> Dieselgate killed people
What? Is he being metaphorical or does he mean via the environmental impact? That's a stretch IMHO. Or alternately am I simply missing something?
Demon-Haunted World
101–110 of 289 posts
Re: Demon-Haunted World
#102> Dieselgate killed people What? Is he being metaphorical or does he mean via the environmental impact? That's a stretch IMHO. Or alternately am I simply missing something?
Re: Demon-Haunted World
#103Doctorow mentions the cases where a printer company has made their software lie about how much ink was left in a cartridge to make consumers replace them more often. I always wondered why a manufacturer would want to do that. I mean, I understand the motive of making consumers buy ink more often, but from the manufacturer's point of view, why would they want to throw perfectly good ink away? Colour ink isn't as expen…
I know of a large printer company who approached a large media company with a deal that would have had the large media company change the color of the text on their printer friendly pages to something near black but requiring the color cartridge instead of true black. As I recall they were willing to pay seven figures annually. The media company did not take them up on their offer. The underhandedness/cleverness of t…
Wow, that's incredible. Even more surprising is that the media company didn't write a story about this.
Re: Demon-Haunted World
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> having some objective event trigger a legal requirement to have the nanny version The problem with this is, who gets to decide which objective event is the trigger? There is no real solution to this problem; it always ends up with a hodgepodge of arbitrary rules that benefit certain people (those with wealth and power), but are a net loss for society as a whole.
Well, either the trigger is legally enforceable, or it is not. If it's legally enforceable, then a legislature gets to decide. If it's not, then either the manufacturer decides, or it doesn't happen.
> If it's legally enforceable, then a legislature gets to decide.
Which in practice, at least in the US, means that unelected bureaucrats get to write the detailed regulations that actually decide, based on extremely vague and broad laws written by the legislature. Which in turn means that people with wealth and power can manipulate the system to get regulations passed that benefit them but are a net loss to society as a whole.
> If it's not, then either the manufacturer decides
Which isn't any better.
> or it doesn't happen
Which would be my desired outcome. If only.
Re: Demon-Haunted World
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> or even better, just generate a random new domain every single time. I'm no expert, but I do recall reading in one of the WC write-ups that there is known malware that does this.
It's called a DGA or domain generation algorithm, I believe Conficker was one of the first botnet's to use this approach about 10 years ago, it's pretty standard trade craft nowadays. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_generation_algorithm
Well this is slightly different. DGA seems to actually use it as a rendez-vous host, whereas in this case, it literally is a dummy domain that they didn't even bother registering, with the only purpose of checking if they were in a VM. In which case, generating any long hash domain would most likely not be registered and would do the job.
Re: Demon-Haunted World
#106This is what I think about at the pump. More and more I see gas pumps ask if you want a receipt BEFORE the gas is dispensed. This seems risky. If you decline the receipt and then dispense gas, the pump could cheat on the amount of gas dispensed with less risk, as a papered record of the purchase amount and price is not produced. If on the other hand, the pump waits to ask if you desire a receipt until after the gasol…
I think they are using the receipt prompt to hide how long credit card authentication is taking. They can't easily cheat on prices as usually there are large signs displaying the current price. They can't easily be cheating on amount dispensed, as the pumps are regularly checked by the local Weights and Measures Department (doesn't rule out a VW like cheat though).
Yeah. Inspectors use a 5-gallon container to test gas pumps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9HG_3SIsEM
So, your gas pump has to be accurate for the first five gallons, but then you can cheat as much as you want.
The only saving grace is that the people who make the pumps and software wouldn't be the main benefiters from cheating at the pump. So probably we're actually okay for gas pumps. It's situations where the software creator also benefits from the sales using that software...
But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe independent gas station operators are buying bootleg software ROMs to flash their pumps... "Boost revenue by 10% with this one easy trick"
And, I see from another comment:
Re: Demon-Haunted World
#107Why do our phones, which certainly felt damn snappy the day we bought them, inevitablely seem to slow down to the point of unusability after a couple dozen months? Even after a factory reset and installing no apps at all... I know it didn't take that long to open/close the built in apps when I bought that iPhone 4, 5, 5s... The only thing I can think of is the flash drive is slowing down as it wears. Or, the CPU cloc…
Someone posted about this issue here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15037960
I've got a Galaxy S3, an S4 couple first generation Moto Gs, a 2012 and a 2013 Nexus 7, a Note 2, I think? 2 Note 3s, and a One Plus One in various states of: loaned to cousins, used as house phones, backups in a drawer, backups in cars, or lying on my desk.
They were all either broken, at yard sales, given to me my clients / contacts that don't want them, or were In general four things kill these devices:
Touchscreen breakage. It is almost never worth trying to replace if the screen cracks.
Flash burnout. Shitty flash chips don't last forever. I've binned almost every older phone than this crop because the flash memory dies.
Charger port wear. Microusb sucks, replacement parts vary wildly depending on model - I can get an S series charger for The software is the ultimate killer. What should be the easiest to maintain is the hardest, because corporate greed and hunger for control trumps customer respect. All my mobile devices are cheap, used, or broken when I get them because none of these exploitative abusers are worth giving a direct cent to.
Sadly mobile flash doesn't support smart monitoring. There are three indicators, but your flash can randomly fail without any of them being observable:
Sector reallocations. As flash stops writing or reading the package will reallocate data. This process is intensive and usually lags out the phone. If when moving large amounts of data into / off the flash the whole phone is freezing, it can be due to this.
Stunted read / write speeds. As the flash degrades and more sectors go bad, your read and write performance suffer. Fragmentation gets worse as working sectors dry up. If your phone was benching ~80MB/s read or write speeds the day you got it and is down to ~20 5 years later, it is likely nearing a failure point. This is usually a gradual aging thing, but you do often see a steep slope of sudden performance crash before the whole chip becomes unusable.
Crippled access times. The former was data rate, this is data latency. The latency should always be consistent and not age much throughout the life of the chip - the ability to access flash almost always stays near-constant over the lifetime of the chip. If this starts going, for very small data sizes, the chips controller can be dying. Which happens, because in phones a lot of corners are cut, and flash mmus are often really, really cheap.
It would be useful if we could get A. lifetime write averages for the flash chips in popular phones and B. trace such a number throughout the lifetime of the device, but we don't have those, so you are almost always flying in the dark on when your phones memory will die.
Re: Demon-Haunted World
#108> like the iTunes and Kindle ‘‘updates’’ that have removed features the products were sold with
Anyone know what iTunes update he's talking about? I don't remember anything that fits this description.
Re: Demon-Haunted World
#109Why do our phones, which certainly felt damn snappy the day we bought them, inevitablely seem to slow down to the point of unusability after a couple dozen months? Even after a factory reset and installing no apps at all... I know it didn't take that long to open/close the built in apps when I bought that iPhone 4, 5, 5s... The only thing I can think of is the flash drive is slowing down as it wears. Or, the CPU cloc…
Next time I get a new phone, I'm going to put together a performance testing plan and record a video of it on the new phone. Then any time I wonder about this, I can run through the plan again and compare with the recording. So, ask me again in a few years.
Thanks for the idea. I just created a list of built-in apps, set them to point to some deafults that do not depened on the network performance (for instance, Calendar only includes Holidays, and displays year view), rebooted and measured time to start them in a succession. Apps that depends on internet are excluded.
While this is not super accurate because OS and app updates could affect their startup time, it is still something measurable. It will be interesting to see if a year from now a set of same apps with basically same functionality will take more time to start on the same (or newer) hardware.
Re: Demon-Haunted World
#110> like the iTunes and Kindle ‘‘updates’’ that have removed features the products were sold with Anyone know what iTunes update he's talking about? I don't remember anything that fits this description.
I don't know about Apple, but Sony is an excellent example.
They removed the ability to use Linux on the PS3. This is probably one reason they have been consistently targeted by hackers.