The purpose of Android for Google is to push users into paid services, Google search, collect some play store fees and some data. None of that actually requires Android to be really open. Just saying something about "open" works as advertisement though...
Fairphone with its 8-year updates, swappable battery, and decent repairability is great for those of us who doesn't like to be forced to change phones often. I'm not sure, however, what variety of distributions you mean. It supports 1 Android, and 1 de-googled Android. Which isn't bad at all, but still doesn't sound like "variety".
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_pho...) lists /e/OS, CalyxOS, IodéOS, LineageOS, postmarketOS, Ubuntu Touch, the latter two being non-Android, the rest Android derivatives on Fairphone 5. Fairphone 6 has only /e/OS and IodéOS listed at the moment, but that will probably change after some time on the market.
There are also various reports of things like running e.g. Fedora on an FP6, https://www.notebookcheck.net/Fairphone-6-turns-into-a-Linux... or Debian on FP4/5, but those generally aren't something that is usable due to lacking support for basic things like calls.
Dimensions and units are separate things, though. For example, 1 minute and 1 second are different units of the same time dimension. Similarly, 1 rad and 1 degree are both dimensionless, but they are both different units.
Theoretically, you can define systems of measurement where a lot of seemingly separate things fall on the same units and dimensions. There are "natural units" in physics where you take the fundamental nature of particles and relativity into account and make some convenient choices for some physical constants such as the speed of light c := 1. Then the speed becomes dimensionless, length and time have the same unit and dimension (a length of 1eV is a time period of 1eV), and almost all units are simply derived from a measurement of energy (electron volt, not as basic as people would like, but useful enough).
> Then the speed becomes dimensionless, length and time have the same unit and dimension
Uh, that is not what the article you linked is saying. Natural units don’t make speed dimensionless, nor allow you to use the same unit for length and time. Natural units remove the conversion constants, not the units or dimensions.
Perhaps in the physics sense, but in computer science we do have the notion of types which does allow us to model the difference between an angle and other numerics.
> While recording by these might not always implicate GDPR directly (as it might be exempted under household exemption or the broader allowances given for journalistic purposes)
I'd guess that the glasses first transfer the recordings to Meta who process and store them abroad for various commercial purposes. That way of working can never fall under the household or journalistic exemptions. And per GDPR the owner of the glasses is on the hook for whatever Meta is doing, because the owner is (by GDPR) contracting Meta to do data processing for him/her.
I don't think the owner is on the hook if they simply use the service. The individual wasn't the one who truly decided the essential means and purposes beyond personal use, Meta is the one who did that and is thus the controller for that processing.
And I believe in case of European users the contract is between Meta Ireland and user, Meta Ireland is the one who would be the one doing the exporting in that case.
Now if user actually did publish it on Meta's service for broader consumption then they might become controller for that & if initial purpose was that then the initial recording is unlikely to be exempted under household exemption.
> The individual wasn't the one who truly decided the essential means and purposes beyond personal use
The user is supposed to have read Meta's terms and conditions and agreed to them. Of course nobody does that, but that doesn't absolve of the responsibility, it rather means that the user who uploads stuff to Meta does things in full knowledge and willingly or carelessly. It just might make Meta liable as well, because naturally their terms were sneaky, hidden, unclear and probably illegal.
And I'd guess that Meta Ireland has been sued often enough that they have some export clause deep in their conditions as well, which the user should also have read and agreed to.
The full analysis of this would need to take in account:
* Who actually determines the essential means and purposes for each processing purpose (and is truly doing it). Fashion ID case is quite relevant here.
* If terms which grant Meta these rights and user a lot of obligations would fall under unfair terms or unfair commercial practices directives. If they do then those aspects of the terms are invalid. These could, for example, affect requirement that the user must get consent from data subject for Meta's processing operations.
All the siblings might talk a lot about "but ruggedized!", "but realtime!", "but supported!".
But in many cases, it is just a case of vendor lock-in. Ruggedized is just a casing and decoupled I/O-ports, you can get that for your Raspberry Pi. Realtime is a concern, but modern PLCs aren't really realtime anymore. Those are usually some big multicore non-realtime ARM, plus some small realtime-capable I/O-processors that do the really time-critical stuff. Or even just a CPLD to implement some trivial ladder logic cycles. Support matters, but if your PLC vendor goes bankrupt you've drained a few millions. Might be better to get something cheap where you can just stock up a few hundred replacement parts for cheaper.
That's why actually, a lot of smaller PLCs are Raspberry Pi CMs now. The vendor won't tell you, but if you open them up, you'll see.
And the big customers also wised up to the PLC scam and are now moving towards putting their control tasks on standard x86 hardware in the shop floor basement plus realtime ethernet with cheap I/O extenders on the shop floor. Which is why the big PLC vendors now try to sell "virtual PLC" to those customers, so they get at least a little money instead of none ;) https://www.siemens.com/en-us/products/simatic/s7-1500v/
Real locks in such systems are rare, sometimes even disallowed. Usually, a lock with a real key is only used to temporarily prevent switching on a machine during maintenance or such.
> The PLC is usually in a control cabinet that can be opened by a control cabinet key:
As far as I can tell, that thing's $50. Why would Joe from shipping have one?
> Usually, a lock with a real key is only used to temporarily prevent switching on a machine during maintenance or such.
Most locks aren't really meant to resist and adversary. They're meant to communicate who is allowed and who is not, and back that up by making violations a little non-trivial.
That's the first search engine hit I've pasted. The cheap ones that work just as well are single-digit prices. And usually there is one in every toolbox on the shop floor.
Depending on his interpretation of the rules about trapped instructions, one could just build a loop in the x86 page tables. Those are usually a tree linked by pointers, and any page table lookup can create another page fault that creates another lookup that...
And the simplest thing you can do on such a system is just to loop indefinitely, thus creating a simple instruction with a memory access (mov or anything, doesn't really matter, even the instruction fetch for a nop would work) to take infinite time.
Page tables are physically addressed, so can't recurse. I assume this thing actually works by causing a page fault on the first instruction of the page fault handler, which is a new instruction.
Nope. Not on x86. You can use either physical or virtual addresses at your choosing. Consumer OSes use virtual ones, so you can swap out page tables (yes, really!). See https://wiki.osdev.org/X86_Paging "Page directory".
Not an LLM problem, just an undecaffeinated meat brain and some faulty memories. I've misread 'When PS=0, the page table address field represents the physical address of the page table that manages the four megabytes at that point.' to mean that when PS=1, the address isn't physical. But PS is page size... And I somehow remembered that you could induce pagefaults when walking the page tables...
We even had open APIs for every bank in Germany, in the form of HBCI and FinTS. With fancy things like optional RSA smartcard auth. The EU killed it all in the name of "omg, security!" (a total bullshit argument if you've ever looked at the specs), now with the new PSD2 the only ones getting proper API access are lots of shady payment providers, credit databases, data brokers and the like...
Nah, DBus itself is plain bad interface design. Perhaps they could just piggyback off Binder if DBus itself weren't beyond saving. Also, despite a common sentiment online, it's not at all a complex process to implement a Binder userspace (given you have a sensible IDL in the first place, that is…)
Wrt/ torvie's narcissistic snarks linked above, the most important task for a kernel is still to facilitate fast IPC. The only viable forms of IPC in Linux are UDS and Binder. The former is slow and clunky. The latter is not a valid choice for DBus. So DBus devs have to manage slow, clunky, ill-suited legacy IPC. When a kernel can't be bothered to accommodate one of the most important operating systems built upon it, that seems really bad.
