What a strange thing to do

It’d be cool if Mozilla could just stick with one thing for more than a couple months. Even if that thing is terrible. Right now it’s like some physical embodiment of ADHD is running the company.

Not to defend the mega corporation, but companies file patents for ridiculous things all the time that never end up actually being made or used.

The last time I looked into HarmonyOS, it was an intentionally vague umbrella name for a family of operating systems and kernels. On phones and tablets, HarmonyOS was a fork of Android 10 (this was when 13 was new). On embedded devices, it was a Linux kernel fork. There were supposedly some unifying features and APIs between them, but the documentation felt very much like Huawei didn’t actually want you to know what HarmonyOS is.

Threads is owned by Facebook, a company notorious for interacting with the web in bad faith.

The EU giveth and the EU taketh away

Yeah, just clone AOSP, edit the source, spend hours fixing build errors, wait hours for the GSI to build, unlock your bootloader and lose all your data, flash the GSI, spend days creating shims to make vendor-specific features work properly, and finally profit. Easy.

I’m saying this having looked at the source code. You can’t hide the build number without turning off Developer Options.

The build number text is set to show if Developer Options is enabled. It doesn’t check anything else.

I don’t think Microsoft can reasonably block opening the command prompt and bypassing the OOBE without breaking a lot of other things, but them removing the simpler workarounds is a pretty obvious attempt to get more people to sign in with a Microsoft account.

Microsoft does sync activation keys to your account but the license is also embedded in the firmware in recent prebuilt laptops and desktops, so you don’t need a Microsoft account to activate.

The article is talking about the initial setup experience, where you could put in a fake email to bypass the requirement to sign in with a Microsoft account.

The good old “make a tech startup with a gimmicky product idea, get millions in VC for some reason, create an underwhelming product that was never meant to be any good, then get bought up by a big company that will sit on the IP and never do anything with it” strategy of making money.

That might explain why the title says “nearly”

I don’t really care about my TV being 4K, but I like the extra desktop space on my PC.

It’s also very nice how this site tries to launch a new tab to ask to enable notifications.

“Microsoft’s latest update breaks [some] VPNs and there’s no fix [yet]”

Windows is getting worse and worse, but do we have to spin legitimate bugs as some nefarious plot?

PC vendors are still selling laptops with 4GB RAM. 16GB should absolutely be the minimum (and should have been since 2020), but it’s very much not true that anything with less than 16GB is over 8 years old.

A coin flip program could replace Wall Street “analysts”

No way

The article links directly to HMD’s website for the phones, where the specs say they only support GSM 800 and 1900.

The phones in the article are 2G-only.

Isn’t this the service that was sending messages from the app to the servers over plain HTTP?

I think it’s more of a politics thing, but I don’t know of any politics communities (I’m sure they exist), so I wouldn’t have seen this otherwise.

And it’s actually news, unlike the dozens of posts people used to make linking to articles about Elon eating breakfast or something.

The Mail app looked great, but I would hardly call it perfect. It constantly failed to notify me of new emails or calendar events, and I know I’m not alone in that.

Project Treble and GSIs solve a lot of the intercompatibility issues. Of course, Treble doesn’t help if your device wasn’t originally Android, or came out before Treble existed.

Your Apple ID has to have a European country set and the phone has to be physically in the EU. I don’t think where you bought it matters.

https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/05/ios-17-4-app-stores-stop-working-travel/

It’s location-based. If you leave the EU, your sideloaded apps stop working.

That’s the great part, you don’t!

Potato potahto

Unfortunately: https://cyberplace.social/users/GossiTheDog/statuses/111886558855943676

Holy shit

News articles about Elon’s constant political clown shows aren’t technology-related just because he’s in charge of a few tech companies.

News articles about a CEO being fired from a tech company and then almost immediately rehired are tech-related, because they’re about the tech company itself and the relevant actions of the people involved.

If this were a story about the opinions of Sam Altman, who happens to be a CEO of a tech company, about world hunger or something, that would be comparable. But it’s an article about how a CEO, who happens to be Sam Altman, was fired and rehired from a tech company over the course of 3 days.

There are still obviously personalities and opinions involved, but they’re in the context of technology, rather than technology being tangentially related to the context of someone’s opinions.

Tucker Carlson concern-trolling to a camera is not a “news report”

Modern Standby includes a Disconnected Standby mode. It never actually enters S3 sleep, because Windows assumes S0 sleep support means no S3 sleep support. Disconnected Standby might use a little less power than Connected Standby, but the computer is still subject to the same wakeups and wakelocks.

If you hold the shift key when you press “shut down” it’ll fully shut down.

I really don’t like macOS “reopen” feature. It doesn’t seem to remember state for most apps, so if they were running at all before shutting down, they’re going to have a window opened on login. Unchecking the option doesn’t seem to work for every app, either. Whenever I reboot, I end up having to close 5 or more windows from apps I had running in the background without open windows.

Your post title is hurting my brain