Though parts of them may be unenforcable, try copying Microsoft Office and distributing it and then telling Microsoft and see how far it gets you in court.
The EULA is the only way you have any rights to the software *at all*. Like the GPL is the only way you have any rights to GPL-d software *at all*. Without it, i.e. if you try to declare it invalid, you have *zero* rights to the software whatsoever.
That's not to say that everything in a contract is legal, the law has things called statutory rights and reasonableness, but the EULA is the only thing granting you *ANY* rights at all.
Invalidate it, and that "copy" of the software you have in your download folder is illegal. Just by existing.
Almost all of them are Internet-dependent, with servers run by the software manufacturers, that stop receiving updates after a few years.
But I've have 1000 games on my account for... 14 years now? That's a better ratio than the number of games I owned in the DOS days whose disks still work or which I can get running on a modern machine.
You're using the same argument as people did 14 years ago. The answer's still the same and well-publicised. Nobody really knows, but Steam/Valve have said they'll do everything they can and have features that *could* in theory keep your account going even if they go bust (highly unlikely but not impossible). Fact is, even they can't guarantee that either as an administrator of a bankrupt company might just switch that stuff off.
I am a gamer. I do use Steam. And I prefer it to every other fly-by-night out there. Microsoft shut down GfWL so some of their games no longer work now, and they're far from bust. If WoW turn off their servers you're stuffed. Origin I don't trust not to just turn off one day.
If you're that paranoid, use GoG.com who provide offline installers. But most of their games use DOSBox to run, so it's nothing you couldn't do yourself.
There isn't a platform in existence where you "own" the games legally. But Steam is cheap, convenient, point-and-click, very reliable and well-known, and has been up for 14 years. In computing terms they are basically a dinosaur with a smartphone.
The alternative in this day and age is really "no games made in the last decade".
Why would you not make "review copies" tied to an account that you can just turn off at any time, date-limited (i.e. terminate on the game's release), etc,?
If there's one use of DRM that seems worthwhile and valid, that's it surely? It doesn't mean to say that you'll need the same functionality in the final game, but at the very least you'd lock it down a bit, no?
And they wouldn't even need "the full game", you could purge have the level data, etc. remove the endings, splat "Review Copy" over the image output, etc. etc.
Anything else - like giving out free codes to competitions... that seems to me to be a bit pointless - a cybercafe in the middle of the Ukraine isn't going to generate anything in terms of measurable sales for you, but you could still track those still.
I'd ditch the advert-funded radio that nobody listens to any more to fund a huge spread-spectrum auction benefitting the taxpayer directly (to the tune of billions of pounds if the 3G/4G/5G auctions are anything to go buy), while carving out several more "unlicenced" areas of spread spectrum that could be used to provide mesh wireless and other services.
I'd also attached to the provisions of the spectrum use that they must cover X percent of the country in their cellular/IP coverage, including at least 10% of current locations that have no notable Internet infrastructure.
Thus we'd get money, cellular coverage, good guaranteed minimum broadband speeds in all areas eventually, better Internet speeds and coverage, pay-for Internet like we do now but potentially millions of free radio stations with no need to maintain broadcasting infrastructure for radio that could be better used for cellular, faster wifi and potential for free mesh networking.
That you think you're NOT paying for the current radio infrastructure is telling that you don't understand that sometimes you have to PAY for the infrastructure to provide the benefits (whether through tax, advertising, subsidies, etc.). You may not pay the radio stations anything, but they're using your money, aren't they?
I'd much rather ditch all broadcast TV and push people towards IP services, personally.
Because once you have a decent line for IP transit (however that may happen), everything can be pushed down it - Internet, telephony, video-on-demand, etc.
We need to wake up and realise that IP is a standard that you can use for almost any kind of data distribution in an efficient manner, especially with multicast / broadcast being used properly.
Give people reliable IP, all those old services will be absorbed and made more efficient. And then you free up a ton of spectrum from broadcast systems that you can use for other things (in the UK, digital was used to "free up" analogue channels for use by 3G... supposedly. But free up both and you can just add them into one giant spread-spectrum, frequency-hopping bunch and improve things like Wifi and cellular access).
My house is entirely "IP". Over 4G no less. No phone, no broadband line, no alarm line, no CCTV cables, no TV connection (despite having satellite on the roof, antenna in the loft, etc.), etc. etc. And my workplace is basically the same now - we cut all the analogue and ISDN phone lines, we changed all the internal phones to IP, we put everything from CCTV to wireless to tannoy/bell systems to access control onto IP / PoE. It's just so much simpler and connecting to any part of the infrastructure means you have potential access to anything and everything that's IP'd (VLAN and permissions not withstanding).
In one job interview they were complaining about their broadband speed, incidental to the interview. I was allowed to jump on a computer and have a quick look.
What I saw was a ton of devices talking out without any control, no caching of common websites, no Windows Update centralisation, etc.
I told them - in interview - I could probably triple their perceived speed (they were loading up speedtest.net and getting silly figures).
They hired me. Day one was obviously a "trial". They had a spare computer, as I asked for, ready and literally signed me into the building and then asked me to "fix" the Internet. So I set up a Squid transparent proxy, inserted it into the Internet path, it instantly cut all the crap unnecessary traffic.
I was about to dig into WSUS, browser caching policies, etc. but at that point the top guy loaded up speedtest.net, saw that the number had consistently tripled (or more) in a matter of minutes, and loved me until the day he retired.
Okay, pulling from experience, let me lead you through a scenario which I think is perfectly viable, somewhat understandable, and yet shows how silly this is:
- A person applying for jobs will easily apply for a dozen or so a day. Especially if they are sought-after, determined to find a new job, and diligent. Nobody "just applies for the one job". - That could be happening *while* they are still at a former employer (it's a silly thing to do to know you don't like working somewhere and wait until you leave to start job-hunting). Hell, I do this while I'm perfectly happy with my job as it's the best way to ensure I'm being paid market rates. - Such a person, if they are any good and choosing their jobs carefully, will get replies of interest from most of those. - That person could then maybe have half a dozen or more interviews with employers from that one day of job-hunting alone. - Even if the markets are bad, that person could easily get a dozen interviews a month. - Each of those interviewers expects to set a time and the candidate to just turn up, unquestioningly. I've had interviewers who were completely inflexible ("Oh, no, sorry, we're doing all the interviews tomorrow. The job will be gone by then"). Not only is this ridiculous if you want the best candidate, it's totally unrealistic and prescient of the attitude they'll have towards project deadlines and days-off. - If the candidate is any good, they'll likely choose a job from the handful of offers they receive. They probably *won't* wait until the end of the month when you could fit them in, unless the job is something amazing and you go out of your way to convince them (i.e. expensive). - That means that likely, most of the interviews they get will be unnecessary, and it's rude to waste people's time so they'll cancel. However, while I 100% agree that they shouldn't just no-show, that's very unprofessional, the everyday jobs? Yeah, nobody young/inexperienced/cheap is going to ring around to cancel in time.
It just tells me that the whole hiring process is just wrong. The interviewer is looking for a shortlist of "who can do Tuesday", then wanting to choose from that list and they turn up for work on the Wednesday. The interviewee is trying to fit a lot of people around a busy schedule, pick the best job, handle offers, negotiate, etc. when they may not have the money to traipse across town, and then has to reject everyone else.
There's no distinguishing between "has a job with a notice period and will need a long, drawn-out application process" and "desperately needs something tomorrow and can work whenever you want". Employer want the former person, but the latter availability.
I've always said that, to me, the best interview process is none at all. As in, no formal round-the-table meet with people who'll never even remember the guy's name in ten years of him working there, let alone care about whether he can do it.
Just invite people, at their convenience, to come work on the job they need for a day. Pay them if you have to. Give them the job they will need to do, show them where they will do it, treat them as an employee for the day, and gauge their performance. No pressure of timescales. No stupid arrangements. No huge commitments. And a meeting-of-minds as regards whether they want/can do the job or not.
Likely you "haven't got a guy" who does that when you're interviewing, so you can get some work out of them and see how well they could handle it, and do that with candidates until such time as you fill the position permanently.
But I think there's a hidden expectation that the candidate should be "grateful" and "totally committed" to some company they've literally never set foot inside. That they'll turn up when you demand, that they'll drop everything to come work for you, that they'll dedicate their life to you before they even work for you. Trust me... if they do that, they're probably so desperate that you might want to question why.
I go to the website. I look for something to watch. I watch it. I turn it off.
Interfering with that workflow is gonna be detrimental to our business relationship, Netflix.
And, let's be honest, you don't show anything I can't get elsewhere. The reasons I use you are:
- People generally know what's available on Netflix and will point you to what's available that you might have missed (P.S. your recommendations are shite).
- I don't have proper Internet, only mobile Internet, because it was cheaper and easier than an install... and they don't count Netflix data. This is easily remedied to another provider who don't count ANY of the big streaming site's data for the same monthly price. Especially when you consider I'm already paying for Amazon Prime, which is included in their package. Literally as simple as ending a 30-day contract and getting a SIM from the other company.
- The real reason I got you was that I don't have a TV, don't really want one, and don't want to subscribe to stupidly expensive services just to get legitimate TV content. I'm quite happy just switching you - and all the others - off. There's plenty of stuff and for the price I'm paying for data packages, Netflix, Amazon, etc. I could easily just buy a few DVD's a month or even online videos (I have a ton on both Amazon and Google Play already) and be happy and ad-less.
My spare time is precious. I work 1/3rd of my life (half my waking life) to get it, and to allow me to use it doing things I want, rather than what others want. Intruding on that spare time while demanding some work-time to pay for you is not going to go down well. I pay for convenience - so that I can fully utilise my spare-time in a trade-off against the work to pay for it.
This touches on everything from automatically paying my bills, to buying modern conveniences, to paying for apps and content, to employing tradesmen when necessary.
Interfere with that delicate balance at your own risk. Currently each month I spend:
- 30 GBP for Internet for all my devices. - 7.50 GBP for my smartphone (just the SIM, it's owned outright and has been for years) - 6 GBP for Netflix. - 8 GBP for Amazon Prime (including all the other benefits). - 2 GBP for TVPlayer (special deal, but likely won't renew when it runs out this Christmas as I don't watch live TV, and all the channels on it have their own catch-up functionality)
The rest of my outgoings are rent, utilities, car, etc. Things that are vital and allow me to live comfortably and make best use of my time.
But you'll notice - you're there because you're a pittance, and you're easily replaceable, and you're also nearly as expensive as my smartphone, but you form a big chunk of what I spend on such things. And you certainly don't give me the same value that my smartphone does.
The second the value/hour drops below a factor of one (one GBP per hour of entertainment), you're really in the shit. And at the moment I do watch quite a bit because it's easy and I can watch it with dinner. But it's nothing I can't get elsewhere. Drive me into the realm where I stop using you because it's too much of a faff, that value plummets and you'll quickly disappear, even if I replace you with nothing.
I get that it's hard... if I'm only paying those rates, and I watch a lot, then that's a lot of rightsholders you have to pay for me to be able to do that, plus all the internet transit and all kinds of overheads. But that's the price of such services. If, like MoviePass, it's no longer viable as a business, ads aren't the solution. They're the death-knell.
I'm happy to pay for my content. A lot more than you might think. But the second you start putting *work* (avoiding ads) into my *leisure* then my work rates are deducted from that value. And that quickly plummets any value I get from you. And you need to do more than break-even for that to be something I'm willing to pay for.
Sorry but the days of me rebooting to go into another OS are over. Long ago.
If I can't virtualise you, or I can't emulate you, then I'm not going to reboot into you. For a start it's a pain-in-the-arse and needs all kinds of work to stay like that through Windows kernel updates etc. I tired of fighting stuff like that back in the days of Windows not recognising EXT2 partitions.
Nowadays, virtualisation is here. If I want to run games at the extreme edge of my computer's abilities, I'd run Windows as the base OS and virtualise whatever else I need on top of it. Truth is, I don't need to bother. A virtualised GPU of any decent spec will play every Steam game on my account (over 1000) to my satisfaction.
Anything old enough to emulate / WINE will certainly work so much better in a virtualised environment with GPU passthrough.
Reboots just shouldn't be happening nowadays. Especially not just to play a game.
Sorry, but my machine reboots in precisely two instances - when the battery fails and it doesn't get a chance to shutdown (it's an old machine, it really needs a new battery), and when I genuinely think there's a valid reason that an installation of new software would require a reboot (e.g. VMWare hypervisor upgrades).
Anything else, I'm not going to reboot for. Certainly not a game. Your game doesn't work in a VM environment or on my platform? Shame. Maybe I'll buy it in a few years time when you wake up.
Hell, I tried once and I ran the latest version of MacOS in a VM with a spec equivalent to a Mac allocated to it, and it ran SMOOTHER than a damn Mac, while my Windows and Linux stuff was all in the background on the same processors.
Intellectual puzzles like this lead to real-world mathematics that gets incorporated into huge things like engineering tables and safety laws, that translate to real-world buildings, runways, etc. that "work better" in some fashion than they otherwise would.
Why does a material, under stress, fracture elsewhere than the stress point? That seems to me to be an incredibly important thing to understand, especially if you're putting your main masses on those secondary/tertiary snapping points "because you don't want to put it all in the middle".
Maths, pure maths, is called pure for a reason and doesn't have an immediate "point". But it underlies every single thing you ever do because it underlies computer science, physics, chemistry, engineering and all kinds of other disciplines which use the findings of pure maths in their calculations for applied maths.
"What good is calculus, it's just areas under a graph!" is the kind of fucking stupidity that you get from such people, not realising just how much that simple concept underlies everything you touch, from power through a cable over time to how to calculate volumes of large objects, to everything imaginable - weather forecasting, stress-measurement on moving parts, etc etc.
I highly doubt the average petty crook gives a shit whether or not you have some silly sticks on it, especially as they could cover it with a $15 shell and still sell it for hundreds.
Hell, it doesn't stop them stealing obviously UV-marked laptops with acid-etched address and company name on them, what makes you think a small removeable sticker will do?
It'll be fenced through three people before anyone even knows it's missing in most cases.
Whatever the historical "norm", on highly asymmetric services, if a customer without techy knowledge buys something called "100Mbps" they expect... well... 100Mbps. And it to be twice as fast as something 50Mbps.
Alright, they may not know what 100Mbps represents, how it compares to MB/s, etc. but that's the technicality. However, selling a 100Mbps where the average person gets home from work (peak time) and receives a maximum of 10Mbps (previous) or EVEN 50Mbps is misleading. Don't claim it if you can't sell it.
If it was a case that you had to compete against other ISPs lying in this manner, while you had to "tell the truth", then yes it's unfair. But if *ALL* ISPs have to stick by the same numbering, then it's not misleading even if everyone goes "But didn't I used to get 100? Why do I only get 10 now?" because they can't go to a competitor that is mis-selling 10 as 100 any more.
Challenge is fine. Complete the whole game without ever turning the thing off or saving/loading isn't a challenge, any more than than just playing the game.
But the game is a game. To be played. And enjoyed. And though you might have to have a dozen shots at the tricky levels, there's no fun at all if you just stay on that level for ever and ever or (worse) only get one shot after hours of trawling your way back.
Any games designer will tell you - impossibly hard games are crap and boring. Stupidly simple games are crap and boring. It's about the balance.
And the balance - for anyone who's not a gaming sadist - is save points at regular intervals but not at any time you ever feel like touching the button.
NES Classic lets you save whenever you like. That's why it's popular. People playing those old games they could never progress (as a child with all the time in the world) on a system where they can play in chunks (in between work and real life) and try to get past the bit they always got stuck on.
I'm no stranger to difficult games, and literally never "saved" a game for the first 10 years of my gaming life (too much faff with cassettes)... and I wouldn't go back to that. Even if I could suddenly find thousands of hours to do so in between life.
There is nothing fun about having to redo everything you've done before.
Sure, if you could save before every jump and just insta-reload, that ruins the game. But at least staying on the same world, if not even the same level, or half-way map save-points (like almost all the Mario games) is a necessary part to ensure you're aren't playing 1-1 several thousand times to each time you get to the end.
Nintendo hard wasn't even that hard. You want hard, go load up ZX Spectrum games and arcade games. Literally, I think I completed 2, maybe 3 games in my entire childhood on that machine, out of thousands. One of those was Nonterraqueous and involved the largest piece of graph-paper I've ever seen in my life, a brother-and-dad mapping team and a co-ordinated effort over several evenings to even get close. And we only managed to map the direct path to the exit (by chance), there was obviously a lot more to explore.
Old arcade games are ludicrously hard too. They were deliberately so to make you put more money in. I've literally only ever completed one arcade game too, and that's because it cost a pittance by the time I played it and brother-and-I had about 50-continues worth of coins.
It doesn't mean that it was *fun*. It's what we had. If you want to see how "not fun" that stuff is, play Paper Mario with it's 100-level challenges mid-game that you go back to square one if you fail.
Saving doesn't ruin a game. Saving EVERY TWO SECONDS, or not being able to save at all can easily do so. Just make it so that you save only at milestones, so the player can relax and not have to do four impossibly-hard-things in a row to get anywhere, and they're fine.
My brother used to save games all the time, and replay even the most minor battles that were lost. That was silly. Hell, he hated Settlers because when you load back in and two same-level units fight each other, the outcome is random, so you can still lose any fight - no matter how many times you load back in.
I've not been to the cinema for years, but from a promotion from an unrelated company (my mobile phone company), I got a load of free or really-cheap tickets (50p for any movie, etc.).
I used them up, at a place with free parking, not far from my house, sat through big-name movies, didn't pay a penny for any extras (popcorn, etc.).
A few things occurred to me:
- The theatres were empty. Barely 10% occupied most of the time. And I was going after work, in the evening, on weekends, etc. to released-that-week movies. - The adverts were far too long, but I took it as "part of my free night out". - The movies were... meh. I mean, watchable but no better than if it had been on TV, where I could have at least paused it, and I didn't really think much of them at all.
I honestly don't think I'd watch those movies ever again, I don't think if it cost me more than literally pocket change that I'd bother, and I don't think the cinema added anything over just watching at home.
And then, at home, I have a projector with a humongous white-screen, black-out curtains, air-con (unusual for the UK but we've had a good summer this year!). I have good personal headphones or a sound system, I can eat and drink what I like, pause when I need, replay, put on subtitles, I get zero adverts, nobody stepping over me, no whispering behind me, and I can turn off the movie when I get bored.
The only "advantage" - seeing movies slightly earlier. Which is just silly, when I have huge libraries available to me that I'm already paying for and could easily suffer the "wait" of them flopping and being available for free or cheaper on Netflix, or Amazon, or Google Play, or whatever...
I don't get the cinema business model any more. I don't see how they operate or profit.
And my own money is better spent on a huge white-screen, a decent projector and hell, setting up in the garden of an evening and inviting mates around.
The large car manufacturers are pushing out orders-of-magnitude more cars than Tesla will be able to manage for at least a decade, even with their fantasy growth. They can take the entire market any time they like - how much advertising do they put to that market? Zero. It's just not worth their time at the moment.
But they have R&D and investment and cash-on-hand that Tesla can only dream of, and they can flood the market with a dozen models each in a year or so if they really want to.
The fact is that it's easy to make the car. It's not easy to make it profitable. And Musk's common theme is "throw money at the problem and don't worry about profit". It would take decades to pay back what he's put into SpaceX and the other companies. In some cases, there is literally no "break-even" point on the horizon once you take into account having to pay back investors and himself.
The big companies aren't going to take a huge loss to hit a tiny sliver of a market that's not profitable and is quite unpopular (the biggest estimate for ALL electric cars I've ever seen is about 1-2% of *new* cars, imagine what that means as a percentage of all the cars on the road, entirely).
And big name manufacturers would on a long-term basis. They sell parts, plans, and patents. Tesla don't. Should it prove popular, the big guys will produce a car within a year (if they haven't already) that's cheaper and which they can sell parts for for the next 20 years.
The big-name guys are happily sitting there letting Tesla do what it wants. If it hits on an idea, they can license it (he's already said he's licensing any patents, etc.) and outbuild and crush the company in a year or so. They could literally bury it under the sheer volume of cars and models they could produce in that time, and you can be sure they're working on it.
I bought a brand-new car only recently. Literally, every place like Fords do have electric cars and/or hybrids. They're not even sold. Nobody steers you towards them. Nobody cares about selling them. There's no profit there.
And the one thing that Tesla knows is that they aren't making money. They're basically burning through initial investment in the hope of gaining traction enough that they can reduce unit costs - their battery factory is the demo of this - eventually and start to make it profitable. The second that happens, the big guy can swoop in and steal all that profit by doing exactly the same, on ten-to-hundred times the scale.
Of course, they're using him as a guinea pig. They can see exactly what's selling and what's necessary. That the infrastructure to support the car isn't there yet either. That the profitability is zero. That the innovation isn't present... it's all just standard kit and standard batteries bolted together with the one thing that they WOULDN'T want to replicate as he's done it - the automated driving computer. Something they've all got their own versions of because it works no matter the type of car.
They're letting him throw his money away and do their market research for them. They can steal the industry and swamp the market in months if they like. They hold infinitely more weight with places like electric recharge stations and government contacts (thousands and thousands of local jobs all over the world). And when he runs out of steam/money, or pisses off the investors, and still can't make profit, they can probably even snap up the name if they want.
You say it yourself almost - they don't have the desire to. They are ignoring the entire market at the moment except for token "green" gestures. But do you honestly think they aren't watching? Do you think that not just one but EVERY manufacturer is that naive to do a Kodak and think "Ah, digital photography will never take off?". They're watching. They know it's not profitable. So let him make a name for himself and throw his money away, and whether it gets popular, or flops, they'll still be putting out a hundred ti
The portion of people who would have bought their own chips and copied a BIOS onto them was vanishingly small. I was really deep into my IT as a kid, and very much considered a "BIOS Saviour" purchase several times, but could never justify it.
But the fact remains that you still wouldn't have known - you may have unwittingly saved yourself from such an attack, but the BIOS could easily program in an innocent-looking presence check and carry on regardless if on a non-compromised device. Hell, it doesn't even need to be in the BIOS, the compromised device could just take advantage of a small signature in the BIOS and replace code offsets to go via its own routines rather than whatever is on the chip, etc. If anyone did that, even 30+ years ago, we would STILL not even know anything about it.
Hell, it took 20 years to discover that the 3DFX drivers for all early Windows were nothing more than blanket-DMA enablers, and with them installed your entire machine is compromised. Nobody knew until the product was obsolete, and that was in easily-viewable software.
Now every machine is Flash BIOS, with key-encrypted updates, done while the machine is live, even with Internet connectivity sometimes, to an unreadable part of the chip. With UEFI the BIOS is basically presenting Turing-complete programming languages too and has access to everything, even if the machine is off.
We have literally no idea what's going on, nor what systems - past or present - may have been compromised in this way. There's almost no way to tell, either, short of decapping every batch of chips and checking they match a spec that's been provably verified to have no malicious capability.
Literally, I could probably quite easily supply you with a 6502, or Z80, or Intel whatever, or even just a plain memory chip that - inside the package - has something that adds on certain signatures to modify the chip's behaviour, or even transmits data over discrete and encrypted radio waves. The only way to ever tell it was there (and not just random noise) would be to pull the thing off and investigate with a suitable microscope (probably an electron microscope given the size of those things nowadays) and analyse every component of a billions-of-transistors multi-layer integrated circuit.
Possibly the only saviour in this instance might be something like homomorphic encryption - where a processor is able to perform actions on encrypted data without ever knowing the decryption details or data. Literally "not trusting the processor at all", at least to do more than basic mathematics on numbers that it can't infer anything from. People have been trying to get it working for decades and though, in theory, it's possible, nobody's really made a chip that does anything useful.
However, that itself just pushes the problem further down the line - somewhere there's a piece of opaque circuitry from China looking at your data, no matter what you do.
Not being funny - but almost every chip you've ever used could have secret unreplaceable firmware and you'd know nothing about it.
This has been true throughout the history of computing, really. Sure, we know now that the Z80 was okay but we had no way of sensibly telling back then and it was all we could use.
Has anyone ever decapped a 386? What about those old AMI BIOS chips, sure we know what firmware can load onto them, but how do we know that's all that's in that chip and there isn't a secret ROM activated under certain conditions? We don't, until the chip is dead and out of the market, and even then we may never know.
Sorry, but "open" hardware of any significant specification is a fallacy... because you cannot verify it without an awful lot of very expensive equipment, even if it operates as if it were a RISC-V processor. Anything could be tapping into that core specification and leaking or acting on data secretly and you'd never know - it would just look and work like RISC-V chips all do to all outside appearances.
Honestly, if you think that nVidia using RISC-V is a bad thing, and isn't going to boost RISC-V adoption, reputation and development, or that your system is somehow going to avoid all such avenues of compromise, you're so wrong that it's laughable.
In fact, if anything, such code makes it incredibly easy to modify such a thing, use its name AND get away with it because nobody will ever check and/or ever be able to sue, that doing that to some big-name chip manufacturer.
Linux generally mounts disks "noatime" for precisely this reason. And if you cut out in the middle of an access-time-write, the filesystem at worst has an incorrect access time.
Windows does not store access times on NTFS or FAT ("To save system resources in Vista, Microsoft disabled the Last Access Time Stamp").
So... no... it doesn't... and no, not all OS do this. Not since the 90's really.
If you haven't written anything to the USB, yes, it's completely safe. Any filesystem that's writing data just because of your passive reading of the disk is a) stupid, b) should have recovery for such, c) shouldn't be writing anything important (e.g. a last access time, maybe?)
If you have written anything to the disk, and it's synced to disk (i.e. activity light is idle) then, yes, it's safe. This may be dependent on OS and whether you can see any activity light. Modern OS should mount without write-caching for external drives unless told otherwise, and any half-decent filesystem should survive a forcible unmount in such circumstances
If the USB is still busy churning after you copied files to it, and you yank it? Yes, you're gonna lose data.
That a bunch of "nerds" can't figure this out after all the years we've had USB disks etc. (I remember starting with them in 95 OSR2 / Linux 2.0 personally?) really worries me.
Same as floppies before it. Floppy only being read-from? You can yank it. Floppy was written to but has now gone idle? You can yank it. Floppy was written to and it still pulsing / flashing? Leave it alone.
If the problem were that simple, everyone would have moved to Rust or similar languages decades ago.
Simple fact, your (evangelical) choice of language does not change how you're forced to express your desires, or fix problems associated with the vast majority of programming errors.
Though there are languages where being "misconstrued" is less likely in a minority of cases, most programming problems are caused by expressing totally the wrong thing and not what you intended at all, not a simple ambiguity of expression.
Hint: There's a reason that Rust still includes "unsafe" functionality. Because what you WANT TO DO is unsafe, not how you want to say it. And that's almost always because you choose that tradeoff consciously (usually for performance or direct-hardware-acces).
Just look at Java. Ignore the syntax of the language itself, but the concept. Partition everything off into a virtual machine, which could be WRITTEN IN JAVA ITSELF (self-hosting). Now do real-world deployment and you discover two things: 1) it doesn't stop bone-headed code, 2) you need to break out of the virtual machine via direct interfaces in order to get what you need done.
It doesn't matter if you describe your security procedures in French or German. Unless you can PERFECTLY describe EXACTLY what you want to do, without possibility of any error, then it doesn't make any difference which one you choose to express it in.
For reference - I hate the Star Wars movies too. All of them. Did when I was a kid, still do. Zippy-zappy effects and unbelievably atrocious dialogue, but at least people talked in it!
2001 is all long-brooding scenes and special effects. Which, whether now or 40 years ago, does not make a movie.
There is no dialogue AT ALL in the first 25 minutes of the movie, or the last 23! 88 minutes of the movie are entirely dialogue-free.
What plot there is is confusing, incomplete, poorly communicated, and not very useful to any other part of the movie. "We found some stones, we go to this place, don't tell anyone", is the plot right the way through until the (stupid) ending.
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I'm afraid that's not true.
Though parts of them may be unenforcable, try copying Microsoft Office and distributing it and then telling Microsoft and see how far it gets you in court.
The EULA is the only way you have any rights to the software *at all*. Like the GPL is the only way you have any rights to GPL-d software *at all*. Without it, i.e. if you try to declare it invalid, you have *zero* rights to the software whatsoever.
That's not to say that everything in a contract is legal, the law has things called statutory rights and reasonableness, but the EULA is the only thing granting you *ANY* rights at all.
Invalidate it, and that "copy" of the software you have in your download folder is illegal. Just by existing.
Name any modern game that you own?
Almost all of them are Internet-dependent, with servers run by the software manufacturers, that stop receiving updates after a few years.
But I've have 1000 games on my account for... 14 years now? That's a better ratio than the number of games I owned in the DOS days whose disks still work or which I can get running on a modern machine.
You're using the same argument as people did 14 years ago. The answer's still the same and well-publicised. Nobody really knows, but Steam/Valve have said they'll do everything they can and have features that *could* in theory keep your account going even if they go bust (highly unlikely but not impossible). Fact is, even they can't guarantee that either as an administrator of a bankrupt company might just switch that stuff off.
I am a gamer. I do use Steam. And I prefer it to every other fly-by-night out there. Microsoft shut down GfWL so some of their games no longer work now, and they're far from bust. If WoW turn off their servers you're stuffed. Origin I don't trust not to just turn off one day.
If you're that paranoid, use GoG.com who provide offline installers. But most of their games use DOSBox to run, so it's nothing you couldn't do yourself.
There isn't a platform in existence where you "own" the games legally. But Steam is cheap, convenient, point-and-click, very reliable and well-known, and has been up for 14 years. In computing terms they are basically a dinosaur with a smartphone.
The alternative in this day and age is really "no games made in the last decade".
Question:
Why would you not make "review copies" tied to an account that you can just turn off at any time, date-limited (i.e. terminate on the game's release), etc,?
If there's one use of DRM that seems worthwhile and valid, that's it surely? It doesn't mean to say that you'll need the same functionality in the final game, but at the very least you'd lock it down a bit, no?
And they wouldn't even need "the full game", you could purge have the level data, etc. remove the endings, splat "Review Copy" over the image output, etc. etc.
Anything else - like giving out free codes to competitions... that seems to me to be a bit pointless - a cybercafe in the middle of the Ukraine isn't going to generate anything in terms of measurable sales for you, but you could still track those still.
Nope.
I'd ditch the advert-funded radio that nobody listens to any more to fund a huge spread-spectrum auction benefitting the taxpayer directly (to the tune of billions of pounds if the 3G/4G/5G auctions are anything to go buy), while carving out several more "unlicenced" areas of spread spectrum that could be used to provide mesh wireless and other services.
I'd also attached to the provisions of the spectrum use that they must cover X percent of the country in their cellular/IP coverage, including at least 10% of current locations that have no notable Internet infrastructure.
Thus we'd get money, cellular coverage, good guaranteed minimum broadband speeds in all areas eventually, better Internet speeds and coverage, pay-for Internet like we do now but potentially millions of free radio stations with no need to maintain broadcasting infrastructure for radio that could be better used for cellular, faster wifi and potential for free mesh networking.
That you think you're NOT paying for the current radio infrastructure is telling that you don't understand that sometimes you have to PAY for the infrastructure to provide the benefits (whether through tax, advertising, subsidies, etc.). You may not pay the radio stations anything, but they're using your money, aren't they?
I'd much rather ditch all broadcast TV and push people towards IP services, personally.
Because once you have a decent line for IP transit (however that may happen), everything can be pushed down it - Internet, telephony, video-on-demand, etc.
We need to wake up and realise that IP is a standard that you can use for almost any kind of data distribution in an efficient manner, especially with multicast / broadcast being used properly.
Give people reliable IP, all those old services will be absorbed and made more efficient. And then you free up a ton of spectrum from broadcast systems that you can use for other things (in the UK, digital was used to "free up" analogue channels for use by 3G... supposedly. But free up both and you can just add them into one giant spread-spectrum, frequency-hopping bunch and improve things like Wifi and cellular access).
My house is entirely "IP". Over 4G no less. No phone, no broadband line, no alarm line, no CCTV cables, no TV connection (despite having satellite on the roof, antenna in the loft, etc.), etc. etc. And my workplace is basically the same now - we cut all the analogue and ISDN phone lines, we changed all the internal phones to IP, we put everything from CCTV to wireless to tannoy/bell systems to access control onto IP / PoE. It's just so much simpler and connecting to any part of the infrastructure means you have potential access to anything and everything that's IP'd (VLAN and permissions not withstanding).
Very similar, but not quite all in the interview:
In one job interview they were complaining about their broadband speed, incidental to the interview. I was allowed to jump on a computer and have a quick look.
What I saw was a ton of devices talking out without any control, no caching of common websites, no Windows Update centralisation, etc.
I told them - in interview - I could probably triple their perceived speed (they were loading up speedtest.net and getting silly figures).
They hired me. Day one was obviously a "trial". They had a spare computer, as I asked for, ready and literally signed me into the building and then asked me to "fix" the Internet. So I set up a Squid transparent proxy, inserted it into the Internet path, it instantly cut all the crap unnecessary traffic.
I was about to dig into WSUS, browser caching policies, etc. but at that point the top guy loaded up speedtest.net, saw that the number had consistently tripled (or more) in a matter of minutes, and loved me until the day he retired.
Okay, pulling from experience, let me lead you through a scenario which I think is perfectly viable, somewhat understandable, and yet shows how silly this is:
- A person applying for jobs will easily apply for a dozen or so a day. Especially if they are sought-after, determined to find a new job, and diligent. Nobody "just applies for the one job".
- That could be happening *while* they are still at a former employer (it's a silly thing to do to know you don't like working somewhere and wait until you leave to start job-hunting). Hell, I do this while I'm perfectly happy with my job as it's the best way to ensure I'm being paid market rates.
- Such a person, if they are any good and choosing their jobs carefully, will get replies of interest from most of those.
- That person could then maybe have half a dozen or more interviews with employers from that one day of job-hunting alone.
- Even if the markets are bad, that person could easily get a dozen interviews a month.
- Each of those interviewers expects to set a time and the candidate to just turn up, unquestioningly. I've had interviewers who were completely inflexible ("Oh, no, sorry, we're doing all the interviews tomorrow. The job will be gone by then"). Not only is this ridiculous if you want the best candidate, it's totally unrealistic and prescient of the attitude they'll have towards project deadlines and days-off.
- If the candidate is any good, they'll likely choose a job from the handful of offers they receive. They probably *won't* wait until the end of the month when you could fit them in, unless the job is something amazing and you go out of your way to convince them (i.e. expensive).
- That means that likely, most of the interviews they get will be unnecessary, and it's rude to waste people's time so they'll cancel. However, while I 100% agree that they shouldn't just no-show, that's very unprofessional, the everyday jobs? Yeah, nobody young/inexperienced/cheap is going to ring around to cancel in time.
It just tells me that the whole hiring process is just wrong. The interviewer is looking for a shortlist of "who can do Tuesday", then wanting to choose from that list and they turn up for work on the Wednesday. The interviewee is trying to fit a lot of people around a busy schedule, pick the best job, handle offers, negotiate, etc. when they may not have the money to traipse across town, and then has to reject everyone else.
There's no distinguishing between "has a job with a notice period and will need a long, drawn-out application process" and "desperately needs something tomorrow and can work whenever you want". Employer want the former person, but the latter availability.
I've always said that, to me, the best interview process is none at all. As in, no formal round-the-table meet with people who'll never even remember the guy's name in ten years of him working there, let alone care about whether he can do it.
Just invite people, at their convenience, to come work on the job they need for a day. Pay them if you have to. Give them the job they will need to do, show them where they will do it, treat them as an employee for the day, and gauge their performance. No pressure of timescales. No stupid arrangements. No huge commitments. And a meeting-of-minds as regards whether they want/can do the job or not.
Likely you "haven't got a guy" who does that when you're interviewing, so you can get some work out of them and see how well they could handle it, and do that with candidates until such time as you fill the position permanently.
But I think there's a hidden expectation that the candidate should be "grateful" and "totally committed" to some company they've literally never set foot inside. That they'll turn up when you demand, that they'll drop everything to come work for you, that they'll dedicate their life to you before they even work for you. Trust me... if they do that, they're probably so desperate that you might want to question why.
That drives the good ca
I go to the website.
I look for something to watch.
I watch it.
I turn it off.
Interfering with that workflow is gonna be detrimental to our business relationship, Netflix.
And, let's be honest, you don't show anything I can't get elsewhere. The reasons I use you are:
- People generally know what's available on Netflix and will point you to what's available that you might have missed (P.S. your recommendations are shite).
- I don't have proper Internet, only mobile Internet, because it was cheaper and easier than an install... and they don't count Netflix data. This is easily remedied to another provider who don't count ANY of the big streaming site's data for the same monthly price. Especially when you consider I'm already paying for Amazon Prime, which is included in their package. Literally as simple as ending a 30-day contract and getting a SIM from the other company.
- The real reason I got you was that I don't have a TV, don't really want one, and don't want to subscribe to stupidly expensive services just to get legitimate TV content. I'm quite happy just switching you - and all the others - off. There's plenty of stuff and for the price I'm paying for data packages, Netflix, Amazon, etc. I could easily just buy a few DVD's a month or even online videos (I have a ton on both Amazon and Google Play already) and be happy and ad-less.
My spare time is precious. I work 1/3rd of my life (half my waking life) to get it, and to allow me to use it doing things I want, rather than what others want. Intruding on that spare time while demanding some work-time to pay for you is not going to go down well. I pay for convenience - so that I can fully utilise my spare-time in a trade-off against the work to pay for it.
This touches on everything from automatically paying my bills, to buying modern conveniences, to paying for apps and content, to employing tradesmen when necessary.
Interfere with that delicate balance at your own risk. Currently each month I spend:
- 30 GBP for Internet for all my devices.
- 7.50 GBP for my smartphone (just the SIM, it's owned outright and has been for years)
- 6 GBP for Netflix.
- 8 GBP for Amazon Prime (including all the other benefits).
- 2 GBP for TVPlayer (special deal, but likely won't renew when it runs out this Christmas as I don't watch live TV, and all the channels on it have their own catch-up functionality)
The rest of my outgoings are rent, utilities, car, etc. Things that are vital and allow me to live comfortably and make best use of my time.
But you'll notice - you're there because you're a pittance, and you're easily replaceable, and you're also nearly as expensive as my smartphone, but you form a big chunk of what I spend on such things. And you certainly don't give me the same value that my smartphone does.
The second the value/hour drops below a factor of one (one GBP per hour of entertainment), you're really in the shit. And at the moment I do watch quite a bit because it's easy and I can watch it with dinner. But it's nothing I can't get elsewhere. Drive me into the realm where I stop using you because it's too much of a faff, that value plummets and you'll quickly disappear, even if I replace you with nothing.
I get that it's hard... if I'm only paying those rates, and I watch a lot, then that's a lot of rightsholders you have to pay for me to be able to do that, plus all the internet transit and all kinds of overheads. But that's the price of such services. If, like MoviePass, it's no longer viable as a business, ads aren't the solution. They're the death-knell.
I'm happy to pay for my content. A lot more than you might think. But the second you start putting *work* (avoiding ads) into my *leisure* then my work rates are deducted from that value. And that quickly plummets any value I get from you. And you need to do more than break-even for that to be something I'm willing to pay for.
iCloud is generally nothing more than AWS or Azure instances.
The Register did an article on it ages ago.
It's why Apple STILL can't give proper data protection guarantees that even Google can give you (e.g. UK DPA / GDPR).
Sorry but the days of me rebooting to go into another OS are over. Long ago.
If I can't virtualise you, or I can't emulate you, then I'm not going to reboot into you. For a start it's a pain-in-the-arse and needs all kinds of work to stay like that through Windows kernel updates etc. I tired of fighting stuff like that back in the days of Windows not recognising EXT2 partitions.
Nowadays, virtualisation is here. If I want to run games at the extreme edge of my computer's abilities, I'd run Windows as the base OS and virtualise whatever else I need on top of it. Truth is, I don't need to bother. A virtualised GPU of any decent spec will play every Steam game on my account (over 1000) to my satisfaction.
Anything old enough to emulate / WINE will certainly work so much better in a virtualised environment with GPU passthrough.
Reboots just shouldn't be happening nowadays. Especially not just to play a game.
Sorry, but my machine reboots in precisely two instances - when the battery fails and it doesn't get a chance to shutdown (it's an old machine, it really needs a new battery), and when I genuinely think there's a valid reason that an installation of new software would require a reboot (e.g. VMWare hypervisor upgrades).
Anything else, I'm not going to reboot for. Certainly not a game. Your game doesn't work in a VM environment or on my platform? Shame. Maybe I'll buy it in a few years time when you wake up.
Hell, I tried once and I ran the latest version of MacOS in a VM with a spec equivalent to a Mac allocated to it, and it ran SMOOTHER than a damn Mac, while my Windows and Linux stuff was all in the background on the same processors.
Sigh.
Allow me to explain once again.
Intellectual puzzles like this lead to real-world mathematics that gets incorporated into huge things like engineering tables and safety laws, that translate to real-world buildings, runways, etc. that "work better" in some fashion than they otherwise would.
Why does a material, under stress, fracture elsewhere than the stress point? That seems to me to be an incredibly important thing to understand, especially if you're putting your main masses on those secondary/tertiary snapping points "because you don't want to put it all in the middle".
Maths, pure maths, is called pure for a reason and doesn't have an immediate "point". But it underlies every single thing you ever do because it underlies computer science, physics, chemistry, engineering and all kinds of other disciplines which use the findings of pure maths in their calculations for applied maths.
"What good is calculus, it's just areas under a graph!" is the kind of fucking stupidity that you get from such people, not realising just how much that simple concept underlies everything you touch, from power through a cable over time to how to calculate volumes of large objects, to everything imaginable - weather forecasting, stress-measurement on moving parts, etc etc.
I highly doubt the average petty crook gives a shit whether or not you have some silly sticks on it, especially as they could cover it with a $15 shell and still sell it for hundreds.
Hell, it doesn't stop them stealing obviously UV-marked laptops with acid-etched address and company name on them, what makes you think a small removeable sticker will do?
It'll be fenced through three people before anyone even knows it's missing in most cases.
Can I ask why you need kerning?
Supporting thousands of users, I don't think I've ever once seen anyone use kerning in Microsoft Office.
Exactly.
Whatever the historical "norm", on highly asymmetric services, if a customer without techy knowledge buys something called "100Mbps" they expect... well... 100Mbps. And it to be twice as fast as something 50Mbps.
Alright, they may not know what 100Mbps represents, how it compares to MB/s, etc. but that's the technicality. However, selling a 100Mbps where the average person gets home from work (peak time) and receives a maximum of 10Mbps (previous) or EVEN 50Mbps is misleading. Don't claim it if you can't sell it.
If it was a case that you had to compete against other ISPs lying in this manner, while you had to "tell the truth", then yes it's unfair. But if *ALL* ISPs have to stick by the same numbering, then it's not misleading even if everyone goes "But didn't I used to get 100? Why do I only get 10 now?" because they can't go to a competitor that is mis-selling 10 as 100 any more.
The numbers don't matter. The truth of them does.
There's a reason the NES Classic is popular indeed:
https://en-americas-support.ni...
Challenge is fine. Complete the whole game without ever turning the thing off or saving/loading isn't a challenge, any more than than just playing the game.
But the game is a game. To be played. And enjoyed. And though you might have to have a dozen shots at the tricky levels, there's no fun at all if you just stay on that level for ever and ever or (worse) only get one shot after hours of trawling your way back.
Any games designer will tell you - impossibly hard games are crap and boring. Stupidly simple games are crap and boring. It's about the balance.
And the balance - for anyone who's not a gaming sadist - is save points at regular intervals but not at any time you ever feel like touching the button.
NES Classic lets you save whenever you like. That's why it's popular. People playing those old games they could never progress (as a child with all the time in the world) on a system where they can play in chunks (in between work and real life) and try to get past the bit they always got stuck on.
I'm no stranger to difficult games, and literally never "saved" a game for the first 10 years of my gaming life (too much faff with cassettes)... and I wouldn't go back to that. Even if I could suddenly find thousands of hours to do so in between life.
There is nothing fun about having to redo everything you've done before.
Sure, if you could save before every jump and just insta-reload, that ruins the game. But at least staying on the same world, if not even the same level, or half-way map save-points (like almost all the Mario games) is a necessary part to ensure you're aren't playing 1-1 several thousand times to each time you get to the end.
Nintendo hard wasn't even that hard. You want hard, go load up ZX Spectrum games and arcade games. Literally, I think I completed 2, maybe 3 games in my entire childhood on that machine, out of thousands. One of those was Nonterraqueous and involved the largest piece of graph-paper I've ever seen in my life, a brother-and-dad mapping team and a co-ordinated effort over several evenings to even get close. And we only managed to map the direct path to the exit (by chance), there was obviously a lot more to explore.
Old arcade games are ludicrously hard too. They were deliberately so to make you put more money in. I've literally only ever completed one arcade game too, and that's because it cost a pittance by the time I played it and brother-and-I had about 50-continues worth of coins.
It doesn't mean that it was *fun*. It's what we had. If you want to see how "not fun" that stuff is, play Paper Mario with it's 100-level challenges mid-game that you go back to square one if you fail.
Saving doesn't ruin a game. Saving EVERY TWO SECONDS, or not being able to save at all can easily do so. Just make it so that you save only at milestones, so the player can relax and not have to do four impossibly-hard-things in a row to get anywhere, and they're fine.
My brother used to save games all the time, and replay even the most minor battles that were lost. That was silly. Hell, he hated Settlers because when you load back in and two same-level units fight each other, the outcome is random, so you can still lose any fight - no matter how many times you load back in.
Yep.
I've not been to the cinema for years, but from a promotion from an unrelated company (my mobile phone company), I got a load of free or really-cheap tickets (50p for any movie, etc.).
I used them up, at a place with free parking, not far from my house, sat through big-name movies, didn't pay a penny for any extras (popcorn, etc.).
A few things occurred to me:
- The theatres were empty. Barely 10% occupied most of the time. And I was going after work, in the evening, on weekends, etc. to released-that-week movies.
- The adverts were far too long, but I took it as "part of my free night out".
- The movies were... meh. I mean, watchable but no better than if it had been on TV, where I could have at least paused it, and I didn't really think much of them at all.
I honestly don't think I'd watch those movies ever again, I don't think if it cost me more than literally pocket change that I'd bother, and I don't think the cinema added anything over just watching at home.
And then, at home, I have a projector with a humongous white-screen, black-out curtains, air-con (unusual for the UK but we've had a good summer this year!). I have good personal headphones or a sound system, I can eat and drink what I like, pause when I need, replay, put on subtitles, I get zero adverts, nobody stepping over me, no whispering behind me, and I can turn off the movie when I get bored.
The only "advantage" - seeing movies slightly earlier. Which is just silly, when I have huge libraries available to me that I'm already paying for and could easily suffer the "wait" of them flopping and being available for free or cheaper on Netflix, or Amazon, or Google Play, or whatever...
I don't get the cinema business model any more. I don't see how they operate or profit.
And my own money is better spent on a huge white-screen, a decent projector and hell, setting up in the garden of an evening and inviting mates around.
I don't think it's a theory.
The large car manufacturers are pushing out orders-of-magnitude more cars than Tesla will be able to manage for at least a decade, even with their fantasy growth. They can take the entire market any time they like - how much advertising do they put to that market? Zero. It's just not worth their time at the moment.
But they have R&D and investment and cash-on-hand that Tesla can only dream of, and they can flood the market with a dozen models each in a year or so if they really want to.
The fact is that it's easy to make the car. It's not easy to make it profitable. And Musk's common theme is "throw money at the problem and don't worry about profit". It would take decades to pay back what he's put into SpaceX and the other companies. In some cases, there is literally no "break-even" point on the horizon once you take into account having to pay back investors and himself.
The big companies aren't going to take a huge loss to hit a tiny sliver of a market that's not profitable and is quite unpopular (the biggest estimate for ALL electric cars I've ever seen is about 1-2% of *new* cars, imagine what that means as a percentage of all the cars on the road, entirely).
And big name manufacturers would on a long-term basis. They sell parts, plans, and patents. Tesla don't. Should it prove popular, the big guys will produce a car within a year (if they haven't already) that's cheaper and which they can sell parts for for the next 20 years.
The big-name guys are happily sitting there letting Tesla do what it wants. If it hits on an idea, they can license it (he's already said he's licensing any patents, etc.) and outbuild and crush the company in a year or so. They could literally bury it under the sheer volume of cars and models they could produce in that time, and you can be sure they're working on it.
I bought a brand-new car only recently. Literally, every place like Fords do have electric cars and/or hybrids. They're not even sold. Nobody steers you towards them. Nobody cares about selling them. There's no profit there.
And the one thing that Tesla knows is that they aren't making money. They're basically burning through initial investment in the hope of gaining traction enough that they can reduce unit costs - their battery factory is the demo of this - eventually and start to make it profitable. The second that happens, the big guy can swoop in and steal all that profit by doing exactly the same, on ten-to-hundred times the scale.
Of course, they're using him as a guinea pig. They can see exactly what's selling and what's necessary. That the infrastructure to support the car isn't there yet either. That the profitability is zero. That the innovation isn't present... it's all just standard kit and standard batteries bolted together with the one thing that they WOULDN'T want to replicate as he's done it - the automated driving computer. Something they've all got their own versions of because it works no matter the type of car.
They're letting him throw his money away and do their market research for them. They can steal the industry and swamp the market in months if they like. They hold infinitely more weight with places like electric recharge stations and government contacts (thousands and thousands of local jobs all over the world). And when he runs out of steam/money, or pisses off the investors, and still can't make profit, they can probably even snap up the name if they want.
You say it yourself almost - they don't have the desire to. They are ignoring the entire market at the moment except for token "green" gestures. But do you honestly think they aren't watching? Do you think that not just one but EVERY manufacturer is that naive to do a Kodak and think "Ah, digital photography will never take off?". They're watching. They know it's not profitable. So let him make a name for himself and throw his money away, and whether it gets popular, or flops, they'll still be putting out a hundred ti
The portion of people who would have bought their own chips and copied a BIOS onto them was vanishingly small. I was really deep into my IT as a kid, and very much considered a "BIOS Saviour" purchase several times, but could never justify it.
But the fact remains that you still wouldn't have known - you may have unwittingly saved yourself from such an attack, but the BIOS could easily program in an innocent-looking presence check and carry on regardless if on a non-compromised device. Hell, it doesn't even need to be in the BIOS, the compromised device could just take advantage of a small signature in the BIOS and replace code offsets to go via its own routines rather than whatever is on the chip, etc. If anyone did that, even 30+ years ago, we would STILL not even know anything about it.
Hell, it took 20 years to discover that the 3DFX drivers for all early Windows were nothing more than blanket-DMA enablers, and with them installed your entire machine is compromised. Nobody knew until the product was obsolete, and that was in easily-viewable software.
Now every machine is Flash BIOS, with key-encrypted updates, done while the machine is live, even with Internet connectivity sometimes, to an unreadable part of the chip. With UEFI the BIOS is basically presenting Turing-complete programming languages too and has access to everything, even if the machine is off.
We have literally no idea what's going on, nor what systems - past or present - may have been compromised in this way. There's almost no way to tell, either, short of decapping every batch of chips and checking they match a spec that's been provably verified to have no malicious capability.
Literally, I could probably quite easily supply you with a 6502, or Z80, or Intel whatever, or even just a plain memory chip that - inside the package - has something that adds on certain signatures to modify the chip's behaviour, or even transmits data over discrete and encrypted radio waves. The only way to ever tell it was there (and not just random noise) would be to pull the thing off and investigate with a suitable microscope (probably an electron microscope given the size of those things nowadays) and analyse every component of a billions-of-transistors multi-layer integrated circuit.
Possibly the only saviour in this instance might be something like homomorphic encryption - where a processor is able to perform actions on encrypted data without ever knowing the decryption details or data. Literally "not trusting the processor at all", at least to do more than basic mathematics on numbers that it can't infer anything from. People have been trying to get it working for decades and though, in theory, it's possible, nobody's really made a chip that does anything useful.
However, that itself just pushes the problem further down the line - somewhere there's a piece of opaque circuitry from China looking at your data, no matter what you do.
Not being funny - but almost every chip you've ever used could have secret unreplaceable firmware and you'd know nothing about it.
This has been true throughout the history of computing, really. Sure, we know now that the Z80 was okay but we had no way of sensibly telling back then and it was all we could use.
Has anyone ever decapped a 386? What about those old AMI BIOS chips, sure we know what firmware can load onto them, but how do we know that's all that's in that chip and there isn't a secret ROM activated under certain conditions? We don't, until the chip is dead and out of the market, and even then we may never know.
Sorry, but "open" hardware of any significant specification is a fallacy... because you cannot verify it without an awful lot of very expensive equipment, even if it operates as if it were a RISC-V processor. Anything could be tapping into that core specification and leaking or acting on data secretly and you'd never know - it would just look and work like RISC-V chips all do to all outside appearances.
Honestly, if you think that nVidia using RISC-V is a bad thing, and isn't going to boost RISC-V adoption, reputation and development, or that your system is somehow going to avoid all such avenues of compromise, you're so wrong that it's laughable.
In fact, if anything, such code makes it incredibly easy to modify such a thing, use its name AND get away with it because nobody will ever check and/or ever be able to sue, that doing that to some big-name chip manufacturer.
Linux generally mounts disks "noatime" for precisely this reason. And if you cut out in the middle of an access-time-write, the filesystem at worst has an incorrect access time.
Windows does not store access times on NTFS or FAT ("To save system resources in Vista, Microsoft disabled the Last Access Time Stamp").
So... no... it doesn't... and no, not all OS do this. Not since the 90's really.
If you haven't written anything to the USB, yes, it's completely safe. Any filesystem that's writing data just because of your passive reading of the disk is a) stupid, b) should have recovery for such, c) shouldn't be writing anything important (e.g. a last access time, maybe?)
If you have written anything to the disk, and it's synced to disk (i.e. activity light is idle) then, yes, it's safe. This may be dependent on OS and whether you can see any activity light. Modern OS should mount without write-caching for external drives unless told otherwise, and any half-decent filesystem should survive a forcible unmount in such circumstances
If the USB is still busy churning after you copied files to it, and you yank it? Yes, you're gonna lose data.
That a bunch of "nerds" can't figure this out after all the years we've had USB disks etc. (I remember starting with them in 95 OSR2 / Linux 2.0 personally?) really worries me.
Same as floppies before it. Floppy only being read-from? You can yank it. Floppy was written to but has now gone idle? You can yank it. Floppy was written to and it still pulsing / flashing? Leave it alone.
They're not that tough. Couldn't even beat the T-100.
If the problem were that simple, everyone would have moved to Rust or similar languages decades ago.
Simple fact, your (evangelical) choice of language does not change how you're forced to express your desires, or fix problems associated with the vast majority of programming errors.
Though there are languages where being "misconstrued" is less likely in a minority of cases, most programming problems are caused by expressing totally the wrong thing and not what you intended at all, not a simple ambiguity of expression.
Hint: There's a reason that Rust still includes "unsafe" functionality. Because what you WANT TO DO is unsafe, not how you want to say it. And that's almost always because you choose that tradeoff consciously (usually for performance or direct-hardware-acces).
Just look at Java. Ignore the syntax of the language itself, but the concept. Partition everything off into a virtual machine, which could be WRITTEN IN JAVA ITSELF (self-hosting). Now do real-world deployment and you discover two things: 1) it doesn't stop bone-headed code, 2) you need to break out of the virtual machine via direct interfaces in order to get what you need done.
It doesn't matter if you describe your security procedures in French or German. Unless you can PERFECTLY describe EXACTLY what you want to do, without possibility of any error, then it doesn't make any difference which one you choose to express it in.
For reference - I hate the Star Wars movies too. All of them. Did when I was a kid, still do. Zippy-zappy effects and unbelievably atrocious dialogue, but at least people talked in it!
2001 is all long-brooding scenes and special effects. Which, whether now or 40 years ago, does not make a movie.
There is no dialogue AT ALL in the first 25 minutes of the movie, or the last 23! 88 minutes of the movie are entirely dialogue-free.
What plot there is is confusing, incomplete, poorly communicated, and not very useful to any other part of the movie. "We found some stones, we go to this place, don't tell anyone", is the plot right the way through until the (stupid) ending.