Xamayon

If it can be made small enough for use in mobile devices, I wonder whether the need for air/oxygen might require compromising on water-tightness. Would an oxygen permeable waterproof membrane allow enough through for operation? It would be interesting if instead of just for cooling, future high powered devices might also need a fan to feed the battery!

That's essentially how mega.io works. The browser encrypts before upload, and the key is added to the download URL. When downloading, the browser uses the key in the URL for local decryption.

The intention is for them to have no access to or knowledge of file contents. Since the key is the URL, and URLs are generally sent to the server by the browser, Mega could (presumably) get the keys when someone follows the download link.

I believe removing the key from the URL still works, the site just prompts for it when needed, but that could also make its way to Mega if they ever decided they wanted it. It seems like a decent approach for ease of use, but has some weaknesses if security is the main goal. Encrypting separately before upload is still a very good idea if it matters for whatever reason.

Yeah, my guess is that they roll out the updates to every client at the same time, and then have the client implement the n-1/2/whatever part locally. That worked great-ish until they pushed a corrupt (empty) update file which crashed the client when it tried to interpret the contents... Not ideal, and obviously there isn't enough internal testing before sending stuff out to actual clients.

Also, screwing over the minnows who are willing to spend some money is a huge gift to the competition. If another product grabs a large portion of the market, and now has more resources to innovate with, the whales may even start to switch over from the now mostly stagnant and overpriced option. I love(d) VMWare, but going forward it will have no place in any environment I control.

For #2 - Assuming it's not a spotting scope or similar, filtering IR wouldn't have much benefit. An IR filter might even hurt for the typical star gazing type usage, depending on the equipment used. Cameras for looking at things in the night sky often explicitly lack IR filters (often at massively increased cost) to increase sensitivity to any available light.

ESXi needs the RAID to be handled by another device, the simplest case is a hardware RAID card with disks locally attached to it. You can also attach remote disks/volumes from other systems, with or without RAID, over the network/SAN/etc using an HBA, special network card, or the software iscsi initiator stuff in ESXi. You can even have something like a windows server act as the iscsi volume host, and attach to it over the normal network if you don't really care about reliability. The ESXi OS will not appreciate it if you ever turn the remote volume host system off, or if the network drops out. It's really too bad the free and cheap ESXi licenses are going away, it was always so nice to work with...

It's not as easy as playing with more 'normal' stuff, but I usually use VMs on a local hypervisor like ESXi, or a bunch of old desktop/server hardware if I have enough space/power/cooling at the time. Winter helps, big stuff often runs loud and hot. To get specialized hardware when needed, ebay or 'trash' from work and such can help a lot.

Think of all the monetization possibilities - The AI could secretly teach your parrot to speak about how it would prefer a different (specific) brand of food, or that you should really buy nicer looking clothes from such and such store!

I find it hard to believe companies could resist such temptation for long, but agree that it does sound like it would be great for the birds (and possibly other pets) if done sanely without such contamination~

My experience is similar; I have my personal email, which has been in use since the early 00s, in almost plain text (@ replaced with <at>) on the about page of a fairly popular site which gets several million visits a month. I only get 5-10 spam messages/day, most of which are filtered without issue. I do get a decent amount of email, but not true 'spam'. It's mostly just crap I've signed up for over the years and can't be bothered to get rid of.

I honestly get more at my work email, which has never been posted anywhere... I wonder if spammers have started to assume the easy to get email addresses are suspicious or not valuable for various reasons.

The $30-50 zenni glasses/lenses in my experience are actually substantially clearer than the (absolute ripoff) $400-500 rayban ones. Same prescription, and the zenni ones even arrived quicker! Frame consistency is a bit of an issue though, I bought a few more cheap pairs with the 'same' frame a few years later and they changed the design subtly which made them fit worse.

Haven't looked into it, but it sounds like it would work similarly (with some nice benefits such as also being able to easily store other metadata/etc). Feasibility would depend on how quickly the indexes and such load, and the resource consumption associated with opening/closing dozens of them at a time 24/7. In my screwy case there are hundreds of thousands of zip files which are randomly accessed on the fly to grab one or two thumbnails at a time. The random access speed on unloaded files is critical, and for zip files it's extremely quick.

I do exactly that for storing the result thumbnails for some of the dbs in my reverse image search engine (SauceNAO). Non compressed zip files allow quickly/easily seeking to and accessing component files without extraction. A few tens to hundreds of thousands per zip file works great. Millions would probably not be too different, but would use more resources/take more time when loading the zip file index.

May be more directly related to the CPU/etc load and HW age rather than software. If the phone's battery is older, it may not be able to keep up with the bursty power draw, which can cause the phone to crash.

From what I understand, there is significant variance in how bitter it is to different people. As an example, I can lick a switch cartridge and just get a slight tingly sensation, it's not particularly bitter or unpleasant. I have also tasted the denatured alcohol used in some decorative tabletop burners (mainly because, hey, it says 100% non toxic - can't be THAT Bad!). It had a similar tingly taste, and reminded me a bit of gin...