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Comment Re:We need more wars (Score 1) 155

I know (or at least hope), that you meant this in jest, but hear me out anyway: there is this common perception, that war clears out the deadwood, burns away the dry shrubbery, and after all the killing has been done and done to, fresh minds will spring to life and reinvigorate society. Reality shows a very different pattern, though. Russia tried to bring this concept to life in the last almost four years, lost over a million convicts, misfits and whatnots, and total alcohol consumption went up, not down.

If you send all these "less than average" people to slaughter, you leave behind a lot of misery, which bogs down the rest of society. This "cleaning steel bath" is a dangerous myth mostly spread by people, who think themselves so far above average, that they don't expect to get sacrificed in this madness..

Comment Re:no shit? (Score 1) 77

I suspect that they feel at least incrementally less burned in this case; since, while it wasn't obviously a good idea for a product, it at least goes somewhere: if you can make a phone functional and adequately rigid at that size; it's quite possible that there's a more sensible device size that you can still apply the miniaturized motherboard and whatever mechanical engineering you did for rigidity to; and just fill the rest of the case with battery; and there may be some other cases where the ability to get an entire SoC and supporting components into a particularly tiny area or make a thin component of a larger system quite rigid is handy.

Still doesn't really explain flaying a normal phone until it barely has a normal day's use with a totally fresh battery when you are still going to glue an entire baby spy satellite to one end of it; but some of the actual engineering is probably reusable.
The 'butterfly' keyboards, or the under-mouse charging port, by contrast, went nowhere. They tried and failed at a few iterations of keyboards that committed expensive suicide if you looked at them wrong; then just went back to allocating the extra mm or whatever once Jony was safely out of the picture; and it's not as though putting the port on the bottom rather than the front of the mouse involved any interesting capability development.

Whatever product manager thought that the 'air' would be a big seller deserves to feel bad; but the actual engineering team can probably feel OK about the odds that a future phone will look somewhat air-like if you were to remove the normally shaped case and larger battery.

Comment American corporatism meets Chinese complaceny (Score 1) 37

For over a decade I have heard these lame stories by American phone companies, that it is completely impossible to block calls/messages with obvious fake displayed numbers. Hand wringing stories are being told about something, which every half-competent router admin considers a 101 level skill.

Then you have the Chinese government, which is very strict on perpetrators against their own people. They handed out 11 death sentences, 2 suspended death sentences and multiple life terms against one of their crime families running scam centers in Myanmar targeting Chinese people.

At the same time they are extremely lax against their own perpetrators, who facilitate crimes against westerners. British stolen/robbed cell phones end up there, they are on lists of stolen phones and still operate without problems inside China. They just don't care. Now you have these scam messages and there will be, again, no reaction from Chinese government.

I am not very optimistic about this, neither about US phone companies clearing up the mess, nor about the Chinese government doing anything about it.

Comment Re:get over yourself its called android no google (Score 1) 67

They're talking about LineageOS. Think Graphene but it doesn't just run on Google hardware. Over a hundred devices and they just added mainline kernel and qemu support so it potentially runs on thousands of devices.

Sadly with less hardening. I wish Lineage would take some Graphene patches. The crazy thing is Lineage descended from Cyanogenmod which had many of these patches!

Comment Re:This is correct. Migrate applications first (Score 1) 34

In the MS case; it wouldn't be too surprising if that order is also the one that urgency dictates. Neither is totally unavailable on-prem only; or entirely without more-chatty-than-one-would-like behavior; but if your concern is about your dependence and Redmond's potential direct control their groupware stuff is moving faster than their OSes(at least if you have enterprise licenses and someone to handle keeping them quiet) in the direction of pure SaaS.

You'll get some nagging about how Azure Arc is definitely the cool kid's future of glorious hybrid manageability; but your ability to run Windows as though it were 15 years ago is definitely greater than your ability to run Office that way.

I suspect that this won't be the last case we see; as MS has shown comparatively little interest in backing down on the future being azure SaaS, and there's no real equivalent to some steep but temporary discounts for dealing with people who have fundamental privacy and operational control issues; while it's not terribly challenging to find a special discount that makes sticking with the status quo look cheaper than trying to do a migration.

Comment "sustain the development" (Score 1) 90

Yeah, nobody is buying this "sustain the development" nonsense.

Somebody needs to keep the servers patched. Somebody needs to keep the app targeting an API that the app stores will host. Bose can afford maybe 1.5 FTE's with redundancy on a rolling basis.

Did they ignore due diligence for a decade and just get nabbed running RHEL 5 and unlicensed Oracle Java on an old VMWare or something?

If Bose is a public corporation perhaps the FTC should have a look at their deliberations.

Comment Scorpion or hubris? (Score 1) 48

I obviously don't expect better from these sorts of people; but I'm honestly puzzled as to why they would turn the screws so quickly and blatantly despite having gone to all the trouble of a reshuffle and a new lineup and some spiel about being likeable rather than Alexa just being something that you sort of poke at because Prime members were given a free surveillance puck with some offer one time.

Is Panay one of those abhuman lunatics who genuinely thinks that the only objection to relentless advertising is that it isn't "relevant" or "engaging" enough? Does he have a scorpion nature that leads him to knowingly doom his own product just because that's what he is? Is he just a figurehead who got to choose the case plastics colors and smile on stage; but some adtech business unit calls all the shots?

I'd fully expect this sort of thing to betray you; but only after enough of a honeymoon period for people to be pleasantly surprised by the behavior of the launch units so that there is actually enough of an install base to betray.

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