That's a very low tech solution. What we need is an internet connected mug that senses with a camera if it's about to be set on top of a piece of paper and starts beeping uncontrollably.

With a firmware update and an additional charge to the customer a model for detecting polished wooden furniture could also be used.

It also needs a permanent internet connection, as the inference for the paper detection is run in the cloud, and a subscription to keep it working.

I call it No-SaaS, No Stains as a Service.

That wiki was invaluable to me when I took computer organization courses. My recommendation would be to learn x86 assembly and C (also familiarize yourself with gdb!) by writing programs that run on a Linux system and only after target bare metal programming by using something like QEMU + gdb or Bochs for emulating bare metal hardware that's also debuggable.

(I used x86 assembly as an example assuming you wanted to boot your OS on a PC. An alternative could be to target a well documented SBC like the BeagleBone Black)

They used the hardened PowerPC for the rover, similar to previous mars rovers and the Snapdragon chip for the helicopter.

I doubt that'll happen. Android has had the possibility to create alternative app stores since the very beginning and even though there are other stores like F-Droid or whatever Samsung calls their bloatware nowadays almost no one uses them. Apple will not bloat their devices with that crap (talking about the Samsung stuff F-Droid is great and I'd love to see an equivalent for iPhones) from the factory and the vast majority of users will still use the default because it's what they are accustomed to and what's recommended by the manufacturer.

All mainstream apps will remain in the Apple store and everything will be pretty much the same with the ability to side-load whatever you please to the device you bought.

Google Play is much less restrictive. You can download real Firefox from there, so there's no point using a different app store for that.

This might be a good side effect - to compete with other app stores (to discourage users from installing them), they might ease up the restrictions.

Does the App Store still ban GPL apps? If so, F-Droid is even more needed on iDevices...

I don't know why, but throwing away computers has always felt wrong to me. I have this small device, built on countless years of research and development that would have been unthinkable not too long ago and it's going straight into a garbage bag. Goodbye to all those semiconductors built on extraordinarily precise manufacturing processes and full of rare earth metals I guess. Now I got a new device with more memory and computing power that'll perform just as bad in a few years for the same tasks because a lot of software sucks ass.

I get that, but sitting in a drawer unused until you die is only a little different than land-filling it. Find a local makerspace, electronic enthusiast mailing list or other place interested people might hang out and offer it to someone who might be able to put it to work, esp someone who might not be able to afford the toy otherwise.

I wonder if Microsoft will continue to patch Windows 10 even after it's official EOL date like what they did with Windows XP. That thing ended up receiving like 12 years of support.

I'd rather be a unicellular microorganism. Only having one cell to worry about sounds pretty chill.

Maybe some people won't. But those that were able to navigate pirate sites in the early 2000s will be easily able to catch up on what somewhat trustworthy sites are used today. I'd wager that it's even a nicer experience now that say in 2010 were internet connections are fast enough to download a movie in a few minutes and all versions of Windows now come with a good built in antivirus program.

The ones that are clueless when it comes to technology will either have to learn about the stuff, or ask a friend to do it. The same thing happened 10 years ago, maybe not with smartphones but copying a movie into a flash drive to watch in one of those fangled new TVs that could play media from an USB mass storage device was certainly a thing.

I at least hope they sell/give away those machines to keep them in circulation. I'd be a real shame to have modern and environmentally expensive hardware like that be torn apart for scrap metal in a recycling facility. Many tech companies love the "eco-friendly" trade in programs that essentially serve to take working, used devices out of circulation.

Security shouldn't be much of an issue with most modern CPUs. The microcode can be updated at boot time by the kernel, even if the one loaded by the BIOS is out of date. So microcode level patches are taken care of.

That leaves attacks on secure boot, which could be feasible with a bad implementation, but I doubt most home users would have to worry about an evil maid attack.

Yeah, it's just not a factor. If it was a laptop that I randomly left unattended a lot or used on unsecured networks, maybe I'd care.