You just know that if they did have a support email address, it'd just reply with "💩".
You just know that if they did have a support email address, it'd just reply with "💩".
And even apparently from name brands.
My sister bought a low-end Samsung tablet (some years ago admittedly), and it NEVER received a software update in the 3 years she owned it. Not a major update, not a security patch, nothing.
I'd hope they've gotten better about that, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
I thought it might be sensible on Linux to use MS Edge for Teams (the PWA version).
Nope, it's just as shit in Microsoft's own browser. There is apparently no saving it.
Since the realistic competitor here is probably magnetic tape, current-generation (LTO9) media can transfer at around 400MB/s, taking 12 hours and change to fill an 18TB tape.
Earlier archival optical disk formats (https://news.panasonic.com/global/stories/798) claimed 360MB/s, but I believe that is six, double-sided discs writing both sides simultaneously, so 30MB/s per stream. Filling the same six (300GB) discs would take about an hour and a half.
Building the library to handle and read/write in bulk is always the issue though. The above optical system fit 1.9PB in the space of a server rack (and I didn't see any options to expand further when that was current technology), and by the looks is 7 units that each can be writing a set of discs (call that 2.5GB/s total).
In the same single rack you'd fit 560 LTO tapes (10.1PB for LTO9) and 21 drives (8.4GB/s).
So they have a bit of catching up to do, especially with LTO10 (due in the next year or so) doubling the capacity and further increasing the throughput.
There's also the small matter that every one of these massive increases in optical disc capacity in recent years has turned out to be vapourware. I mean I don't doubt that they will achieve it someday, but they always seem to go nowhere.
To note: this appears to be a move from 5 years (standard, free) + 5 years (extended, paid) to 5+7. Users not paying Canonical aren't getting anything different as to with prior LTS releases.
Standard free support for 24.04 is still 2024-04 through 2029-06.
From the video description:
I have been a Samsung product user for many years, and I don't plan to stop anytime soon
And all sympathy I had for this person just vanished. If you don't demand better, they will keep doing - and getting away with - shit like this.
Voting with your wallet might be the one voice you have left in this world, what a way to squander it by continuing to buy products from companies whose representatives behave in this manner.
Not OP, but genuine answer: because I loathe being forced into their way of doing things. Every little thing on the Mac seems engineered with an "our way or the highway" mentality, that leaves no room for other (frequently, better) ways of achieving anything.
Adding to that, window/task management is an absolute nightmare (things that have worked certain ways basically since System 6 on monochrome Mac Classic machines, and haven't improved), and despite all claims to the contrary, its BSD-based underpinnings are just different enough to Linux's GNU toolset to make supposed compatibility (or the purported "develop on Mac, deploy on Linux" workflow) a gross misadventure.
I just find the experience frustrating, unpleasant, and always walk away from a Mac feeling irritated.
(For context: > 20 year exclusively Linux user. While it's definitely not always been a smooth ride, I seldom feel like I'm fighting against the computer to get it to do what I want, which is distinctly not my experience with Apple products)
I genuinely hope you enjoy all the negative reviews you're about to receive, Sony.
I've been seeing a lot about Sodium-ion just in the past week.
While they seem to have a huge advantage in being able to charge and discharge at some fairly eye-watering rates, the miserable energy density would seem to limit them to stationary applications, at least for now.
Perfect for backup power, load shifting, and other power-grid-tied applications though.
To make it worse, we have our own in New Zealand, which is the (worldwide) original of that format. The Aussie series is a spin-off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border\_Patrol\_(New\_Zealand\_TV\_series)
Something not so far mentioned is Tree Style Tab.
If you habitually have a lot of tabs open, you'll probably know how annoying it is finding things when each page title has been condensed down to 4-5 characters. On widescreen displays (especially 16:9), vertical pixels are also a lot more precious, while horizontal ones are plentiful.
For me (3840×2160 display, 200% scale), its vertical tab sidebar fits about 30 tabs before needing a scrollbar, and you get a full width title for each and every one.
It can be a bit of an adjustment at first, but I've been using this since the pre-WebExtensions days (since around Firefox 4.0), it's definitely one of my must-haves.
It does however affect getting updates from government agencies, and others who insist on only disseminating real-time information to the public via Twitter.
For instance: https://twitter.com/WakaKotahiWgtn
This is the account for traffic events (road closures, traffic accidents, etc) in my city. Not signed in, the latest visible post is from February 2023.
Since I don't have a twitter account, this is now functionally useless.
Worse still, a lot of "modern" designs don't even both including that trivial amount of content in the page, so if you've got a bad connection you get a page with some of the style and layout loaded, but nothing actually in it.
I'm not really sure how we arrived at this point, it seems like use of lazy-loading universally makes things worse, but it's becoming more and more common.
I've always vaguely assumed it's just a symptom of people having never tested in anything but their "perfect" local development environment; no low-throughput or high-latency connections, no packet loss, no nothing. When you're out here in the real world, on a marginal 4G connection - or frankly even just connecting to a server in another country - things get pretty grim.
Somewhere along the way, it feels like someone just decided that pages often not loading at all was more acceptable than looking at a loading progress bar for even a second or two longer (but being largely guaranteed to have the whole page once you get there).
I would contend that bricks are technically region locked, for the majority of people.
That is, if you see the shipping cost of getting one to a different region, you're absolutely going to leave it in its country of origin.
I recently bought a Boox Palma, which is a phone-size Android device with a real E-Ink display.
It's not a phone (WiFi/Bluetooth only, no mobile radio), and with 4-bit greyscale it's definitely an adjustment to use with a lot of apps (it has per-app DPI & contrast controls to help), but they've done a lot of work on the refresh rate to make it feel responsive.
It even has midrange-phone specs (SD 6xx series CPU, 6GB RAM, 4Ah battery), with full Google Play, so it's a quite usable Android device overall. Like most modern E-Ink devices, has a CCT warm-to-cool frontlight, so great for night-time use.
Now would I want to use it as my only, everyday device (if it was a phone too)? Probably not. Could I? Almost certainly.
Colour E-Ink is still quite limited (in contrast, and resolution), but I expect the patents on that are quite a bit newer and we won't be seeing so much movement in that area so soon.
The estimated training time for GPT-4 is 90 days though.
Assuming you could scale that linearly with the amount of hardware, you'd get it down to about 3.5 days. From four times a year to twice a week.
If you're scrambling to get ahead of the competition, being able to iterate that quickly could very much be worth the money.
It was obvious right from the outset that Reddit's assertions as to the costs and motivations were not remotely genuine.
There was a comment early on to the effect of "it should only cost about $1 per user per month". Were that in fact the case, they could easily have added their own payment method to collect said dollar directly from users, allowing API / 3rd-party client access on a per-account basis. No weird limitations, just the experience you were already enjoying for a nominal fee.
The whole principle was from the outset pants-on-head idiotic, and it's clear the few times I have been to Reddit since that both the quality and quantity of content has noticeably reduced. Who could have predicted that the "freeloading" 3rd-party app users were the ones providing the bulk of the content (y'know, that content that, for all purposes, is Reddit, and they get to sell ads against).
The OpenTF site itself provides a view on that point: https://opentf.org/#regular-user
And they're right; while you might consider yourself compliant with today's version of the license, they can change those terms whenever, and however they like in the future.
I weirdly do remember Hudson from my previous roles as a software developer, but like so many products forked that way it's barely a footnote in history at this point.
The phrase "cutting off your nose to spite your face" comes to mind.
Those of us who had to develop websites and make them even vaguely functional in IE6 haven't forgotten.
Dark times, those were.
Unfortunately Firefox doesn't have a replacement for the "Android System WebView" component, so any app that embeds a browser component (and oh boy is that a lot of them) will still be using Chrome.
There's a relevant ticket here: https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview/issues/167
It should be possible to have a shim that allows Mozilla's "GeckoView" component to implement the API, but - per that ticket, at least - most Android ROMs won't allow alternatives to the Google one.
The Firefox browser is genuinely great, but it's so far from possible to replace Chrome with it everywhere a browser is used.
What sets some of Boox's models apart from the other e-readers is they're full Android devices; you can install most apps from the Play Store. Perhaps not as great for battery life, but a world apart so far as functionality goes (and you can even install the other e-book vendors' apps if you have existing purchased content).
In the "pocketable" size category, Palma which is a phone form-factor device (I have one of these, has been great), the Page looks very much inspired by the design of the Kindle Oasis, or the Tab Mini C has a colour e-ink display.
Free for personal use, so yes-ish. That'll certainly be a deal-breaker for some.
Realistically, people who are using it for personal use would probably be upgrading to the next LTS shortly after it's released (or in Ubuntu fashion, once the xxxx.yy.1 release is out). People who don't qualify to be using it for free anyway are more likely to be the ones keeping the same version for >5 years.
I too have an oddly specific one of these, which is tartare sauce.
I actively dislike all three of mayonnaise, gherkins, and capers. Mix 'em together though? Brilliant.
Happened to me once.
I hit the home button on the headunit to dump out of Android Auto back to the headunit's UI, went back into AA, and it reappeared.
Hasn't happened again since.
and the people who do still download, wouldn’t care about doing it while on battery
Very much this; I've got a whole army of machines I can SSH into to launch a long-running download, which frequently additionaly cuts out a 2nd step of copying the file to where it needs to be after downloading it (a action which would normally cause additional battery usage on the laptop).
And I thoroughly agree with you; I want the laptop to go to S3 sleep immediately when I shut the lid, and then pull it out of my bag a hours later with only a couple of percent of the battery consumed in the interim.
Except that they've ruined that too. You now need an account to view anything, so the reach of announcements is greatly diminished.
At this point leaving shouldn't really be too difficult, since a large portion of your audience already has; because they've been shut out, or have quit voluntarily.
eSATAp! What a wild combination.
Not actually a terrible idea, even if it frequently was limited to powering 2.5" drives due to a lack of 12V. Some had extra contacts for that, but most that I saw didn't.
Induction elements “cycle” on and off – hundreds or thousands of times per second [...] There is no human perceptible duty cycle
See unfortunately what you're describing here are good induction stoves, which is not the majority of what is on the market.
I've seen far too many of the bad kind, with duty cycles measured in the tens of seconds. Your 7/10 on the dial could be - like a non-inverter microwave - something in the neighbourhood of 7 seconds on / 3 seconds off. At that point they can actually be worse to use than old halogen glass cooktops, which at least remain hot during the off part of their thermostat's cycle.
This is not even just cheap no-name crap either, have witnessed it with big-name-brand in-bench stovetops with four-figure pricetags.
If you're doing something like poaching eggs (which typically calls for a wide, flat pan), you'll actually see the water starting and stopping boiling in a cycle as it switches. Absolutely terrible.
His might be the most level-headed take on this whole drama. Disinterested and dispassionate, just stating facts as facts, and opinions as opinions.
Honestly, some of the other "players" in this saga could learn a thing or two.
(Now perhaps 94 minutes is a little much, but that's a separate issue)
I also have to say it's mildly ironic to criticise the "late" posting of the video, when one of the points raised is that of "post quickly / dubious accuracy" first-mover advantage content creation.
Yes and no.
The original 2015 release (10240) has support from 2015 - 2025. The latest 2021 release (19044) 2021 - 2032.
The product as a whole has around 16.5 years of support from go to woah, but each individual release is supported for 10 - 11.
This video about ex-Soviet RTGs of questionable radioactive source choice is quite a good watch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT8-b5YEyjo
NASA apparently used RTGs for deep space missions only, while in the same timeframe the Soviets scattered them all across the countryside, then promptly forgot about them.
There's some space occupied by the servo tracks (which align the heads to the tap) in LTO, but if we ignore that...
Current-generation LTO9 has 1035m of 12.65mm wide tape, for 18TB of storage. That's approximately 13.1m², or just under 1.4TB/m².
A 90 minute audio cassette has around 90m of 6.4mm wide tape, or 0.576m². At the same density it could potentially hold 825GB.
DDS (which was data tape in a similar form factor) achieved 160GB in 2009, although there's a lot more tape in one of those cartridges (153m).
Honestly, you'd be better off using the LTO. Because they're single-reel cartridges (the 2nd is inside the drive), they can pack a lot more tape into the same volume.
They're not really particularly low power.
Quick search suggests around 8W power consumption with a 2 ohm heater, which at the approximately 4V of a charged Lithium-Ion battery (V=IR, P=VI) checks out to around a 2A draw.
Similar results suggest the batteries inside are in the neighbourhood of 0.75Ah (3.7V nominal) = 2.8Wh. I don't know how much of that capacity actually gets used during the "lifespan" of the vape, but I'd guess half would be a good estimate. In any case, probably safe to assume you need to pack around 2Wh in at minimum.
A Lithium AA battery (Li-FeS2 chemistry) gives you 3.4Ah @ 1.5V = 5.1Wh, but has a maximum discharge current of 2.5A (only 3.8W). The AAA is only 1.2Ah with 1.5A discharge, but two of them would give you 3.6Wh and 4.5W, closer to the target but still under.
You could probably arrange this in some sort of configuration whereby the batteries charge a capacitor and that runs the heater, at those kind of numbers it'd need to be at most a 2 seconds off for 1 second on deal, but that honestly seems like it should be fine for, y'know, vaping. Might just need to have an on/off switch to avoid draining the batteries when you're not using it.
But I guess we're at the point where manufacturing Li-Po cells happens in such vast quantities that the extra electronics to charge a capacitor from a 1.5V battery probably cost more.
Sony pioneered that one, I reckon over the lifespan of a phone - especially since people tend to keep phones longer these days - it does make a difference. I'm glad other manufacturers have done the same (I believe Apple has something similar, and maybe one other Android OEM).
My Xperia 1ii (mid 2020) still reports around 83% of its original battery capacity, and it's been plugged in overnight more or less every day of its life.
Not in so much detail, but it's also really hard to define unless you've one specific metric you're trying to hit.
Aside from the included power/cooling costs, we're not (overly) constrained by space in our own datacentre so there's no strict requirement for minimising the physical space other than for our own gratification. With HDD capacities steadily rising, as older systems are retired the total possible storage space increases accordingly..
The performance of the disk system when adequately provisioned with RAM and SSD cache is honestly pretty good too, and assuming the cache tiers are adequate to hold the working set across the entire storage fleet (you could never have just one multi-petabyte system) the abysmal performance of HDDs really doesn't come into it (filesystems like ZFS coalesce random writes into periodic sequential writes, and sequential performance is... adequate).
Not mentioned too is the support costs - which typically start in the range of 10-15% of the hardware price per year - do eventually have an upward curve. For one brand we use, the per-terabyte cost bottoms out at 7 years of ownership then starts to increase again as yearly support costs for older hardware also rise. But you always have the option to pay the inflated price and keep it, if you're not ready to replace.
And again with the QLC, you're paying for density more than you are for performance. On every fair metric you can imagine aside from the TB/RU density - latency, throughput/capacity, capacity/watt, capacity/dollar - there are a few tens of percent in it at most.
Sadly not so much on the CM4, which is what a lot of people are after these days.
Seem to be plenty of special-purpose bring-your-own-Pi carrier boards (like the Home Assistant "Yellow") that people haven't been able to get CM4s for in going on a year at this point.
Sony listened to their customers complaints and brought back the headphone jack for the 2nd generation Xperia 1.
Their phones continue to feature some of the best waterproofing (real world performance, and not just the rating they slap on it) in the entire industry.
That has never been a justifiable argument against the headphone jack, despite being an all-too-frequent one.
Being in an HPC-adjacent field, can confirm.
Looking forward to LTO10, which ought to be not far away.
The majority of what we've got our eye on for FY '24 are SSD systems, and I expect in '25 it'll be everything.
We've done this exercise recently for multi-petabyte enterprise storage systems.
Not going to name brands, but in both cases this is usable (after RAID and hot spares) capacity, in a high-availability (multi-controller / cluster) system, including vendor support and power/cooling costs, but (because we run our own datacenter) not counting a $/RU cost as a company in a colo would be paying:
Note that the total power consumption for ~3.5PB of HDD vs ~5PB of flash is within spitting distance, but the flash system occupies a third of the total rack space doing it.
As this is comparing to QLC flash, the overall system performance (measured in Gbps/TB) is also quite similar, although - despite the QLC - the flash does still have a latency advantage (moreso on reads than writes).
So yeah, no. At <1.5× the per-TB cost for a usable system - the cost of one HDD vs one SSD is quite immaterial here - and at >4× the TB-per-RU density, you'd have to have a really good reason to keep buying HDDs. If lowest-possible-price is that reason, then sure.
Reliability is probably higher too, with >300 HDDs to build that system you're going to expect a few failures.