It's a laser so the it doesn't have the problem of the ink drying out like my old HP multifunction color inkjet. It prints and scans with my Windows 7 machine, my Mac and my Android devices. The toner cartridges are cheap and last 1000 pages.
The only downside is that, unlike my old HP inkjet it doesn't do color. But, realistically, how many times do you need that? And if I did I could get printed somewhere else.
Basically don't buy an inkjet - they cost a fortune in ink cartridges if you only use them infrequently. Buy a cheap mono laser printer or a mono laser multifunction device if you do a lot of scanning.
The Soviet Union advocated a conception of human rights different from the notion of rights prevalent in the West. Western legal theory emphasized the so-called âoenegativeâ rights: that is, rights of individuals against the government. The Soviet system, on the other hand, emphasized that society as a whole, rather than individuals, were the beneficiaries of âoepositiveâ rights: that is, rights from the government. In this spirit, Soviet ideology placed a premium on economic and social rights, such as access to health care, adequate and affordable basic food supplies, housing, and education, and guaranteed employment. As it acted on these guarantees during the postwar decades, the Soviet system evolved into a giant welfare state. The Kremlin proclaimed the achievement of such rights, and the benefits that Soviet citizens received from them, as evidence of the superiority of the Soviet Communist system to that of the capitalist West, where the importance of civil and political rights was emphasized, while the notion of economic and social âoerightsâ was viewed much less favorably.2
Personal property was allowed, with certain limitations. Real property mostly belonged to the State.Health, housing, education, and nutrition were guaranteed through the provision of full employment and economic welfare structures implemented in the workplace.[16]
However, these guarantees were not always met in practice. For instance, over five million people lacked adequate nutrition and starved to death during the Soviet famine of 1932â"1933, one of several Soviet famines. The 1932â"33 famine was caused primarily by Soviet-mandated collectivization.
I.e. in theory many positive rights. In practice mostly famine, shortages and bread lines.
People had a duty to work wherever the state told them to, and in practice the state had no obligation to feed them. Hence the deaths from collectivisation.
There may not be an official way, but if your possible systems are all from a limited set and you're really only having to differentiate between Windows and UEFI or DOS and Windows (the other poster pointed out that there's an official way of having both DOS and Windows entry points),
That was me
then it should be possible to find a system call that just provides information on both systems and has a return value that lets you tell them apart. You do this early and then jump to the relevant entry point.
The problem is that even though Windows and UEFI both use PE files, there are significant differences.
Windows applications use subsystem=2 for GUI and 3 for console
Also windows executables are.exe and UEFI applications are.efi
I.e. it's hard to build a single executable that would pass the subsystem and file extension checks to run on both Windows and UEFI. Which of course is by design - otherwise people would run executables on the wrong platform and brick it.
Here it seems like Dell just distribute a bunch of different executables. One for Windows/FreeDOS(.exe), one for Linux(.bin) and one for UEFI (.efi)
You could have them share a data file if space is at a premium.
Though a Win32/UEFI polyglot may be possible I can't find one. And I'm not sure how it would work.
The one possibility would be if Terse Executable files can begin at something other than offset zero in a file. TE files are a sort of stripped down PE file with all the unnecessary crap removed from the PE headers.
Originally this just printed "This program requires Microsoft Windows". Of course if you have a Dos version of something you can make that the stub.
The problem is that there's no documented way to combine two PE files for different APIs - Win32 and UEFI. It's also not really clear to me what the UEFI app should be built for - you can have native x86, native x64 or EBC - a byte code format.
Even though most Windows installations are 64 bit they can still run x86 code, so that seems safe. With UEFI you have to either match the native architecture or use EBC. And it's not clear how many UEFI bioses are x86, x64 or EBC capable. Then again I suppose Dell would know what would work. Still combining Win32 and UEFI code into one PE file seems like it would need a trick I don't know.
FreeDos and Windows would be easy - you'd have a Win32 PE file where the DOS exe stub exe was the FreeDos update exe. Same with FreeDos and UEFI because UEFI uses PE files. So you have a PE file for the UEFI code with the FreeDos code as the stub file.
UEFI uses PE files but the API is completely different to Win32. They must have worked out some way to mix MZ EXE, Win32 x86 PE and UEFI PE into one file.
And it's already in the 'new' platform - assuming that iOS source code can be tweaked easily enough to run on MacOS. So developers don't need to start over. Then again, if it's too much work, there may not be enough incentive to get your iOS stuff to work nicely on MacOS.
iOS and macOS share APIs but an iPhone app and a macOS app both need to have very different UIs.On an iPhone sized touch screen device you need a very simple UI. On macOS you can have a much more full featured one.
Not realizing that has done enormous damage to Windows as a platform - you ended up with a touch screen optimized UI on desktop machines. And forcing touch screen stuff into desktop Windows didn't convince anyone to write UWP apps that could run on both desktop and mobile. Now Windows Phone has been killed off by desktop Windows is still stuck with a lot of Metro-isms.
If Apple try and do what MS did, I can't see it working out for them.
OTOH, If there's no one to provide the 'right', like no available doctor to treat you (in the case of a 'right to healthcare'), no amount of government intervention can guarantee that right.
Exactly. In the classic case you have a state which in theory guarantees a lot of positive rights - free food, free house, free everything but doesn't grant many negative ones - freedom of speech, freedom from torture, right to due process, habeus corpus etc.
In practice you starve to death on a collective farm and if you complain about it you get arrested, tortured and sent to a concentration camp where you also starve to death.
See - Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Eastern Europe in the Cold War.
The lack of negative rights makes the positive rights meaningless.
Lenovo need to stop people writing the Bios because otherwise they'd able to remove the crapware Lenovo put in the Bios to stop people removing the crapware they put in the Windows by installing a fresh Windows image.
With an unmodified Lenovo Bios the crapware will be re-installed via Windows Platform Binary Table
Beginning with Windows 8, a PC manufacturer can embed a program - a Windows.exe file, essentially - in the PC's UEFI firmware. This is stored in the "Windows Platform Binary Table" (WPBT) section of the UEFI firmware. Whenever Windows boots, it looks at the UEFI firmware for this program, copies it from the firmware to the operating system drive, and runs it. Windows itself provides no way to stop this from happening. If the manufacturer's UEFI firmware offers it up, Windows will run it without question.
Were it not for this Bios resetting feature - a ludicrously determined user could do the following
1) Remove Windows 2) Use some other OS to dump the Bios out 3) Hack said dump to mess up the Windows Platform Binary Table and reflash it 4) Reinstall Windows from an image
And then they'd have a copy of Windows with no Lenovo Service Engine installed! The horror! Instead it seems like Lenovo have had the Bios reset itself to stop step 3), so the determined user would still have LSE installed.
Fascism and Nazism both aimed at a planned economy geared for expansionist war and an all encompassing state - Mussolini defined fascism as "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state". Pinochetian-Minarchism has a small state consisting mostly of a few army employees engaged in murderous anti communist activities with ageing rotary aircraft. Outside the state private enterprise is unaffected, and in fact privatisation means formerly owned state owned companies are sold to the private sector.
Fascism and Nazism are a form of socialism but Pinochetian-Minarchism is a Minarchist night watchman state where the army has a somewhat suspicious accident record when transporting civilians.
He's talking about the difference between negative 'freedom from' rights like 'the government is not allowed to censor' versus positive rights - you have a right to get something.
Positive rights convey an obligation on someone else, in this case to BT to upgrade their exchanges. Negative rights do not.
Some people disagree on this. Usually people with a lot of money.
A lot of countries have a right to a lot stuff - food, water, a job etc in theory but in practice they get nothing. E.g. the USSR, North Korea etc.
Meanwhile there are lot of countries which have few rights to those things but in practice people tend not to die of of thirst of famine.
Basically countries which only grant negative rights (freedom from X) tend to outperform ones that grant extensive positive rights (right to X) for for negative and positive rights.
Apple and Samsung are pushing to shorten them to sell more phones and non replaceable batteries, slowing the phone with each upgrade and moving to people where they replace each year is a way to do that. Meanwhile Americans tend to keep their phones longer and longer, probably because they're pissed off that phones are being increasingly defeatured.
Microsoft have a long history of this sort of thing. Back in the Windows Phone days they banned third party non managed applications but made it clear to Adobe that Adobe would be allowed to use native code for Flash if they wanted to
Update: The latest on this is that Microsoft's Charlie Kindel says that Adobe will have special native access for Flash, but that no other vendor will have that privilege. This still does not make sense to me. Let's suppose that Windows Phone 7 is a big success. What justification could Microsoft have for supporting the Flash runtime but not the Java runtime, for example? I suspect that Microsoft is chasing the Flash checkbox to one-up Apple; but if Adobe gets native access, others will no doubt follow.
Adobe declined the offer. And amusingly all those technologies are now more or less extinct - Windows Phone's Silverlight and XNA APIs were killed off, and Flash is pretty much dead now too.
The only reason Skype ran on Windows Phone is that Microsoft bought the company so they could deploy Skype's Win32 code signed with the Microsoft key. And then they did a rewrite using ReactXP.
Microsoft killed off Windows Phone, but Skype is bundled with Windows 10 and runs on Android and iOS. Android and iOS got the horrible ReactXP rewrite replacing the original native app. I'm not sure if the Windows 10 version is the original Skype Win32 C/C++ code, a WinRT C++ hack of it or the the ReactXP rewrite.
It is very tiresome when Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc demand than ISPs being regulated as Title II common carriers who must be network neutral and then ban each others products from their platforms.
But yeah, it's like in One Million Years BC where the humans can watch the dinosaurs fight each other rather than hunting them. Though of course the dinosaurs didn't managed to achieve regulatory capture to stop the mammals taking over, unlike tech megacorps.
You do realize that Republicans like illegal immigration, because it forces working class wages down, right? If someone lowered the boom on people illegally employing illegal immigrants, it would solve a lot of problems. The Republicans aren't about to do it.
The mainstream Republicans are weasels about immigration, but it was the Democrats who pushed abominations like the Motor Voter law
Existing law makes it a crime for a person to willfully cause, procure, or allow himself or herself or any other person to be registered as a voter, knowing that he or she or that other person is not entitled to registration. Existing law also makes it a crime to fraudulently vote or attempt to vote. This bill would provide that if a person who is ineligible to vote becomes registered to vote by operation of the California New Motor Voter Program in the absence of a violation by that person of the crime described above, that person's registration shall be presumed to have been effected with official authorization and not the fault of that person. The bill would also provide that if a person who is ineligible to vote becomes registered to vote by operation of this program, and that person votes or attempts to vote in an election held after the effective date of the person's registration, that person shall be presumed to have acted with official authorization and is not guilty of fraudulently voting or attempting to vote, unless that person willfully votes or attempts to vote knowing that he or she is not entitled to vote.
I.e. they're adding illegals to the voter rolls and decriminalising them voting.
And Democrats are even now fighting Trump's Wall. The reason for this is that Hispanics voted 2:1 Democrat to Republican
Given the Democrats believe the constitution is a living document and have already managed to reinterpret it to make gay marriage a right, and Hillary believed that DC vs Heller was wrong and that the Second Amendment needs to be reinterpreted so that individuals do not have the right to bear arms, who's to say that the Democrats next major initiative might be to reinterpret the First Amendment to say that hate speech bans are fine?
Thank the GOP got in and got Gorsuch on the SCOTUS basically. Otherwise Hillary would have nominated someone who'd have blown away big chunks of the Bill of Rights so the Second Amendment ended up meaning what it does in NYC - you have the right to bear arms, so long as you're a cop, an ex cop, rich or know the right people. Actually NYC passed law against misgendering too, so the First Amendment means jack shit there too. I'm sure if Hillary had got in she'd have nominated a SCOTUS judge who've have pushed this crap on the rest of the country.
Not to mention she said 'the unborn person has no constitutional rights'. Which honestly sounds like the Democrat position prior to the civil war that slaves people had no rights.
Three phones (that certainly all cost more than 1/3 of an iPhone if they weren't budget phones) versus what would probably be a single iPhone. Yeah, the TCO must be on your side, snort.
I bought an S2 and waited three years to get an S5. And the S5 lasted three years and now I've got a V20. Which will hopefully last three years until I have to replace it.
I.e. I buy a phone every three years. Interestingly I'm not alone in this - Motley Fool say people upgrade every 29 months on average
https://www.fool.com/investing... "Americans now take an average of 29 months to upgrade their cell phone, up from 28 months at the end of last year, and an increase of 24 to 26 months that was typical just a couple of years ago, as noted in a recent Wall Street Journal article. And just four years ago, the upgrade cycle was just 22 months. "
A phone with no removable battery from a manufacturer who degrades performance with each software update isn't going to last you three years. It will be 1-2 tops. And the Motley Fool article points out Apple and Samsung are both pushing for 12 month upgrade cycles.
"But if users are taking longer to upgrade their phones, it's clear that this could be a problem for two of the biggest smartphone makers, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Samsung (NASDAQOTH: SSNLF). Both companies now have their own yearly smartphone upgrade plans, which allow customers to pay the companies directly for their device each month, choose any of the four U.S. wireless providers, and then trade in their smartphone every 12 months for the latest model."
Actually without a firmware reset and new battery, which is tricky on the new phones, I'd have upgraded sooner, probably in 1-2 years. Like Apple, Samsung phones seem to slow down alarmingly with time, and batteries wear out.
So yeah, TCO is on my side over people who buy a new iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy every 1-2 years. And Motley Fool point out that Apple users buy a phone every 22 months with Apple trying to push this to 15.
" Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said back in February that he believed Apple has already sold about 250,000 iPhones through its upgrade program, which could definitely be considered a success given that it debuted not too long ago. But Munster made a prediction that the iPhone upgrade program would also lower the device's upgrade cycle, which appears unlikely now. Originally, Munster thought the program would reduce the average iPhone user's upgrade time frame from 22 months to only 15 months. But that 15 month time frame would mean iPhone users would be upgrading their phones 14 months earlier than the average American, based on Citigroup's new data. And with Apple's iPhone sales currently slowing, that quick upgrade time seems even more unlikely. "
You go ahead and build your business in your perceived wonderful marketplace. Give it a real good shot & invest everything you have into it.
Do come back in a few years to let us know how you did...
Apple fans show their people skills once again. If I find a viable manufacturer I'd be tempted to Kickstart it, but to be honest I've got other things that I need to work on.
Something like cryptocurrency mining will max out the CPU, which will draw more power which increase temperature.
Lithium ion batteries are basically consumables and need to be user replaceable. Sadly most electronics seems to be moving in the direction of non user replaceable batteries which makes it consumable too.
If it's a $20 pair of Bluetooth headphones I suppose it doesn't matter. If it's a $600 phone, I think it very much does.
I've bought an S2, and S5 and now a V20. If I'd got an iPhone I'd have had less flexibility and a higher total cost of ownership. Samsung are heading the same way and I want no part of it - both Samsung and Apple sell you a very expensive phone you basically have to replace in 1 or at most years' time.
The V20 was $400 or so and it should hopefully keep me going for 3, in the unfortunately highly likely case where no one makes a phone I can upgrade to without losing features I want.
What would be an ideal phone?
Something like this -
A Qualcomm Snapdragon that's one generation old to keep down costs. A removable battery. Dual SIMs. Water seals. Probably a 1080p IPS display to maximize battery life and keep down costs. A fingerprint sensor. A headphone jack. USB-C. Stock Android or LineageOS. Perhaps 64GB of internal memory, but an microSDXC slot to make it expandable. Ram perhaps 4GB.
I'd aim to sell it for $300-400.
I.e. it's basically a V20 except with seals. It might sell a bit cheaper actually given the lower spec display and that I'm not bumping the flash and ram size.
Now you say more people buy Samsung and Apple phones. I reckon given the choice above phone it'd sell pretty well. Not Apple or Samsung levels of well but you could make a business selling them.
Sooner or later I think a lot of people are going to get pissed off with the Samsung/Apple model which pushes people to upgrade and at the same time removes features people like - headphones jacks, SD cards, fingerprint readers and removable batteries and adds features people don't like.
In those days we used to have these things called BillG reviews. Basically every major important feature got reviewed by Bill Gates. I was told to send a copy of my spec to his office in preparation for the review. It was basically one ream of laser-printed paper.
I rushed to get the spec printed and sent it over to his office.
Later that day, I had some time, so I started working on figuring out if Basic had enough date and time functions to do all the things you could do in Excel.
In most modern programming environments, dates are stored as real numbers. The integer part of the number is the number of days since some agreed-upon date in the past, called the epoch. In Excel, today's date, June 16, 2006, is stored as 38884, counting days where January 1st, 1900 is 1.
I started working through the various date and time functions in Basic and the date and time functions in Excel, trying things out, when I noticed something strange in the Visual Basic documentation: Basic uses December 31, 1899 as the epoch instead of January 1, 1900, but for some reason, today's date was the same in Excel as it was in Basic.
Huh?
I went to find an Excel developer who was old enough to remember why. Ed Fries seemed to know the answer.
"Oh," he told me. "Check out February 28th, 1900."
"It's 59," I said.
"Now try March 1st."
"It's 61!"
"What happened to 60?" Ed asked.
"February 29th. 1900 was a leap year! It's divisible by 4!"
"Good guess, but no cigar," Ed said, and left me wondering for a while.
Oops. I did some research. Years that are divisible by 100 are not leap years, unless they're also divisible by 400.
1900 wasn't a leap year.
"It's a bug in Excel!" I exclaimed.
"Well, not really," said Ed. "We had to do it that way because we need to be able to import Lotus 123 worksheets."
"So, it's a bug in Lotus 123?"
"Yeah, but probably an intentional one. Lotus had to fit in 640K. That's not a lot of memory. If you ignore 1900, you can figure out if a given year is a leap year just by looking to see if the rightmost two bits are zero. That's really fast and easy. The Lotus guys probably figured it didn't matter to be wrong for those two months way in the past. It looks like the Basic guys wanted to be anal about those two months, so they moved the epoch one day back."
"Aargh!" I said, and went off to study why there was a checkbox in the options dialog called 1904 Date System.
The next day was the big BillG review.
June 30, 1992.
In those days, Microsoft was a lot less bureaucratic. Instead of the 11 or 12 layers of management they have today, I reported to Mike Conte who reported to Chris Graham who reported to Pete Higgins, who reported to Mike Maples, who reported to Bill. About 6 layers from top to bottom. We made fun of companies like General Motors with their eight layers of management or whatever it was.
In my BillG review meeting, the whole reporting hierarchy was there, along with their cousins, sisters, and aunts, and a person who came along from my team whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word. The lower the f***-count, the better.
Bill came in.
I thought about how strange it was that he had two legs, two arms, one head, etc., almost exactly like a regular human being.
He had my spec in his hand.
He had my spec in his hand!
He sat down and exchanged witty banter with an executive I did not know that made no sense to me. A few people laughed.
Bill turned to me.
I noticed that there were comments in the margins of my spec. He had read the first page!
He had read the first page of my spec and written little notes in the margin
The depressing thing is that Samsung have adopted the same sort of bullshit with Galaxy phones. Which makes me think Samsung's days as the top selling Android manufacturer are basically over. It's shame really, up to the S5 they made decent if pricey phones. Now I wouldn't buy any phone they made.
Slashdot Mirror
That's "Blue Öyster Cult". Doesn't your keyboard have a Ö key?
I got one of these
https://www.which.co.uk/review...
It's a laser so the it doesn't have the problem of the ink drying out like my old HP multifunction color inkjet. It prints and scans with my Windows 7 machine, my Mac and my Android devices. The toner cartridges are cheap and last 1000 pages.
The only downside is that, unlike my old HP inkjet it doesn't do color. But, realistically, how many times do you need that? And if I did I could get printed somewhere else.
Basically don't buy an inkjet - they cost a fortune in ink cartridges if you only use them infrequently. Buy a cheap mono laser printer or a mono laser multifunction device if you do a lot of scanning.
There was no free food, free house or free anything back then in the socialist countries.
http://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/...
The Soviet Union advocated a conception of human rights different from the notion of rights prevalent in the West. Western legal theory emphasized the so-called âoenegativeâ rights: that is, rights of individuals against the government. The Soviet system, on the other hand, emphasized that society as a whole, rather than individuals, were the beneficiaries of âoepositiveâ rights: that is, rights from the government. In this spirit, Soviet ideology placed a premium on economic and social rights, such as access to health care, adequate and affordable basic food supplies, housing, and education, and guaranteed employment. As it acted on these guarantees during the postwar decades, the Soviet system evolved into a giant welfare state. The Kremlin proclaimed the achievement of such rights, and the benefits that Soviet citizens received from them, as evidence of the superiority of the Soviet Communist system to that of the capitalist West, where the importance of civil and political rights was emphasized, while the notion of economic and social âoerightsâ was viewed much less favorably.2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Personal property was allowed, with certain limitations. Real property mostly belonged to the State.Health, housing, education, and nutrition were guaranteed through the provision of full employment and economic welfare structures implemented in the workplace.[16]
However, these guarantees were not always met in practice. For instance, over five million people lacked adequate nutrition and starved to death during the Soviet famine of 1932â"1933, one of several Soviet famines. The 1932â"33 famine was caused primarily by Soviet-mandated collectivization.
I.e. in theory many positive rights. In practice mostly famine, shortages and bread lines.
People had a duty to work wherever the state told them to, and in practice the state had no obligation to feed them. Hence the deaths from collectivisation.
There may not be an official way, but if your possible systems are all from a limited set and you're really only having to differentiate between Windows and UEFI or DOS and Windows (the other poster pointed out that there's an official way of having both DOS and Windows entry points),
That was me
then it should be possible to find a system call that just provides information on both systems and has a return value that lets you tell them apart. You do this early and then jump to the relevant entry point.
The problem is that even though Windows and UEFI both use PE files, there are significant differences.
Windows applications use subsystem=2 for GUI and 3 for console
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...
UEFI applications uses subsystem=10
http://wiki.osdev.org/UEFI#Bin...
Also windows executables are .exe and UEFI applications are .efi
I.e. it's hard to build a single executable that would pass the subsystem and file extension checks to run on both Windows and UEFI. Which of course is by design - otherwise people would run executables on the wrong platform and brick it.
Here it seems like Dell just distribute a bunch of different executables. One for Windows/FreeDOS(.exe), one for Linux(.bin) and one for UEFI (.efi)
http://www.dell.com/support/ho...
You could have them share a data file if space is at a premium.
Though a Win32/UEFI polyglot may be possible I can't find one. And I'm not sure how it would work.
The one possibility would be if Terse Executable files can begin at something other than offset zero in a file. TE files are a sort of stripped down PE file with all the unnecessary crap removed from the PE headers.
http://wiki.phoenix.com/wiki/i...
But it seems unlikely UEFI executable loader code is willing to skip bytes endlessly until it sees a VZ signature.
Oops. the link to how PE files contain a Dos exe stub didn't work
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
Originally this just printed "This program requires Microsoft Windows". Of course if you have a Dos version of something you can make that the stub.
The problem is that there's no documented way to combine two PE files for different APIs - Win32 and UEFI. It's also not really clear to me what the UEFI app should be built for - you can have native x86, native x64 or EBC - a byte code format.
Even though most Windows installations are 64 bit they can still run x86 code, so that seems safe. With UEFI you have to either match the native architecture or use EBC. And it's not clear how many UEFI bioses are x86, x64 or EBC capable. Then again I suppose Dell would know what would work. Still combining Win32 and UEFI code into one PE file seems like it would need a trick I don't know.
I wonder how they do that?
FreeDos and Windows would be easy - you'd have a Win32 PE file where the DOS exe stub exe was the FreeDos update exe. Same with FreeDos and UEFI because UEFI uses PE files. So you have a PE file for the UEFI code with the FreeDos code as the stub file.
UEFI uses PE files but the API is completely different to Win32. They must have worked out some way to mix MZ EXE, Win32 x86 PE and UEFI PE into one file.
And it's already in the 'new' platform - assuming that iOS source code can be tweaked easily enough to run on MacOS. So developers don't need to start over. Then again, if it's too much work, there may not be enough incentive to get your iOS stuff to work nicely on MacOS.
iOS and macOS share APIs but an iPhone app and a macOS app both need to have very different UIs.On an iPhone sized touch screen device you need a very simple UI. On macOS you can have a much more full featured one.
Not realizing that has done enormous damage to Windows as a platform - you ended up with a touch screen optimized UI on desktop machines. And forcing touch screen stuff into desktop Windows didn't convince anyone to write UWP apps that could run on both desktop and mobile. Now Windows Phone has been killed off by desktop Windows is still stuck with a lot of Metro-isms.
If Apple try and do what MS did, I can't see it working out for them.
^ Satya Nadella
OTOH, If there's no one to provide the 'right', like no available doctor to treat you (in the case of a 'right to healthcare'), no amount of government intervention can guarantee that right.
Exactly. In the classic case you have a state which in theory guarantees a lot of positive rights - free food, free house, free everything but doesn't grant many negative ones - freedom of speech, freedom from torture, right to due process, habeus corpus etc.
In practice you starve to death on a collective farm and if you complain about it you get arrested, tortured and sent to a concentration camp where you also starve to death.
See - Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Eastern Europe in the Cold War.
The lack of negative rights makes the positive rights meaningless.
Lenovo need to stop people writing the Bios because otherwise they'd able to remove the crapware Lenovo put in the Bios to stop people removing the crapware they put in the Windows by installing a fresh Windows image.
With an unmodified Lenovo Bios the crapware will be re-installed via Windows Platform Binary Table
https://www.howtogeek.com/2263...
Beginning with Windows 8, a PC manufacturer can embed a program - a Windows .exe file, essentially - in the PC's UEFI firmware. This is stored in the "Windows Platform Binary Table" (WPBT) section of the UEFI firmware. Whenever Windows boots, it looks at the UEFI firmware for this program, copies it from the firmware to the operating system drive, and runs it. Windows itself provides no way to stop this from happening. If the manufacturer's UEFI firmware offers it up, Windows will run it without question.
Were it not for this Bios resetting feature - a ludicrously determined user could do the following
1) Remove Windows
2) Use some other OS to dump the Bios out
3) Hack said dump to mess up the Windows Platform Binary Table and reflash it
4) Reinstall Windows from an image
And then they'd have a copy of Windows with no Lenovo Service Engine installed! The horror! Instead it seems like Lenovo have had the Bios reset itself to stop step 3), so the determined user would still have LSE installed.
Fascism and Nazism both aimed at a planned economy geared for expansionist war and an all encompassing state - Mussolini defined fascism as "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state". Pinochetian-Minarchism has a small state consisting mostly of a few army employees engaged in murderous anti communist activities with ageing rotary aircraft. Outside the state private enterprise is unaffected, and in fact privatisation means formerly owned state owned companies are sold to the private sector.
Fascism and Nazism are a form of socialism but Pinochetian-Minarchism is a Minarchist night watchman state where the army has a somewhat suspicious accident record when transporting civilians.
He's talking about the difference between negative 'freedom from' rights like 'the government is not allowed to censor' versus positive rights - you have a right to get something.
Positive rights convey an obligation on someone else, in this case to BT to upgrade their exchanges. Negative rights do not.
clean drinking water
Some people disagree on this. Usually people with a lot of money.
A lot of countries have a right to a lot stuff - food, water, a job etc in theory but in practice they get nothing. E.g. the USSR, North Korea etc.
Meanwhile there are lot of countries which have few rights to those things but in practice people tend not to die of of thirst of famine.
Basically countries which only grant negative rights (freedom from X) tend to outperform ones that grant extensive positive rights (right to X) for for negative and positive rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You could do 15 to 20% of light speed with a postage stamp sized spacecraft and a shitload of lasers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We could send the aliens a Qualcomm Snapdragon. Everyone likes Qualcomm Snapdragons.
I used to look forward to getting a new phone, these days I put off as long as I can.
You're clearly unfamiliar with the Principles Of Pinochetian-Minarchism, explained in meme form here.
https://epeak.in/2017/11/06/th...
Yeah, pretty much. I found an interesting article on Motley Fool about cell phone replacement cycles
https://www.fool.com/investing...
Apple and Samsung are pushing to shorten them to sell more phones and non replaceable batteries, slowing the phone with each upgrade and moving to people where they replace each year is a way to do that. Meanwhile Americans tend to keep their phones longer and longer, probably because they're pissed off that phones are being increasingly defeatured.
Microsoft have a long history of this sort of thing. Back in the Windows Phone days they banned third party non managed applications but made it clear to Adobe that Adobe would be allowed to use native code for Flash if they wanted to
http://www.itwriting.com/blog/...
Update: The latest on this is that Microsoft's Charlie Kindel says that Adobe will have special native access for Flash, but that no other vendor will have that privilege. This still does not make sense to me. Let's suppose that Windows Phone 7 is a big success. What justification could Microsoft have for supporting the Flash runtime but not the Java runtime, for example? I suspect that Microsoft is chasing the Flash checkbox to one-up Apple; but if Adobe gets native access, others will no doubt follow.
Adobe declined the offer. And amusingly all those technologies are now more or less extinct - Windows Phone's Silverlight and XNA APIs were killed off, and Flash is pretty much dead now too.
The only reason Skype ran on Windows Phone is that Microsoft bought the company so they could deploy Skype's Win32 code signed with the Microsoft key. And then they did a rewrite using ReactXP.
https://microsoft.github.io/re...
Microsoft killed off Windows Phone, but Skype is bundled with Windows 10 and runs on Android and iOS. Android and iOS got the horrible ReactXP rewrite replacing the original native app. I'm not sure if the Windows 10 version is the original Skype Win32 C/C++ code, a WinRT C++ hack of it or the the ReactXP rewrite.
It is very tiresome when Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc demand than ISPs being regulated as Title II common carriers who must be network neutral and then ban each others products from their platforms.
But yeah, it's like in One Million Years BC where the humans can watch the dinosaurs fight each other rather than hunting them. Though of course the dinosaurs didn't managed to achieve regulatory capture to stop the mammals taking over, unlike tech megacorps.
You do realize that Republicans like illegal immigration, because it forces working class wages down, right? If someone lowered the boom on people illegally employing illegal immigrants, it would solve a lot of problems. The Republicans aren't about to do it.
The mainstream Republicans are weasels about immigration, but it was the Democrats who pushed abominations like the Motor Voter law
https://leginfo.legislature.ca...
Existing law makes it a crime for a person to willfully cause, procure, or allow himself or herself or any other person to be registered as a voter, knowing that he or she or that other person is not entitled to registration. Existing law also makes it a crime to fraudulently vote or attempt to vote.
This bill would provide that if a person who is ineligible to vote becomes registered to vote by operation of the California New Motor Voter Program in the absence of a violation by that person of the crime described above, that person's registration shall be presumed to have been effected with official authorization and not the fault of that person. The bill would also provide that if a person who is ineligible to vote becomes registered to vote by operation of this program, and that person votes or attempts to vote in an election held after the effective date of the person's registration, that person shall be presumed to have acted with official authorization and is not guilty of fraudulently voting or attempting to vote, unless that person willfully votes or attempts to vote knowing that he or she is not entitled to vote.
I.e. they're adding illegals to the voter rolls and decriminalising them voting.
And Democrats are even now fighting Trump's Wall. The reason for this is that Hispanics voted 2:1 Democrat to Republican
https://www.nytimes.com/intera...
And you have people like this
https://www.theguardian.com/co...
Saying that real change will only be possible when whites are a minority. Which, thanks to their immigration policies will happen in 2043.
There will be no bans on hate speech. In the US, "hate speech" is a matter of personal opinion, and will continue to be
40% of Millennials support bans on hate speech.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
Given the Democrats believe the constitution is a living document and have already managed to reinterpret it to make gay marriage a right, and Hillary believed that DC vs Heller was wrong and that the Second Amendment needs to be reinterpreted so that individuals do not have the right to bear arms, who's to say that the Democrats next major initiative might be to reinterpret the First Amendment to say that hate speech bans are fine?
Thank the GOP got in and got Gorsuch on the SCOTUS basically. Otherwise Hillary would have nominated someone who'd have blown away big chunks of the Bill of Rights so the Second Amendment ended up meaning what it does in NYC - you have the right to bear arms, so long as you're a cop, an ex cop, rich or know the right people. Actually NYC passed law against misgendering too, so the First Amendment means jack shit there too. I'm sure if Hillary had got in she'd have nominated a SCOTUS judge who've have pushed this crap on the rest of the country.
Not to mention she said 'the unborn person has no constitutional rights'. Which honestly sounds like the Democrat position prior to the civil war that slaves people had no rights.
Given a choice between the somew
Three phones (that certainly all cost more than 1/3 of an iPhone if they weren't budget phones) versus what would probably be a single iPhone. Yeah, the TCO must be on your side, snort.
I bought an S2 and waited three years to get an S5. And the S5 lasted three years and now I've got a V20. Which will hopefully last three years until I have to replace it.
I.e. I buy a phone every three years. Interestingly I'm not alone in this - Motley Fool say people upgrade every 29 months on average
https://www.fool.com/investing...
"Americans now take an average of 29 months to upgrade their cell phone, up from 28 months at the end of last year, and an increase of 24 to 26 months that was typical just a couple of years ago, as noted in a recent Wall Street Journal article. And just four years ago, the upgrade cycle was just 22 months. "
A phone with no removable battery from a manufacturer who degrades performance with each software update isn't going to last you three years. It will be 1-2 tops. And the Motley Fool article points out Apple and Samsung are both pushing for 12 month upgrade cycles.
"But if users are taking longer to upgrade their phones, it's clear that this could be a problem for two of the biggest smartphone makers, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Samsung (NASDAQOTH: SSNLF).
Both companies now have their own yearly smartphone upgrade plans, which allow customers to pay the companies directly for their device each month, choose any of the four U.S. wireless providers, and then trade in their smartphone every 12 months for the latest model."
Actually without a firmware reset and new battery, which is tricky on the new phones, I'd have upgraded sooner, probably in 1-2 years. Like Apple, Samsung phones seem to slow down alarmingly with time, and batteries wear out.
So yeah, TCO is on my side over people who buy a new iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy every 1-2 years. And Motley Fool point out that Apple users buy a phone every 22 months with Apple trying to push this to 15.
" Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said back in February that he believed Apple has already sold about 250,000 iPhones through its upgrade program, which could definitely be considered a success given that it debuted not too long ago. But Munster made a prediction that the iPhone upgrade program would also lower the device's upgrade cycle, which appears unlikely now.
Originally, Munster thought the program would reduce the average iPhone user's upgrade time frame from 22 months to only 15 months. But that 15 month time frame would mean iPhone users would be upgrading their phones 14 months earlier than the average American, based on Citigroup's new data. And with Apple's iPhone sales currently slowing, that quick upgrade time seems even more unlikely. "
You go ahead and build your business in your perceived wonderful marketplace. Give it a real good shot & invest everything you have into it.
Do come back in a few years to let us know how you did...
Apple fans show their people skills once again. If I find a viable manufacturer I'd be tempted to Kickstart it, but to be honest I've got other things that I need to work on.
Batteries swell when they worn out. And they wear out faster at higher temperature.
https://www.newscientist.com/a...
Something like cryptocurrency mining will max out the CPU, which will draw more power which increase temperature.
Lithium ion batteries are basically consumables and need to be user replaceable. Sadly most electronics seems to be moving in the direction of non user replaceable batteries which makes it consumable too.
If it's a $20 pair of Bluetooth headphones I suppose it doesn't matter. If it's a $600 phone, I think it very much does.
I've bought an S2, and S5 and now a V20. If I'd got an iPhone I'd have had less flexibility and a higher total cost of ownership. Samsung are heading the same way and I want no part of it - both Samsung and Apple sell you a very expensive phone you basically have to replace in 1 or at most years' time.
The V20 was $400 or so and it should hopefully keep me going for 3, in the unfortunately highly likely case where no one makes a phone I can upgrade to without losing features I want.
What would be an ideal phone?
Something like this -
A Qualcomm Snapdragon that's one generation old to keep down costs. A removable battery. Dual SIMs. Water seals. Probably a 1080p IPS display to maximize battery life and keep down costs. A fingerprint sensor. A headphone jack. USB-C. Stock Android or LineageOS. Perhaps 64GB of internal memory, but an microSDXC slot to make it expandable. Ram perhaps 4GB.
I'd aim to sell it for $300-400.
I.e. it's basically a V20 except with seals. It might sell a bit cheaper actually given the lower spec display and that I'm not bumping the flash and ram size.
Now you say more people buy Samsung and Apple phones. I reckon given the choice above phone it'd sell pretty well. Not Apple or Samsung levels of well but you could make a business selling them.
Sooner or later I think a lot of people are going to get pissed off with the Samsung/Apple model which pushes people to upgrade and at the same time removes features people like - headphones jacks, SD cards, fingerprint readers and removable batteries and adds features people don't like.
Tech companies need a strong leader who is detail obsessed. E.g. consider Microsoft back in the Bill Gates days
https://www.joelonsoftware.com...
In those days we used to have these things called BillG reviews. Basically every major important feature got reviewed by Bill Gates. I was told to send a copy of my spec to his office in preparation for the review. It was basically one ream of laser-printed paper.
I rushed to get the spec printed and sent it over to his office.
Later that day, I had some time, so I started working on figuring out if Basic had enough date and time functions to do all the things you could do in Excel.
In most modern programming environments, dates are stored as real numbers. The integer part of the number is the number of days since some agreed-upon date in the past, called the epoch. In Excel, today's date, June 16, 2006, is stored as 38884, counting days where January 1st, 1900 is 1.
I started working through the various date and time functions in Basic and the date and time functions in Excel, trying things out, when I noticed something strange in the Visual Basic documentation: Basic uses December 31, 1899 as the epoch instead of January 1, 1900, but for some reason, today's date was the same in Excel as it was in Basic.
Huh?
I went to find an Excel developer who was old enough to remember why. Ed Fries seemed to know the answer.
"Oh," he told me. "Check out February 28th, 1900."
"It's 59," I said.
"Now try March 1st."
"It's 61!"
"What happened to 60?" Ed asked.
"February 29th. 1900 was a leap year! It's divisible by 4!"
"Good guess, but no cigar," Ed said, and left me wondering for a while.
Oops. I did some research. Years that are divisible by 100 are not leap years, unless they're also divisible by 400.
1900 wasn't a leap year.
"It's a bug in Excel!" I exclaimed.
"Well, not really," said Ed. "We had to do it that way because we need to be able to import Lotus 123 worksheets."
"So, it's a bug in Lotus 123?"
"Yeah, but probably an intentional one. Lotus had to fit in 640K. That's not a lot of memory. If you ignore 1900, you can figure out if a given year is a leap year just by looking to see if the rightmost two bits are zero. That's really fast and easy. The Lotus guys probably figured it didn't matter to be wrong for those two months way in the past. It looks like the Basic guys wanted to be anal about those two months, so they moved the epoch one day back."
"Aargh!" I said, and went off to study why there was a checkbox in the options dialog called 1904 Date System.
The next day was the big BillG review.
June 30, 1992.
In those days, Microsoft was a lot less bureaucratic. Instead of the 11 or 12 layers of management they have today, I reported to Mike Conte who reported to Chris Graham who reported to Pete Higgins, who reported to Mike Maples, who reported to Bill. About 6 layers from top to bottom. We made fun of companies like General Motors with their eight layers of management or whatever it was.
In my BillG review meeting, the whole reporting hierarchy was there, along with their cousins, sisters, and aunts, and a person who came along from my team whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word. The lower the f***-count, the better.
Bill came in.
I thought about how strange it was that he had two legs, two arms, one head, etc., almost exactly like a regular human being.
He had my spec in his hand.
He had my spec in his hand!
He sat down and exchanged witty banter with an executive I did not know that made no sense to me. A few people laughed.
Bill turned to me.
I noticed that there were comments in the margins of my spec. He had read the first page!
He had read the first page of my spec and written little notes in the margin
The depressing thing is that Samsung have adopted the same sort of bullshit with Galaxy phones. Which makes me think Samsung's days as the top selling Android manufacturer are basically over. It's shame really, up to the S5 they made decent if pricey phones. Now I wouldn't buy any phone they made.