There's a little bit of feedback: Each belt has a rotary encoder to track position, and the motors apply positive torque rather than positive position. This is in contrast to how stepper motors work on a 3d printer, for example.
Why tune anyway? Isn't the job of speakers and earphones to reliably reproduce the sound that the person who produced the track wanted? The only tuning that should be done by default is to compensate for the form factor or the room, such that what the listener hears is exactly what the producer heard when making the track. Of course, give the user an equalizer with some presets they might want, but leave it up to the end user, not what the manufacturer thinks the user wants.
>Exposure to ionizing radiation causes cell damage to living tissue and organ damage.
>Gamma rays, X-rays, and the higher energy ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum are ionizing radiation, whereas the lower energy ultraviolet, visible light, nearly all types of laser light, infrared, microwaves, and radio waves are non-ionizing radiation
In other words, the UV causes cancer because it's in the ionizing range of the spectrum. Radio waves don't because they're not.
You're right! But also, it's effectively the same as ionizing:
"UV-A and UV-B are technically non-ionizing, but all UV wavelengths can cause photochemical reactions that to some extent mimic ionization. For example, ultraviolet light, even in the non-ionizing range, can produce free radicals that induce cellular damage and can cause skin cancer."
I'm not convinced, both android and iPhone have a feature that shows you when it's recording microphone or camera [1] [2]. Moreover, those things require app creators to request microphone and camera access.
If this happens, it's likely limited to when those indicators are lit. App creators need to get that permission from the OS and they can't override the light.
> There are things we can do now—things we need to do now, like video conferencing and real-time collaboration—that couldn’t be done with traditional desktop software.
This is not at all true. You could have desktop software with networking that could do things like real-time collaboration. In fact, that's exactly what happens now in Office; I can collaborate with others on a Word doc right in the desktop app. It's just not how it happened since we decided to focus on webapps instead
Really impressive that they got thru an entire develop, build, approval, and documentation process in just about 2 days. Not that any of those steps are extremely hard for this fix, but I'm always impressed when big corporations can move so fast
I sympathize with the engineers, QA, and everyone involved in getting this out.
I have to imagine it was a lot of long hours, and the testing was insane. The last thing I want to do is put this tool out and it somehow messes things up more.
But glad it’s out. Hopefully it helps with the remaining machines and with any that are being problematic.
They probably got an exemption to fast track the release because this is a critical issue. I wouldn't expect testing to be so thorough for a release in 2 days. The exemption is more likely.
To be fair, there isn't a whole lot of code there. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft had the WinPE generator written already for some other project.
Actually they may not have a choice, since they have forced people to install their local windows with a Microsoft login, and tying bitlocker to this login, there is probably many situations out there that requires microsoft login supported winPE just to fix this
They could say "third party kernel modules are installed at your own risk" and provide the usual level of business hours support. CrowdStrike fucked up and Microsoft is helping its customers recover from CrowdStrike's fuckup.
They are not only backward compatible or bug compatible. They are others-person-bug compatible. It's the only way to prevent users thinking about switching to another OS.
One thing I’ve never understood about “kernel never breaks user space”.. doesn’t that completely atrophy the kernel, preventing it from ever having big rewrites or architectural changes? What if an initial implantation was terrible, and there are 100x performance improvements to be had by doing a breaking change?
Implement a new API for the better route, isolate the terrible code as much as possible, notify the users, deprecate it, and remove it or move it to a userspace shim after enough years had past and almost everyone was off it?
If anything, then events like this makes decision makers rethink if they really should run Windows everywhere. Why does a flight schedule display has to run Windows, for example?
It might not be their fuckup, but they will lose users too, for sure.
They recommend crowdstrike to customers. Now they are trying to at least skim some good will. Also bad a kernel module that can ruin the OS is partially their fault.
Microsoft competes directly CrowdStrike with Defender across multiple areas - I'm not sure they recommend them to customer over their own products at the cost of losing sales.
I don't think Microsoft is realistically in a position to forbid other companies from writing kernel level modules, from an antitrust standpoint I would think that would land them under investigation(s)
I also think Microsoft should be responsible, they gave the keys to sign the kernel driver so I expect that driver to at least be subject to regular testing and scrutiny not just when initial release was made.
They didn't "give the keys", they have a signing infrastructure that is meant to be used for validating organizational identity and origins of code. They have a quality checking system, but it's only required for certain levels of Microsoft backing. I think it used to be called the Windows Logo Program or something?
You are right Microsoft are not checking the 3rd party code itself they are only running a lot of tests on the compiled code.
There is a recent video now from a former Microsoft employee where he explains that those drivers that get WHQL certification are ran on test machines in stress conditions for some time, or at least that is how it used to be when he worked there.
Since that process is probably quite slow to be able to push update within a couple hours Crowdstrike just bypassed the QA testing by injecting their own data files into the driver.
