There is so much "Stallman was right" in all of these examples... non-free software always manages to eventually sneak in malicious anti-user features, where the user has no recourse. At least with free software there's always the fundamental freedom to fork. You think systemd is a Red Hat plot to destroy Linux, then go use Devuan. You don't trust what Google could be doing with Chrome, take your pick of alternatives:
> Whenever someone refuses to show source code I always think, "what are you hiding in there?" There's usually something.
There's a dilemma that developers face when deciding to release source code that's bigger than fear of software theft or the desire to hide something evil in the code. It's a fear of being scrutinized, ridiculed, or humiliated over the quality of their code.
Imagine 2 programs that do something useful and are functionally equivalent. Program A is closed source. Program B has source code available for inspection. Suppose on inspection, program B's code turns out to be bloated, ugly, poorly organized, and with many potential bugs or defects. B's reputation is screwed. However, for all you know, A's code is just as bad or worse. But you don't know for sure.
Bloggers and reviewers will write that no source is available for A.
Bloggers and reviewers will write that program B's code sucks.
The consumer reads that "program A doesn't give you source code" and that "program B's code is garbage", but are otherwise functionally equivalent. Which do you think will have greater influence on most consumers and their purchasing decision?
That's one major reason why more developers don't release source code. I wish I knew a way out of this dilemma.
> think systemd is a Red Hat plot to destroy Linux, then go use Devuan
This was the first thing that came to my mind as well, after reading the post!
> people tend to act more morally when they think they might be watched,
> Whenever someone refuses to show source code I always think, "what are you hiding in there?" There's usually something.
This goes further to all the bias perpetuation engines that the players (size immaterial!) from our software industry are peddling around as a silver bullet. No one know how the blackboxes are built, what biases were built in (unknowingly, or worse, knowingly!), what tests are done and data used etc.
This thread on twitter https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/901851127624458240 , when read with Cory Doctorow's post in context highlights the dangers that are looming just ahead which might go totally unnoticed due to the noise in the system, shrouded by short-term gains but the bad effects which would be visible only in long term.
Free software wouldn't protect you in a lot of these cases though. Fuel pumps could run on free software, but since you didn't install it, it could've been easily altered by the people who did.
Hell these days, you'd have to build the hardware yourself to make sure someone didn't put something malicious in it.
> Whenever someone refuses to show source code I always think, "what are you hiding in there?"
I think it's mainly just laziness, most devs don't want to be always under review and can live easier lives if they can allow themselves a bit of a mess in their own projects without consistenly dealing with complaints. And many open source users are super obnoxious, bombarding devs with insane questions/requests all the time, then acting super hostile when they don't get what they want right away.
This isn't a new demon-haunted world, this is the old, demon-haunted world before nineteenth-century progressive politics, back when "milk" that wasn't half chalk still might have a fish in it (see famous Thoreau quote on evidence.)
We aren't enforcing the laws we have and our grandfathers and mothers had. (Three guesses why.) Not on monopolies, contracts, patent misuse... nothing.
Just this week I and Hearthstone came to a stop - Blizzard's new policy insists on a credit card and that I owe them for purchases made if they leak the card no! I can't sign in to play "my" cards 'till I agree this is totally cool. Sure, the old policy said they could revise it as they liked, but the law says otherwise and always has. They don't care - it'll be years before the law is enforced against them, as it was with Steam and refunds.
No cops - so to speak - on the beat, and Trump vowing to fire more regulators, that's what's changed. The number of potential demons is more of a constant.
"... farmers have worked on their own equipment "for decades, generations even." Brasch also pointed to the emerging DIY sources of information in the world as a way that farmers and others who want to make repairs can learn about their equipment: "You can go to a YouTube for something as simple as baking a cake to repairing or operating an item. I think that's the way the market is moving. We'd like this market to move with the rest of the world."
This is one of the IP/copyright issues being negotiated in the new version of NAFTA (US, Canada, Mexico), as many farmers are affected.
Doctorow 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 expensive to manufacture as they like to claim but it's still worth something. Why didn't they just put less ink in the cartridge to begin with (and maybe lie about how much was in it), instead of lying about how much was left toward the end of its life and throwing ink away?
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 gasoline is dispensed, the dispenser will not know if a written record will be requested, and cheating the customer is riskier.
Therefore, I always request a receipt if asked prior to dispensing my gasoline.
Form a company that explores new markets in legal liabilities. It could bring lawsuits with little risk where the payoff could be billions of dollars. Off the top of my head:
* Research whether channels were engineered into smartphones to allow water to leak in (since they have no moving parts and should self-evidently be watertight).
* Find the planned-obsolescence parts in things like car doors that were engineered too thin or out of plastic so that door and window handles fail after a certain number of uses.
* Find evidence that companies opted to use proprietary battery and charger form factors which drove up prices and prevented interoperability.
...the list is nearly endless. Most of these seem like they depend on research or whistleblowers. If the free market and regulations won't prevent this kind of widespread hacking then maybe lucrative opportunities could be found working within the courts!
That's not remotely how waterproofing works. Getting any meaningful degree of ingress protection is hard. It requires entirely different assembly techniques and is generally contrary to user serviceability.
Proprietary batteries are the reason thin electronics exist. You can't use 18650s to make a MacBook.
I think the problem here is that you vastly underestimate how hard manufacturing is. The things you're proposing are like me trying to sue Facebook because it crashes all the time. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it because they're actively trying to subvert me for nefarious reasons? No, it's just because they don't know how to do it better in a reasonable price range.
> Find the planned-obsolescence parts in things like car doors that were engineered too thin or out of plastic so that door and window handles fail after a certain number of uses.
There’s no way in hell car companies are purposely under-engineering things to cause them to break. That damages the brand reputation, and will drive the next sale to a competitor.
Yes, they make engineering tradeoffs. No, they don’t design a part with the specific intention that it will fail earlier than a comparable (cost-wise) design would.
Watertight is a hard engineering problem to solve. If it isn't a vacuum or loaded with some other gas then you will get water coming in because of temperature cycles causing the device to act like a pump, which in a phone are a problem because you will have temperature fluctuations caused by charging, usage and environment.
Reminds me of an idea from the novel "Makers", by the very same Cory Doctorow, in which there's a mass VC-funded lawsuit against a particular known media megacorp.
Devil's advocate here... I would have hoped the opportunities were so lucrative that whistleblowers would have already, eh, blown the whistle. That's exactly the point of the whistleblower's protection laws.
So maybe these things aren't as widespread as you'd think... at least not in a legal sense. I'd also like to think that maybe people aren't "designing" flaws into things rather than finding the maximum economic benefit, or just are "naive" to what they design.
> Form a company that explores new markets in legal liabilities. It could bring lawsuits with little risk where the payoff could be billions of dollars.
Sort of like a patent troll, but for good? I do like it.
I think there's always a danger of having this type of litigation be abused (in this case I'm also thinking of drive-by litigation around the Disabilities Act etc.)
edit aww spitfire beat me to the patent troll punch.
Why 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 clock rate is programmed to progressively lower itself the longer it runs.
Has anyone done the performance analysis on used phones to prove this isn't just my brain moving the goalposts as hardware improves, or apps just slowing down as they bloat, but that the old devices really and truly are running the same software significantly slower than when they were new?
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.
I don't get this; everyone says it, but I've never seen it in smartphones. Laptops, sure, but Windows really DOES accumulate a lot of cruft, and OSX's updates never seem to improve performance.
Smartphones, though? The only slowdown I've noticed is when the battery starts to go. And then you can usually tell; the device gets hot as the battery pushes up against all the ESR it's accumulated, the CPU steps back a bit...that's what I figure, anyways. For me, it's always coincided with the same inflection point when I start really noticing things like charge cycles taking much longer and a sharp drop-off in the life of a 100% charge.
I've experienced and noticed a different problem. I've had the same phone for almost 5 years (have a hard time replacing something that still works well and is in good condition), and I've found it's not the speed that has worsened and I can live with not having certain features to run some new apps; it's the storage.
My phone's storage is not large by today's standards, I have 16 GB. I run fewer apps than I did when I got the phone, and have run the same general collection from day one. I have less music on my phone than I had in the past. I have only had to continually remove applications and music as just about every week it has warned me that my storage is almost full. This only started within the last year. I won't have added anything new, keep my cache flushed, etc and I still have to continually remove items.
Is there something practical I'm missing here, or... ?
How about this simple hypothesis: Android is suffering from the same problems all Windows had prior to Windows 7 - drive fragmentation. Cheap flash will not give you nice access times when data is fragmented, and over time fragmentation accumulates.
Could be the drive slowing.. but definitely a big chunk of loss of performance comes from OS updates (i.e. that were not tested on the now old device for performance and battery discharge rate as aggressively as initial release)
Are you comparing identical OS versions and an identical amount of apps installed? Newer versions often make everything slower. I remember when the iOS 6 -> iOS 7 update happened, the exact same code run on the same device with different OS versions ran %20 slower.
My iPhone 6 used to be snappy, but now takes almost 10 seconds to just open an app. Perhaps new OS updates are not as well-optimized for older iPhones as they are for the latest version.
Ars Technica's Android 8.0 deep-dive has some interesting charts showing Android device performance deteriorating over time:
My own iPhone 7 is plenty fast, but I have noticed that the older models seem to be getting slower.
Presumably this is because Apple keeps adding features and animations and so on, and so iOS grows bigger and more resource-hungry, as are apps, and developers aren't optimizing by running their stuff on old iPhone 5 models anymore.
Perhaps not over months, but over years OS bloat becomes nontrivial. Subjectively, my phone appears to slow down after most updates; objectively it definitely loses usable space to the operating system. App bloat displays a similar problem, albeit less blatant.
This seems to mirror Wirth's Law more generally; every piece of software on your phone gets more demanding every time it updates.
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 <$20 on ebay.
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 <$5 most of the time, but trying to replace a Droid phone charger once was impossible because the charger harness was soldered to the pcb.
Software. I generally outright ignore devices without a ROM scene and an unlocked bootloader, but even then it is entirely volunteer how long Cyanogen/Lineage/Paranoid/etc are willing to keep supporting these fossil kernels. The S3, Note 2-3, and original Nexus 7 are all on their deathbeds because of lagging community support for these devices. It is worth mentioning, however, for the Samsung devices they have gone community supported far longer at this point than their official support periods lasted. Great job Samsung.
Batteries are usually a non-issue. You can buy shitty Chinese knockoff batteries (or if you are lucky Anker) that don't hold a charge and don't last long, but you can keep these devices running on bootleg parts for a while.
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.
There is also the really rare chance you find a corrupted file you cannot open that used to work, which can in extremely rare circumstances mean that your phone has ran out of unallocated sectors and is now losing capacity including written data, but that is highly unlikely - flash almost always becomes unwritable way before becoming unreadable, and your phone will fail before unreadability starts manifesting en masse.
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.
> There must be anti-trust enforcement with the death penalty – corporate dissolution – for companies that are caught cheating.
This was the norm in the US until the late 1800s. Indeed, corporations had to act in the public interest. And if they didn't, they were dissolved.
But then, the railroad corporations got wealthy enough that they were able to buy favorable Supreme Court rulings. Basically, they got human rights. After former male slaves, but before women.
Hmm, I suspect the article is not really news to the people who frequent sites like this, and perhaps not even to the readership of a science-fiction mag like locus.
But I would like a nice readable article like that to appear in more mainstream publications. It should make a good story, being both true and sensationalist and important at the same time.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Tesla in this context. Not only do they make it almost impossible to get a Tesla car repaired anywhere but their service centers, but they also collect a ton of data [1].
>instead, it tries to trick the reviewers, attempting to determine if it’s landed on a Car and Driver test-lot, and then switching into a high-pollution, high-fuel-efficiency mode.
This has actually been the case for some time. The car magazine wouldn't just go borrow a car, they would get one directly from the manufacturer. And the manufacturer would send a ringer, a vehicle with an EPA test-exemption that doesn't have to comply with any emissions regulations.
I suppose the era of Youtube car review channels is bringing that method to a close though.
I'm curious about the WannaCry situation. If the killswitch was truly to detect being in a VM, could they still not have bought the domain and just left unresponsive, or even better, just generate a random new domain every single time.
I guess they just didn't foresee someone buying the domain.
Don't know about iTunes, but much along these lines Sonos removed support for Windows DRM and ticked off customers who had their music stored in that format. Amusingly, the link I found about it is also a post by Cory Doctorow.
I suspect the Kindle feature he's talking about is the text-to-speech feature, which the publishers hated because it threatened audiobook sales. Or maybe he's talking about Amazon deleting books from customers' Kindles?
May have been the one that "helpfully" deleted your music, and replaced it by compressed version, even if you didn't bought it via iTunes. Or deleted your files period, if it detected a not so "equivalent" version you could download.
Supposedly to save local disk space.
I recall an accounting of a composer losing his work file that way —they got compressed behind his back. Thank goodness he had a backup.
Certainly some iTunes features have been removed over the years, but I don't know if it's anything that anyone would care about. The "Ping" music social network is gone, for example.
I wonder if we can require software to be open source for the same reason that food has to list its nutritional information and ingredients. Information asymmetry makes a deal unfair.
HP is an egregious cheater, and this kind of cheating is in the DNA of any company that makes its living selling consumables or service at extremely high markups – they do their business at war with their customers.
This is a very strong statement. Asking for high margins puts you at war with your customers?
In a world populated by IOT devices full of software (as discussed previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15034955), we'll end up in a post-scientific world where the underlying rules that govern a device's behavior are so complex and arcane that we'll have little chance of reverse engineering how basic devices work anymore.
I think in practice it will mean that devices become bricks relatively quickly, and when people realize they have been cheated, there will be a strong backlash: imagine "paleo diet" but for devices.
History repeats itself. Car makers tried to lock out third party parts decades ago. Claimed you only had a license to operate the vehicle, no ownership. Music and movie companies argued against First Sale doctrine similarly.
Courts wouldn't have it. They will stop this too. Digital property will be declared property, not licenses. No limits on resale transfer or rental and the like. Companies will howl like stuck pigs. And it will benefit them, as well as consumers, tremendously.
What I worry about is the regulations and certifications many other industries have to curtail cheating may someday be needed in our domain. I do not look forward to the day that happens.
[+] [-] jordigh|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Communi...
Plus, people tend to act more morally when they think they might be watched, whether they actually are watched or not.
Whenever someone refuses to show source code I always think, "what are you hiding in there?" There's usually something.
[+] [-] computator|8 years ago|reply
There's a dilemma that developers face when deciding to release source code that's bigger than fear of software theft or the desire to hide something evil in the code. It's a fear of being scrutinized, ridiculed, or humiliated over the quality of their code.
Imagine 2 programs that do something useful and are functionally equivalent. Program A is closed source. Program B has source code available for inspection. Suppose on inspection, program B's code turns out to be bloated, ugly, poorly organized, and with many potential bugs or defects. B's reputation is screwed. However, for all you know, A's code is just as bad or worse. But you don't know for sure.
Bloggers and reviewers will write that no source is available for A.
Bloggers and reviewers will write that program B's code sucks.
The consumer reads that "program A doesn't give you source code" and that "program B's code is garbage", but are otherwise functionally equivalent. Which do you think will have greater influence on most consumers and their purchasing decision?
That's one major reason why more developers don't release source code. I wish I knew a way out of this dilemma.
[+] [-] raghava|8 years ago|reply
This was the first thing that came to my mind as well, after reading the post!
> people tend to act more morally when they think they might be watched, > Whenever someone refuses to show source code I always think, "what are you hiding in there?" There's usually something.
This goes further to all the bias perpetuation engines that the players (size immaterial!) from our software industry are peddling around as a silver bullet. No one know how the blackboxes are built, what biases were built in (unknowingly, or worse, knowingly!), what tests are done and data used etc.
This thread on twitter https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/901851127624458240 , when read with Cory Doctorow's post in context highlights the dangers that are looming just ahead which might go totally unnoticed due to the noise in the system, shrouded by short-term gains but the bad effects which would be visible only in long term.
[+] [-] eksemplar|8 years ago|reply
Hell these days, you'd have to build the hardware yourself to make sure someone didn't put something malicious in it.
[+] [-] Nomentatus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitL|8 years ago|reply
I think it's mainly just laziness, most devs don't want to be always under review and can live easier lives if they can allow themselves a bit of a mess in their own projects without consistenly dealing with complaints. And many open source users are super obnoxious, bombarding devs with insane questions/requests all the time, then acting super hostile when they don't get what they want right away.
[+] [-] Nomentatus|8 years ago|reply
We aren't enforcing the laws we have and our grandfathers and mothers had. (Three guesses why.) Not on monopolies, contracts, patent misuse... nothing.
Just this week I and Hearthstone came to a stop - Blizzard's new policy insists on a credit card and that I owe them for purchases made if they leak the card no! I can't sign in to play "my" cards 'till I agree this is totally cool. Sure, the old policy said they could revise it as they liked, but the law says otherwise and always has. They don't care - it'll be years before the law is enforced against them, as it was with Steam and refunds.
No cops - so to speak - on the beat, and Trump vowing to fire more regulators, that's what's changed. The number of potential demons is more of a constant.
[+] [-] walterbell|8 years ago|reply
From http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a2...
"... farmers have worked on their own equipment "for decades, generations even." Brasch also pointed to the emerging DIY sources of information in the world as a way that farmers and others who want to make repairs can learn about their equipment: "You can go to a YouTube for something as simple as baking a cake to repairing or operating an item. I think that's the way the market is moving. We'd like this market to move with the rest of the world."
This is one of the IP/copyright issues being negotiated in the new version of NAFTA (US, Canada, Mexico), as many farmers are affected.
[+] [-] captaincrowbar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SubiculumCode|8 years ago|reply
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 gasoline is dispensed, the dispenser will not know if a written record will be requested, and cheating the customer is riskier.
Therefore, I always request a receipt if asked prior to dispensing my gasoline.
[+] [-] zackmorris|8 years ago|reply
Form a company that explores new markets in legal liabilities. It could bring lawsuits with little risk where the payoff could be billions of dollars. Off the top of my head:
* Research whether channels were engineered into smartphones to allow water to leak in (since they have no moving parts and should self-evidently be watertight).
* Find the planned-obsolescence parts in things like car doors that were engineered too thin or out of plastic so that door and window handles fail after a certain number of uses.
* Find evidence that companies opted to use proprietary battery and charger form factors which drove up prices and prevented interoperability.
...the list is nearly endless. Most of these seem like they depend on research or whistleblowers. If the free market and regulations won't prevent this kind of widespread hacking then maybe lucrative opportunities could be found working within the courts!
[+] [-] wyager|8 years ago|reply
Proprietary batteries are the reason thin electronics exist. You can't use 18650s to make a MacBook.
I think the problem here is that you vastly underestimate how hard manufacturing is. The things you're proposing are like me trying to sue Facebook because it crashes all the time. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it because they're actively trying to subvert me for nefarious reasons? No, it's just because they don't know how to do it better in a reasonable price range.
[+] [-] anyfoo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] function_seven|8 years ago|reply
There’s no way in hell car companies are purposely under-engineering things to cause them to break. That damages the brand reputation, and will drive the next sale to a competitor.
Yes, they make engineering tradeoffs. No, they don’t design a part with the specific intention that it will fail earlier than a comparable (cost-wise) design would.
[+] [-] Tsagadai|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mholmes680|8 years ago|reply
So maybe these things aren't as widespread as you'd think... at least not in a legal sense. I'd also like to think that maybe people aren't "designing" flaws into things rather than finding the maximum economic benefit, or just are "naive" to what they design.
[+] [-] spitfire|8 years ago|reply
Sort of like a patent troll, but for good? I do like it.
[+] [-] screature2|8 years ago|reply
I think there's always a danger of having this type of litigation be abused (in this case I'm also thinking of drive-by litigation around the Disabilities Act etc.)
edit aww spitfire beat me to the patent troll punch.
[+] [-] zaroth|8 years ago|reply
The only thing I can think of is the flash drive is slowing down as it wears. Or, the CPU clock rate is programmed to progressively lower itself the longer it runs.
Has anyone done the performance analysis on used phones to prove this isn't just my brain moving the goalposts as hardware improves, or apps just slowing down as they bloat, but that the old devices really and truly are running the same software significantly slower than when they were new?
[+] [-] mikeash|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leggomylibro|8 years ago|reply
Smartphones, though? The only slowdown I've noticed is when the battery starts to go. And then you can usually tell; the device gets hot as the battery pushes up against all the ESR it's accumulated, the CPU steps back a bit...that's what I figure, anyways. For me, it's always coincided with the same inflection point when I start really noticing things like charge cycles taking much longer and a sharp drop-off in the life of a 100% charge.
[+] [-] 52-6F-62|8 years ago|reply
My phone's storage is not large by today's standards, I have 16 GB. I run fewer apps than I did when I got the phone, and have run the same general collection from day one. I have less music on my phone than I had in the past. I have only had to continually remove applications and music as just about every week it has warned me that my storage is almost full. This only started within the last year. I won't have added anything new, keep my cache flushed, etc and I still have to continually remove items.
Is there something practical I'm missing here, or... ?
[+] [-] lostmsu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanbuckley|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mahyarm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpeterso|8 years ago|reply
Ars Technica's Android 8.0 deep-dive has some interesting charts showing Android device performance deteriorating over time:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/android-8-0-oreo-tho...
[+] [-] lobster_johnson|8 years ago|reply
Presumably this is because Apple keeps adding features and animations and so on, and so iOS grows bigger and more resource-hungry, as are apps, and developers aren't optimizing by running their stuff on old iPhone 5 models anymore.
[+] [-] Bartweiss|8 years ago|reply
This seems to mirror Wirth's Law more generally; every piece of software on your phone gets more demanding every time it updates.
[+] [-] nonamechicken|8 years ago|reply
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 <$20 on ebay.
In general four things kill these devices:
Batteries are usually a non-issue. You can buy shitty Chinese knockoff batteries (or if you are lucky Anker) that don't hold a charge and don't last long, but you can keep these devices running on bootleg parts for a while.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:
There is also the really rare chance you find a corrupted file you cannot open that used to work, which can in extremely rare circumstances mean that your phone has ran out of unallocated sectors and is now losing capacity including written data, but that is highly unlikely - flash almost always becomes unwritable way before becoming unreadable, and your phone will fail before unreadability starts manifesting en masse.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.
[+] [-] nikanj|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirimir|8 years ago|reply
This was the norm in the US until the late 1800s. Indeed, corporations had to act in the public interest. And if they didn't, they were dissolved.
But then, the railroad corporations got wealthy enough that they were able to buy favorable Supreme Court rulings. Basically, they got human rights. After former male slaves, but before women.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|8 years ago|reply
Source? Let's say a company owning a factory was thusly dissolved. What would you do? Parcel bricks out to shareholders?
We got rid of this for a good reason. It nukes long-term investment by laying the road for expropriation.
[+] [-] adrianratnapala|8 years ago|reply
But I would like a nice readable article like that to appear in more mainstream publications. It should make a good story, being both true and sensationalist and important at the same time.
[+] [-] Opossum|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.tesla.com/about/legal
[+] [-] shmerl|8 years ago|reply
Also, conditional cheating reminded me The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
[+] [-] letlambda|8 years ago|reply
This has actually been the case for some time. The car magazine wouldn't just go borrow a car, they would get one directly from the manufacturer. And the manufacturer would send a ringer, a vehicle with an EPA test-exemption that doesn't have to comply with any emissions regulations.
I suppose the era of Youtube car review channels is bringing that method to a close though.
[+] [-] ehsankia|8 years ago|reply
I guess they just didn't foresee someone buying the domain.
[+] [-] Kostic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eridius|8 years ago|reply
Anyone know what iTunes update he's talking about? I don't remember anything that fits this description.
[+] [-] thinkling|8 years ago|reply
https://boingboing.net/2011/12/22/sonos-removes-windows-drm-...
I suspect the Kindle feature he's talking about is the text-to-speech feature, which the publishers hated because it threatened audiobook sales. Or maybe he's talking about Amazon deleting books from customers' Kindles?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/07/amazon-sold-pirated-...
[+] [-] RachelF|8 years ago|reply
They removed the ability to use Linux on the PS3. This is probably one reason they have been consistently targeted by hackers.
[+] [-] loup-vaillant|8 years ago|reply
Supposedly to save local disk space.
I recall an accounting of a composer losing his work file that way —they got compressed behind his back. Thank goodness he had a backup.
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dove|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|8 years ago|reply
This is a very strong statement. Asking for high margins puts you at war with your customers?
[+] [-] titzer|8 years ago|reply
In a world populated by IOT devices full of software (as discussed previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15034955), we'll end up in a post-scientific world where the underlying rules that govern a device's behavior are so complex and arcane that we'll have little chance of reverse engineering how basic devices work anymore.
I think in practice it will mean that devices become bricks relatively quickly, and when people realize they have been cheated, there will be a strong backlash: imagine "paleo diet" but for devices.
[+] [-] otakucode|8 years ago|reply
Courts wouldn't have it. They will stop this too. Digital property will be declared property, not licenses. No limits on resale transfer or rental and the like. Companies will howl like stuck pigs. And it will benefit them, as well as consumers, tremendously.
[+] [-] bluetwo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donatj|8 years ago|reply
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?