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What's that touchscreen in my room?

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Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#151

Post by bitwize »

alexambarch wrote: post #116
kelnos wrote: post #53

> There were two strings printed with labels “SSID” and “Pwd”. I froze in horror. They wouldn’t dare. It is literally 3 meter distance. These are embedded devices, they do not need this complexity… Not surprising at all. I would expect that a lot of these are bought as retrofits, and not as a part of new construction. Running wires through existing walls can be annoying, and they don't want to put that barrier to sal…

> Also, oh, man, Jazelle. I'd forgotten about that. Hardware support for Java bytecode... that did not pan out well. As someone who was too young to be paying any attention during this time, what were some of the reasons this didn’t pan out? Java seems so dominant looking back that I’m surprised something like this wouldn’t have been a success.

The Lisp machine failed because Lisp compiler technology got better and better at targeting generic 32-bit CPU hardware, which was becoming increasingly cheap and plentiful. So the benefits of having all this custom hardware to specially execute Lisp code were nullified -- leaving only the costs.

The same thing happened to Java in hardware. It seemed like a good idea at the time because it allowed developers to target a language they were already familiar with, and present an alternative to Wintel -- especially when you realize that Java was all the rage as a sort of universal programming environment, and in particular J2ME was a big deal for proto-"smart" phones before the iPhone came along. But embedded Java didn't really pan out, memory and CPU time got cheaper, and compiler and JIT tech improved to the point where there was just no benefit to adding the hardware it took to decode Java instructions. So Jazelle was deprecated and replaced with something called ThumbEE, which was a more generic framework based on ARM's Thumb instruction set for running code for an abstract machine, providing features like automatic null-pointer checking and that. Like you could set up a ThumbEE environment for running Python or .NET code in addition to Java. Nowadays even ThumbEE is deprecated. Neither feature appears in ARMv8 processors, for instance.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#153

Post by madaxe_again »

kelnos wrote: post #53

> There were two strings printed with labels “SSID” and “Pwd”. I froze in horror. They wouldn’t dare. It is literally 3 meter distance. These are embedded devices, they do not need this complexity… Not surprising at all. I would expect that a lot of these are bought as retrofits, and not as a part of new construction. Running wires through existing walls can be annoying, and they don't want to put that barrier to sal…

>> To be honest, the whole thing was a bit scary, since I was very close to the mains

I laughed at this. Changing a fuse is… a bit scary? They literally teach this in elementary school in the U.K. - or they did. As you say, no need to fretfully check the fuse - either it blows or it doesn’t, and you’ll know when it does. At least he didn’t find the receptacle holding a dead fuse, carefully wrapped in the ceremonial aluminium shroud of eternal life and certain death, which is a crime I may have committed in my younger, more fire-prone years.

I find it interesting how uncomfortable some people are outside of their comfort zones - but then I am a person who spends his life sticking his nose in stuff he has no business with.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#154

Post by a2800276 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #109
kelnos wrote: post #53

> There were two strings printed with labels “SSID” and “Pwd”. I froze in horror. They wouldn’t dare. It is literally 3 meter distance. These are embedded devices, they do not need this complexity… Not surprising at all. I would expect that a lot of these are bought as retrofits, and not as a part of new construction. Running wires through existing walls can be annoying, and they don't want to put that barrier to sal…

> Running wires through existing walls can be annoying, and they don't want to put that barrier to sale in front of them. It also makes it more convenient to compromise the device from across the street (or across town with a directional antenna). Though of course that's not a problem if your security is up to par and the device continues to receive regular security updates, and we can only surmise that the author ha…

> we can only surmise that the author has discovered a rare outlier in this space where that is not the case.

Exactly what I was thinking! What luck that the author found the single IoT device out there that's a cobbled together piece of bodged electronics designed by a graduate from a webdev bootcamp with a Corel Draw focus. A device that, while only ~15 years old is not only hopelessly useless, but also obsolete and insecure.

It's a good thing all other consumer IoT device manufacturers think about and prioritize security, longevity! Also, that customers nowadays are more focused on installing something fit-for-purpose and sustainable once than buying the cheapest shit possible with the blinkiest LEDs.

I shudder to think about how long they tried to get the string-and-cups based telephone to work in my building until the 1930's when they installed the copper still used today for DSL. Or how terrible the paper-straw based water system must have been up to the 1890's when they realized investing in metal pipes has advantages. So glad the days of short-term thinking are behind us.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#155

Post by AVincentInSpace »

geerlingguy wrote: post #83
astrange wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SIM cards and secure elements (contactless credit cards) both use this, or did at one point.

For a time, Java was set to be the 'everything everywhere' language, IIRC in some quarters the hype behind Java on everything was even bigger than Cloud, then Crypto, then AI.

Just you watch, WASI is gonna be next

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#156

Post by madaxe_again »

anigbrowl wrote: post #134
userbinator wrote: post #100

Interesting article but one thing stood out: The landlord had no idea what this is. There are no buttons or labels on the thing, just a tiny yellow light to let you know it has the power. You move in and find a mysterious device on the wall that, at least to me, appears somewhat ominous and it's not obvious whether it may have a camera and possibly a microphone (the picture of it on the manual appears to show that it…

The landlord had no idea what this is. Golgafrincham B Ark candidate detected.

Hey, he might be an exceedingly skilled telephone sanitiser.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#157

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #128

A few years ago I came to the realisation that if you want people to be more environmentally conscious or economical in terms of utility consumption, (electricity, water, gas, etc), they need far better data than a single figure per month. You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes. That way people can spot things like “having my electric heater on for those couple of hours used more electr…

Something in my apartment is consuming a ton of power and I don't know what. I would love a graph with a resolution better than a day.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#158

Post by outofmyshed »

tjohns wrote: post #77
MeImCounting wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fascinating! I did not know this about british plugs. Why is that? Is it a safety measure?

British household electrical systems are normally built as one large ring circuit, originally in order to save copper after WW2. This means you don't have breakers for each branch circuit (there are no branch circuits), just the single mains breaker for the house. This single breaker is too large to trip from a short from occuring in the smaller wires inside an appliance. So each plug (or hardwired device) needs it's…

Houses built post-1960s (with more than one floor) will have more than one socket ring each protected by a circuit breaker at the distribution board, usually one per floor for general sockets, with a separate one for the kitchen, and usually individual 32A breakers for things like electric ovens and hobs.

Lighting rings are also separate, usually on 6A breakers. We cheap out on cable by not running neutrals to the switches, which causes nerds headaches when they want to install generic smart light switches.

My house is reasonably large (worked hard, all my own money) and has a 20-way distribution board with separate socket and light rings for groups of rooms. It’s handy for isolation purposes.

More recent builds’ rings will be protected by a combination of MCBs and RCDs, or individual RCBOs (now the cost has come down) which combine the two functions and is ultimately the safest option for most situations.

Individually fusing plugs (and in the case of high-draw appliances like washing machines and dryers, protecting with a fused socket) is still a very good idea. And don’t get me started on earthing practices in other countries…

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#159

Post by PeterisP »

girvo wrote: post #94

> C in IoT stands for “cost-effective” I guess I know this sounds pithy (and it is!) but you'd be surprised exactly how cheap and cost effective Wi-fi enabled SoCs are. A lot of the time we're getting Wi-Fi for free, and most of those SoC's don't have the Ethernet controller by default, so it's more cost-effective to use Wi-fi if it can fit your use-case. Other physical protocols/connection types can be supported of…

Purely from a materials perspective, 2x cheap WiFi-capable microcontrollers (e.g. esp8266) will cost the manufacturer something like $4-$5 total for both devices - which is comparable to 3m cable+connectors+cheap chips to handle the cable connection (even ignoring the cost of some person to install the cable which is far more expensive than that) so indeed I don't get why the author considers that doing the connection over WiFi is somehow wasteful.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#160

Post by yread »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #157
jonathanlydall wrote: post #128

A few years ago I came to the realisation that if you want people to be more environmentally conscious or economical in terms of utility consumption, (electricity, water, gas, etc), they need far better data than a single figure per month. You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes. That way people can spot things like “having my electric heater on for those couple of hours used more electr…

Something in my apartment is consuming a ton of power and I don't know what. I would love a graph with a resolution better than a day.

Check the coffee machine. Full auto espresso machines can be huge hogs
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