Posts by doublelayer

$17k solid gold Apple Watch goes from Beyoncé's wrist to the obsolete list

Re: No doubt

Yes, they can replace the batteries, but I'm referring to the stresses that that might place on the unit compared to the smaller ones placed on a mechanical watch or one that uses very little power. Opening the case much more frequently to replace a battery that drains every day is going to add to the maintenance cost, and if you ever get a battery that swells, it could cause damage that's much harder to repair.

However, maybe it would be better to talk about the fact that that watch only has 2.4 GHz WiFi, and we will eventually get to a point where that is not as often used. I already didn't bother having a 2.4 GHz signal for my home network, so it wouldn't be able to connect if I had one, and I doubt I'm the only person to have done that. Of course, when it stops being able to connect to the internet unless you set up a connection method you otherwise wouldn't, it's not entirely useless then either, but it's a bit less functional. This is pretty common when it comes to devices whose main point is to be a computer.

Re: No doubt

People can melt that down to get at the 75% of it which is supposed to be gold, and I'm sure that if it wasn't, we'd have heard the story by now. What I don't know is how much gold there really is in the case, because they only said how much of the gold-colored metal is gold, not how much of that metal is on it. It could be a thin shell around the rest of the obsolete unit. Then again, we're talking about the people who spent $17k on a newly released product that wasn't expected to last for decades, so those people probably don't care enough to get full value from their junk.

Isn't this the point, though? You decide what features you want to have and select a device that meets those requirements, including any tradeoffs required to get there. For instance, my wrists are devoid of any kind of watch, because I've considered the options. I don't need a watch to tell me the time because my computer's right in front of me and it has a clock and my phone is nearby and it has one. The traditional time-only devices aren't useful to me. The list of features in smartwatches are also not that useful to me because, as before, my phone can do most or all of that and I don't mind getting it if I decide I want to talk to someone or I have a calculation that I don't want to do in my head.

I find the comments comparing smartwatches to time-only watches a bit confusing, because people appear to be comparing things only on where you keep it during use, not what it does. On the same basis, I should tell anyone who has a mobile phone that they're stupid because it gets much less battery life, even if it's one of those that last a week, than my solar-powered pocket calculator. Sure, you can call people with that one and my calculator only has four arithmetic functions and that percentage key for those who don't want to type /100, but they're similarly-sized devices that are both stored in the pocket, so they must be comparable and expected to work the same way for the same amount of time.

Re: No doubt

I'm guessing that anyone who bought a solid gold first generation product has enough money and obsession with Apple that they've already bought a newer one and don't care that this one has become worthless. I'm sure someone will buy it for the gold value, though I don't know how much gold they can have put in it without making it a bit too heavy. Either way, Apple isn't going to need to make them functional.

I have to disagree a bit about your comparison to a simple watch. These things aren't the same kind of product, so it's not surprising that one lasts much longer than another. A watch that only tells the time doesn't use as much power as one that has a WiFi radio and GPS receiver in it, so purely for battery reasons, the smartwatch will last a shorter time. Apple should have had more software support than they did, but I don't think anyone was expecting it to be working usefully in 2050 when WiFi will look very different and the things we used to use with the device no longer exist.

ASUS's Zenbook S 13 is light, fast, and immediately impressive

Re: Apple power plugs

I would have the same concern, so I got some magnetic USB-C power cables which I can connect to charge my computer. The magnetic tip protrudes a couple millimeters away from the case which isn't ideal, but otherwise they've been working pretty well. You have to be careful to find cables which will agree to pass the voltage you need, because there are some magnetic USB cables that are 5V only.

Apple power plugs

Your praise for Apple's power adapters confuses me. Yes, they have the option to simply plug the transformer into a socket without a cable going between the two, but this also means that the transformer can easily block other sockets or cause other problems. This gets worse as the laptop's power requirements increase, because they always make the transformer longer to deal with this. The one that only puts out 45 W can probably fit neatly in a few places, but the one that makes 85 W not so much. It can easily block nearby sockets, is too big to fit into recessed sockets, and can be heavy enough that you don't want to install it on vertical sockets in a few countries. If you have any of those problems, the solution is a cable included in the box (at least it used to be) that goes from the socket to the transformer, exactly what you didn't like about this one. Is a box in the middle of a cable really so big a problem? I doubt it's as massive or heavy as the ones for gaming laptops, so if it's as small as some of the ones I've seen, it makes relatively little difference.

X Social Media sues Twitter 2.0 over alphabet soup branding

When does a raw deal become your fault

From the article: "Yaccarino has really been given a raw deal."

I guess so, in the sense that her job is a pretty awful one and it's not likely to get better, but a lot of us knew that when she joined. She should have as well. Eventually, that stops really being a raw deal and starts being a bad decision to accept that deal. I don't think she was out of alternative options before she accepted this.

Google doubles minimum RAM and disk in 'Chromebook Plus' spec

Re: Weren't Chromebooks supposed to be low-end-use-as-terminal-only ?

They gave up on that a long time ago. It made them seem even more pointless to me, because now they're no longer cheaper* than a laptop that can do more things**. Then again, I was never going to buy one that could only do the Chrome OS things, so maybe it was inevitable that they'd realize that dumb terminals weren't very popular when you could have a smart one without much difference.

* There are cheap Chromebooks the same way there are cheap Windows laptops. You can run Windows 10 on a dual-core Celeron or Athlon with 4 GB of RAM and an eMMC, and it won't even be unusable, but you still don't want to to the extent that buying used is a better idea if you really have that restriction in budget.

** Yes, I know, Chromebooks have a Linux VM, just like every other OS in existence. I prefer when I can select my own versions of Linux and, if the need is there, Windows. I'm not particularly interested in testing a bootloader that might be unlockable when I can buy lots of computers whose bootloader unlock procedure is pushing the right function key when it turns on and selecting a different disk from the menu.

Musk's first year as Twitter's Dear Leader is nigh

No, PayPal the product already existed under the PayPal name. The company wasn't called that yet, but it wasn't called x.com either. Musk brought in the x.com name along with some cash because he threatened to overwhelm PayPal the product by spending a ton of money to get users away from it. When they got rid of him, they made the company name PayPal to match the product they offered already. Somewhat like Twitter, Musk found someone else's idea and slapped his pointless name on it.

Free software pioneer Richard Stallman is battling cancer

Re: An inspirational guy

Make sure that the -rf flag combination is incredibly important to catch out people who typo rms to rm so that it causes the maximum possible damage. Maybe -f could be "full output", while being careful that the default non-full output is useless. After all, what better tribute to our long history of CLI tools but making sure that some of the command decisions are either confusing or make accidents a bit too easy?

Re: +1

I don't know, but when posts of mine have a couple inexplicable downvotes, I tend to ignore them as either someone pressing the wrong button, someone annoyed at something I said elsewhere, or someone who simply didn't want to explain why they disagreed. I don't think it's the time when someone blindly downvotes all the posts as I can see a few that have none, but that's always a possibility as well. I tend to ignore downvotes unless there appears to be an unusual number of them, in which case I start to look for a reason someone objected to what I said as it will help me better understand our opinions.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Re: Would love to upgrade my RPi 400.

They could, but for a few reasons, it wouldn't be any better. I've covered some of them in the comment you replied to. For one thing, look at a Pi 400 teardown. It's not easy to take apart the 400 without breaking something, meaning manually swapping the board is not a process people will want to do too often. It's possible, but the last thing they need is to have a lot of complaints about the board breaking when someone tried it.

The second reason is that there's basically nothing that gets reused. I have a Framework laptop which has swappable motherboards. When you buy a new motherboard, you're keeping a battery, case, screen, audio system, ports, and quite a lot of stuff really. If you swap the motherboard of a 400, the only thing you're keeping from the old one is the keyboard, and it's a pretty basic, cheap keyboard, and a plastic shell which are really cheap to make. There's little advantage to the user in keeping those things when you could have a new keyboard and your old 400 still works.

The third reason is that the new Pi is more powerful. I could see them making a 500 with a faster storage facility using the new interfaces on the board, but if they did that with a 400 motherboard, there would be no space for the new hardware and possibly a heat problem. Redesigning it to attach up the new interfaces would also let them change the design somewhat. For example, one of the complaints about the 400 was that the USB 2.0 port was on the left side and some people wanted it on the right for a mouse used by right-handed users. If they made a new version, they could easily move that or even have two of them, and since they'd have to redesign just to add the things the Pi 5 can bring, it would let them find some new design options.

Re: Lost the plot

I'm aware of the Windows tax, and I tend to avoid paying it when I can. Still, that's not the same as locking down a computer, where they could have done a lot more things, probably quite successfully. I think Gates might have tried to do it had he remained in charge. He was more willing to pursue a monopoly and more aware of the technical requirements to do so. However, he didn't remain in charge and the locking down didn't happen. Microsoft had important roles in several areas of firmware standardization where they could have put locks. Those locks aren't there.

But maybe that's not for lack of trying, maybe Intel just wouldn't let them. Let's consider the hardware Microsoft makes. That's the area where they can do whatever they want to lock them down. It wouldn't be hard at all for them to make sure that a Surface would only ever run Windows. After all, they're writing the BIOS, firmware, everything. I've had a Surface running Linux, and the steps to do that were plug in USB drive and select it in the boot manager. Microsoft could have also been sneaky and made sure that drivers weren't supported under Linux if I did that. No, everything worked perfectly out of the box. Microsoft even developed some phones, first with Windows Phone and then with their two-screen Android things. We're talking about a market where nearly everybody is locking them to only boot the manufacturers' version of the OS, not even letting you change that without hacking. Did Microsoft gleefully adopt this strategy where it wouldn't be noticed among the ten other companies doing the same? No, both the Nokia phones and the Surface Duo have been unlocked and a frequent target of people hacking them to install other operating systems, from the people who managed to run Windows 11 on a Duo to people using them to test mobile Linux.

Microsoft doesn't do everything well and I have plenty of complaints about them. Painting them as a constantly evil force in defiance of years of experience does not help.

Re: Would love to upgrade my RPi 400.

"I wonder if they'll offer a drop-in motherboard upgrade for the 400?"

No, they won't. There is no part that can be reused. The only thing you could possibly reuse there is the keyboard, but the rest of the system's all in one piece. Even if they made a 500 (or whatever) mainboard, you'd probably have to cause some damage to the case to get it in, and the mainboard would cost about the same as one in a plastic shell with a whole new keyboard on top. This is probably a good thing, because if they do make a 500, they have a chance to improve on the design of the 400. At the very least, they'll have other interfaces that it would be useful to provide somehow but the 400 case has no provision to do.

Re: For my pumpkin soup...

It depends what experiments you want to run. If you're just interested in learning how to use Docker, you can do that on your computer without having to have much RAM in it. If you want to create distributed systems with it, then your laptop will not be great no matter how much memory it has* but Pis would work pretty well. If you want to run something that needs a lot of RAM, then unless it already supports using distributed nodes with less memory, the Pis won't be able to run it well and you'll want to get more RAM in a single, powerful device to run that.

* Yes, you can experiment with distributed systems by creating a bunch of VMs on one machine and treating them as nodes, which will work as a simulation, but it won't give you the real thing like a cluster of SBCs would.

It all depends on what your motivation is. It sounds like your motivation is "I want to be part of the Pi movement". That is not necessarily others' motivation for buying a Pi. They might just want a small computer for a certain task, and for that motivation, there are many non-Pi computers in existence which they'd consider. If they're not specifically attached to the Raspberry Pi's products as the only option and only consider things that they can run Linux on, it is much more logical to compare options for price, performance, power consumption, etc.

I'd also point out that "the Pi movement" is kind of vague. What counts here? Does someone else's SBC count? It's still ARM, Linux, open source, low-power*, easy prototyping, but it's not the Raspberry Pi's product. What if the Raspberry Pi company built something completely different? Would that be part of the movement. The term is so vague that it kind of sounds like the argument of someone who only ever buys Apple products and always will just because Apple made them, but I'm guessing that's not what you intend. I may not be a participant in the movement simply because I don't understand what it is.

* The power consumption of boards like this may also be the reason people are considering X86 boxes in the same category. Yes, the Raspberry Pi will be consuming less power than refurbished boxes, but not so much less that it changes how you would use it. If you include others' SBCs in there, they usually consume more power than the Pi does.

I didn't know that, and it's good to hear if your summary is correct in all cases, because it addresses a large sector where the Pi has been unsuitable. Specifically, the Pi has always run pretty badly when you need it to be powered by a battery. Power consumption at idle wasn't low enough to avoid quickly draining a battery, but the only lower power mode was to completely shut it down, meaning that resuming from that would require waiting through the whole boot process and you either needed to build in an RTC or be confident that you'd always have networking so you could have the clock working. This is why, for example, I never bought one of the Pi-into-a-laptop products; they'd all advertise three to four hours of battery life and deliver two. I did build several battery-powered Pi projects myself, and in order to get them to last long enough, I ended up having to put in a battery so heavy that the portability aspect was sacrificed.

Re: Lost the plot

Oh, that's why every Windows machine I've ever owned can be erased quite easily and have my choice of Linux installed on it? If Microsoft was going to lock down computers so I couldn't do that, they've had about three decades to try. The only times they got anywhere close were the Windows RT ARM devices (dead) and the current Windows on ARM devices (you can still install Linux without them blocking you, but the Linux probably won't work because ARM).

Re: Lost the plot

Oh, yes, I remember netbooks. I liked the idea. So did some people online. Everybody else I met had some other views, views like "But the screen's so tiny", "but the keyboard's so cramped", "but that software is so different", "but the system's so slow (under Linux, it was, because they were trying for cheapness)". Linux users weren't universally supportive either, because the screen was just as small, the unusual keyboard was even more likely to affect people typing code or using a terminal, and they tended to like having ports (so do I, but I'm slightly less likely than the average Linux user to refuse to buy something that lacks an RJ-45 port). As a result, they didn't buy one. That was a bit disappointing to me. However, the few modern reincarnations of the idea are still out there, and while more expensive than I'd like, they run pretty well. That includes running Windows 10 or 11 as well as Linux, and I have done both. Windows was not the only thing that kept Netbooks from being as popular as those who liked them would have preferred.

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

Of course such things exist, and you don't even have to get that advanced when you can have one central CSS file which is linked in to every other page and use a variety of template pages that get pasted in. The trouble is that, with each change you make, someone has to learn more of a markup language that, while pretty simple for those of us who use significantly more complex languages, is still precise and takes some persistence to use properly. Consider the difference if someone, let's call her Alice, has built a website for someone else, yes it's Bob. Now, Alice is busy doing something else, and Bob wants to add a new announcement to his website. How does he do that?

If Alice has written it in hand-coded HTML, the instructions probably look like this:

Write your new article in HTML. Save it as its own page, then modify the home page file to link to it with a summary. Make sure to link in the CSS file on your new page so they look the same. Then run this script which will replace the template lines with your standard navigation, header, and footer content. Once finished, upload all the new files to the server and test.

If Alice used Word Press, the instructions look like this:

Log in to the backend. Click new page, write the content in the boxes. If you need links or anything like that, there are buttons to add them right next to those boxes. Check the box to mention this on the front page, and if you want, adjust the summary. Click preview, and if it all looks good, click submit.

Which would Bob, who does not know HTML yet because Alice was doing that, want to do this time? For that matter, if Alice isn't the only typical maintainer, which one does she want to do if she doesn't want to see someone else mangle the scripts she's written for this? In most cases, Alice wants to have a CMS that has a GUI editor, perhaps because she's gotten tired of Bob calling her every time he wants a new page on the site because he can't be bothered to learn HTML and CSS to do it himself, but he can manage to type in some boxes. However, Alice doesn't necessarily have time to hand-code a CMS for Bob, so he ends up with one of the existing ones with a bit of customization on it.

I'd like for this to be different, but it's not. I know this from experience. I have written many backend systems in more complex languages to get around the basic options of HTML, but I do that for my own systems or internal things for my job. The thought of having to do that for other clients as a web designer sounds like a job I would dislike very much.

Even this has a reason, and it's one I'm forced to accept and to notice in other areas of my work. I write software, not websites, but there are still plenty of cases where I have to write some code but it feels like I shouldn't. Usually, it's some form of data manipulation (take it out of this database, do a little branching to reorganize it, put it in a json file). This doesn't take a lot of mental effort, as I don't have to do anything particularly efficient, nor invent any new paradigms, nor know much about the system, basically no creative effort and little technical knowledge involved. Since I can and have done all of those things, it feels like someone who doesn't have the knowledge that I and my colleagues have should be able to do this simple bit. Unfortunately, it is usually not that easy.

The same is true of HTML. If you want to have a page with some text and some links, it feels weird to have to hire someone who knows how to make a page. Of course, one can just learn some HTML and make a functional page, but it won't make a visually appealing page, nor will it make later modifications easy when each page on your site has to be built from hand. To build a low-end CMS for your own site takes more knowledge of some backend language to construct the pages as well as the frontend HTML and CSS. I've done it several times, but I've used either PHP or Python (and once C, but I wouldn't recommend that). People don't want to learn that, nor do they want to hire someone to do something comparatively basic. Word Press, while not really the right tool for the job, lets someone design some kinds of site without having to learn to code properly. Yes, the resultant page's code will be ugly and the maintenance requirement is high, but they don't care about the former or know about the latter. From their perspective, their site looks good enough, they spent a lot less time than the coder would have, and if they need something bigger, they'll deal with it then.

I don't know, but I have heard lots of complaints when PDF support wasn't in browsers. One typical complaint was that there were a lot of PDFs online and they didn't like downloading them. The other one was typically targeted at Windows by Linux and Mac users who thought that an operating system that didn't ship with a PDF viewer was substandard. Oddly enough, when Microsoft added PDF viewing to Edge, they didn't change their minds; one might think they didn't like Windows for a different reason. So yes, people did ask for it, just not us although since I don't edit PDFs, a reader in the browser works well enough for me.

Re: Self-reinforcing

"Though it's a brave company willing to potentially lose 3 from every 100 customers."

Not brave at all. Some companies are really obsessed about making sure that every customer has a brilliant experience, sometimes to a level where their workers suffer from it. Most others don't bother with that, even if it means that some of the customers won't want to stay customers. A lot of tactics to save money can deal with a 3% drop if they save enough, and businesses take that gamble all the time, sometimes to their benefit and sometimes not. In addition, most companies that don't work on Firefox assume that the users will just use something else, and often they're correct. My family uses Firefox (I didn't make them or even ask them to, so it's not just us technical people), but if something doesn't work, they'll temporarily use Chrome rather than make a big deal about the problem. Of the Firefox users, what proportion will really refuse to use something that doesn't work well in it?

We can, but it won't help. Plain HTML lacks too many features that people like using, which is how we got scripts in the first place. HTML version updates come too slowly to entirely clear them out, although the update to HTML 5 helped a lot. For better or for worse, and often it is worse, users have come to expect that a webpage can update itself, not require you to refresh it every few minutes to retrieve updated information. They know you can make a table where you can click on a column to sort it without reloading the whole page. They know you can have an upvote button that doesn't reload this entire forum topic when you do it. And they know that you can put these things together and get, for example, a collaborative word processor that doesn't need any program installed, even if that word processor is going to be much more annoying than the local ones. This means that, if we tried to reverse the course, those users and the companies who make the products will be asking why they can't have those things anymore and we'll have to have a better answer than "because I hate JavaScript and it means browsers are harder to write", because they won't care about either of those completely true statements.

EFF urges Chrome users to get out of the Privacy Sandbox

Re: Better than cookies

While I didn't vote, I take a rather different view. Topics is better than cookies in the sense that me cutting you on the arm is better than me breaking your arm. I shouldn't be doing either, and you can act to prevent me doing them. Arguing that the cut is the better of two evils is not very relevant when you have the option of keeping me from touching your arm at all.

This is even more true when you consider that topics does not necessarily mean that any other tracking has stopped. It's just a new method, not as strong or dangerous as the ones that exist. Theoretically, people might eventually stop using the tracking they were already doing in favor of this one. I've already discussed this possibility in a different comment and concluded that I don't expect anyone to do that. However, it's easy to demonstrate that it has not happened yet, even if it eventually could.

Re: Is there a local database involved ?

Sure, we could probably compile a new version of Chrome that always says we're interested in the same three categories and get everyone to use it. I was going to suggest 1, 2, and 3, but 2 and 3 don't exist because whoever made this list may not understand how serial numbers work. If we're going to do that, we'll have to decide pretty quickly what our three magic ones will be, or we'll end up dividing the users unnecessarily.

The problem is that it won't really help for three reasons:

1. Anyone who is willing to use that version is likely not to be using Chrome in the first place. How much pollution can we cause if we're all using Firefox or even one of the non-Chrome Chromiums which don't have this yet?

2. Google will still have all the data they ever did and will be using that, not the new topics thing, to target their ads and tracking.

3. Advertisers won't give up on any of their tracking to use this. Honestly, it's pretty useless from the advertisers' perspective and they won't have any reason to use it. For example, there's a topic ID for tracking people interested in vacation services, but there are no topic IDs for where they want to go. If your business is advertising to people for a certain destination, that's next to useless. Paying to advertise your vacation package to Australia will be much less likely to work if you're targeting vacations in general than if you can target people who recently visited a site about travel to Australia (or, since they're not very good at tracking despite the effort, someone who recently did anything at all related to Australia). I'm sure they'll have some people look into the system to see if they can use it to track the users more, but they're not going to abandon their tactics for something less useful.

PhD student guilty of 3D-printing 'kamikaze' drone for Islamic State terrorists

Re: The cops also reportedly discovered at the home an IS application form,

IS were well-known for having an unusually good bureaucracy and documentation for things that other groups might not write down, such as exactly who they stole what from and whether the person from whom it was stolen was murdered, enslaved, imprisoned, or escaped. I'm not surprised they have application forms, given that their recruiters were probably quite eager to collect as much personal information on possible supporters as they could.

Israel and Italy have cheapest mobile data out of 237 countries

I don't think we have anything close to the stuff we would need to evaluate that. Take the maximum prices. I'm sure there is someone willing to sell you a gigabyte of data in the US for $83.33. If there isn't, I'm now willing to do so and I'll also sell plans at the UK's top price as well. In both cases, it's really easy to make a profit on that. What the study doesn't mention is how many people actually use that plan. For example, I've seen some ridiculous data prices sold by companies aiming at the hobbyist IoT market (think a 4G device designed to connect to a Raspberry Pi), but it's not marketed to people with phones and most hobbyists who want that will build their own and use a more normal provider. Should that plan be in the list, moving the averages? It might be better to weight it by number of customers, but that could leave you tracking the prices paid by people who didn't shop around, not the price you could actually get if you spent a few minutes looking. You could also use the price of a plan that you would view as optimal after doing some comparison shopping, which would probably be cheaper but means you could accidentally base your calculations on a price that's only offered temporarily. Now repeat all these questions for over two hundred countries. It's not an easy question to answer.

Re: Yes, but.

It doesn't always work that way either, for example in countries that subsidize the price of bread. A few countries have done this so they can do some damage to the economy without having that particular statistic become the focal point of a protest. There are metrics you can use to try to compare purchasing power, but they're not going to be simple.

Re: Market pricing factors

A coverage map will indicate otherwise. Yes, in rural areas, one network might have towers where the others do not, but that can happen anywhere. They all cover the entire country, and with a quick search to check those maps, they all have some claim to be better nationwide (fastest, biggest, most 5G by some unspecified metric, other unverifiable claims). I think your allegation of non-compete agreements is simply incorrect, but since they'd be illegal anyway I'm not expecting you'd have a citation.

Twitter, aka X, tops charts for misinformation, EU official says

Re: No Joke?!

People probably assumed "This is here for the problem I have, therefore it should work". Then they take it, nothing happens, and they assume things would have been worse if they hadn't taken it. When you're dealing with symptoms that are already quite variable, subjective, and difficult to measure, how would they know how much effect they got from the product they bought?

Teardown reveals iPhone 15 to be series of questionable design decisions

Re: They want how much for one?

I don't know about that. How many people bought diamonds, for themselves or someone else? Those were and are expensive, even though there's no real reason for that, and really quite popular. It might not count as a single mass-market product, but if it doesn't, it just consists of a few subproducts all of which have diamonds as a central component.

The iPhone 84 was launched today by the Russian military manufacturing division, but it is only available to certain people with a historical link to Russia who will be receiving their free models shortly. The iPhone 82 is available for the average consumer, and it will run rather well although it's strongly recommended that you carry the device in a sturdy bag as its characteristics are similar to the earlier, unpopular iPhone 76. Experts are still recommending against the use of the iPhone 80, released early last year, but iPhones 78 and 79 have been very popular among those who own them and holding their value strongly, especially after the recent warnings about what iPhone 85 will look like and general customer distress at the ideas of iPhone 86 and 87 due to release shortly. We asked a chemist about the risks of iPhone 88, and while she admitted that it had ended badly before, she was planning to be on a different planet by the time of its release because, in her words, "you should know about Apple's manufacturing practices by now". She went on to say that, if only someone could make an Android device that would stay supported longer than it took the iPhone 43 to stop being deadly, maybe we would have stopped them before we had the calamity that resulted from the unexpected release of a large shipment of iPhone 55 prototypes whose cases had not yet oxidized.

Re: Anti trust?

No, there isn't, because this isn't what antitrust does. Apple doesn't manufacture chips, and TSMC doesn't make phones, so they wouldn't be counted as in the same industry. All Apple is doing here is buying all the capacity that currently exists, but TSMC is free to create more and will certainly do so since they want to keep having the most advanced manufacturing capacity they can. Other phones won't be able to make their chips on that process right now, but nothing stops them making them on the next best one that TSMC also has or waiting until Apple's contract expires, because Apple's contract simply means they've bought a lot of capacity, not that they've forbidden TSMC from helping a competitor.

Alexa's future is pay-to-play, departing Amazon exec predicts

Oh, all you have to do is to ask your Alexa device to cancel your subscription, then confirm the request on the Alexa app with which you set up the device. Then log into your Amazon account in a browser or the Amazon app, go to your services and subscriptions area, find the subscription concerned, and fill out the cancellation form, then confirm with the link sent to your email. Simple, really. Of course, if you don't have the Alexa app because what's the point of keeping around an app for managing something that's independent of your phone, who knows.

For the avoidance of doubt, I made all this up. I don't have the hardware, so I can't get you real instructions. I just imagine it will be more complicated than it should be.

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

Re: Too pessimistic

"It does require you to have a multi-AP setup, preferrably with wired or optical backhaul,"

And here we have the problem. Start to explain to anyone whose home is already built what this means and what they'll have to do and they'll get confused. I've set up a mesh network in a house that didn't have the infrastructure for it, and while it worked, it wasn't pleasing from an aesthetic or an infrastructure point of view. Access points hidden behind or under furniture where I could find a power point that was unused, and no, they didn't happen to have ethernet to every room so I had to use some more basic backhaul methods. At least, because this was 5 GHz, I didn't have to install so many access points. Even if the walls won't absorb the frequencies, their range will be rather small. When compared to putting a single access point in the center of a location, which works very well for a small apartment and not terribly in a house whose walls are not radiopaque, people will tend to prefer that. If I'm building my own house, I'll try to have ethernet ports all over the place and convenient power sources for wall-mounted access points, but most places aren't built like that.

I think it's support. They don't want to hire or train people to figure out what the user's equipment interface looks like and talk them through getting set up, but if they provide a box which has maybe five options, it should be hard for the user to mess it up. I'm relatively technical, but even I have managed to break a router configuration when I've tried to do something I didn't have experience with. The same reason explains why some ISP-provided equipment now has a remote login method: if the user has messed it up, it's usually easier for the support person to go into the interface and figure out why than to talk the customer through that part. These are, of course, the same things that we want them not to be able to do. As such, I have to disagree with the writer here. I've known ISPs who don't mind if you want to bring your own equipment and don't do anything if you use their equipment as a dumb modem, and I think they don't care about us because we're not likely to call them if our routers are misconfigured. It's the others they're worried about.

Why Chromebooks are the new immortals of tech

Re: Data

A few problems with your comment. The first one is that you've confused me with the person to whom you originally replied. Check the names. They're "Roj Blake". I'm "doublelayer". I'm not that guy, even if we have some points in agreement. You're putting words in my mouth which I didn't say because you didn't check that, and unfortunately you're also putting them in Roj's mouth because some of them appear to be things you have a problem with, even if we didn't say it.

"I was merely pointing out your apparent browser based bigotry is flawed."

If there is any "bigotry" in our comments, it's OS bigotry. In fact, what I object to is the way the OS chooses to work. As far as I'm aware, Chrome OS will not do anything without a Google account, and it has a Chrome base which isn't affected in the same way that Chrome on a different OS would be. This makes it much more difficult to browse without attaching an identity with which Google can associate your activity. Similarly, even Chrome on a different OS, while tracker blocking is still technically supported, has gone to extreme lengths to prevent it from working properly by changing the browser to make most methods impossible and the remaining methods difficult. These problems, and many others I have about Chrome, are not simply problems because Google wrote it. They're problems because they prevent me taking steps to protect my data. I refrain from using Chrome and Chrome OS for these functional reasons.

"We are all intelligent enough to know that rather than trying to run away from the data harvesting and the ‘game’, we need to utilise our experience and knowledge to minimise the risk of giving our data lives away."

And we are all intelligent enough to know that some of that game is identifying those who will put our privacy at most risk and avoiding them. The opposite of running away isn't running straight into the fray with a tiny shield.

Re: Microsoft offers 15 years in hardware support terms

That's why Windows would have been better. While Chrome OS dropped support from all the older hardware, a machine from 2010 can run the latest Windows 10, with security updates and feature updates, just fine. It's not slow either as long as you have enough resources. Windows 10 significantly reduced the delays that Windows produced, although that's not a guarantee that any given Windows machine will be fast. In 2025, that will change, but right now, you can run an OS with security updates on some pretty old hardware without having to use Linux.

Re: Macs supported way more than 3 years

I think the writer knew that. I think articles like this might be clickbait for the El Reg forums: say something ridiculous, leave in multiple incorrect statements, and let us all have fun poking holes in it. Not that I haven't heard similarly bad arguments from other Chromebook adherents. Similarly, he seems to suggest a law of Windows where it slows down with time, whereas anyone in IT knows that it slows down with additional software and resource usage, so if you do the same things for years, it won't slow down, and if you throw too many pieces of software in the startup folder, it can become slow in a week if you want that. In order to excuse the faults of Chromebooks and Chrome OS, he has to find reasons why everything else is broken, and when it isn't, just make something up that appears to fit.

Re: Data

Show me fewer ads? Google never does that. Google is in the business of showing me as many ads as they can without me refusing their services. No data I could give them will cut down on the ads they will show. Few of that would even result in better ads, but at least that's possible under their business model. Your suggestions make you sound like you don't have a clue what Google does with the data it takes.

Re: Data

Well, unfortunately I do find you a bit rude there. I'm a fan of privacy, rather young, possibly younger than you, and I don't appreciate false dichotomies. Unlike your first reply, I don't think you're stupid, which means you probably know that the options you suggested are not realistic.

It's fashionable to portray every company that collects some data as equal and suggest that preserving your privacy is effectively impossible without getting started on "set yourself up on a desert island". Sure, some days it feels like that might be easier, but since most people, including me, cannot actually do that, it's annoying to have that incorrectly stated as the alternative. There is a difference between cheerfully giving all the data to Google and continuing to browse sites with Google analytics on them while blocking the domains. Yes, in the second case, Google will still have some data on me and I won't know how much. It will still be less than if I don't block any Google collection and always keep a Google account on a Google browser. You're posting here. I'm sure you're aware of that, and thus I take some offense at your mocking of those of us who value not handing over all the data about us and our activities to any company who steps up.

Google killing Basic HTML version of Gmail In January 2024

Re: What happend to...

This wasn't talking about HTML in emails. It was talking about the webmail client, which can be the one that is mostly HTML (I'm not sure if it's entirely JS-free, but there's relatively little of it if any) versus the full version which is a very large pile of scripts so the interface changes more as you use it. Both support plain text and HTML emails.

As for what an email can contain, the ship sailed on HTML email a long time ago. People wanted to do something as simple as add some formatting to text, and plain text couldn't do it. They wanted to select a format that could do some more and HTML was chosen. It's not going back, but since the email protocol is still the same, plain text emails will continue to function for a long time.

Re: Will Miss Plain Old HTML Mail

I have installed that and got the same surprise you did. I can't say I've found any changes I actually like in it, but at least I have not found any functional problems, just annoying interface elements.

Authors Guild sues OpenAI for using Game of Thrones and other novels to train ChatGPT

Re: Only the living can sue.

The problem with that argument is that I can do whatever I want to my reputation, but for you to do something for me which I didn't agree to which harms me, reputation or otherwise, is a problem. Just having written a book you didn't like doesn't make any other reputation-harming activity fair game.

Re: a sequence of bits that correspond to the text of a given novel-length work

"If there is a guardrail preventing verbatim quotation of large expanses of text, that guardrail must surely have sight of the original text that must be prevented from being regurgitated?"

I don't think it's even that complex. I think that the guardrail looks like this:

if (prompt.fuzzymatch("Could you quote [work]")) {

if (work.known_to_be_copyrighted) {

refuse();

}

}

With a model that clearly can and has quoted from copyrighted works repeatedly has a guardrail like that, all you have to do is find a prompt that gets around that check. It's akin to a conversation where you're trying to get me to accept a bribe, but I'm saying things to avoid clearly committing a crime if you happen to be recording me.

You: "We would like to bribe you to make things easier on us."

Me: "I'm sorry, but I cannot take a bribe."

You: "We'd like to give you some money to make things easier on us."

Me: "I'm sorry, but this sounds like bribery, and I can't do that."

You: "How would you like it if we paid for some nice stuff for you?"

Me: "A gift? Thank you very much."

You: "And how about you help us with a problem we've had?"

Me: "Happy to help."

The iPhone 15 has a Goldilocks issue: Too big or too small. Maybe a case will make it just right

Re: New phone no thanks

Some of us don't buy the expensive Apple devices. I have the cheapest iPhone available, which is at most three times the price of yours and I got a discount when buying it. I don't expect to bend or shatter it as I've not done that before, and I expect it to have software support for longer than your device which helps justify the increased cost. I think people who buy the SE series of products mostly don't understand the high prices either, the same way that I think you'd find the higher prices of Android flagships unjustified.

Re: While the world slowly turns n burns.

Can't agree with you there. Native apps work offline (yes, I'm sometimes offline, we all are). They can have access to features of a phone that aren't easily supported from a website. They can interact with parts of the system that a webpage doesn't without some JS hack or a one-size-sort-of-fits browser control, for example interacting with the filesystem without just using the browser's upload box and file download capabilities. It's not just about putting buttons somewhere that works well on a phone screen, but interacting with the rest of the system.

Re: Phones are lovely but they'd be much better without cameras

Apple's done plastic. They had plastic laptops and the early iPhones had plastic backs. The plastic they used was pretty easy to crack and didn't age well, so they decided to use something that looks nicer unless it's totally broken, safe in the knowledge that the people buying it would put a case on it so that probably wouldn't happen. If you're going for efficiency, a plastic back is just fine. If you're selling expensive items and have to convince people that they're luxury goods, it probably won't. The same reason that people wear diamonds when there are other rocks that look pretty is the reason they'll use materials for aesthetic reasons rather than just cost.

Re: Phones are lovely but they'd be much better without cameras

Most serious photographers I know have forgotten that the rest of us are not serious photographers. Some of us are not photographers at all. I find the camera on my phone useful only on the rare occasion that I want to document something. The pictures I take are much less likely to be described by "oh, what a beautiful picture of a landscape" and more "oh, someone will have to clean up that landscape".

There are many others who like to take pictures not just to document something, but still not for the same purposes you might have. If someone wants to have a bunch of pictures of their cat, they might not really need all of those pictures to be extremely artistic. The same is true if they want to record their friends, their holidays, their children, or a lot of other things.

Your camera is much better than mine. However, if I didn't have one on my phone, I'm much more likely to do without one than to buy something like you have.