Posts by Kevin McMurtrie 3557 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2007
Like toilet paper supplies, some stocks are crashing with no explanation. I reloaded my trading account with a little money to play the game.
If anything good comes from the panic, it might be ordinary people making some money off the glitches and panics of predictive financial systems.
IPv6 is trivial. I've been using in my home network and personal server for years. The only hard part is finding routers that aren't garbage. Even if the router hardware is good, someone is going to load it with firewall rules posted 10 years ago to a message board for "security." Imagine trying to get IPv6 passing through an old government building filled with 5 generations of routers configured by 4 generations of IT staff. Maybe they have a few coax and Cat-3 hops along the way.
The biggest problem with all batteries is that the chemical reactions don't return the atoms to exactly where you want them. No battery has ever solved that. The batteries crystalize, crumble, or short out over time. Goodenough's claims haven't been reproduced in any article I can find today.
There's, of course, a chance that he has no idea what he's talking about because he's discovered a new capacitor that isn't known to exist. He deserves some R&D funding but only with close observation.
The Samsung shovelware does not grant access to settings until you log in. Turning the constant advertisements off requires creating a Samsung Cloud account, agreeing to many bad things, and then logging apps in. These apps will now stop asking to be turned on but they remain logged in and active. They remain active even after Samsung says that your account has been closed.
Really disabling Samsung's shovelware requires Package Disabler Pro or some ADB work. Even so, there are numerous background tasks with vague names that are still active.
The flame test didn't fix any dents from a fingernail or #2 point. The #6 point shredded the screen with trivial effort.
I'm guessing they're using using vapor deposition to apply a hard mineral layer to a plastic panel. It prevents haziness caused by microscopic scratches and oil absorption, but otherwise doesn't offer much mechanical protection. That wouldn't be very high-tech, unique, or honest.
How much power is available to the payload? I can imagine that designing your payload with its own solar panels in a way that's aerodynamically compatible would be difficult. Nuclear power would be frowned upon in applications that are likely to crash to Earth.
All kinds of interesting things are possible if there's enough power available.
A significant driving force for me to upgrade has been electric power consumption. Power consumption in a upper-mid level desktop system has fallen from around 600W to about 60W in the past 20 years. That's of no concern if you live someplace cold, but screw that in a hot climate. I'm hoping the year 2020 is the last year I need to buy a spinning rust array too. That's about 8W/disk that's always on, with one extra for RAID5 reliability, and then double it because I need a backup.
iCloud is powered by white unicorns beaming rainbows from their horns into candy fiber optic links, all in a heavenly walled garden floating in a cloud. It's not a dark room full of dirty, heartless machines running Windows and Linux.
The map I'm looking at, the article I'm reading on Wikipedia, and the song I'm listening to are on a large microSD card. It's not that I'm planning anything bad, it's that government spy software shouldn't be trusted to interpret your actions if it's even half as bad as average software. I'm guessing it's much worse.
I'd feel much better if these data taps were documented and had a mandatory alerting system to the carrier and an independent watchdog. It's the "secret" part that makes it so prone to abuse and access from unauthorized entities.
Gaming display but no headphone jack for real-time audio. 108mpix sensor that combines pixels to partially recover the lost dynamic range of small pixels. Massive camera bump. Samsung shovelware. Samsung kills app tasks too aggressively to use extra RAM. Dated looking hole in the display. Costs $$$$.
Other than the S series having lots of radio channels, this seems like an awful phone.
I was interested in Go, took a class, wrote a web service with it, and swore to never use it again. There are too many things it outright refuses to do in an easy, clear, or safe way. Go is big at Google because they're using a dumbed-down subset of C++ that's arguably worse.
Sometimes a perfect app isn't a perfect fit.
Relational databases remain in heavy use because companies need to perform efficient queries on small and well known relationships, or need critical data in a rigid structure so it's always perfectly understood. They can also count on SQL working long after everyone retires, even if the underlying DB changes.
I don't know of anyone today who is still using traditional SQL to brute-force graph traversal searches. It might seem like it from the database name, but they have been updated to process graph data. I'd also say that unlimited scalability is irrelevant for a small or medium sized business that can't afford much storage or computational power anyways.
How about the networks that are willing to host criminals? CloudFlare, DigitalOcean, Amazon, OVH, Alibaba, Leaseweb, Google, and the entire country of China. Reports of criminal activity are routinely ignored, or the reporting address isn't even real. Another dozen could be accused of creating services where criminals can activate services hundreds of times faster than they can be shut down; intentionally fabricating a whack-a-mole environment.
The drones will never be found to contain anything as obvious as a backdoor. All they need is one or two good bugs that makes them vulnerable. While the Chinese drones likely have bugs that the Chinese government can exploit, it would be foolish to think that other drones are somehow perfect and immune. Foreign attackers might even be relying on bugs in American chipsets and operating systems.
Funded by 5G investors? Nevermind the all power needed to get mmWave to pass through anything more dense than a vacuum.
The whole point of desktop computers was escaping the constraints of centralized computing. History says that local computing was a very good idea.
Gaming - Too much bandwidth and latency
Photo editing - Needs a bigger screen, not a bigger CPU
Video editing - Slow import and export
File sharing - Slow import and export
Web browsers - Privacy nightmare
Email clients - Would perform worse
CGI rendering - Only a watchmaker could operate the tiny controls on a phone's screen.
Companies should open up the source code before abandoning a working project. If the excuse is protecting 5 year old trade secrets, you're not innovating quickly enough. It should be a law for anything under 4 years old. I have devices from Samsung, Moto, ZTE, LaCie, and Panasonic that were unsupported and incomplete even before sales ended. I now return devices immediately if they have bugs that will be "fixed in the future."
A lot of cloud apps consume 10x to 100x the resources they should. It starts with a web app framework that prototypes well but scales very badly. It's scaled massively horizontally at low efficiency, wired together with Kafka queues, wrapped in armies of Redis clusters, sliced up into foreground and background systems, while another cluster parses billions of log entries for monitoring. Insiders consider it good because it somewhat resembles global-scale architecture, except without the throughput.
My experience with companies not caring about security and disaster recovery is that they already have a secret imminent disaster. Maybe there were some investment mistakes, historical data corruption that inflated perceived performance, gross exaggerations, or a flawed business model. Having everything wiped clean by an outside influence is, by comparison, a graceful exit.
As others have said, it likely has nothing to do with pointer sizes. MacOS has always had very complex and platform-specific APIs. When those APIs change, your codebase is dead and can't be salvaged. Your codebase might not even be in a compatible programming language (Pascal, C, Objective-C, ...). I went through a couple of those API revisions and decided not to be a MacOS developer anyone.
How about this: Sell a premium browser. Get paying customers and, in return, serve them with the product they want. It's never going to work asking customers to donate towards an average browser that's always a few major bugs away from working correctly.
I know it's open source. The payment is to provide regular builds from a carefully curated source fork and support for getting bugs fixed. If Firefox can't be reliable enough to sell then what's the point of having Mozilla?
108 mpix behind a crap lens may be excessive but how dare you complain about having too much RAM!
PhotoMate R3 (camera RAW file editor), OsmAnd+ (offline maps), PDFs of technical documents, and probably lots of games would perform better. The only catch will be deactivating 10GB of new Samsung shovelware and spyware.
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