Ever had spaghetti ice cream with strawberry sauce and grazed white chocolate as “parmesan”

That’s how I got a free netbook. The netbook had 32GB flash with windows and office occupying 27+GB. Then windows wanted to do an update - with an 8+GB file. Spot the problem. And windows can get quite annoying with updates. As the netbook could not be expanded, and attempts to redirect the update to a USB stick did not work, a newer netbook was bought, and I got the old one. Linux plus libreoffice plus a bunch of extras happily sat in 4GB…

A friend of ours was approaching her 40th birthday. But she only admitted to having a “round” birthday, and even forbade her kids to talk about mommys age, even though we made a big production to learn her age with trick questions and all. And then we told her that if she keeps mum about her age, we’ll just guesstimate it.

That’s how she got sent loads of cards for her 50th birthday. She was a bit pissed when we arrived for the party. And then we handed her the real cards for her 40th.

I was about to post it. Can you imagine, there is actually a DVD with that film - and a load of extras from the creators.

Hacking. Each and every time it is part of a movie or TV series.

Yes, there are differences in certain x86 command sets. But they actually have a market. RISC-V is just a niche, and splintering in a small niche is making the support situation worse.

And it does not concern you that this RVA profile is version 23? Which means there are a number of CPUs based on lower versions, too, as they don’t just update on a whim? And they are incompatible, with version 23 because they lack instructions?

So a compiler would have to support at least a certain number of those profiles (usually, parts in the embedded world are supported for 10+ years!), and be capable of supporting the one or other non-RVA extension, too, to satisfy customer needs.

That is exactly what I meant with “too many standards”.

Several differing extensions of the RISC-V core machine instructions, for example. A pain in the rear for any compiler builder.

I’ll wait and see. RISC-V is a nice idea, but there are way too many different “standards” to make it a viable ecosystem.

I’m not really into the stock market, but I would not buy Boeing at the moment.

There is always the issue of “x applies” and “x is enforcable”. Think of Signal or Telegram here.

The moved their jurisdiction to the Netherlands? In the EU? Wow. Now the GDPR can be used to really kick their butts.

While it is not shape-shifting, I’ve experienced a touch screen where you actually could “feel bumps”. Depending on your fingers position, it vibrates in a way that makes you “feel” a bump or ridge. It was amazing.

Like entering a PIN: You close your eyes and put a finger on the screen. The code centers a numeric keyboard at this position so you are on the “5”. You can move your fingers up, and you can feel a “ridge” when moving to the “2” field. You move left and feel a ridge when moving to the “1” field. If you move back to the “5”, you can feel the “bump”, and it differs from the feel of the “ridge”. Once you are on the right field, you lift your finger and bring it down again to select this number. If you leave it off a bit longer, it just re-centers the keypad to the “5” position.

Of course this only works with one finger, but it is absolutely amazing how convincing this is, especially if you close your eyes.

Absolutely. And all the tooling you need is a simple nail clipper. Which you can usually get at the duty free, too.

It’s there, it’s simple, it’s just applied science.

You do not need any of this. You should know some chemistry and physics, but you can get everything you need to make a bang.

There is no need to pack a bomb for a flight. Just buy the parts and ingredients you need to build one in the duty-free shop after the TSA security theater.

That is the culinary answer for the question.

Good. I happen to know companies that will have to kick out some rather nice machines that happen to be just under spec for Win11. Those machines are still top for running Linux.

That is a long shot at best. Games are hungry for power and resources, and adding an emulation layer, even a transpilation system between x86 code and ARM processor will not actually improve the situation.

I’ve seen worse. A group at the university was using the IBM mainframe for basically everything from their terminals. To reduce load on the mainframe, the university spent a load of money to buy a cluster of workstations with crazy specs and software, each one more expensive than a big new car back then.

I visited them shortly after they got those killer machines. For comparison: in our university department, we had green serial terminals connected to an old VAX 11/780. They had those shiny new workstations with GUI on high-resolution (for that time) color monitors. My friend there logged in - and his autostart just opened two terminal sessions on the IBM mainframe, where he did all his work just like before. He was happy that he had the terminals in a windowed environment, though, so he could easily open and handle several sessions on the machine at the same time.