I have a Google smart speaker that I got as a freebie. I used to use it (>3 years ago) for timers, alarms, etc. and had few problems, I just stopped when I moved and didn’t set it up. I put them back up a few months ago and it sure seems worse to me. Always triggering on random conversations, or to dialog on TV. Anyway they are permanent residents of the closet now. They suck.
“If we confuse them now, we can get another contract in a few years to fix the naming situation again!”
Some consulting firm surely was paid a few million to come up with these names.
Spaceship Georg, whose body is 5.7×10⁹ miles from Earth, is an outlier and should not be counted.
(A portion of Clyde Tombaugh’s remains are on the New Horizons spacecraft about this far from Earth). Edit: but this of course is useless for place of death statistics.
Those World War 2 movies as well - like, we already had millions die during the war, and now we’re doing it again to make a movie out of it? (/s)
Or, if you’re more fun, a giant wall of lava lamps! The coolest randomness in town!
(Cloudflare does this)
Even USB-C is a nightmare. There’s 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2, which were rebranded as “3.2 Gen X” with some stupid stuff there as far as what speed it supports.
Then it can do DisplayPort as well. There used to be an HDMI alt mode too!
An Intel computer might have Thunderbolt over the same cable, and can send PCIe signals over the cable to plug in a graphics card or other devices.
Then there’s USB 4 which works like Thunderbolt but isn’t restricted to Intel devices.
Then there’s the extended power profile which lets you push 240 W through a USB C port.
For a while, the USB-C connector was on graphics cards as Virtualink, which was supposed to be a one-cable standardized solution to plugging in VR headsets. Except that no headsets used it.
Then there’s Nintendo. The Switch has a Type-C port, but does its own stupid thing for video, so it can’t work with a normal dock because it’s a freak.
So you pick up a random USB C cable and have no information on what it may be capable of, plug it into a port where you again don’t know the capabilities. Its speed may be anywhere between 1.5 MBit/s (USB 1.0 low speed) and 80 GBit/s (USB 4 2.0) and it may provide between 5 and 240 W of power.
Every charger has a different power output, and sometimes it leads to a stupid situation like the Dell 130 W laptop charger. In theory, 130 W is way more than what most phones will charge at. But it only offers that at I think 20 V, which my phone can’t take. So in practice, your phone will charge at the base 5W over it.
Dell also has a laptop dock for one of their laptops that uses TWO Type-C ports, for more gooderness or something, I don’t know. Meaning it will only fit that laptop with ports exactly that far apart.
The USB chaos does lead to fun discoveries, such as when I plugged a Chromecast with Google TV’s power port into a laptop dock and discovered that it actually supports USB inputs, which is cool.
And Logitech still can’t make a USB-C dongle for their mouse.
At least it’s not a bunch of proprietary barrel chargers. My parents have a whole box of orphaned chargers with oddly specific voltages from random devices.
The scalp bird takes advantage of this by nesting in people’s hair and consuming the fruit. This causes another symbiotic relationship as it spreads the fruit seeds.
(Not saying this was your case, but generally good to check) - a finicky/wobbly USB type c connector has been a symptom of a dirty charging port several times in the past. Awful lint/dirt would get packed down into it, preventing the charger from fully inserting.
I ended up carefully and gently picking it out, though there are some delicate small contacts in there!
Anyway, good luck trying GrapheneOS! It’s been my daily driver for months and past the learning experience it’s great!
Ew. I hate that. I see they offer an option in settings to permanently switch out of S mode, but that seems like it’s a crappy excuse. I’m guessing most users are never going to go there, and will stay in S mode, using only Microsoft’s awful products. That’s their intention, at least.
I mean there are ongoing costs with any form of power generation. Obviously there’s fuel costs for most, but even other renewables have maintenance costs. You’ll also need to keep investing anyway as power demands increase over time. So newer solar installations eventually replace the old.
I’m just speculating. It seems like, at least at the moment, anti cheat continues to be able to run as kernel. The article says Microsoft will have more to say on anti cheat “in the near future.”
It may be that they don’t crack down on the realtime applications as hard, since the number of users impacted is so much smaller. Antivirus and anti cheat are on many millions of machines and are usable by the average consumer. Specialty software may be considered differently, I. E. “You know what you’re doing and what risks you’re assuming” for the more technical customer.
It will be interesting to see where they go with this.
An interesting question. Assuming they’re only targeting security/antivirus products at the moment (see the discussion regarding anti-cheat) it may be that those applications get a pass for now.
Pro [white, American, male, able-bodied, wealthy, straight/cisgender, …] Life…
What a mess. Fortunately, the frequency thing is less of an issue with modern power supplies, like my laptop charger is rated for 100-240V 50-60 Hz, so it Just Works. But I imagine that was more of a pain before these were widespread.