Giver of skulls
Looks like it’s one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nezara_viridula (third instar, maybe fourth?).
These bugs go through five stages of moulting changing shape and size every time, so in a few weeks they may just look like a bug you’ll recognise.
Arbitration court with one person is a win for the company. Arbitration court with a thousand people is a massive loss for the company. That’s why these arbitration clauses aren’t always bad. If anything, for small cases they’re good for the people because the bulk of the legal charges are paid by the companies that write these clauses.
A bunch of large companies went through a phase where they all went for arbitration clauses, and a bunch of them moved back quickly after they found out how much more expensive paying for ten thousand arbitration cases was compared to just one single class action lawsuit. Maintaining ten thousand legally binding, individually composed outcomes can haunt them for decades if they’re unlucky.
Steam has learned the same lesson here.
This is basically what Apple’s game porting toolkit does, except that’s not meant for distributing to end users (probably because they don’t want to expose their users to the bugs inherent to such emulation layers).
Thanks to COPPA, American kids under 13 actually have very good protections online. To the point companies like Google and Valve will forego profits so they don’t have to comply.
Perhaps they should’ve asked for a sliver of a percentage rather than a large amount upfront, but based on their counter-offer they weren’t interested in percentual royalties.
Until the game is launched, Rockstar is operating on investment money and every component of the game is expressed in cost. Spending 1/85th of 11 years of revenue (or about a third on top of development cost) on songs upfront is hard to sell to executives. Especially when the rate is set by a small band like this.
Asking Beatles money for a Heaven 17 song was worth a try, but I don’t think they get to feel incredulous after their counter-offer was refused. Don’t high-ball offers you can’t afford to lose!
The offer was for $22.5k ($7.5k per member). Their counter-offer of $75k per member ($225k) was rejected and that’s why they went public. GTA V has 441 licensed songs, and there’s no way Rockstar is going to be paying $99 million dollars for just songs.
I’m not surprised they rejected a 10x counter offer, and looking for sympathy on social media is kind of silly. Pretty crazy that this band thought they had the negotiating power to get a 10x deal out of this.
I understand that. But those rules are also making people give up on contributing to the kernel. When I put code out in the open for others to take advantage of as they wish, I don’t feel like adjusting my work to other people’s standards so that they can use my code.
Valve contributed to Linux before, so the fact that they don’t have any direct upstreaming plans right now indicates that something is causing friction.
Don’t underestimate the political/administrative hurdles for contributing code to projects like Linux. I doubt the technical challenges of the platform driver are keeping Valve from mainline.
Code quality can be a reason to get your code rejected, but often the problem is also getting the right people to look at things before the next conflicts, and formatting the code in the peculiar ways the Linux project likes to format their code. There are tons of patches containing perfectly correct and bug free code abandoned in the mail archives that’ll never get merged because attempts to upstream code were abandoned after back and forths with the team. There’s a wealth of code to be discovered in the mail archives that abandoned their efforts after being told to alter their mail client not to send HTML email alone.
To me, the abandoned effort to mainline code indicates a loss of interest, and that’s rarely caused by technical challenges.
On the upside, because the code is open source, anyone is free to submit the driver again and put in the work to adjust it to the requirements of the Linux kernel project. The Linux maintainers themselves can also step up and apply the necessary corrections, that I’m sure Valve would appreciate, to mainline the code.
Writing working, finished code and changing that code to please the Linux kernel people are two very different things. I’m not surprised the Deck is still running a fork.
Apple and Google turn a blind eye to large apps. App stores need Facebook more than Facebook needs the app stores.
That said, they need some pretty complicated bypasses to not show a microphone icon every time they try to listen in.
I believe these apps will listen in on calls and maybe voice messages, but they’re not enabling the microphone 24/7.
Based on stories like these, I get the feeling there’s active hostility from the maintainers against Rust contributors. While the kernel in general has accepted Rust contributions, the maintainers of individual subsystems seem to disagree.
I don’t think the language matters. The problem is cultural, first and foremost. Had a new wave of programmers used C to expand the Linux kernel, they probably would’ve run into the same issues.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard devs complain about the DRM API, and most of my kernel panics seem to involve DRM as well (mostly Nvidia, but the Intel driver crashes too). Maybe it’s because of performance reasons, but DRM seems very hard to get right, even for already merged in-tree drivers.
If the problem does turn out to be technical in nature, maybe Linux needs to ask Microsoft for help. They don’t seem to have that many issues rewriting system components into Rust, and they have the additional challenge of remaining binary compatible with the C(++) code that came before it.
The OEM also pays for the UEFI firmware and the licenses for the HDMI patents. When it comes to essential software, which Windows is for most customers, the price is included.
There are devices that optionally come with Windows Pro, and in those cases I can see the price difference making a practical difference.
It’s a real shame. I would’ve loved running the Windows 7 or Windows XP userland on the Windows 11 kernel.
The OEMs also pay for the license for video playback patents and for UEFI firmware to be developed. Windows is just part of the formula for the vast majority of Windows compatibles.
Comparing prices between Windows computers and the Linux equivalent of the same model, the OEM license seems to come for free. The Linux versions even seem to be more expensive on average because fewer stores stock them.
The independent Windows licenses come with support and warranty directly from Microsoft, something you don’t get when you buy Windows through an OEM like most people do.
I don’t have a problem with this particular popup, but isn’t that the exact same argument people used to defend Microsoft’s ads? The OS comes with computers for free and you can turn all of those ads off as well.
I don’t really mind with KDE because they have no real income streams other than donations, but I don’t see why you’re not allowed to be annoyed by notifications like these just because you got stuff for free.
C isn’t even bad, as long as you use the minimum amount required and do a LOT of security analysis on every line you write.
The problem with C code isn’t necessarily the language, a lot of it is the culture of people who think that unlike everyone else, they can write good, secure, bug-free C code, and they can ignore the warnings. They’re just that good!
These people seem to take the mere concept of a language that enforces memory access or security features as an insult to their intelligence.
Because of this bullshit, Linux is now behind in terms of Rust take up as Windows has begun rewriting components into Rust. I wouldn’t be surprised if the ego-based in-fighting between kernel devs will lead to Windows being significantly more secure in a few years.
On Linux there have been some challenges. Lockdown mode and hibernation don’t play nice. This isn’t to do with secure boot (you can also disable lockdown mode individually) but to prevent kernel access to processes that can edit the hibernation image last-minute (to bypass SELinux, for instance, which shouldn’t be possible even as root), lockdown mode has prevented hibernation for the longest time. I don’t know if it’s been fixed yet, it’s been a while since I last checked.
Disabling secure boot makes the kernel go “whelp, looks like there’s no way to secure the boot process anyway” and will disable lockdown mode by default. If your device is free from other lockdown mode issues, this’ll seem to turn secure boot into a lockdown mode toggle, even though it’s just a side effect.
You don’t. There’s no replacement when your secure boot configuration is buggy or turned off.
Not everyone cares that someone could alter their bootloader and extract their encryption keys. Others have laptops from shitty companies with known-broken secure boot implementations. If your secure boot can be bypassed because your laptop manufacturer imported “test key do not trust” as their root of trust, there’s nothing you can do to replace secure boot, except for maybe reflashing the firmware to something like Coreboot.
In theory one could write a bootloader that uses something like SGX or some other super privileged system to do hardware attestation before exchanging encryption keys with a server, but I don’t know of anything like that on a bootloader level. Before Intel dropped SGX (SGX being broken completely by side channel attacks like meltdown and spectre), getting Intel to sign your SGX blob was difficult and expensive , so that would bar relatively simple criminals from bypassing your boot configuration, but it’d cost a pretty penny.
While that works pretty well, I find it strange how little people use the ability to tap an NFC tag to instantly connect. Getting the camera pointed at a code only takes a second but tapping a sticker is even quicker.
I guess most people don’t know about that feature.