I paid for a car that I could drive halfway across the country in and be comfortable,not spend a fortune on fuel, and not worry too much about it stranding me on the side of the road. The smart screen just happened to come with it. So it seems to have worked out fine for me.

Are you naturally an asshole or are you making a special effort here?

Or just don’t connect your phone to it. That’s what I do. I’ve never touched the “smart” screen in my car except to adjust the air conditioner.

Oh, I’ve got no complaints about the article or even its title. Few people learn Perl or Raku these days so it would be surprising for most people.

I thought it was interesting myself - Perl’s my go-to scripting language but I never used Raku. I might consider it next time I have a non-trivial scripting project.

I’m not sure why that’s surprising. Raku started out as Perl 6. Perl was designed primarily for use in a shell environment. Convenience features like the arguments to MAIN bit are in line with Perl philosophy.

Have you tried burping and jumping up and down?

It’s can’t in the sense of “I can’t eat another bite.” Yes, until your stomach bursts and you die, you can eat another bite, but everyone understands what you mean.

I can’t watch YouTube with ads. The “without forcing myself” is implied.

I hate that logo. I glanced at the subject and thought the X Window System was standardizing remote audio over the X protocol.

It’s difficult to eliminate the use of electricity, although generally you’d have them on a battery backup.

Internet is required to contact the fire department or other emergency center (these panels tend to do more than just fire). Used to be just phone lines using a touch tone code, but phone lines are going away. They’re pushing hard for cloud solutions now for security panels - I imagine fire will go that way soon enough.

I don’t see it as irrational. You’re thinking about it the wrong way round.

Manufacturers buy chips from proven sources, where the chip can be traced back to the fab that made it. The entire system of trust is built on the assumption that the chip designers and fabs are trustworthy and that the shady stuff happens elsewhere in the supply chain.

When the designers can’t be trusted, it breaks everything. Up until now it hasn’t been a problem except in extremely sensitive areas like military equipment - only governments can force a company to risk everything by compromising their own products. But take the risk away - make it cheap enough to design new microcontrollers - and what’s to stop a chip designer from taking money from (for example) the Russian mafia? IoT is huge, everywhere, and Risc-V is ideally suited for it.

I don’t think it’s so much “security by obscurity” as it’s an issue of a much lower bar for chip production. Intentional back doors or malware represent a huge risk for a product line, so manufacturers won’t put them in without someone like the NSA leaning on them. It’s a simple risk/benefit calculation.

But the risk is much lower if you can snag a processor design off the 'net, make your modifications, send it off to a fab and sell it under a fly-by-night operation. If it’s ever discovered, you take the money and run.

I see this sort of thing all the time.

There’s a disconnect between the time scales for industrial equipment and the time scales for IT and telecommunications. A PLC running a factory might last 30 years, but the software to program and troubleshoot it won’t run on modern operating systems or computers. The company doesn’t want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade it when there’s nothing wrong with it.

Same with telecommunications - POTS worked for a century, and over the last decade we’ve seen it largely disappear, which makes fire alarm panels everywhere inoperative. We recently ran into an issue where a fire marshall refused to allow anything but POTS and all of the non-end-of-life hardware only supported IP.

I don’t believe so - the docs mention several ways to boot a pi but most only work for newer models.

An option might be to boot an SD card read-only and run everything over NFS. It’s trivial to do that sort of thing with some UNIX clones (OpenBSD, for instance), but I don’t know about a modern Linux.

It might be too outdated to do major services, but it’s still fine for its original use - interfacing with electronic components.

You could build a weather station, monitor temperature and humidity in your attic and crawlspace, automatically water plants, etc. You don’t need much electronics knowledge for that sort of thing.

If I remember right, it was sponsored by DARPA. It was in the early 80s, so it would have been on VAX. It wasn’t the first implementation (there were several prototypes), but it’s the design that stuck; all the major OS implementations of TCP/IP today use the sockets API (if not the source code directly; several identical network vulnerabilities on different OSs are due to the fact that BSD code was free to use and copy).

Ah, DEC. Some really cool stuff came out of Maynard, MA.

A few notable things about DEC:

• They made computers that were affordable by smaller businesses and universities.
• The PDP-10 - one of DEC’s only mainframes - was where the bulk of early Lisp development occurred, mostly for AI research.
• UNIX originated on DEC hardware (before VMS).
• The team that developed the Alpha (the successor to the VAX) was hired by AMD to develop the 64-bit Athlon architecture (what became X86_64 - i.e. what your computer is probably based on).
• Intel chose a little-endian architecture for the 8086 because that’s what the VAX used.
• TCP/IP was developed on UNIX running on a VAX.
• After the minicomputer market crashed, DEC was bought by Compaq, taken out behind the woodshed, and shot like a dog.

Oh, you know he’ll try to find a way to be president for life. And half the media will support it.

Got the stuff you need in order to solder and an interest in electronics repair? Go for it. Ten to one that’s an off-the-shelf part.

Otherwise get it replaced.

I’m not sure I understand. I’m working, so I’m charging for it.

There are a lot of different flavors of being on call.

I’m on call all the time. That just means I might get a phone call at any time and have to help one of our techs on a site. I don’t have to be near the office for that - it’s the knowledge in my head they want.

I charge regular time for it.

Honestly, the cat photos are just a bonus.