Posts by tcmonkey 185 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jul 2017
Have you considered that people might be stealing devices to scrap for parts precisely BECAUSE those parts are being made arbitrarily expensive? They’re creating a rod for their own backs. Make the parts cheaper and the repairs actually possible and the need for stolen bits drops dramatically. No need to stuff about with all this pairing nonsense. Win-win.
As much as I applaud anything that brings some attention to the *BSD world, this really isn't the thing stopping me from using it on the desktop. Having recently tried to do so again, here is a numbered list of what stopped me dead in my tracks.
1) Woeful Wi-Fi support. FreeBSD does not have any support for wireless AC, which means that no card newer than the N generation will work. This was an absolute dealbreaker.
2) No bluetooth support to speak of. I use this for audio quite frequently, and it not being there was a PITA.
3) Lack of support for containerized applications. This one isn't really FreeBSD's fault, since the issues come from that entire ecosystem relying on Linux-specific functionality, but it made it hard to use it for my day job.
4) Lack of support for USB HID devices in the udev emulation, which made USB peripherals annoying to get working in some cases.
Upvote for the second part of your comment, but after god knows how many ancient bugs that pop up years later I think the 'peer review' part of the argument is objectively bullshit. Sure they COULD be reviewed, but either nobody is actually doing it or they're not doing an especially good job.
"It appears that at least one school is formatting and reimaging the laptops from a known clean build before issuing them to pupils."
Good. Anyone who doesn't do this as standard practice when sourcing any machine for any purpose whatsoever deserves a paddling. Your PCs should arrive blank, and if they don't arrive blank you should *make* them blank and then load a known-good environment yourself. This sort of stuff has happened far too many times to be worth risking.
Pleased to see the return of magsafe. Charger cost aside it always struck me as a good common-sense idea. It was terribly ironic that an idea made popular by Apple was (until recently) only seeing serious use in Microsoft products of all things. In saying that, I would now also miss being able to plug the charger in on whichever side of the machine is convenient, like you can with USB-C, which can be dead handy at times.
Ok, so it's not as good as the RPi is, but remember that this is a first generation product. It was never going to be.
If you want there to be a credible alternative to ARM (really NVidia in a dress), you have to accept that isn't going to spring up overnight, and that the first releases ain't gonna be perfect.
I'm not even an Open Source evangelist, but even I can see the value in a totally free hardware ecosystem (and yes, I know there are doubts about blobs etc on this, but baby steps). Competition breeds innovation.
Nobody is saying that you should, I'm just a little frustrated that every time I complain about something I dislike on Apple devices someone seems to come along and burble about upgradable this and replaceable that on Android devices like it's the cat's pyjamas without actually taking into account what my actual issue was. My original post was written with no small degree of frustration, which has mostly boiled away now. I hadn't really intended it as a personal attack.
Maybe, just maybe, (stick with me here, I know this is a big concept) not everyone has the same requirements from their mobile devices as you do? I'm with the Monstr, I don't give a shit about expandable this or upgradable that. Not one. Not even a rosebud. Not even a hard fart in fact. I don't keep anything on my phone, so the smallest storage SKU is just fine thank you. I always use an external battery case, so a user replaceable built-in battery also isn't a big deal. I just want a device with reasonable build quality that I don't need to replace every two years just to keep inside of manufacturer support. It would be nice if the OS wasn't written and maintained by one of the least pleasant corporations ever to have existed too, but I realise that's a stretch these days since they're all bastards. The suggestions of sailfish and ubuntu devices above were nice, but since nobody really uses them there's no ecosystem. I don't want flavour-of-the-microsecond app XYZ, but I do need my banking to work.
Had a similar moggie years back. I don't recall it ever bringing anything back alive, but it had an unfortunate habit of bringing rabbit carcasses home and then breaking up the bones (notably the spine) with its teeth under your bed at 2AM. Truly the stuff of nightmares, plus you had to dodge the organs the following morning.
In fairness to the cat, it didn't kill them for fun. Or at least not solely for fun, as the majority of the victim was eaten, and the cat required very little feeding as a result.
NaTiOn sTaTe AtAcKeRs!1!1!!one!!!
I’m not sure where companies are getting the idea that their products are so secure that only a government assisted outfit can break into them, but as this post shows it’s clearly absolute horseshit in some/most cases. How about the next time they think about drumming up fear and loathing of an entire country they actually provide some evidence of that claim?
‘Allegedly’ is not worth the paper it’s written on.
...for any family members who are constantly asking you to come around only to find that rebooting the router solves the issue.
Go to your local hardware store and find a cheap 24 hour timer. The analogue ones with the pins or 'segments' will be fine. Shouldn't cost more than a fiver. Set it to the correct time, and then set it so the the output is on all the time, excluding 15 minutes at some dizzying time of the morning (3am perhaps). Plug the sucker in, and plug the router into it. Hey presto, an easy daily reboot without the user being expected to do anything, except maybe reset the time on the timer if the power goes out.
I use precisely two printers. A HP 4350 A4 mono and a (much larger) 5550 A3 colour. The 4350 was bought second hand for cheap, and the 5550 is a frankenstein rebuilt from two printers found dead on the side of the road. I like them both. I especially like that they were both built to last, don't phone home and don't require any bloatware to do their jobs. Oh, and they both have 3rd party consumables available.
Why can't they make them like that anymore?
One of Sharp's very first LCD projectors (the XV100) had a power supply that suffered from the same design flaw. Here in Australia it became a service item to remove the 110v components from the PSU to stop them from being blown up every time the mains dipped, which happened very frequently in the early 90s.
Whilst this is obviously despicable behaviour by HP, the impact wouldn’t be half as bad if people would just stop buying shitty inkjet printers. The mountains of e-waste produced by these monstrosities would shrink substantially too! Perhaps some legislation is required...
Lasers might be a higher initial outlay, but they are better in almost every way that matters.
Yes, but the things you were doing on the machine back in those days were vastly different from the workloads of today. Decoding an MP3 on a machine like that would have consumed almost if not all of the available system resource, to say nothing of full motion video. Sure, some software is crap today, and some of it always will be, but we're asking the machines to do things that would have been utterly impossible not even 10 years ago.
I do wish we'd stop building things with Electron though.
And for the second time in really not very long at all, I am ok with them being the only winners.
Locked down walled garden monopoly vs online digital tat slinger targeting children with useless habit forming rubbish. I don't know who I look down upon more. (Maybe Epic, maybe...)
Congratulations on missing every point that I made.
Yes, you can run other "browsers", but they're all the same engine under the hood, so if you want to render a site in something other than a Webkit browser you're SOL. I said as much in my original response to you. This also means no browser plugins. All of this is stuff that Android has had since literally day 1.
I say that the file manager provided isn't a proper file manager because it does not really allow you to perform traditional tasks. Sure, you can copy files around, but you want to pick a file and open it with a given application? Nup. Want a file to be visible to an application with it being it its sandbox? Nup. Want to view content loaded to a device, such as images or sound files? Nup. Want to send a file to a non-Apple device, using what might be considered an Open Standard? Nup. As a file manager it is spectacularly useless.
As doublelayer says above - "Openness doesn't always mean that the included tools do everything, but instead that if they don't, you can replace them with something that does. On Windows, you can. On Mac OS, you can. On IOS, you can't." - he's exactly right, and on this iOS has all the options of a brick.
Again, I say all this as a user. I have an iPhone X in my pocket _right now_. These limitations are not especially bothersome to me, but to say they don't exist is simply untrue.
Eh? Shirley you don't mean the same iOS that has always prevented you from even so much as -running- a browser that doesn't use Safari under the hood, still doesn't have a proper file manager and only just recently allowed content blocking in the browser it does have?
iOS has never been open, and I say that as a user!
Easy to scream and shout at MS for this one, but methinks this is more a case of everything looking like a nail to a man who has only a hammer. Spreadsheets were not designed for such tasks, and jamming them in where they do not fit was bound to cause problems. Anyone who has worked support in an office environment will tell you the same.
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