Some early Fords around the Model T era had a switch on them to flip between running on ethanol or gas. The idea being that farmers would brew their own fuel as needed. Big Oil didn’t like that, and so it went away. Where we are now isn’t thanks to science and technology, just pure greed off the backs of everyone.

Firefox can be installed from Mozilla and managed by Obtainium. Much better option all the way around.

Especially when it involves modems. Qualcomm had a vice grip on them for so long, and still mostly does, so there’s little competition, and no good competition. They make great modems, but they’re also a US military contractor and can’t truly be trusted. Competition, is also generally good.

In the context of basic communications, market share really shouldn’t. Phone calls are a standard, SMS is a standard, MMS is a standard. RCS should equally be a standard, along with IMS video calling that has been in the 3GPP spec since Rel99 (that’s 1999). Flip phones in the early aughts could do video calls (in Europe) way before FaceTime was a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye. Every phone right now could do out of box voice call/video call/text/picture messaging regardless of platform, if the cellular standard bodies would grow a pair.

Problem is, companies like Apple and Google became huge, unregulated, and monocultured.

How we humans allowed something as basic as communication to be put behind walled gardens is just a failure of humanity.

There is no technical reason. The carriers/cellular industry gave up on their efforts to push RCS and let Google own it all for the most part, and with it, everyone lost openness.

It’s also why Samsung Messages is on a slow burn EOL. The Samsung/Google partnership had Google encourage Samsung to drop their RCS support and just push Google’s app, after Google decided to sunset the openness of the messaging API. Third-party SMS apps will all slowly die. Probably also partly why Signal dropped SMS support. It was around the same time.

Android’s weird changes are nothing but badness, and will likely get worse. Hopefully the open OS community can start focusing more energy behind alternative mobile OSes that aren’t dependent on a corporation.

Somehow, I don’t think it’s a competition.

They’re all in the 2+/-.2 C range, and increasing in frequency.

What’s different about the flyover states is they are flat, are running out of water, and all the increased tornadic/hail activity is just going to make them no-mans-land over the next half century, outside of the temperature issues. (And not trying to compete either, it’s just weird.)

The amount of larger hail popping out of these storms is crazy too. Homes will need stronger roofs and windows, there will be more risk to aircraft as well with how rapid they seem to be popping off these days. (Secondary issues will be developing as well since the US is slashing weather prediction budget, which is reducing available data.)

Links on what damage to expect, a plane a few years ago that ended up damaged from a hail storm over New Mexico, double-sucks too, the airplane’s weather radar is in the nosecone, so they lose their ability to see what they’re flying through in that case:

Link 1

Link 2

I recall this meme from a year or so back with a different joke attached.

But what parties they get to have on their super mega yachts while abusing the people that work for them or are abducted by them! /s

That is also the first thing that popped in my head.

Oh, the stories I could tell you… I should write a book some day.

My general contribution to the conversation is GitHub should have a donation system. Once a week, some kind of donation raffle happens, and the winner gets GitHub taken down for “reasons” for 4 hours, then 5, 6, 8. Microsoft profits more, and it slowly becomes a technology-and-money-induced vacation day.

Honestly, no, you don’t need a team. It is good practice, but not necessary. I’ve worked at several companies where the production build was made from a tower under a desk or a server blade, or an iMac on a shelf, sometimes one guy knew how it worked, sometimes nobody did, sometimes the whole team did. In most cases, managed by the product’s dev team. IT just firewall-wrapped the crap out of them.

Not to discredit the main meta thread of “we don’t have to manage anything with cloud” vs “having management team” debate. Odd thing is, cloud prices are climbing so rapidly that the industry could shift back in a near future.

Bottom line for most business though: As long as the cost makes sense, why bother self-hosting anything. That’s really what it comes down to. A bonus too, as most companies like being able to blame other companies for their problems. Microsoft knows that, and profited greatly with Windows Server/Office/etc. for that very reason.

When your quarterly profits are dashed because an employee backed into your server room and turned on the halon fire suppression system and you gotta rebuild from scratch from month-old off-site tape backups, how do you write a puff piece to explain that away without self-blame or firing the very people that know how it all works?

When your quarterly profits are dashed because Microsoft’s source control system screwed up, you make a polite public “our upstream software partners had a technical error, we’ve addressed and renegotiated,” message, shareholders are happy, and customers are still stuck with a broken product, but the shareholders are happy.

Apple/Google and others tried to do such illegal (in the US) non-competes earlier in this century: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-recruitment-emails-lawsuit-2014-1

That being said, China does tend to have …various techniques for copying/stealing technology and passing it off as their own. Is it good or bad? Who knows. Their copy of the tech may end up being superior. Every company worth their salt tends to have R&D departments that take apart the competition’s hardware/software to see how it functions, though. GM did it with cheap Japanese cars to design the Saturn in the 1990s, and that was lauded.

Always a weird/interesting problem. Do we let a company have a monopoly so we have 20 years of Qualcomm cornering the market on wireless modems and no other vendor was legally able to pursue their own flavors easily so they were always inferior, if they existed at all? Do we let company B steal the idea of company A and become wildly more popular, destroying company A’s income because company B just did it better? Does the end result become more cutthroat markets? Or do things shake out organically? Patents seemed a good mechanism to allow a company a temporary edge in a domain, but then they quickly become abused (see: Qualcomm) so that company can ostensibly be a forever monopoly.

Edit: Oh, and Samsung copies iOS (and vice versa) with every phone release, so are they any better?

Go to bed at 2, wake up at 10, same sleep and wake duration as go to bed at 8, wake up at 4. “Day” as in daylight will be different, sure, but that’s about it. It is all relative.

It has turned into this weird thing. The short of it is: antennas and battery, and a touch of telemetry.

There are so many bands across so many frequencies, as well as needing multiple antennas for MIMO that they all take space.

Large batteries are required to run the modems and ostensibly laptop processors, and also…

…All the telemetry gathering they do requires power, also adding to the desire of a big battery. (The last one is fascinating, a phone on GrapheneOS will last 2-7 days on a charge depending on use. The same on stock Android will barely last a day.)

When users find information that they wish to retain – such as schedules, event details, reservations, or listings – they can capture it by pressing the Plus Key or swiping up with three fingers. AI Plus Mind intelligently saves the relevant on-screen content to a dedicated Mind Space, helping users streamline their experience by capturing precisely what’s needed and keeping it organized in one accessible location.

So…it’s a screenshot shortcut?

You know your company is useless when you survive on patent suits.

Win+R, notepad, enter. The run command still works…for now.

They sure are destroying that platform at lightning speed.

Pretty much have to buy a phone that supports a custom ROM as the Qualcomm-based Samsung phones are basically impossible to downgrade unless an exploit is discovered.

Funny/sad thing is, even Apple lets you downgrade your OS for a couple of weeks after a major release.