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Comment Re:The Ban Wasn't in the Packets (Score 2) 107

Riot isn't identifying a Ryzen by staring at TCP packets. Vanguard runs on the PC, where it can collect hardware information or request TPM attestation and send the result to Riot. CPUID identifies a processor model, not an individual chip; a CPU-bound firmware TPM is a more plausible explanation for a ban following a used CPU.

TPM wouldn't work because you'd have to transplant it from one motherboard to another. The CPUID instruction gives a lot of information (including serial number) if you ask it the right way. It's how the CPU-Z application gets all that information - there's tons of information available via CPUID on a modern processor depending on what you load EAX/EBX can call it.

Comment Re:Roms? (Score 1) 24

How will you get the ROM once everything is "digital"?

Hack the PS5.

There's a new jailbreak on PS5 that handles basically up to firmware 15.5. Use it to get access to the PS5 filesystem and grab your files from there.

I'm sure there will be other ways that probably involve simulating the PS5 and downloading the files directly.

Comment Longevity and specificity? (Score 2) 24

The fact that this approach is catalytic rather than requiring a binding agent seems positive in terms of longevity and not being directly depleted by repeat exposure; but I'd be curious how durable the material is under real-world conditions(clothing that gets hard wear tends to get hard washes) and also how specific it is. 'Organophosphate' means something moderately specific in the context of chemical warfare; but a lot of fairly prosaic compounds are, technically, 'organophosphates'(like DNA and RNA when held together by phosphodiester bonds); and this would be considerably less helpful in practice if it is busy chewing up the genomes of random soil bacteria; and markedly less helpful in practice if there's a "do not perturb the nanites in your clothing if you want them to not migrate into your cells and start mitigating the harmful effects of your DNA" user notice on the treated article.

Comment Re:I can believe both things (Score 2) 80

I'm not worried about the idea of personalized pricing. It just doesn't seem feasible. Implementation hurdles are abundant, the likelihood of complaints in-store is very high, and for not that much benefit.

Personalized pricing in store will be a nightmare for Walmart. Think of several situations that are extremely common. Like what if two people are looking at an item? When I shop at Walmart, there are inevitably other people around and they're looking at the same stuff I'm looking at. The price tag can only show one price - so whose price is it going to show?

The second problem is shoppers in general. There are people who take time to shop - they can take an hour or more shopping for groceries and stuff. You're going to have to remember what price you shown someone so when they check out you use the "right" price. Also, if you've done grocery shopping, you inevitably run into people who complain about every price as it's rung up. Imagine the fun to be had if the price changes and they're constantly checking to make sure the register shows the correct price.

And if you're going to do dynamic pricing, people are going to snap photos of the price tag and make sure they're being charged what the tag says. It's going to clog up the checkout lines because people are going to verify every price rings in properly. This just makes the lines way longer and way slower, and likely having to have more cashiers on checkout will negate any extra profits to be made if checking out takes way longer as everyone argues prices.

And yes, people will argue about things like 10 cents or less.

Comment Good work on the easy part! (Score 5, Interesting) 31

This doesn't seem like a lie, a NIC is in a pretty good position to knock something off the network if it feels like it and the 'bluefield' devices have enough punch onboard to run some rules regarding whether or not to do that; but it seems like a wild exaggeration of how helpful it actually is.

If you actually have a set of rules that detect your bot being wicked it will presumably save you some CPU time to run them on the NIC rather than having the host CPU watching the traffic; but the hard part is the set of rules that detect your bot being wicked.

This is basically the equivalent of adding a firewall and claiming that you've solved network security. Yeah, the firewall is pretty well placed to block malicious traffic; defining 'malicious traffic' is left as an exercise for the reader.

Comment Re:haptics history (Score 4, Informative) 44

Taction probably is a troll, but ever since Apple sued Samsung for round corners design patent infringement, I figure that made Apple a patent troll too, and every patent fight they lose is karma. I'm on Taction's side for that reason alone.

And let the ignorance of the rounded corners patent show.

The rounded corners patent was a design patent. The Taction patent is a utility patent. If you don't know the difference, well, a utility patent is on something the thing does. A design patent is on something it looks like.

They are patents in that everything is AND - you must have something AND something AND something AND something ... If you lack one of those things, you are much more likely to win a patent lawsuit.

With that in mind, the Apple patent is simple - rounded corners, a tray with icons and a app selector that scrolls left and right. Samsung had that to a T. They literally copied the UI. Why didn't Apple go after Google? Because Google didn't. They had rounded corners, an app drawer at the bottom, BUT, not an app selector - because Android had widgets you could put up.on the screen. They had a separate app drawer that showed all the apps. Those two differences meant "rounded corners" patent wasn't valid on Android in general.

It's just like how the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit was much more than hot coffee and once you understand that, the lawsuit made much more sense. (McDonald's purposely sold overly hot coffee to save money on coffee grounds as it let them extract more coffee from them. They were told time and time again it was too hot to serve but they persisted. When it happened, the victim asked for a mere $30,000 for medical bills. But that was rejected, despite the fact that McDonald's paid out medical expenses for previous occurrences. And while she won millions, it was reduced on appeal to under a million dollars).

It's much more than rounded corners. It's literally Samsung redesigning the UI to match the iPhone in functionality. When Samsung lost, they basically added widgets to the screen which was enough to work around the patent. Eventually they decided to make TouchWiz their own.

Comment Re:Waste of a keyboard key... (Score 2) 68

Lots of keyboards ditched more useful keys to fit a copilot key,

Actually, the key the Copilot key took over was the Context Menu button on most keyboards. If you pushed it, you got the equivalent of the right-click menu. Unlike the Windows key, it likely never got much use, so it remained a mostly useless key.

It's so useless many keyboards chose to omit the context key or put other keys there. Some replaced it with another Windows key, others used custom function keys.

Comment Timing? (Score 2) 65

Support for Office 2016 and 2019 ends October 14th of this year; I assume that the feature is dropping now; rather than either 20 years ago as part of ECMA-376 and eventually in a live product for either Office 2010 or 2013, or never if they didn't want to do that, in order to draw a hard line under the utility of those?

It otherwise seems like a kind of weird time to do it. In principle what a 'cell' is has never really had an obvious mandatory scale: it has essentially always been relevant that a 'cell' existed in relation to other cells, so that something like an array could be a row; but it has also long been allowed and encouraged to do things like substring operations that acknowledge that cell contents are 'larger' objects that contain smaller ones; and are not automatically spilled out for that reason alone. Not clear that the pragmatic use case for spreadsheets would ever have supported some sort of 'any data type that implies it can be decomposed into elements shall be' rule, strings getting broken up into substrings and so on; but it's also not clear that the pragmatic use case is going to be much clarified by a single cell being n levels deep of lists and arrays of lists and arrays being a fully supported thing rather than something you hack on by shoving JSON into text cells or whatever.

It definitely seems like asking for confusion when some, but only some, "excel spreadsheets" have cells that are arrays, potentially of arrays, while others have rows of cells with contents that, at least formally, are not acknowledged as arrays.

Comment Re:Nintendo Digitech 2.0 (Score 1) 119

Yeah, I know what you mean. I just did it the easy way - dropped out of university, eventually move to Montreal where it was almost *difficult* to be a programmer and not end up at a game studio. Thankfully the industry grew in Toronto as well and I was able to move back after some lovely years there.

Comment Re:My advice (Score 4, Interesting) 129

Their reasoning sounds plausible only if read from a "business weasel" perspective. If there's a market for RPis with more lower quality RAM, nobody is "undercutting" RPF; they're selling the products they want to, at the price they want to, and choosing not to offer big/slow/cheap OEM RAM configurations. And even if someone could undercut them on the exact same components - So what??? RPF may be a non-profit, but I am not!

The problem isn't resellers undercutting RPi. It's someone buying a 1GB RPi, doing the mod with 8GB of poor quality RAM, then selling it as an 8GB RPi at a modest discount.

The problem is that you buy the board and because the RAM is bad, you perform a return and find out it was a counterfeit RPi board that doesn't work for you.

Despite the AI issue, you can find RAM. Often poor quality recycled RAM with errors are stupidly cheap (and used in many products as-is). The board can boot with bad RAM, but run stable it might not, and you'd be more likely to blame RPi than on the reseller you bought the dodgy unit from

The fact that RPi took this long to do it would mean they're actually seeing a bunch of returns with the RAM swapped out.

It could also be that people are buying the 8GB units, swapping them with 1GB units and selling them as fake 8GB units, like those $20 "1TB" USB sticks you can find easily on Amazon.

Changing the RAM on an RPi isn't a trivial procedure - I believe it's PoP RAM so it's not something a hobbyist would easily do without a lot of specialized equipment and experience in being able to separate PoP RAM from the base CPU and reballing and such. So hobbyist wise, they aren't likely to be ones affected since few would have the expertise or equipment. But those trying to sell counterfeits do.

Comment Re:oh good (Score 1) 74

That's the sort of curious thing about this announcement: at least in theory(I assume things are uglier in practice) the X1 parts that they shipped for windows-on-ARM/Copilot PCs already use UEFI/ACPI in line with what MS wants for booting Windows.

That obviously doesn't mean that there's a working GPU driver; or that naive power management doesn't cause the system to run at 90% of maximum power and hammer the battery flat; but the theory was that the last gen was already doing the "big kid ARM that has embraced PC standards" thing; very similar to the 'standards base' that ARM encourages ARM server part vendors to use.

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