You can't just take a desktop operating system and cram it into a mobile device. They don't work the same way. Even if you tweak the system itself, create a new interface that works acceptably with a tiny touch screen - you still have a whole ecosystem, thousands of programs designed for big screen and physical peripheral.
That's not how DeX works at all.
The idea is : you keep Android (or Tizen) working on your phone just as before.
But whenever the phone is connected to the DeX dock, instead of blowing up the Android interface on the lot-of-inches monitor, you start a separate Ubuntu VM and display that on the screen and control it through the USB/Mouse. (A little bit like having your USB Bootstick with you, except you don't even need a desktop to boot it, you run it on the smartphone's CPU).
And because all the above mentioned systems all run on the Linux kernel : Android (and Tizen) and Ubuntu....you can simply use a chroot or a container to spin up very quickly your desktop linux whenever docked. (Instead of booting a whole VM).
...which you're now replacing with the "Runs as the chipset's northbridge" proprietary blob on the smartphone's baseband modem by Qualcom.
(Haven't checked in detail, but I would be prepared to think that the Exynos variants aren't any better. Discreet baseband modems haven't been in fashion anymore since the days of TI OMAP).
Normal people usually run a browser, officially to use their workplace's outlook webmail and some google docks (but in practice even more to surf on Facebook and/or Youtube). Which such a phone will provide.
Normal people might also need from time to time to open some MS Word document. To which the recent enough version of LibreOffice provided is compatible enough.
The only thing that is going to be hard to pull off with this kind of "smartphone as a desktop's CPU" is the typesetting dumpster fire that is PowerPoint (not two different version of Microsoft's official product are compatible with each other. Don't keep your hopes to high regarding pixel-perfect import to LibreOffice). But on the other hand, the fact that this device has an HDMI out, kind of indirectly solves the problem, by making sure that the same device and software used to write the presentation can also be used to show it.
"Give me an IBM Model M keyboard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard). . . or give me death!"
And the same old factories (and even a few old timer personnel) are still churning out buckling spring mechanical keyboard under the Unicomp brand name.
intel ME isn't on Qualcomm/ARM chips in mobiles that android (linux) runs on, or any of these IoT devices. I'm willing to wager there are more mobile phones in the world than intel ME enabled PCs at this point.
The correct mention would be : MINIX is the most widely deployed OS on desktops in the world.
But indeed, the desktop themselves are completely dwarfed by the embed world, were Linux seems to be the king.
and linux would be on some AMD x86 systems
BTW, IPMI is the industry standard for "lights-out management" (and Intel ME/AMT is the Intel proprietary "lights-out management").
According to several presentation at conferences : - lots of IPMI implementation run actually Linux on their embed micro-controller. (Meaning that even in the server room/cluster/data center, Minix isn't the king it claims to be on the dekstop) - expect as many GPL-violations and tivoizations as you could imagine (so no, you can't install Debian on your micro-controller) - IPMI is just as buggy, broken and exploitable as Intel ME. (Running a IPMI-enabled server with an Opteron on a Super-micro motherboard, won't save you from exploit. It will just switch you to a different collection of exploits).
For chromebooks where google can't use their own openbios-based stack, they use heavily modified firmware, where the ME part running on the micro-controller embed in the chipset is reduced to the base minimum necessary to get the chipset running.
Among other, all the juicy bits that are targeted by ME-exploits (half-broken webserver serving as the user-interface, capability to reflash the UEFI/BIOS while the main Intel CPU isn't even powered, VNC-like server with USB-over-network extensions, etc.) are all removed. (Common, these are *chromebooks*, why to they need tools for Admins doing "lights-out" maintenance ?!?)
In a similar way, the parts of UEFI that run at "negative rings" on the main Intel CPU have also been reduced or removed.
If you grew a brain twice as large as a persons brain would it be twice as intelligent?
Very serious answer : size plays some role, but only in relation of other metrics.
- You need to compare the ratio between the size of the brain and the overall size of the body that said brain needs to control. The more body you need to control, the more primary motor and sensory zone you need inside the brain to control it. i.e.: the more you needs cells in the brain whose primary role is to be connected to part of the body.
A human has a brain of around a kilogram. An elephant's is a bit under 5kg, a whale is a bit 8 kg. That doesn't mean that whales laugh at our "inability to come with a good theory of everything and struggle with string theory instead". It's just that whales have a lot more "whale" to move around and thus need the corresponding brain parts to control it.
- You need to compare the amount of neurons (the actual brain cells doing the work) to the amount of other cells (the support cells that help the whole thing work out). (It's an approximation but you got the thing). Part of the reason why dolphins aren't winning Nobel prizes yet (apart from obvious specie-ism) is also because they have brain better adapted to their harsh environment (cold seas). Part of their brain size isn't due to neurons working to make them intelligent, but to all the other support cells making sure that the brain keeps working without any problem under circumstances where a human would have been frozen.
- You need to have a look at the brain surface. The more intelligent species (great apes, cetaceans, etc.) have found way to cram more brain power in tighter volumes by wrinkling and crumbling the surface : we tend to have deeper sulci.
You should become familiar with a concept called "Signal-to-Noise Ratio" before speaking any similar bullshit regarding the shit circus that you dare to call "intelligence gathering" on your side of the Atlantic pond.
Technically, torture works fine if you torture several persons
By inflicting torture to more people, you'll just end up with even more unreliable bullshit that all spat to you just to make you stop. Just a bigger pile of more random stuff they all hoped will make you stop, and that is.
and cross reference the statements.
You have such a huge pile of random bullshit, that you won't generate anything significant by cross-referencing.
You're most likely to get random match (some people happen to have randomly uttered the same thing in the middle of their ordeal) or thing that match due to shared common beliefs rather than actual truth (basically the poor victims will shout anything that they think will make you stop. Lots of them might think that you want to hear that it's the "evil foreign pedo-terrorist pirates with a a slightly different skin shade who did it, I swear !" So you're going to hear that a lot, even if none of the poor victim you've caught has the faintest clue of whatever you're speaking about).
You might not even have a single person in your pool of human playthings for sadists which has any information relevant to this.
Thus, it can be used for intelligence gathering but not in the justice system.
"Intelligence gathering" means the gathering of actual intelligence. Not hoarding as much noise as possible and hoping for some miracle by the data analyst guys which will suddenly make a small signal shine in the middle of the pile. You don't find needles by stacking more hay on top of the haystack.
This is valid both regarding human-rights violating practice such as torture : you're basically just adding noise, you're not helping anything, except maybe your disgusting sadistic tendencies.
And it is valid regarding privacy violating practice such as NSA-levels mass-spying.
NO, you can't find anything about me on Facebook. I don't have an account there, no one I know is allowed to reference me there
Yup, you don't have a Facebook profile, and you've politely asked your closest friend to not upload pictures with your face on them to it. Good for you.
The problem is that Facebook will data mine the living shit out of everything it comes by.
Maybe one person with whom you didn't communicate using throw away accounts (but, e.g.: you mailed using a regular e-mail, all called them with your called-ID visible) had facebook's app installed on their smartphone (and the app will automatically mine any contact details it comes by, including caller list and e-mail addresses auto-added to the replied-to list)
Maybe someone you don't know personally uploaded a picture of a crowd while you were out in the public without wearing dazzle make-up (forget about usual clothing accessories like sun-glasses, Facebook face recognition system is fine-tuned well enough to be able to recognise you even with these).
etc.
Add all these small crumbs of information together over time and facebook ends up having quite some idea about who you are without you or any of your direct friend ever giving out any such information.
At the pub used to be answer, and for some is still the most relevant.
Meet in the bar for an afterwork beer, and while there discuss interesting new plans for a trip on the upcoming week-end. And hook up with a nice girl while you're at it.
The whole internet or the mobile network could go down in flame, the above mentioned method can still work. (And if you're a regular enough at the bar, even the banking, payment processing and ATM systems can go down, and it still works for a couple of beers "on the house" or "I know you well enough, you can pay me tomorrow when the system is back up").
That's the problem with wireless file transfer: it's slow.
Almost a decade ago, Bluetooth introduced the 3.0 + HS revision of the standard, which included "Alternate MAC/PHY". This enabled Bluetooth to using the 800.11 MAC/PHY used by WiFi to achieve faster transfert speed.
If both device supported it (e.g.: smartphone with combined radio chipsets, or laptop using combined Wifi+Bluetooth mini cards) it means fast transfer.
For large files I'll use USB and charge at the same time.
Depending on the combination of feature supported by the phone (e.g.: 800.11N dual or even AC, but only USB2.0 micro USB, the transfert over USB might end up not being that much faster).
IR Link was horrible, because most laptop IR transceivers had a very narrow view. It was sort-of okay for PDAs if you held the PDA directly against the IR port, but impossible to align for a pair of laptops reliably.
On the other hand, most of the PDA and phone I've had back then all worked nicely. Seems engineering spent more time testing if the IR solution was optimal, compared to laptop where IR was an additionnal check on the feature list.
Bluetooth file transfer is also pretty mature at this point. I've used it between Windows, Mac, and FreeBSD machines and with old Nokia and new Android phones (it probably works with iOS, though it didn't in the original iPhone).
Nope. Bluetooth file sending (OBEX) doesn't work on iOS anymore. Apple has removed the feature and replaced it with a proprietary Bluetooth-enabled version of AirDrop.
AirDrop is nice because it uses bluetooth to identify nearby machines and to advertise public keys, but then creates a two-device ad-hoc wireless network and transfers at high speed.
Which is stupid and redundant given that most recent bluetooth standards (Bluetooth 3.0 + HS and more recent) can do it themselves ("Alternative MAC/PHY" - BT 3.0 do the hand shake on classic bluetooth, but then can re-use their wifi's 800.11 MAC/PHY to do high-speed transfers).
Which means that even ancient obsolete Apple devices like the iPhone 4S could do it.
Using OBEX on any more recent BT device achieves the exact same thing, and is a standard thus not needing any vendor proprietary incompatible extensions.
The only situation where the AirDrop kludge seems to make sense is in the home-built no-name beige-boxes, where Bluetooth and WiFi are handled by completely different extension modules (e.g.: a USB Bluetooth dongle and a PCIe Wifi card) and thus BT can't see/access the WiFi MAC/PHY. (Happens also on a few older laptops my old Dell Latitude uses separate module for BT and Wifi. But lots of modern laptops tend to use combined Wifi + Bluetooth modules. It's not only for space saving, it also makes "Alternate MAC/PHY" work).
I'm quite annoyed that Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all developing independent protocols for this though. I want an open protocol that works with all of my devices, not a mess of protocols where I can use one between my laptop and Android phone, one between my laptop and iPad, none between my iPad and Android phone, a different one between Windows devices, and so on.
...and you see where all this is going : There is one such shared protocol, and it's called DropBox. Or Google Drive. Or iCloud. etc.
Basically, the manufacturer have low incentive in developing (or keeping, in the case of bluetooth OBEX) cross platform standard - because they let the user swap files for free. This eats into the profits of any cloud-storage solution. (DropBox "Pro" accounts, etc.)
With autonomous vehicles though you have the potential to make a "taxi service" that's cheaper to use than owning the car, while still retaining almost all the convenience (aside from using your car for storage).
Why wait for autonomous vehicles ? Car-sharing services already work well as of today. And some (as the specific "free floating" example I've linked) are completely straight forward : inside the coverage zone, you can pick up any car you find (an app can help you locate one if there's currently none in street down from your building) and leave it anywhere in the coverage zone.
Most people use their car what, maybe an hour or two per day? So 4-6 people could potentially share the same car if their schedules meshed perfectly, each paying under 1/4 of the purchase price and a bit more in mileage/maintenance costs than they normally would (since the car also has to drive between users).
Obviously finding 4 people whose schedules mesh that perfectly is all but impossible, but with a big enough pools of cars and riders the discrepancies are easy to compensate for.
Actually there has been some studies done by ETHZ on the above mentioned car sharing system, and indeed, it's been proven than one such car replace four regular cars. (That's not even an autonomous car. It doesn't move on it's own to the next user, it just stays waiting in the street for you, but as you mention, with a big enough fleet of shared cars, it works out eventually).
Station-based shared cars systems are also similarly popular in Europe, too.
That, and Facebook, are the 2 biggest memory hogs on my phone I wish I could delete
If they came pre-installed with the phone, and you can't actually reflash a decent ROM (LineageOS) because of locked bootloader, you can still uninstall the update and then disable them. The App will still take place on your flash, but at least they won't be running and hogging system ressource (memory and CPU cycles).
If you *need* them installed (because of networking effect because all your friends, your family, your significant other(s) keep stupidly using them), you can try the Lite version that Facebook produces for 3rd-world countries. They consume much less resources. (But might miss some feature : Facebook Messenger Lite only features text chat, no video/audio calls).
It sounds like you're making a veiled Analog vs Digital argument again.
No, I'm just answering to the post above:
Heck, with really good tape and really good equipment, you can get audio that's almost CD quality.
Yes, you can achieve almost CD quality on tape, and the simplest most straight forward method is to store the actual CD audio stream on tape. (Either as a backup file, and that what the modern day LTO Ultrium tape format is all about, or as an actual PCM audio stream one of the various Digital Audio Tape formats that exist since at least a couple of decades).
Regarding the veiled Analog vs Digital argument : I'm not into listening to recordings of bats or dolphins (nor am I into X-Ray and Gamma ray photography*). Thus CD's digital is pretty good enough for me as it already covers the whole range physiologically perceivable by human ears.
---- *: As in image that actually keeps the X-rays component of the spectrum, not as black-and-white human visible rendering of X-Ray detectors as used in medical imaging).
Some forms of tape (not cassette, or anything the individual consumer will buy) can be used as the master and far exceed CDs just storing the audio; not that it matters for most purposes.
Good for them. I'm sure you these forms are useful in some fields. (As in biologists actually studying bats' and dolphins' calls) In my case, as you suggest, it doesn't matter.
That to me basically says "the display that'll suck my battery dry the fastest".
Actually, that depends.
classic IPS TFT LCD display contantly needs power (to keep the light on). Thus even a whole black screen consume power (to make light that will be blocked near completely by every signle liquid cristal). Only very recent high-range desktop and TV display have started locally varying the light emitted by LED backlights to adapt to local display (they'll dim the backlight in some region of the display instead of filtering the light through the LCD).
OLED based display only need power to make the (proteins inside the) pixels shine. A dark pixel doesn't consume power, a whole black screen consume nearly no power at even if the phone is on (that's how OLED phone can manage not to kill battery while displaying time and/or status while suspended : only the non-black pixels consume power).
So switching from LCD to OLED (and turning of display-while-suspended) actually can increase your battery life.
Apple, Samsung and Google are making competing products for the same user base where they are trying to make the ultimate premium phone
Google isn't making a product directly competing for the same user base.
Google's userbase are the advertisers, and the product they sell are the eyeballs of the viewer. They don't care if you saw the ads while looking at a Google Pixel, a Samsung Galaxy, any other random Android-running smartphone, or even Apple iPhone, for that matters. As long as they managed to expose you to the ad, they earn money.
Their other biggest revenue stream is their Play Store. Given the huge prevalence of Android-running devices, or even Android-compatible hardware (like Chromebooks or Jolla's Sailfish OS) Google again doesn't specifically need to build their own devices.
Google making device isn't a revenue stream generator for them. It's only a way to show case bleeding edge technology that will end-up being eventually available in most other android-running device by other manufacturer. It's basically just a marketing stuff, to make sure that people will still go on-line and still run android apps.
But they don't make the biggest chunk of their fortune by selling devices themselves, and thus are absolutely NOT in direct competition with Apple nor Samsung.
Heck, with really good tape and really good equipment, you can get audio that's almost CD quality.
And it's called DAT, and it's (very approximately) a CD (-like) bit-stream recorded on a digital tape.
Yes, you can achieve CD quality on tape if you store CD streams on tape.
--
Small details: Yes, I know. CD are exactly 16bits @ 44.1 kHz, whereas DAT are 16 bits too, but with various sample rates available. But you can use a digital sound on DAT that is an exact clone of a CD, that's my point.
Or just store your perfect CD rip files on Ultirum LTO backup tapes and stop bothering me about minute format details.
Considering the high cost of these vehicles (especially Teslas), the effect of the current subsidy system is to transfer tax dollars to the already well-off.
Which can all be traced back to the way cities are organized in your country, with even simple tasks ("going to buy some groceries") involving driving several kilometers. This makes the general population used to drive longer distance, and therefor anxious about the range of any vehicle, which in turn pressures manufacturer to build EV with huge batteries. And as batteries are the most expensive part in an EV, the end result is that in north america, EV are extremely expensive and for the ultra rich only.
Contrast this with Europe, which is more densely populated. Everday normal car usage very rarely exceeds a couple of dozens of kms. As such even tiny batteries (e.g.: 22kWh, giving somewhere around ~125km range depending on who's driving) were already very useful. As such european manufacturer have more likely used a bottum up approach, starting with small car and short range, and progressively extending them as technology improves (as opposed to the US marker, were Tesla took the opposite approach : build a car with a good range that cost a lot and the produce progressively cheaper car models as production costs go down).
Such small cars european cars (e.g.: Renault Zoe, formely with 22kWh battery, now 45kWh) are popular here around (not only to upper class but even to mid-class) and available in car sharing companies (meaning that even student can drive them). Far different situation than Teslas in the US.
I think some engineering students at UC should make a few cell phone listening devices
Cell phone technology isn't very secure per se. For big brains used to work on radio devices, building a listening system wouldn't be that much difficult. The only way to be sure that your communication remains secure, is to use end-to-end encryption. The only way to keep some level of anonymity is to add onion routing to the equations (but due to high latency, you're then limited to texting).
...the main problem is that the frequencies used by smartphone aren't public (unlike your good old friend 2.4 Ghz used by WiFi, Bluetooth, wireless USB and just near everything else under the sun). These frequencies are heavily regulated, and the mere fact that you start playing around might be asking for trouble. (Well at least if you're only passively listening, there's less chances of being caught, and in practice you can't cause any cell network disruption).
Also, modern plastic chemistries have tremendously improved, with things like longer distances (>100m) and/or multi-gigabites now possible on POF (Plastic Optical Fiber).
That means that if you can wire up your whole house or you whole building LAN with cheap plastic oprtical fiber (doesn't even require a termination, you just cut the cable and plug then directly into the connector of the box, a little bit reminiscent of speaker connectors), you could definitely go beyond in-room use. Distributing sound over long distances if you want, *without* any ground loops.
10 years ago when Apple released the iPhone, it really had shaken the market up.
Well, depends on your point of reference.
By comparison of common feature phone of the era : Yes it was revolutionary.
By comparison of what PDAs have been doing for the past few decades, starting from Psion, PalmOS, etc.. : The iPhone was just "meh..."
It was just a bit more modern than the then current iterations of PalmOS that started to show their age. And it was just a little bit less sucky then Microsoft's usual Windows bullshit. On the hand iOS completely lacked any 3rd party apps support, whereas the main competitors back then had vibrant communities of 3rd party developers and apps markets.
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You can't just take a desktop operating system and cram it into a mobile device. They don't work the same way.
Even if you tweak the system itself, create a new interface that works acceptably with a tiny touch screen - you still have a whole ecosystem, thousands of programs designed for big screen and physical peripheral.
That's not how DeX works at all.
The idea is : you keep Android (or Tizen) working on your phone just as before.
But whenever the phone is connected to the DeX dock, instead of blowing up the Android interface on the lot-of-inches monitor, you start a separate Ubuntu VM and display that on the screen and control it through the USB/Mouse.
(A little bit like having your USB Bootstick with you, except you don't even need a desktop to boot it, you run it on the smartphone's CPU).
And because all the above mentioned systems all run on the Linux kernel : Android (and Tizen) and Ubuntu. ...you can simply use a chroot or a container to spin up very quickly your desktop linux whenever docked.
(Instead of booting a whole VM).
...which you're now replacing with the "Runs as the chipset's northbridge" proprietary blob on the smartphone's baseband modem by Qualcom.
(Haven't checked in detail, but I would be prepared to think that the Exynos variants aren't any better.
Discreet baseband modems haven't been in fashion anymore since the days of TI OMAP).
Normal people don't run Linux!
Normal people usually run a browser, officially to use their workplace's outlook webmail and some google docks (but in practice even more to surf on Facebook and/or Youtube).
Which such a phone will provide.
Normal people might also need from time to time to open some MS Word document. To which the recent enough version of LibreOffice provided is compatible enough.
The only thing that is going to be hard to pull off with this kind of "smartphone as a desktop's CPU" is the typesetting dumpster fire that is PowerPoint (not two different version of Microsoft's official product are compatible with each other. Don't keep your hopes to high regarding pixel-perfect import to LibreOffice).
But on the other hand, the fact that this device has an HDMI out, kind of indirectly solves the problem, by making sure that the same device and software used to write the presentation can also be used to show it.
Also, this Ubuntu-based desktop is 100% compatible with Youporn which probably solves the needs of 99% of internet use.
"Give me an IBM Model M keyboard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard). . . or give me death!"
And the same old factories (and even a few old timer personnel) are still churning out buckling spring mechanical keyboard under the Unicomp brand name.
(This message was typed using one of these).
intel ME isn't on Qualcomm/ARM chips in mobiles that android (linux) runs on, or any of these IoT devices. I'm willing to wager there are more mobile phones in the world than intel ME enabled PCs at this point.
The correct mention would be :
MINIX is the most widely deployed OS on desktops in the world.
But indeed, the desktop themselves are completely dwarfed by the embed world, were Linux seems to be the king.
and linux would be on some AMD x86 systems
BTW, IPMI is the industry standard for "lights-out management" (and Intel ME/AMT is the Intel proprietary "lights-out management").
According to several presentation at conferences :
- lots of IPMI implementation run actually Linux on their embed micro-controller.
(Meaning that even in the server room/cluster/data center, Minix isn't the king it claims to be on the dekstop)
- expect as many GPL-violations and tivoizations as you could imagine
(so no, you can't install Debian on your micro-controller)
- IPMI is just as buggy, broken and exploitable as Intel ME.
(Running a IPMI-enabled server with an Opteron on a Super-micro motherboard, won't save you from exploit. It will just switch you to a different collection of exploits).
For chromebooks where google can't use their own openbios-based stack,
they use heavily modified firmware, where the ME part running on the micro-controller embed in the chipset is reduced to the base minimum necessary to get the chipset running.
Among other, all the juicy bits that are targeted by ME-exploits (half-broken webserver serving as the user-interface, capability to reflash the UEFI/BIOS while the main Intel CPU isn't even powered, VNC-like server with USB-over-network extensions, etc.) are all removed.
(Common, these are *chromebooks*, why to they need tools for Admins doing "lights-out" maintenance ?!?)
In a similar way, the parts of UEFI that run at "negative rings" on the main Intel CPU have also been reduced or removed.
If you grew a brain twice as large as a persons brain would it be twice as intelligent?
Very serious answer :
size plays some role, but only in relation of other metrics.
- You need to compare the ratio between the size of the brain and the overall size of the body that said brain needs to control.
The more body you need to control, the more primary motor and sensory zone you need inside the brain to control it.
i.e.: the more you needs cells in the brain whose primary role is to be connected to part of the body.
A human has a brain of around a kilogram. An elephant's is a bit under 5kg, a whale is a bit 8 kg.
That doesn't mean that whales laugh at our "inability to come with a good theory of everything and struggle with string theory instead". It's just that whales have a lot more "whale" to move around and thus need the corresponding brain parts to control it.
- You need to compare the amount of neurons (the actual brain cells doing the work) to the amount of other cells (the support cells that help the whole thing work out). (It's an approximation but you got the thing).
Part of the reason why dolphins aren't winning Nobel prizes yet (apart from obvious specie-ism) is also because they have brain better adapted to their harsh environment (cold seas). Part of their brain size isn't due to neurons working to make them intelligent, but to all the other support cells making sure that the brain keeps working without any problem under circumstances where a human would have been frozen.
- You need to have a look at the brain surface. The more intelligent species (great apes, cetaceans, etc.) have found way to cram more brain power in tighter volumes by wrinkling and crumbling the surface : we tend to have deeper sulci.
You should become familiar with a concept called "Signal-to-Noise Ratio" before speaking any similar bullshit regarding the shit circus that you dare to call "intelligence gathering" on your side of the Atlantic pond.
Technically, torture works fine if you torture several persons
By inflicting torture to more people, you'll just end up with even more unreliable bullshit that all spat to you just to make you stop.
Just a bigger pile of more random stuff they all hoped will make you stop, and that is.
and cross reference the statements.
You have such a huge pile of random bullshit, that you won't generate anything significant by cross-referencing.
You're most likely to get random match (some people happen to have randomly uttered the same thing in the middle of their ordeal) or thing that match due to shared common beliefs rather than actual truth (basically the poor victims will shout anything that they think will make you stop. Lots of them might think that you want to hear that it's the "evil foreign pedo-terrorist pirates with a a slightly different skin shade who did it, I swear !" So you're going to hear that a lot, even if none of the poor victim you've caught has the faintest clue of whatever you're speaking about).
You might not even have a single person in your pool of human playthings for sadists which has any information relevant to this.
Thus, it can be used for intelligence gathering but not in the justice system.
"Intelligence gathering" means the gathering of actual intelligence. Not hoarding as much noise as possible and hoping for some miracle by the data analyst guys which will suddenly make a small signal shine in the middle of the pile.
You don't find needles by stacking more hay on top of the haystack.
This is valid both regarding human-rights violating practice such as torture : you're basically just adding noise, you're not helping anything, except maybe your disgusting sadistic tendencies.
And it is valid regarding privacy violating practice such as NSA-levels mass-spying.
NO, you can't find anything about me on Facebook. I don't have an account there, no one I know is allowed to reference me there
Yup, you don't have a Facebook profile, and you've politely asked your closest friend to not upload pictures with your face on them to it.
Good for you.
The problem is that Facebook will data mine the living shit out of everything it comes by.
Maybe one person with whom you didn't communicate using throw away accounts (but, e.g.: you mailed using a regular e-mail, all called them with your called-ID visible) had facebook's app installed on their smartphone (and the app will automatically mine any contact details it comes by, including caller list and e-mail addresses auto-added to the replied-to list)
Maybe someone you don't know personally uploaded a picture of a crowd while you were out in the public without wearing dazzle make-up (forget about usual clothing accessories like sun-glasses, Facebook face recognition system is fine-tuned well enough to be able to recognise you even with these).
etc.
Add all these small crumbs of information together over time and facebook ends up having quite some idea about who you are without you or any of your direct friend ever giving out any such information.
How do your friends arrange meetings?
At the pub used to be answer, and for some is still the most relevant.
Meet in the bar for an afterwork beer, and while there discuss interesting new plans for a trip on the upcoming week-end.
And hook up with a nice girl while you're at it.
The whole internet or the mobile network could go down in flame, the above mentioned method can still work.
(And if you're a regular enough at the bar, even the banking, payment processing and ATM systems can go down, and it still works for a couple of beers "on the house" or "I know you well enough, you can pay me tomorrow when the system is back up").
That's the problem with wireless file transfer: it's slow.
Almost a decade ago, Bluetooth introduced the 3.0 + HS revision of the standard, which included "Alternate MAC/PHY".
This enabled Bluetooth to using the 800.11 MAC/PHY used by WiFi to achieve faster transfert speed.
If both device supported it (e.g.: smartphone with combined radio chipsets, or laptop using combined Wifi+Bluetooth mini cards) it means fast transfer.
For large files I'll use USB and charge at the same time.
Depending on the combination of feature supported by the phone (e.g.: 800.11N dual or even AC, but only USB2.0 micro USB, the transfert over USB might end up not being that much faster).
IR Link was horrible, because most laptop IR transceivers had a very narrow view. It was sort-of okay for PDAs if you held the PDA directly against the IR port, but impossible to align for a pair of laptops reliably.
On the other hand, most of the PDA and phone I've had back then all worked nicely. Seems engineering spent more time testing if the IR solution was optimal, compared to laptop where IR was an additionnal check on the feature list.
Bluetooth file transfer is also pretty mature at this point. I've used it between Windows, Mac, and FreeBSD machines and with old Nokia and new Android phones (it probably works with iOS, though it didn't in the original iPhone).
Nope. Bluetooth file sending (OBEX) doesn't work on iOS anymore. Apple has removed the feature and replaced it with a proprietary Bluetooth-enabled version of AirDrop.
AirDrop is nice because it uses bluetooth to identify nearby machines and to advertise public keys, but then creates a two-device ad-hoc wireless network and transfers at high speed.
Which is stupid and redundant given that most recent bluetooth standards (Bluetooth 3.0 + HS and more recent) can do it themselves ("Alternative MAC/PHY" - BT 3.0 do the hand shake on classic bluetooth, but then can re-use their wifi's 800.11 MAC/PHY to do high-speed transfers).
Which means that even ancient obsolete Apple devices like the iPhone 4S could do it.
Using OBEX on any more recent BT device achieves the exact same thing, and is a standard thus not needing any vendor proprietary incompatible extensions.
The only situation where the AirDrop kludge seems to make sense is in the home-built no-name beige-boxes, where Bluetooth and WiFi are handled by completely different extension modules (e.g.: a USB Bluetooth dongle and a PCIe Wifi card) and thus BT can't see/access the WiFi MAC/PHY.
(Happens also on a few older laptops my old Dell Latitude uses separate module for BT and Wifi. But lots of modern laptops tend to use combined Wifi + Bluetooth modules. It's not only for space saving, it also makes "Alternate MAC/PHY" work).
I'm quite annoyed that Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all developing independent protocols for this though. I want an open protocol that works with all of my devices, not a mess of protocols where I can use one between my laptop and Android phone, one between my laptop and iPad, none between my iPad and Android phone, a different one between Windows devices, and so on.
...and you see where all this is going :
There is one such shared protocol, and it's called DropBox. Or Google Drive. Or iCloud. etc.
Basically, the manufacturer have low incentive in developing (or keeping, in the case of bluetooth OBEX) cross platform standard - because they let the user swap files for free. This eats into the profits of any cloud-storage solution. (DropBox "Pro" accounts, etc.)
So then, what you're saying is black pixels don't matter?
Or that white pixels are keeping the most power, depending on which flamewar you want to start.
With autonomous vehicles though you have the potential to make a "taxi service" that's cheaper to use than owning the car, while still retaining almost all the convenience (aside from using your car for storage).
Why wait for autonomous vehicles ?
Car-sharing services already work well as of today. And some (as the specific "free floating" example I've linked) are completely straight forward :
inside the coverage zone, you can pick up any car you find (an app can help you locate one if there's currently none in street down from your building) and leave it anywhere in the coverage zone.
Most people use their car what, maybe an hour or two per day? So 4-6 people could potentially share the same car if their schedules meshed perfectly, each paying under 1/4 of the purchase price and a bit more in mileage/maintenance costs than they normally would (since the car also has to drive between users).
Obviously finding 4 people whose schedules mesh that perfectly is all but impossible, but with a big enough pools of cars and riders the discrepancies are easy to compensate for.
Actually there has been some studies done by ETHZ on the above mentioned car sharing system, and indeed, it's been proven than one such car replace four regular cars. (That's not even an autonomous car. It doesn't move on it's own to the next user, it just stays waiting in the street for you, but as you mention, with a big enough fleet of shared cars, it works out eventually).
Station-based shared cars systems are also similarly popular in Europe, too.
That, and Facebook, are the 2 biggest memory hogs on my phone I wish I could delete
If they came pre-installed with the phone, and you can't actually reflash a decent ROM (LineageOS) because of locked bootloader, you can still uninstall the update and then disable them. The App will still take place on your flash, but at least they won't be running and hogging system ressource (memory and CPU cycles).
If you *need* them installed (because of networking effect because all your friends, your family, your significant other(s) keep stupidly using them), you can try the Lite version that Facebook produces for 3rd-world countries. They consume much less resources. (But might miss some feature : Facebook Messenger Lite only features text chat, no video/audio calls).
Regarding the other common hogs:
- For Snapchat, I don't have any idea.
- Skype also has a Lite version, but Microsoft hasn't enabled it in the playstore for all users, so you need to side-load it yourself, e.g.: from apkmirror.
It sounds like you're making a veiled Analog vs Digital argument again.
No, I'm just answering to the post above :
Yes, you can achieve almost CD quality on tape, and the simplest most straight forward method is to store the actual CD audio stream on tape. (Either as a backup file, and that what the modern day LTO Ultrium tape format is all about, or as an actual PCM audio stream one of the various Digital Audio Tape formats that exist since at least a couple of decades).
Regarding the veiled Analog vs Digital argument :
I'm not into listening to recordings of bats or dolphins (nor am I into X-Ray and Gamma ray photography*).
Thus CD's digital is pretty good enough for me as it already covers the whole range physiologically perceivable by human ears.
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*: As in image that actually keeps the X-rays component of the spectrum, not as black-and-white human visible rendering of X-Ray detectors as used in medical imaging).
Some forms of tape (not cassette, or anything the individual consumer will buy) can be used as the master and far exceed CDs just storing the audio;
not that it matters for most purposes.
Good for them. I'm sure you these forms are useful in some fields. (As in biologists actually studying bats' and dolphins' calls)
In my case, as you suggest, it doesn't matter.
That to me basically says "the display that'll suck my battery dry the fastest".
Actually, that depends.
classic IPS TFT LCD display contantly needs power (to keep the light on). Thus even a whole black screen consume power (to make light that will be blocked near completely by every signle liquid cristal). Only very recent high-range desktop and TV display have started locally varying the light emitted by LED backlights to adapt to local display (they'll dim the backlight in some region of the display instead of filtering the light through the LCD).
OLED based display only need power to make the (proteins inside the) pixels shine. A dark pixel doesn't consume power, a whole black screen consume nearly no power at even if the phone is on (that's how OLED phone can manage not to kill battery while displaying time and/or status while suspended : only the non-black pixels consume power).
So switching from LCD to OLED (and turning of display-while-suspended) actually can increase your battery life.
Apple, Samsung and Google are making competing products for the same user base where they are trying to make the ultimate premium phone
Google isn't making a product directly competing for the same user base.
Google's userbase are the advertisers, and the product they sell are the eyeballs of the viewer.
They don't care if you saw the ads while looking at a Google Pixel, a Samsung Galaxy, any other random Android-running smartphone, or even Apple iPhone, for that matters. As long as they managed to expose you to the ad, they earn money.
Their other biggest revenue stream is their Play Store.
Given the huge prevalence of Android-running devices, or even Android-compatible hardware (like Chromebooks or Jolla's Sailfish OS) Google again doesn't specifically need to build their own devices.
Google making device isn't a revenue stream generator for them.
It's only a way to show case bleeding edge technology that will end-up being eventually available in most other android-running device by other manufacturer.
It's basically just a marketing stuff, to make sure that people will still go on-line and still run android apps.
But they don't make the biggest chunk of their fortune by selling devices themselves, and thus are absolutely NOT in direct competition with Apple nor Samsung.
Heck, with really good tape and really good equipment, you can get audio that's almost CD quality.
And it's called DAT, and it's (very approximately) a CD (-like) bit-stream recorded on a digital tape.
Yes, you can achieve CD quality on tape if you store CD streams on tape.
--
Small details: Yes, I know. CD are exactly 16bits @ 44.1 kHz, whereas DAT are 16 bits too, but with various sample rates available.
But you can use a digital sound on DAT that is an exact clone of a CD, that's my point.
Or just store your perfect CD rip files on Ultirum LTO backup tapes and stop bothering me about minute format details.
Actually, yes, there are.
But you live on the wrong (north american) side of the atlantic pond.
Considering the high cost of these vehicles (especially Teslas), the effect of the current subsidy system is to transfer tax dollars to the already well-off.
Which can all be traced back to the way cities are organized in your country, with even simple tasks ("going to buy some groceries") involving driving several kilometers. This makes the general population used to drive longer distance, and therefor anxious about the range of any vehicle, which in turn pressures manufacturer to build EV with huge batteries.
And as batteries are the most expensive part in an EV, the end result is that in north america, EV are extremely expensive and for the ultra rich only.
Contrast this with Europe, which is more densely populated. Everday normal car usage very rarely exceeds a couple of dozens of kms.
As such even tiny batteries (e.g.: 22kWh, giving somewhere around ~125km range depending on who's driving) were already very useful. As such european manufacturer have more likely used a bottum up approach, starting with small car and short range, and progressively extending them as technology improves (as opposed to the US marker, were Tesla took the opposite approach : build a car with a good range that cost a lot and the produce progressively cheaper car models as production costs go down).
Such small cars european cars (e.g.: Renault Zoe, formely with 22kWh battery, now 45kWh) are popular here around (not only to upper class but even to mid-class) and available in car sharing companies (meaning that even student can drive them).
Far different situation than Teslas in the US.
apple invented a glorified palm pilot
Which ironically was an Apple Newton done right.
(Palm was initially making graffiti plugin for Apple Netwon, before deciding to try to prove the world they could do a better PDA. They did succeed)
I think some engineering students at UC should make a few cell phone listening devices
Cell phone technology isn't very secure per se. For big brains used to work on radio devices, building a listening system wouldn't be that much difficult.
The only way to be sure that your communication remains secure, is to use end-to-end encryption.
The only way to keep some level of anonymity is to add onion routing to the equations (but due to high latency, you're then limited to texting).
and do a demonstration in front of the Police station: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/receiv...
...the main problem is that the frequencies used by smartphone aren't public (unlike your good old friend 2.4 Ghz used by WiFi, Bluetooth, wireless USB and just near everything else under the sun).
These frequencies are heavily regulated, and the mere fact that you start playing around might be asking for trouble.
(Well at least if you're only passively listening, there's less chances of being caught, and in practice you can't cause any cell network disruption).
especially with better codecs.
Also, modern plastic chemistries have tremendously improved, with things like longer distances (>100m) and/or multi-gigabites now possible on POF (Plastic Optical Fiber).
That means that if you can wire up your whole house or you whole building LAN with cheap plastic oprtical fiber (doesn't even require a termination, you just cut the cable and plug then directly into the connector of the box, a little bit reminiscent of speaker connectors), you could definitely go beyond in-room use. Distributing sound over long distances if you want, *without* any ground loops.
10 years ago when Apple released the iPhone, it really had shaken the market up.
Well, depends on your point of reference.
By comparison of common feature phone of the era : Yes it was revolutionary.
By comparison of what PDAs have been doing for the past few decades, starting from Psion, PalmOS, etc.. : The iPhone was just "meh..."
It was just a bit more modern than the then current iterations of PalmOS that started to show their age. And it was just a little bit less sucky then Microsoft's usual Windows bullshit. On the hand iOS completely lacked any 3rd party apps support, whereas the main competitors back then had vibrant communities of 3rd party developers and apps markets.