The main thing rubbing me wrong is forcing to support the parents - parents decide to have a child, so they do owe the child support during its live. The child didn’t have a choice in this, and therefore owes the parents nothing. Now if the parents were decent people there’s a high chance the kids want to help out because of that - and that’s a perfectly good thing to do. But there should not be a forced obligation by society.

I think only one is currently still working in the company - but they do own it via a bunch of “Stiftungen”. IIRC that construct was selected back then to make sure that spoiled brats can’t fuck it up eventually.

You’re joking, but quite possibly he’d not even want to buy the one.

The owner family is very reclusive after a kidnapping in the 70s - but we know at least that the founders were living relatively frugal.

Ownership of Aldi is by a handful of “stiftungen” - and one of the more recent judicial squabbles in the family were of one side accusing the other trying to pull more money out of Aldi than necessary to live a non frugal livestyle.

Don’t get me wrong - they’re billonaires, though probably quite limited liquid assets. But based on their behaviour they have a good chance to survive the revolution.

One exception nowadays: Business notebooks - and that’s only because the rest of the notebook market went to shit. If you want a somewhat compact notebook with more than 64GB of RAM, decent CPU performance and good battery life Apple currently is the only one offering something.

At least she didn’t mix it up with a real gun, like that german police officer.

Helsinki is getting out of the “burning stuff to make electricity” business. It used to have coal power plants - last ones closed down in 2023 and 2024. There are some dedicated plants for district heating still, but also there’s the trend to move away from burning stuff.

The problem is - is it just a mass storage device? Or is it maybe also a USB keyboard that will try to enter some payload? Or maybe it even contains a radio, and can communicate with an attacker nearby?

You can’t tell from the outside which protocols a USB device implements.

You can fit all of that functionality into the space of a USB-A plug - so if it is a thumbdrive you have way more space to work with than you ever need.

At minimum restrict your computer to only loading mass storage drivers - but as you quite likely habe USB input devices it is just a lot easier to investigate such a device on something like a raspberry pi.

The space used by the smallest solar charger I’ve seen on Amazon seems to be similar to 6 or more batteries in the format the N900 was taking - so if you look at space, slow charging from solar charger, and reliance on sun conditions taking individual batteries seems to be the better option for a few days hike. It’s also easier to stow individual batteries to wherever you still have space left.

With my N900 I used to travel with 6 to 10 charged batteries to have a few days of runtime. Things got better now with powerbanks - but for something like hiking just carrying a few spares would still be smaller and lighter.

There was the 386DX and significantly cheaper SX - first was full 32 bit, second just 32bit instruction set with smaller external busses.

Then you could add the math coprocessor. And of course RAM and disks were expensive. 16MB RAM was way above normal for that time.

About 20 years ago I made a script that converts pictures to HTML tables. Back then RAM was a severe problem for this, and even for more powerful hardware browsers tended to just crash on larger pictures.

I checked it again a few years later, and things looked way better. I guess using CSS it’d be rather trivial nowadays to do the same with a short video by just cycling through showing/hiding tables of each frame.

Paid and FOSS are not mutually exclusive. You can always build packages yourself if you don’t want to pay. A well executed implementation might allow some projects to drop or reduce their play store efforts.

Ukraine took hundreds of prisoners so far, and a fair share of that probably are conscripts. That already is a bit of a mess he’ll have to solve.

the “whatever that might be” in that context meant “the machine dependent format could be anything, and it wouldn’t matter for B”

I did not sign with them after I had some issues with the contract provided, and the resulting interactions with my future manager. I’d say at least for someone from Europe the company culture is less than ideal from that encounter.

AMD keeps some older generations in production as their budget options - and as they had excellent CPUs for multiple generations now you also get pretty good computers out of that. Even better - with some planning you’ll be able to upgrade to another CPU later when checking chipset lifecycle.

AMD has established by now that they deliver what they promise - and intel couldn’t compete with them for a few generations over pretty much the complete product line - so they can afford now to have the bleeding edge hardware at higher prices. It’s still far away from what intel was charging when they were dominant 10 years ago - and if you need that performance for work well worth the money. For most private systems I’d always recommend getting last gen, though.

No OS updates, unless promised at release. Some security updates, though. They’re GPL violators, and don’t release kernel sources, which makes 3rd party OS images harder.

Devices are generally easily repairable,they sell spares, and their support also sends you parts during warranty period if you ask - I just received a new battery for my titan slim.

This doesn’t have anything to do with user control - modern windows versions need drivers to be WHQL signed to get that kind of access. Alternatively you’ll need to enable developer mode on your system, and install your own developer certificate into its keyring for running own code, which has its own drawbacks.

Crowdstrike is implemented as a device driver - but as there is no device Microsoft could’ve argued that this is abusing the APIs, and refused the WHQL certification. Microsofts own security solution (Defender) also is implemented as a device driver, though, and that’s what the EU ruling is about: Microsoft needs to provide the same access they’re using in their own products to competitors. Which is a good thing - but if Microsoft didn’t have Defender, or they’d have done it without that type of access it’d have been fully legal for them to deny the certification for Crowdstrike.

Both MacOS and Linux have the ability to run the type of thing that requires those privileges on Windows in an unprivileged process - and on newer Linux versions Crowdstrike is using that (older versions got broken by them the same way they now broke Windows). So Microsoft now trying to blame the EU can be seen as an attempt to keep people from questioning why Microsoft didn’t implement a low privilege API as well, which would’ve prevented this whole mess.

I have a 96 core one. While it’ll be fine as a desktop for compiling I’d stick with an AMD system.

The devkit has 6 memory channels, and you’ll want to fill them all - there’s a surprisingly high performance penalty if you don’t. Even then, compiling a code base which could be spread over hundreds of cores is still significantly slower on the ampere compared to my old 3970x.

One thing I find very amusing about this is that AMD used to have a reputation for pulling too much power and running hot for years (before zen and bulldozer, when they had otherwise competetive CPUs). And now intel has been struggling with this for years - while AMD increases performance and power efficiency with each generation.