A few years ago I ported some legacy device firmware from its ancient Sun-based development environment to gcc (68k cross-compiler) and Linux. Most of the code compiled reasonably as-is. Some of it required a bit of hand-holding, like telling gcc that I really did need to store four characters one at a time rather than a single long when talking to a dual-port RAM interface.

Some of the low-level OS code did in fact require assembly. So be it.

...laura

We dont complain about educating children on copyrighted works.
In fact if we did our children would not be very knowledgeable.
Same goes for AI

Castillo de San Marcos - Built at Sea Level in 1672.

Castillo de San Marcos - Still at Sea Level in 2025.

I accept that no matter what I do at airport security it will be wrong. This is, according to some sources, by design. Keeps the bad guys on their toes. Something like that.

As a Canadian the only biometric ID I have is my passport. Despite the pressure to do so, I do not use it for domestic flights. International flights only. For U.S. domestic flights I use my drivers license. For Canadian domestic flights, my pilots license.

...laura

Have any of these people ever been to England?

...laura

Sorry to rain on your parade, but "Neutrality" wont get us out of this mess.
We are already into our carbon "Overdraft" so-to-speak.
We need a carbon negative civilisation. Net Zero is a #Propaganda term
and its an insufficient target, the targets to achieve "Net Zero" are not even in the right ballpark.

The fact that : "$80 per ton for forest projects versus $1,000 for direct air capture"
is true gives away several key facts.

1) That we will fail - on the grounds that the motivation to solve the problem is to profit rather than prevent our kids dying from respiritory failure, starvation due to failed crops or extrme weather.

2) One of these technologies ( forests ) is proven to work at scale and has done for millenia
        yet were cutting them down faster than replanting them, because its more profitable. Strengthening
        my first point

3) Microsoft see the truth, but the penny hasnt dropped yet, they still think that profiting from disaster
        is a valid stance.

The gym where I work out has Sirius XM as their background music, variously Hits 1 or The Pulse. If you told me it was all pre-recorded loops and/or AI I wouldn't doubt it.

The gym's soundtrack has nevertheless introduced me to some neat new music, duly added to my workout playlist. In that sense it's served its purpose. It's also exposed me to some truly dire excuses for music. People buy this garbage?!

The radio-friendly versions of songs are sometimes inadvertently amusing. "My give a craps are on vacation" "I'm a real tough kid I can hannnndle it"

...laura

Hubble has provided a spectacular return on its investment, both in science results and in PR (i.e. pretty pictures).

Is it worth additional refurbishing? Is it worth bringing back to Earth? Both decisions are way above my paygrade. In many ways JWST is "better", but will it capture the public's imagination the way Hubble did? I doubt it.

...laura

You also get a streamlined setup in a lot of cases. I run a small business ($200k to $400k/year revenue). I personally know how to set up servers, I like geeking out about things like ZFS and spool and RAID-Z. On the other hand for the business I write iOS apps, and that means Macs with MacOS. They have a backup system (Time Machine) that is fiddly to set up a NAS to support. I know because I’ve bought commodity Linux hardware, set up file sharing (I have tried both NFS and AFP) and attempted to get my little Linux system to be a target for Mac Time Machine, and invariably the Macs don’t see the Linux system after a while and stop backing up.

I know how to debug tech issues, and expect if I spent a few hours a week on it I would eventually figure out I have something configured wrong, or one of the 20 packages involved have a bug and a fix (or a bug I could fix). Except if I do that those are house I’m not billing. “A few hours a week” rapidly becomes much more money then paying to buy a NAS.

I’m not likely to buy any subscription stuff for my NAS, and if I outgrow my disk space and can’t put commodity drives in to expand I’ll give commodity hardware and a self install another run. Maybe it will “just work” next time. That would be cool, I like ZFS and I could set it up to resilver every month I know I would feel better about that then even a RAID-Z that isn’t set to resilver.

When you are making money paying someone else money in order to get time can cost a lot less then spending the time you need to get the service (NAS and/or backups in this case) for free.

The word “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. That isn’t a trivial operation for a lot of people. Consider someone running a photography business who buys a NAS so they can have all their work product backed up locally. Yes, in theory they could follow some canned instructions on how to install and configure TrueNAS, but it is going to take them a lot of time, and they may get derailed at any point and not manage to complete the process because the software they loaded is maybe slightly newer (or older) then the step-by=step they are using, and the UI has changed in some way _you_ might find trivial and take 15 seconds to adapt to, but the part of the brain you use to interpret UI and figure out what it means they have “wasted” on understanding color temperatures and how to adjust focus depth. Which to be fair to them is much more valuable in their day-to-dayand to be fair to you, you have a lot less need to understand color tempatures then a photographer.

So the value of all the stuff TrueNAS offers v having a user friendly UI and support channel differs depending on who you are, and what you are good at. Even my solution of “put the disk in the old NAS and format it first” isn’t exactly easy for some people. Not because they are dumb, but because they are going to add drives to it every what five years? That is a long time to remember an extra set of hoops to jump through. (It won’t be too hard if they think about it in advance, and put a sticky note on the back of the old NAS “format all new disks in old NAS first!” And on the old NAS “don’t throw out, needed to format new disks before using in new NAS!”)

Don’t discount how important “easy UI, phone support” is to some people.

Er, if I read this stuff right, you “just” need to keep the old NAS around and start each drive in it. Once formatted in a 2024 or prior Synology the not-branded disks will be allowed to do everything the branded disks are required for, even after you move it to the new Synology. So you are “stuck” keeping an old Synology around to “bless” every disk before you use it...

Nobody has any issue with legal immigrants. Nobody ever did.

It's the other kind that people have issues with. Not to mention efforts to erase the distinction in the first place.

...laura

I'm doing Android development at work and have a couple of test devices that are on Samsung's upgrade list. I was looking forward to having Android 15 hardware to play with. Then Samsung went dark so I bought a cheap Brand X Android 15 tablet from Amazon. It does what I need to do.

...laura

There is no mention of it in the release notes.

Intel support the genocide currently being committed by Israel.
No amount of rebranding can wash the blood off its hands.