It's bizarre to me there are people cheering on the potential death of x86. Sure it has warts, but it is an accidentally created mostly-open platform we'll likely never see created again. And ARM's vaulted power efficiency advantages are really overblown, having more to do with different design goals and not needing to care about a diverse platform than inherent advantages of the underlying cpu architecture. I suspect if x86 ecosystem does die we won't end up with much to show for it compared to what will be lost.
They are too smart to repeat the mistake of the IBM PC again. Even with "open" ISAs, kernels, they will rules-lawyer out the blackbox part out just like with Android phone makers etc.
Weird mobile SoCs are increasingly open. There's device tree. Modern Pixel devices use UEFI.
Why bother with obfuscated nonstandard schemes when it gets you bad PR and increases your own development costs to get a FOSS stack up and running? Manufacturers just lock the bootloader instead. That can't be reverse engineered around.
Thats what I meant. They will find some other part of the stack to lock down to rules lawyer against the openness of whatever the rest of the stack is. You have an open source Linux kernel, you may have an open source chip, so as you said they might cryptographically lock the bootloader. And now Android I believe is trying to make an end run around drivers in the Linux layer too. If thats true then manufacturers will jump to shift drivers into the Apache layer instead of the GPL kernel. ie if they even provide source dumps at all.
edit: It seems I am misinformed about the moving drivers above part. Perhaps I might have confused this from Fuchsia. In any case the main point was that as you yourself gave the example of, they will always find some part of the stack to hide all the real power/real logic into even if the other parts are open.
In sounds like you have Firefox's fingerprint resist feature enabled. This confusion occurs every time this topic comes up because there are two different strategies used to attack the problem and people end up measuring them both the same way.
You can try to be so generic that the attributes are meaningless, the meatspace version of this would be everyone wearing a Guy Fawkes mask so they all have the same face and you can't tell the difference between individuals. Or, you can wear a new generic face every single day so that nothing you did yesterday connects to you, an bland ephemeral identity.
Tor uses the former method (or tries to), everyone is up to something but you can't tell them apart because they all have the same face/browser attributes. Firefox's fingerprint resist is the second method, normally identifying values are fuzzed repeatedly so that while each signature is identifiable you won't be using it for long enough to connect them to eachother. Both strategies have their merits.
After my wife stole (back) her high school alarm clock I wasn't satisfied with the replacements. But I picked up an old one for $0.25 at a market festival recently and am pretty happy with it.
This seems like the most difficult era as far as emulation of PC games goes. There was a ton of change and different 3D accelerators during this time and hardware advanced away from things like 16-bit color and dropped support. And it is old news, look up "thief crappy colors" so see all the work that had to be done to get Thief: The Dark Project (and games using the same engine) to look normal on modern hardware. And that was 10-15 years ago. And many games didn't have the fan base to update game like Thief did.
Isn't flood insurance already nationalized? My understanding was about 100 years ago these properties in flood zones were deemed un-insurable by the private industry and the government decided to fill in the gap, probably because a lot of wealthy landowners owned these properties.
Around here there is a local grocery store that has flooded requiring a complete gutting 3 times in the last 20 years. And they're rebuilding it again. Seems like insanity to me but if some one is willing to sell you subsidized insurance for this and there isn't an available plot of land infested with NIMBY red tape I can understand why they do it. I can't understand why anyone thinks this is a good way to set things up though.
Microsoft should just double down again on the doubling down. That would be twice as good and really start to make some headway I figure. Maybe as good squared, I'm not an C-level exec so I confess I don't fully understand the math on this.
I'm not sure this is appealing to wallstreet at all but this just describes the appeal of open source as a customer to me. VMware is a just perfect case example, they're literally firing paying customers and destroying a product lots of people are using to make a quick buck. The company and the product will ultimately be destroyed regardless of their underlying value but not before they make bank.
But if Vmware was open source they never would have bought it. The leverage being closed provides is the whole point.
My experience with Meta is it is just a PII fishing expedition masquerading as a security check.
I abandoned my facebook account when they asked for my driver's license scan, a few weeks later suddenly they didn't need it after all. My BIL recently wanted me to check sout omething he had setup on facebook and I found I could "login" by clicking one of the "what are people doing" spam emails they send. I've never used it on this PC before and have no idea what the password even is anymore. Super secure.
