This sounds like it'd be a bit hard on the batteries themselves, like as in, shorten their usable life.
Unless its achieved by decreasing the depth of the charge cycle. i.e.: their 4000mAh battery is what another manufacturer would have called a 6000mAh battery.
Shallower cycle would help extending the battery life. Shallower cycle would keep the charging in the part of the cycle where the battery charges at max current (as opposed to "tappering" into max voltage, decreasing current closer to the ends of deeper charge cycles).
Combine with a giant screen (thus more room in the body for a physically larger battery) and a tweaked chemistry in the battery, and is possible to imaging a battery that can charge at 3C without dying within a couple of months (or exploding within a couple of days)
Charge rate limitation is expressed as "C" - i.e.: in multiples of battery capacity.
Let's say LiPo is roughly 1C. (It's a very rough approximation, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. Actual Lithium charge rate limit depends on current voltage. When nearing full capacity, the max charge current should decrease. Basically, beyond a certain point, you charge at constant voltage (which gives decreasing current) instead of at a constant current (which forces you to keep at a fixed voltage delta) )
A big 4000mAh battery would charge at 4A max. Meaning it would take 1 hour to charge them fully.
You would think that two 2000mAh batteries will charge faster in parallel, except they won't. They are smaller, so 1C means each needs to be charged at 2A max. So in the end, each needs to be charge to 1 hour again. If you manage to charge them in parallel, you're simply back to 1 hour again.
Now if you paid attention to the introduction you see a completely different way to improve things : charge cycle depth. As I said, 1C isn't actually constant on a Lithium battery (Again, DON'T ACTUAlLY TRY CHARGING AT 1C AT HOME).
If you don't go all the way up to the max (and symetrically, don't completely discharge your battery and start all the way down from the beginning - though nearly no electronics does that, because this REALLY kills the battery and require extreme careful charging on the lower part), you can avoid the parts of the charge cycle that are extremely slow, and keep in the sweet spot where the charging rate is higher. e.g.: the 4000mAh battery is what other would have called a 6000mAh battery. Or another way to put it, Xiaomi's charge cycle only goes from 15% to 85%. (Thank fully, the popular trend of ever larger screens gives more room for larger battery space, thus helping making this easier. Well, that's unless the manufacturer have jumped onto the "making the phone thin enough to slice cheese" bandwagon)
That's also how Telsa can manage that much charge of battery in such short time: they don't push the battery too much. And if you paid attention about my above comment about "REALLY killing" the battery, you'll deduce that shallower charge cycles (e.g.: always charge between 15% and 85% only) will lead to also much longer battery life. Which is also another reason why Tesla is doing it: their car batteries are supposed to last for 8 years, not be thrown away after 2 years like most smartphones are expected to be in today's over-consumerist societies. (And on these cars, you can even further configure even shallower cycles on the onboard controller to extend battery life even further).
Different chemistries might help having better life endurance and faster cycles. This is what is done by most remplacement of lead-acid batteries (LiFePo can charge at a faster rate, have more safety and longer life, but at the cost of less energy density. - But here: who cares? you're replacing a giant, heavy, low density lead-acid battery. Even LiFePo is a ginormous gain in space and weight). Tesla does it too (their batteries are a different tweak of Lithium Nickel Manganese Coblat, than the Lithium Cobalt in your laptop. Which has the bonus advantage of being less reliant on Cobalt and other conflict minerals)
TL;DR: - No parallel charging doesn't make it fast. - Charge cycles depth, and tweaking chemistry is what can shorten charge time.
Engaging "Captain Obvious" mode, ruiner of quick jokes since birth of forums:
yeah, because then stealing electricity might be more of a concern:-)
Charging an e-vehicle requires at least some voltage and amps.
More than what's available on, e.g.: street lights. (Europe, that would usually be 250V with quickly is hard requirement for a heist )
The household connector (Europe, that would be 250V, between 10A and 16A depending on regions and type of connector) would be a rather slow trickle. It's okay if you leave a vehicle *over-night* or even a couple of days. It's okay-ish if your battery is near dead and you want to get just a little bit more so you can manage to reach a better charging option (you must not be in a hurry. be ready to be patient)
US household connector are basically junk (If memory serves me well, 120V with 10A to 15A depending on connector). You should leave your car plugged in for probably a week to steal any meaning full amount of electricity. And such a slow "theft" is going to be painfully obvious.
So either you need to stay for impractically long time connected to your stealing spot. Or you need to steal from a specific rare spot with better voltage/amps, most of which arent easily accessible: - in houses, they would be located in kitchen/cellar - out door they would be only available at special industrial spots: e.g. where construction workers or market's food tucks needs to connect. They are either better guarded (if nothing else, because they would be a safety liability if something goes wrong), or are freely accessible to begin with for the specific purpose to attract customers to the venue (some public car chargers).
Also electricity is incredibly cheap compared to gas (hence the whole idea of business trying to attract you with cheap or free charging). So the whole procedure would help make as much money as stealing candy.
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*: i.e. 250V on each phase, but 400 between phases.
But the Huawei is on a smartphone ! and uses RYYB instead of RGGB !
(== hopefully that will be enough to avoid triggering some old patent and getting an injunction blocking the import of our phone in the patent-friendly countries such as US).
I haven't seen the Huawei in action, but the way it used to work in old compact point-and-shoot it that the variable focal length happens by having the lens move around inside the periscope, instead of having them move in the external objective like on bigger photo cameras.
We'll have to wait until iFixit does a disassembly to see if indeed the lens are moving inside or whether it's only a telephoto with fixed focal length as you suggest and unlike every other thing of this kind that came before it.
and is "targeted at businesses" whatever that means, I suspect it means game experiences will suffer greatly.
It means we were quite optimistic when we projected the expected growth of the VR gaming market, and ended up no pushing out as many units today as we expected back then. (See CCP Games shutting down their VR R&D and shelfing projectes such as EVE: Valkyrie)
So in order to recoup cost, instead of aiming for more units (which will never find buyer, for lack of a big enough ecosystem of VR Games), we'll have to earn money buy selling more expensive "Premium" units. And we heard that the business sector is supposed to be some big spender.
So now we're waiting for a miracle for the business sector to suddenly find some killer application for VR tech to start buying our same shit at a higher price.
as soon as you're willing to pay a 75% income tax.
...which surely beats setting aside 75% of your revenues to pay off various debts (mortgages, other credits, etc.) that you got your self into to pay things that we tax-paying "evil euro-communists" get for free (e.g.: student loans vs. nearly free education).
Oh, yeah, I get it. You don't like that taxes are imposed on you, you'd prefere chosing yourself, where you're going to lose 75% of your income.
For us now but not for the people at the time. Go and read some Dickens. Life sucked very hard for a lot of people.
...in a society that completely lacked any form of social welfare, social assistance to help you transition, unemployment benefits to make the end meets until you find yourself some other source of income, etc.
Where basically if you didn't have education and some economies in the bank (i.e.: was rich enough to even *have* a bank account to begin with), Society's only opinion was "sucks to be with you".
Yes, this time, this is exactly going to go the exact same way as the dystopian past of Dickens' time.
Quick rule of thumb: 1. All automation in the past was GOOD. 2. All automation in the future will be BAD. The is what the public has believed for at least three centuries.
everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
The problem is while Darwin's selection is doing its work among the kids in the anti-vaxx classroom, there are risk of collateral damage in the neighbouring class, for the couple of kids whose parent aren't against vaccination but for some reason (e.g.: non-working immune system, other incompatibilites preventing vaccination, or simply hasn't been vaccinated yet, etc.) the kid isn't properly immunized.
cf. Herd immunization.
You wouldn't want to to hurt those.
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(And in practice, the firm anti-vaxx believer will find a way to put the blame on the school and hospital why their kid died - Hey, the doctor put the kid on all these unnatural chemical drugs while trying to save it, instead of trying to put the kid on all natural 100% raw-vega hyper doses of Vitamin C like I read in some forum on my favorite conspiracy theroy website !)
MMO wolfpacks targeting people for real-life consequences, SWATTING, etc? That's not your grandpa's colecovision.
And isn't your {insert latest popular console or computer gaming platform here} neither, here around in the "rest of the world".
Swatting is a very specific problem of the US - a country whose police has tons of big toy that they are itching to send whenever some actions is happening.
The rest of the world doesn't even have "Swat" to begin with and wouldn't understand why sending military-like tanks whenever somebody phones in telling they "heard gunshots".
In other word, the problem aren't the games, the problem is your dysfunctional country where it is possible to send tanks at somebody else's house with a simple phone call. What is wrong with you guys ?!
Pandering to the cheapskates doesn't make sense. However, the ad-mongers are desparate for funding right now since a recession is looming.
the ad-mongers aren't the only desperate.
If someone is that cheap, then why are they not fetching an ad-free copy from BitTorrent?
The main point of all these attempts at cheap tickets etc. is to try to get people out of BitTorrent (or Netflix/Amazon/whatever/wtfbbqlol) and *back into* the movie theaters.
Don't worry, you can probably just play a video of you paying attention to the phone and it'll take in place of you actually watching the ad.
The low tech version: - Hacked android / app, piping the content of a pre-recorded video into the video input of the app. (In a couple of months, they'll try various way to fingerprint the input to detect if it's in a loop, clever users will trivially bypass these checks, just by flipping random pixels / adding noise).
The high tech version:
- teleprompter-style two-way mirror like the ones used by every single youtuber. Except that instead of youtube, the camera is actually the android app playing the add (with a dummy cable in the audio jack, so it doesn't actually play the sound) And instead of the script, your normal activity is visible on reflected prompter image.
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Almost fool-proof until they decide to exclusively only display interactive ads (the kind where you need to play a mini-game to "complete" the ad - usually for a sort of enforced demo-trial games).
Probably because back when the law was passed, "making music" was considered to be the act of writing the sheets, and the act of playing was merely considered as a performance of the music (think band playing in a corner of the pub/saloon/whatever. Or the musician(s) playing while a silent film is running - mostly equivalent to a movie playing an audio track).
The considered "performing" mostly the same way as an automatic piano playing a roll, or the way we nowadays consider an MP3 player reproducing a sound file.
Eventually, once recording and reproducing performance became common, a "specific performance" became a thing and artists became something important. But by then, the commercial entities managed to wrestle law into their advantages.
funny, it seems like we are always being told that we are given encryption tools that are unbreakable, only in hindsight to find out that they were nowhere as secure as advertised.
Maybe the long post wasn't clear enough. I'm not saying that the algorithms are guaranteed 100% unbreakable for ever.
I'm just saying that the reason of unbreakability have change drastically over time.
- Old algorithms were unbreakable because to break them requires additional computing power. It wasn't available at the time. But with time (and Moore's law) a big enough computer is guaranteed to emerge, eventually. They were (in a way) *guaranteed* to be breakable one day in the future. Just a matter of (computer) engineering.
- Newer algorithm *WILL NOT* be broken just by a bigger computer. That doesn't guarantee that they'll never be broken, it only guarantees that a bigger computer *IS NOT* the thing that will break. They'll get broken instead by either one of the following three:
- New type of physics and maths that make the algorithm irrelevant. ( ^- that is what all the quantum-crypto love to speculate about, but currently it's not something that we observe in the wild)
- Bugs are discovered, turns out the algorithm is flawed. In theory no a big enough computer can physically exist to break it, but it in practice, thanks to bugs it turns out it's trivial. ( ^- that's what happens to all cryptography standards that get phased out. See RC4)
- People are stupid. No amount of cryptographic science is going to save you if your password everywhere is always "123". Hey that's my luggage's... Or if it can simply be bypassed due to implementation blunder, because basically the lock is indeed locking the door on the left side, but noone will prevent you from unscrewing the door's hinge on the right side. ( ^- in practice, that's what is happening most of the time time nowadays. See haveibeenpwnd).
So, you can take your condescending attitude and have a nice circle-jerk with megol whilst feeling secure nobody will break the encryption on your video
Nobody is saying that the encryption of the video is never ever going to by broken. The things that we try to say is that the way it will be broken have changed.
Back in the old days, the hairy-porn video with moustaches will eventually get broken, because somebody will eventually make a big enough computer.
Nowadays, most of the time, the amateur-porn will get broken/private nudie pick will get disseminated, because most likely some bozo though that "pa$$w0rd" was secure enough (but, it follows the required numbers/signs rules !), or because some researcher has noticed that the reportedly "military grade super secret crypto technique" used by the video storage, if you twiddle the bits in a certain un-expected way, boils down to a simple ROT-13 that your pocket calculator could break.
But nowadays a bigger computer isn't the thing that will break it, it's physically not possible *now*.
(but it was physically possible a long time ago, but considered distant enough, so such crypto did get used back then)
To go back to the subject,
- 56bits DES got broken, because 56bits is small and eventually a big computer could be built (even back then people were drawing attention and sending alerts that a government *could* have the budget to make such a big computer quite soon).
- 256bits AES cannot be broken by a physical computer. Not now, not in 1'000 years from now. It could be broken by an entire new physics and maths to make an exotic new type of computer (that's what quantum computing is touted by some to be able to open as possibilites), or because some scientist will discover bugs, enabling ways to break AES, without needing to go through all 2^256 combinations (and this just hasn't happened yet for any meaningful reduction of this big number).
AES considered unbreakable and potentially getting broken on
Sepcifically for the maps on android, OSMAnd is an openstreetmap-powered solution that can also run offline.
For the rest of the de-googled smartphone see my other post above, with both solutions for no-google-apps phone and completely no-android phones. (I personnally do the latter, running Sailfish OS on Sony Xperia)
I'm wondering whether we will eventually get a trustworthy western corporation with their own version of Android that doesn't snoop so much. I have an old Android phone that my kid uses and that thing lasts almost a week on a single charge of the 1800 mAh battery.
If you specifically require *Android* :
- using the opensource LineageOS - and using either F-Droid (specifically for opensource software) or/and Aptoide (multiple 3rd party repositories) to obtain 3rd party apps. - and optionnally installing MicroG as an alternative implementation if any of your must-have apps requires a library that is normally provided by Google (And optionnally (- and optionnally Yalp store if you desperately need apps from Play store).
this are the ways to proceed to obtain an Android that doesn't snoop too much.
If you aren't married to Android specifically:
- look at the upcoming Librem 5 by Purism. It's exactly designed with the intent of "a phone that doesn't snoop too much on the kids", being built from the ground up for that (with physical kill-switched to block the separate USB-connected modem, etc.)
- or, if you want something that you can install today, look at Sailfish OS, a full blown GNU/Linux by the guys who used to work on Maemo/Meego at Nokia (before the whole Elop+Microsoft fiasco), which is installable on select few devices (Jolla sells licensed version to install on a couple of Sony devices. In the forum you can find community made opensource version for other phone) ( ^- I use that, on Sony Xperia smartphones)
- or check Ubuntu Touch, nowadays handled by UBPort now that Cannonical has dropped the ball.
Note that is you have a couple of android apps that you need, the commercial version of Sailfish offers an app compatibility layer (and refer to MicroG above and in the forum if your apps insist on Google libraries).
and Purism is considering making an app compatibility layer too (again, use MicroG for apps that require Google libraries).
For *maps* specifically, check out "OSM Scout Server" (installing your own local open-street map server on your phone) and "Pure Maps" (a nice non-google map application that can optionnally fetch maps from OSM Scout Server). The devs are currently making Sailfish OS version, and they plan to release Librem versions too once that phone hits the market.
Why not then allow the user to block GIFs past the initial frame? One could just download one frame and stop.
Because GIFs are just step 1 on the scale of horrendously ineficient way to get a stupid animated background. If web designer notice GIF don't work, they'll find alternatives:
Much further down, you find horrors like a bunch of discrete frames that get loaded and animated without javascript, relying entirely on CSS. And if you start blocking CSS, half of the web (all these "modern design with panes" type of pages that attempt to do flashy things while you scrool) will become broken and unusable.
Allowing mute video is the simple solution.
For the rest, let WebExtension authors try to cook up a solution that works enough and is verstile enough to not break the web.
For instance, unilaterally rolling out AMP in Chrome made it a new standard.
What the fuck is even AMP ?! I haven't heard about it much, and I can still function without major problems without it. Just shows how important this thing is... or not. If you use web browsers complying to W3C HTML standrd, you're still okay.
As opposed to...
Or Chrome making JS faster, because people were disabling it (and Google's tracking).
Try disabling javascript nowadays. Just try it. You'll see that half of the web doesn't display correctly.
Making JS faster has little to do with the tracking specifically (though faster JS in general means that tracking specific JS could do a little bit more). It has more to do with the fact that most web developers are considering the browser as an operating system and even a simple static pages requires gobs of third party libraries fetched from all over the web.
That's why people aren't disabling JS and why all browser makers (including Mozilla) need to make it faster: every single page requires to download more javascript code than the whole needed to fit id's Doom back in the 90s.
If your page weights 10 megabytes worth of javascript fetched from 15 different servers, the fact that 1-2k of them fetched from google is used to track is barely noticeable.
And switching to Firefox won't change a thing to this: webpages are still going to require dozens of megabyte's worth of javascript, and firefox' javascript engine will be just as well leveraged to run(*) the tiny part that relates to tracking as chrome's.
If your web browser doesn't follow modern Javascript standards, you won't be able to display significant parts of the web. If your web browser features a javascript engine, it will run(*) the tracking javascript.
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(*) unless you install some whitelisting solution like NoScript which at least is an option on Firefox (requires more than basic WebExtension API, so only works with Firefox, not on Chrome) or uBlock (Firefox supports webextensions on mobile browsers too, Chrome doesn't - uBlock is desktop-only there).
The whole point of my post is the ability to put yourself a firmware that you trust.
How can I get an iOS (or any other firmware, for that matters) to flash myself on an iPhone ?
You can't.
You're back to trusting whatever was pre-flashed at the factory.
From the point of view of "you have no control on what is running on your phone", iPhone are at least as bad as shit from Xiaomi or Huawei or even TFA's HMD, and actually even worse in practice (you can't unlock the bootloader and put your own firmware there).
You do realize ms dos was an unlawful Rip-off of dr dos, right?
You're confusing the names.
Your mixing it up with Q-DOS, that's the thing that Microsoft ripped to quickly produce MS-DOS and license as PC-DOS to IBM.
DR-DOS is the earlya attempt at bringing multi-tasking to DOS, by Digital Research, the company making the *other* major OS back then i.e.: CP/M - the OS that inspired QDOS, and that Digital Research didn't manage to license to IBM.
QDOS and thus MS-DOS being close to CP/M was a big point for Microsoft. As said above CP/M was the major OS at the time, and having a very similar API meant that application developper could quickly writes port of their software for PC-DOS on the IBM PC.
DR-DOS also leverage the closeness: it's based on Concurrent DOS, which is based on CP/M-86 (which eventually added MS-DOS compatibility) and the whole CP/M family explored multi-tasking with MP/M-86 (including MP/M-86, direct predecessor of Concurrent DOS)).
Digital Research was a significant competitor to Microsoft, that's why Microsoft tried to crush them as much as possible. (Including making the DOS-based Windows harder to run on DR-DOS)
In general all these early systems were so primitive and designed for single use
Yes, indeed. And weren't even network connected on any large scale, so not much targetted by malware. Sneakernet was, for a long time, the only viable way for a virus to have an chance at replicating (until BBS were a thing).
The UNIX, VMS and other Mainframe OS's were just to system intensive to run on these early PC's to be affordable for a normal middle class family to own.
Yes, indeed. But on the other hand, those massive machine where multi-users, connected, and among the first to communicate across larger territories, once arpanet started existing. Meaning that the knowledge about security, etc. did exist. I wasn't relevant to apply it to Apple II computers or the first 8088-based IBM PC, but the knowledge did exist.
These Early PC OS's had a few commands, and mostly just populated RAM in its executable sections with the program code, and pointed the program counter to that location. These all these early PC OS's are acceptable to viruses.
Again, I agree. These home machine were simple, and couldn't afford much in terms of security, and on the other hand, weren't much exposed to multi-users, networks, and menace (from anything else than sneakernet).
Now the MSDOS system because of the PC Compatible market, and with a legal loophole IBM had.
Still agree. MS-DOS getting popular was a fluke.
Mostly due to IBM designing an expensive machine (and slightly under-powered. Hey, you gotta protect your core business !) exclusively made out of common, off-the-shelf parts (gotta catchup after missing the micro-computer revolution). Giving a great opportunity to clone (anyone else could buy similar or better parts from the same metaphorical shelf) and make attempts at slightly better or cheaper alternatives. Also IBM was a big brand, giving even more popularity to the platform.
And thus MS-DOS (and the BIOS underneath, be it IBM's original, or cloners' clean-room re-implementation's Phoenix) becoming a de facto standard.
Microsoft being already at that point marketing itself aggressively, of course were going to win (note that two other BASICs from your list were ALSO written by Microsoft: Apple's non-ROM/non-Integer BASIC is written by Microsoft (as opposed to the in-ROM Integer BASIC), Commodore's BASIC was single-licensed from Microsoft too). No matter which company took off, they were on board automatically.
Created a Generation of software build around MSDOS Compatibility Up to Windows ME. Because these OS's needed to be backwards compatible with older software, they kepts on hacking and tricking the DOS Environment to keep working.
That is the exact point where we start to disagree. Microsoft systematically opted for the most lazy and fast fix-ups, because they wanted to concentrate more on marketing aggressiveness than on correctness.
e.g.: There was very little effort from either IBM or MS-DOS to standardize on anything but the few offerings of BIOS and DOS. To do anything but simple CLI software, you had to directly bang the hardware. They could have worked together with various software developper to make something like standard libraries, etc.
Compare the situation with Mac OS which was much more reliant on API, AmigaOS which had strong API offering, etc.
The NT Kernel got rid of a lot of the DOS code, but still had limited compatibility, which still lead to security problems. But the problems moved from easy virus code, to problems with access and authentication, mainly because Multi-tasking, Multi-User OS's was a new thing for the home User, and the fact that software can run in the background without a UI is possible, making it a problem.
The problems were with mostly Microsoft trying to keep as much compatibility with older software than possible, b
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds like it'd be a bit hard on the batteries themselves, like as in, shorten their usable life.
Unless its achieved by decreasing the depth of the charge cycle.
i.e.: their 4000mAh battery is what another manufacturer would have called a 6000mAh battery.
Shallower cycle would help extending the battery life.
Shallower cycle would keep the charging in the part of the cycle where the battery charges at max current (as opposed to "tappering" into max voltage, decreasing current closer to the ends of deeper charge cycles).
Combine with a giant screen (thus more room in the body for a physically larger battery) and a tweaked chemistry in the battery, and is possible to imaging a battery that can charge at 3C without dying within a couple of months (or exploding within a couple of days)
Charge rate limitation is expressed as "C" - i.e.: in multiples of battery capacity.
Let's say LiPo is roughly 1C.
(It's a very rough approximation, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.
Actual Lithium charge rate limit depends on current voltage. When nearing full capacity, the max charge current should decrease. Basically, beyond a certain point, you charge at constant voltage (which gives decreasing current) instead of at a constant current (which forces you to keep at a fixed voltage delta) )
A big 4000mAh battery would charge at 4A max.
Meaning it would take 1 hour to charge them fully.
You would think that two 2000mAh batteries will charge faster in parallel, except they won't.
They are smaller, so 1C means each needs to be charged at 2A max. So in the end, each needs to be charge to 1 hour again.
If you manage to charge them in parallel, you're simply back to 1 hour again.
Now if you paid attention to the introduction you see a completely different way to improve things :
charge cycle depth.
As I said, 1C isn't actually constant on a Lithium battery (Again, DON'T ACTUAlLY TRY CHARGING AT 1C AT HOME).
If you don't go all the way up to the max (and symetrically, don't completely discharge your battery and start all the way down from the beginning - though nearly no electronics does that, because this REALLY kills the battery and require extreme careful charging on the lower part), you can avoid the parts of the charge cycle that are extremely slow, and keep in the sweet spot where the charging rate is higher.
e.g.: the 4000mAh battery is what other would have called a 6000mAh battery.
Or another way to put it, Xiaomi's charge cycle only goes from 15% to 85%.
(Thank fully, the popular trend of ever larger screens gives more room for larger battery space, thus helping making this easier.
Well, that's unless the manufacturer have jumped onto the "making the phone thin enough to slice cheese" bandwagon)
That's also how Telsa can manage that much charge of battery in such short time: they don't push the battery too much.
And if you paid attention about my above comment about "REALLY killing" the battery, you'll deduce that shallower charge cycles (e.g.: always charge between 15% and 85% only) will lead to also much longer battery life.
Which is also another reason why Tesla is doing it: their car batteries are supposed to last for 8 years, not be thrown away after 2 years like most smartphones are expected to be in today's over-consumerist societies.
(And on these cars, you can even further configure even shallower cycles on the onboard controller to extend battery life even further).
Different chemistries might help having better life endurance and faster cycles.
This is what is done by most remplacement of lead-acid batteries (LiFePo can charge at a faster rate, have more safety and longer life, but at the cost of less energy density. - But here: who cares? you're replacing a giant, heavy, low density lead-acid battery. Even LiFePo is a ginormous gain in space and weight).
Tesla does it too (their batteries are a different tweak of Lithium Nickel Manganese Coblat, than the Lithium Cobalt in your laptop. Which has the bonus advantage of being less reliant on Cobalt and other conflict minerals)
TL;DR:
- No parallel charging doesn't make it fast.
- Charge cycles depth, and tweaking chemistry is what can shorten charge time.
Engaging "Captain Obvious" mode, ruiner of quick jokes since birth of forums:
yeah, because then stealing electricity might be more of a concern :-)
Charging an e-vehicle requires at least some voltage and amps.
More than what's available on, e.g.: street lights. (Europe, that would usually be 250V with quickly is hard requirement for a heist )
The household connector (Europe, that would be 250V, between 10A and 16A depending on regions and type of connector) would be a rather slow trickle.
It's okay if you leave a vehicle *over-night* or even a couple of days. It's okay-ish if your battery is near dead and you want to get just a little bit more so you can manage to reach a better charging option (you must not be in a hurry. be ready to be patient)
US household connector are basically junk (If memory serves me well, 120V with 10A to 15A depending on connector). You should leave your car plugged in for probably a week to steal any meaning full amount of electricity. And such a slow "theft" is going to be painfully obvious.
So either you need to stay for impractically long time connected to your stealing spot.
Or you need to steal from a specific rare spot with better voltage/amps, most of which arent easily accessible:
- in houses, they would be located in kitchen/cellar
- out door they would be only available at special industrial spots: e.g. where construction workers or market's food tucks needs to connect. They are either better guarded (if nothing else, because they would be a safety liability if something goes wrong), or are freely accessible to begin with for the specific purpose to attract customers to the venue (some public car chargers).
Also electricity is incredibly cheap compared to gas (hence the whole idea of business trying to attract you with cheap or free charging).
So the whole procedure would help make as much money as stealing candy.
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*: i.e. 250V on each phase, but 400 between phases.
http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Minolta_DiMAGE_X
But the Huawei is on a smartphone !
and uses RYYB instead of RGGB !
(== hopefully that will be enough to avoid triggering some old patent and getting an injunction blocking the import of our phone in the patent-friendly countries such as US).
I haven't seen the Huawei in action, but the way it used to work in old compact point-and-shoot it that the variable focal length happens by having the lens move around inside the periscope, instead of having them move in the external objective like on bigger photo cameras.
We'll have to wait until iFixit does a disassembly to see if indeed the lens are moving inside or whether it's only a telephoto with fixed focal length as you suggest and unlike every other thing of this kind that came before it.
and is "targeted at businesses" whatever that means, I suspect it means game experiences will suffer greatly.
It means we were quite optimistic when we projected the expected growth of the VR gaming market, and ended up no pushing out as many units today as we expected back then. (See CCP Games shutting down their VR R&D and shelfing projectes such as EVE: Valkyrie)
So in order to recoup cost, instead of aiming for more units (which will never find buyer, for lack of a big enough ecosystem of VR Games), we'll have to earn money buy selling more expensive "Premium" units. And we heard that the business sector is supposed to be some big spender.
So now we're waiting for a miracle for the business sector to suddenly find some killer application for VR tech to start buying our same shit at a higher price.
If passersby have their laptop HDD wiped by the strong nearby EM field,
Hello, what is this weird object that you call "HDD"?
And how can I connect it to my laptop's M.2 NVMe connector?
as soon as you're willing to pay a 75% income tax.
...which surely beats setting aside 75% of your revenues to pay off various debts (mortgages, other credits, etc.) that you got your self into to pay things that we tax-paying "evil euro-communists" get for free (e.g.: student loans vs. nearly free education).
Oh, yeah, I get it. You don't like that taxes are imposed on you, you'd prefere chosing yourself, where you're going to lose 75% of your income.
For us now but not for the people at the time. Go and read some Dickens. Life sucked very hard for a lot of people.
...in a society that completely lacked any form of social welfare, social assistance to help you transition, unemployment benefits to make the end meets until you find yourself some other source of income, etc.
Where basically if you didn't have education and some economies in the bank (i.e.: was rich enough to even *have* a bank account to begin with), Society's only opinion was "sucks to be with you".
Yes, this time, this is exactly going to go the exact same way as the dystopian past of Dickens' time.
Quick rule of thumb:
1. All automation in the past was GOOD.
2. All automation in the future will be BAD.
The is what the public has believed for at least three centuries.
To quote Douglas Adams:
The problem is while Darwin's selection is doing its work among the kids in the anti-vaxx classroom, there are risk of collateral damage in the neighbouring class, for the couple of kids whose parent aren't against vaccination but for some reason (e.g.: non-working immune system, other incompatibilites preventing vaccination, or simply hasn't been vaccinated yet, etc.) the kid isn't properly immunized.
cf. Herd immunization.
You wouldn't want to to hurt those.
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(And in practice, the firm anti-vaxx believer will find a way to put the blame on the school and hospital why their kid died - Hey, the doctor put the kid on all these unnatural chemical drugs while trying to save it, instead of trying to put the kid on all natural 100% raw-vega hyper doses of Vitamin C like I read in some forum on my favorite conspiracy theroy website !)
MMO wolfpacks targeting people for real-life consequences, SWATTING, etc? That's not your grandpa's colecovision.
And isn't your {insert latest popular console or computer gaming platform here} neither, here around in the "rest of the world".
Swatting is a very specific problem of the US - a country whose police has tons of big toy that they are itching to send whenever some actions is happening.
The rest of the world doesn't even have "Swat" to begin with and wouldn't understand why sending military-like tanks whenever somebody phones in telling they "heard gunshots".
In other word, the problem aren't the games, the problem is your dysfunctional country where it is possible to send tanks at somebody else's house with a simple phone call. What is wrong with you guys ?!
Pandering to the cheapskates doesn't make sense. However, the ad-mongers are desparate for funding right now since a recession is looming.
the ad-mongers aren't the only desperate.
If someone is that cheap, then why are they not fetching an ad-free copy from BitTorrent?
The main point of all these attempts at cheap tickets etc. is to try to get people out of BitTorrent (or Netflix/Amazon/whatever/wtfbbqlol) and *back into* the movie theaters.
Don't worry, you can probably just play a video of you paying attention to the phone and it'll take in place of you actually watching the ad.
The low tech version:
- Hacked android / app, piping the content of a pre-recorded video into the video input of the app.
(In a couple of months, they'll try various way to fingerprint the input to detect if it's in a loop, clever users will trivially bypass these checks, just by flipping random pixels / adding noise).
The high tech version:
- teleprompter-style two-way mirror like the ones used by every single youtuber.
Except that instead of youtube, the camera is actually the android app playing the add (with a dummy cable in the audio jack, so it doesn't actually play the sound)
And instead of the script, your normal activity is visible on reflected prompter image.
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Almost fool-proof until they decide to exclusively only display interactive ads (the kind where you need to play a mini-game to "complete" the ad - usually for a sort of enforced demo-trial games).
...and meanwhile, the raspberry pi lives...
Probably because back when the law was passed, "making music" was considered to be the act of writing the sheets, and the act of playing was merely considered as a performance of the music (think band playing in a corner of the pub/saloon/whatever. Or the musician(s) playing while a silent film is running - mostly equivalent to a movie playing an audio track).
The considered "performing" mostly the same way as an automatic piano playing a roll, or the way we nowadays consider an MP3 player reproducing a sound file.
Eventually, once recording and reproducing performance became common, a "specific performance" became a thing and artists became something important.
But by then, the commercial entities managed to wrestle law into their advantages.
funny, it seems like we are always being told that we are given encryption tools that are unbreakable, only in hindsight to find out that they were nowhere as secure as advertised.
Maybe the long post wasn't clear enough.
I'm not saying that the algorithms are guaranteed 100% unbreakable for ever.
I'm just saying that the reason of unbreakability have change drastically over time.
- Old algorithms were unbreakable because to break them requires additional computing power. It wasn't available at the time. But with time (and Moore's law) a big enough computer is guaranteed to emerge, eventually.
They were (in a way) *guaranteed* to be breakable one day in the future. Just a matter of (computer) engineering.
- Newer algorithm *WILL NOT* be broken just by a bigger computer. That doesn't guarantee that they'll never be broken, it only guarantees that a bigger computer *IS NOT* the thing that will break.
They'll get broken instead by either one of the following three:
- New type of physics and maths that make the algorithm irrelevant.
( ^- that is what all the quantum-crypto love to speculate about, but currently it's not something that we observe in the wild)
- Bugs are discovered, turns out the algorithm is flawed. In theory no a big enough computer can physically exist to break it, but it in practice, thanks to bugs it turns out it's trivial.
( ^- that's what happens to all cryptography standards that get phased out. See RC4)
- People are stupid. No amount of cryptographic science is going to save you if your password everywhere is always "123". Hey that's my luggage's... Or if it can simply be bypassed due to implementation blunder, because basically the lock is indeed locking the door on the left side, but noone will prevent you from unscrewing the door's hinge on the right side.
( ^- in practice, that's what is happening most of the time time nowadays. See haveibeenpwnd).
So, you can take your condescending attitude and have a nice circle-jerk with megol whilst feeling secure nobody will break the encryption on your video
Nobody is saying that the encryption of the video is never ever going to by broken.
The things that we try to say is that the way it will be broken have changed.
Back in the old days, the hairy-porn video with moustaches will eventually get broken, because somebody will eventually make a big enough computer.
Nowadays, most of the time, the amateur-porn will get broken/private nudie pick will get disseminated, because most likely some bozo though that "pa$$w0rd" was secure enough (but, it follows the required numbers/signs rules !), or because some researcher has noticed that the reportedly "military grade super secret crypto technique" used by the video storage, if you twiddle the bits in a certain un-expected way, boils down to a simple ROT-13 that your pocket calculator could break.
But nowadays a bigger computer isn't the thing that will break it, it's physically not possible *now*.
(but it was physically possible a long time ago, but considered distant enough, so such crypto did get used back then)
To go back to the subject,
- 56bits DES got broken, because 56bits is small and eventually a big computer could be built (even back then people were drawing attention and sending alerts that a government *could* have the budget to make such a big computer quite soon).
- 256bits AES cannot be broken by a physical computer. Not now, not in 1'000 years from now. It could be broken by an entire new physics and maths to make an exotic new type of computer (that's what quantum computing is touted by some to be able to open as possibilites), or because some scientist will discover bugs, enabling ways to break AES, without needing to go through all 2^256 combinations (and this just hasn't happened yet for any meaningful reduction of this big number).
AES considered unbreakable and potentially getting broken on
Sepcifically for the maps on android, OSMAnd is an openstreetmap-powered solution that can also run offline.
For the rest of the de-googled smartphone see my other post above, with both solutions for no-google-apps phone and completely no-android phones.
(I personnally do the latter, running Sailfish OS on Sony Xperia)
I'm wondering whether we will eventually get a trustworthy western corporation with their own version of Android that doesn't snoop so much. I have an old Android phone that my kid uses and that thing lasts almost a week on a single charge of the 1800 mAh battery.
If you specifically require *Android* :
- using the opensource LineageOS
- and using either F-Droid (specifically for opensource software) or/and Aptoide (multiple 3rd party repositories) to obtain 3rd party apps.
- and optionnally installing MicroG as an alternative implementation if any of your must-have apps requires a library that is normally provided by Google (And optionnally
(- and optionnally Yalp store if you desperately need apps from Play store).
this are the ways to proceed to obtain an Android that doesn't snoop too much.
If you aren't married to Android specifically:
- look at the upcoming Librem 5 by Purism. It's exactly designed with the intent of "a phone that doesn't snoop too much on the kids", being built from the ground up for that (with physical kill-switched to block the separate USB-connected modem, etc.)
- or, if you want something that you can install today, look at Sailfish OS, a full blown GNU/Linux by the guys who used to work on Maemo/Meego at Nokia (before the whole Elop+Microsoft fiasco), which is installable on select few devices (Jolla sells licensed version to install on a couple of Sony devices. In the forum you can find community made opensource version for other phone)
( ^- I use that, on Sony Xperia smartphones)
- or check Ubuntu Touch, nowadays handled by UBPort now that Cannonical has dropped the ball.
Note that is you have a couple of android apps that you need, the commercial version of Sailfish offers an app compatibility layer (and refer to MicroG above and in the forum if your apps insist on Google libraries).
and Purism is considering making an app compatibility layer too (again, use MicroG for apps that require Google libraries).
For *maps* specifically, check out "OSM Scout Server" (installing your own local open-street map server on your phone) and "Pure Maps" (a nice non-google map application that can optionnally fetch maps from OSM Scout Server).
The devs are currently making Sailfish OS version, and they plan to release Librem versions too once that phone hits the market.
Why not then allow the user to block GIFs past the initial frame? One could just download one frame and stop.
Because GIFs are just step 1 on the scale of horrendously ineficient way to get a stupid animated background.
If web designer notice GIF don't work, they'll find alternatives:
Much further down, you find horrors like a bunch of discrete frames that get loaded and animated without javascript, relying entirely on CSS.
And if you start blocking CSS, half of the web (all these "modern design with panes" type of pages that attempt to do flashy things while you scrool) will become broken and unusable.
Allowing mute video is the simple solution.
For the rest, let WebExtension authors try to cook up a solution that works enough and is verstile enough to not break the web.
For instance, unilaterally rolling out AMP in Chrome made it a new standard.
What the fuck is even AMP ?! I haven't heard about it much, and I can still function without major problems without it. Just shows how important this thing is... or not.
If you use web browsers complying to W3C HTML standrd, you're still okay.
As opposed to...
Or Chrome making JS faster, because people were disabling it (and Google's tracking).
Try disabling javascript nowadays. Just try it.
You'll see that half of the web doesn't display correctly.
Making JS faster has little to do with the tracking specifically (though faster JS in general means that tracking specific JS could do a little bit more).
It has more to do with the fact that most web developers are considering the browser as an operating system and even a simple static pages requires gobs of third party libraries fetched from all over the web.
That's why people aren't disabling JS and why all browser makers (including Mozilla) need to make it faster:
every single page requires to download more javascript code than the whole needed to fit id's Doom back in the 90s.
If your page weights 10 megabytes worth of javascript fetched from 15 different servers, the fact that 1-2k of them fetched from google is used to track is barely noticeable.
And switching to Firefox won't change a thing to this: webpages are still going to require dozens of megabyte's worth of javascript, and firefox' javascript engine will be just as well leveraged to run(*) the tiny part that relates to tracking as chrome's.
If your web browser doesn't follow modern Javascript standards, you won't be able to display significant parts of the web.
If your web browser features a javascript engine, it will run(*) the tracking javascript.
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(*) unless you install some whitelisting solution like NoScript which at least is an option on Firefox (requires more than basic WebExtension API, so only works with Firefox, not on Chrome) or uBlock (Firefox supports webextensions on mobile browsers too, Chrome doesn't - uBlock is desktop-only there).
The whole point of my post is the ability to put yourself a firmware that you trust.
How can I get an iOS (or any other firmware, for that matters) to flash myself on an iPhone ?
You can't.
You're back to trusting whatever was pre-flashed at the factory.
From the point of view of "you have no control on what is running on your phone", iPhone are at least as bad as shit from Xiaomi or Huawei or even TFA's HMD, and actually even worse in practice (you can't unlock the bootloader and put your own firmware there).
It's not like Apple has a stellar reputation for security.
It's all depending on your point of reference.
Today's subject is Microsoft.
Compared to the nightmare of security, bugs and telemetry that is Microsoft, Apple and any other vendor HAS a stellar reputation.
You do realize ms dos was an unlawful Rip-off of dr dos, right?
You're confusing the names.
Your mixing it up with Q-DOS, that's the thing that Microsoft ripped to quickly produce MS-DOS and license as PC-DOS to IBM.
DR-DOS is the earlya attempt at bringing multi-tasking to DOS, by Digital Research, the company making the *other* major OS back then i.e.: CP/M - the OS that inspired QDOS, and that Digital Research didn't manage to license to IBM.
QDOS and thus MS-DOS being close to CP/M was a big point for Microsoft. As said above CP/M was the major OS at the time, and having a very similar API meant that application developper could quickly writes port of their software for PC-DOS on the IBM PC.
DR-DOS also leverage the closeness: it's based on Concurrent DOS, which is based on CP/M-86 (which eventually added MS-DOS compatibility) and the whole CP/M family explored multi-tasking with MP/M-86 (including MP/M-86, direct predecessor of Concurrent DOS)).
Digital Research was a significant competitor to Microsoft, that's why Microsoft tried to crush them as much as possible.
(Including making the DOS-based Windows harder to run on DR-DOS)
In general all these early systems were so primitive and designed for single use
Yes, indeed. And weren't even network connected on any large scale, so not much targetted by malware.
Sneakernet was, for a long time, the only viable way for a virus to have an chance at replicating (until BBS were a thing).
The UNIX, VMS and other Mainframe OS's were just to system intensive to run on these early PC's to be affordable for a normal middle class family to own.
Yes, indeed. But on the other hand, those massive machine where multi-users, connected, and among the first to communicate across larger territories, once arpanet started existing.
Meaning that the knowledge about security, etc. did exist.
I wasn't relevant to apply it to Apple II computers or the first 8088-based IBM PC, but the knowledge did exist.
These Early PC OS's had a few commands, and mostly just populated RAM in its executable sections with the program code, and pointed the program counter to that location.
These all these early PC OS's are acceptable to viruses.
Again, I agree. These home machine were simple, and couldn't afford much in terms of security, and on the other hand, weren't much exposed to multi-users, networks, and menace (from anything else than sneakernet).
Now the MSDOS system because of the PC Compatible market, and with a legal loophole IBM had.
Still agree. MS-DOS getting popular was a fluke.
Mostly due to IBM designing an expensive machine (and slightly under-powered. Hey, you gotta protect your core business !) exclusively made out of common, off-the-shelf parts (gotta catchup after missing the micro-computer revolution). Giving a great opportunity to clone (anyone else could buy similar or better parts from the same metaphorical shelf) and make attempts at slightly better or cheaper alternatives.
Also IBM was a big brand, giving even more popularity to the platform.
And thus MS-DOS (and the BIOS underneath, be it IBM's original, or cloners' clean-room re-implementation's Phoenix) becoming a de facto standard.
Microsoft being already at that point marketing itself aggressively, of course were going to win (note that two other BASICs from your list were ALSO written by Microsoft: Apple's non-ROM/non-Integer BASIC is written by Microsoft (as opposed to the in-ROM Integer BASIC), Commodore's BASIC was single-licensed from Microsoft too). No matter which company took off, they were on board automatically.
Created a Generation of software build around MSDOS Compatibility Up to Windows ME. Because these OS's needed to be backwards compatible with older software, they kepts on hacking and tricking the DOS Environment to keep working.
That is the exact point where we start to disagree.
Microsoft systematically opted for the most lazy and fast fix-ups, because they wanted to concentrate more on marketing aggressiveness than on correctness.
e.g.: There was very little effort from either IBM or MS-DOS to standardize on anything but the few offerings of BIOS and DOS. To do anything but simple CLI software, you had to directly bang the hardware.
They could have worked together with various software developper to make something like standard libraries, etc.
Compare the situation with Mac OS which was much more reliant on API, AmigaOS which had strong API offering, etc.
The NT Kernel got rid of a lot of the DOS code, but still had limited compatibility, which still lead to security problems. But the problems moved from easy virus code, to problems with access and authentication, mainly because Multi-tasking, Multi-User OS's was a new thing for the home User, and the fact that software can run in the background without a UI is possible, making it a problem.
The problems were with mostly Microsoft trying to keep as much compatibility with older software than possible, b