It’s likely CentOS 7.9, which was released in Nov. 2020 and shipped with kernel version 3.10.0-1160. It’s not completely ridiculous for a one year old POS systems to have a four year old OS. Design for those systems probably started a few years ago, when CentOS 7.9 was relatively recent. For an embedded system the bias would have been toward an established and mature OS, and CentOS 8.x was likely considered “too new” at the time they were speccing these systems. Remotely upgrading between major releases would not be advisable in an embedded system. The RHEL/CentOS in-place upgrade story is… not great. There was zero support for in-place upgrade until RHEL/CentOS 7, and it’s still considered “at your own risk” (source).

Anything that pushes the CPUs significantly can cause instability in affected parts. I think there are at least two separate issues Intel is facing:

• Voltage irregularities causing instability. These could potentially be fixed by the microcode update Intel will be shipping in mid-August.
• Oxidation of CPU vias. This issue cannot be fixed by any update, any affected part has corrosion inside the CPU die and only replacement would resolve the issue.

Intel’s messaging around this problem has been very slanted towards talking as little as possible about the oxidation issue. Their initial Intel community post was very carefully worded to make it sound like voltage irregularity was the root cause, but careful reading of their statement reveals that it could be interpreted as only saying that instability is a root cause. They buried the admission that there is an oxidation issue in a Reddit comment, of all things. All they’ve said about oxidation is that the issue was resolved at the chip fab some time in 2023, and they’ve claimed it only affected 13th gen parts. There’s no word on which parts number, date ranges, processor code ranges etc. are affected. It seems pretty clear that they wanted the press talking about the microcode update and not the chips that will have the be RMA’d.

I’m not sure it fits 100% with what you’re looking for, but I’ll take chance and recommend Slice & Dice (Google Play, Apple App Store). Free demo, no ads, single in-app purchase to unlock the full version. This game is easily the best value-for-dollar mobile game I’ve ever purchased.

Because the toxins your body is reacting to are already in your bloodstream. It’ll take time for those to get metabolized by your liver, and how much or little you vomit won’t change how much work your liver has to do.

He was a raging alcoholic who hid his illness from the medical professionals who examined him as part of his Super Size Me “experiment.” A lifetime of booze did way more damage than 30 days of McDs possibly could.

The plow. It allowed early river valley peoples to generate semi-reliable food surpluses, and those food surpluses triggered everything that came after. I can’t take credit for this argument, I first encountered it in this episode from the first season of Connections.

Jesus, what a bunch of needless “security”

I disagree with this part. Ticket theft is an actual issue, there are lots of ways to get a copy of someone else’s barcode and either use it before they do or (more likely) sell it to someone else online. TicketMaster’s marketing is talking up the increased security to distract from their true purpose, which is of course to find more ways to take more money from fans. Of course it’s debatable whether the increased security is worth the decreased convenience for ticketholders. That is the inevitable tension when it comes to security, where any increase in security always incurs at least some cost in terms of convenience.

This is all for personal data mining.

TicketMaster might be selling user data, but I don’t think that’s their main aim. They want control of the resale market so they can take a cut when tickets are resold. Note how they don’t allow direct transfers between two mobile wallets, they only allow transfers using their app. That’s so they can monitor transfers. If they see someone transferring dozens or hundreds of tickets to many other TicketMaster users then that person is likely reselling and they can clamp down on their account. TicketMaster’s true intent is to force all resales onto their ticket marketplace, because that’s where they get to take a cut of resales.

Oh yes, I don’t mean to absolve them of any blame. They treated it as an expensive lesson, which is probably the best way for them to process it.

Also while TicketMaster is going to sell this as being an “enhanced security” thing, it’s pretty obvious that increased security is only a side benefit for them. Their angle in this is getting more control over the tickets they sell. As long as there are many people who want to go than can physically fit in a venue, there will be a reselling market for event tickets. TicketMaster wants to take a cut of these downstream transactions.

While the security of rotating barcodes does hinder outright scams, mobile wallets normally allow wallet users to transfer items like tickets to another user if the ticket issuer allows it. TicketMaster does not allow this for their tickets, of course, because it could allow someone to resell tickets while cutting TicketMaster out of the transaction. Currently TM allows transfers using their app, but I’m sure they monitor usage of the feature and clamp down on anyone transferring many tickets. In other words if you try to resell in bulk without using TicketMaster’s own platform (where they get to take a cut), they drop the hammer on you.

The reason you can’t use screenshots or printouts is because they’re now using rotating barcodes. Much like the rotating codes in an authenticator app, the number values behind the barcode are changing on some regular cadence. Only the most recent barcode value is considered valid.

The only other option is to use a mobile wallet, but that prevents me from sending my friends their tickets, since I purchased them all together.

Some ticket sellers allow you to transfer tickets from one wallet to another wallet, but of course TicketMaster isn’t one of them because they’re fucking TicketMaster. What TicketMaster does allow is transfers from one TicketMaster account to another. Of course then everyone needs to have a TicketMaster account, needs to have the app, etc. It’s either that or leave all the tickets in your app or wallet and go in together. If you tell the door person “I have the tickets for these X people,” they’ll be able to handle that.

Yes because the security of barcodes and screenshotted tickets were such a huge problem before.

I think what you just described is actually a problem. Friends of my parents were visiting somewhere, bought tickets to a show from a reseller, met up with the seller (normal looking guy, no red flags, gave some plausible story why he was selling) and paid cash for printed out tickets with barcodes. Printouts looked legit, dates on the printouts were correct, etc. Went to the doors, tried to scan their tickets, got told that unfortunately they’d just been scammed. The impression they get from the box office worker is that this sort of bad news is something they’ve had to deliver frequently. Anecdotal, but I doubt those friends of my parents were the only ones to get scammed in this way. TicketMaster still sucks as an organization but the extra security of rotating barcodes does serve a legitimate security purpose, just like the rotating security codes generated by an authenticator app.

Airlines have recently been having problems with stowaways using screenshots of boarding pass barcodes or QR codes too. Such stowaways should get caught before departure by passenger headcounts or boarding ID checks, but clearly there are gaps or breakdowns in these procedures because some of these stowaways are getting caught at the destination. Others may have successfully flown for free. If it keeps happening I bet we’ll see rotating barcodes come to mobile boarding passes too, if that hasn’t already happened.

Hardly the first time. I’d argue the US made the same mistake in Afghanistan in 2003, diverting resources to Iraq because Bush Jr. had such a hard-on for Saddam.

Guy Gavriel Kay. First book published in 1984, part of a trilogy that was Tolkien-esque, quite decent, but not exactly ground-breaking. He’s since gone on to something a little more unique, which he describes as “historical fiction with a quarter-turn to the fantastic.” Impeccably researched but set an alternate world that’s a close but not exact mirror of our own. This allows him to take a few small liberties with historical accuracy in service of telling a better story. Personally I think he really hit his stride in 1995 with The Lions of Al-Rassan, and almost everything he’s written since then has been exceptional.

I’m sure there would be a way to do this with Debian, but I have to confess I don’t know it. I have successfully done this in the past with Clover Bootloader. You have to enable an NVMe driver, but once that’s done you should see an option to boot from your NVMe device. After you’ve booted from it once, Clover should remember and boot from that device automatically going forward. I used this method for years in a home theatre PC with an old motherboard and an NVMe drive on a PCIe adapter.

The game had an 8-hour free trial. That would drive the “engagement” they’re talking about, and I’m guessing it’s the only positive news they have. If the game was selling well or had significant daily active users, they’d be talking about that instead.

Depends on the color of the wall, but likely no. A matte black wall would absorb a lot of light, a matte white wall would reflect most of the light. Other colours would fall somewhere in the middle, reflecting some wavelengths and absorbing others. The only difference with a mirror is that it reflects light in a uniform fashion, whereas a painted wall will generally scatter reflected light. But scattered light still contributes to total light output! The only scenario where a mirror behind a lamp would come close to doubling light output would be if the wall we’re comparing against is painted with Vantablack or some other ultrablack paint that absorbs 99%+ of the light from the lamp.

Yeah, that’s definitely a thing. They need to implement an idle timer. Seems like a low effort feature that would improve the login experience significantly.

Same playbook the IDF ran during the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Cordon off an area and let some militia do the dirty work. Bet they’ll investigate themselves after the fact and conclude they had no “direct responsibility”, just like they did previously.

If you look at the Steam player charts for the game you’ll see when it’s working vs. when it’s not. Off-peak it works fine, but right now the player base is ramming up against their temporary player cap for hours at a time on-peak. If you try to connect when there are thousands of others also trying to connect, that’s when things go south. That was the case for much of the weekend.

Edit: Here’s a chart illustrating what I mean:

In the last 48 hours, player counts hit 400k at about 7pm Eastern UTC and just stayed there for 6-ish hours. That isn’t normal, almost all other player count charts show a gradual rise and fall over the course of a day. The devs implemented an artificial cap after they found that their servers bog down when there are too many active players, basically sacrificing the peak time login experience to preserve the in-game experience. If you try to connect while the active player count is pegged, you’re essentially joining a swarm of other players who are also trying to connect at the same time. That swarm is likely DOSing some aspect of their own login systems.

If you let it sit on the black screen, it will eventually let you in. Or to be exact it will eventually display the intro movie and splash screen, you’ll probably see servers at capacity there and after some time there you’ll eventually get in. Not exactly sure what it’s doing on that black screen, but I’m guessing it’s trying to talk to some server that’s massively overloaded. I spent most of the weekend playing with friends, so I had to suffer through the wait multiple times.

Consider jobs involving fieldwork. There are all sorts of jobs that involve a team in a remote / isolated location, and some tend to pay pretty well because most people aren’t up for that sort of lifestyle. For example my father was a geologist and could spend months at a time with a team in remote locations, conducting surveys and taking samples.