Posts by HeadPlug

Apple redecorates its iPhone prison to appease Europe

Re: I think I disagree, but I’m not sure…

Au contraire, no one is forcing you to enable sideloading on your iPhone.

Saying "just buy an Android" misses the bigger point - smartphones are a duopoly, and a binary choice is rarely really a choice. It's like saying "if you don't like online surveillance, go live in the woods" - there's a lot of possible options that sit in between the two extremes, that for some reason aren't being presented.

Normally, competition would provide those other options, but due to the nature of platforms, we've seen how impossible it is for even a well-funded 3rd option to break through. That's why these companies are called "gatekeepers" - they have enormous power they can use to squash competition. So regulation steps in - the same reason they to had to break up Ma Bell, i.e. "have a phone" vs "not get extorted" is not really a choice.

There's nothing at all forcing you to enable sideloading, on either Android or iOS. You betcha Apple won't make it easy, so you don't have to worry about accidentally enabling it. It's literally an extra choice that people now have that you don't have to exercise if you don't want to.

Linux interop is maturing fast… thanks to a games console

Re: interesting Until....

Why do we need filesystem dedupe? Don't Flatpak apps already reuse the same runtime when they declare they are compatible with that version? Or do you mean deduping the common bits found across runtimes?

Also, Snap gets flak mostly because of Canonical keeping it rather closed off, not due to its technological specifics(I believe the glacial app startups caused drama initially, but should have since been fixed)

Europe's right-to-repair law asks hardware makers for fixes for up to 10 years

I can easily picture Apple charging £229 for a new charging port and £539 for a new display or whatever, if they are forced to provide replacements. I believe them or Samsung is also currently providing "assemblies" with multiple parts instead of individual parts, for a higher price of course.

The law must state that essential components(display, biometrics, speaker, camera, battery, charge port, etc.) need to be separate and individually replaceable. This is in addition to all other parts and components being able to be replaced, with the total cost of all parts being unable to exceed launch month price.

And even with these measures I can still inagine Apple pissing on everything in new and imaginative ways... The only green bills they like have US presidents printed on them.

UK competition watchdog investigates Apple and Google 'stranglehold' over the mobile market

"Apple’s approach provides users with a valuable choice, centered on security, privacy and performance, between ecosystems"

Ah, "between ecosystems". Our way or the highway, basically.

Intel reveals pay-to-play Xeon features with software-defined silicon

I'm assuming the SKUs with features disabled will be much cheaper, to undercut AMD, with the full-featured SKUs coming in at their usual price. Over time, if Intel starts gaining back on AMD, I suppose the full-feature SKUs will grow exorbitant in price, so Intel will get to keep their "you can always pay for fully unlocked" promise, but making it financially impractical to do so, forcing customers to get the gimped versions and pay for the 1-2 features they actually need, which will then come up to around how much they used to pay for full chips before, with room for extra revenue for Intel down the line should those customers' needs change.

That, or sell a full SKU and then start charging subscriptions in 5 years for the SDSi SKUs.

Meta's Cicero chatbot can probably beat you at Diplomacy

Even more scraping

It seems that everything I as a person will ever post online will eventually be used in some AI's training data set...

Google reveals Pixel 7 phones with 1.7 Stadias of security fixes promised

Re: Support lifecycle still not up to Apple's standards

And Google doesn't have its usual excuse this time - they make both the drivers for the SOC & the OS those drivers connect to.

I was hoping the Pixel 6's "5 years security only" is them getting their feet wet, but apparently Google just likes having one finger on the trigger at all times when it comes to supporting their products.

Systemd supremo Lennart Poettering leaves Red Hat for Microsoft

Not an expert, but...

I for one am sad - I do believe we need distros with lots of knobs and going a certain way, but at the same time, we've never had a proper modern distro to compete with commercial OSes on UX. As controversial as his contributions were, I can't help but feel they were necessary if we were ever to have a polished, "just works" distro.

I don't get why systemd is so controversial anyways - yes, it's a lot of eggs in one basket, but if so many distro maintainers decided to adopt it anyways, just like other 'scandals' like Wayland and Flatpak, maybejustmaybe it actually solved bigger problems and made things slicker?

In other words, we can have both Devuan and Debian, so why fight a purity war? We've had power user distros for decades, maybe it's time for a distro that the community hates, but at least ticks UX boxes so we can at least fight Window$ and Tim Apple.

Apple to replace future iPhone Lightning port with USB-C next year, this guy claims

Some Chinese phones already support 200W+ chargers?

https://9to5google.com/2021/05/31/xiaomi-200w-charger-video/

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/oppos-incredible-240w-charging-can-completely-fill-a-phone-in-10-minutes

Europe twists YouTube's arm to get better cookie consent popups

Re: This is how I browse a webpage these days

Firefox has builtin settings to block autoplay of audio/video

Computers cost money. We only make them more expensive by trying to manage them ourselves

Re: Two unmentioned benefits

Would you get the first benefit if you have your own hardware in general, and some cloud for things like Black Friday, and offload extra traffic there?