greyhair

From the text of the article:

"Every Android phone opens from the back."

I have replaced screens an a couple different models of Motorola phones, and the screens popped off the front. Just looking at my Pixel 5a, the screen clearly pops off the front.

This wouldn't bother me as much, except it is on the ifixit web site, which posts videos on screens repairs, that clearly show any number of Android phones being opened from the front.

Disappointing mistake, coming from ifixit.

Plasma did have an issue with 'burn in' on static images. If you did a lot of gaming on them, you could see it. Same with banners on news programming.

If you watch a lot of movies, it isn't an issue. Plus, the TVs came with a 'burn in' reduction program that you could run a couple times a year, but that operated by sweeping an intense white bar across the screen, so you were effectively 'wearing' the pixels down to a similar level to reduce the obvious burn in. If you ran that cycle to often, it would kill the maximum brightness.

Still running my Panasonic 50" Plasma from that era. So heavy. And yes they are power hogs, but in reality, ours really isn't on that often. Three, maybe four hours a week, on average.

But oh, the picture quality back then, compared to LCDs and rear projection. No comparison, and even today, it holds up well.

If all my neighbors dive into Amazon 'sidewalk' at 900Mhz, and trash my DECT handsets and my ZWave IoT, I am going to be really pissed.

The analogy for me has always been Snap-On hand tools vs Craftsman. If you are making a living twisting wrenches eight hours a day, six days a week, the wrench you use really does matter.

Adobe is to software as Nestle is to water.

I like the stuff that Frame is doing, but I don't like the way that jack sticks out. I would be happier plugging a dongle into a USB-C port, when I needed it, than having that 'nub' hanging out all the time.

I noted elsewhere, I fought this battle once. People outside the development team kept saying "it needs more buffers", but they were not looking at the network analyzer, and they weren't looking at the internal states. As buffers became excessive, it started with weird latency bouncing, and it just got worse and worse as you added buffers. We had a network impairment simulator. It was fun to turn that knobs on that and see how that interacted with packet loss buried in your buffer.

I had to fight this battle in 1998 with a DSL SoHo modem/NAT router (single box) with a 10Mb/S Ethernet jack routing through an ADSL modem with a maximum speed of 8Mb/S Down and 1Mb/S Up. The 'Up' path was killer with the PC trying to stream 10Mb/S Ethernet into a NAT router that could (at best) dump 1Mb/S up through DSL. So a 10/1 ratio.

And yes, make your buffers too big (we had relatively tons of memory) and all you get is weird latency cycles as the higher level protocols over-send, then fall back. Make your buffers to small, and the total throughput falls off, bu the latency is far more 'normal'. We ended up buffer scaling based on what the upstream connection really achieved, so larger buffers for a 1Mb/S link than for a 128Kb/S link. We would start the router at 1Mb/S buffer sizing, and scale down if the DSL link throughput was less than that.

At the time we were working through that, a number of people would scream 'just give it more buffer', not understanding how badly that broke something like TCP.

Web link is flagged by Avast has containing a malware payload.

Perfection is the enemy of good enough.

I don't know how old you are, but someday, you are going to be approaching seventy years old, and look back on the long arch of your life and realize how much effort you put into things that didn't really matter at all, and didn't put enough effort into the things that do, like art, love, and friendship.

I've spent the last forty years of my life working on embedded systems in telecom, on technologies that reigned in the marketplace for some brief period of time, then were relegated to the dustbin of history. My father-in-law worked at IBM, and within ten years of his retirement, everything he ever worked on was obsolete.

Other than fundamental math and physics, everything is ephemeral.

Love, art, family, and friends will endure. All else is dust within the span of your lifetime.

When my wife and I bought were looking for a home in 1993, our #1 requirement was that it was a walkable urban environment with a minimum of restaurants, bars, and parks, and preferably, other entertainment as well.

We narrowed it down to four towns in the area near both our jobs, and settled in a town of about 12,000 that is 2 square miles in area. Our neighborhood of single family homes is mostly 50ft x 90ft lots. There are several apartment complexes in town, and also several high rise apartment buildings.

We had a few bars and restaurants when we bought the house, there are more now, plus a very good performing arts theater, a movie theater, and several good parks. It really hit all the points.

The added kicker is that we have a light rail stop in town that can deliver us to Manhattan in 85 minutes.

In spite of that, we know a lot of people that question why we didn't take that same amount of money and buy a much larger house on a full acre out in the suburbs. They really just don't get it.

In the mid 1970s, in my welding class, the school was located down the street from a small manufacturer that formed various metal alloys.

They would provide the school with bins of scrap from their manufacturing free of charge. Those were our practice coupons in class. We had to be careful to return the welded scraps back to the proper bin so the manufacturer could recycle them.

Our class was just a very small part of their recycling flow. It was a great relationship, we needed practice materials, and they hired welders.

Those keyboards don't have the same environmental requirements. Automotive environmental is hard. Temperature extremes, high and low, plus humidity extremes.

There are also reliability expectations. If I need defrost because the windshield just fogged over, it better activate when I turn that knob on my sixteen year old car. And so far, it always has.

My brother works in automotive engineering, it isn't 60+ driving this trend. It is the design team, which skews young, and the marketing team, which also skews young.

Tesla does not skew 60+ anywhere in the company, and they introduced these oversized screen based displays years ago.

So on you four bullets above:

1) True 2) I don't know, perhaps? 3) Maybe a quick 'image' audience, but are they doing usability testing? 4) Completely false.

The big weight is on point #1, for two reasons.

1) Those displays may seem expensive, until you actually price out the panels they are using. Then go and see what those physical buttons cost. They are not cheap. And there are a lot of them. And both technologies have micro processors behind them, so using physical knobs and buttons doesn't save money there.

2) Using modal displays to cover multiple controls saves dashboard real estate, and eases design constraints. Designers love it.

One of the things I hate the most, is that I want a mostly dark interior when I drive at night, and now I'll be stuck staring at an illuminated display that I hate using in any case.

Touch screens suck. My twenty year old son and I were just discussing this a couple days ago. He has been working part time as a valet to make some extra money, so he gets to drive a lot of different cars, just to park them, but has to interact with the transmissions, at the very least, and often has to turn off blaring sound systems (yeah, people drop their cars with the valet with the radios cranked.)

His daily driver is a 2012 Hyundai Elantra GLS. He also occasionally drives my 2007 Ford Fusion. Both have fairly logical physical controls.

He hates how non-intuitive the touch screen controls are, and how you physically have to look (even if briefly) at the screen to see what state it is in, and to find the buttons. You cannot just operate them by feel.

He also does not like electronic shifters. I have never driven a Mercedes, but he says the shifter on the newer Mercedes is frustratingly slow. You have to put you foot on the brake, tap the lever, then wait for the indicator to actually change.

What I find particularly frustrating on all this, I know that the knob driven climate controls are just inputs to a computer that is driving servo motors under the dash. There are no cables. But it is intuitive, it is tactile. I don't have to look to change the fan, or the temperature, or the vent configuration. Same with the radio. I know where the on/off and the volume is. I know where the AM/FM/CD buttons are. I know where the six preset buttons are. I can run the radio with out looking. And when I move the shift lever on the Elantra, it has a very distinctive 'gate' flow. It is easy to know what gear it is in without looking. Doubly true for the five speed manual in the Fusion.

So this change to glass panels is not for the consumer, it is for the manufacturer. It is for the designer. We have reached the age in electronics where the display is cheaper than physical controls. The manufacturers are trying to sell it as a 'feature'. It is not a feature, it is cheapness. It is crass.

This is how microbial life ends in a petri dish.

Either by consuming all the nutrients, or so polluting the dish with their metabolic waste that they can no longer survive.

See Ciba-Geigy New Jersey

I think that most of the horror stories I hear on new appliances are control board failures, more than physical hardware failures.

I have a washer and dryer from 1993 that are still going strong, but over the years I have had to replace belts, or idler pulleys. I have had to replace hot surface igniters, and the fan impeller in the dryer. But over all they have held up well. But neither one has any digital logic. They both use old school mechanical timers.

Our washer acted up briefly about ten years ago. Was making a hammering noise during agitation, and we called an appliance repair guy to look at it. He told us to run it until it quit, and left us with recommendations for two manufacturers of washer/dryers that still build units with mechanical timers. He said those will run as long as our current units. The noise sort of went away after a few months, and the washer still runs.

Flip side, I have helped two friends diagnose controller board failures on touch pad controlled ovens. One was the relay driver. The other was actually a failed membrane push button in the display, it was stuck active. In both cases, the ovens were less than five years old.

And the guy the looked at our washer said basically the same thing. The vast majority of his service calls are for failed control modules.

At the time I deleted my Facebook account, I had a total of twenty friends. And all of them were people from where I moved away from, or people that moved away from me.

Family, and local friends, I did not friend on Facebook, because I was going to see you anyway.

My mom asked why I wouldn't 'friend' her, and I responded that I talked to her on the phone for 60-90 minutes every single weekend. Without fail. Plus, I used to snail mail her printed photos on a regular basis.

When she died, I found two boxes crammed with every photo I ever sent her.

I lived very briefly in Manhattan near Lincoln Center. There was a bar about three blocks from the apartment that was very pleasant, and it was 90% always the same people from the neighborhood. We all knew each other. It was weird being in this city of about six million (at that time) and still have this very small conclave (forty people?) that frequented this one bar.

Instagram has spiraled down a hole with the introduction of reels. I was an early adopter of Instagram, and where it has headed, sucks.

I deleted my Facebook account pre-COVID, and I don't miss it at all. And my Instagram account is next. It brings me no joy anymore. It has not for several months now.

My only online 'social' activity now doesn't involve any IRL friends at all. About three or four really pleasant Reddit groups that actually help people learning new skills, or trading ideas they have tried. So little snark, it is refreshing as can be.

Mostly he is opposed to anything that could possibly impact his financial position in any way. Multi-family housing in the town where he lives will likely depress his property value a little bit.

The wealthy towns surrounding my blue collar town have always shifted their affordable housing requirements by sending funds to other towns to meet those commitments, until the state closed that little loophole. They screamed bloody murder about having a timeline to provide affordable housing within their town limits.

That is how it goes with the wealthy. They want affordable housing, so that their underpaid workers and underpaid help have a place to live, but not in their town. I have watched this all around me for the last thirty years.

I have a good job, and I cannot afford the housing in any of the three towns that immediately abut our town. I have no idea where all the money comes from.

Your GPA may be what gets your foot in the door, but your knowledge and your ability will determine the long arc of your career.

Me also, still rolling code for custom embedded hardware at 65. Started in the mid 1980s, in embedded, running proprietary RTOS, then later, commercial RTOS (pSOS, vxWorks, ThreadX, QNX), then NetBSD, and now Linux.

The amount of Python code I have written in the last three years, when I really only learned Python six years ago....

I have had the great joy of working with younger peers over the last two decades. Still working, but at a small company, and the youngest coworker is in their 50s. I miss having recent college grads around. We did have an intern prior to COVID, a really bright young man (Hi Josh, if your see this), that returned after graduation, but he found a more suitable job within a year.

I have been happy about how technically proficient some of my young coworkers have been over the years.

One thing I do try to bring to the table, particularly with new hires, is explaining how much money they are earning compared to their age peers, how learning to live within your pay, day one, while saving a little every month, will make a huge difference in your life, not just when you are really old, but even after just ten years.

It is the one life experience that older workers can share, that will make a lifetime of change for incoming hires, particularly those fresh out of college.

Something I learned from my father when I was really young. When you don't know something, say "I don't know" first, then "We can probably figure it out".

Always, always, lead with "I don't know"

I am 65, and there are still things I don't know.

I am still doing this and I am 65. Started in this industry at the tender age of 27, this being my third career choice.

I have taken a minor step back after turning 62, for a few simple reasons:

A) I am not 'building my career' at this point, so leave that opportunity open to the young. (this is the key point) B) I just want to do technical work, I don't have any reason to be the team lead any longer. C) I don't want to spend multiple hours in planning meetings every week. Particularly making plans for products five years down the road, and having someone else be responsible for those decisions. (likewise, I would like to see the average age of our representatives come down, for the same reason)

I still enjoy the work. I particularly enjoy working with young people. I still learn something new every month.

The people I work with all know me, some have known me for twenty years, so that helps. Maintain your network, people! Your network matters.

I find far more ageism now, outside of work, than at work.

This is the truth.

I have learned to politely tolerate young people, outside of work, trying to explain to me how to use my technology. Hint: If you visit my home, I hand you a photo with a QR code of the guest network, and I expect you know how that works. But when I go to restaurants, I have to tolerate an overly cheerful hostess explaining to me how QR code menus work.

Long time Instagram user. Deleted my Facebook account years ago. The recent changes to Instagram totally suck. I hardly see any of my friends pictures anymore. Maybe one, or two, then a constant shit-stream of 'reels'.

I am done. No more Instagram for me. I am hoping someone will bootstrap a replacement that basically replicates Instagram from two years ago.

The same problem has destroyed instagram. I closed my Facebook account years ago, pre COVID, but still enjoyed instagram.

In the last six months, a steady rot has crept into instagram. I hardly see any of my friend's photos anymore. Just reel after reel after reel from people I have never heard of. I wish they had a settings button to block all reels, but they don't.

So, that is the end of instagram for me.

Meta sucks.