If the motherboard's on-board video relied on an old-school XDDM-style video driver, Windows 7 is the last OS version to support that driver model. In Windows 8 and later, only WDDM-style drivers can be used.
Many of my complaints about Windows 10 are absent in the enterprise branch and long-term servicing branch of Windows 10. The problem is that the cost of obtaining legal copies of those branches for personal use is ridiculously high. So I continue to use Windows 7 Ultimate, even if it means sticking with my aging PC and having to resort to tricks to keep the updates coming (remember the point-of-sales trick for XP?).
If people could install Windows 10 and have it look and act somewhat similar to Windows 7 without having to resort to exotic editions, registry hacks, or third-party tools, I think a lot of people would finally jump ship, even if they had to pay extra for those features. I sure would.
I say this as someone who just this week had to roll their own installation DVD in order to install Windows 7 on a new NVMe SSD. So I am set for a while longer.
I wonder what kind of power losses a system like this will incur. IIRC, some of the best inductive charging systems lose at least 15% of their power to the ether.
...demand full, compilable/installable sources for all components, and also full documentation of all of the silicon...
It is possible to obfuscate subtle bugs within your code, so even if the EU had access to the source, it would require an incredibly thorough audit of the code. Just look at how multiple audits of open source packages such as openssl continue to turn up subtle, exploitable bugs that have been undetected for years. Finding those issues can be quite challenging.
And once your initial audit team has moved on, taking their knowledge with them, what level of competency do you think their replacements will have in checking all of the patches and version updates? It is a very common tactic to slip these backdoors into later bits of code once people's guards are down.
Recall that Huawei isn't just on the US ban-list due to supposed state espionage fears. They've also been accused of stealing intellectual property from Nortel, Cisco, and possibly Motorola (source). It wouldn't be outrageous to assume they have targeted Ericsson, Nokia, or Alcatel-Lucent as well.
Worse, given the opaque relationship between Huawei and the Chinese government, we have no idea how much of that corporate espionage was performed by government teams, an issue the US has been fighting for some time (source), nor how much financial support the government is providing to subsidize pricing.
In short, banning Huawei is probably a good idea for those more mundane reasons alone.
Removing the carrier SIM lock [usually] doesn't revoke the ability to make Wifi calls. The encryption keys are still in the carrier-specific firmware and they still work. It is when you have a firmware that lacks those keys that you run into problems, which is usually the case with those carrier agnostic/universal handset models. You'd encounter the same issue if you replaced the stock firmware with a Lineage image or replaced it with a compatible firmware for another carrier.
The larger issue is that we have carrier-specific hardware in the USA, not just software. Many manufacturers offer generic models for sale in Canada and the Caribbean that cover most, if not all, of the bands allocated in North America. As example, both the Samsung GS9 G960U and G960W support every LTE band used by major carriers, including the new bands 66 and 71 and the rarely used hi bands 30, 41, and 46. There are even a few that support both GSM and CDMA. So it isn't as if the technology isn't available.
Biggest downside I've seen to using those universal unlocked phones is that carriers refuse to support VoWifi on them.
I'd argue that the use of "hoarder" with regard to digital assets goes even father back. I grew up with a friend who was a prolific hoarder of pirated video games. He had stacks of boxes filled with disks in his room and closet. It was as much physical hoarding as it was digital because of the storage of the time, but I'd argue that either usage was apt.
I'd argue that the late '90s was probably the point where such hoarding left so little of a physical footprint that you could solely call it digital hoarding. That was also the time that high speed internet, website scraper software, and easy access to alt.bin.* groups all really became common.
One of the responsibilities of having a rental property is ensuring proper usage. The people in the article completely failed in that regard. They could have driven by the house, they could have asked a trusted neighbor to watch for trouble, or they could have installed remote cameras. It appears that none of that happened.
Another responsibility is having the correct liability insurance to cover situations which are more difficult to notice. While ABnB does offer some level of protection, I've read enough stories to know that it is usually insufficient. I'd want a policy that would cover anything ABnB did not.
I disagree. These sorts of people have always been around. The difference is that back in the day, the level of reporting was much lower so you probably never heard about it. I suspect that the old "boys will be boys" mentality probably resulted in more people looking the other way, too.
Our history is defined by people being assholes. There are just more cameras around to catch it now.
Wikipedia says 16Mhz 68k available "late eighties". So possibly not 1986
I believe that one of the second-source manufacturers had a 16 MHz CMOS version available in either '86 or '87. It definitely would have been an option for any second generation system.
In fact the 7.16Mhz is derived from NTSC video timings
So is the system clock, which runs at 28.64 MHz. I mentioned 14.32 MHz since it is a multiple of that colorburst frequency.
and everything runs with it
Not on the A3000. While the chip bus and Z2 bus still ran at 7 MHz, the fast bus, Z3 bus, and the bus controller chips ran at either 16 or 25 MHz. Then you have all of those processor slot cards...
So, realistically if you want it to be faster, you'd have to design everything around the faster clock, from custom chips to ram chips
Not necessarily. The simplest option would be to have the processor run at 14 MHz, the rest of the system at 7 MHz, use some SRAM to shadow the fast bus and Z2 bus, and add some glue to bridge the two.
On the flip end, you could have an ECS designed to run at 14 MHz, in which everything on the A600 looks like an A500, but at twice the speed.
This was my thought as well. While T-Mobile does still offer a few channels of GSM service for M2M connectivity (all on Band 4 in my area), does Verizon or Sprint still offer service compatible with an IS-95 (cdmaOne) handset? Also, with the deployment of 5G in 2019, will those older 2G channels still be around by the end of the challenge since the carriers plan on reallocating those channels?
Might be a better idea to hand them a basic 3G phone with data connectivity disabled.
Finally, it did not help the Amiga, at all, that the management at Commodore saw it mostly as a cash cow and did not put much into mainstream marketing or to speed hardware development.
While the marketing issues at Commodore didn't help, the killer flaw at Commodore is that the Amiga platform was relatively stagnant for seven years after the release of the Amiga 1000. This allowed competing platforms to either meet or exceed many aspects of the Amiga.
It is a shame that Commodore engineering and management failed to define a mutual set of expectations early in the design of the Ranger chipset. That might have prevented its cancellation and would have resulted in a second-generation chipset with more significant improvements over the ECS.
It is also a shame that Commodore took so long to break past the 7.16 MHz barrier. My understanding is that 16 MHz CMOS 68000 variants were available in 1986. Imagine if either the A2000 or A600 came stock with a 14.32 MHz 68000 processor instead.
It may happen faster than you think. Many cellular networks plan on retiring their older 2G and 3G kit for 5G. That will allow them to reuse much of their current infrastructure as well as reuse existing spectrum licenses, cutting down on deployment times. In urban areas, it will take the strain off of LTE networks. In rural and exurban areas, it will be marketed as an alternative to DSL and existing WISPs.
Call me when they include a classic shell option. I absolutely hate the new Windows 10 start menu. Yes, there is a third party utility that can provide such a menu, but the author has complained about how each new version of Windows makes it increasingly difficult to keep the utility functional.
Why have a cap on extensions? Place a price on extensions that goes up significantly with each additional extension. If the cost is worth it to the rights holder, let them pay it.
The United States already has several reactors down at the Palo Verde in Arizona that can operate on MOX fuel. I believe that the issue is that we need a facility that can create the MOX fuel in large quantities. So unless the CANDU reactors can operate on unblended MOX fuel components, they would need a MOX fuel processing plant just as the US would.
When I've had cell phone plans that offered free inbound or unlimited text messaging, I've barely had any issues with text spam. But the one time that I had a plan that charged 5 cents per text (inbound or outbound), I was flooded by spam. What was maddening is that I had an unlimited plan with that same carrier on my work phone, and that work phone didn't receive any text spam, so it was clear that the carrier was policing things only when it was to their advantage.
Clearly, shifting the cost liability can silence spam.
With voice-mimicking software getting better and better, I imagine that these sorts of spear-fishing scams will become more prevalent, especially against the elderly.
Scour social media for videos of identifiable individuals, find all familial elder links, train the software, and then make a call in that individual's voice using their number in the caller ID field about a phony issue that asks them to send money.
The recent upgrade to Android 8.0 has ruined Bluetooth audio on my V30. It skips every few seconds during playback, regardless of device (soundbar, headphones, car nav). This is a widely reported issue that has been open for months. It even skips every few minutes during playback using the headphone jack. Lame.
Even though Apple continues to support much older phones, typically if you upgrade the iOS on your phone more than once, then you will start to notice slow performance. Maybe that's why Android doesn't allow it.
Typically, but not always. I've heard conflicting reports about the performance of newer iOS versions on older handsets. Some say it is faster, some say it is slower. YMMV. Supposedly the last few generations had had better longevity. I've heard similar reports regarding Nexus handsets and those rooted to run Lineage.
Supposedly one major roadblock is that Android handset manufacturers depend on chipset manufacturers to provide Linux device drivers. When those chipsets reach EOL status, no further device drivers are written. If a newer version of Android uses a newer Linux kernel that isn't compatible with the older drivers, that's a show stopper. AOSP derivatives such as Lineage sidestep that problem by using open-source device drivers that may be maintained after the chipset goes EOL.
The problem with importing phones from Europe is that it presents a new set of challenges. The biggest issue is that most manufacturers will not honor the warranty of phones purchased in other countries. So once your 30 day reseller return window has closed, that's it. The other major issue is that many European phones lack one or more North American LTE bands. In the most extreme cases, you'll be stuck using 3G HSPA.
Just buy a phone that's already on the officially supported LineageOS list and you are good to go.
I see that many of the North American variants of phones are not listed on the officially supported lists for 15.1 or 16.0. That makes your suggestion difficult to follow.
Speaking of Nokia, they're adopted the Android One channel for their phones, which guarantees two years of version updates plus an additional year of security updates. That's a plus. Too bad that only the Nokia 6.1 is officially available in Canada and the US. I like the overall specs of the Nokia 7, but the global model would be seriously limited on a North American network.
Hey Android manufacturers, this is one place where Apple makes every other smartphone platform look bad. Of the three mainstream flagship Android phones I've owned, I've never had one where I received updates for more than two years. Even my wife's five-year-old Blackberry Z30 received a security update three months ago.
I'm getting tired of watching perfectly good expensive hardware get the axe because the official software updates stop. I've tried third party ROMs, but they never worked quite right with my hardware. I'd be content just with security updates after two years, but even that appears to be asking for too much.
Now that my current Android phone is EOL, I do not look forward to the chore of replacing it. Maybe it is time to look a bit more outside of the Android ecosystem.
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If the motherboard's on-board video relied on an old-school XDDM-style video driver, Windows 7 is the last OS version to support that driver model. In Windows 8 and later, only WDDM-style drivers can be used.
Many of my complaints about Windows 10 are absent in the enterprise branch and long-term servicing branch of Windows 10. The problem is that the cost of obtaining legal copies of those branches for personal use is ridiculously high. So I continue to use Windows 7 Ultimate, even if it means sticking with my aging PC and having to resort to tricks to keep the updates coming (remember the point-of-sales trick for XP?).
If people could install Windows 10 and have it look and act somewhat similar to Windows 7 without having to resort to exotic editions, registry hacks, or third-party tools, I think a lot of people would finally jump ship, even if they had to pay extra for those features. I sure would.
I say this as someone who just this week had to roll their own installation DVD in order to install Windows 7 on a new NVMe SSD. So I am set for a while longer.
I wonder what kind of power losses a system like this will incur. IIRC, some of the best inductive charging systems lose at least 15% of their power to the ether.
...demand full, compilable/installable sources for all components, and also full documentation of all of the silicon...
It is possible to obfuscate subtle bugs within your code, so even if the EU had access to the source, it would require an incredibly thorough audit of the code. Just look at how multiple audits of open source packages such as openssl continue to turn up subtle, exploitable bugs that have been undetected for years. Finding those issues can be quite challenging.
And once your initial audit team has moved on, taking their knowledge with them, what level of competency do you think their replacements will have in checking all of the patches and version updates? It is a very common tactic to slip these backdoors into later bits of code once people's guards are down.
Recall that Huawei isn't just on the US ban-list due to supposed state espionage fears. They've also been accused of stealing intellectual property from Nortel, Cisco, and possibly Motorola (source). It wouldn't be outrageous to assume they have targeted Ericsson, Nokia, or Alcatel-Lucent as well.
Worse, given the opaque relationship between Huawei and the Chinese government, we have no idea how much of that corporate espionage was performed by government teams, an issue the US has been fighting for some time (source), nor how much financial support the government is providing to subsidize pricing.
In short, banning Huawei is probably a good idea for those more mundane reasons alone.
Removing the carrier SIM lock [usually] doesn't revoke the ability to make Wifi calls. The encryption keys are still in the carrier-specific firmware and they still work. It is when you have a firmware that lacks those keys that you run into problems, which is usually the case with those carrier agnostic/universal handset models. You'd encounter the same issue if you replaced the stock firmware with a Lineage image or replaced it with a compatible firmware for another carrier.
The larger issue is that we have carrier-specific hardware in the USA, not just software. Many manufacturers offer generic models for sale in Canada and the Caribbean that cover most, if not all, of the bands allocated in North America. As example, both the Samsung GS9 G960U and G960W support every LTE band used by major carriers, including the new bands 66 and 71 and the rarely used hi bands 30, 41, and 46. There are even a few that support both GSM and CDMA. So it isn't as if the technology isn't available.
Biggest downside I've seen to using those universal unlocked phones is that carriers refuse to support VoWifi on them.
I'd argue that the use of "hoarder" with regard to digital assets goes even father back. I grew up with a friend who was a prolific hoarder of pirated video games. He had stacks of boxes filled with disks in his room and closet. It was as much physical hoarding as it was digital because of the storage of the time, but I'd argue that either usage was apt.
I'd argue that the late '90s was probably the point where such hoarding left so little of a physical footprint that you could solely call it digital hoarding. That was also the time that high speed internet, website scraper software, and easy access to alt.bin.* groups all really became common.
One of the responsibilities of having a rental property is ensuring proper usage. The people in the article completely failed in that regard. They could have driven by the house, they could have asked a trusted neighbor to watch for trouble, or they could have installed remote cameras. It appears that none of that happened.
Another responsibility is having the correct liability insurance to cover situations which are more difficult to notice. While ABnB does offer some level of protection, I've read enough stories to know that it is usually insufficient. I'd want a policy that would cover anything ABnB did not.
I disagree. These sorts of people have always been around. The difference is that back in the day, the level of reporting was much lower so you probably never heard about it. I suspect that the old "boys will be boys" mentality probably resulted in more people looking the other way, too.
Our history is defined by people being assholes. There are just more cameras around to catch it now.
Wikipedia says 16Mhz 68k available "late eighties". So possibly not 1986
I believe that one of the second-source manufacturers had a 16 MHz CMOS version available in either '86 or '87. It definitely would have been an option for any second generation system.
In fact the 7.16Mhz is derived from NTSC video timings
So is the system clock, which runs at 28.64 MHz. I mentioned 14.32 MHz since it is a multiple of that colorburst frequency.
and everything runs with it
Not on the A3000. While the chip bus and Z2 bus still ran at 7 MHz, the fast bus, Z3 bus, and the bus controller chips ran at either 16 or 25 MHz. Then you have all of those processor slot cards...
So, realistically if you want it to be faster, you'd have to design everything around the faster clock, from custom chips to ram chips
Not necessarily. The simplest option would be to have the processor run at 14 MHz, the rest of the system at 7 MHz, use some SRAM to shadow the fast bus and Z2 bus, and add some glue to bridge the two.
On the flip end, you could have an ECS designed to run at 14 MHz, in which everything on the A600 looks like an A500, but at twice the speed.
This was my thought as well. While T-Mobile does still offer a few channels of GSM service for M2M connectivity (all on Band 4 in my area), does Verizon or Sprint still offer service compatible with an IS-95 (cdmaOne) handset? Also, with the deployment of 5G in 2019, will those older 2G channels still be around by the end of the challenge since the carriers plan on reallocating those channels?
Might be a better idea to hand them a basic 3G phone with data connectivity disabled.
Finally, it did not help the Amiga, at all, that the management at Commodore saw it mostly as a cash cow and did not put much into mainstream marketing or to speed hardware development.
While the marketing issues at Commodore didn't help, the killer flaw at Commodore is that the Amiga platform was relatively stagnant for seven years after the release of the Amiga 1000. This allowed competing platforms to either meet or exceed many aspects of the Amiga.
It is a shame that Commodore engineering and management failed to define a mutual set of expectations early in the design of the Ranger chipset. That might have prevented its cancellation and would have resulted in a second-generation chipset with more significant improvements over the ECS.
It is also a shame that Commodore took so long to break past the 7.16 MHz barrier. My understanding is that 16 MHz CMOS 68000 variants were available in 1986. Imagine if either the A2000 or A600 came stock with a 14.32 MHz 68000 processor instead.
It may happen faster than you think. Many cellular networks plan on retiring their older 2G and 3G kit for 5G. That will allow them to reuse much of their current infrastructure as well as reuse existing spectrum licenses, cutting down on deployment times. In urban areas, it will take the strain off of LTE networks. In rural and exurban areas, it will be marketed as an alternative to DSL and existing WISPs.
Call me when they include a classic shell option. I absolutely hate the new Windows 10 start menu. Yes, there is a third party utility that can provide such a menu, but the author has complained about how each new version of Windows makes it increasingly difficult to keep the utility functional.
Why have a cap on extensions? Place a price on extensions that goes up significantly with each additional extension. If the cost is worth it to the rights holder, let them pay it.
The United States already has several reactors down at the Palo Verde in Arizona that can operate on MOX fuel. I believe that the issue is that we need a facility that can create the MOX fuel in large quantities. So unless the CANDU reactors can operate on unblended MOX fuel components, they would need a MOX fuel processing plant just as the US would.
This is probably the best idea I've seen.
When I've had cell phone plans that offered free inbound or unlimited text messaging, I've barely had any issues with text spam. But the one time that I had a plan that charged 5 cents per text (inbound or outbound), I was flooded by spam. What was maddening is that I had an unlimited plan with that same carrier on my work phone, and that work phone didn't receive any text spam, so it was clear that the carrier was policing things only when it was to their advantage.
Clearly, shifting the cost liability can silence spam.
With voice-mimicking software getting better and better, I imagine that these sorts of spear-fishing scams will become more prevalent, especially against the elderly.
Scour social media for videos of identifiable individuals, find all familial elder links, train the software, and then make a call in that individual's voice using their number in the caller ID field about a phony issue that asks them to send money.
The recent upgrade to Android 8.0 has ruined Bluetooth audio on my V30. It skips every few seconds during playback, regardless of device (soundbar, headphones, car nav). This is a widely reported issue that has been open for months. It even skips every few minutes during playback using the headphone jack. Lame.
Even though Apple continues to support much older phones, typically if you upgrade the iOS on your phone more than once, then you will start to notice slow performance. Maybe that's why Android doesn't allow it.
Typically, but not always. I've heard conflicting reports about the performance of newer iOS versions on older handsets. Some say it is faster, some say it is slower. YMMV. Supposedly the last few generations had had better longevity. I've heard similar reports regarding Nexus handsets and those rooted to run Lineage.
Supposedly one major roadblock is that Android handset manufacturers depend on chipset manufacturers to provide Linux device drivers. When those chipsets reach EOL status, no further device drivers are written. If a newer version of Android uses a newer Linux kernel that isn't compatible with the older drivers, that's a show stopper. AOSP derivatives such as Lineage sidestep that problem by using open-source device drivers that may be maintained after the chipset goes EOL.
The problem with importing phones from Europe is that it presents a new set of challenges. The biggest issue is that most manufacturers will not honor the warranty of phones purchased in other countries. So once your 30 day reseller return window has closed, that's it. The other major issue is that many European phones lack one or more North American LTE bands. In the most extreme cases, you'll be stuck using 3G HSPA.
Just buy a phone that's already on the officially supported LineageOS list and you are good to go.
I see that many of the North American variants of phones are not listed on the officially supported lists for 15.1 or 16.0. That makes your suggestion difficult to follow.
Speaking of Nokia, they're adopted the Android One channel for their phones, which guarantees two years of version updates plus an additional year of security updates. That's a plus. Too bad that only the Nokia 6.1 is officially available in Canada and the US. I like the overall specs of the Nokia 7, but the global model would be seriously limited on a North American network.
Hey Android manufacturers, this is one place where Apple makes every other smartphone platform look bad. Of the three mainstream flagship Android phones I've owned, I've never had one where I received updates for more than two years. Even my wife's five-year-old Blackberry Z30 received a security update three months ago.
I'm getting tired of watching perfectly good expensive hardware get the axe because the official software updates stop. I've tried third party ROMs, but they never worked quite right with my hardware. I'd be content just with security updates after two years, but even that appears to be asking for too much.
Now that my current Android phone is EOL, I do not look forward to the chore of replacing it. Maybe it is time to look a bit more outside of the Android ecosystem.