That would be Locarno, Switzerland, whose transport agency is known as Ferrovie Autolinee Regionali Ticinesi.

I've run Termux for quite a while on my Androids, but this appears to be a full Linux in a VM, rather than a user-mode shell running directly on Android. Too bad it didn't make it to the 7a.

I still have an official retail copy of pre-RHEL Red Hat Linux (5.1). I wonder where they would be today if nobody had bought copies back in the day? I know that they lost me the day they stopped shipping retail boxes.

Don't throw around the "freeloader" crap. I'd be happy to be able to buy a retail box again. I'd not be happy to dick around with license servers and activation schemes and phoning home and "Mother, may I?" whenever I boot my system.

This is it, or more precisely, the centralized platforms that have defined it. Got a niche subject you want to discuss and there isn't a place for it? Web 2.0 was great - it's a lot easier to create /r/$TOPIC than it is to set up and run your own forum for the subject. Unfortunately, once you're on someone else's platform, you're at someone else's mercy, as our recent Twitter and Reddit dramas have shown us.

It looks like the pendulum is swinging the other way now. Aside from federated systems, there are quite a few of the old forums that never went away, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see their resurgence.

Search is also pretty far into the enshittification cycle. Lately, I've noticed that both Google and DDG cheerfully ignore the minus operator. No more adding "-ebay -pinterest -tumblr" to clean up your search results! We can't let those pesky users have any control, can we?

Could Twitter choose to start printing out the records Congressional Republicans are likely to demand, filing them away in a storage facility, and then deleting the electronic versions? The Twitter employees who did the printing could verify that these are accurate copies of the originals. Too bad for the interns who would have to dig through literal tons of paper to try to find whatever smoking gun Republicans think is there.

You're not the only one to notice how smoking and cooling fans are a bad mix. Back before the pandemic, my lifetime-smoker sister came to me thinking that her laptop had a virus on it. We fire it up, and the fan is sounding like a jet taking off. I went through it and found no trace of malware. At this point, I opened it up, and found it was just choked with tobacco fuzz. After cleaning that out, the laptop ran a lot better, for some reason.

I'm just glad she didn't run a heavy-duty gaming rig in a high-airflow case. *gaaaack*

Aside from the already-mentioned exposed die, this could have been back in the era when CPUs were often in ceramic packages. In the 386 era, that wouldn't be as much of an issue (no need for a cooler), but ZIF sockets were like hen's teeth. Later on, you might have a ZIF socket for your K6, but if you botched the cooler installation, you could once again crack it. I'm always worried, even with today's metal-packaged monsters, but have managed to avoid breaking a CPU or socket.

Exposed dies seem to be more of a laptop thing, and something you need to be aware of if you change the thermal compound. Otherwise, I've heard of it being done by overclockers decapping their CPUs. No thanks, that's a lot of trouble and a lot of risk.

There's nothing quite like the light show you get from spilling your soft drink onto a vacuum-tube audio amplifier. Did that one when I was a wee lad and such amplifiers were the norm.

Not that it really matters anymore, but T-Mobile's (US) LG phones had unlocked bootloaders. The catch is, though, that running a custom ROM became such a hassle in general, and the Stylo 5's Android skin good enough, that I've never bothered.

Sucks that I won't see a followup to the Stylo 5, which has been rock solid. They always seemed to offer a bit more for the buck than Samsung.

Was ventilator usage tested in double blind studies for COVID-19? How about lockdowns? Or cloth masks? Or those Chinese street fire-trucks that atomize bleach or something. HCQ is a lightening rod in a field of unknowns because Orange Man said something about it. The reality is very little is truly understood about COVID-19.

Are you kidding? This is the SJW's "final solution". Minitruth.

To be fair to PulseAudio, ALSA hasn't gone away at all; it is just one of many backends available to PulseAudio. It also has some nice capabilities - as long as I enable it on the receiving machines, I can stream audio to them over the network. I'm already finding this handy - I can have a Raspberry Pi upstairs with an SDR stick receiving radio transmissions and sending the audio downstairs to my desktop. In spite of its rocky start, I actually like PulseAudio now.

As an init system, I'm OK with systemd - unit files are a much cleaner solution than init scripts, and they work the same across distros, and I'd take systemd over Solaris SMF any day.

That being said, this new home directory thing is a complete non-starter for me. I don't carry $HOME around on a USB stick, and won't do so, ever. I don't want the delay of decrypting $HOME every time I log in, and then there's the problem (already pointed out) of what happens if the machine dies during the process. This is a recipe for data loss, plain and simple.

This proposed new home directory scheme sounds like it could be easily weaponized into ransomware, perhaps even by vendors themselves.

"Hello $USER. We see you haven't kept your subscription paid up. Until you do, and fork over a $1000 late fee on top of that, we've encrypted your home directory with our own key. Thank you for being a loyal customer of $VENDOR."

Seriously, hands off my home directory!

X86 has led to vulnerabilities. If this chip is immune to branch prediction exploits (like Meltdown and Spectre), I'll be the first in line.

I hope that Ix has made his getaway by now, since it might be too late otherwise.