RiverCrochet

Would this work on other platforms, I wonder? Or would they just freak out? Someone else can give it a try on the Commodore 64 or something.

I don't remember seeing this on Commodore 64 too much. Most type-in hybrid BASIC-machine language programs would have numerous DATA statements with opcodes and a loop to READ and POKE them (typically in the tape buffer area somewhere in the fist 2K of RAM or in the 4K area at 49152/$C000).

Commodore 64 BASIC's LOAD"WHATEVER",8 command would load a file of any size in the BASIC text area without validation or checking it for any type of format. So much commercial C64 software often had a one line "10 SYS2063" (or similar) stub that would simply jump into the actual code which was tacked on to that BASIC stub. But the LIST command wouldn't display anything after the stub - I guess the "next line" bytes were set to $0000 to indicate end of program.

TV makers would have to collude with every ISP for that to be worth depending on.

Not to say it couldn't happen - but it wouldn't be a backdoor thing, it'd be very up front. All that's needed is for ISPs to create/join some SSO-like standard that lets you use ISP credentials as smart TV credentials (e.g. Your Xfinity account is automatically your Vizio account, sign on with your Xfinity account to get free streaming deals now).

I feel like if TVs start doing that, they'll display a network ID and signal bars at the top of the screen like cell phones do, so the TV maker doesn't get blamed for ISP problems.

I haven't seen any open WiFi networks around me in years. I don't think it's a thing anymore; it's definitely not something a TV company can rely on.

That would require the Roku to specifically be set up to act as a router. You can't just connect to a random device that's not specifically a router/AP and use its internet connection.

Since Roku like other smart TV companies makes money off of user data captur, it's not incentivized to enable those conditions for a downstream device, especially if not specifically advertised as a feature.

Just imagine, if the rumours are true and Apple's 'foldable' phone costs 2500€ or more - who is going to buys this?

Phones are a bad example in the US at least-not sure how it works in the EU.

I think most people in the US simply finance new phones through their provider who is already providing them the plan, so it just looks like an expensive phone plan to them for a few years. Apple could offer a deal where a $3000 phone is simply a $200/mo. add-on to your bill over 3 or 4 years.

I bet this causes more things to be tied to a cellular provider and offered the same way, like game consoles and maybe even TVs. Imagine signing on to your cellular provider for a 10 year contract to get a few new phones, a game console or two, and a couple TVs.

Plex/Jellyfin is for those without a home theater. I typically listen/watch media on my phone or old iPad, or sometimes a laptop. Since Jellyfin works through the browser it covers all these scenarios. On the occasion I have some people over and we want to watch it on a TV I can connect the laptop to the TV.

Looks like they all use Starlink and no one uses the FCC-subsidized fiber.

Starlink is nice, but I'd still want the option to switch to an alternate provider if Starlink suddenly raises their prices or otherwise becomes uncompetitive for some reason. I guess they do have cell service out there, though.

I wonder how the copper PSTN is out there, or if it's totally replaced by that fiber.

In contrast, p-bits flip between 0 or 1 with a tunable probability.

Isn't this basically an ADC (except the tunable probability isn't an input voltage)? Is this kinda-sorta a new form of analog computing?

IANAL but I bet that:

- If the license terms include a section on termination, and termination is done in accordance with the license terms, it's fine legally.

- Licenses can be transferable but that doesn't make them non-terminable.

I could be wrong, though.

It's pretty crappy that we got to the point that overly simple actions (like clicking on buttons or breaking stickers on packages) can be considered accepting license terms. Is that really a "meeting of the minds"?

Then the button should say "Buy Revocable License."

Inevitably people will ask what that means. That will lead to a FAQ on the company's site somewhere, and various videos on the social media explaining it periodically with lots of comments. That will be a good thing.

Corporate marketing teams will eventually settle on something better sounding but technically legal, something like "Premier Anytime Access" for specific movies (versus "Bronze 24-hr Access"), or similar.

Calling the registry a database makes it seem better engineered than it really is.

Running queries on the registry like SQLite? Nope. The Windows registry internally from what I've been able to read is a weird reimplementation of a file system (a trivial database I guess but a real database lets you index on things other than name). It's compact but as far as I know completely unofficially documented.

(Most data structures with unique names or ids for each data item could trivially be considered databases, but generally if you say something is a database, you typically expect to create queries more sophisticated than "select data where name is X" and also expect to be able to create or use separate indexes to support those queries.)

The reputation of brittleness and danger of the registry is because Windows stores a lot of configuration parameters there that the kernel uses as boot, but because it's not a plain text file, comments explaining what the settings do can't be right there in the same place you're editing.

Most of the Windows CE phones of that era (pre-Windows Phone 7) were also basically "rooted" - i.e. you could install any .CAB and there was nothing stopping you. But Linux is a real operating system and Windows CE is basically on the same level as Windows 95 from an architecture standpoint.

A friend of mine worked at a cell phone repair shop and it was fairly common for someone to bring in their bulky keyboard-slideout HTC PDA that had frozen and typically the only recourse was a "hard reset" - reverting the phone to factory settings and removing all stored data (which was in the MB those days). Of course WinMo on most PDAs of the time was quite capable of keeling over all by itself without the aid of third-party programs, so the user couldn't always be blamed.

From the article:

"Elop oversaw the 2011 launch of a Linux-based smartphone, the Nokia N9. The N9 ran on a distribution of Linux called MeeGo. Reviewers at the time praised the new smartphone direction the Finnish phone maker had taken. 'Possibly the most beautiful phone ever made,' wrote one reviewer about the N9 for Engadget.

But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. Nokia announced its Lumia line of phones the same year—a direct pivot away from MeeGo toward the Windows Phone. It would be the last major strategic turn Nokia would take as a cellphone manufacturer. From this point forward, a succession of C-suite decisions all but sealed the fate of Nokia’s iconic line of phones."

We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones. Sad to me. I wonder where this could have gone without Microsoft.

Consumers and gamers are already alienated. If the price of RAM keeps going up I'm not sure much technology will actually be here to stay. What's the point of AI "art" anyway if everyone needs $10,000 devices to interact with the content? AI isn't going to raise wages, it's just going to enable people to produce more for the same wage.

See also: https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/NTSC_video

Over 30 years after its introduction, IPv6 has still not replaced IPv4.

The protocols are designed to exist side by side. Don't use IPv6 if you don't want to or can't. At some point IPv4's will be extremely expensive and you might prefer IPv6 performance over 3 or 4 layers of CGNAT, but by then the Internet is going to be on complete lockdown and most of what you do will need to be business-cased, identity-verified, approved, authorized, and managed by your ISP on a whitelist basis due to security, so I have stopped caring.

Some things:

* By the way, there was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4

* The 32-bitness of IPv4 (AF_INET) is baked in on a very low API/syscall level among all operating systems. If you're going to make changes there, you may as well just use IPv6 (AF_INET6) because most of the work is already done.

* Your scheme has a total dependency on IPv6 to work. The value add is unclear. It's easier for servers to enable IPv6 than enable IPv6+adopt this scheme.

* Your scheme isn't going to make IPv6 traffic use IPv4 routes. Routes and IP reputation are becoming complex because the Internet is cracking under the pressure of the current geopolitical situation plus the last 20 years of consolidation and centralization. It may not survive in much other than name, especially if more countries adopt a national-level firewall.

In a town nearby me (not really near me but within an hour's driving distance), sometimes I will see old people selling fresh fruit/vegetables in their front yard. They typically take cash, Cashapp, or Venmo. It's super convenient to be able to use Venmo in that situation. These are people I haven't met before.

Device/board manufacturers shouldn't be hiding information needed for an OS to talk to it and use it behind an NDA. I bought the hardware, the operating system and applications I use it with are my business. Closed-source drivers shouldn't be a thing.

I know that they are, and it's sad, but I'm glad Linux (as opposed to some things built on Linux like Android) fundamentally holds this ideological position and takes a stand here. No PC hardware business would even exist if its base platform wasn't made to be an open on by IBM and Compaq in the early 80's.

I agree with most of this, which is why emulation is generally better unless you specifically want to operate/show off a museum.

Maybe things will be like the Nintendo BS-X where people will reverse engineer consoles with games downloaded to extract the game from it.

That being said I do have a physical Atari 2600 with a few games. Astroblast with paddles is still a fun game today, and Video Olympics (the Atari VCS version of Pong) is extremely fun to bring out at parties.

there is nothing wrong with those emotional ties

This is a US centric viewpoint, and also a non-leadership viewpoint.

It may not be wrong to experience emotional attachment to an employer, but it's unwise in my opinion if it can all be gone instantly.

Because companies exist to make money, and they will let you go if they can't afford you, want to avoid serious trouble, or think they'll make more money doing something else, with little or no notice. They'll lay off thousands at the drop of an email. You might get some severance, and that takes care of you for a while, but it's better if you take it into your own hands and jump ship every few years. Ultimately you have to be responsible for yourself and your own well-being.

but honestly it stopped feeling like "a job" or "work" but just one of those things I was doing online that happened to increase my bank balance

This sentence right here makes me think you don't need to work for survival, and that's not the position the majority of people on the planet are in. I'd love to look at my job as something that merely increases my bank balance and not something essential to keep me insured, housed and fed.

None of the stuff that makes Windows suck compared to Linux is because of the kernel.

Two things I can think off off the top of my head that do completely suck about Windows: the forced updates and forced antivirus (e.g. Defender). None of those depend on the kernel, and Windows userland running on top of Linux wouldn't inherently make those two things suck less.

I ask a remote computer using an open protocol to send me stream of 3 million bytes, once, and then it sends me those bytes. Explain how this is unethical.

they had very flat (on one side) Ethernet pigtails in the PCMCIA days.

On the NES, most mappers would control which 16Kbyte blocks from the PRG ROM appeared in the upper ($C000) or lower ($8000) block of the NES ROM space. Often the upper block was fixed because of IRQ/RES/NMI vectors. I think later mappers allowed 8K blocks. So you only had those fixed windows at those fixed granularities, not the 16-byte granular sliding window 8086 offered.

I don't know about DMG/GBC/GBA games. Some very interesting stuff happened on those platforms (e.g. Game Boy Camera, and some game that lets you control a sewing machine in Japan?) and I bet a pure sliding window mapper exists.

The PC Engine/Turbografx-16 had platform support for mapping (specific CPU instructions did it) but it was 8 fixed windows in the CPUs 64K address space that pointed to 8K size offsets in the ROM I believe. SNES had a 24-bit address space and DMA to copy things to VRAM so not sure mappers were really on that platform.

I haven't seen an open network around me or anywhere I go in years. Even places like gyms, coffee shops, and restaurants require passwords typically.

I think it's much more likely TVs make deals with cell phone companies and offer hardware that only works with their cellular service. Many pay more than $100 a month on their phone bill to pay off a phone. People might accept another $20 or so for a large screen TV with bundled apps-costs can be kept down for the carrier with ads and tracking that can't be bypasssed as it will use the carrier's network connection.

Elitism doesn't logically counter an argument. If you're yearning for the skill that makes you elite, then work to get it. If you want the output of skill without the work, you're fake, and it will show in your output. There's many that don't care and you can make money off of them. The smart will see being on the wrong side of this as being exploited. No one can really stop you from exploiting the un-smart, but everyone can make a decision to not be un-smart.

"Your music was made on a computer? That's not real music! All you do is push some buttons!"

Non sequitur/red herring. I'll explain with an example.

In the late 80's or early 90's, Emu Systems made a device called the Proteus One. It's basically the guts of a keyboard without the keyboard, you bring your own MIDI keyboard.

It will definitely make sounds if you push buttons (keys) on your attached keyboard. If you compose these sounds, pushing those keys, you're an artist.

The unit has a "Demo Mode" where it will play a stored song. If you push this button, the sound you cause this unit to make is not artistry. Specifically, you're not an artist for having pushed this button.

Downloading artists' songs is not equivalent to people using AI to generate sounds/images and claiming they are an artist. I really don't have a problem with people using AI to generate sounds/images for their own personal enjoyment, but taking what it generates and then telling others that you "made this" or are an artist is deception.

artists shouldn’t expect to be paid for their digital output

The issue is the notion that an artist gets to control what one does with their personal property that isn't the artist's property. No one is saying artists shouldn't get paid. Artists should get paid but setting up a system that surveils everything I hear and see to enforce it is too much.

Many people just don’t care about this stuff

I agree with this though I don't follow your tie-in to piracy. Most people do not really care about music, and the industry has known this and delivers most music through ad-supported channels and shapes what music production it can to fit this. The ugly truth is that there's probably a lot of people who wouldn't mind listening to AI radio, it's probably coming, and it will be good enough that a sizeable percentage of the population will enjoy it and not care.

The real art has always been outside of the industry though, and that won't change in the AI age.

What plug?

Cloudflare.

So you object to its current implementation, not to the principle itself

Correct. The greater principle is freedom. Copyright is supposed to be a temporary trade of limitation of freedom in exchange for the progress of art.

Isn't that up to the individual to decide?

An individual can decide to do or be whatever they want, the entitlement aspect comes into play when we talk about what others are obligated to do in support of that.

Contrived example: As an recording artist, you're probably not going to make money selling CDs because people will copy them. We can say the artist is entitled to do this and make CD burners illegal, and now I lose the ability to back up any type of files using this technology, which reduces my freedom for things not related to copying music CDs. I don't think an artist selling CDs is worth this loss of freedom; I support myself working a 9 to 5 job-doing something other than selling easily copyable CDs, and this is something the artist can do as well.

can't creators decide who gets access to their creations?

If it's on their physical property.

Is it not inherently theirs?

No. For example, a creator of a song does not own my hard drive.

What's the difference with e.g. a piece of bread?

Operating system calls used in copying data locally and sending/receiving network data locally/remotely fail on pieces of bread, but don't on a series of bits that when given to an .mp3 player make sound.

So it's legal to steal stuff that you were never going to buy anyway?

Saying somethng is stealing X is a false premise if the owner is not deprived of X. Saying X is depriving Y of future profits is false unless you know for a fact that X was going buy anything from Y.