> If they can be used like that, why couldn't they be used... as phones?
To facilitate planned obsolescence, manufacturers stop providing OS updates after a relatively short time. And then they cease providing security patches after a... still relatively short time.
If you unlock the device and install a custom ROM, which may or may not function adequately for you to begin with, then you're probably also compromising secure boot, which is a problem for the security model of how many people use phones -- and many apps simply refuse to work with this setup (whereas the obsolete OS with no security patches is considered fine, apparently).
> To facilitate planned obsolescence, manufacturers stop providing OS updates
I don't think it works like that. Manufacturers stop providing OS updates as soon as they can because providing any kind of support has a cost. Planned obsolescence means "they care about making it obsolete" (active). But the reality is that they just "don't care about keeping the product alive" (passive). And the only way to make them provide updates is to force them by law.
> If you unlock the device and install a custom ROM, which may or may not function adequately for you to begin with, then you're probably also compromising secure boot
You can relock the bootloader with the FairPhone. You will still have a message saying it's a custom OS, but I don't think it compromises the secure boot, does it?
> many apps simply refuse to work with this setup
I heard that there are apps that refuse to work with an unlocked bootloader, but I haven't heard of apps refusing to work with a relocked bootloader. Is that a thing?
Manufactures care about support for as long as they think consumers will care. If phones stop working one month after you buy them consumers would revolt. They have decided that 2 years is an acceptable number for customers - long enough that most will be willing to pay to upgrade after that long. If you are one of the "cheap" customers who want to keep your phone longer they want to force you to spend money and most customers seem to be willing to pay then so they are happy.
Why should someone who is going to throw their phone away in 2 years (or less) anyway be forced to subsidize those who want to keep theirs longer? There is a cost to supporting old hardware and that needs to be paid by someone.
Why should someone who is going to throw their phone away in a day (or less) anyway be forced to subsidize those who want to keep theirs longer? There is a cost to supporting old hardware, and that needs to be paid by someone.
I was assuming that we as a society would rather want to survive this century, but you're right, maybe we don't. We surely act like we really, really don't.
But hypothetically, if we were to want to survive, such regulations would be some of the very easy steps to take (and by far not enough, of course).
And again, I think you're right: it's far more likely that we as a society will just collapse, so maybe it's not even worth wondering what we would do if we didn't want it.
Why couldn’t manufacturers proclaiming to espouse longevity, such as Fairphone, release the vendor source code for out-of-support hardware which are supposedly no longer relevant and so doesn’t matter if the competition can see the code? Or is it an issue of signing certificates?
I wonder, but it could be that some of the hardware they use doesn't offer an open source firmware. Qualcomm for instance isn't super open.
IMO we should put in the law that manufacturers have to mainstream their device and provide a way to flash an updated firmware. There is no way they do it without being forced, because it's a pure source of cost for them.
That's how it works: companies optimise in the legal framework we give them. Regulations set that framework.
Contracts with vendors, usually. Vendors who make not much of their profit from Fairphone and would happily cut them off if they wanted terms like that.
There's a reason Pine64's devices (which are made out of parts with available public datasheets as much as possible - they don't do the software side of things) are mostly made with parts from a few generations ago, whose manufacturer doesn't care much any more.
I honestly thought that we were agreed on the definition of AGI. My understanding classified it as a model that can build on its knowledge and better itself, teaching itself new tasks and techniques, adapting as necessary. I.e., not simply knowing enough techniques to impress some humans. By this definition, it doesn't matter if it's super-intelligent or if its knowledge is rudimentary, because given enough add-on hardware and power, it could become super-intelligent over time.
"students took a pen-and-paper test to assess their performance in three key areas: English language—the primary focus of the pilot—AI knowledge, and digital skills."
Using sqlite keeps a persistent open database connection, so you only have to send requests for content that sqlite has probably cached. When reading static files, you open, read, and close a file with every request, meaning more context switches, even though the filesystem layer will have cached the file content. If you want to speed this up, the appropriate solution is to add a caching front-end, not to turn everything into a database. It will be faster than using sqlite and easier to maintain and troubleshoot.
Well you can store metadata in SQLite. You can update metadata and files in a transaction. It already has a caching layer built in (I think 8mb by default, that might need some tuning for this use case). It is thread safe (I mean it is a giant rw mutex but whatever) Does not sound that bad to just use it instead of building a caching layer that might be marginally faster than sqlite. And if you restart your caching frontend thing, it will need to rebuild the cache using tons of syscalls. SQLite cache will fill up easier as it has less context switches.
One major downside I see would be backing up the database. You can do granular backups on a filesytem. Even rsync would work fine. You’d need to basically snapshot the entire thing here.
I remember being a kid in the 1960's dog poop, cig butts, pop tops, and broken glass everywhere. Every vacant lot accumulated junk.
More on topic diesel trucks and buses had the tail pipe coming out of the back. I remember carping at my mom for always stopping right behind buses. And she said, oh you're right.
That's very normal in America. But it's also very normal for people to simply ignore this rule, and leave poop all over the sidewalk.
Similarly, many public parks require that dogs be kept on a leash. However, here again dog owners don't think they need to follow rules, and let their dogs run loose. Reminding them of the rule is usually met with hostility, profanity, and physical threats.
It's not about what is or isn't a public thoroughfare. It's about what is or isn't "a reasonable expectation of privacy." It just turns out that, because people are expected to walk/drive on streets, and people are also generally expected to have functional eyes, your front yard doesn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
It's both. The problem is that the cost to just be passing by in the air has come way down, and that creates a new question of privacy that wasn't practical to worry about before.
(If it weren't being addressed by the cops specifically right now vis-a-vis warrentless searching, it'd have to be addressed by society eventually as we get into questions like "Who's eyes are on the camera feeds from all those Amazon delivery drones?").
To facilitate planned obsolescence, manufacturers stop providing OS updates after a relatively short time. And then they cease providing security patches after a... still relatively short time.
If you unlock the device and install a custom ROM, which may or may not function adequately for you to begin with, then you're probably also compromising secure boot, which is a problem for the security model of how many people use phones -- and many apps simply refuse to work with this setup (whereas the obsolete OS with no security patches is considered fine, apparently).