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Comment Re:10000 a year! (Score 1) 20

It probably does cost Google something. They scan apps and devices for malware, and anything that increases the number of apps and ways to distribute them will increase the cost. They also have to certify these app stores, they aren't just going to let anyone set one up and start distributing malware or pirate streaming apps.

It feels calibrated to deter unserious applicants, but not cause further legal woes.

The real issue is F-Droid and similar open source app stores. It remains to be seen exactly how it is going to pan out.

Comment Re:Terrible feature (Score 1) 136

How does it work for an outage? With solar inverters they need to have a special island mode where they disconnect the grid, so there is no chance of backfeeding power into it and electrocuting the technician who is trying to fix it. Most inverters don't support that and have an automatic cut-off if they don't detect the grid is up (i.e. there is already 110V 60Hz there).

If you have Vehicle 2 Load you can just plug appliances directly into the car.

Comment Re:New Nuclear Please (Score 2) 62

Many of the nuclear fanatics want it because they think it means they don't have to change their lifestyle, or because they are NIMBYs and fear wind turbines and solar farms appearing near them (but don't care about nuclear plants near someone else).

Renewables and storage are by far the cheapest and fastest option now. Nuclear is just kicking the can down the road, not doing anything for another 20+ years because "nuclear is coming".

Coincidentally published today: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fbu...

Comment Re:Skeptical that this always presents itself quic (Score 1) 62

True, but I wouldn't read much into the 75,000 figure. Folding it repeatedly isn't the same as keeping it in a pocket, exposed to normal dust and lint, and folding it repeatedly. In other words, it's likely to be optimistic.

I'd say the flaw is that the tolerance is so tight that the manufacturing yield is unacceptably low.

Comment Re:Skeptical that this always presents itself quic (Score 1) 62

In this case it appears to be a design flaw. They all break in the same place, in the same way. iFixIt found that there is a part of the hinge right under the screen there, and it appears that sometimes it gets misaligned and damages the screen.

My memory of a systemic failure was HP laptops. They had a deal with Nvidia that meant they all used Nvidia chipsets, and they would all eventually fail as the repeated heating and cooling cycles caused the BGA soldering to fail.

Comment Re:Oh boy. (Score 2) 60

It sounds like BS anyway. Their press release says

"Components sourced from U.S. and allied-country suppliers account for more than 90% of the BlueChip prototypesâ(TM) component procurement cost."

Note that they include "allied-country suppliers", and are using the cost rather than the component count.

Does anyone make high grade NAND in the US?

Comment Re:They were using Open Source software, so ... (Score 1) 126

Indeed, I think they were expecting a smooth transition.

Unfortunately a lot of hype has been put out about how easy it is to ditch Microsoft products like Office and Windows. The reality is very different. LTT released a video just yesterday about how easy switching from Windows to Linux is, and within about 10 seconds of it starting the jargon would have gone over most people's heads.

Comment Re:Compatibility is always going to be a problem.. (Score 2) 126

Nice idea but I don't know how you would do that. Most people are like the ones in the article. They open a document, it looks broken, they blame the app that opened it. They don't care who is right or if it is standards complaint. It worked yesterday, it worked for their colleague who sent it over.

Comment Re:They were using Open Source software, so ... (Score 5, Interesting) 126

The crappy articles linked don't explain what went wrong, but I found one which did: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.techspot.com%2Fnews%2F...

It sounds like the main issue was compatibility. They had a large number of templates and documents in Microsoft formats, and had to deal with ones coming from other departments.

The problems sound like the usual ones with MS documents being extremely brittle. Because every version of Word keeps the page layout and font rendering exactly the same, nobody notices. As soon as they switch to another app, slight changes on character dimensions, rounding errors, and unimplemented layout bugs combine to break everything. The resultant document is a mess and very labour intensive to fix.

They could employ people to work on fixing that in code, but it would probably be easier to just fix the documents, or develop an agentic AI that can do it automatically.

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