Sure but it's not the iPhone that is good about fast charging, it's the chargers.
iPhones use a proprietary protocol to detect how much power the charger can deliver. Most of the USB charge regulator chips on the market support it, because it's very popular. Even the cheapest ones will support iPhone fast charging, if nothing else.
Some Android phones do actually measure how much current the charger can deliver and adjust automatically. In fact most of the mid to high end ones do. But not iPhones, they rely on the charger telling them.
That's because USB chargers can catch fire if you do the "test and try" method.
By default, USB charging via shorted D+/D- lines only allows 800mA. This is guaranteed in the USB standard.
Apple went and implemented their own way to get 0.5A, 1A and 2A charge currents - and once told, they draw those currents. You better not lie or the Apple device can and will cause your device to enter protection mode. It's why a lot of chargers lie. The packaging says they support 2A charge, but they are keyed to tell iOS to draw 1A because they actually are 1A chargers.
I've seen products destroy chargers though - we've had one that could draw up to 2A, and using the "try and use" method, we've smoked many power adapters (notably the cheap ass USB ones from China fakes)
They are happy to supply us with 2A, but they're grossly overloaded at that point and after a while will smoke and burn out (if you're lucky)
All your data? Is there a real point? If it succeeds, Tor fails.
Yeah, their network can't handle 3G speeds, so if they can send your data through Tor, you'd think it was Tor giving you crappy data speeds and not their data network.
They have 17 sources, so that's one heck of a conspiracy theory once you fit that in.;)
What surprises me is how many people, even here at slashdot, hear a few executives making strong statements and they forget all about which is provable, positive statements, or negative statements?
If it happened, and not everybody knew about it, do people who tried to find out about it but found nothing have evidence that nothing happened? Or do they only have no information?
The way I see it, Bloomberg is making statements they haven't shown the proof to. But they claim they do have that proof. As these things normally go, the details would get dribbled out later. But the deniers, they're saying they don't have any proof at all. So they're claiming that they are ignorant of if it is true. And yet, they're also claiming that their ignorance means it didn't happen, which is clearly specious.
Even the NSA, who doesn't make public statements even in situations where the country is known to have been attacked, is claiming that they're ignorant and their ignorance means something. Wowsers, people. Just wowsers. If that's what it takes to convince people you can prove a negative, they've been naive to be so quiet about so many important things for so long!
You can't prove a negative. That's a known fact. (Prove to me you aren't a murderer, for example).
What likely happened here is a general mixup - there is enough sprinkling of truth to the whole story that none of the companies involved can sue for defamation (it likely happened, it was caught, and that's why both Amazon and Apple dropped SuperMicro as a supplier). Add to it a bit of "I heard that X heard form Y that got it from Z..." to get some embellishment, and now you end up with a story that basically started out as "A couple of years ago Apple and Amazon both dropped SuperMicro as a supplier for unknown reasons... we think we know why" to "The Chinese are spying on everything right now and they've infected a major US telecom provider!".
Both Amazon and Apple figured out what happened when they got those infected boards, and dropped SuperMicro. Quite likely they were working with the FBI or something to figure out if others were affected (they probably were) and thus were asked to keep quiet while other vulnerable companies were quietly notified and could inspect their machines.
It doens't notify the seller of the app that you've uninstalled it. Rather, the next time the owner of the app tries to notify that user of something, apple/google answers that no one is listening anymore at that address. It's been like this for years, maybe some people understood that just now ?
Not even.
What happens is the app developer sets up their server to send a "ping" to your device every so often as part of the notification mechanism. The use of this is to tell apps they have new data to fetch (e.g., new e-mail, new IMs, a VoIP call is coming in, someone liked their post, etc). This prevents the app from having to poll, which is very battery intensive.
What some developers realized is they can create a special ping message that does nothing - the app gets the message, and it responds back. If they send that ping and hear no response, they know that the phone associated with that notification no longer has the app installed
What they can do after that depends on how much data they slurped from your phone while it was installed.
...that values being clever over doing the right thing, with a cool eye toward the consequences.
Adding melamine to baby formula to jack up the protein content? Clever. Not so clever when babies become sick and die because of kidney failure.
Ripping off designs from other companies? Clever. Not so much money needed for R&D. Not so clever when consumers find out there's an inferior product under that familiar user interface.
Cheating on benchmarks? And so it goes...
No, it's a mindset of GREED over the right thing. Green, as in money. The US was once a country like it, but evolved beyond it by introducing regulations that prohibit all sorts of actions.
Melamine in milk? Why, it came about in an attempt to turn 1L of milk into 2L of milk (or 1 gallon into 2 gallons). You do it by adding water. But an analysis would show that you actually watered down the milk, so add melamine to fool the measurement devices into recording it as double the amount of milk. Thus, you make twice the amount of money out of that milk.
Ripping off designs is similar - you see those designs sell, so you make a counterfeit version and hope to sell enough to fool people into paying money for it Also means you don't have to do a bunch of R&D in trying to figure out why widgets work the way they do. And if the product is expensive, there will be gullible folks willing to pay half price for a similar looking product. All you need to do is fool them into buying your cheap copy.
Benchmark cheating is the same - you want to show good numbers so people feel they're getting a good phone. If the phone benchmarks the same as every other phone in the store, it won't sell, so you want to show something ridiculously big so they can put it in big numbers on the phone tag and people will buy it because it has a big number.
Second, other people start to try to mimic that behavior, until you end up with a whole team that is working 60+-hour weeks. And performance begins to suffer, because it turns out there really are limits to how much intellectual work you can usefully do in a week.
Actually, it's not just intellectual work, but work in general. You might not believe this, but Ford was one of the first to recognize this and had people work less hours. Turns out after a certain point, workers get tired and their output drops significantly and it impacts quality
At some point the worker is too tired to care about what they are doing and thus present themselves as a hazard to themselves, others, and the product.
I love how something is "dead" if continuous updates aren't being done. At some point you are finished. It works as intended. Quit adding shit for the sake of adding shit.
It works until you have a high DPI display and/or use display scaling, and things go horribly wrong from there. "2x mode" works to make it from impossible to use to barely able to use, but it only scales the main player window by 2x - option windows, equalizer, playlist and other sub windows are still ultra tiny.
I'd be willing to bet this is actually true and the companies don't want to publically admit it and have to recall billions are dollars in tech and they probably convinced the government it would be detrimental to the companies and rhwbeconomy for it to happen as well.
Except neither Amazon nor Apple sell servers. And it's likely the Bloomberg article is true, but the timeline is wrong. It's not currently they've found the chips, but they found it years ago. Remember, both Amazon and Apple both ditched SuperMicro years ago for undisclosed reasons. Quite likely they found the chips themselves and the boards never made it into production. So Bloomberg is true that there were chips, but they were discovered and never put in service and have never been used even today.
The problem would be that it was true way back when and not now, but you can't sue for defamation if it's partly true in the past and not true now. At best you can ask politely to retract the article (and potentially re-do it).
Quite possibly it's a mix of truth (it actually happened) and falsehoods (it's still happening and Apple/Amazon are blindly using the servers). Apple feels it's a big mess to sort out what is real from what is fake.
Well, we're getting close to that now if you ask me. People (and I mean 'people in general', not the techies, not the highly educated) posess fewer and fewer skills, have less knowledge in their own heads, and have little incentive to learn skills or personally know things. The reason for this is more and more 'convenience' technlologies, and, ironically, the Internet. Why bother knowing anything when you can just Google (or DuckDuckGo) it, or have your smartphone do it for you? If certain companies have their way, in a decade or so people won't even know how to operate a motor vehicle anymore (although I maintain that particular technology will ultimately fail due to using the wrong approach). Schools are more motivated to teach kids just enough to pass standardized tests (so the schools get their funding), and not so much on actually teaching them to think. To make matters worse (and to keep this comment in context), manufacturers practically go out of their way to ensure that their products can't be effectively repaired, and certainly not by the end-user, even if the end-user is otherwise skilled, and worse, many manufacturers put legal barriers in place to discourage attempts at repair and penalize anyone who attempts to disseminate information that might facilitate repair. Then there's the fact that there has been for quite some time now a growing movement towards discouraging people from actually owning many things -- but that's a totally different discussion. I fear that we're moving inexoriably towards the world of Idiocracy; it's a coin-flip at this point however whether the consequences of climate change will take us out before that happens though.
You make an incorrect assumption that "techies" and "highly educated" are possessing fewer and fewer skills. In fact, techies are some of the worse when it comes to stuff they care about - like intellectual property law. It's not hard to understand generally, but most techies cannot differentiate between trademarks, copyrights and patents (both kinds), as evidenced by repeated "rounded corners!" type remarks (design patent), or "IP is evil, OSS is good!"
Likewise a lot of people are forced to have new skills they didn't need before - your mechanic now needs to know how to operate a computer if he wants to be able to work on modern cars. And with that comes modern computer problems - updates, Windows, viruses, etc. All he wants is to get the damn error codes out of the ECU or other computers in the car and potentially program in new stuff into same. So why does it involve having to know about "signed drivers" or "logins" or "Windows Update" and "anti-virus"? None of that stuff relates to his primary job in fixing and maintaining a vehicle.
A change has happened recently - while big companies went from simple cash registers to POS systems based on PCs and servers and backend systems, newer systems don't. They use things like iPads and such and either through the cloud or some backend server, the iPads do all the checkout and cash register stuff. Thus instead of having to maintain a new PC just so your back end inventory, back of house ordering, or other systems can interoperate, today you can use a fairly maintenance-free setup.
And let's not forget our lives have gotten more complex. TV used to come in via an antenna on top of the TV or the building. It went in to the coax input on your set and you were done. Sometime along came cable and you did the same thing, maybe with a converter box if your TV lacked the capability to tune in that many channels.But nowadays you got so many options for TV, most of which generally include the necessity of computer-like set up of WiFi and IP settings and running "apps". What happened to just connecting the cable to the wall and hitting the "channel up/down" button on the remote?
As for repair, that became a hobby option. When a TV cost you a year's disposable income and lasted maybe 100 hours before dying, you learned how to take the back off, remove all the tubes
I really really wish the pendulum would swing back to the operating system to just being an operating system. The kernel, drivers, window manager, desktop environment, etc., but basically no built-in apps, personal assistants, advertising, activation, or any other nonsense unless I want it.
As does every OEM computer maker too, because those "missing apps" are preloaded software opportunities. Right now Windows by itself does a lot of stuff which means taking a hit on pre-loaded software bundles.
But if they removed a bunch of apps, hardware manufacturers can sell those missing app spots to make more money...
Only ousted as chairman, not as CEO. So even more symbolic than the article says.
That's because that's how it works. The shareholders own the company, and they appoint a board of directors to manage the company on their behalf. They choose a chairman to lead the board.
The board then appoints an executive team (CxO) to manage the day to day operations of the company and represent the board (and by extension, the shareholders).
At best, the shareholders can oust the board or the chairman, but they cannot get rid of the executive team except by having the board do it.
Anyhow, Zuckerberg has never been much in the way of a traditional CEO - eschewing the traditional suit for a hoodie. That has angered some shareholders who expect their chairman and CEO to be a certain way.
Only Apple can have such a huge workforce, yet be unable to knock out basic updates to what amount to bog standard PC's wrapped up in designer cases. What the heck are all those people doing in the Spaceship, or are they all concussed from running into glass walls?
Easy. They're working on more profitable products.
Remember, the two worst sellers in the Apple line up are the Mac Pro and Mac Mini. And it's not because they are way outdated - it's always been true even when Steve Jobs was alive.
The Mac Pro sort of made it up by having a much larger margin, but the Mac Mini doesn't have much margin at all.
The problem with updating the Mini is well, Intel. The Mini lineup consists of one logic board only, so Apple needs from Intel a selection of CPUs that share the same socket. For mobile, Intel really only makes one set of processors, which is why you end up with a quad core i5 and a dual core i7 - it's what Intel has that shares the same footprint.
This is exactly right. For the few documents I actually infrequently need to print, I have a brother color laser printer I got off of Amazon for ~$300. It's bulky, but the toner isn't going anywhere, it connects via wifi, and doubles as a copier/scanner.
In the event I need photos printed and they have to look nice, I'll just use Costco/Walgreens/CVS, they probably have better printers than I would have anyway.
Exactly. I use the color laser at work for things that need a splash of color. My home printer is black and white,, and it serves me just fine. The only time I needed to print photos, I used a photo printing service.
And the likes of Costco and such don't use crappy inkjet printers. No, they use real photo printers on real photo paper. Basically the same kind of machine that used to generate prints from 35mm film has been adapted for the digital world (they have a very high resolution CRT screen that images the photo paper).
For photos, they are simply stunning and come with your pick of matte or gloss photo paper. And photo paper means it doesn't run at the slightest hint of water.
Inkjet printers are junk. I wouldn't print photos on them - it costs under 50 cents for a 4x6 print from the store. Better than paying $30 for a pack of 10 inkjet printer photo paper and all the special inks.
Well, code under both the MIT and BSD licenses can be used in GPL's code, but since licenses like some of the BSD licenses allow for future code to be closed, there for removing the freedom of future uses, the GPL code can't be used in the BSD projects.
"Full BSD" license code is GPL incompatible. Only modified BSD (lacking the advertising clause) is compatible.
And saying GPL can take BSD code and not vice versa is the same as "locking up BSD" code - except GPL fanboys always say "you can close source BSD code" instead of "you can GPL BSD code" because both have the exact same result - closed source or GPL, the code is no longer available to the original BSD project. Just they refuse to admit that GPL can lock up BSD code just as much as closed source "evil" can.
That's why some feel the hypocrisy - GPL fans always say BSD code can be "closed" which makes GPL better. Yet the GPL can close BSD code just as much as closed source code can. Except the GPL can also say "Look, we fixed your bug and you can't have it!".
From a BSD perspective, "closed source" lockup is exactly the same as "GPL" lockup. Except the closed source folks generally don't say their license is superior.
Personally, I like GPLv2, so my code is generally mixed license - BSD (full) and GPLv2 (only). Never really liked GPLv3 so those mix of licenses lets me release my code without having to deal with GPLv3 (because you cannot mix v2-only code with GPLv3).
The major players at the time (Cantel and Bell Mobility) built out in the major metropolitan areas and then built on the highways in between the cities (401, 400, hw7, etc.) Belleville was between Toronto and Montreal (and Kingston in between) so it (rightly) got some attention.
My family got one somehere around 1988 or so - I think Cantel actually started building out in the Vancouver area and saw some news article about it. Next thing I knew, on the wekend we headed to the mall and visited the store. We got one of the portable (not transportable) units - the Motorola DynaTAC, but it was a second or third generation model that wasn't as large as the one they demo'ed.
As the kid, it was my duty to hang onto the phone - which you have to admit, was cool at the time (and the parents knew it would free them from carrying something).
I wouldn't say cellphones were essential back then - it was one phone per family, not one phone per person. And even when going out, people still used the traditional methods of keeping in touch - like leaving a plan so in an emergency you could call a restaurant of something.
The "Reliance" part is because we've forgotten the old methods - the first thing people say when schools start banning cellphones is "how will I contact my kid" - well, back when I was in school, you called the office, who then either sent the principal to your classroom or asked for you over the PA system. (And the PA system was advanced - you could talk to an individual classroom and even respond so the principal would ask for a student and the teacher could reply).
Even worse, not having a phone means it's hard to get access to a phone - payphones are all long gone. Your phone dies, you're pretty much stuck unless you have a friend who can lend you their phone, because trying to use some stranger's phone is a non-starter.
One experiment I should try - get a seat on the commuter train, and offer it up to people... if they'd give up their electronic device (phone, tablet, etc) for the duration. (They're allowed non-electronic entertainment - a deadtree book, for example). I'm curious how many are so tethered to their phones that they get serious FOMO when forced to give it up.
2. What makes "1 in 4,000" easier to digest than "0.025%"?
0.025% is not a "people friendly" number. It's a tiny fraction that most people will never see in their lives.
As an example, show me 0.025% of something. Anything. Perhaps 0.025% of a TV. Or a cup of water. Or your phone's storage. It's hard to visualize simply because it seems to imply "a portion of".
But 1 in 4000 is more "people friendly" because you're not asking a tiny part of something, but now one unit in a bunch of units. You don't show me 0.025% of a cup of water, but 1 cup of water in 4000 cups. I can't instinctively grasp 0.025% of a cup of water, but I can see a cup, and think I see 3,999 more.
Think of it this way - we are taught percentages as fractions of a whole. 50% of a cup of water is half a cup. But 1 in 2 cups is 1 cup full of water and 1 empty cup. When your percentages get smaller, it's harder to visualize the tiny part of the whole, but easier to recognize a whole as part of a bigger group.
And yes, "people friendly" units are very useful. It's why you see storage often measured in CDs and DVDs. And it's easy to confuse - even in the metric system. Take mass for example, it's measured in grams, But you can grasp 1,000 kilograms more readily than if it was stated as 1 Megagram, despite both being the same mass. "Kilogram" is a people unit - everyone's handled kilogram massed things in their lives.
Whne I'm programming, I can already type vastly faster than I can think, and I'm a solidly average typist.
And that's really why it's "good enough". When doing a solidly creative task (e.g., writing - either text or a program), the average typist of around 60 WPM is more than fast enough to keep up with their thoughts. Or more so, given text is usually bursted from the mind to the keyboard.
The best typists can do 120WPM. Short of duplicating (re-typing) documents, there generally isn't much need for such speed continuously.
The only other use is transcribing speech - but you won't be able to type that fast (fast speech is around 250WPM, normal speech can be 150WPM or so). That's why courts still use stenographers which use a special keyboard and on average can do 250-300WPM. Of course, in the past, the stenographer had to translate their scribbles (if handwritten) or tape (if type) to actual words, but modern technology makes it possible for computers to actually do the conversion (with some training and customization including personal dictionaries).
But the fact that stenography isn't a regular school topic illustrates how little need there is for extremely fast typing.
If you just stick to a decent password, not only will it help those forgetful law enforcement types ( because it won't matter if they look at your phone or not ) but you also cannot be forced to give up a password ( in the US at least . . . . for now ) so it's a win-win for everybody:D
Personally, I think the phones should have an emergency user-configurable duress code. Key it in even once and the phone encrypts the entire phone ( just to be sure ) to some random key ( plausible deniability. . . . you truly won't know the passcode to unlock it at that point ) or just runs an embedded version of Bleach-Bit ( or similar ) that kills any hope of pulling any data from the device at all.
It was tried. Before we used fingerprints, the vast majority of phones did not even have a simple 4-digit PIN on them. Why? Because it was discovered that entering a 4-digit PIN was too much effort, when done about 1,000 times a day. Or more correctly, if you're only going to glance at your phone for under 30 seconds, spending 5 to unlock it was a huge deterrent.
And yes, that's the usage pattern of a lot of phones - the phone is unlocked to check status and everything which takes a few seconds, but happens hundreds of times a day. So even if they had a PIN set up, it quickly got disabled just out of annoyance.
Biometrics boosted the number of locked phones since you're not entering you're password thousands of times a day.
Of course, because of the police thing a number of phones have a "disable biometric" mode. For iOS, press the side button and either volume up or down button for a second and it'll enter "SOS" mode. This requires the password to be entered in order to unlock the phone.
Thus, two women will indeed always give two X chromosomes, leading to a girl. Two men will have 25% female children, 50% male children and 25% children with YY chromosomes. A quick google shows that pretty much no-one knows what that would be like. It is not impossible that it would not be viable.
It is widely believed that the Y chromosome, because of its size, is more of a "patch" chromosome. During conception, the X chromosome is "dominant" and the fetus will actually have ovaries and vagina and other female characteristics. However, a little while later, the Y chromosome disables several genes in the X chromosome, and several changes take place. The ovaries "drop" and turn into testicles. Likewise, the vaginal organs and such descend and modify themselves to become the scrotal sac and penis. The Y chromosome patches other genes inside the X chromosome to give other male characteristics.
Thus, a YY pair will be non-viable as it will lack genes only in the X chromosome.
And this would also explain things like transgenderism or gender fluidity - the patching process isn't perfect and during development errors can occur.
But seriously - any open source project ought to be included in the distro's repository and kept up to date there. I guess snaps could be handy for things you can't afford to keep up to date - to prevent breakage. But there are ways to prevent taking repo updates for individual apps. I guess snaps can protect you from library updates breaking things too, but seriously - open source desktop apps ought to be either less mission critical or more backward-compatible than the kinds of things that snaps are useful for. Wishful thinking?
Well, the main reason is you need something configured in a specific way for the system to work, and configuring said item may require pages of instructions. Or it also may include changes to a core library to include a feature the distro doesn't. Now you have a problem - you need to get the upstream owner to reconfigure the distro package to include the feature you need, before you can go and upload your package. Repeat this for a few more non-trivial libraries and it can be a headache and a mess (what if the upstream owner says no, or that they believe that feature is a security risk, etc).
Basically Linux has reached the point in its life where it's impossible to satisfy everyone - what if you configured the system one way, and and application you want to use requires your system configured another way? Or what if two programs need some library configured in a mutually exclusive fashion?
And it's always nicer to have something set up and all ready to run rather than something that needs 500 pages of documentation describing how to configure each and every dependency properly
Fact, Democrats controlled the presidency when DMCA passed.
And Republicans controlled congress.
In fact, Bill Clinton may have been President, but at the same time, democrats lost Congress for the first time. (They've never regained it since). And since all bills pass through both the legislative and executive branches, well, both sides are at fault. Even if Clinton didn't sign the DMCA, congress could still enact it anyways
I'd be nice if at least all the phones that have a notch would allow to just show black around the notch (the LG G7 does just that). It's an option that doesn't cost much and would content many people.
The new Google Pixel 3 phones do that actually - you can "disable notch" and it just turns it black. But then it turns into a really big bezel, so it's really siz of one and a half dozen of the other.
Of course, a nice use of the notch would be to have status icons that don't disappear - a full screen game for example could use everything but the notched area so the notch could still show useful status information like the time and signal status. Or perhaps it could be used for system buttons (back, home, etc) during full screen applications.
Or just get rid of spoofing. What valid reason is there to spoof a number? The ONLY reason is so the person can't call you back directly and has to go to a central answering service. Companies love that, but that is their problem.
Lots of valid reasons to spoof.
1) Business - making outgoing calls uses a trunk line that doesn't necessarily result in a callable number. Instead, you spoof it so you can give the DID or main line number of company so the person being called can call back. Calling trunk lines does absolutely nothing (dead air, or it rings forever).
2) Call centers - they may handle dozens or hundreds of customers and may need to call you back. It would be nice if the number shown is the company you called, right? I mean, if you called Apple and they said they'd call you back, the number should be the Apple number you called, rather than some random call center number. If you're in urgent need of support and get "Unknown number" calls, you might ignore them, not realizing they're your support call being returned.
3) VoIP. Again, trunk lines. Be nice if someone was using VoIP for their phone that when they called out, their number showed up, right? Better than some random phone number of the trunk line that was used to complete the call to POTS. And since that number changes, it would make using VoIP almost impossible if no one picked up because of all the strange numbers they were getting. (It still happens where you get all 0's or something Then again, it's only VoIP - I mean, who uses it?
What should happen instead is the phone company filters what numbers can be spoofed. There's no reason for a business to spoof numbers that it doesn't own, and call centers already "own" the number used to reach it so they can spoof that. They should not be able to spoof random arbitrary numbers. VoIP providers have pools of numbers as well which can be used to limit their available spoof numbers.
Of course, if you really want to get rid of scammers, ban VoIP. That's it - that's the only way they can call from India and do their scams.
But of course, VoIP is too valuable and too "high tech" and modern. Perhaps we can ban spoofing VoIP, so every VoIP call shows up as 000-000-0000.which could be your friend with Vonage or Skype or other program, or an Indian scammer. After all, it's not our fault people use VoIP, right?
I suggest to watch, here voice of well known repair professional
Of course he has a different opinion - his views are on the opposite of the equation.
The problem is, he doesn't see the fraud - he just feels the effects of trying to prevent it, which irritates people like him because well, it affects his business.
If he was subject to the same fraud he probably would be singing a different tune. I'm sure his policies will change pretty fast the moment he gets dozens or more people refusing to pay for his services daily or having to repair the same device over and over and over and over again on his dime because the customer keeps bringing it back broken with the same fault.
When he starts losing money to fraudsters, I'll take his opinion a bit more seriously.
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That's because USB chargers can catch fire if you do the "test and try" method.
By default, USB charging via shorted D+/D- lines only allows 800mA. This is guaranteed in the USB standard.
Apple went and implemented their own way to get 0.5A, 1A and 2A charge currents - and once told, they draw those currents. You better not lie or the Apple device can and will cause your device to enter protection mode. It's why a lot of chargers lie. The packaging says they support 2A charge, but they are keyed to tell iOS to draw 1A because they actually are 1A chargers.
I've seen products destroy chargers though - we've had one that could draw up to 2A, and using the "try and use" method, we've smoked many power adapters (notably the cheap ass USB ones from China fakes)
They are happy to supply us with 2A, but they're grossly overloaded at that point and after a while will smoke and burn out (if you're lucky)
Yeah, their network can't handle 3G speeds, so if they can send your data through Tor, you'd think it was Tor giving you crappy data speeds and not their data network.
Thus they can offer LTE service at 2.5G speeds!
You can't prove a negative. That's a known fact. (Prove to me you aren't a murderer, for example).
What likely happened here is a general mixup - there is enough sprinkling of truth to the whole story that none of the companies involved can sue for defamation (it likely happened, it was caught, and that's why both Amazon and Apple dropped SuperMicro as a supplier). Add to it a bit of "I heard that X heard form Y that got it from Z..." to get some embellishment, and now you end up with a story that basically started out as "A couple of years ago Apple and Amazon both dropped SuperMicro as a supplier for unknown reasons... we think we know why" to "The Chinese are spying on everything right now and they've infected a major US telecom provider!".
Both Amazon and Apple figured out what happened when they got those infected boards, and dropped SuperMicro. Quite likely they were working with the FBI or something to figure out if others were affected (they probably were) and thus were asked to keep quiet while other vulnerable companies were quietly notified and could inspect their machines.
And thus, everyone is telling a part of the truth
Not even.
What happens is the app developer sets up their server to send a "ping" to your device every so often as part of the notification mechanism. The use of this is to tell apps they have new data to fetch (e.g., new e-mail, new IMs, a VoIP call is coming in, someone liked their post, etc). This prevents the app from having to poll, which is very battery intensive.
What some developers realized is they can create a special ping message that does nothing - the app gets the message, and it responds back. If they send that ping and hear no response, they know that the phone associated with that notification no longer has the app installed
What they can do after that depends on how much data they slurped from your phone while it was installed.
No, it's a mindset of GREED over the right thing. Green, as in money. The US was once a country like it, but evolved beyond it by introducing regulations that prohibit all sorts of actions.
Melamine in milk? Why, it came about in an attempt to turn 1L of milk into 2L of milk (or 1 gallon into 2 gallons). You do it by adding water. But an analysis would show that you actually watered down the milk, so add melamine to fool the measurement devices into recording it as double the amount of milk. Thus, you make twice the amount of money out of that milk.
Ripping off designs is similar - you see those designs sell, so you make a counterfeit version and hope to sell enough to fool people into paying money for it Also means you don't have to do a bunch of R&D in trying to figure out why widgets work the way they do. And if the product is expensive, there will be gullible folks willing to pay half price for a similar looking product. All you need to do is fool them into buying your cheap copy.
Benchmark cheating is the same - you want to show good numbers so people feel they're getting a good phone. If the phone benchmarks the same as every other phone in the store, it won't sell, so you want to show something ridiculously big so they can put it in big numbers on the phone tag and people will buy it because it has a big number.
Actually, it's not just intellectual work, but work in general. You might not believe this, but Ford was one of the first to recognize this and had people work less hours. Turns out after a certain point, workers get tired and their output drops significantly and it impacts quality
At some point the worker is too tired to care about what they are doing and thus present themselves as a hazard to themselves, others, and the product.
It works until you have a high DPI display and/or use display scaling, and things go horribly wrong from there. "2x mode" works to make it from impossible to use to barely able to use, but it only scales the main player window by 2x - option windows, equalizer, playlist and other sub windows are still ultra tiny.
Except neither Amazon nor Apple sell servers. And it's likely the Bloomberg article is true, but the timeline is wrong. It's not currently they've found the chips, but they found it years ago. Remember, both Amazon and Apple both ditched SuperMicro years ago for undisclosed reasons. Quite likely they found the chips themselves and the boards never made it into production. So Bloomberg is true that there were chips, but they were discovered and never put in service and have never been used even today.
The problem would be that it was true way back when and not now, but you can't sue for defamation if it's partly true in the past and not true now. At best you can ask politely to retract the article (and potentially re-do it).
Quite possibly it's a mix of truth (it actually happened) and falsehoods (it's still happening and Apple/Amazon are blindly using the servers). Apple feels it's a big mess to sort out what is real from what is fake.
You make an incorrect assumption that "techies" and "highly educated" are possessing fewer and fewer skills. In fact, techies are some of the worse when it comes to stuff they care about - like intellectual property law. It's not hard to understand generally, but most techies cannot differentiate between trademarks, copyrights and patents (both kinds), as evidenced by repeated "rounded corners!" type remarks (design patent), or "IP is evil, OSS is good!"
Likewise a lot of people are forced to have new skills they didn't need before - your mechanic now needs to know how to operate a computer if he wants to be able to work on modern cars. And with that comes modern computer problems - updates, Windows, viruses, etc. All he wants is to get the damn error codes out of the ECU or other computers in the car and potentially program in new stuff into same. So why does it involve having to know about "signed drivers" or "logins" or "Windows Update" and "anti-virus"? None of that stuff relates to his primary job in fixing and maintaining a vehicle.
A change has happened recently - while big companies went from simple cash registers to POS systems based on PCs and servers and backend systems, newer systems don't. They use things like iPads and such and either through the cloud or some backend server, the iPads do all the checkout and cash register stuff. Thus instead of having to maintain a new PC just so your back end inventory, back of house ordering, or other systems can interoperate, today you can use a fairly maintenance-free setup.
And let's not forget our lives have gotten more complex. TV used to come in via an antenna on top of the TV or the building. It went in to the coax input on your set and you were done. Sometime along came cable and you did the same thing, maybe with a converter box if your TV lacked the capability to tune in that many channels.But nowadays you got so many options for TV, most of which generally include the necessity of computer-like set up of WiFi and IP settings and running "apps". What happened to just connecting the cable to the wall and hitting the "channel up/down" button on the remote?
As for repair, that became a hobby option. When a TV cost you a year's disposable income and lasted maybe 100 hours before dying, you learned how to take the back off, remove all the tubes
As does every OEM computer maker too, because those "missing apps" are preloaded software opportunities. Right now Windows by itself does a lot of stuff which means taking a hit on pre-loaded software bundles.
But if they removed a bunch of apps, hardware manufacturers can sell those missing app spots to make more money...
That's because that's how it works. The shareholders own the company, and they appoint a board of directors to manage the company on their behalf. They choose a chairman to lead the board.
The board then appoints an executive team (CxO) to manage the day to day operations of the company and represent the board (and by extension, the shareholders).
At best, the shareholders can oust the board or the chairman, but they cannot get rid of the executive team except by having the board do it.
Anyhow, Zuckerberg has never been much in the way of a traditional CEO - eschewing the traditional suit for a hoodie. That has angered some shareholders who expect their chairman and CEO to be a certain way.
Easy. They're working on more profitable products.
Remember, the two worst sellers in the Apple line up are the Mac Pro and Mac Mini. And it's not because they are way outdated - it's always been true even when Steve Jobs was alive.
The Mac Pro sort of made it up by having a much larger margin, but the Mac Mini doesn't have much margin at all.
The problem with updating the Mini is well, Intel. The Mini lineup consists of one logic board only, so Apple needs from Intel a selection of CPUs that share the same socket. For mobile, Intel really only makes one set of processors, which is why you end up with a quad core i5 and a dual core i7 - it's what Intel has that shares the same footprint.
It's all the data Apple has on you that you don't already have access to. So all the hidden data Apple keeps.
iCloud data is easily accessible through the web, your phone or your Windows or Mac PC (using iCloud sync).
If you have someone wanting to download photos, iCloud control panel will do just that.
Exactly. I use the color laser at work for things that need a splash of color. My home printer is black and white,, and it serves me just fine. The only time I needed to print photos, I used a photo printing service.
And the likes of Costco and such don't use crappy inkjet printers. No, they use real photo printers on real photo paper. Basically the same kind of machine that used to generate prints from 35mm film has been adapted for the digital world (they have a very high resolution CRT screen that images the photo paper).
For photos, they are simply stunning and come with your pick of matte or gloss photo paper. And photo paper means it doesn't run at the slightest hint of water.
Inkjet printers are junk. I wouldn't print photos on them - it costs under 50 cents for a 4x6 print from the store. Better than paying $30 for a pack of 10 inkjet printer photo paper and all the special inks.
"Full BSD" license code is GPL incompatible. Only modified BSD (lacking the advertising clause) is compatible.
And saying GPL can take BSD code and not vice versa is the same as "locking up BSD" code - except GPL fanboys always say "you can close source BSD code" instead of "you can GPL BSD code" because both have the exact same result - closed source or GPL, the code is no longer available to the original BSD project. Just they refuse to admit that GPL can lock up BSD code just as much as closed source "evil" can.
That's why some feel the hypocrisy - GPL fans always say BSD code can be "closed" which makes GPL better. Yet the GPL can close BSD code just as much as closed source code can. Except the GPL can also say "Look, we fixed your bug and you can't have it!".
From a BSD perspective, "closed source" lockup is exactly the same as "GPL" lockup. Except the closed source folks generally don't say their license is superior.
Personally, I like GPLv2, so my code is generally mixed license - BSD (full) and GPLv2 (only). Never really liked GPLv3 so those mix of licenses lets me release my code without having to deal with GPLv3 (because you cannot mix v2-only code with GPLv3).
My family got one somehere around 1988 or so - I think Cantel actually started building out in the Vancouver area and saw some news article about it. Next thing I knew, on the wekend we headed to the mall and visited the store. We got one of the portable (not transportable) units - the Motorola DynaTAC, but it was a second or third generation model that wasn't as large as the one they demo'ed.
As the kid, it was my duty to hang onto the phone - which you have to admit, was cool at the time (and the parents knew it would free them from carrying something).
I wouldn't say cellphones were essential back then - it was one phone per family, not one phone per person. And even when going out, people still used the traditional methods of keeping in touch - like leaving a plan so in an emergency you could call a restaurant of something.
The "Reliance" part is because we've forgotten the old methods - the first thing people say when schools start banning cellphones is "how will I contact my kid" - well, back when I was in school, you called the office, who then either sent the principal to your classroom or asked for you over the PA system. (And the PA system was advanced - you could talk to an individual classroom and even respond so the principal would ask for a student and the teacher could reply).
Even worse, not having a phone means it's hard to get access to a phone - payphones are all long gone. Your phone dies, you're pretty much stuck unless you have a friend who can lend you their phone, because trying to use some stranger's phone is a non-starter.
One experiment I should try - get a seat on the commuter train, and offer it up to people... if they'd give up their electronic device (phone, tablet, etc) for the duration. (They're allowed non-electronic entertainment - a deadtree book, for example). I'm curious how many are so tethered to their phones that they get serious FOMO when forced to give it up.
0.025% is not a "people friendly" number. It's a tiny fraction that most people will never see in their lives.
As an example, show me 0.025% of something. Anything. Perhaps 0.025% of a TV. Or a cup of water. Or your phone's storage. It's hard to visualize simply because it seems to imply "a portion of".
But 1 in 4000 is more "people friendly" because you're not asking a tiny part of something, but now one unit in a bunch of units. You don't show me 0.025% of a cup of water, but 1 cup of water in 4000 cups. I can't instinctively grasp 0.025% of a cup of water, but I can see a cup, and think I see 3,999 more.
Think of it this way - we are taught percentages as fractions of a whole. 50% of a cup of water is half a cup. But 1 in 2 cups is 1 cup full of water and 1 empty cup. When your percentages get smaller, it's harder to visualize the tiny part of the whole, but easier to recognize a whole as part of a bigger group.
And yes, "people friendly" units are very useful. It's why you see storage often measured in CDs and DVDs. And it's easy to confuse - even in the metric system. Take mass for example, it's measured in grams, But you can grasp 1,000 kilograms more readily than if it was stated as 1 Megagram, despite both being the same mass. "Kilogram" is a people unit - everyone's handled kilogram massed things in their lives.
And that's really why it's "good enough". When doing a solidly creative task (e.g., writing - either text or a program), the average typist of around 60 WPM is more than fast enough to keep up with their thoughts. Or more so, given text is usually bursted from the mind to the keyboard.
The best typists can do 120WPM. Short of duplicating (re-typing) documents, there generally isn't much need for such speed continuously.
The only other use is transcribing speech - but you won't be able to type that fast (fast speech is around 250WPM, normal speech can be 150WPM or so). That's why courts still use stenographers which use a special keyboard and on average can do 250-300WPM. Of course, in the past, the stenographer had to translate their scribbles (if handwritten) or tape (if type) to actual words, but modern technology makes it possible for computers to actually do the conversion (with some training and customization including personal dictionaries).
But the fact that stenography isn't a regular school topic illustrates how little need there is for extremely fast typing.
It was tried. Before we used fingerprints, the vast majority of phones did not even have a simple 4-digit PIN on them. Why? Because it was discovered that entering a 4-digit PIN was too much effort, when done about 1,000 times a day. Or more correctly, if you're only going to glance at your phone for under 30 seconds, spending 5 to unlock it was a huge deterrent.
And yes, that's the usage pattern of a lot of phones - the phone is unlocked to check status and everything which takes a few seconds, but happens hundreds of times a day. So even if they had a PIN set up, it quickly got disabled just out of annoyance.
Biometrics boosted the number of locked phones since you're not entering you're password thousands of times a day.
Of course, because of the police thing a number of phones have a "disable biometric" mode. For iOS, press the side button and either volume up or down button for a second and it'll enter "SOS" mode. This requires the password to be entered in order to unlock the phone.
It is widely believed that the Y chromosome, because of its size, is more of a "patch" chromosome. During conception, the X chromosome is "dominant" and the fetus will actually have ovaries and vagina and other female characteristics. However, a little while later, the Y chromosome disables several genes in the X chromosome, and several changes take place. The ovaries "drop" and turn into testicles. Likewise, the vaginal organs and such descend and modify themselves to become the scrotal sac and penis. The Y chromosome patches other genes inside the X chromosome to give other male characteristics.
Thus, a YY pair will be non-viable as it will lack genes only in the X chromosome.
And this would also explain things like transgenderism or gender fluidity - the patching process isn't perfect and during development errors can occur.
Well, the main reason is you need something configured in a specific way for the system to work, and configuring said item may require pages of instructions. Or it also may include changes to a core library to include a feature the distro doesn't. Now you have a problem - you need to get the upstream owner to reconfigure the distro package to include the feature you need, before you can go and upload your package. Repeat this for a few more non-trivial libraries and it can be a headache and a mess (what if the upstream owner says no, or that they believe that feature is a security risk, etc).
Basically Linux has reached the point in its life where it's impossible to satisfy everyone - what if you configured the system one way, and and application you want to use requires your system configured another way? Or what if two programs need some library configured in a mutually exclusive fashion?
And it's always nicer to have something set up and all ready to run rather than something that needs 500 pages of documentation describing how to configure each and every dependency properly
And Republicans controlled congress.
In fact, Bill Clinton may have been President, but at the same time, democrats lost Congress for the first time. (They've never regained it since). And since all bills pass through both the legislative and executive branches, well, both sides are at fault. Even if Clinton didn't sign the DMCA, congress could still enact it anyways
The new Google Pixel 3 phones do that actually - you can "disable notch" and it just turns it black. But then it turns into a really big bezel, so it's really siz of one and a half dozen of the other.
Of course, a nice use of the notch would be to have status icons that don't disappear - a full screen game for example could use everything but the notched area so the notch could still show useful status information like the time and signal status. Or perhaps it could be used for system buttons (back, home, etc) during full screen applications.
Lots of valid reasons to spoof.
1) Business - making outgoing calls uses a trunk line that doesn't necessarily result in a callable number. Instead, you spoof it so you can give the DID or main line number of company so the person being called can call back. Calling trunk lines does absolutely nothing (dead air, or it rings forever).
2) Call centers - they may handle dozens or hundreds of customers and may need to call you back. It would be nice if the number shown is the company you called, right? I mean, if you called Apple and they said they'd call you back, the number should be the Apple number you called, rather than some random call center number. If you're in urgent need of support and get "Unknown number" calls, you might ignore them, not realizing they're your support call being returned.
3) VoIP. Again, trunk lines. Be nice if someone was using VoIP for their phone that when they called out, their number showed up, right? Better than some random phone number of the trunk line that was used to complete the call to POTS. And since that number changes, it would make using VoIP almost impossible if no one picked up because of all the strange numbers they were getting. (It still happens where you get all 0's or something Then again, it's only VoIP - I mean, who uses it?
What should happen instead is the phone company filters what numbers can be spoofed. There's no reason for a business to spoof numbers that it doesn't own, and call centers already "own" the number used to reach it so they can spoof that. They should not be able to spoof random arbitrary numbers. VoIP providers have pools of numbers as well which can be used to limit their available spoof numbers.
Of course, if you really want to get rid of scammers, ban VoIP. That's it - that's the only way they can call from India and do their scams.
But of course, VoIP is too valuable and too "high tech" and modern. Perhaps we can ban spoofing VoIP, so every VoIP call shows up as 000-000-0000.which could be your friend with Vonage or Skype or other program, or an Indian scammer. After all, it's not our fault people use VoIP, right?
Of course he has a different opinion - his views are on the opposite of the equation.
The problem is, he doesn't see the fraud - he just feels the effects of trying to prevent it, which irritates people like him because well, it affects his business.
If he was subject to the same fraud he probably would be singing a different tune. I'm sure his policies will change pretty fast the moment he gets dozens or more people refusing to pay for his services daily or having to repair the same device over and over and over and over again on his dime because the customer keeps bringing it back broken with the same fault.
When he starts losing money to fraudsters, I'll take his opinion a bit more seriously.