Posts by Jim-234 212 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Aug 2012
So because there might one day be a possibility of Chinese kit having a backdoor (despite nobody being able to find one or prove anything),
The Europeans would like to go buy all the USA kit which is regularly found out to have back doors in it for the USA government to spy on everyone.
I'm going with it's all a bunch of lies and the real reason is bribes / payoffs / blackmail to help USA based corporations keep selling their dated and overpriced gear.
So the delivery driver blatantly lied and caused the customer a great deal of harm and many billable hours.
So is Amazon going to do anything about it or are they so scared to be seen as the slightest bit not woke, that they will let their lying delivery driver go unpunished?
That engineer should haul them into court for all the time he had to spend on it and get his lawyer to legally compel the lying driver to show up and answer for his lies.
As much as folks love "free market" eventually big cloud providers and internet providers will need to be strictly regulated as public utilities to ensure justice and fair treatment for everyone and not just, hey let's ruin your life in an instant because we feel like it and who cares if you are right.
Yet another article waxing poetic about how people don't need any actually good programs and tools to do their work.
Oh some shoddy, slow, barely functional web based piece of garbage is all anyone needs.
Sorry but if you want to actually have good productivity you need good software and usually that means fully featured programs often running locally.
A good example is how much more productive you can be using a full version of Microsoft Outlook as opposed to relying on something like Gmail in a web browser.
In personal experience, I've found the big high capacity micro SD cards are probably more likely to fail than your phone's onboard storage.
If you have hundreds of Gigabytes of stuff to back up, then just hook your phone up to your computer or laptop with a USB-C to USB-C cable and back it all up pretty quickly.
I'm not sure how anyone can possibly stand to use YouTube without adblock and script blocking software?
The native Android YouTube app is pretty much just an all the time in your face ad machine with a bit of content tossed in every so often.
Killing their own product by making it a stupid annoying mess... Seems almost like a theme for Google.
Having ordered one of their phones years ago and paid for it only to have years of endless excuses why they can't yet ship it, I have to perhaps suggest someone might want to tell them to actually ship the phones they took money for and then worry about their fancy new docks.
The usual suspects will cheer the inbuilt bias of ChatGPT because anything is great if it works against people or ideas they don't like or don't want to talk about.
However going forward this means it has been built with a strong bias based off the designers and that could prove very problematic as time goes on, especially as more builders of similar systems or the builders of this system keep adding in their own biases, eventually turning it into a pointless echo chamber of their own viewpoints.
To be fair, if you sign up ahead of time and order the phone at launch, Samsung does offer your choice of accessories (in this case $150 worth of accessories) so you can get a charging pad or two and a charger or two or a case and charger and charging pad etc.
That might work better for a lot of folks who upgrade from Samsung to Samsung as the same wireless charger or charger plug you had for your phone 2 generations ago still works just fine and you could pick anything else you wanted to apply that credit to.
So for a very long time the "Land O Lakes" brand had a picture of a female native american surrounded by a background of a nice big open landscape.
Apparently some modern woke pale faces were "offended" about that.
So the company happily removed the Native American from the landscape and all the woke pale faces were happy to just have a landscape with no Native Americans shown.
Which pretty much is exactly historically what the pale faces did some time back. Remove Native American, keep land.
You have to wonder if when they were coming up with the great idea to just remove the Native American from the picture, anybody thought about the coincidental historical significance?
Whoever designed that power connector spec needs to go back to school to learn something.
When you are wiring up proper electricity, you learn (or find out quickly) that if something is to be pulling a continuous load, you need to be at least 30% to 40% over spec because the specs for wires and connectors are almost never marketed for 100% load 100% duty cycle.
You run into this in a hurry when doing electrical outlets and cabling / installations for charging EVs
You also then have to worry about getting enough air around the connectors and such to cool.
Anyone with a decent background in electrical engineering or proper installation / design could have taken a look at that connector and said, 600W at 12V from that? You are out of your mind.
You need at least double the carrying capacity they used, and enough room for air to get in to cool the connectors just a bit.
Had they gone with just 2 of the same high power connectors they put one of on the Quadro A6000 and similar GPUs, (which are fed by 2x 8 pin standard GPU cables if you don't have native ones), all would have been good for a long time.
Also this obsession with hugely tall cards and then power connectors on the top of them???
That of course leads to tight bends on cables for anything but the most huge monster of cases.
Would it have been so hard to put the connector on the back panel of the card like Evga was going to do?
(not on the short edge opposite the output connectors, as the cards are already insanely long).
ARM is going ahead and doing themselves what all the fear mongers claimed NVIDIA was going to do and why they couldn't be allowed to buy ARM.
I bet lots of folks are going to be thinking an NVIDIA owned ARM would have been the lesser of 2 evils as compared to the current ARM path of "well we are a monopoly on mobile chipsets so now it's time to wring our customer dry".
Here due to similar Tax laws and costs of course, above ground pools are very popular as they are not taxable, it's a temporary thing much like a tent setup.
So you can put up your little pool have your fun, then take it down when you get tired of keeping it clean.
I think the other main reason that it didn't take off as much was that it required too much local hardware to run well.
They had an experiment going where the graphics processing was done server side and sent to a web browser. If that had been giver priority, I think that might have actually helped boost popularity greatly.
As far as nothing to do, there was actually lots of interesting things to do, the problem was much like trying to find some product on Amazon or eBay, searching for something you were interested in, turned up way more junk than good stuff and it took a whole lot of searching to find stuff.
Pretty much the common lack of vision from the corporate front on what an end user would experience.
Instead of having a team dedicated to making sure new users could quickly get on and find things they were interested in.
That and pretty much zero new user support and withdrawing support for the volunteer support community.
It is a fairly complicated user interface even now.
Second Life made a really good start almost 2 decades ago on having a virtual world where people could (for better or worse) do mostly as they wanted without exorbitant fees and rigid controls.
It was a great place where you could log in and start building whatever you wanted and meet friends and be whatever you wanted to be.
They were working on trying to make the interface open and interoperable so that you could seamlessly use their servers and servers hosted by others and have a common link that would enable everyone to expand much like the broader internet.
Unfortunately that key step got stopped, possibly because you know money, and thinking that being open would mean less money. And that kind of stalled it's growth and the entire idea all together as each tech company made their own little fifedoms where everything was only them and nothing worked with anything else and it was them or bust.
That is probably one of the biggest reasons nothing is happening in any big way.
Imagine how far the internet would have gotten if you could only use one software package, on one company's servers and only do what they said you could do at prices they set with no competition.
It's well known that the batteries in Electric Vehicles degrade as more charging / discharge cycles are put on them, resulting in sometimes significantly lower capacity after a couple thousand cycles.
The Tesla Power Walls aren't any different and quite possibly may have even less available use cycles.
The cost of replacing vehicle batteries is very substantial (if even possible) so vehicle to grid would not seem to be a good idea for the owners of the vehicles.
Even with your power wall, signing up for such a scheme might mean the lifespan is cut in half or even more, and those are not cheap either.
I could see some governments trying to mandate it, so then the question is, will they be paying the owners for the replacement costs since they could easily have cut the useful working lifespan in half?
There is something to be said for the statements many environmentalists have been making regarding the carbon footprint of PoW crypto mining being a bad thing for the planet.
The amount of power being sucked up by bitcoin mining just in Texas alone is quite surprising, the article only talks about a couple big players, but there are lots of smaller players down to folks running mini mining centers in their houses. The total amount of electrical draw for mining cryptocurrency is significant enough that it has an effect on everything from carbon emissions to how many power plants need to be in operation.
There is lots of talk about how we don't have enough electricity to increase the number of electric vehicles by a significant percent. It would be interesting to see how many gasoline and diesel powered vehicles could be replaced with electric versions for the same load on the grid, if you removed Pow crypto mining.
If Microsoft is greedy enough to try to force everyone to have a Microsoft account to use Windows 11 instead of a local account, I can see a severe level of push back.
They already spy on you enough as it is, no need to give them complete control of your computer.
Perhaps maybe we could ask people to stop leaving the back doors to their systems open so the crooks can come in and harvest all the passwords?
That's really the root of this, sure blame the users for re-using the same passwords sometimes, but why not crack down on those storing all the passwords a bit more. If they were doing their job most of this wouldn't be a problem.
It appears the solution to corporate types loosing all the customers passwords is to trust another corporation to keep it all safe and it will be all better like because they are so much smarter than the users. Okay so what happens when the corporations that the other corporations make you use to get access happen to get hacked one day? My guess is they will blame it on the users again.
I have this suspicion that the lately renamed Zuckerbook company will build the worst kind of dystopian corporate controlled virtual prison.
You can only do and say what ZuckerFace allows you do do and say and anything not to their liking will be banned.
Intrusive advertising all over the place and your every movement, word and chat sent to advertisers.
Then if you behave in "good" according to Zuckerbook, things go well, when you are a bit of a rebel, things go bad, eventually they start selling the ability to manipulate people to other companies (much like they did on ZuckerBook for "research").
I would much prefer to enjoy something such as Second Life (which I used for years), where you can pay and be the actual customer, not the product.
Yes, you meet the worst of people in an open setting but you also get to meet the best of people and the rest of people.
I guess it will all come down to, do you like doing exactly what some ZuckerFace like character does and be under their control for "free" and maybe "safer"? or do you want to take risks like in the real world, pay your way and be able to enjoy doing things the way you want.
I'm guessing in near future where you own nothing but rent everything from your corporate overlords, they will let you enjoy the virtual world to distract you from the horrible hovel of a corporate owned beehive apartment you are forced to live in.
systemd
I ran into a couple Dell laptops that had discrete video chips from AMD that went bad and would crash a normal Linux or Windows install when it got going.
Devuan worked right out of the box forcing the intel chipset video and let me use the laptops that would otherwise have been discarded.
I'm sure with more work, I could have gotten another distribution to work, but these weren't exactly worth spending hours on.
Who's religion gets to dictate to everybody else what is "obscene"?
In general practice when people go on about "obscene", usually they mean something that they are not comfortable with based on their social / religious viewpoints.
"Obscenity" was routinely used in many western countries, for decades, to punish those who's artistic viewpoints did not perfectly align with the hetero-normative, christian viewpoints.
In my 2017 I'll often get the steering required warning even when I have had both hands on the wheel for a very long time. It seems if you don't move the wheel at all because you are driving down a long straight stretch of road, the system gets nervous that a human shouldn't be able to keep their hands still for that long...
So another round of blaming users and passwords.
How about companies stop being cheap asses about security, so criminals don't keep going in the back door and stealing all the customer information (including passwords) right out of their databases?
It seems there is no actual punishment for lax security policies at big companies that let criminals walk away with entire databases of hundreds of millions of users and all their passwords and details.
But oh those same users should have to pay more / jump through more hoops because nobody seems to want to pay to keep their servers properly secure?
And your "recovery pin" is essentially a password, so when that database is stolen... ??? Let me guess, they will say it's all the users fault..
So soon, owning your own high performance personal computer will be the mark of some kind of dangerous underground freedom loving rebel.
I guess for everybody else, they can just have systems that can't hardly do anything and have to connect to some corporate owned server somewhere that does all the backend processing but it's all good as long as the corporations are the ones using up all the energy and not the citizens.
Classic example of trying to ration pie to people instead of getting back in the kitchen and making as much pie as everybody wants.
If it wasn't all about politics, you could make plenty of power so there is no shortages, in a way that doesn't pollute the planet.
So Windows 10 was basically promised to be "free" upgrades for the "supported life of the system"...
So how do you get everybody to have to pay Microsoft for an OS upgrade?
Force the system to be "past the supported life".
Put in some requirements that block all but the latest systems that Microsoft just got licence fee money for, with some bogus hardware requirements and lists.
Microsoft gets to collect new license fees, and the customers get to have to purchase a whole new PC so Microsoft can get their cut. It wouldn't do for Microsoft to just simply charge you for Windows 11 and let you keep using your perfectly good PC now would it?
This is a rare opportunity for the courts to break the near monopoly Big Tech is trying to force on the consumer.
If Apple wins, consumers all across the world for a long time are going to be the losers.
Especially if Apple is allowed to continue with their unfair, undocumented, unaccountable, obtuse stands or approving or disapproving apps that essentially say they can do anything they want for any reason or no reason and tough for any developer they don't like.
This is mostly an issue because in many parts of California, you can only get a permit if you happen to be rich or politically well connected or politically powerful.
Other states have rules that anyone that passes the background check, completes the classes & tests, and pays the fee gets the permit regardless of their social station.
Some folks however are of the opinion that the common people should not be able to carry weapons to protect themselves and such protection should only be afforded to the rich, politically powerful and politicians who always seem to have plenty of people with weapons surrounding them, I guess their lives matter more?
The Samsung Tizen OS is actually pretty decent for what you need it for on a watch.
The applications that Samsung has put out cover most of what is really practical to do with the watch.
It's very easy to customize how you want it to look and it doesn't go around bothering you.
The google wear OS is a horrible monstrosity that basically wants to tell you what it thinks you should want in stupid dumb ways and is very hard to customize and use as a decent daily driver.
I'm on my 4th version of the Samsung watch and I hope to be able to keep going, but if they totally mess up the software, why bother.
So instead of complaining, use it and enjoy it & then when you are not actively using it, do some mining with it & give it 6 months to 12 month depending on your power rate and you'll have most likely gotten all your money back and have a card left that cost you nothing when all is said and done.
Then on top of that it will still have decent resale value.
Or you could be happy that Nvidia will "save" you by making sure that you have to pay for the card, can't make any money on the side with it & it's worth very little when you upgrade.
For all the iPhone lauders.
Your 5+ year old iPhone,
Does the battery still reasonably work and hold a decent charge?
With the latest software update does the phone still perform nicely or has it slowed down considerably?
I know few people in my friends and family that are happy with the performance of their iPhones after 4 years, let alone more. Generally a mix of either battery life / battery issues or the latest software updates making the phone crawl force them to upgrade their iphones in 3 to 4 years at the most.
It seems a lot of this could have been stopped at the very beginning by ending the stupid practice of allowing those with power and money to conduct private prosecutions of those they want to go after.
If this isn't the perfect example of why you can't allow private rich corporations and people to use the law as their own private weapon, I don't know what else would make the point?
The amount paid out to the victims of this horrible fraud is insultingly low and nobody seems to be talking about that.
All the high and mighty judges that were so eager to be vindictive need to personally go and offer groveling apologies to every single innocent victim they sentenced and then put in some real work towards making things right and making sure those responsible for the fraud get proper punishment on par with the suffering they caused by their greed.
Perhaps a ban on Fujitsu doing any more work at all in the UK until all the victims have been fully compensated for the destruction of their lives would be in order. If Fujitsu thinks it's too tough, well they can sue the post office...
I would say that your approach is a very bad idea.
Apparently most of the world decided to give a virtual monopoly on software to a couple large multi billion dollar (mostly American) companies.
Perhaps they could be held to account that their software is so insecure that opening something in your e-mail allows the take over of your computer?
It seems instead of fixing the root of the problem by suggesting those who get extremely wealthy writing the software don't produce buggy code, you suggest that the least technical end users should have their livelihoods under constant threat of being destroyed by arrogant know it all types who want to have fun setting traps for people instead of actually working on trying to not have such an insecure operating system be responsible for all their business.
Your solution most likely would do nothing more than simply enable some IT people with a god complex to go around terrorizing the workers at their company while making nothing actually more secure and making doing actual business very difficult.
I seem to recall this same kind of thing going on every Xeon CPU launch, where they say the new processor is 2.65x or something faster than some xxx generation but then when you look at the processors that are lined up for comparison, usually the new latest one has a bunch more cores than the old one.
Considering that core count matters greatly in software licencing these days, it might be nice if they could clearly show what it looks like if you compare the different generations of CPUs using exact same core count and exact same clock speed...
One of the reasons I much prefer Linux over Microsoft Windows 10 is the "Automatic Updates" that quite often cause serious issues and can leave your computer unusable until you decide that a re-install is probably quicker than trying to fix whatever mess they made.
If I want updates, I'll update when I'm good and ready.
How about we say you force automatic updates, you are responsible for fixing any systems that the update crashes... Oh and good luck when an upgrade to Mint happens to mess with your Nvidia drivers and you have disk encryption.....
I got the higher end of the 3 batch the Ultra model and first thing went to go look for apps to remove.
Facebook was there, but surprisingly there was a handy option to uninstall which it happily did and nothing Facebook related appeared.
That alone makes we glad to upgrade from my Note 8 which had 3 Facebook spyware groups installed and their "Facebook App Manager" kept re-enabling itself after every reboot and using a fair bit of data without my consent.
I guess Samsung eventually got the point, at least for now.
Considering that most flagship phones blow right past the $1000 mark, I think it's a bit disingenuous for anyone to complain about people wanting to keep their phones as long as possible.
Apart from marginally better cameras each generation, there is no real reason for many not to simply use their phone for 4 or more years.
Then if the phone's batteries happen to magically die after 2 years, most likely anybody not locked into apple will pick a different brand.
Going to a "phone store" to get the phone or a service plan is probably the worst idea ever.
Call up the customer support line on most major carriers here in the USA and they will tell you pretty plainly NOT to go to (their own) branded stores for a phone unless you enjoy being a chump.
If they had the option to turn it into a manageable IP connected security camera that would probably be the single application that would make this explode in popularity.
Attach a charger cable stick the phone somewhere with a bit of double sided tape and security camera for the house done.
I would suggest that it's reasonable to bet that other governments if they are allowed to put such a "contact tracing system" into place will eventually decide that the data must be used "for the public good" because... (insert whatever crime/sedition is riding a current wave of hysteria).
Probably something about terrorists or think of the children or rebelling against being imprisoned in your homes en mass or such...
I'm still holding out hope that one of the guilty makes a deal and agrees to fess up to the CEO being behind the whole thing.
It's not enough of a smack down for the evil corporation to loose a few low lying executives.
A CEO being arrested and charged, kind of makes them start thinking there may be personal consequences for their actions.
Samsung may finally start regretting their abusive behaviour towards their customers, but only long after someone else has taken their market share.
If your customer clearly does NOT want to be bothered with ads.
Boasting about how you can find ways to force ads in their faces is probably going to blow up in your face.
The other big loosers are the brands that apparently are told they should pay big money for these "forced" ads.
I'm not sure about others, but if something forces an ad on my phone or computer or anything else, my immediate reaction is anger towards whatever brand is being displayed, which makes me way less likely to buy anything from them.
The specification are quite lackluster for the price.
However if they could see their way clear to ship it without being loaded up with a bunch of uninstallable adware and bloatware and junk from FB, then it might actually be well worth the cost.
I've gotten a bit tired of paying for a Samsung flagship only to have it try to shove junk in my face anytime it can unless I get it all taken out after every major update.
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