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Comment Re:Meanwhile in Ipad land (Score 2) 28

Being a limited consumer, not creator product is a feature, not a bug as far as Apple is concerned.
If you made iPad sufficiently attractive that it could replace the Mac which Apple thinks you should also own, that would be a bad thing for the fruit company. Similarly, Macs are denied foldover screens, touch screens and tablet modes to prevent you from getting the idea that you don't need an iPad too.
Apple may be the only company that could sustainably support that arrogance.

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 32

Doesn't matter what Musk fanboys who love his current dementedness think or not.
SpaceX is currently, capably managed by COO Gwynne Shotwell -but due to a series of brilliant decisions Musk made some time ago is frankly, clearly so far ahead of every other old space, new space and national space programs it's not even debatable.
I don't understand what exactly people who are mad that SpaceX essentially has a near monopoly on cost-effective space flight think or want. SpaceX got there by taking huge risks, mostly with it's own investors money (NASA never paid SpaceX a dime to develop landing/reuse) creating "launch as a service" when everybody else just wanted to sell "buy our throwaway rocket and launch combo from us". International space industry is full of lazy, greedy rent-seeking behemoths like Boeing or bureaucratically paralyzed govt programs and SpaceX is a breath of fresh air -no matter how much we may or may not hate the asshole Elon.

Comment Re:Multiple sources [Re:What?] (Score 1) 32

I predict the much more capable and economical Starship will be landing it's Super Heavy 1st stage booster long before New Glenn does. It already did the controlled descent into the Gulf on Flight 4, just have to get the chopsticks to grab it on a pad landing -which is going to be extremely hairy.
New Glenn is supposed to be able to do a 1st stage landing on six hydraulic legs which ought to be only slightly more complicated than a Falcon 9 landing but will still take some time work out. Like F9, NG will have to be refurbed and transported to a launch site before going up again, whereas the SH booster would, in theory, be landing ON it's launch pad, ready to be refueled.

Submission + - Systemd wants to expand to include a sudo replacement (fosspost.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering has posted on Mastodon about their upcoming v256 release of Systemd, which is expected to include a sudo replacement called “run0”.

The developer talks about the weaknesses of sudo, and how it has a large possible attack surface. For example, sudo supports network access, LDAP configurations, other types of plugins, and much more. But most importantly, its SUID binary provides a large attack service according to Lennart:

"I personally think that the biggest problem with sudo is the fact it’s a SUID binary though – the big attack surface, the plugins, network access and so on that come after it it just make the key problem worse, but are not in themselves the main issue with sudo. SUID processes are weird concepts: they are invoked by unprivileged code and inherit the execution context intended for and controlled by unprivileged code. By execution context I mean the myriad of properties that a process has on Linux these days, from environment variables, process scheduling properties, cgroup assignments, security contexts, file descriptors passed, and so on and so on."

He’s saying that sudo is a Unix concept from many decades ago, and a better privilege escalation system should be in place for 2024 security standards:

  "So, in my ideal world, we’d have an OS entirely without SUID. Let’s throw out the concept of SUID on the dump of UNIX’ bad ideas. An execution context for privileged code that is half under the control of unprivileged code and that needs careful manual clean-up is just not how security engineering should be done in 2024 anymore."

Submission + - New charger could double the service-life of Li-Ion batteries 1

NewtonsLaw writes: Lithium-Ion (LI) batteries are the backbone of much of our modern technology. They're in our phones, our laptops, our smartwatches and even the EVs that are increasingly appearing on our roads. One of the problems with LI technolgy however, is the very finite life of those batteries.

In the case of an EV, the battery pack represents a very significant portion of the total price you pay when buying one. Right now, the life of EV batteries is generally considered to be at least eight years, under normal use. But what if that could be doubled — simply by changing the way those batteries are charged?

This announcement by researchers in Europe indicates that the service life (ie: the number of charg/discharge cycles) of LI batteries could be as much as doubled, through the use of a pulsed current charging technology.

The standard charge method for LI cells is to deliver a constant direct current (DC) until the voltage of the cell rises to around 4.2 volts, at which time the voltage is maintained at a constant level and the charge current allowed to fall off. Once the charge current reaches a predefined minimum level, the cell is considered charged.

The new pulsed current method does not use DC but instead opts to recharge by way of intermittent pulses of current. This is not a new charging technology although it's not the norm for LI cells. Pulsed current chargers have been used on older chemistries such as nickel-cadmium in order to reduce/eliminate the formation of dendrites that would otherwise create short-circuits or significantly increase the self-discharge rate. Applying this tech to recharging LI cells seems to be a significant game-changer, if the lab results are duplicated in "the real world (TM)"

Doubling the life of your EV's battery or even your smartphone's battery is no small thing.

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