If I was to guess, id say someone did this as a side project at QC because maybe they like FOSS and want to give something back. Given the partnership between QC and MSFT for laptops and Google for android, I won't be surprised if we never see interest from QC for any real linux hardware.
And until then they will milk as much money as possible. If there is outrage or they see sales dropping, a few thousand dollars per hotel will replace those rooms with doors leaving with net profit and steady shareholder growth. Some statistical analysis ppt made by some mid level MBA must have proposed this and got a promotion.
This is why it falls on us to not simply put up with what little they expect us to settle for. Ask about their privacy and bathroom doors when booking and if caught by surprise by a lack of an actual door or inadequate privacy demand a new room, or go elsewhere taking a refund if necessary.
I have to admit that I'm getting very tired of the unsustainable push for endless growth driving companies everywhere to jack up prices as high as people will tolerate and then also delivering the least and worst product/service they can possibly get away with on top of it. It means that everything is getting shittier unless you're willing to spend insane amounts of money to get what used to be standard and more affordable.
It's becoming exhausting maintaining a list of businesses I no longer want to give money to and products/services I won't pay for. This is especially true as companies change names, redesign products, and buy up one another. the list just grows and grows all the time.
> Some statistical analysis ppt made by some mid level MBA must have proposed this and got a promotion.
Not necessarily. Just like natural evolution doesn't requite its participants to understand themselves, neither does the market require anyone at a business to understand why they are successful.
>In February, Lorenzo Gutierrez Lugo, a driver for a small trucking company that specializes in transporting furniture, clothing and other belongings to families in Mexico, was driving south to the border city of Brownsville, Texas, carrying packages from immigrant communities in South Carolina’s low country.
If you think 'this is just a normal citizen doing good work' at first and you are breaking privacy here, keep reading.
>They unearthed no contraband. But Beltran arrested Gutierrez Lugo on suspicion of money laundering and engaging in organized criminal activity because he was carrying thousands of dollars in cash — money his supervisor said came directly from customers in local Latino communities, who are accustomed to paying in cash.
carrying thousands of dollars in cash over the US Mexico border is so suspicious that there is likely a lot more happening. The trucking company spent 20,000$ to get him out of it.
The more I think of better call Saul and breaking bad, the more I wonder whether this is one of those situations where the reality is actually much worse than television fiction.
90% of the drugs that enter US come from the south border. At 120 tons of drugs being 'seized' not the ones being distributed, I am assuming the scale of this thing is massive. [1]
Carrying cash isn't a crime. The fact that no charges were brought says that they couldn't prove a crime was committed either. And please read the fifth amendment.
> No criminal charges were ultimately brought against Gutierrez Lugo
No but carrying over $10,000 into the US requires you to declare it and maybe pay taxes if you can't prove its source or risk being sized (which is fine if it's drug money).
One more thing to note about TP-Link today is that they don't just abandon firmware updates but also switch chips and hardware.
For example, They will call some device Deco / Archer ABC with a Qualcomm chip that's latest and greatest. They might sell it for 499$ for example and then let reviewers do their thing to review these products everywhere with 5 stars. Great!
Six months or maybe a year down the road when the product starts getting traction as people start buying new WiFi standards like 6/6E/7 etc. they will swap out the chips inside and launch a v2 of that same product with either mediatek chips or a slower Qualcomm SOC. This affects performance and stability and it also drives down the pricing with cheaper hardware.
This has been done a lot with Deco units. Reviews are for original v1 hardware but what's being sold is a different hardware completely. Not only is this a firmware problem but keep in mind such practices really show lack of trust.
People in the comments are defending TPLink for how 'solid' their products are. As someone who just switched to UniFi APs from a Deco Mesh (wired), I have to admit that the difference is deep dark hole and bright sunshine day. Maybe people are comparing to spectrum charter modem combos but I definitely don't see how a router that loses firmware updates in a year can be praised. And it needs reboots so frequently. The Deco has an option now to reboot 'everyday'. This sounds something maybe needed for rare cases where the ISP expects a reboot, but the fact that your routers have that as a feature to keep it stable is a big red flag.
I was so used to this that when I started looking for this setting in UniFi OS I had forgotten the part 'networks are not supposed to be rebooted frequently!'.
First, all of the TP-Link devices I use still have firmware updates regularly. I can't talk about Deco series, which I don't own.
Second, mesh capabilities are not consistent across different brands, that's true. On the other hand, comparing TP-Link, which is a home/SOHO brand to UniFi, which is essentially a prosumer/enterprise offering is not fair. I have a small mesh (three devices) at one of the places I run these devices, and it hands-off nicely, extends coverage, and gives me the speeds written on the tin.
Do I expect it to compare to a UniFi or Aruba mesh where the smallest element has more processing power than my router? Of course not. Do I expect it to run on a 300 sqm house with 10+ devices? Again, no. But as long as my network runs, I can access the devices with good connections and speeds they advertise, I'm golden.
Lastly, "restart everyday at this time" setting is present since forever on many devices. The feature is to help home-downloaders / data hoarders to renew their IP periodically. Heck, even JDownloader has a feature to reset your modem remotely if your modem supports to renew IPs (since 2004?). Assumptions don't help here.
I never had to automatically restart any of the routers/modems I used regardless of the manufacturer sans a couple Cisco/Linksys devices. E4200 which had two processors, one for the switch and one for the router. The router one stopped responding randomly to cut whole network off from internet, and my E900's processor crashed flooding whole home network with packets basically paralyzing it. Oh, that same E900 failed to negotiate with the on board RTL8139 Ethernet controller, so I had to buy another "Cisco/Linksys" RTL8139 card.
TP-Links I had never done anything remote. They even have the best latencies and WAN recovery when things go south on ISP side. My TP-Link 802.11AX extender works flawlessly with my ISP supplied WiFi6 modem, and despite having no mesh communication going on, running on the same SSID and handing off pretty reliably.
Yes, a home product with a dedicated controller unit, Fx networking support, cloud based management with ability to self-host, traffic shaping and SDN capabilities.
People can dedicate a small cabinet to UniFi rack-mountable gear plus the network center of their house. TP-Link has none of those, and not aiming for that market, even.
It's comparing a Peugeot 3008 with a Mercedes-Benz G Class and adding that, Mercedes has serious off-road trucks like Unimog, but G Class is their end-user product.
Apples to Pineapples.
BTW, it's not hard for me to install and manage a high capacity UniFi network in any way. I don't use their devices, because I don't want to manage yet another network.
A 3 pack WiFi 7 BE65 mesh from TPLink at launch costed 1500$. They seem to have done their usual hardware switching to now sell a similar BE63 for 500$. But if you are going to compare the two compare the actual hardware equivalent product. For 500$ You can get a controller and a couple of APs from UniFi, the setup will be far better than a 3pack BE63.
From what I see, Deco BE series have multiple models, with slightly different port configuration. Looks like BE65 comes with 4x 2.5gbE and BE65 comes with 2x5gbE + 1x2.5gbE. Moreover the site has multiple other Deco BE models. Both BE63 and BE65 is on sale and can be purchased.
From my experience, TP-Link makes hardware changes with "H/W versioning" in their model numbers. I have many RE220 extenders with different hardware revisions, earlier ones doesn't supporting OneMesh. However, I don't find later versions performing worse w.r.t. earlier ones.
However, $500/unit, the backbone of the devices doesn't look underpowered, esp. when looking to both wireless and wired specs. Considering my RE700X is saying what's written on the tin, and being rock-solid despite working with a non TP-link device and and being behind two 30cm walls.
I expect these Deco devices to live up to their specs.
I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with my WiFi. Turns out all I had to do is power restart it. All my problems went away after setting up weekly reboots. It is stupid that it works and it is stupid that it is the only solution for stable WiFi. Shame on tplink
its usually either low memory which basically crashes the devices or buggy software which works until you hit the bug at which point it requires a restart to get it working again. Most common is memory problems though because these devices have just enough memory to make it work.
I have not used the Deco access points but the Omada ones have web rock solid for me for about 4.5 years now and I used UniFi before that with no real issues either.
> I definitely don't see how a router that loses firmware updates in a year can be praised
My Deco M4 mesh units from 2019 are still receiving regular firmware updates (to be fair, I think more to bring compatibility with new features than for security updates, but regardless).
The Ubiquity hardware might be good, but the firmware is so shit, especially for IPv6, that I had to replace it with OpenWRT to get it to work (offer IPv6 prefixes for delegation).
The iPhone and services that go with the iPhone (music apps iCloud) together make apple what it is even today. The numbers are huge and the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro are still the gold standard of smartphones. Everything else is probably secondary support hardware and software for the iPhone.
I plan on moving away from macOS (maybe Asahi on my old M1 Air but leaning towards Arch on framework) but every attempt to reconsider the iPhone for me has failed.
The biggest thing I see is how the iPhone helped fuel social media and in turn social media helped iPhone with sales. The phone is a social and secure device and the iPhone excels at that thanks to iCloud services and the ease with which you can manage the phone. Upgrading is so seamless, managing Photos with iCloud is a no-brainer. Everything about it screams social and it does it extremely well.
The personal computer vs Mac war is still ongoing but android vs iPhone war was over years ago. The iPhone won and there is not much anyone can do at this point to compete at that scale unless someone comes up with something truly extraordinary rather than just putting LLMs inside apps.
For companies revenue and especially profit margin share usually matters much more. If an iPhone user in the US etc. is worth >= 10x more than an user in a third world country (both for manufacturers and ad/service providers that’s a win).
Apple could probably get > 50% market share in those countries if they significantly reduced their margins (they’d still be profitable but of course it makes little sense m)
There are 195 official countries in the world, many of those have close to zero iPhone customers, and surely the companies on those countries also need customers.
Truth is Apple doesn't care about those countries where regular citizens cannot afford Apple, they see themselves as the Ferrari, Bentley, Karan Acoustics, ... of the computer world.
They certainly don’t see themselves that way. Maybe Lexus or Audi, but not even that.
Those are very niche luxury brands, that sell impractical status products (there isn’t really and equivalent for them in the “computer world”) for the 1% or subset of it. Apple is not that, it’s an upper middle tier mass market brand.
But yes, they certainly don’t care about markets where they can’t be competitive while maintaining their margins
> The personal computer vs Mac war is still ongoing but android vs iPhone war was over years ago.
I don't think Macs are even a consideration for most "hackers." You can't build you own machine, Linux support is limited, they just cater to a crowd that wants a polished experience and don't mind giving up their freedom for it.
As for the phone market, I think Apple's success mostly comes to a combination of clever marketing and phone users being on average even less technically-minded than desktop users. Add to that social pressure now the the iPhone is dominant. That being said you couldn't pay me to give up my Pixel running Graphene, a device that is completely immune to corporate spyware, forced "upgrades," sideloading restrictions and compliance with idiotic laws like client-side scanning (if it ever happens).
Imagine a scenario where you want to start gardening. Go to gardening clubs and you'll find a lot of free information there and people to guide you. Public libraries exist if you want to join a book club and start reading. Again free. Agriculture, irrigation, building homes, woodworking, stitching clothes, etc. everything essential has been free to learn and do.
Apply this to the internet and essentials are FOSS. Linux, DNS and maybe RISCV someday will mean you can build computers and internet on essentials that are free to learn and use.
Land for garden in my town costs like 1000 eur per square meter. Gardening clubs are full of old dudes, who want to have a sex with me. Public libraries are homeless shelters now. If I actually plant some vegetables (in pots or front yard), it will be full of dog/cat excrements the next day!
You are living in imaginary land, nothing is free in todays society!
no, of course not. I swear to God, reading comprehension among Linux fans falls lower and lower every year.
shitting on them makes anything you say about a competing operating system appear like fully biased opinion, rather than fact. if you want people who you have not already captured to listen to you, you must do your best to appear unbiased. shitting on anything is 100% bias. and if you have opinions like that, how can someone you're trying to win over trust that the positive things you're saying about this other thing aren't also 100% opinion?
Stick to the facts if you want to ever hope to do anything other than make Linux fans appear like they are rabid dogs who attack anything they don't like on sight.
You can do that if you want, I don't care. But I don't go to rabid dogs for their opinions when it comes to choosing things, and no one else does either.
You say things like this to get a mob going, and I want you to admit that. you all shit on things you don't like because you want to feel heard by others who also shit on those same things. but people who aren't like that come here and they read this stuff, too. And you're shitting on them in the process.
>Oct 20 12:51 AM PDT We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue may also be affecting Case Creation through the AWS Support Center or the Support API. We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share.
Weird that case creation uses the same region as the case you'd like to create for.
The support apis only exist in us-east-1, iirc. It’s a “global” service like IAM, but that usually means modifications to things have to go through us-east-1 even if they let you pull the data out elsewhere.
As someone who's had to do extensive work on myself to survive I can relate to a lot of things said here. I have gone through a lot of material on psychology and spend a lot of time thinking myself when I read or go through the material. This was after 3 years of medication and 20 years of suffering and reaching the point of wanting badly to end my life due to multiple factors growing up.
What I would suggest if you wanted to start working on yourself building healthier relationships with yourself and others:
First is find a suitable therapist. Shop for a therapist like you shop for clothes. Do a session or two and see what you feel. What you need depends on what you are going through. Depression panic anxiety marriage health etc. But don't continue therapy where you don't feel good. There wont be a perfect fit but 'good enough' is someone you can talk to and is compassionate and helps you to do well. They will also assign small homework and that is important. The right therapist will be on your team and slowly nudge you in the right direction (though with your knowledge not sneakily). This builds trust.
Second would be start working on your body. Your body is just as important as your mind. And the two are very interlinked. Yoga, Mindfulness, being more present (ditch your phones and social media accounts), exercise, food, etc. all contribute to your mental wellbeing which will help you create a good relationship with yourself. Once you give the body the love it needs, it will give it back to you.
Third would be to do some reading on mental health and books by psychologists. The thing is you will get lot of insights on your own life reading all that. But be careful too, it might bring up intense memories (like trauma) that can be dangerous. So go slow. Peter Levine, Gabor Mate, Bessel van Der Kolk, Gottman, Richard Shwartz, David Burns, beane Browne etc. Such authors are actively doing work on the cognitive side of things. Some have extreme theories so look for things that apply to you.
I will admit that I was skeptical of the whole 'change your thoughts and things will change' and to some extent I still think that it's not the whole story. But you have to do the self work and your mind is a big part of it. I am very far from building healthy relationships in my life but I think I am having a good relationship with myself lately. I may have gone a few notches down in depression and things have improved.
There is a lot more to share tbh on this but these things are something I did in the last two years that seem to have helped.
When I read su**de my brain read suicide, so you still put the word in my mind, what's your point doing that? In fact I spent more time thinking and parsing the word suicide because of the asterisks.
It’s more like putting a lipstick on a pig. You know some people will get triggered. But you say it anyway. And then pretend it’s not so bad because you put asterisk in there, so it’s totally not the same thing. Yet you’re talking about the same thing. But it’s totally not the same!!! Yeah, right.
How? You read it the same way in your brain? Like when you read you think of the words, so they are all there in the same way, with the only added extra parsing on top (ie an extra half second spent on the word you want to avoid). If you want to be careful to avoid this, avoid the subject or use different framing that doesn't require to use the word. Censoring it in text makes zero sense for the reader for your intended purpose.
This feels like a weird combo of "I know talking about this subject will put the thought in people's minds, but I still want to talk about it and say the same thing exactly while at the same time showing that I think it's problematic". But then why do it?
You say it all with so much certainty. Why do you think your approach is better than the other commenter? (Also, certainty is a tipoff, ime, of a lack of knowledge or wisdom.)
Obviously I speak in first person, makes zero sense, to me. I'm definitely not wise though, that's why I asked because for many of these things I often start really puzzled and after a few years of sharing some opinion someone finally says something that makes it click for me and I was hoping to see if there's something I'm missing. I'm not very "woke" by default and it requires plenty of talking and thinking for me to see the other side. And this is a discussion forum to share ideas! When you're wrong just post something online and wait, like xckd said.
I think there's validity in avoiding gratuitous mentions of some topics given some audiences, but what I'm puzzled by is the specific implementation that to me makes it worse than just not thinking about it and writing what you'd write anyway. It really makes no sense, to me.
> I'm definitely not wise though, that's why I asked because for many of these things I often start really puzzled and after a few years of sharing some opinion someone finally says something that makes it click for me and I was hoping to see if there's something I'm missing. I'm not very "woke" by default and it requires plenty of talking and thinking for me to see the other side. And this is a discussion forum to share ideas! When you're wrong just post something online and wait, like xckd said.
Well, I think that's pretty wise. Sorry to be so argumentative! :)
> I think there's validity in avoiding gratuitous mentions of some topics given some audiences, but what I'm puzzled by is the specific implementation that to me makes it worse than just not thinking about it and writing what you'd write anyway. It really makes no sense, to me.
I don't pretend to know enough about human psychology to have a certain answer, but here are my thoughts:
Words, specific words, have impacts beyond their meanings. For example, people use euphemisms all the time - gentle ways of saying something harsh - in many (all?) cultures, because they work. More generally, people say things politely rather than rudely or directly, even talking about happy things like sex, or natural things like excreting waste.
Perhaps it lessens the blow; it allows people to glance at something troubling without being retraumatized. It also signals care: Being polite communicates you care about and respect the other person; being rude conveys the opposite.
People have long made the logical point that the meaning is the same so why not say the rude thing, but clearly almost everyone feels otherwise and the words we choose have an impact beyond their meanings.
And in case it does help someone to obscure the word, why not do it?
> Obviously I speak in first person, makes zero sense, to me.
It's not obvious. People make assertions about the world all the time.
They activate different neural pathways? Might not apply to you but it probably applies to others. At least that's what GP believes, and I find it plausible too.
That may be true for people seeing the censored for the first time. But then it just becomes a double speak theater.
Sort of like illegal vs undocumented migrants. First time you hear, it may pass in different ways. But once you realize what’s the topic, people on both sides will read both words the same way. And both in their own ways. It just becomes a kind of virtue signaling after few uses.
> Sort of like illegal vs undocumented migrants. First time you hear, it may pass in different ways. But once you realize what’s the topic, people on both sides will read both words the same way. And both in their own ways. It just becomes a kind of virtue signaling after few uses.
People who study these things, including persuasive public communication, have a very different opinion. So do writers of every stripe, from technical writers to poets. The words we use matter.
For example, the sides in the abortion debate call themselves 'pro choice' and 'pro life', and call their opponents negative things. Goverments have long called targets who challenge the status quo, especially voilently, 'terrorists', even though their tactics may have nothing to do with terrorism. Political actors invest lots of money and work in finding the most effective words.
There's a difference between 'slaves' or 'colleteral damage', creatures or objects that play a role in someone else's actions, and 'enslaved people' or 'enslaved men and women' or 'people who were killed by the bomb', who are real humans caught up on something awful.
People use pejoritives for the same reason - for example, 'wetbacks' or 'illegals' for undocumented people, all sorts of names for enemies in warfare, etc.
I’m yet to see someone who switched camps because of pro life or undocumented wording. On the other hand, all sides seem to make lots of fun of the other side wording and make jokes out of that. Or use exact wording as pejorative.
Wording may make difference in marketing for on-the-spot decisions. But in the long run, when people take a deeper look, wording seems to not make a difference.
You see people in one camp making fun of it - the reactionary camp, whose purpose is to destroy 'liberalism' in any form. Of course they attack it.
Should everyone else just quit because someone is attacking? If someone attacks everything you do and say, does it mean anything substantively, or is it just a signal to their comrades?
I see people in various camps trying to use double speak as a weapon. And I don’t see people changing camps because of wording. And all camps are making fun of wording of the other side on any topic.
I’m not on US so here camps are slightly different and don’t exactly make two camps. With many topics crossing what you may call „reactionary“ and „progressive“ lines in strange ways. Here frequently people at the same time are in different camps on different topics with same people. And use same tactics both „with“ and „against“ same people based on topic.
You said that people using that language were ridiculed, as if that should be a factor in their behavior. So should they stop because their opponents use ridicule?
> I don’t see people changing camps because of wording
I still don't see what evidence you have. I've presented evidence that experts and practioners have long invested a lot of resources in using language in this way. Just look at Fox News - it's almost their entire reason and means.
I was saying that the language didn’t change the outlooks of the other side. The only impact was the other side making fun of them.
People have invested time in all sorts of useless ideas. And social sciences have a pretty bad track record in recent decades.
I’m not very familiar with Fox News. But isn’t it the example of what I’m saying? It does nothing to convert the other side and pretty much a circlejerk of believers?
How may Fox News watchers changed their minds because NYT started calling illegal migrants „undocumented“? My bet at best it’s feel-good virtue signaling for their crowd that was already deep in that camp.
I know what you're saying. I don't see evidence of it - that you perceive it, especially because you can't read people's minds, is not strong evidence.
Communication has different registers, that is, in different situations some words words or expressions are less or more appropriate. For example formal or casual talk.
I don't have a proof, but I think 'su**de' is a more appropriate form of 'suicide' here than 'suicide', just because it is.
