Sure you can. You can put in a SDcard slot, so people can upgrade the memory to whatever they want.
But since they didn't bother doing this, because they want everyone to store everything in "the cloud" and pay high data-access fees to get to it, I for one won't be buying one of these devices.
Buying stuff from China is only an issue in this way if it's some kind of network-connected computing device and the software is preloaded and not easy to replace. This basically means cellphones, and not much else.
If you buy a toilet valve made in China, for instance, I don't think that's something you need to worry about spying on you.
Even a laptop computer shouldn't be a problem, if you're just going to wipe the HD and install Linux. (If you're stupid and you use Windows, however, you're going to get spied on by Microsoft thanks to their new "telemetry" keylogger, and I don't see how it's any better or worse for China to spy on you than MS.)
But cellphones are definitely a different matter, since it's not so easy to change the software on them.
But when you, as a society, have made yourself completely dependent on China for all your manufacturing needs, including very high-end technological devices, I do think it's a bit silly to complain about them spying on you.
That's a good point; one of the big criticisms of the KDE project is that they're too ambitious, esp. with things like desktop search which were big projects that involved a lot of machine resources (to do all the indexing in the background), and this took away from getting all the basics just right.
The idea that you need a DE, however, is not "silly". I don't know about you, but I like having a cohesive DE that includes things like a task tray, a wifi manager, etc. Maybe you like running command-line scripts to manage wifi when you're on-the-go, but I sure as hell don't want to go back to that.
Maybe, but in many states, holding a phone to your ear and driving is flatly illegal and will get you pulled over and a distracted driving ticket. Driving with the car's built-in handsfree phone system will not, and is usually completely legal. If nothing else, having two hands on the wheel is a big plus (as well as being able to talk to the car and tell it "call my wife" or whatever instead of messing with a dialer; on my car I can make calls without even looking away from the road).
Finally, danger is relative. If you're driving on a rural interstate highway and the nearest town is 2 hours away, it's probably more dangerous NOT to talk on the phone; at least it'll keep you awake. If you're in heavy rush-hour traffic, then get off the phone.
Exactly. So if your programming team aren't all experts in C, you need to just fire them all, and hire ones who are. Expert-level C programmers are everywhere these days, and can be hired cheaply. Your company's upper management will have no problem with you taking extra time to find enough expert-level C programmers and get them hired and started in the company.
It's always the young engineers that hate C/C++. It was that way twenty years ago. Why?
WTF are you talking about? 20 years ago I was still in school, and everything was C or C++ (or assembly). We didn't have any alternatives back then, except Java, which at the time was still very new. Of course, there were a bunch of academic languages and older languages: FORTRAN, COBOL, Lisp, Forth, Pascal etc., but most of those are older than C; in fact, in 1995, C++ was a relatively new language.
Then you're completely unqualified to work on avionics code under DO-178B. Freeing memory is strictly forbidden. If you have to free memory, you're doing something wrong.
It's nothing new, it's the same as proprietary software economics going back to the early 90s or before. Remember "Don't Copy that Floppy" from the BSA? They've been complaining about how much money software makers have "lost" for *decades* now. Basically, every time some flat-broke 15-year-old living with his parents pirates a copy of some $10,000 CAD program or whatever, that company just "lost" $10k.... sure.
For instance, I just lost one trillion Dollars. My coworker failed to give me 1T dollars, so that money is lost, and I've been unfairly denied that money that I'm entitled to. It doesn't matter if there's no possible way my coworker would even have access to $1T. I demand justice!
That's weird; the only reason I shop on Ebay is because I'm looking at things which are either used, or on a close-out sale of some kind. Also, some weird niche things from very small sellers are frequently sold there. For mass-market, brand-new stuff, Ebay is the last place I look, unless I'm hoping to score a bargain from someone who bought one, and either didn't use it or barely used it (which goes back to the "used" criterion) and decided they didn't want it.
Look at Google ads in the past before they started all this tracking and spyware crap. When you googled for some terms, Google showed you ads (small, text-only ads on the right side, separate from the regular search results) which pertained directly to what you were searching for. *That* is "relevant" advertising.
It's too bad it's such a rarity these days, but it does exist.
Another (non-internet) example is many magazine ads. For instance, if I pick up a woodworking magazine and leaf through it, and I see an advertisement for a table saw, that's fairly relevant. It's pretty hard to do any decent woodworking without a table saw, so if you want to advertise your table saw to an audience that's most likely to want one, placing an ad in a woodworking magazine is a pretty good bet.
Where do you see those? On television? Who still watches that? I think the last time I saw a Carl's Jr. ad was probably at least 10 years ago, back when I still had a TV.
By what? Which one were you thinking of? The Internet Architecture Board, the McConnell AFB in Wichita, Individual Address Block, the International Assn. of Book-keepers, the International Assn. of Bryologists, the UK's International Accounting Bulletin, the Israel Assn. of Baseball, IAB meteorites, or the Interactive Advertising Bureau (an online advertising trade group, different from the UK's Internet Advertising Bureau, which this guy is part of)?
I do agree, it's pretty stupid that there's two trade groups for online advertisers, and they're both called "IAB".
Who care if it's anti-competitive or not? What are you or anyone else going to do about it? If you're not willing to switch to a better vendor, then you have only yourself to blame; MS has made no attempt to hide their anti-consumer ways. If you think the government is going to make them behave, then you are ridiculously naïve.
Leave it to Microsoft to piss even more of their users off. I swear, sometimes I think they're intentionally running the ship aground.
I think they're intentionally testing to see just how far they can push their idiot users before they really abandon them (which is really, really far). Everyone has made themselves so dependent on MS that they're just not going to leave, no matter what, so MS has finally realized this and is exploiting it. Face it, most people don't want to pay the price premium for Macs, and they refuse to install Linux even though it's free, so they'll put up with as much abuse as MS decides to dole out.
When a "victim" refuses to leave their abuser, do you really feel sorry for them?
I have to disagree about the Star Trek movies. Star Trek III was pretty decent. However, you really have to think of it as the bridge between Star Trek II and Star Trek IV; the three go together as one continuous story arc, especially the latter two. Star Trek IV doesn't even make sense if you didn't watch III first.
ST 7 and 9 weren't horrible movies either, they were just blah. ST9 (Insurrection) really was more like a 2-hour TNG episode than a movie, and not one of the better ones either. But at least it wasn't as awful as that TNG episode with Riker in a coma. Even the episode's writer says that episode was utter shit.
Simple: because you've made yourself dependent on a vendor who cares more about those other peoples' needs, and of course their own bottom line, than your needs or wants. Why should that vendor give two shits about your and your needs or your disappointment?
If you don't like it, maybe you should use a different vendor. But people like you never do switch, you just bitch and moan and then bend over, so exactly what incentive does MS have to treat you differently?
We already do this: modern cars have Bluetooth, and connect to your phone (and with the way the Bluetooth protocol works, you have to explicitly "pair" two devices, in effect authorizing your phone to work with your car).
4G is needed in your car mainly for navigation, communications, and music. Maybe "need" isn't the right word here, but it can be convenient; a lot of people like to listen to streaming music, so being able to play Pandora on your car stereo is nice. Being able to place and receive calls from your car is both nice and much safer than using the phone (since the car can do it hands-free with a microphone and the built-in speakers). And being able to get traffic updates while driving and have your nav system reroute you is a huge time-saver.
Why this is a concern is because these "infotainment" systems are frequently tied into other parts of the car. How much and in what way depends on the particular system.
IMO, all these systems should be completely open-source so that interested people can look for security problems, and so updates can be made. Manufacturers (I don't mean automakers here, I mean small electronic device makers, esp. such as router makers and phone makers, but there's little reason to believe automakers will do much better) have a terrible track record of abandoning products after a short time and not providing software or security updates, leaving users open to hack attacks. Disgustingly, the manufacturers' advice for these problems is to simply "buy a new device from us!". Forcing all such software to be open-source, and also requiring the technique (and any encryption keys needed) for performing updates to be open, would mostly solve this problem. Just look at the open-source firmwares for routers, and for phones. And unlike phones and routers where there's countless versions of the hardware out there and it changes every 3 months, from what I can tell, cars aren't like this: they come up with an infotainment system and use it in all the automakers' products for years at a time. My Mazda's system is made by JCI/Visteon and is used in almost all Mazdas, for instance, same firmware and all. I imagine other automakers are the same. So if someone came up with an alternative firmware for my car, the same build would work for probably a dozen cars across a 4-8 year range.
Finally, I have to point out (I've already mentioned it above), but for your bit about "rigging the Bluetooth" to specifically authorize a given phone, **Bluetooth already works that way**. It's part of the protocol. Some random person can't just drive by with a Bluetooth phone and hack into your car; you have to pair them.
Then you're really ignorant about how OSes and browsers work. Sure, theoretically, JS can do that within a single browser tab, but that's it. If you're logging into Google/Amazon, then you're already sending your keystrokes there, so what's the problem?
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Sure you can. You can put in a SDcard slot, so people can upgrade the memory to whatever they want.
But since they didn't bother doing this, because they want everyone to store everything in "the cloud" and pay high data-access fees to get to it, I for one won't be buying one of these devices.
Buying stuff from China is only an issue in this way if it's some kind of network-connected computing device and the software is preloaded and not easy to replace. This basically means cellphones, and not much else.
If you buy a toilet valve made in China, for instance, I don't think that's something you need to worry about spying on you.
Even a laptop computer shouldn't be a problem, if you're just going to wipe the HD and install Linux. (If you're stupid and you use Windows, however, you're going to get spied on by Microsoft thanks to their new "telemetry" keylogger, and I don't see how it's any better or worse for China to spy on you than MS.)
But cellphones are definitely a different matter, since it's not so easy to change the software on them.
But when you, as a society, have made yourself completely dependent on China for all your manufacturing needs, including very high-end technological devices, I do think it's a bit silly to complain about them spying on you.
That's a good point; one of the big criticisms of the KDE project is that they're too ambitious, esp. with things like desktop search which were big projects that involved a lot of machine resources (to do all the indexing in the background), and this took away from getting all the basics just right.
The idea that you need a DE, however, is not "silly". I don't know about you, but I like having a cohesive DE that includes things like a task tray, a wifi manager, etc. Maybe you like running command-line scripts to manage wifi when you're on-the-go, but I sure as hell don't want to go back to that.
Maybe, but in many states, holding a phone to your ear and driving is flatly illegal and will get you pulled over and a distracted driving ticket. Driving with the car's built-in handsfree phone system will not, and is usually completely legal. If nothing else, having two hands on the wheel is a big plus (as well as being able to talk to the car and tell it "call my wife" or whatever instead of messing with a dialer; on my car I can make calls without even looking away from the road).
Finally, danger is relative. If you're driving on a rural interstate highway and the nearest town is 2 hours away, it's probably more dangerous NOT to talk on the phone; at least it'll keep you awake. If you're in heavy rush-hour traffic, then get off the phone.
Exactly. So if your programming team aren't all experts in C, you need to just fire them all, and hire ones who are. Expert-level C programmers are everywhere these days, and can be hired cheaply. Your company's upper management will have no problem with you taking extra time to find enough expert-level C programmers and get them hired and started in the company.
It's always the young engineers that hate C/C++. It was that way twenty years ago. Why?
WTF are you talking about? 20 years ago I was still in school, and everything was C or C++ (or assembly). We didn't have any alternatives back then, except Java, which at the time was still very new. Of course, there were a bunch of academic languages and older languages: FORTRAN, COBOL, Lisp, Forth, Pascal etc., but most of those are older than C; in fact, in 1995, C++ was a relatively new language.
That's more dogmatic than I would accept.
Then you're completely unqualified to work on avionics code under DO-178B. Freeing memory is strictly forbidden. If you have to free memory, you're doing something wrong.
Sounds like a micro-aggression to me.
It's nothing new, it's the same as proprietary software economics going back to the early 90s or before. Remember "Don't Copy that Floppy" from the BSA? They've been complaining about how much money software makers have "lost" for *decades* now. Basically, every time some flat-broke 15-year-old living with his parents pirates a copy of some $10,000 CAD program or whatever, that company just "lost" $10k.... sure.
Completely wrong.
For instance, I just lost one trillion Dollars. My coworker failed to give me 1T dollars, so that money is lost, and I've been unfairly denied that money that I'm entitled to. It doesn't matter if there's no possible way my coworker would even have access to $1T. I demand justice!
That's weird; the only reason I shop on Ebay is because I'm looking at things which are either used, or on a close-out sale of some kind. Also, some weird niche things from very small sellers are frequently sold there. For mass-market, brand-new stuff, Ebay is the last place I look, unless I'm hoping to score a bargain from someone who bought one, and either didn't use it or barely used it (which goes back to the "used" criterion) and decided they didn't want it.
-1 Stupid.
Look at Google ads in the past before they started all this tracking and spyware crap. When you googled for some terms, Google showed you ads (small, text-only ads on the right side, separate from the regular search results) which pertained directly to what you were searching for. *That* is "relevant" advertising.
It's too bad it's such a rarity these days, but it does exist.
Another (non-internet) example is many magazine ads. For instance, if I pick up a woodworking magazine and leaf through it, and I see an advertisement for a table saw, that's fairly relevant. It's pretty hard to do any decent woodworking without a table saw, so if you want to advertise your table saw to an audience that's most likely to want one, placing an ad in a woodworking magazine is a pretty good bet.
Welcome to modern business. "Lose" has a very different meaning today than it did in the past.
Yeah, it's basically the old saying, "there's no such thing as bad publicity."
Where do you see those? On television? Who still watches that? I think the last time I saw a Carl's Jr. ad was probably at least 10 years ago, back when I still had a TV.
By what? Which one were you thinking of? The Internet Architecture Board, the McConnell AFB in Wichita, Individual Address Block, the International Assn. of Book-keepers, the International Assn. of Bryologists, the UK's International Accounting Bulletin, the Israel Assn. of Baseball, IAB meteorites, or the Interactive Advertising Bureau (an online advertising trade group, different from the UK's Internet Advertising Bureau, which this guy is part of)?
I do agree, it's pretty stupid that there's two trade groups for online advertisers, and they're both called "IAB".
It's always wrong to use gotos. So if the hardware is using gotos, you just shouldn't use the hardware....
Use the Qt toolkit (with C++); it handles Unicode just fine.
Who care if it's anti-competitive or not? What are you or anyone else going to do about it? If you're not willing to switch to a better vendor, then you have only yourself to blame; MS has made no attempt to hide their anti-consumer ways. If you think the government is going to make them behave, then you are ridiculously naïve.
Leave it to Microsoft to piss even more of their users off. I swear, sometimes I think they're intentionally running the ship aground.
I think they're intentionally testing to see just how far they can push their idiot users before they really abandon them (which is really, really far). Everyone has made themselves so dependent on MS that they're just not going to leave, no matter what, so MS has finally realized this and is exploiting it. Face it, most people don't want to pay the price premium for Macs, and they refuse to install Linux even though it's free, so they'll put up with as much abuse as MS decides to dole out.
When a "victim" refuses to leave their abuser, do you really feel sorry for them?
They DO have an option to disable it. Are you really naïve enough to trust Microsoft to honor that setting, and not change it at the next update?
I have to disagree about the Star Trek movies. Star Trek III was pretty decent. However, you really have to think of it as the bridge between Star Trek II and Star Trek IV; the three go together as one continuous story arc, especially the latter two. Star Trek IV doesn't even make sense if you didn't watch III first.
ST 7 and 9 weren't horrible movies either, they were just blah. ST9 (Insurrection) really was more like a 2-hour TNG episode than a movie, and not one of the better ones either. But at least it wasn't as awful as that TNG episode with Riker in a coma. Even the episode's writer says that episode was utter shit.
Simple: because you've made yourself dependent on a vendor who cares more about those other peoples' needs, and of course their own bottom line, than your needs or wants. Why should that vendor give two shits about your and your needs or your disappointment?
If you don't like it, maybe you should use a different vendor. But people like you never do switch, you just bitch and moan and then bend over, so exactly what incentive does MS have to treat you differently?
We already do this: modern cars have Bluetooth, and connect to your phone (and with the way the Bluetooth protocol works, you have to explicitly "pair" two devices, in effect authorizing your phone to work with your car).
4G is needed in your car mainly for navigation, communications, and music. Maybe "need" isn't the right word here, but it can be convenient; a lot of people like to listen to streaming music, so being able to play Pandora on your car stereo is nice. Being able to place and receive calls from your car is both nice and much safer than using the phone (since the car can do it hands-free with a microphone and the built-in speakers). And being able to get traffic updates while driving and have your nav system reroute you is a huge time-saver.
Why this is a concern is because these "infotainment" systems are frequently tied into other parts of the car. How much and in what way depends on the particular system.
IMO, all these systems should be completely open-source so that interested people can look for security problems, and so updates can be made. Manufacturers (I don't mean automakers here, I mean small electronic device makers, esp. such as router makers and phone makers, but there's little reason to believe automakers will do much better) have a terrible track record of abandoning products after a short time and not providing software or security updates, leaving users open to hack attacks. Disgustingly, the manufacturers' advice for these problems is to simply "buy a new device from us!". Forcing all such software to be open-source, and also requiring the technique (and any encryption keys needed) for performing updates to be open, would mostly solve this problem. Just look at the open-source firmwares for routers, and for phones. And unlike phones and routers where there's countless versions of the hardware out there and it changes every 3 months, from what I can tell, cars aren't like this: they come up with an infotainment system and use it in all the automakers' products for years at a time. My Mazda's system is made by JCI/Visteon and is used in almost all Mazdas, for instance, same firmware and all. I imagine other automakers are the same. So if someone came up with an alternative firmware for my car, the same build would work for probably a dozen cars across a 4-8 year range.
Finally, I have to point out (I've already mentioned it above), but for your bit about "rigging the Bluetooth" to specifically authorize a given phone, **Bluetooth already works that way**. It's part of the protocol. Some random person can't just drive by with a Bluetooth phone and hack into your car; you have to pair them.
Then you're really ignorant about how OSes and browsers work. Sure, theoretically, JS can do that within a single browser tab, but that's it. If you're logging into Google/Amazon, then you're already sending your keystrokes there, so what's the problem?