62
Condor
6y

1. I wish that people start taking back their device ownership. Right to repair is an extremely important thing. Like that Nexus 6P that I've recently repaired by jamming another battery into it, now it's at 110-ish% health according to AccuBattery. And it cost me.. €10 or so? All the while if I wasn't able to get in there, it would've been a €120 paperweight (and that's not even considering the €300-ish (? Someone please fill me in on that) price it retailed at back in 2015 when it was a flagship).

(edit the so many'th: according to https://express.co.uk/life-style/... the base model was apparently £449 at release, haven't been able to verify it though.. point is, a paperweight at such prices would've been quite a bummer, I mean for me it was even one given that it failed a mere few months after purchase for €120.. €40/m for a phone ain't nothing :/)

Right to repair is an extremely important thing, and the ability to do so shouldn't ever be impeded. Users should become able again to service the devices that they own.

2. I wish that people start caring about their privacy again. Google and Facebook and the likes are large companies, but at the end of the day, that's all they are. Large companies. And they're hungry for your data, not because they're selling it, rather because they're collecting it to an extent which they shouldn't. Over at DDG (https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckg...) they explain a very much viable alternative revenue model pretty well. Additionally, there's several tools which you can use to limit the amount of data that's being collected about you. These include but are not limited to Firefox, NoScript, ad blockers (I personally use uBlock), a trustworthy VPN (ideally one of your own), and Tor.

3. I wish that software would become less inefficient. It really pains me to see that applications with functionality that could be implemented in a couple of MB at most come at a size of several hundreds of MB. 1% efficiency, even the inefficient as fuck tungsten light bulbs weren't that awful!!! Imagine what could be done with all the hardware we have available nowadays, if every piece of software would be around 80% efficient as is a common norm in electronics. Just looking at Linux which is still in many ways convoluted, modern desktops with a couple hundred MB of RAM usage? You've got it! So why can't OS's like Windows (although I have to say, huge improvements have been made there over the last few years) and browsers like Firefox and Chrome be more like that? I really don't understand.

There's several more wishes I have of course, but those are the most important ones.. hopefully I'll be able to see at least one of them come true during my life.

Comments
  • 4
    Think the dev genie said the same thing as it did with me haha. But i agree, if you can't open it you don't own it. Sheep won't care about privacy until the wolf eats them. As for the final one i wish people would have to work with 128mb of memory for a whole system like the old days when shit hit the fan if something froze the computer
  • 6
    The only sane rant this week.
    The problem is that the users don't care. They don't care if they can't repair their own devices. They don't care about their privacy. They don't notice the calculator using gigabytes of RAM. They just don't care.
  • 0
    Replaceable batteries and waterproofing don’t really like each other. I’ll pick the latter, no question. By the time my battery health gets low I’ll be using a different device anyway πŸ˜›
  • 1
    @620hun That's just the manufacturers' excuse, in reality it's pure and simple planned obsolescence. In fact many phones are not IP68 certified, yet they are still glued together like a kid's notebook.

    A sealing gasket and some screws would do the same job, or perhaps even better, without sacrificing the ease of maintenance.
  • 1
    Best rant on this topic so far!

    (At least from what I've read...)

    You know, once there was a time, when "Solving The Problem With Hardware" was meant to tell people that they were doing it wrong. Now it's common standard.

    But this won't change while the software developer scene and industry keeps piling turtles upon turtles.

    Yes, you can write your app in *that* language with *this* framework in only 200-300 lines, instead of doing it yourself in 3k-4k lines.

    But those few hundred lines pull in tens of thousands lines of inefficient fuckshit that result in a large bloated program that's inefficient as hell.

    Until people start understanding this tiny detail of their laziness, things won't change...
  • 0
    @BlueDav000 Planned obsolescence is just a buzzword people like throwing around without a second thought. Batteries have a finite lifetime by their design. Most phones have batteries that you can replace easily, the only problem is the water sealing. You can’t open the phone without damaging the sealing, and it’s basically impossible to reseal at home. Proper service centres can do it, though.

    @M1sf3t Show me a phone without a replaceable battery. All are replaceable, it’s only about what sacrifices you’ll have to make. If I have to damage the water sealing I won’t open my phone, period.
  • 1
    @620hun I can't argue with the "using a different device anyway" when MTBF is at least for the average user equal to MTTF (i.e. planned obsolescence). I've bought a OnePlus 6T a few months ago because I was left without a phone after my Nexus 6P got its BLOD that I didn't know how to solve. Now that I've repaired it though by replacing the battery and disabling those big cores, I don't think that I would've bought this OnePlus 6T if I was able to do this immediately after the 6P crashed. It's still a very capable phone, even today.

    As for the repair of it, that was actually a particularly difficult one. You can check out the iFixit video on it if you're curious, but essentially it requires a heat gun (which most users don't have at home) set to 120°C, to very carefully heat up and pry into the plastic cover piece to remove it. Same thing with the glass (!) camera panel. It's quite a tedious and downright risky process. The glass could've easily shattered and the plastic could've easily bent permanently. And if you apply too much heat, it could've melted.

    Granted, when I finally got in there, it was again the classical PH-0 screws and then the battery.. which was also glued in (who cares about pull tabs anyway, right), so I had to heat up that lithium cell as well, which had an inherent risk of explosion. But yes, after all that.. at least there's still a connector rather than it being directly soldered in. As if someone with a heat gun wouldn't also have a soldering station. Thanks Huawei and Google! At least there's still a connector.

    I don't know man, but I really don't think that all that glued garbage is worth any IP rating. And besides, o-rings have been used for sealing in hydraulics for decades. That and a good screw can hold water in up to several hundred bars of pressure. Compare that to a piece of plastic and some glue. Planned obsolescence at its finest.
  • 1
    @M1sf3t yes but the issue with those is that they aren't temperature regulated, so they run at some 500°C all the time. Had one of those too, wasn't a very good experience.. even melted the plastic around the nozzle 🀨 and blowing that on a phone would be pretty.. exciting, but probably in a not so good way πŸ˜›
  • 1
    @Frederick Same here actually. I've gotten some links to Foobar a few months ago, yet didn't use them because I still had to learn either Python or Java for it (why Google wants their potential sysadmins to learn programming languages like that is beyond me, but whatever) which got pushed into the backlog for a while, like pending projects of mine usually do. After learning from @Root how vengeful Google is towards ex-employees though, I've given that a second thought as in, I'll probably use all 3 of those links as exploratory burners when Foobar gets online again (if they're still valid by that time). Not like I have the appropriate level of experience to work at a Google datacenter with tens of thousands of servers per DC yet anyway. Maybe in a couple of years I'll take my chances one more time, but for now.. no. Additionally, I don't like Google one bit - they've done some things right, but a lot of things I've got serious doubts about. I'll need a lot of clarification and justification from uncensored Google employees before I'll ever consider working there and supporting their business.
  • 2
    Thoughts on 2:
    I don't use Facebook or any social media(I use YouTube because I must).
    And friends tell me to use again. They talk about some features that Facebook have that they like.
    And I always defend using privacy issues.
    And friends say, wtf will the Facebook do using "his data".
    And I say, what is never meant to be theirs should never be theirs. And if they are doing it doesn't mean its right.
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