>"Why doesn't my wifi dongle work?" "You need to build this source package" Your wifi works out of the box. If it doesn't you might have to mess with drivers, but that is really unlikely (and can happen with Windows).
> "How do I open a Word document" "Libre Office" You fucking click on it, and it opens. The splash screen tells you it is Libre Office, but you open it in the same way.
> "All the formatting is broken" "Keep trying diiferent Office suites" This is an uncommon issue these days, but yea, if you use a different platform and save it in a way not meant to be compatible, you might have to reformat it a bit here and there.
> "How do I run my games?" "You can't" More like: How do I run games X, Y, and Z? With the answer being, you can't run X, Y has a Linux version, and Z you use Wine.
The problem there is the devs who aren't making Linux versions. Linux as an aggregate has bent over backwards to run Windows binaries.
At this point I'll never trust them again. Windows 7 wooed me back from Linux (a situation not helped by GNOME being in peak bed-shitting mode at that particular moment), relegating my Linux drive to an infrequently booted partition on a machine that spent most of its time in Windows.
Windows 10 really opened my eyes. Like many folks, I skipped 8, seeing it as mostly a usability downgrade. I figured 10 would be like 7, but with the back end of 8 and new shiny stuff. Instead it was a security and privacy and version management disaster. Just reading through https://privacy.microsoft.com/... was enough to freak me out. Watching the internet fill up with people writing goofy scripts to turn off telemetry and batten down the hatches to prevent data leaking to everywhere all the time, watching people tcpdump the stuff from their locked down machines and seeing packets fly to Microsoft each and every time they opened notepad, watching people change four bytes in the Windows 7 solitaire binary to allow it to run in 10, so they can play solitaire without ads or a subscription...
And then to find out that Microsoft had silently shipped telemetry patches to Windows 7, let it sit for about three months, and then TURNED IT ON SERVER SIDE.
The moment when I was tearing out a service that didn't exist for any reason except to hurt me and was installed only because I updated my computer like they said I should, and was spying on me for weeks...was when I realized I had been a goddamned fool, that this would never get better, that Microsoft was simply irredeemable.
When they next temporarily step back the telemetry and server-side drama, consider that it is a ruse, and they will be right back to it immediately. It's guaranteed that they will.
Here's the file sniffer that probably exists, or at least, you give them permission for one at any time: https://privacy.microsoft.com/...
"When you provide payment data to make a purchase, we will share payment data with banks and other entities that process payment transactions or provide other financial services, and for fraud prevention and credit risk reduction....In addition, we share personal data among Microsoft-controlled affiliates and subsidiaries...
Finally, we will access, transfer, disclose, and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails in Outlook.com, or files in private folders on OneDrive), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to:...protect the rights or property of Microsoft, including enforcing the terms governing the use of the services - however, if we receive information indicating that someone is using our services to traffic in stolen intellectual or physical property of Microsoft, we will not inspect a customer's private content ourselves, but we may refer the matter to law enforcement. "
So maybe they can't sniff your hard drive, but if they do, you have suspiciously granted them permission. Hrm...
Obviously if your data is in the cloud, the government already has access to it if it needs. This just looks like a territorial dispute between different parts of the government...
You can't make it work with javascript. You can write a simple language, like HTML, that is meant to handle most cases of the net. You can then add to that language whenever a new thing becomes needed.
But instead, if you insist on having a general purpose language that you write your fucking webpages in, of COURSE it will end up being as complex as code. Because it IS code.
As long as javascript is tolerated, this will become more and more of a problem. Webpages aren't just "apps": they are, on average, each a program larger than DOOM I, on average.
And this problem isn't just limited to javascript- any time you want to treat the web like it hosts programs for you to run instead of data for you to view, you will hit this barrier.
It's like fucking impossible to get this working these days. I couldn't find a mobo that met my needs AND had a PS2 port, and in *practice*, N-key rollover is never supported in USB. Frustrating. My keyboard supports it, but that isn't enough without a PS2 port.
So a state can take away the death penalty for murder, and there's no death penalty for murder. But if someone murders for RACISM, then the feds can come in overrule the state? That's a little bit odd, right?
> I'm uncertain how low in the Intel CPU family it goes by now
Go ahead and research it, you're in for a GREAT time. I bet you can't find one single Kabylake, Skylake, Broadwell, or Haswell without it.
> It has many benefits for managers of datacenter machines
If it was limited to those it might make some sense.
> but why is it not disabled by default?
The vuln in question is not a default feature. Remote management is not enabled by default, neither is this goofy serial-over-TCP thing.
The real question is, if you remove the ME through hardware modifications, why does the Intel chip shut down after 30 minutes? Why is it SO mandatory on EVERY chip?
Do you also think the "close" button works on elevators? Do you think turning off telemetry in Windows 10 turns it off?
The ME is running regardless of what you set your BIOS to. Whether it can reach the outside world seems like it is motherboard dependent. It's true that you aren't vulnerable to THIS vuln. But what about the others? We know there are others. We just don't know exactly where they are. The bad guys sure do though.
> If you're really worried about it get a "Min SKU" part. Name one that doesn't have ME.
>if you're extra paranoid never use the on-board LAN I don't, but I shouldn't have to.
The concerns with ME are in two categories: one, it could have bugs in it. That's proven beyond a doubt: it has wildly exploitive bugs that live at a level you simply can't detect. That was a theory for years, now it is proven beyond ANY doubt. Two, it could have backdoors. You could argue that any bug that gives access like these is already these things. We shouldn't have to rely on faith, smoke, and mirrors to be sure that the digital infrastructure we've built every goddamned thing on isn't corrupt at its core. If Intel wasn't hostile, they would disable the 30 minute timeout. If AMD wasn't hostile, they would allow cores to process instructions with no PSP present, or be open source (as they are reportedly considering). We simply should not be in this position, and there's no opt out that I'm aware of.
Hoping that the BIOS, the motherboard, and the choice of PCI network adapter aren't compatible (to prevent a possible bug or backdoor) isn't really a great way to live bro.
First, lets get to the meat of it: you don't need an ME, except that the chip will stop working (again, after 30 minutes) if the ME code is removed. There are certain machines on which the ME has been successfully neutered, but this physical hack (which involves reflashing, certainly no CPU modifications) is limited to a few motherboards. Still, it should trivially debunk your claim. Further evidence includes the fact that the ME wasn't included (or mandatory) until a few years ago, and prior versions worked just fine without it. In any event, the fact that any intel chip will work for exactly half an hour before entering HLT state should prove that it is not in any way necessary to run- except that Intel has applied a kill switch.
It doesn't "come turned off". The specific settings needed for THIS vulnerability do come disabled: I said as much. The problem is that the entire AMT / ME system is a giant mess of impossible to debug code only known to a handful of Intel engineers, who have at this point made MULTIPLE mistakes. There's one that lets you log in to any system with it active, and this new one is a vulnerability to a different feature. It's possible that ALL features have bugs, backdoors, or both. The fact that this is wildly privileged ( runs at a more privileged permission set than level 0, "-1", or even "-2") and has access to ethernet and RAM should be enough to be concerned: the fact that this code is unauditable, omnipresent, and has multiple known bugs should be enough to be angry: the fact that the code is mandatory should make you deeply suspicious of bad acting.
Ok, second, on to the dessert. > if you want a CISC computer Irrelevant. CISC CPUs do not require this. They existed before this: they run without this. This has nothing to do with microcode. > With a RISC CPU the registers are probably real hardware registers Intel chips have physical registers, but the architectural registers differing from the physical registers (and having a lot more physical registers) is a reasonably old optimization trick that all modern x86s use. But HEY, so does ARM, a supposed "RISC" architecture, and the first machine to implement this was a RISC chip as well, IBM's POWER series. There's not much difference between modern RISC and modern CISC. "CISC" was mostly invented to slam RISC in the first place. It's not a real distinction in modern computing, and is a bit debatable historically anyway. Games, and other things, work just fine when compiled for "RISC" chips.
>There are real reasons why CISC CPUs must use microcode Which is offtopic: nothing about Intel's management engine involves microcode.
> If you don't like it, just stick to RISC CPUs Offtopic and wrong: a RISC chip can have something like this attached, or not.
You can't, though. In fact, if you actually remove the ME code, the Intel chip enters a halt state after 30 minutes. AMD is worse: the cores are held in reset until released by the PSP.
Your pedantry relies on the fact that you can disable the particular feature that a vulnerability was discovered in. But that doesn't solve the problem, because there's still all that spooky code running in an unauditable way. This is at least the THIRD ME vuln in the last year or so.
> Everybody who knew said all along that if you add enterprise-level management software, it becomes an attack vector
Why is the ME present on every machine, no matter how small? Why is it in every laptop, desktop, tower, workstation, and server? Why all that ubiquity, if the only people who could ever make use of it are enterprise guys who pay for support and have a conformant BIOS and MOBO and turn it on? WHY IS IT EVERYWHERE????
> I do not agree - because you can always buy newer devices to run the same software
You can't. That's my point. You can't install an arbitrary version of ios on an iPhone. Once this fix goes in, you will be unable to obtain a new device that is at all capable of running the old 32 bit apps. If someone ports 32 bit support to jailbreak-land, then you may be able to work with that sometimes, here and there, for awhile... but jailbreak is a very spotty thing.
> You can if you jailbreak it which you absolutely can for any 32-bit IOS device.
Right now, I couldn't jailbreak my current phone- there's no jailbreak for that version. Going forward, we can assume that there will be a number of jailbreaks, but there's no reason to assume any reasonable uptime on them.
But older devices? Your point about 32 bit devices is almost off topic. 32 bit ios devices won't be losing 32 bit support. My point is, there are a finite number of these, and they are difficult to repair and generally prone to expiry. You can't hack one together, you can't buy a new one from Apple, and they don't last forever. Certainly they are a physical artifact and not an electronic one, and it is in that jail of ever-decreasing older products that the 32 bit apps will wither and die.
Essential's phone OS is supposed to be open source, right? So far, so good. But it also seems to be based around a variety of gimmicks, such as its doofy camera stripe (the feature I guess being that the screen stretches up a bit higher) and its internet-of-things integration.
So who is their market? A, uh "phone enthusiast" would be giving up all of their Android or ios apps to move over to this, right? So that group won't be pouncing on it. "Phone gaming" is a huge market, but I'm not sure if that drives sales or is mostly a result of the ubiquity and capability of phones, but it doesn't seem like it is an overture to that group either, especially not with the screen all weird. Whatever section of the market uses their phone for productivity will probably be constrained by not being in one of the two bigger ecosystems, and the very larger more "I need a phone because it is just generally required to function in society at this point" type folks are not going to be catered to by an expensive top end phone anyway.
Is this thing more of a luxury item than an iPhone? Is it more open than an Android? Is it more functional at anything than either? Is it more secure than either? If it really ends up having some killer app or functionality, won't that just be copied by Apple and Samsung and Google and HTC within a year?
Maybe it's a trend I don't understand yet, but I think this is going to have a rocky start, and if it succeeds, it will be by battling hard for years. Either way I can't picture being super happy being an early adopter.
When they first announced those I was cautiously excited. Like the first (or near enough) book has a scene on Caladan- the peaceful water planet that House Atreides started out on at the beginning of Dune, where Duke Leto Atreides fights a giant water elemental. It was totally bonkers.
Even fanfiction would have enough shame not to add that. What those two did was wholly ludicrous.
> Alcohol is a poison to the human body regardless of amount consumed
True, but what's your point? There's a huge variety of things that are toxic. If you retroactively subtracted all or almost all of alcohol from human history, you'd definitely have a much lamer playlist. How many ideas were born under the influence of some voluntarily imbibed mind affecting chemical, and then refined under the light of sobriety (or under the light of caffeine)?
Also, how many relationships (romantic and friendly) are lubricated by alcohol? Its easy to think of the negative cases, but are there NO positive cases ever?
It's a complex poison. It has a bunch of social upsides, and tolerance for it seems to have been selected for in societies that have access to it- that is to say, being able to booze "correctly" has actually bean a selection pressure in RECENT human history.
> The only reason it is legal today is because addiction demands it should be.
Disagree. When prohibition ended, it wasn't addicts who drove that, it was everyone. The more you read about that frightening top-down attempt to reshape society, the scarier it sounds. It wasn't just the minority of addicted drunks in the world that drove that around.
I would make an argument that, out of all the mind-altering substances to have a prohibition against, we've chosen a really large set of reasonably harmless ones (cannabis, EVERY hallucinogen despite no addictive properties, etc.), and conspicuously left out alcohol, which causes a real and noticeable amount of harm to society every year. But I think that's more a conservative choice: we know we can have a society with alcohol, because we DO, and we know trying to take it out ruins everything, because it DID, but we're hoping to prevent change happening from other substances. That seems more inline with our national character, and more predictive of the anti-drug hysteria we whip ourselves up in every decade and a half-ish.
Anyway, it's not just addiction driving its legality, and being a poison at every dose does not imply that something should be banned.
> Getting loaded is considered bad form and makes you a boring conversationalist, even if YOU think you're brilliant.
I mean, there's degrees of inebriation. If I'm sober (or even drinking to a buzz) and a friend is getting hammered, it's clear I'm in for a reasonably boring night, though I'll probably be part to some ludicrous statements. Two folks with a light buzz will usually have a pretty good time though.
As far as solo drinking goes, I want to find a way to say "drinking increases creativity" in a way that doesn't sound so unilateral. In my experience, it is definitely easier to make mental connections when under the influence of at least a little alcohol. Depending on your work and hobbies, a little bit of drinking at night sometimes may, uh, fit your use case.
32-bit ios actually stands to be the first "lost platform" in computing history. EVER!
Hyperbole? Hear me out:
Unlike almost every other platform, there's no reliable and good way to run ios software (or ios itself) outside of the hardware. The only things that look like emulators are open source, and you can't even choose to install older versions of the OS on hardware past a cut-off date. Apple has fully DRMed their platform, fully closed it off. But up until now, if you have played by their rules, there's always been a way to run any given application: the expectation that your app can't be emulated well on Linux or whatever isn't something universal, so the computing consumer world has been pretty accepting of this.
This fully closed and cryptographically sealed system is something reasonably new in computing, and Apple's smashing success with it has encouraged others to duplicate it to some lesser degree- Windows 10S tries to take their model and offer a greater degree of freedom with an opt-out for cash (instead of no opt-out), Android has taken parts of their system, etc. But so far, everything has eventually (once it is no longer a primary economic driver) been emulated, been archived, been available for the future. Perhaps the loss of 32-bit ARM code compiled for ios is no great eternal loss to the world, but the precedent is now set for the expiry of code in a way that has never been done before.
You can't exclusively blame Ballmer, the toxicity of Microsoft's strategy was in full effect by the time he took charge, and even Bill Gates was pissed about it. Still, he didn't seem to do them many favors.
The bigger problem with his comments is this: a basketball team can be a complete failure one year and a smashing success a couple years later. They still get a seat at the table. A basketball team that exclusively loses won't go out of business, and will instead be given preferential draft picks. The last time an NBA team went defunct was the early 1950s: all but like two of them failed during the Truman administration. A company puts WAY more on the line than an NBA team, and an NBA player at any given point in time is much rarer a creature than a business competing in any given market.
Slashdot Mirror
>"Why doesn't my wifi dongle work?" "You need to build this source package"
Your wifi works out of the box. If it doesn't you might have to mess with drivers, but that is really unlikely (and can happen with Windows).
> "How do I open a Word document" "Libre Office"
You fucking click on it, and it opens. The splash screen tells you it is Libre Office, but you open it in the same way.
> "All the formatting is broken" "Keep trying diiferent Office suites"
This is an uncommon issue these days, but yea, if you use a different platform and save it in a way not meant to be compatible, you might have to reformat it a bit here and there.
> "How do I run my games?" "You can't"
More like: How do I run games X, Y, and Z? With the answer being, you can't run X, Y has a Linux version, and Z you use Wine.
The problem there is the devs who aren't making Linux versions. Linux as an aggregate has bent over backwards to run Windows binaries.
At this point I'll never trust them again. Windows 7 wooed me back from Linux (a situation not helped by GNOME being in peak bed-shitting mode at that particular moment), relegating my Linux drive to an infrequently booted partition on a machine that spent most of its time in Windows.
Windows 10 really opened my eyes. Like many folks, I skipped 8, seeing it as mostly a usability downgrade. I figured 10 would be like 7, but with the back end of 8 and new shiny stuff. Instead it was a security and privacy and version management disaster. Just reading through https://privacy.microsoft.com/... was enough to freak me out. Watching the internet fill up with people writing goofy scripts to turn off telemetry and batten down the hatches to prevent data leaking to everywhere all the time, watching people tcpdump the stuff from their locked down machines and seeing packets fly to Microsoft each and every time they opened notepad, watching people change four bytes in the Windows 7 solitaire binary to allow it to run in 10, so they can play solitaire without ads or a subscription...
And then to find out that Microsoft had silently shipped telemetry patches to Windows 7, let it sit for about three months, and then TURNED IT ON SERVER SIDE.
The moment when I was tearing out a service that didn't exist for any reason except to hurt me and was installed only because I updated my computer like they said I should, and was spying on me for weeks ...was when I realized I had been a goddamned fool, that this would never get better, that Microsoft was simply irredeemable.
When they next temporarily step back the telemetry and server-side drama, consider that it is a ruse, and they will be right back to it immediately. It's guaranteed that they will.
> there was also chatter about it being a file sniffer and keylogger, but that was debunked pretty hard
Here's how to disable the keylogger you claim doesn't exist:
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
Here's the file sniffer that probably exists, or at least, you give them permission for one at any time:
https://privacy.microsoft.com/...
"When you provide payment data to make a purchase, we will share payment data with banks and other entities that process payment transactions or provide other financial services, and for fraud prevention and credit risk reduction. ...In addition, we share personal data among Microsoft-controlled affiliates and subsidiaries...
Finally, we will access, transfer, disclose, and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails in Outlook.com, or files in private folders on OneDrive), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to: ...protect the rights or property of Microsoft, including enforcing the terms governing the use of the services - however, if we receive information indicating that someone is using our services to traffic in stolen intellectual or physical property of Microsoft, we will not inspect a customer's private content ourselves, but we may refer the matter to law enforcement. "
So maybe they can't sniff your hard drive, but if they do, you have suspiciously granted them permission. Hrm...
Obviously if your data is in the cloud, the government already has access to it if it needs. This just looks like a territorial dispute between different parts of the government...
You can't make it work with javascript. You can write a simple language, like HTML, that is meant to handle most cases of the net. You can then add to that language whenever a new thing becomes needed.
But instead, if you insist on having a general purpose language that you write your fucking webpages in, of COURSE it will end up being as complex as code. Because it IS code.
As long as javascript is tolerated, this will become more and more of a problem. Webpages aren't just "apps": they are, on average, each a program larger than DOOM I, on average.
And this problem isn't just limited to javascript- any time you want to treat the web like it hosts programs for you to run instead of data for you to view, you will hit this barrier.
> Do they have the raised ridges on the F and J keys?
Fuck those things. I want to be able to remap the keys to Dvorak, like a sane person.
WASD keyboards will sell you ones with the ridges on U and H, at least.
> full n-key rollover
It's like fucking impossible to get this working these days. I couldn't find a mobo that met my needs AND had a PS2 port, and in *practice*, N-key rollover is never supported in USB. Frustrating. My keyboard supports it, but that isn't enough without a PS2 port.
The WASD keyboards use a cherry switch, as do most mechanical keyboards. The ones in question recreate the buckling spring.
Personally, I really like the cherry switches, but I get if someone wants them springs back.
Oh look, another reason why a web form has to have javascript to work. It's for security, doncha know!
So a state can take away the death penalty for murder, and there's no death penalty for murder. But if someone murders for RACISM, then the feds can come in overrule the state? That's a little bit odd, right?
> I'm uncertain how low in the Intel CPU family it goes by now
Go ahead and research it, you're in for a GREAT time. I bet you can't find one single Kabylake, Skylake, Broadwell, or Haswell without it.
> It has many benefits for managers of datacenter machines
If it was limited to those it might make some sense.
> but why is it not disabled by default?
The vuln in question is not a default feature. Remote management is not enabled by default, neither is this goofy serial-over-TCP thing.
The real question is, if you remove the ME through hardware modifications, why does the Intel chip shut down after 30 minutes? Why is it SO mandatory on EVERY chip?
You need to work on posting shit that is less retarded.
Do you also think the "close" button works on elevators? Do you think turning off telemetry in Windows 10 turns it off?
The ME is running regardless of what you set your BIOS to. Whether it can reach the outside world seems like it is motherboard dependent. It's true that you aren't vulnerable to THIS vuln. But what about the others? We know there are others. We just don't know exactly where they are. The bad guys sure do though.
> If you're really worried about it get a "Min SKU" part.
Name one that doesn't have ME.
>if you're extra paranoid never use the on-board LAN
I don't, but I shouldn't have to.
The concerns with ME are in two categories: one, it could have bugs in it. That's proven beyond a doubt: it has wildly exploitive bugs that live at a level you simply can't detect. That was a theory for years, now it is proven beyond ANY doubt. Two, it could have backdoors. You could argue that any bug that gives access like these is already these things. We shouldn't have to rely on faith, smoke, and mirrors to be sure that the digital infrastructure we've built every goddamned thing on isn't corrupt at its core. If Intel wasn't hostile, they would disable the 30 minute timeout. If AMD wasn't hostile, they would allow cores to process instructions with no PSP present, or be open source (as they are reportedly considering). We simply should not be in this position, and there's no opt out that I'm aware of.
Hoping that the BIOS, the motherboard, and the choice of PCI network adapter aren't compatible (to prevent a possible bug or backdoor) isn't really a great way to live bro.
Your post is badly misinformed.
First, lets get to the meat of it: you don't need an ME, except that the chip will stop working (again, after 30 minutes) if the ME code is removed. There are certain machines on which the ME has been successfully neutered, but this physical hack (which involves reflashing, certainly no CPU modifications) is limited to a few motherboards. Still, it should trivially debunk your claim. Further evidence includes the fact that the ME wasn't included (or mandatory) until a few years ago, and prior versions worked just fine without it. In any event, the fact that any intel chip will work for exactly half an hour before entering HLT state should prove that it is not in any way necessary to run- except that Intel has applied a kill switch.
It doesn't "come turned off". The specific settings needed for THIS vulnerability do come disabled: I said as much. The problem is that the entire AMT / ME system is a giant mess of impossible to debug code only known to a handful of Intel engineers, who have at this point made MULTIPLE mistakes. There's one that lets you log in to any system with it active, and this new one is a vulnerability to a different feature. It's possible that ALL features have bugs, backdoors, or both. The fact that this is wildly privileged ( runs at a more privileged permission set than level 0, "-1", or even "-2") and has access to ethernet and RAM should be enough to be concerned: the fact that this code is unauditable, omnipresent, and has multiple known bugs should be enough to be angry: the fact that the code is mandatory should make you deeply suspicious of bad acting.
Ok, second, on to the dessert.
> if you want a CISC computer
Irrelevant. CISC CPUs do not require this. They existed before this: they run without this. This has nothing to do with microcode.
> With a RISC CPU the registers are probably real hardware registers
Intel chips have physical registers, but the architectural registers differing from the physical registers (and having a lot more physical registers) is a reasonably old optimization trick that all modern x86s use. But HEY, so does ARM, a supposed "RISC" architecture, and the first machine to implement this was a RISC chip as well, IBM's POWER series. There's not much difference between modern RISC and modern CISC. "CISC" was mostly invented to slam RISC in the first place. It's not a real distinction in modern computing, and is a bit debatable historically anyway. Games, and other things, work just fine when compiled for "RISC" chips.
>There are real reasons why CISC CPUs must use microcode
Which is offtopic: nothing about Intel's management engine involves microcode.
> If you don't like it, just stick to RISC CPUs
Offtopic and wrong: a RISC chip can have something like this attached, or not.
> They're hopefully going to open source that portion
I mean, we can hope man. If AMD actually had this, I'd consider making the switch.
> You can turn the feature off
You can't, though. In fact, if you actually remove the ME code, the Intel chip enters a halt state after 30 minutes. AMD is worse: the cores are held in reset until released by the PSP.
Your pedantry relies on the fact that you can disable the particular feature that a vulnerability was discovered in. But that doesn't solve the problem, because there's still all that spooky code running in an unauditable way. This is at least the THIRD ME vuln in the last year or so.
> Everybody who knew said all along that if you add enterprise-level management software, it becomes an attack vector
Why is the ME present on every machine, no matter how small? Why is it in every laptop, desktop, tower, workstation, and server? Why all that ubiquity, if the only people who could ever make use of it are enterprise guys who pay for support and have a conformant BIOS and MOBO and turn it on? WHY IS IT EVERYWHERE????
> I do not agree - because you can always buy newer devices to run the same software
You can't. That's my point. You can't install an arbitrary version of ios on an iPhone. Once this fix goes in, you will be unable to obtain a new device that is at all capable of running the old 32 bit apps. If someone ports 32 bit support to jailbreak-land, then you may be able to work with that sometimes, here and there, for awhile... but jailbreak is a very spotty thing.
> You can if you jailbreak it which you absolutely can for any 32-bit IOS device.
Right now, I couldn't jailbreak my current phone- there's no jailbreak for that version. Going forward, we can assume that there will be a number of jailbreaks, but there's no reason to assume any reasonable uptime on them.
But older devices? Your point about 32 bit devices is almost off topic. 32 bit ios devices won't be losing 32 bit support. My point is, there are a finite number of these, and they are difficult to repair and generally prone to expiry. You can't hack one together, you can't buy a new one from Apple, and they don't last forever. Certainly they are a physical artifact and not an electronic one, and it is in that jail of ever-decreasing older products that the 32 bit apps will wither and die.
Essential's phone OS is supposed to be open source, right? So far, so good. But it also seems to be based around a variety of gimmicks, such as its doofy camera stripe (the feature I guess being that the screen stretches up a bit higher) and its internet-of-things integration.
So who is their market? A, uh "phone enthusiast" would be giving up all of their Android or ios apps to move over to this, right? So that group won't be pouncing on it. "Phone gaming" is a huge market, but I'm not sure if that drives sales or is mostly a result of the ubiquity and capability of phones, but it doesn't seem like it is an overture to that group either, especially not with the screen all weird. Whatever section of the market uses their phone for productivity will probably be constrained by not being in one of the two bigger ecosystems, and the very larger more "I need a phone because it is just generally required to function in society at this point" type folks are not going to be catered to by an expensive top end phone anyway.
Is this thing more of a luxury item than an iPhone? Is it more open than an Android? Is it more functional at anything than either? Is it more secure than either? If it really ends up having some killer app or functionality, won't that just be copied by Apple and Samsung and Google and HTC within a year?
Maybe it's a trend I don't understand yet, but I think this is going to have a rocky start, and if it succeeds, it will be by battling hard for years. Either way I can't picture being super happy being an early adopter.
> The ones that people actually cared about grew emulators.
And the ones no one cared about are WAITING for emulators. That's fine. That's not lost: at best, that's misplaced. This could really be lost.
> I prefer the term, "Pretty okay fanfiction".
When they first announced those I was cautiously excited. Like the first (or near enough) book has a scene on Caladan- the peaceful water planet that House Atreides started out on at the beginning of Dune, where Duke Leto Atreides fights a giant water elemental. It was totally bonkers.
Even fanfiction would have enough shame not to add that. What those two did was wholly ludicrous.
> Alcohol is a poison to the human body regardless of amount consumed
True, but what's your point? There's a huge variety of things that are toxic. If you retroactively subtracted all or almost all of alcohol from human history, you'd definitely have a much lamer playlist. How many ideas were born under the influence of some voluntarily imbibed mind affecting chemical, and then refined under the light of sobriety (or under the light of caffeine)?
Also, how many relationships (romantic and friendly) are lubricated by alcohol? Its easy to think of the negative cases, but are there NO positive cases ever?
It's a complex poison. It has a bunch of social upsides, and tolerance for it seems to have been selected for in societies that have access to it- that is to say, being able to booze "correctly" has actually bean a selection pressure in RECENT human history.
> The only reason it is legal today is because addiction demands it should be.
Disagree. When prohibition ended, it wasn't addicts who drove that, it was everyone. The more you read about that frightening top-down attempt to reshape society, the scarier it sounds. It wasn't just the minority of addicted drunks in the world that drove that around.
I would make an argument that, out of all the mind-altering substances to have a prohibition against, we've chosen a really large set of reasonably harmless ones (cannabis, EVERY hallucinogen despite no addictive properties, etc.), and conspicuously left out alcohol, which causes a real and noticeable amount of harm to society every year. But I think that's more a conservative choice: we know we can have a society with alcohol, because we DO, and we know trying to take it out ruins everything, because it DID, but we're hoping to prevent change happening from other substances. That seems more inline with our national character, and more predictive of the anti-drug hysteria we whip ourselves up in every decade and a half-ish.
Anyway, it's not just addiction driving its legality, and being a poison at every dose does not imply that something should be banned.
> Getting loaded is considered bad form and makes you a boring conversationalist, even if YOU think you're brilliant.
I mean, there's degrees of inebriation. If I'm sober (or even drinking to a buzz) and a friend is getting hammered, it's clear I'm in for a reasonably boring night, though I'll probably be part to some ludicrous statements. Two folks with a light buzz will usually have a pretty good time though.
As far as solo drinking goes, I want to find a way to say "drinking increases creativity" in a way that doesn't sound so unilateral. In my experience, it is definitely easier to make mental connections when under the influence of at least a little alcohol. Depending on your work and hobbies, a little bit of drinking at night sometimes may, uh, fit your use case.
32-bit ios actually stands to be the first "lost platform" in computing history. EVER!
Hyperbole? Hear me out:
Unlike almost every other platform, there's no reliable and good way to run ios software (or ios itself) outside of the hardware. The only things that look like emulators are open source, and you can't even choose to install older versions of the OS on hardware past a cut-off date. Apple has fully DRMed their platform, fully closed it off. But up until now, if you have played by their rules, there's always been a way to run any given application: the expectation that your app can't be emulated well on Linux or whatever isn't something universal, so the computing consumer world has been pretty accepting of this.
This fully closed and cryptographically sealed system is something reasonably new in computing, and Apple's smashing success with it has encouraged others to duplicate it to some lesser degree- Windows 10S tries to take their model and offer a greater degree of freedom with an opt-out for cash (instead of no opt-out), Android has taken parts of their system, etc. But so far, everything has eventually (once it is no longer a primary economic driver) been emulated, been archived, been available for the future. Perhaps the loss of 32-bit ARM code compiled for ios is no great eternal loss to the world, but the precedent is now set for the expiry of code in a way that has never been done before.
You can't exclusively blame Ballmer, the toxicity of Microsoft's strategy was in full effect by the time he took charge, and even Bill Gates was pissed about it. Still, he didn't seem to do them many favors.
The bigger problem with his comments is this: a basketball team can be a complete failure one year and a smashing success a couple years later. They still get a seat at the table. A basketball team that exclusively loses won't go out of business, and will instead be given preferential draft picks. The last time an NBA team went defunct was the early 1950s: all but like two of them failed during the Truman administration. A company puts WAY more on the line than an NBA team, and an NBA player at any given point in time is much rarer a creature than a business competing in any given market.