Posts by fuzzie 262 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Feb 2012
That said, memory is just the one single item that post-sale, can significantly extend the lifetime of a laptop.
I'm not convinced they can't maintain the slim line profile and offer socketed DIMMs.
My 2015 X1 Carbon is still in very good shape, but 8GB is just not cutting it any more.
I've sourced a 16GB motherboard (a later SKU of the same model) from ebay, but that's pretty excessive just for a "memory upgrade"
Yes, you can
There are "with Linux" options, e.g. "Build Your ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 Intel (14") with Linux"
> https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/configurator/cto/index.html?bundleId=21CBCTO1WWUS2
You get to pick from Ubuntu or Fedora.
I agree it's support is spotty and likely only for the models which got the Ubuntu or other "certification"
Indeed, I came around to say much the same, i.e. there's already a wide-agree upon standard.
In Elon's case, I suspect it's much more a case of the tail wagging the dog. If he can make his standard the official North American one, he doesn't have to update his entire charging network to become compliant. Electrify America, the charging network built by Volkswagen as penance for #dieselgate, already support the ISO "Plug and Charge" standard. It seems Tesla's network has a proprietary version thereof.
Forking the standard much?
Here's my angle on it: I have a sneaky suspicion that, as part of the swing to e-mobility, combined with ride hailing, people started to realise they don't _actually_ need to own a car. Mix in the GenZ/Alpha who, due to study debt or just slow erosion of disposable income, a) can't afford them, b) don't have their own houses/garages to park them, or c) prefer spending on experiences, not stuff. With many life services going on-demand, pay-as-you-go cf. video, music, rides, shopping.
Now, in Europe, for the most part, e-mobility seems to be focussing on the right things, i.e. for mass transit, public transport, city commutes. That's where robo-taxies, robo-buses or truck platoons are also more practical.
tl;dr: The petrol heads aren't going to switch quickly. The well-heeled tech enthusiasts may already all have Teslas. The remainder of the market who actually want to _own_ a car, can be very well served by those dyed-in-the-wool Big Auto crowd, i.e. VW, GM, Ford, etc. They don't need/want 0-100km/h in 2s or 700km range bragging rights
There's some more details in this article, esp some yummy bandwidth numbers
> https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-12-05-blue-ska-thinking-construction-begins-on-square-kilometre-array/
And MeerKAT, which SKA will further extend
> https://www.sarao.ac.za/science/meerkat/about-meerkat/
And more of an overview of the entire SKA
> https://www.skao.int/en/explore/telescopes
Someone else opined that Musk's Twitter deal provided Musk a convenient excuse to sell a large number of Tesla shares. Without that excuse such sales might be viewed as him de-risking or having otherwise lost some faith in Tesla's growth and the share price might then have taken a knock. But selling to fund the deal, it looks much more benign.
He probably never bargained on Twitter insisting on the deal going through. Even if it goes through, I can't see how Musk and the board could have any productive relationship after all this acrimony.
WhatsApp will happily ensure that end-to-end encryption works properly. You can likely be sure of that, barring the occasional arm-twisting from a government and/or agency. The value for them is not in the content of your messages, but in to whom you're talking
Imagine the insane mountains of meta-data. Given "sufficient" uptake,this is like being plugged straight into the backbone of the economy, especially the more informal economy. The type of thing which revenue and economic activity agencies.
They're also aggressively onboarding small and large businesses to their hosted platform, i.e. they provide a WhatsApp phone number, chat bots, etc. and the business only pays per message sent/received. Again, that's a treasure trove of meta data.
Or VoIP, or a Google Talk or Skype or even a landline number. The number needs to be capable of receiving either an SMS or a voice call during the minute or two of registration so that you can get the activation code. After that, despatch of it in your favourite manner. You won't need it again.
Yes, there are oodles of other wannabe options, but at least, compared to others, Signal have gone to great lengths to have their technology and architecture independently reviewed and evaluated. That doesn't mean it's perfect, but at least they're trying harder than most.
The XMPP crowd also had it audited before they decided to adopt it
> https://conversations.im/omemo/audit.pdf
Indeed, Twilio was the weak link here. Signal hashes contact numbers for matching. That way they can match contacts' from different users by number, but without knowing what the actual numbers are. They can only tell it's the same number.
> https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
But, in order to do the initial registration/activation of your Signal installation, you need an activation code through some out-of-band channel. That's where Signal have to give your number (and only the number from where you're activating) to Twilio to send the activation code. Subsequent to that, I don't think they ever need the number. It's purely for the bootstrap.
> https://signal.org/blog/change-number/
I suspect, that's how they detect device changes to alert you that your chat buddy changed devices and that you should confirm their identity before continuing your conversation.
Indeed MMS was fundamentally push email. The message format was limited to a very simple structure, but re-used the fundamentals of MIME and email. And then they used the same SMS channel to serve as notification with a link to retrieve the full message.
You could argue push email made Blackberry. They just did slicker, with more conviction, a better user experience and support stock email by routing the "fetch" parts through their secure Blackberry server.
tl;dr: MMS wasn't a horrible idea, maybe a bit ahead of its time and lacking operator commitment/roaming.
RCS was sort of just "handed" to them by Google as a "here's a standard for you". GSMA had tried, around the time of MMS/WAP to create a Wired Village (or maybe I misremember the name) initiative. It was in the identify, communities and instance messaging domain. That was a design-by-committee fail and never even got off the ground.
VoLTE is _just_ VoIP over LTE. Sadly it inherited many of the security issues of VoIP.
Yes, and no in both cases. Google cobbled it together then convinced the GSMA to turn it into a standard. They even generously offered to host the servers for GSMA members/operators. The operators aren't generally keen, because they don't see money in it.
The standard part also didn't include end-to-end encryption, but now Google has gone it built it over-the-top, but it only works when the clients are Google's, e.g. their Android Messages app.
Channelling my inner cynic: this has been a very long and winding road for Google to try and establish a foothold in the messaging space. A job at which they've consistently failed. As per usual, they'll tout the end-to-end encryption as the main feature, but neglect to mention the insane amount of meta data they'll be privy to. I'm sure they're green with envy at the amount of meta data Meta/Facebook/Whatsapp is slurping up.
I would not be surprised if Google has similar WeChat-style super-app aspirations for Messages/RCS once they've firmly turned it into a global platform. Of course, I might be overly cynical.
Talk about a blast from the past. I last used it on my old Nokia N8 and then when I (had to eventually) move to Android it just wasn't available. Sony's keyboard had a reasonable swipe built in and then they moved to Swiftkey which was a bit better at it. Unfortunately even though "Swype keyboard" is in the Play store search suggestions/autocomplete, it doesn't show up under any of the results. Does mean you can only still use it if you (once) bought it?
There seems to be some (unwritten) assumption that macOS has become the state of the art of desktop environments. Between that and the (perceived?) shrinking of the desk top market, it appears everyone is aiming for some tablet/phone/fat finger friendly interface. That model just doesn't translate well to keyboard and mouse.
The vertical-space-is-precious mantra is often cited in the context of macOS and it's global menu bar. But Macs are not widescreen, they're 3:2 and Surface is similar. Which makes the argument against moving docks/bars even more frustrating.
And then you see the previously much-vilified hamburger menu from mobile finding a second life on the desktop. Together with left/right slide-in menus. And the general lack of support for keyboard shortcuts. Not to mention that every "cross portable" library generally focuses on looking "close enough" to the native platform, but rarely support anything deeper, again, see keyboard shortcuts or forms/component tabbing order/navigation.
More insanely frustrating are things like double- or triple-click-to-select, but no two platforms or toolkits can agree on the selection boundaries, e.g. white-space separated. Or, if punctuation separated, no-one can agree on which sets of punctuations count for in or out. The result is huge cognitive as you have to remember which application does what how.
Maybe it's time Ubuntu (or someone with deep pockets or a nice research grant) to do (another) proper set of usability tests. Like Ubuntu did for Unity way back when. GNOME and Gtk3/4 seems to have decided they're going off in a direction, audience be damned. KDE I don't know well enough to tell, but they seem to have swallowed (some of) the converged phone/tablet-desktop experience as well. Maybe one could at least come up with some unified HIG, like XDG, owned by the freedesktop people.
Ubet has the same habit in South Africa and probably elsewhere. If their drivers are fined for operating without a proper public drivers licence or have their cars impounded for being suitably licensed, Uber pays all the fines and release monies. It means eery Tom, Dick, and Harriet who wants to make a quick buck shuttling people around, can do so with impunity.
It's just part of the cost of flooding the local market, suffocating the local taxi industry (though they've needed a wake-up call or a while) and slowing the expansion of proper public transport options
I'm sure there are ways to get some skin in the game. Instead of making it a percentage of the entire corporate's profits, make it a percentage of the board's income/shares. That should help focus their attention a bit and, at the same time, maybe cause a rethink of their insane pay packages. After all, they are ultimately responsible and have to account to the shareholders.
It's already a very capable base mobile operating system. It has been ported to a fair set of hardware. It's a got a good security story and forms the basis for a few non-Android corporate/government projects. Yeah, Russia is are also it as a base for a mobile operating system. If you really want it, there's a quite up to date Android runtime you can add, but if your whole aim is to get away from Android, just don't add it.
And that's always a clincher: someone has to do the hard work and graft to bring up any OS on new hardware. And, fight it as you might want to, the Android hardware adaption layer has become a de facto standard. At least it's only the low level stuff, i.e. base band blobs, drivers for sensors etc.
If you're in areas of weak coverage or spotty charging options, e.g. music festivals, it's well worth turning your phone into a "feature phone". Switch it to 2G-only and you still get calls, SMS, MMS and avoid the battery-draining signal strength hunting that goes along with spotty 3G/4G coverage.
And, because 2G is a long-solved chipset and power problem, you get retro style stand-by times like a week or more. Sure, not an option where 2G has/is being discontinued, but sill widely useful.
You do call out a good point that's often lost in the noise. The regulations does not require the cookie consent banner if you use any cookies, only if you use cookies which could be viewed as tracking and/or storing personally identifiable information. Simply session cookies or retaining your cookie preferances are perfectly fine and doesn't need a pop-up.
Of course, many companies are acting very passive aggressive about this and making the experience worse for the users, presumably in order to "show them how bad these laws are".
Lots of sites seems to use OneTrust to present their cookie validation dialogue. And the arms-long list of partners and vendors you mention is probably the list from IAB (some advertising conglomerate). That's like three hundred or so "partners" all claiming legitimate interest and you often have to go unselect them individually. Some one should just slap down OneTrust for not following the symmetrical UX rule.
I'm not quite convinced their modems are that much better. I believe it's more a case of a very cosy relationships with the mobile carriers in the US. They've been running a very profitable oligopoly there. Qualcomm was made by their CDMA tech and patents which made its way into 3G and subsequently LTE/5G. I would be very surprised if the US carriers just aren't keen to qualify many different modems. And, as was shown in the Qualcomm competition case, they force bundles, i.e. "You want our modem, you have to use our main SoC as well". That's how they've been siting very pretty pushing out mostly lightly-tweaked Arm reference designs.
And, related to Mr Coward's comment above, Qualcomm are very aggressive at end-of-lifing products which makes it really hard for ODMs/OEMs to offer any longer term support for devices.
Zuck is not totally oblivious to the objections he might face from the other incumbent Big Techs. That's why he's been winding his way in through the back door. Everyone's been scrambling for the next billion users, hence the stampede and continual love-ins in India (and to a lesser extent Africa). Things like zero-rated facebooks/whatsapp access gets the unconnected online. And with heavily-subsided phones, for many of these, facebooks/whatsapp become "The Internet" much like AOL and CompuServe used to be in the dial-up world. They've already integrated with India's national payment platform. You can do c2c and c2b (and probably b2b) through it. No need for pesky EMV or Libra/Diem. And facebook Pay is happening. More recently they've been carpet bombing businesses to get them onto WhatsApp business. They'd host the entire customer support, etc infrastructure for free and charge only per message. That's a very compelling proposition. I've seen many business now, even the large established corporates, lead with WhatsApp contact details. Sure, they promises end-to-end encryption of messages, but WhatsApp doesn't care about that. They score boat loads of meta data about who's talking/shopping with/etc who. Frankly, they might have/get a better view of the economy and its networks than the tax authorities.
tl;dr: The magic bullet here is the network effect. And building that network is always easier from the large "wild west" markets were they have little competition and relatively weak legislation and regulators.
My underlying assumption with fair-access data sets is that they are suitably anonymised. We have pretty clever ways to do that already, be it cryptographic envelopes or homomorphic encryption. That, of course, still requires someone to set the standards, enforce their application and hunt down and slap the inevitable violators. And all for the sake of a very elusive and hard-to-quantify ideal. We already know how well politicians and the electorate handle abstract notions.
This is exactly the direction I see Facebook heading. They also realised people aren't too keen on one app doing it all. Whether that's for privacy reasons, I suspect not. I suspect it's much more about the illusion of choice, i.e. if I don't like X any more, I can move to Y. And I only do it for that single use case, not upend my entire life, i.e. swapping GMaps for Waze or for WeGo is easier than switching Android to/from Apple.
What Facebook is now doing is making all the connections behind the scenes, out of sight. Branding has already changed: InstaGram, WhatsApp "from facebook". And more and more things like events and marketplace and payments and business-hosting, are added to existing apps. Other offerings might become separate apps, but behind the scenes is one humongous shared data model into which and from which they all feed. In the mean time people continue to think they're exercising choice.
I'm starting to believe that we need some regulation that says if you've accumulated more than X amount of data regarding more than Y percent of the population, you must make that data available to third parties on an equal access/non-disciminatory manner. It introduces a return-on-investment calculation compared to "owning it all" and levels the playing field for new entrants into the market. Also players can survive in niche markets, because the data for their niche still has market value.
As the subjects says. I believe Arm would be better suited to be owned by a mix of companies in a consortium. A bit like what happened when HERE maps spun out of Nokia and is now owned by a disparate bunch, but all who have a vested interest in an open platform for mapping and logistics. And none of them have large enough, controlling interest to dominate, unlike, e.g. OpenSymbian and Nokia
> https://www.here.com/company/investors
A similar setup could work just as well for a group of interested parties with a vested interest in a neutral CPU architecture provider. The current Arm architecture licensees are probably a good starting point of that group, but I can see it span anything from the mobile phone companies to IoT through home automation, etc. You name it. And draw up the charter that the consortium continues to be managed, steered by the current crowd so it doesn't devolve into a W3G or other tail-wagging-the-dog world.
That's a hugely important point you make. The steady decrease in driving-related fatalities over the past decades have not been because humans magically became much better at driving. It's because we've learnt how to built better and safer roads, improve signage, made cars safer and make it easier, sometimes trivial for humans to do the right thing not get themselves or others killed.
We're now entering the uncanny valley where cars appear to be better than they really are at self-driving and the responsibility is on the manufacturer and car to ensure the human is always fully aware of the limitations. We lob large sue balls at companies about "water proof" vs " water resistant", but somehow in this case the distinction is not important enough.
There's even a spec for it already. I notice Apple is on the committee. I'm quite sure they could leverage that to ensure they remain in control of which USB-C cables they will allow to charge their devices
* https://www.usb.org/document-library/usb-authentication-specification-rev-10-ecn-and-errata-through-january-7-2019
The SARB (South African Reserve Bank) has a Fintech unit which has been running various experiments and built proofs-of-concept over the past few years. Crypto currencies are just a small part of it. One of the experiments investigated inter-bank settlements, i.e between various commercial banks and the reserve bank itself. Subsequent projects looked at bond settlements. They were looking at scalability and interoperability across diverse on-prem and different cloud-based platforms.
* https://www.resbank.co.za/en/home/quick-links/fintech
* https://www.ledgerinsights.com/south-africa-launches-second-cbdc-trial-central-bank-digital-currency/
* https://www.itweb.co.za/content/KPNG8v8dZW2v4mwD
* https://www.itweb.co.za/content/Gb3Bw7W8n98M2k6V
My understanding of those new announcement is expanding those projects across into an international sphere, i.e. across legal and regulatory frameworks and between different currency domains.
South Africa has recently introduced legislation to curb that practice. Manufacturers can no longer demand cars be serviced only through their anointed channels. It spreads liability around a bit, but at least it means third party service, repairs and parts can no longer be deemed sub-standard by default and the manufacturers will have to justify rejecting warranty claims.
I've you are, as am I, a fan of headphone jack and SD cards, you should look at the Sony Xperia range. They had a brief moment of insanity when they removed the headphone jack, but it's back. Both those items have been nearly identifying features of the range. Add in that they've been really good open source supporters and listed second/third after Google for timeous software updates.
See also Android TV and Google TV. Same thing.
The more ephemeral consumer software gets backed into medium-life consumer goods, the more urgently we need either minimum support standards and/or right to repair legislation so unbrick old(er) devices. I'd argue the software support cycle should at least match the hardware support, but preferably the parts supply cycle.
The last few years' Xperias has had a "battery care" feature that does predictive charging. It looks at when you usually go to bed or plug it into the charger and when you get up. It'll charge up to ~80% initially and leave over night to top up to 100% about half an hour before your get up. They claim that doubles the battery's life span. My current phone is getting to two years old and I've not noticed any decrease in battery life/capacity. It also monitors your use during the day and will warn you if it looks like you'll run out before your anticipated charge time so you can enable stronger power saving features if you need.
The T14/T14s variants are 14" and don't have a numeric keypad. The 15" T15/T15s models do have numeric keypads. What frustrates me about the 15" models is that the trackpad is centred in the middle of the main keyboard. I end up pushing the keyboard to the right to centre the main keyboard in front of me. Ended up with nasty RSI in my right shoulder due to repeatedly reaching past the numeric pad to operate the mouse. Now mousing left-handed, because compact desk keyboard seem to now be a thing. Also very awkward to balance a 15" on the occasion you might have to rest it on you lap.
The reviewed model is the *s model, T14s. It's slightly more ultra-booky/streamlined and hence more of a stock configuration. Go for the non-s T14/T15 model and you have mixed ram, some soldered, some user upgradable. I have 16GB base/soldered + 8GB; can upgrade to the 16GB + 16/32GB. The non-s models also have wired Ethernet and HDMI. Battery, and many other parts, are user-replaceable. No special screws required, and conveniently documented in the public Hardware Manual.
South Africa has legislation, PoPI (Protection of Personal Information) very similar to GDPR and should also have an opt-out ability, but its market size is pretty insignificant in the bigger picture. Facebook generally just ignores it. India has the benefit of being the largest WhatsApp market so much easier to get Facebook's attention.
Note: With Brexit, UK lost GDPR protection and UK customers are moving from Facebook Ireland/EU to Facebook/US jurisdiction. I can imagine Facebook would fight hard against further balkanization of the customer base.
Another item, many EU citizens have noted that GDPR offers them protection regardless of where they are (resident), i.e. the Facebook filter cannot be geographic presence. tl;dr: It gets messier really quickly, but I bet it's not something Facebook really wants to address, because it "dilutes" their data schnarfing base.
India is also the proving ground for their deep integration with (hosted) businesses and payment gateways so Facebook has a strong interest in that not going belly-up.
An analysis of the T&Cs changes were done and discussed in this HackerNews thread
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685446
WhatsApp is technically correct that message and call content remain private and encrypted. What is happening is that businesses which host on Facebook will now also be able to have encrypted conversations with users. In order for that to work, the users encryption keys have to made available to these third parties. In addition, more meta data is being collected and shared with "Facebook Companies" and hosted third-party vendors. The "Facebook will read my messages" scare, I believe, is largely unfounded, but it is a sign that Facebook is becoming much more aggressive at monitising WhatsApp.
My view is they want to turn WhatsApp into WeChat, i.e. the one app in which you spend you entire day. See WhatApp Pay, UPI payment integration in India, forthcoming Reliance online shopping platform integration. Spot the direction? For none of those do they need to read your messages or listen in to your calls, but there's an absolute goldmine in meta data there.
That's also why they're so panicky in India, because it's their proving ground and stepping stone.
Also, there are different demographics between Facebook and WhatsApp. Facebook is losing its shine and becoming for "old" people. Integrating WhatsApp likely brings Facebook a large demographic who might not/not longer be active on Facebook. WhatsApp users are looking at incoming Facebook and thinking it's going to merge into Facebook or Messenger and are running. Watch this space, but I bet the same is heading to InstaGram soon enough.
Those stats are also a bit deceptive.
They're comparing Tesla driven miles against miles driven by the general driving population. The general population miles also include other bits like driving in bad weather, or at night. And Tesla, for the most part, are on AutoPilot in day time highway/freeway, i.e. relatively open road scenarios. Human drivers on open roads and highways tend also to not have that many accidents. I'd venture most open road accidents are "stupid" things like overtaking on blind corners, rises or in bad weather.
tl;dr: Be very wary of that comparison.
Sort of related. The EU wants to make lane keeping/lane assist a standard feature on all cars. They reckon that would reduce accidents by 10-15%. That's quite significant. And that's already pretty much stock tech on mid- and higher end cars.
Those have already been done, and it extended the life, but not to "infinite" (enough). A side problem is that the logs are often critical to investigations. In one case where a Tesla caught alight, killing the driver, the fire progressed fast enough to damage the ECU within the flush duration and they had no around-the-incident data to investigate.
The impression I get about the design is that it's very much a "this is where all the action" happens design and would require a fair bit of re-architecting. Not just a case of replacing the failing units with new ones with the same failure profile. The NAND is part of the Nvidia card/SoC so not just replacable either. They might have to go with a wholly different, newer model and one wouldn't know how modular that design is. Likely not a drop-in upgrade.
Tesla has gone with commercial, consumer-level components in many places. And that's bitten them a few times. The NAND flash thing is not "obvious", but for a typical automotive manufacturer with established design, development process, it likely would have been picked up. They've learnt, through hard experience, the cost of post-release repairs/fixes.
Telsa had an issue with tablet screens delaminating and fading, because they bought consumer-level components which couldn't deal with the temperature variances and UV exposure inside cars. They're rookie/newbie mistakes. Nothing that can't be fixed, some much more expensive than others. Bullying customers who complain about it, silencing others through NDAs and being argumentative with NTHSA doesn't help. But then, they now have a $500bn kitty to burn on fixes/improvements.
It might well that they still have all the components duly separated so that it's really a security issue.
The problem is the big table thing is _the one interface_ to rules them all. There aren't secondary controls, e.g. for heating, defrosting. Clearly they're playing system/safety and indicator sounds through the stock audio/entertainment system. Not a good dependency to have for safety critical bits. Or having separate display(s) for the rear/safety cameras.
It's a very stock PC/computer model, but this is not a PC. If anything goes wrong with the unit so it cannot display or cannot accept touch inputs, its impact is wide. Most other manufacturers seem to know or have learnt that critical components require their own, independent dials/knobs.
Just UEFI boot your favourite distro and it installs without issues. You can even, as of recently, order the machines from Lenovo with Ubuntu pre-installed. Additionally, all firmware, i.e. BIOS etc updates come through Software centre and/or "fwupdmgr". I believe they, and Dell, promised fingerprint reader support in 2021.
I similarly have the Gen 3, but the 1440p non-touch matte screen. It's been a real trooper and the newer models just haven't been that much of a huge jump to convince me to upgrade. Its 8GB is getting long in the tooth. It's picked up a freeze-up and non-booting issue recently. I hope it's just thermal paste.
For my work machine I got a T490 last year. Marginally larger/heavier, slighty beefier CPU and discrete GPU, wired Ethernet, even more ports, and, more importantly, user-upgradable RAM. Like yourself, I've had to navigate some HiDPI issues. It's a real solid workhorse machine. Highly recommended if you want something a bit beefier and more expandable than the X1 Carbon.
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