Posts by Charlie Clark 12190 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
Is it still full of Samsung cruft, spyware and tracking?
There is some cruft but it's easy to disable most of it.
Does it try to inject advertising into my browsing or use of apps like Samsung tellies do.
No. Unlike a telly you're free to install whichever browser you want, along with tracker blockers like Blockada.
Still, I don’t feel like the S21 is really intended for power users, or those desperate to hang on the bleeding edge.
This has been Samsung's strategy with the S range for several years: occasionally something new but mainly improving on last year's model. This is also basically what Apple does and is good for customer loyalty: when you want a new phone, you generally want something like the old one, but better: more storage, waterproof, wireless charging, better optics, etc.
For those that want the bleeding edge it has the foldable range and will presumably continue to try new form factors and features.
They are plotting AND COMMITTING, genocide and insurrection.
You're close to a trilemma: genocide, insurrection and gun rights – you can have any two.
Plotting a crime is usually a crime in itself. As is incitement and that's how these things should be pursued. Going after the gatekeepers rather than the perpetrators will only entrench the role of the gatekeepers over what is and isn't acceptable. I'd rather have the law and the courts do that.
Parler is also a messaging app. I haven't followed the cases in the US but it's worth noting that Telegram runs its own server infrastructure and has, in the past, been victim of bans in the past, including, I think, by AWS which it uses to obfuscate location. The owner does say that he will close groups and channels if he thinks complaints legitimate but the main difference is that the platform was designed from the outset to be difficult to close down. Scaling on AWS to handle the traffic is one thing, being able to foil government blocks quite another.
It's the risk that all democracies run and supposed to be offset by people's better nature.
And the fact that the US Congress is full of partisan numpties has little to do with free speech on social media and messenger services. There have always been whackos there. The current excesses are driven more by money and the primary system which puts extremists on the slate. The electoral system favours the two party system and letting the legislature draw the electoral boundaries is very much letting the fox run the hen coop. That said, the recent rise of populism in democracies around the world suggests there are other factors in play.
Most of the beneficiaries, espeically Tesla, have virtually zero costs when raising new capital so this money will either end up as dividends or share buy backs.
This money would be far more effective if spent on research for the catalytic creation of hydrocarbons and fuel cells. Unlike the physics around energy density of Lithum batteries, which set some firm limits, the chemistry (and biochemistry) around creating hydrocarbons using renewable energy does look like it can be done below cost. This would give us a safe, efficient and fungible way to store excess renewable energy, which would be carbon neutral at minimum. If we can then develop fuel cells that can use what's produced we can create more efficient vehicles and reduce our dependency on energy imports.
But this is just another example of politicians chasing the lamplight…
I've always said it was healthy…
I found the copy of Rustler in the park and I'm just trying to return it!*
* Actually, I do remember coming across the odd wank mag in the park to and from school. Never understood why anyone would take them to the park except perhaps to perpetuate cliches!
Testing for prostate cancer has been a real problem with lots of false positives and biopsies causing more problems than they would have solved. Because little was known about PCA base levels, biopsies were often performed when levels were high for a population but not for an indiviual – rinse and repeat for other measures such as blood pressure. I'm part of a long-term EU study that will provide data on PCA base levels and development over time that will hopefully provide better data for future inference testing.
The value will matter in any compensation claims, which may extend to any third parties: this is after all in America. From the brief description, I assume Dropbox will be required to turn over logs of which files were copied and who had access to them. Dropbox doesn't automatically sync the whole file system and in my experience doesn't bother with removable storage so any copying will have been done deliberately.
Wireless charging has to be the worst, most inefficient way anyone could have invented to charge a phone.
Not really. Given a reasonable surface area and low enough current the losses are not that much greater than with many power supplies, which often have shitty transformers. Good phones with good chargers are now very good at getting this right. This is one of the reasons I switched to extension cables with integrated USB ports. I don't have any scientific data, but given the number of 5V devices I could switch to using them, I'm pretty certain it's had an impact.
And, overall, in the lifecycle of a mobile phone, the energy used to charge it is tiny compared with production and decommissioning.
While there is no doubt a risk of major open source projects being held hostage by a few major players, tinkering with the licences is unlikely to change anything. The open source principles have proved their worth time and again and many of the large companies have embraced them so much that they provide stewardship and resources for some projects. Companies that release their software under an open source licence should not be surprised if their competitors adopt it: it was their choice to do so. There is a risk that they can use such projects to dominate the market. If this is the case the regulation may be required, just as it would in any other case of market dominance.
Chip sales were given a double boost in 2020 by all the extra kit orderd for home offices, but also by stockpiling in China ahead of US sanctions. Data centres continue to expand, but so does their use of non-Intel (and non-x86) hardware. And Intel is still nowhere in the embedded market. Still, the company still has excellent engineers across the board and lots of cash so there is no reason to see why it shouldn't continue to be successful, though some restructuring is inevitable.
I think the amendment was framed with something like a restoration in mind and citizens should be able to fight fire with fire… But, it's possible to argue that this threat has diminished over time or could be countered more effectively by limiting the powers of the executive branch.
But political reform always seems to need upheaval to be successful and, despite the many problems in US politics, it still looks a long way away from the kind of consensus needed for meaningful reform. In the meantime partisanship, gerrymandering and regulatory capture will no doubt continue.
Trump's actions suggest that the details of the presidential pardon should be reviewed and clarified. But it's difficult to see a majority in Congress for this in the foreseeable future. But, in general, in order for such a power to have the occasionally necessary impact, you have to live with the odd abuse.
The problem with Trump wasn't with his abuse of power, but with the fact that he got chosen as a presidential candidate in the first place (because the election was outsourced to the media), then elected (because the other candidate was weak), and then feted by a party that had become beholden to him. Had he been impeached first time round this would never have happened, and the GOP would have started its renwal earlier. And calls for sincere electoral reform (ending the primary system, reforming the electoral college, etc.) might have been heeded.
I think he may find that more dificult now that he is no longer president and the shine is wearing off. Presumably, this is why he held so many rallies and fundraisers after the election.
Sure, he's guaranteed a slot on some of the more extremist channels, though he won't earn anything like enough to service his debts. But he might also learn that people drop their champions as fast as they raise them.
The Second Amendment does cover all firearms. But you might expect it to be revised from time to time to reflect changes in society and technology. A bigger issue, as I understand it, is that the right to bear arms (whether small pistols, AK47s or whatever) is intimately coupled with the right to challenge an abusive king, ie. not for everyday use.
Not having hardware acceleration is nowadays more than just a minor irritatiion, especially on ARM.
The best bet is to wait until another manufacturer sees the opportunity and releases their own ARM-based stuff. Though this would be easier if Microsoft or Google were keener on providing support.
They've been suffering from quantum effects for different generations and have come up with some fairly ingenious solutions such as geometry and different doping. But this is what drives up the costs. If we only had PCs we probably wouldn't be anywhere near 5nm but the several billion smartphones have changed things a bit.
That only reduces the geopolitical risk. If things continue, we'll have a duopoly at best and a monopoly at worst. Until the Chinese have enough IP for their own fabs… But even so there is potentially a huge risk in price rises. And what if TSMC decided to get into the design business as well?
Users are free to post what they want in the knowledge it will be published, so this wouldn't be relevant to GDPR even if it was in the EU, which isn't. The app itself is not that different in principle, let's say, from a weather tracking app. It wouldn't surprise me if there weren't a myriad of similar apps for colds, etc.
In the US the problems would arise if the app were making claims based on the data submitted. But even then it would be the FDA who decides. Letting the various app stores act as gatekeepers is a problem.
Even though the app looks to be of questionable utility – it's basically just a mashup – it's difficult to argue why it should be banned when hundreds, if not thousands, of similar, in the sense that they rely on people providing information along with their GPS, apps are available. As long as the app itself isn't mailicious and the provider is handling data correctly, it's difficult to argue that the ban isn't discriminatory, which is key for whether Apple has the right to do this.
You can put your pedant hat away.
It seems that WhatsApp lumps lots of countries together into the "Europe" region where it follows GDPR whether or not the countries are part of the EU. Course, it may only be a matter of time until, like Facebook, UK users of WhatsApp are considered part of "rest of the world".
Given how capriciously, including retroactive tax grabs, various Indian governments have enacted legislation in the past, I don't think that would matter. It's also not shy to wield the ban hammer.
But this is probably just standard posturing and sabre-rattling: not a day goes by in India without it. Presumably, a suitable donation to the BJP will help resolve the issue…
My S5 was "waterproof", well, water resistant, but good enough for practical purposes such as navigation on a bike and it had a removable battery.
I think the biggest argument for non-removable batteries is that it is not a problem for most people. If it were, you could expect the market to say no. Lithium Ion batteries last much longer than NiCd or NiMH and most people are probably happy with the battery lasting from dawn to dusk most of the time. For heavy use, a powerpack is more flexible and packs a bigger punch. That said: I'm all for more modularity and repairability.
They're now looking at how much expensive office space they can offload. Also, if they're lucky, they don't need to worry about health and safety directives for their soon-to-be-freelance employees.
But the thing that annoys me most about this discussion is how much of it is a first-world problem. Lots of people doing really important work don't have an option of doing it from home and some of them regularly work in far riskier environments. I wonder how they feel when the subject dominates the headlines.
Cynic, moi?
Phone numbers and SIMs make sense on mobile devices and are used only to set things up. You can read the Signal docs about what they use, and why. Access to contacts is local only and purely for convenience, it's not a requirement.
But there other options: neither Threema nor Wire require mobile numbers to use. Threema even has different levels of trust depending on how well contacts know each other.
That's what I thought too but Johannes Caspar the Hamburger Data Privacy Commissioner, and in this role one of the leading lights in Germany, considers the changes problematic and the matter will be referred to the Irish Data Privacy Commissioner.
Based on what I've seen over the last week it looks like that, in Germany at least, WhatsApp has blown it. Lots of people are popping up on the other services and it's probably only a matter of time until the network effect sets in as "influencers" drag their users with them to other platforms.
There are other currents: Corona protesters have long been using Telegram groups and channels; and recent developments in America are pushing people onto alternative platforms.
Horses for courses. Telegram is more user friendly, has excellent desktop apps, and scales brilliantly: it has some of the largest groups on the internet and has recently added audio calls to groups: this makes it much more interesting for me than, say, Zoom. There is some concern about ownership and location of servers: data does get stored on their servers. That said, it's extremely resilient, which is why it's being used in Belorussia to coordinate protests and Russia gave up trying to block it. There are also some concerns about encryption, especially with data being kept on the servers, but at least it doesn't leak telephone numbers like WhatsApp does.
Signal was designed for security which meant it is less user friendly than others but that minimal data was stored on their server. For example, until recently, you couldn't administer groups or have group calls because groups were essentially chains of bilateral chats. They have since done some very interesting research on zero knowledge group management which means that even you control the server you don't know who belongs to which group. In addition, they have have added support for group audio and video calls (up to 10), which is about all you can do without a server-based solution. The software has been peer-reviewed and the server has survived several subpoenas with Signal demonstrating how little information about users they can provide.
It's probably worth noting that there are other options such as Threema (costs € 4 one-off, developed and hosted in Switzerland and partly financed by a for suits version), which does not require a telephone number, and Wire, which has also had its software peer-reviewed.
Personally, I use Signal, Telegram and Threema for different groups. Interoperability would be great but prepared to use the right tool for the job and share as little compromising information as possible whatever the network, because even if you know the information can't be intercepted, you can't always be sure who's on the other end nor what they do with it.
I also think the MagSafe connection is a brilliant solution for charging. I only wish that Apple would push to have it standardised: this is the sort of thing that patents are supposed to support the adoption of. Easier enough to have an USB-C - MagSafe adapter so that proprietary chargers are not required.
The risk of the computer being dragged around is, however, less than that of permanent damage to the socket. And this is where Apple could certainly improve: last year I had to have the whole USB sub-board replaced because having everything to the side can lead to unnecessary strains on the arrangement. On my MacBook 2015 I had both the USB and HDMI in constant use and, even with short cable buffers and infrequent removal, it was obviously too much for the arrangement. Though presumably I should have rearranged my office so that the screen was always to the right of the Mac…
As for the touchbar: you can see why the designers thought it was a good idea. On something like a phone a virtual menu (like the sidebar on the newer Samsungs) makes a lot of sense, but bugger all at the top of a keyboard, which is why you can still buy dedicated peripherals for sequencers, etc.
Magsafe was/is a really, really elegant solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.
Flying notebooks are maybe less of a risk than buggered sockets due to the stresses that they can be under and I reckon USB-C is more susceptible here because it's smaller. This is why Nokia and Ericsson also had "pop" connections for charging.
But whatever they do, please make an effort to standardise it.
As long as onboard storage was so small and expensive, I'd have to agree but that has changed over the last few years. But, as Apple have shown, many people also appreciate not even having to worry getting additional storage. And there are probably also specious arguments about speed, especially for recording 8k video of the little darlings
My S10e has 128 GB and, although it will take an SD card, I haven't had the need for one yet. Personally, the next time I get a phone I'd still be looking for SD support but, given suffiicient onboard storage, wouldn't considere a deal breaker.
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