chithanh

Really? It's one thing to understand that whatever pathogen you were infected with is (also) foodborne. But tracking the infection to something particular which you ate is generally quite hard, and it is even harder to track accidental contamination.

And many people do not understand where actual danger comes from. For example it is a really bad idea to rinse raw chicken meat. Yet this practice is still widespread.

https://www.cdc.gov/food-safety/communication-resources/wash...

> installing Windows will still make your Linux system unbootable until you fix it with a rescue disk

This is no longer true. On UEFI systems the only thing you have to do normally is fix the boot order. In fact installing Linux first and Windows second tends to be the better dual-boot strategy nowadays.

Fixing the boot order can be done from UEFI setup, and even from Windows command line

  bcdedit /enum firmware
  bcdedit /set {fwbootmgr} displayorder {yourlinuxuuid} /addfirst

(Put single quotes around {} if you use PowerShell instead of CMD.exe)

> If you’re not in the US and not a US citizen, then I have no idea what laws apply to you or how they are interpreted.

I live in the EU, where consumers are authorized by Directive 2009/24/EC to reproduce and translate computer programs on other systems in order to achieve interoperability.

But even in the US there is the Sony v. Connectix precedent that creation of interoperable products is compliant with the DMCA and the anti-circumvention provisions do not apply to them.

> I don't understand how you consider the Nintendo Switch to be abandonware.

I don't? My comment was on the primary use of emulation.

And Nintendo Switch is not the predominant console that is emulated. In fact Switch emulation runs only on relatively modern systems, not on Android and not on the myriad of cheap emulation hardware that is sold on AliExpress.

More precisely, the unstable parts of the systems were ejected, leaving only the (relatively) stable parts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkwood_gap

> EMULATORS ARE PRIMARILY USED FOR PIRACY.

Even if that is true (and I guess for that you'd have to classify downloading abandonware as piracy): Valve founder Gabe Newell famously said that piracy is a "service issue".

So if you give emulator users the option of playing or buying legitimate copies without jumping through hoops, then piracy rates will drop.

> Qualcomm itself also wouldn't be able to emulate or sell x86 without the cross-licensing agreement

As far as I am aware, the AMD-Intel cross licensing agreement allows to continue to sell existing products after termination, just not bring new ones to market. And Qualcomm would of course continue to sell Intel's products, just possibly not develop new ones.

If Qualcomm buys Intel, they will have the patents that are needed to emulate modern x86 instructions like AVX. Or are you aware of any patents that AMD owns or claims to own on emulating x86?

> I have to ask as a sanity check - am I talking to a human or a bot?

Human. I guess I have to thank you for not writing "ignore previous instructions" or similar.

Could also go the other way. Some of you may be old enough to remember the 1993 fire in the Sumitomo epoxy resin factory. Following that, DRAM chips became drastically more expensive (prices increased from $30 to $80 per megabyte) for much longer than the supply disruptions lasted, and interestingly also much longer than other ICs which saw only moderate price increases.

Arguably, the problem of underrepresentation became already unsustainable during Affirmative Action by the classification of African immigrants as black. Because the latter displace African-Americans who do worse in test scores than Africans.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2007/may/29/internatio...

In the scenario that I describe, Qualcomm is disinterested in x86, it just wants maximum profit off the purchase. Very much like Oracle basically shitcanned all of Sun Microsystems' products and squeezed Sun customers hard.

Keep in mind that the outlook for Intel products is not that rosy both short- and mid-term. They will certainly not go back to commanding historic margins in the datacenter. Also they lost trust from both institutional and private customers in how they handled the Raptor Lake voltage problem. Whether these customers come back anytime soon is doubtful.

Also on the manufacturing side, Intel foundries are bleeding money, 20A is cancelled, and 18A is yet unproven. So making back the purchase price off the usual business would likely take a looong time.

Yes, it is possible that Intel's patents on their instruction sets and on emulating them are all invalid, but Qualcomm is the kind of litigious company that seems determined to find out. (Their patents are also the presumed reason why Qualcomm is basically the last major vendor to offer AV1 hardware decode in their processors)

It is also possible that the EU blocks the merger but in the current political climate, the EU has become something of a vassal of the US. same politicians who pressure for replacement of Lina Khan will also exert pressure on the EU.

> MediaTek, Samsung, and Rockchip already make consumer ARM laptops

Yes, but them not being able to economically emulate newer x86 instructions would be a major sales point for Qualcomm Snapdragon. They could basically capture all the customers which are dependent on x86 software.

> Qualcomm's biggest advantage in the PC space was their exclusivity agreement with Microsoft for Windows on ARM but that is already dying at the end of the year

I think you got that backwards. The exclusivity was the precondition for Qualcomm to become interested in the Windows on ARM. Otherwise they would not even have bothered to release products specifically for that tiny market. It is Microsoft who desperately needs to become independent from x86.

> Qualcomm really did dump billions into Intel just to stop making their processors and it was allowed, how is Qualcomm going to get their money back at all let alone better than squeezing Intel normally without first killing its main source of revenue?

Qualcomm will continue to sell x86 processors, just like Oracle continued to sell SPARC processors, for a while. But they would wind down the x86 business and try to capture locked-in x86 customers onto (high-margin) Snapdragons, and they have all the ingredients to make this happen. And they will have the patents both on the design and manufacturing side to at least cause serious trouble for competitors.

China is busy replacing imported CPUs with domestically produced ones on a massive scale. Qualcomm's China business is at risk of collapse anyway. I don't think the Chinese will be interested nor able to buy Intel and AMD x86 chips for much longer either. My guess is that Qualcomm can placate them by promising to leave Zhaoxin alone (legally binding of course).

UK CMA folded extremely quickly after FTC lost their lawsuit. Microsoft had already communicated that they would withdraw Activision Blizzard products from the UK in case the deal were continued to be blocked.

The EU is a bit of a question mark, but blocking the FTC approved merger of two US companies could be seen as too costly politically.

In the scenario that I am envisioning, Qualcomm will be indifferent to Intel products, the only focus being to extract the maximum money out of their purchase. Oracle did the same, and nearly all Sun products are now dead or a shadow of their former selves. Plus Oracle narrowly missed the Jackpot in Oracle v. Google.

> Doubly so after already receiving over a billion in antitrust fines in 2009 for simply being "unfair" about the agreement, not even outright removing it.

Intel continued their unfair business practices, particularly in their compiler. If you wonder why Intel CPUs didn't move up from declaring CPUID Family 6 until now, that is why. More recently there was the MKL scandal. No antitrust authority was interested in either.

> Not to mention the cross-licensing deal between Intel and AMD also includes x86 patents from both sides anyways

The AMD-Intel cross-licensing agreement will need to be renewed when Qualcomm buys Intel, because it has a termination clause in case of ownership change. The companies can continue to sell existing products, but new products would need a new patent deal.

But Qualcomm won't be interested if they can just sell their Snapdragon CPUs to former x86 customers, who have no other choice because of Intel's patents on emulating the newer x86 instructions.

MacBooks certainly have volume, but Wine/Proton on macOS is facing serious technical challenges which they only started to address (Wine 9.0 with WoW64 was only released in January). Chromebooks are much lower hanging fruit.

You would need the FTC to intervene to stop the acquisition. And currently there is a massive lobbying push by US technology companies to replace Lina Khan with someone who is more merger friendly.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-06/kamala-ha... (non-paywall archive link: https://archive.md/PhHhU )

Yes, you could emulate an x86-64 CPU with SSE2 (aka x86-64-v1), but that is no longer sufficient for lots of modern x86 code. Windows 11 wants SSE4.2 at least or else it won't even boot.

As Arstechnica wrote, Intel specifically warned that they hold patents on emulating the more recent instruction sets.

But unlike ARM Chromebooks, an ARM Steam Deck does not exist today, and will not exist until at least November 2025 per Valve statements.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-09/new-steam... (archived link w/o paywall: https://archive.md/VWvsW )

You don't need Proton for that, and the article talks about Valve testing proton-arm64.

Intel certainly would not.

Qualcomm as the new owner of Intel, trying to extract maximum profit out of their IP, possibly. Think of when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems.

It seems pretty clear to me that the main target of this is ARM Chromebooks, at least for now. As these are the only products currently shipping in any relevant numbers where this makes sense.

After buying Intel, Qualcomm could sink x86 by simply not renewing the cross-licensing agreement with AMD.

With Intel's patents on emulating x86 on other CPU architectures, Qualcomm could then ensure that going forward, the only economically viable way of running x86 code is on Snapdragon CPUs.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel...

I don't think that is an issue. Yes, companies which insist on RTO have to pay more, but as extra compensation in order to make up for the difference in time and money spent commuting.

But I'd argue what could be outsourced profitably has been outsourced already. And countries which welcome digital nomads who "work from home" while visiting on tourist visas are getting fewer also. In fact the Thai Government launched DTV which can be seen as precursor to measure and later capture (read: tax) some of the benefits of that for themselves.

> things changed since February 2020

Certainly nobody will blame managers for real estate decisions which were made prior to 2020. But a large number of companies revised expectations that workers would return to office as late as Q1 2023 and some even later.

https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/5/15/23721410/return-to-...

> sunk costs do not justify throwing more good money after bad

Sure. In a rational world, the office space costs are sunk and everybody just moves on. But seeing that RTO just decreases competitiveness for hiring without hard benefits to show for, this indicates that the decisions are not rational. The sunk cost fallacy is easy to fall for, and that is even before considering how business leadership roles attract narcissists who have a hard time taking blame for anything.

It is not bullshit, though it does not apply universally either. In many cases it may just be managers who need to justify having spent all that money on their office spaces.

That being said:

Deflating a real estate bubble is painful, just ask China. By artificially keeping up demand for office spaces through unnecessary RTO, banks and governments avoid having to go through that, at least for the time being.

And yes, with (partially government-guaranteed) mortgage-backed securities and all that, large-scale devaluation of commercial real estate is going to be a huge pain.

In NYC where the vacancy situation is particularly dire, politicians have been banging the RTO drum for a while.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-30/wall-stre...

I don't think Apple (or Google, Microsoft, …) sells your data. Or can you point me to the website where I can buy user data from them?

What I would admit is that Apple is maybe not as motivated to protect your data from unintentional leaking. Without user data, Google would be almost nothing. So they have to be extremely careful to maintain the trust of their users. For Apple (or Microsoft) their business is still sizeable enough with out user data.

Seems not a good idea to roll your own. What if your software encounters U+2212 "MINUS SIGN" next?

Probably best to just transliterate to ASCII using gettext or unidecode or similar.

Very nice. Also recommended reading is Eugenie Cheng, The Joy of Abstraction[1] which emphasizes diagram chasing to visualize abstract relationships.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108769389

Firefox on Android is not amazing, it is on the contrary quite annoying and has gotten more so over the years

* Tabs get stuck frequently, and can only be revived by closing, then undoing close.

* Can no longer access about:config in release builds

* Bookmarks got demoted in favor of Pocket, can no longer set bookmarks as default home page

* URL autocompletion got dumbed down, first on mobile and then also on desktop

* etc.

With the established science thing many counterexamples exist, also recent ones. We are now seeing bad outbreaks of preventable disease in undervaccinated communities, because parents increasingly subscribe to unscientific antivax theories.

Or corporal punishment, where scientific consensus since 1990s is that it is harmful. The countries which have banned it since did so ahead of change in public opinion.

There are times when the government is wrong, but it is by far more right than wrong. Thanks to government intervention we saw childhood mortality drop from the high levels in previous centuries, and letting parents just do their thing would eliminate much of that progress.

The comment which I linked was just an illustration. And I was talking about porting mobile games from iOS/Android to Windows Phone.

Besides that, porting wasn't easy even for apps which worked on Windows already. The API was quite different, and not in a good way. For example none of the standard Windows file I/O API was available. There was DirectX but it was DX11 FL9_3 which is not how you access GPUs on desktop Windows (you would either use DX9 or DX11 FL11_x).

Microsoft had a Windows CE based smartphone OS at the time, namely Windows Mobile 6.5. Releasing WP7 as a short-lived and compatibility-breaking product with show-stopping deficiencies hurt them in a major way.

And it is not that the WP8 release fixed everything that was wrong. Rather, it added to developer churn by switching to yet another API, it upset users because no WP7 phone could be upgraded to WP8 (except for the HTC HD2 which originally came with WM6.1), and it still didn't support any modern mobile web browsers.

Then there was this strange limitation to only 720p screens and dual-core CPUs until WP8 GDR3. Or that you could not disable automatic screen rotation until that update. VPN support and the notification center came only with WP8.1.