Posts by Kevin McMurtrie 3553 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2007
Back up your phone, factory reset, restore, and tell me that it's back to normal. Your application data is gone unless you put it on Google Cloud.
Through Android 10 you could back up your phone, factory reset, restore, and it would be no more disruptive than a normal restart. Android 11 removed that functionality. Not even ADB or OEM setup tools can do it without rooting.
Apple and Google will continue what they've already been doing - restrict the hardware specifications and intercept everything in the operating system. Want to back up the files on your phone? Pay Apple or pay Google or have no backups. No, ADB can't perform backups anymore. It's for "security." Want to add configuration files to support your cellular carrier? Nope, nope, nope. Maybe just swap the camera app to get better photos? That's usually a "no" too. The OS only provides pre-processed images.
I don't want to hear complaints about plummeting sales when Google and Apple have forced an ecosystem of endless identical, boring, crippled, and yet insanely expensive phones.
I've only had two kinds of crashes using a Linux desktop:
1) NVIDIA drivers
2) Counterfeit hardware from Fry's Electronics
Everything else is very stable.
NVIDIA drivers are a special hell that's not going to be fixed by using Rust. You only have to run 'apt upgrade' and all your apps start crashing because NVIDIA prohibits minor version mismatches between kernel and user spaces. Oh, you wanted CUDA working too? <panic>
Less work can mean more failures. Let us not forget the IBM Deskstar 75GXP. There was a limited number of times that the head could fly over a track before the media flaked off. Idle drives had rapid data loss then head crashes in 1 to 2 years
Less crappy drives seem to spend their idle time scanning for weak blocks to remap. It keeps the head moving and moves data before the error correction bits run out.
Needless to say, I read the Backblaze reports before buying now.
My gas & electric bill was going up 50% a year thanks to the local power company doing whatever the hell it feels like without much government interference.
I'm about net zero annually with solar, a battery, and buying better appliances when the old ones wear out. If winter rates or credits become less regulated, I can buy more panels, storage, and home insulation to keep the crazy energy rates away.
They also have a frothing rabid customer retention department. You can try making an online purchase without spam, but the spam will flow. You can't opt-out either. I used California law to have my data removed.
They eliminated ordering as "guest" so now I won't place any orders. How's that for customer retention?
A musician would know:
- Small numbers of sine waves sound awful. They need distortion, modulation, and chords.
- Modulating a tone adds harmonics. Any musical modifications will alter the balance of harmonics so it deviates from the alert.
- 853 and 960 Hz were chosen to create irritating non-musical harmonics.
It's not going to happen by accident.
Java has a lot of public contributions in it, including contributions from very big companies. Oracle can't take it over.
Stop using Oracle's Java. That's it. There was a time when their implementation was too superior to pass up, but those years are long gone and Oracle is just predatory lawyers.
It can be done locally. At least until bribes and lobbying from greedy power companies kill it, you can get credit for exported power. The trick is to have enough battery capacity to not import anything between sundown and the end of peak rates. It works out like:
Morning: Import power at normal cost
Noon: Solar provides power and charges the batteries
Afternoon: Batteries are full. Solar provides power and exports at peak cost
Evening: Batteries provide power until peak cost ends
Night: Import power at normal cost
Since you rigged the system to import at normal cost and export at peak cost, you have a lot of credit to use for dark rainy days when there's insufficient solar power. Power companies are OK with this from an operational point of view because high loads on hot sunny days is what overheats the grid. Except Texas, where it blacks out when it's cold.
I've worked in Fintech and every single penny has to go to the right place and reconcile with other systems. If there's a known fault, the data has to be dumped for manual correction. If there's a silent fault, normal logging has to be enough to correct it later. A bug can change your plans for the rest of the week.
Millions of dollars per hour was stressful enough for me. A cold beer to sooth the nerves of everyone working at NYSE (not to be consumed during work hours) ->
And in our actual dumb modern world:
Sports car driver - I can accelerate faster than the fast lane before the onramp ends. (swerves into fast lane at 100 MPH)
Prius driver - Prius coming through! Prius heading to the Prius lane. (swerves into fast lane at 35 MPH)
Tesla driver - ... (texting)
12 cars totaled, 4 cars on fire, 5000 people stuck in traffic.
I'll believe that the FBI cares about Internet crime when the Internet isn't such a cesspit. Those botnets and fake businesses aren't owned by script kiddies anymore.
One might even get the impression that letting the heists and hacks get bigger is an intentional step towards asking for more funding.
If you're going for big specifications, Samsung delivers at the cheapest price. The screens are very bright, big, high resolution, and not too expensive. They're also completely inappropriate for a giant wall because viewing angle limits in LCD are only partially solved.
I presume they found a way to purchase commercial models that don't show @#%! pop-ups. I used to be able to stop pop-ups on my LG by declining all the TOS, but they're back. And yes, it bugs you if you unplug its internet.
Invent a technology that can serve humanity.
Give it away for free.
Invest in it.
Monetize it.
Alter the technology to serve corporate profits.
Die from customer distrust.
Die from profits forbidding innovation.
Lost customers become fertile ground for another company.
I knew Google wouldn't stay on top for much longer but I wasn't expecting Microsoft to do them in. In hindsight, the Microsoft campus growing in the middle Google HQ was good foreshadowing. Now MS can buy neighboring buildings as Google vacates them.
Typical old app written by tech enthusiasts with self-taught PHP and SQL skills:
There's a CUSTOMER table with personal information. Do you use that? No. Data quality is poor because a customer may be multiple people. It's old.
That can join to a USER_INFO table with PI. Do you use that? No, somebody read that the contact information should be normalized to a new table.
That can join to a USER_ADDRESS table with PI. Do you use that? Yes, but not everything does. Check the USER_INFO and CUSTOMER tables too.
<desk flip>
Rushmore made it extremely difficult to make payments on time. My new account code didn't work. Once fixed, their online payment system crashed whenever I logged in (site literally gone for 2 minutes). They said you should pay by phone or write a check when online payments can't be made. They didn't answer the phone. Online reviews said to purchase certified mail delivery for every check you send or they will claim it didn't arrive.
The company's specialty was, after all, making money on debt collection. My low interest mortgage had no other value.
Capital One bought ING Direct and my mortgage along with it. Then they sold my mortgage to the gutter-scum debt collector Rushmore Loan Management. I had to nuke my savings to immediately pay off my loan because Rushmore had already started their usual process to fraudulently force healthy mortgages into default.
You're experiencing "Non-Standalone" aka "NSA" 5G. LTE is the primary connection but 5G bands can be added as secondary bandwidth. It's a battery hog and it increases latency.
"Standalone" aka "SA" 5G means the phone uses 5G bands as the primary connection but can add LTE for a speed boost. I have an older phone that supports this and it's amazing, especially out in the fringes where LTE is usually too saturated. Sadly, few phones support it even years after 5G deployment.
Then there's the fake 5G. This is where your phone indicates "5G" for SA bands it doesn't support. This is everyday life with T-Mobile and crappy cellphones. T-Mobile only has NSA 5G on short-range urban bands. Everywhere else is SA 5G, including the long-range 600MHz band. Guess which signal the crap phones how. Yep, the strong long-range band that it can't use. 5 bars of 5G but the phone won't work.
I've been trying to sort out what 5G modes phones support but it's hopeless until somebody roots it and posts to https://cacombos.com/.
"capture further 5G patent license agreements among handset manufacturers"
So that's why 5G doesn't work. Most new phones have the hardware and even claim to be using 5G, but they aren't. I was wondering why phones are still crippled this far into deployment and Ericsson just answered my question. Fake 5G is cheaper and most won't notice.
My Sony Xperia 1 III is a "5G" phone but it's cleverly configured with invalid parameters for the very market it's made for. It always shows "5G" in the display but can almost never use it.
Execs file a sell date for their stock, announce moderate layoffs to bump up the stock price, sell, and retire. It's very fashionable these days.
I sold my options on the bumped up stock price following my own layoff. It's far from retirement levels of money but I can only hope I contributed towards a nice downward dent in that bump.
Batteries are balanced during charging with shunt regulators or linear regulators. It sounds inefficient but there's not much to do. I have an old 95 Wh pack and the balancer chip doesn't even get warm.
I don't think there's any discharge balancing other than putting lots of cells in parallel to average out capacity. Except Honda. They made every cell a single point of failure in their early hybrids.
Is this only implementing the IETF draft, which seems like not a great idea since it's a draft, or is this a new trick to evade privacy measures? 'forums.theregister.com' would be 20 bits for Google to leak data from one service to another. If the IETF is followed, blocking those bits would cause the DNS response to be rejected.
(The TLDR of the draft is that DNS caches remain case sensitive but the response must use the original case. This makes blind, brute-force forgery of DNS responses over UDP more difficult.)
No, it's because of innovation being nothing but minor benchmark bumps for several years now. Oh, sorry, I forgot about major innovations in the camera bump shape A lot of phones still, today, have a useless partial 5G implementation, a partial Android OEM overlay, and/or the same 128/256 GB storage as several years ago. It's so lazy and it comes with a huge price increase.
Google and Apple aren't doing their operating systems any favors either. iOS is still dated and clumsy. With 3rd party Android ROMs mostly gone, Android only has stupid idea from Google coming in.
I had one of those (RV042G I think) and it was hopeless to secure. If I reported a vulnerability, Cisco would send me a patched firmware file with a worse vulnerability. I crushed and disposed of it when the WAN ports had admin telnet permanently open with the default password. Giving it away for free would have been an act of cruelty.
Linksys WiFi APs followed shortly for the same reason.
I presume this requires enormous tanks. I have a heat pump hot water heater that consumes about 500W of electricity. That's over 2000W of heating in summer when the garage is a solar cooker but maybe only 600W to 1000W in winter. That low level of recovery means double-sizing the tank to minimize resistive heating.
I like the tech as long as it's only on when asked to be on. But yes, there are too many cars out there with buggy nuisance tech that defaults to "on" for every drive. I think some Mazda cars beeped constantly from faulty lane-assist. VW has their random brake-slamming from crude collision avoidance.
Older people want heavier and heavier cars for their perceived protection in crashes. Mandating a weight limit is probably the only way to go. These same people are future "wrong pedal" drivers that are going to launch their 700HP electric mammoths into others. You can't line every sidewalk in a city with bollards.
Another problem is all the people buying Teslas believing that a future software update will turn them into limos before they kill themselves with poor driving skills. A white Tesla 3 is the new Prius - the car that you watch carefully because there's a higher probability of a confused driver. (Or worse - Autopilot is on)
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