Linus Torvalds Achieved a Net Worth of $150 Million

Red Hat and VA Linux went public, and since they acknowledged it would not have been possible without the programmer, Torvalds received shares reportedly worth $20 million. Before it went public, Red Hat had allegedly paid Torvalds $1 million in stock, which the programmer claims was the only big payout he received.

He revealed that the rest of the stock Transmeta and another Linux startup awarded him were not worth much by the time he could sell them. However, in the case of his Red Hat stock, it must have been worth his while because, in 2012, Red Hat became the first $1 billion open-source company when it reached the billion-dollar mark in annual revenue.

Whether he exercised his stock options is unclear, but the money he makes from the gains could be the reason why his net worth has continued to soar.

Well, that’s one definition of being communist, I suppose. Myself, I think that it’s fairly safe to say that Torvalds is okay with private ownership of industry.

The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like

SMSes use a standard available to any app. WhatsApp is controlled by a single company.

If you were arguing that XMPP or something like that should be used instead of SMS, okay, that’s one thing, but I have a hard time favoring a walled garden.

The Fallout 3 remaster (fiscal year 2024)

If you consider that A Tale of Two Wastelands – where people forward-ported the Fallout 3 world to the Fallout: New Vegas engine and ruleset – was successful, that could be pretty solid. I still think I’d forward-port Fallout: New Vegas to the current Bethesda engine before I’d forward-port Fallout 3, though. Fallout: New Vegas was a better game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout:_New_Vegas#Tale_of_Two_Wastelands

Tale of Two Wastelands

Tale of Two Wastelands is a total conversion mod for Fallout: New Vegas that merges the entire content of Fallout 3 and its DLC and New Vegas into one game. The mod implements features introduced in New Vegas into Fallout 3, such as the Companion Wheel, crafting recipes, and weapon mods. Players can freely traverse between the two games on a single save file, keeping all of their items and their progression between game worlds.[76][77][78][79]

Also, most Fallout: New Vegas mods worked with Tale of Two Wastelands, which was pretty cool.