I assume the same must exist for euros.

I would never use a physical card with NFC anyway because it is both inconvenient (have to enter PIN every 5 transactions) and insecure (for transactions without PIN there's no verification layer), whereas on my phone I have to unlock it for every transaction no matter how small, and doing so is a small matter of pressing my finger on the fingerprint reader.

I'm as anti-capitalist as they come but this is kind of a lost fight in my mind because if not Google - then Visa/Mastercard and the bank itself will know every transaction I make anyway.

And to add to payments, the store loyalty apps are the worst... Lidl over here has an app only (no physical loyalty card), and they should be hanged for developing that... first of all, you're waiting in line while a grandma takes her phone out of her purse, then unlock it, and of course android is not satisfied with her fingerprint right then but also wants a pin... then all apps, then scroll down to L, find LidlPlus app, tap on it... QR code? Nope, not yet! First you get a daily coupon wheel of fortune, tap, wait for it to spin, see what your award is... and if it's something that she just bought, she has to manually activate that coupon in the menu (again, tap, find, tap, tap back), and then click the card button to get the qr code to scan... it's literally minutes sometimes of just waiting, instead of scanning a simple qr code on a plastic card pulled from the wallet.

We even had one of our telcos break down (full internet loss, country wide), POS terminals not working at all, and there are actually people with zero cash with them, not even like 50 euros (for just-in-case (like this))... and then you have to wait for them to turn around, take their stuff back and go home hungry.

I get that you might want one if you are a tech maximalist with a single focus. But that doesn't mean you should stop carrying your card.

I don't really care, as I'm protected from fraud by the card issuer and regulations in my country.

> Having my phone stolen is pretty much another level of attack.

Stealing a wallet or a phone seems just about the same level of difficulty.

And you can trick an iPhone into believing you're a transit terminal and charge arbitrary amounts to real credit cards, without unlocking the phone. (And Apple thinks this is a feature.) The attack requires specialized hardware and physical access, but if you've stolen the phone, that's fine.

(Yes, I know, this article is about Android. But most people where I live have iPhones, even if I don't.)

Do you guys not have wallets with card slots?

That people trade anything for even just perceived convenience? That isn't news either, but it does explain a lot of the sad state of affairs we are struggling with today.

You live in a pretty weird bubble. (And I live in San Francisco, so I know about weird bubbles.)

That's from a year ago, I'm sure it's only grown since.

I think it's you who's in a bubble, my friend.

I own a 3d printer which makes most of these projects look like the perfect fit for a 3d print (even when there are far simpler solutions). So that is what I'd do :)

Command Strips work similarly to the adhesive that holds batteries into phones. Very strong hold in the directions that count, but pulling the tab stretches them in a way that causes their structure to collapse and release. Must have for anyone who rents a house and doesn't want to put holes in walls etc, but I've also found them to be very useful for all sorts of off-label applications.

They're strong enough to hold heavy picture frames etc on to walls, lasting for years and still detaching easily. I'd certainly trust them to secure this little motor!

I have 11 and a 15 year old Thinkpads, both have 16G memory. Both works great and have plenty of years left in them. But I do not have Microsoft Windows on them.

I believe the 11 year old device works as fast if not faster than any Windows 11 system on modern equipment.

(Some are still being sold with only 8 GiB, too, but I think those may be becoming outliers, or purposefully intended for only light use such as the MacBook Neo.)

Of course it also depends on what you use the computer for. For browsing and streaming 16 GiB is absolutely fine. For other uses 16 GiB can easily become constrained, though, even for tasks that a laptop can otherwise handle fine. And if the RAM in a recent laptop is non-upgradable, will it still be good 5 or 10 years from now?

My 13 year old laptop, that I still use from time to time (mostly because it is the only windows machine I have) has 8 GB of ram (which truly is barely usable today), it is on the slimmer side and my requirement to have at least 8 GB of ram at that time really limited my options (and there was no option to get more than that in a slim form factor). The norm (not even entry level) was 4 GB and there were tons of options with even less than that.

> XenSource got acquired by Citrix, who closely aligned with Microsoft in order to leverage the Xen commercialization against VMware ~ and the opensource community is hyper-aware of the long term damaging outcomes of these types of alliances with Redmond's powers for FUD.

> KVM's parent org. got acquired by Red Hat and that makes it more palatable for those same reasons.

> Hyperscalers who use KVM to manage multiple client VM instances on the same hardware via over-provisioning get to have kernel level insight into the KVM instances behavior via native, low-latency access to the hardware and direct integration with the Linux kernel's performance framework (perf) - this makes the noisy neighbor problem easier to mitigate than the same task on Xen which requires another layer of abstraction and has less out of the box native support choice of tools.

> KVM is/became a kernel module, and its development is now 'in-tree' for mainline kernel which also meant the kernel can perform the type-1 hypervisor activities using the standard Linux memory and hardware management toolkit. i.e. less maintenance

> there are more reasons, having to do with Xen pre-existing from the days when hardware didn't natively support virtualization and thus the need to modify the VM kernels to be PV (paravirtualized) - but putting KVM into mainline made the vanilla kernel hypervisor-aware as both host and guest

but mostly it's the first reason, and the rest sort of cascade from that one - the 'lack of support' from the standard tools developing opensource community is probably the largest reason.

The original question was vague, but we are getting a bit all over the place. Hyperscalers and most other uses don't really overlap that much.

TLDR; Its complicated. Open source communities have learned they need Institution/Foundation grade protection to keep IP from becoming commercial property in some cases. KVM won by having that realization earlier than most. There are very functional Enterprise tools for Xen which are AGPL but are behind a paid pre-compiled binary which discourages free-as-in-beer AND free-as-in-speech adoption. For anyone is willing to modify source and compile for themselves the tools are both kinds of free.

For the more 'all over the place version' here goes nothing:

I was in the thick of it over two decades ago. Avi (KVM's original coder) had very good insights and organizational wisdom. He started development when the virtualization hardware for intel/amd was already invented and that made virtualization possible as a normal linux kernel process. This is distinct from the Xen point-of-view which is about using the microkernel's abstraction as a separation of concerns, for several reasons including a basic security posture.

The 'sentiment' in regards to the risk of corporate vs true opensource was perhaps within the smaller community at the time and not highly visible outside of that community. It did however exist and later the changes in licensing for XenServer ultimately led to the fork of XCP-ng.

Other acquisitions about the same time which led to similar sentiment include:

Android's acquisition by Google just prior to the Citrix and Xen point in time, shortly after that MySQL was aquired by Sun which then got acquired by Oracle, leading to MariaDB.

The Qt framework acquired by Nokia, and mismanagement thereafter leading to the KDE Free Qt Foundation's origin.

Java/OpenJDK also went through the Sun to Oracle path which resulted in IP lawsuits against Google by Oracle for Java use on/in Android.

Another software suite which had been sponsored in a very cooperative way by Sun was OpenOffice.

Following the Oracle acquisition and on the heels of the aggressive licensing stance by Oracle in other software stacks motivated OpenOffice original core of developers to create TheDocumentFoundation and the libre-office fork to keep the development out from under Oracle's / Larry's corporate thumb.

Sun all but admitted that they had lost the necessary developer participation and market inertia by 'donating' (dumping) OpenOffice on the Apache Foundation.

We can perhaps agree that the donation didn't really get the community back together and reunite libre-office and OpenOffice in any meaningful way as the move put OO under the commercialize as you please Apache License vs LGPL/MPL,

So; this all establishes a theme of concern and developer communities tendency to a reaction to those concerns in the open source world in the 'several decades ago' time. Citrix as corporate owner of a significant part of the Xen ecosystem versus Red Hat's stewardship of KVM was part of the motive for decisions way back then, by my best recollection of the time.

The current AWS (arguably useful as a surrogate for the broader hyperscaler use case) approach is Nitro, which is KVM adjacent so for the sake of KVM vs Xen, and although AWS did stay in the Xen camp for quite a while (still offers Xen-on-Nitro for those who need it) I expect that the same reason applies - standard tooling and mainline support. Although Nitro does require some Amazon proprietary hardware to function.

I remember thinking at the time that if Xen had better stewardship it could have been a better contender for main kernel support, not instead of KVM, but as an also option. But the virtualization hardware was a big win for KVM and it took Xen a little bit to catch up with the PVH option.

Xen has remained solidly useful for virtualization in many places, including non-hyperscaler type use.

Xen Orchestra supports both XenServer or XCP-ng backends. While being technically open source it does have a a few features including backups which are paywalled in the precompiled binaries with a feature flag which prohibits free license users from accessing those functionalities.

The reluctance of users / enterprise customers to edit the source code to disable the 'check for paid/free license' and compiling clean binary appliance, and to do that for every update of the original source is their 'moat'.

While they are fully compliant with the AGPLv3 and can say "our stuff is open source", this satisfies only the strictest sense of the license. It doesn't supporting integration with most distributions' repositories. This ends up looking like a commercial product to most users look for personal to enterprise scale management front ends.

This 'moat' might not be expected to last with the arrival of code-monkey via agent. Enterprises previously opting not to maintain in-house code repos for management tools like this and just pay the 2k to 4k USD minimum entry cost for Xen Orchestra or similar are already starting to look at multiples of that in token subscription fees. As in-house code repositories become standard practice, why pay for both if the one will get you the other for the asking.

/thank_you_for_reading_my_TED-of-the-day

I agree, but XCP-ng is still the most attractive system on the market for home / small business use in my opinion. Xen Orchestra itself isn't needed either, I do most stuff on the cli and code-monkeying arguably reinforces that even more. Patching up something that allows you to VNC a VM for the initial setup/debug doesn't require much investment / knowhow.

KDE Free Qt Foundation predates the whole Nokia debacle and smartphones by more than a decade.

You are right. It was Nokia buying Trolltech and getting the seats on the board of the KDE Free Qt Foundation in 2008 that I was not recalling properly. It's been a minute.

Thanks for catching my miss.

We can all continue to rely on the freedom aspect of Qt and KDE, the Foundation was ahead of the pack in protecting the openness through the risks of privatization.

I like it because it is not a bag of parts. Everything is included. It is a VM toolkit that JFW, and it is not what keeps me awake at night

The only reason I suggest switching to XCP-ng is if you are fleeing VMware or the warts of your current system exceed your tolerance level. Personally, starting from a greenfield, I would go to XCP-ng without hesitation because XCP-ng is that level of production quality.

Love the ability to just forward one or several applications directly instead of the whole desktop environment. Ability to resume connections are also a godsend.

Seems like that usecase isn't given a lot of effort nowadays.