Is there any information on how the settings change was made?
Obviously, OS updates could change settings(sometimes by legitimate necessity since an OS update can add new settings that need a default of some kind, remove features that used to have settings but no longer need them; or modify a feature enough that there isn't a clear answer for what 'preserving' the old setting would mean); so if it was done by pushing out an OS update with the wrong settings that would be sloppy but not fundamentally sinister.
If, however, Google has sent MDM-like remote control(probably in Google Play Services somewhere), and they used that to toggle the setting things get rather less innocent.
In the hypothetical world where Comcast imposes tight control and strict bandwidth caps on my SATA bus; while I'm free to purchase copious, low-latency, WAN options from a reasonably competitive market this would be ideal.
As it is, I'm sure 'Cortana guesses which files you don't really need access to right now' will be a hilarious game for the whole family.
As we have seen in other areas of phone design(and the so called 'system on chip' generally), considerable savings of both cost and power can be achieved through denser integration of components, reduction in duplication of function, power hungry bus logic, and so forth.
Imagine, if you will, the sorts of power and cost savings that could be realized if Google took the revolutionary(indeed, Courageous) step of moving the dongle into the phone.
I realize that it's a radical proposal; and I don't make it lightly; but a handset that already has DACs and analog audio stages to drive its mic and speaker(s) would be perfectly placed to realize this gain of integration by adding just an extra couple of channels to support what is effectively one extra pair of speakers and possibly mic. Not possible today, perhaps; but what of tomorrow?
I'd imagine that Mars would be a case where much more intensive cultivation practices would make sense(compared to the cost of shipping pretty much any crazy hydroponics setup looks like a rounding error; and nobody is going to worry too much about your genetically engineered sugar-algae escaping into the pristine Martian oceans; but that space would be at something of a premium:
If you want to use it you need to enclose it(or excavate it and seal as needed), heat it; quite likely light it; and initial reports are that the local soil may have perchlorates that need to be dealt with, in addition to just having absolutely zero accumulated humus, just mineral sand and dust, if you want to try non-hydroponic techniques.
Even so, though, something resembling agriculture (potentially with algae or e coli with plant genes spliced in or something; but using biological sugar synthesis rather than some sort of industrial chemical synthesis: if you are 6 months and a lot of money away from spare parts/fresh reagents/replacement catalyst bits, the ability of organisms to reproduce themselves a new population could come in very handy indeed. Keep a bunch of samples of the relevant organisms in storage(cryo, dried seeds, etc.) and you'll be much more resilient: worst case you have to irradiate the grow vats until the contaminant organisms are cleared out, then restart from a frozen sample.
They have their limits, some very annoying, and our understanding of how to control them is still a work in progress; but it's still the case that biology has effectively delivered replicator nanites a billion-odd years before robotics. And on a planet where you can't just FedEx in spares if something goes unexpectedly badly that could be quite useful.
" It's even one of the most common sources of power in the universe! Except on Earth, because of leftards."
Did you actually use the average properties of the universe as an, um, 'data', point about what sources terrestrial electricity production should use? Because 'the universe' is so representative of conditions on earth in other respects? Is having an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, rather than an almost complete vacuum also a liberal conspiracy?
Plus, I think that you might have been a trifle sloppy lumping fission and fusion together under 'nuclear'. Not only is fission power something of an aberration on a universal scale(supplies of elements heavy enough are pretty scarce; and found more or less exclusively as byproducts of stars that did a rather heroic amount of fusion before they got to that step); the industry-standard fusion generator configuration is an open-reactor gravity contained design; not one of the oddball ultra-compact curiosities..
In fact, if you venture outside during the day you can see the one we already have installed and (mostly uneventfully) supply most of earth's energy requirements...
I'm sort of surprised to see Qualcomm releasing a discrete part at this level of integration (rather than "here's an entire cell modem on module so you can 5G your widget with minimum regulatory hassle and without adding an RF witch doctor to your traffic light control company's team" or "here's the silicon and some design guide docs; engineering support for larger customers").
Is there just more demand than I realize from people who are doing things too tightly integrated/space constrained for the full "lump of cell module" treatment(would be phone ODMs with limited RF experience, such that they buy antennas rather than integrate them as trace antennas or into phone body/structure?) or do the requirements of '5G' impose sufficiently new and stringent requirements that it's expected that relatively few will be able to so it in house, at least for the first generation or two?
Only if you can take on the(generally sharply uphill) battle of demonstrating that you were rightsized and/or not hired because you were bad for health insurance rates; rather than for essentially any other reason.
If your former or prospective employers are foolish enough to gloat somewhere discoverable about ditching the uneugenic, and you are able to make it through a long, punishing, probably expensive, case that will stamp a radioactive "NOT A TEAM PLAYER" on you whether you win or lose, perhaps you'll obtain a settlement of some sort.
That's definitely not scary enough to discourage something so eminently cost effective.
Among other possible cases, hiring and firing decisions are an obvious candidate: employer-pooled insurance doesn't remove the impact of high or low cost individuals; just average it across a bunch of employees.
This creates a fairly obvious incentive to call the sickies, unless making an exception for some total rockstar. Which has the obvious consequences in both risk of being dismissed for some trumped up reason and in terms of reduced mobility(among those whose employers aren't actively cullingthe uneugenic: but who know that any prospective employer probably won't go for someone who ruins the average cost of the employee plan).
They won't have a direct effect; but do you think that a lesson in the ease and convenience of papering over engineering problems is going to do the rigor of various costly, but reliability critical, quality control measures any good?
Quality control involves a lot of being willing to look rigorously at things that would be much less of a nuisance if you just let them slide long enough to be someone else's problem.
This seems like the product of either Nvidia's lawyers going a but crazy or something not going well on their end:
It's already the case that tech journalism is strongly 'access' based; whether the company likes you or not pretty much dictates whether you get review samples in time to have a full write-up on release day or get ignored in favor of people who do(which, given how much of the interest is in cutting edge stuff really hurts). However, unlike other 'access' dominated areas(reporting on government or military, say); the window where undesirable 3rd parties can be kept away is limited: you can uninvite them to E3 hype sessions and make sure that they don't have a new product far enough ahead of time to be able to show comprehensive benchmarks on release day; but you are still releasing a consumer product with distribution controlled only by price.
Someone trying to get a Pentagon story without cooperation could spend years or decades trying to FOIA stuff or have it undergo automatic classification review due to age. Someone writing about video cards can have unlimited physical access to a sample for under $1000(except certain pro/specialty parts) as soon after release day as they can find one in stock.
Given that, I don't really understand what Nvidia is seeking to achieve here: it's already pretty easy to get tech sites that depend on having day-one hardware reviews and 'exclusive' pre-release to toe the line; but also pretty much impossible to keep a lid on people who are willing to test retail samples without your cooperation; or to clamp down on anonymous sources giving The Register material to write snarky articles about your underfill woes or the like. What is it that isn't currently controlled that Nvidia thinks it needs to(and has any hope of) control?
I can understand the logic behind adding support for characters that weren't necessarily a priority back when the internet was a DARPA and some mostly anglophome universities project; but are there any non-scam/amusing novelty use cases for mixed alphabet domain names?
I ask in sincere curiosity. With the possible exception of non-latin alphabets used alongsiide hindu-arabic numerals; I can't think of any situations where a human natural language is written such that it would use domain nes that are a mixture of multiple alphabets from a Unicode perspective(and, if there were such a language, it would arguably be on Unicode to fix that by assigning the necessary codepoints to the alphabet currently being cobbled together out of several: since Unicode is about glyphs rather than fonts the fact that the same symbol is used doesn't make it the same thing for Unicode purposes, as with all the Greek letters that get one codepoint as mathematical symbols and another as Greek letters, or the visually identical overlaps between Latin and Cyrillic that get coded as completely distinct things because they are.); but what I don't know about linguistics and contemporary natural language usage is very much not an impressive arguement.
Are there any legitimate/expected use cases; or should a domain name cobbled together from multiple alphabets be treated as deeply suspicious in essentially all cases?
It's pretty shameless to use the term 'poaching'; when it specifically implies that the animal being hunted is the property of someone other than the hunter.
Not that I'd ever suspect that HR sees us a prey animals who are owned by our feudal overlords or anything; that sort of negativity just isn't in keeping with company values.
They don't do 'usable' as in 'hand holding'; but, while that imposes a nontrivial learning curve, it has the very refreshing effect of meaning that there is relatively little 'automagic' doing cryptic stuff when you aren't looking in order to try to make things Just Work. If you want something somewhere you will probably have to put it there; but if you put something somewhere it probably won't get moved unexpectedly.
Atuomagic has its place(the old OpenBSD installer's enthusiasm for not hiding details of disk partitioning was always sort of irksome without obvious benefit; and it has been dropped in newer versions); but (outside of substantially smaller embedded and educational OSes) OpenBSD does atypically well in giving you the ability to know what is going on, not just have a rough mental sketch of where the black boxes and here-be-dragons zones are. Makes it nice to work with after some time beating your head against automagic that isn't working for some reason and is brutally opaque about why.
In a sense it is opt-in: people who are primarily concerned about performance (at least outside of packet filtering) tend not to run OpenBSD.
I don't know(and would be curious to) how large or small the effort required to make this a toggleable on/off, so it's hard to say if it would even be feasible for the project to maintain both versions(given that scheduler fiddling is involved in getting good HT results, since hyperthreaded cores can't just naively be treated as real additional cores, I'd imagine that dropping support reduces the required effort; but would welcome more detail).
In general, though, OpenBSD is very much one of those things where the people who go there know what they are getting in to, which is OpenBSD being aggressively willing to err on the side of greater caution or correctness while exhibiting a distaste for binary blobs that differs from Stallman's only in that they are willing to let you use their software in your blob-riddled product; but they certainly aren't going to touch your blobs if it can be avoided.
The theory that enormously complex software systems specifically designed to be capable of novel behavior definitely won't go off the rails seems like something that you could only embrace if you've never actually interacted with real software as written by real people.
There is also the...minor...problem that "have a human in the loop deciding" will be a feature that will have to be implemented in software; and we definitely don't have a history of either unhelpful program output or unpleasant reaction to malformed inputs; so that will go well.
The slightly less pleasant aspect, in this case, is that(for anything that employs steam DRM, which is much of the catalog) "not support" isn't "we make no guarantee that anything will continue to work, advise you to upgrade; and definitely won't be providing updates" but rather "it will stop working by design, along with everything you purchased through it."
I think you can get an extra couple of weeks by kicking steam into offline mode at the last moment; but as soon as Valve stops treating the last XP-compatible release as legitimate the clock is ticking.
Support for an OS of XP's age is reasonably generous by consumer software standards; but the move(sadly not confined to Valve, or even at its most intense there) toward "we don't support" meaning "it gets bricked" rather than just "don't bother us if it doesn't work; and we really don't recommend doing it" is considerably less pleasant.
Apparently the problem is that, while you can train a dog to react to more things; it's quite difficult to get them to lose interest in things you previously trained them to care about; which makes your former pot hounds a lousy source of probable cause: If the police can at least claim that doggo only 'indicates' in response to illicit narcotics then they can either just proceed, or get really trivial permission to proceed, on the basis of the dog smelling something.
If the dog 'indicates' in response to illicit narcotics; but also that popular, odorous, and legal thing that's just become super popular; you are stuck making an argument precisely as weak as "So, your honor, we needed to frisk him for cocaine because he smelled of cigarette smoke"; which isn't going to go so well against defendants who aren't being utterly railroaded.
I suspect that this would annoy the cops; and quite possibly give them an opening to charge you with some sort of hazardous waste infraction; but the price of shredded lower grade electronic scrap is only modestly higher than that of mulch. Fido and friends could spend days grovelling through fiberglass fragments.
A more elegant, if more involved, process would probably be to cook up an 'air freshener' infused with the less-than-totally-delightful scent of partially scorched flux, outgassing epoxy; and mixed halogenated flame retardants.
I'm not arguing that hydrocarbon producers are going to be happy about it; or regions where that is the local industry more prosperous for it(indeed, both will definitely not be the case); but I think you are looking at 'multi trillion industry' the wrong way:
Fossile fuel extraction isn't a multi trillion industry because it's inherently valuable(indeed, it's pretty much solid negative externalities); it's an industry of that size because the (substantially larger) "human activities that require energy and/or petrochemicals" industry(effectively all human industry, even the stuff done by hand once you count Haber process nitrogen) can afford to pay that much for the energy it needs and currently has no better options.
You can trivially say of basically any industry that it would be better off if it had fewer competitors and its customers had greater need for its products; and that wouldn't be false; but it would be ignoring the fact that the good of the industry in question would be at the expense of that industry's customers; who would be the ones footing the bill for that greater prosperity.
In this case, the industry in question is enormous; but that's an indication of just how extraordinarily large its customer base is; and all those customers stand to gain from improved efficiency or new energy sources.
This doesn't mean that things will uniformly go well; we'll probably see some regional outcomes that make Appalacian coal country look like a shining success story; but the prediction I was responding to wasn't "things will suck in some places"(which is true); but "global financial crisis"; and I stand by the assertion that, if "essentially all human activities become cheaper" = "global financial crisis" you are doing something profoundly wrong.
It seems as though our vaunted financial indicators must be...a trifle off...in some way if a combination of cheaper energy efficiency measures and increase in availability of energy sources cheaper than the current low cost options would have negative effects on the economy.
How do you do that? The cost of a fair amount of energy(and often a lot of petrochemicals that will presumably be cheaper if less demand for using them as fuel means lower cost for purchasing them as feedstocks) is baked into pretty much every good and service imaginable. What sort of ghastly mistake does it take to turn "basically everything has become cheaper to produce" into a financial crisis?
I wouldn't want my job to depend on keeping Intel's margins at their historical levels; but that's different than being screwed: All those mobile devices sucking 'cloud' services sell Xeons at a steady clip; the options for ARM outside of embedded remain (surprisingly, in all honesty) rather tepid(basically everyone has talked about how they've got a totally rocking ARM-for-datacenter option coming real soon now; but releases have been a lot less common, especially releases you can actually buy; and would want to. AMD has their Opteron A series; but doesn't talk about them much now that they have an x86 option that is actually good again; Qualcomm has made some noises about datacenter CPUs(no word on whether you are expected to just throw those away when they lose interest in driver support 1.5 Android releases from now...); Cavium has some stuff; but it's honestly a bit surprising how little there is.
Given the number of cellphones, even pretty awful ones, that shove one of the 64-bit ARMs and a bunch of RAM into something battery powered I would have naively expected a reasonably healthy "We took a top of range 64 bit ARM and put it on a motherboard in one of the ATX sizes, with DIMM slots and peripherals; excellent value if you have a workload that doesn't lean too hard on peak single threaded performance or rely on x86 binary compatibility" market. Instead, it's mostly dev boards(often with the only software support being a BSP aimed at allowing you to get what's on the dev board shoved into an Android widget); typically with significant I/O limitations(even bottom-feeding consumer desktop parts usually have RAM expansion and PCIe lane supplies quite superior to the dev boards; though ARMs that at least have PCIe are more common than they used to be).
ARM options have moved upmarket somewhat in the half server/half embedded things like NASes; used to be that ARM NASes were the very lowest of the low; now some reasonably respectable ones are available; but the offerings are still sparser than one would expect.
Worst case, of course, Intel always has the option of doing merchant foundry stuff. Not as prestigious, or high margin, as fabbing their own parts that also command a substantial premium; but fabbing other people's SoCs to order would still beat bankruptcy by a considerable margin.
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Is there any information on how the settings change was made?
Obviously, OS updates could change settings(sometimes by legitimate necessity since an OS update can add new settings that need a default of some kind, remove features that used to have settings but no longer need them; or modify a feature enough that there isn't a clear answer for what 'preserving' the old setting would mean); so if it was done by pushing out an OS update with the wrong settings that would be sloppy but not fundamentally sinister.
If, however, Google has sent MDM-like remote control(probably in Google Play Services somewhere), and they used that to toggle the setting things get rather less innocent.
In the hypothetical world where Comcast imposes tight control and strict bandwidth caps on my SATA bus; while I'm free to purchase copious, low-latency, WAN options from a reasonably competitive market this would be ideal.
As it is, I'm sure 'Cortana guesses which files you don't really need access to right now' will be a hilarious game for the whole family.
As we have seen in other areas of phone design(and the so called 'system on chip' generally), considerable savings of both cost and power can be achieved through denser integration of components, reduction in duplication of function, power hungry bus logic, and so forth.
Imagine, if you will, the sorts of power and cost savings that could be realized if Google took the revolutionary(indeed, Courageous) step of moving the dongle into the phone.
I realize that it's a radical proposal; and I don't make it lightly; but a handset that already has DACs and analog audio stages to drive its mic and speaker(s) would be perfectly placed to realize this gain of integration by adding just an extra couple of channels to support what is effectively one extra pair of speakers and possibly mic. Not possible today, perhaps; but what of tomorrow?
I'd imagine that Mars would be a case where much more intensive cultivation practices would make sense(compared to the cost of shipping pretty much any crazy hydroponics setup looks like a rounding error; and nobody is going to worry too much about your genetically engineered sugar-algae escaping into the pristine Martian oceans; but that space would be at something of a premium:
If you want to use it you need to enclose it(or excavate it and seal as needed), heat it; quite likely light it; and initial reports are that the local soil may have perchlorates that need to be dealt with, in addition to just having absolutely zero accumulated humus, just mineral sand and dust, if you want to try non-hydroponic techniques.
Even so, though, something resembling agriculture (potentially with algae or e coli with plant genes spliced in or something; but using biological sugar synthesis rather than some sort of industrial chemical synthesis: if you are 6 months and a lot of money away from spare parts/fresh reagents/replacement catalyst bits, the ability of organisms to reproduce themselves a new population could come in very handy indeed. Keep a bunch of samples of the relevant organisms in storage(cryo, dried seeds, etc.) and you'll be much more resilient: worst case you have to irradiate the grow vats until the contaminant organisms are cleared out, then restart from a frozen sample.
They have their limits, some very annoying, and our understanding of how to control them is still a work in progress; but it's still the case that biology has effectively delivered replicator nanites a billion-odd years before robotics. And on a planet where you can't just FedEx in spares if something goes unexpectedly badly that could be quite useful.
" It's even one of the most common sources of power in the universe! Except on Earth, because of leftards."
Did you actually use the average properties of the universe as an, um, 'data', point about what sources terrestrial electricity production should use? Because 'the universe' is so representative of conditions on earth in other respects? Is having an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, rather than an almost complete vacuum also a liberal conspiracy?
Plus, I think that you might have been a trifle sloppy lumping fission and fusion together under 'nuclear'. Not only is fission power something of an aberration on a universal scale(supplies of elements heavy enough are pretty scarce; and found more or less exclusively as byproducts of stars that did a rather heroic amount of fusion before they got to that step); the industry-standard fusion generator configuration is an open-reactor gravity contained design; not one of the oddball ultra-compact curiosities..
In fact, if you venture outside during the day you can see the one we already have installed and (mostly uneventfully) supply most of earth's energy requirements...
I'm sort of surprised to see Qualcomm releasing a discrete part at this level of integration (rather than "here's an entire cell modem on module so you can 5G your widget with minimum regulatory hassle and without adding an RF witch doctor to your traffic light control company's team" or "here's the silicon and some design guide docs; engineering support for larger customers").
Is there just more demand than I realize from people who are doing things too tightly integrated/space constrained for the full "lump of cell module" treatment(would be phone ODMs with limited RF experience, such that they buy antennas rather than integrate them as trace antennas or into phone body/structure?) or do the requirements of '5G' impose sufficiently new and stringent requirements that it's expected that relatively few will be able to so it in house, at least for the first generation or two?
This seems like an obvious "Well I'm glad we reached consensus so quickly..." opportunity.
Only if you can take on the(generally sharply uphill) battle of demonstrating that you were rightsized and/or not hired because you were bad for health insurance rates; rather than for essentially any other reason.
If your former or prospective employers are foolish enough to gloat somewhere discoverable about ditching the uneugenic, and you are able to make it through a long, punishing, probably expensive, case that will stamp a radioactive "NOT A TEAM PLAYER" on you whether you win or lose, perhaps you'll obtain a settlement of some sort.
That's definitely not scary enough to discourage something so eminently cost effective.
Of course not! It's not as though growing up in a theocratic dystopia could possibly be causing the problem; so it must be interwebs games.
Among other possible cases, hiring and firing decisions are an obvious candidate: employer-pooled insurance doesn't remove the impact of high or low cost individuals; just average it across a bunch of employees.
This creates a fairly obvious incentive to call the sickies, unless making an exception for some total rockstar. Which has the obvious consequences in both risk of being dismissed for some trumped up reason and in terms of reduced mobility(among those whose employers aren't actively cullingthe uneugenic: but who know that any prospective employer probably won't go for someone who ruins the average cost of the employee plan).
They won't have a direct effect; but do you think that a lesson in the ease and convenience of papering over engineering problems is going to do the rigor of various costly, but reliability critical, quality control measures any good?
Quality control involves a lot of being willing to look rigorously at things that would be much less of a nuisance if you just let them slide long enough to be someone else's problem.
This seems like the product of either Nvidia's lawyers going a but crazy or something not going well on their end:
It's already the case that tech journalism is strongly 'access' based; whether the company likes you or not pretty much dictates whether you get review samples in time to have a full write-up on release day or get ignored in favor of people who do(which, given how much of the interest is in cutting edge stuff really hurts). However, unlike other 'access' dominated areas(reporting on government or military, say); the window where undesirable 3rd parties can be kept away is limited: you can uninvite them to E3 hype sessions and make sure that they don't have a new product far enough ahead of time to be able to show comprehensive benchmarks on release day; but you are still releasing a consumer product with distribution controlled only by price.
Someone trying to get a Pentagon story without cooperation could spend years or decades trying to FOIA stuff or have it undergo automatic classification review due to age. Someone writing about video cards can have unlimited physical access to a sample for under $1000(except certain pro/specialty parts) as soon after release day as they can find one in stock.
Given that, I don't really understand what Nvidia is seeking to achieve here: it's already pretty easy to get tech sites that depend on having day-one hardware reviews and 'exclusive' pre-release to toe the line; but also pretty much impossible to keep a lid on people who are willing to test retail samples without your cooperation; or to clamp down on anonymous sources giving The Register material to write snarky articles about your underfill woes or the like. What is it that isn't currently controlled that Nvidia thinks it needs to(and has any hope of) control?
Any word on whether the victim was heard gasping "Quod Erat Demonstrandum" as he was rushed off for treatment?
I can understand the logic behind adding support for characters that weren't necessarily a priority back when the internet was a DARPA and some mostly anglophome universities project; but are there any non-scam/amusing novelty use cases for mixed alphabet domain names?
I ask in sincere curiosity. With the possible exception of non-latin alphabets used alongsiide hindu-arabic numerals; I can't think of any situations where a human natural language is written such that it would use domain nes that are a mixture of multiple alphabets from a Unicode perspective(and, if there were such a language, it would arguably be on Unicode to fix that by assigning the necessary codepoints to the alphabet currently being cobbled together out of several: since Unicode is about glyphs rather than fonts the fact that the same symbol is used doesn't make it the same thing for Unicode purposes, as with all the Greek letters that get one codepoint as mathematical symbols and another as Greek letters, or the visually identical overlaps between Latin and Cyrillic that get coded as completely distinct things because they are.); but what I don't know about linguistics and contemporary natural language usage is very much not an impressive arguement.
Are there any legitimate/expected use cases; or should a domain name cobbled together from multiple alphabets be treated as deeply suspicious in essentially all cases?
It's pretty shameless to use the term 'poaching'; when it specifically implies that the animal being hunted is the property of someone other than the hunter.
Not that I'd ever suspect that HR sees us a prey animals who are owned by our feudal overlords or anything; that sort of negativity just isn't in keeping with company values.
They don't do 'usable' as in 'hand holding'; but, while that imposes a nontrivial learning curve, it has the very refreshing effect of meaning that there is relatively little 'automagic' doing cryptic stuff when you aren't looking in order to try to make things Just Work. If you want something somewhere you will probably have to put it there; but if you put something somewhere it probably won't get moved unexpectedly.
Atuomagic has its place(the old OpenBSD installer's enthusiasm for not hiding details of disk partitioning was always sort of irksome without obvious benefit; and it has been dropped in newer versions); but (outside of substantially smaller embedded and educational OSes) OpenBSD does atypically well in giving you the ability to know what is going on, not just have a rough mental sketch of where the black boxes and here-be-dragons zones are. Makes it nice to work with after some time beating your head against automagic that isn't working for some reason and is brutally opaque about why.
In a sense it is opt-in: people who are primarily concerned about performance (at least outside of packet filtering) tend not to run OpenBSD.
I don't know(and would be curious to) how large or small the effort required to make this a toggleable on/off, so it's hard to say if it would even be feasible for the project to maintain both versions(given that scheduler fiddling is involved in getting good HT results, since hyperthreaded cores can't just naively be treated as real additional cores, I'd imagine that dropping support reduces the required effort; but would welcome more detail).
In general, though, OpenBSD is very much one of those things where the people who go there know what they are getting in to, which is OpenBSD being aggressively willing to err on the side of greater caution or correctness while exhibiting a distaste for binary blobs that differs from Stallman's only in that they are willing to let you use their software in your blob-riddled product; but they certainly aren't going to touch your blobs if it can be avoided.
The theory that enormously complex software systems specifically designed to be capable of novel behavior definitely won't go off the rails seems like something that you could only embrace if you've never actually interacted with real software as written by real people.
There is also the...minor...problem that "have a human in the loop deciding" will be a feature that will have to be implemented in software; and we definitely don't have a history of either unhelpful program output or unpleasant reaction to malformed inputs; so that will go well.
The slightly less pleasant aspect, in this case, is that(for anything that employs steam DRM, which is much of the catalog) "not support" isn't "we make no guarantee that anything will continue to work, advise you to upgrade; and definitely won't be providing updates" but rather "it will stop working by design, along with everything you purchased through it."
I think you can get an extra couple of weeks by kicking steam into offline mode at the last moment; but as soon as Valve stops treating the last XP-compatible release as legitimate the clock is ticking.
Support for an OS of XP's age is reasonably generous by consumer software standards; but the move(sadly not confined to Valve, or even at its most intense there) toward "we don't support" meaning "it gets bricked" rather than just "don't bother us if it doesn't work; and we really don't recommend doing it" is considerably less pleasant.
Apparently the problem is that, while you can train a dog to react to more things; it's quite difficult to get them to lose interest in things you previously trained them to care about; which makes your former pot hounds a lousy source of probable cause: If the police can at least claim that doggo only 'indicates' in response to illicit narcotics then they can either just proceed, or get really trivial permission to proceed, on the basis of the dog smelling something.
If the dog 'indicates' in response to illicit narcotics; but also that popular, odorous, and legal thing that's just become super popular; you are stuck making an argument precisely as weak as "So, your honor, we needed to frisk him for cocaine because he smelled of cigarette smoke"; which isn't going to go so well against defendants who aren't being utterly railroaded.
I suspect that this would annoy the cops; and quite possibly give them an opening to charge you with some sort of hazardous waste infraction; but the price of shredded lower grade electronic scrap is only modestly higher than that of mulch. Fido and friends could spend days grovelling through fiberglass fragments.
A more elegant, if more involved, process would probably be to cook up an 'air freshener' infused with the less-than-totally-delightful scent of partially scorched flux, outgassing epoxy; and mixed halogenated flame retardants.
I'm not arguing that hydrocarbon producers are going to be happy about it; or regions where that is the local industry more prosperous for it(indeed, both will definitely not be the case); but I think you are looking at 'multi trillion industry' the wrong way:
Fossile fuel extraction isn't a multi trillion industry because it's inherently valuable(indeed, it's pretty much solid negative externalities); it's an industry of that size because the (substantially larger) "human activities that require energy and/or petrochemicals" industry(effectively all human industry, even the stuff done by hand once you count Haber process nitrogen) can afford to pay that much for the energy it needs and currently has no better options.
You can trivially say of basically any industry that it would be better off if it had fewer competitors and its customers had greater need for its products; and that wouldn't be false; but it would be ignoring the fact that the good of the industry in question would be at the expense of that industry's customers; who would be the ones footing the bill for that greater prosperity.
In this case, the industry in question is enormous; but that's an indication of just how extraordinarily large its customer base is; and all those customers stand to gain from improved efficiency or new energy sources.
This doesn't mean that things will uniformly go well; we'll probably see some regional outcomes that make Appalacian coal country look like a shining success story; but the prediction I was responding to wasn't "things will suck in some places"(which is true); but "global financial crisis"; and I stand by the assertion that, if "essentially all human activities become cheaper" = "global financial crisis" you are doing something profoundly wrong.
It seems as though our vaunted financial indicators must be...a trifle off...in some way if a combination of cheaper energy efficiency measures and increase in availability of energy sources cheaper than the current low cost options would have negative effects on the economy.
How do you do that? The cost of a fair amount of energy(and often a lot of petrochemicals that will presumably be cheaper if less demand for using them as fuel means lower cost for purchasing them as feedstocks) is baked into pretty much every good and service imaginable. What sort of ghastly mistake does it take to turn "basically everything has become cheaper to produce" into a financial crisis?
I, for one, salute your Courage. If the 'notch' is design genius; the crack matrix is genuinely revolutionary.
I wouldn't want my job to depend on keeping Intel's margins at their historical levels; but that's different than being screwed: All those mobile devices sucking 'cloud' services sell Xeons at a steady clip; the options for ARM outside of embedded remain (surprisingly, in all honesty) rather tepid(basically everyone has talked about how they've got a totally rocking ARM-for-datacenter option coming real soon now; but releases have been a lot less common, especially releases you can actually buy; and would want to. AMD has their Opteron A series; but doesn't talk about them much now that they have an x86 option that is actually good again; Qualcomm has made some noises about datacenter CPUs(no word on whether you are expected to just throw those away when they lose interest in driver support 1.5 Android releases from now...); Cavium has some stuff; but it's honestly a bit surprising how little there is.
Given the number of cellphones, even pretty awful ones, that shove one of the 64-bit ARMs and a bunch of RAM into something battery powered I would have naively expected a reasonably healthy "We took a top of range 64 bit ARM and put it on a motherboard in one of the ATX sizes, with DIMM slots and peripherals; excellent value if you have a workload that doesn't lean too hard on peak single threaded performance or rely on x86 binary compatibility" market. Instead, it's mostly dev boards(often with the only software support being a BSP aimed at allowing you to get what's on the dev board shoved into an Android widget); typically with significant I/O limitations(even bottom-feeding consumer desktop parts usually have RAM expansion and PCIe lane supplies quite superior to the dev boards; though ARMs that at least have PCIe are more common than they used to be).
ARM options have moved upmarket somewhat in the half server/half embedded things like NASes; used to be that ARM NASes were the very lowest of the low; now some reasonably respectable ones are available; but the offerings are still sparser than one would expect.
Worst case, of course, Intel always has the option of doing merchant foundry stuff. Not as prestigious, or high margin, as fabbing their own parts that also command a substantial premium; but fabbing other people's SoCs to order would still beat bankruptcy by a considerable margin.