Since I know how many of those businesses are run I'll let you in on the very obvious secret: there’s zero chance they have enough uplink to accommodate everyone using 100% of their bandwidth at the same time, and probably much less than that.
Residential network access is oversold as everything else.
The only difference with storage is there’s a theoretical maximum on how much a single person can use.
But you could just as well limit backup upload speed for similar effect. Having something about fair use in ToS is really not that different.
Residential ISPs don’t work financially unless you oversell peak time full-rate bandwidth. If you do things right, you oversell at a level that your customers don’t actually slow down. Even today, you won’t have 100% of customers using 100% of their full line rate 100% of the time.
Back in the late 1990s we could run a couple dozen 56k lines on a 1.544 Mbps backhaul. We could have those to the same extent today, but there’s still a ratio that works fine.
Yes, yes. We know. The business environment can't be arsed to maintain it's own integrity by actually building out the capacity they want to charge for. Everyone hides behind statistical multiplexing until the actuarial pants shitting event occurs. Then it's bail out time, or "We're sorry. We used all the money for executive bonuses!"
Building out for 100% of theoretical capacity makes no sense but you can still easily accommodate the small handful of power users with plenty to spare. Most ISPs will not drop or throttle users trying to get their money's worth if it’s fiber or similar. LTE of course that’s another thing.
That sort of horrible abuse only happens in areas where some provider has strict monopoly, but that’s an aberration and with Starlink’s availability there’s an upper bound nowadays.
My guess would be price. Shoppers probably got more sensitive to the price of a keyboard as the price of computers dropped, and approximately none of them were choosing between two computer-bundles at the store with any regard for keyboard quality.
Most people and companies just use the keyboard that shipped with the computer. I don't think noise is as much of an issue as people make it out be.
Marketing made up this story about linear switches being for gamers. So now every mechanical keyboard needs to make unnecessary noise and offer extra resistance for harder bottom out or you're not a serious typist.
But that's not inherent to the keyboard. Linear switches are not any louder than cheapo office high-profile membrane.
I'm not a gamer these days, but from what I've seen, the gamers like a different type of keyswitch than regular typists. Normal typists like a clicky keyswitch where it clicks with very little travel, and has plenty of travel after this to avoid bottoming out. (so, Cherry blue)
Gamers want mechanical keyswitches with no click at all. (Cherry brown I think)
This is the marketing mythos I was talking about. The best typist keyboard is regular linear switch. Typing without bottom out is impossible. Clicking is just audio. Of course most mechanisms of producing clicking mean some degree of tactility (added resistance), but any tactility bump you have to overcome means you come out on the other side with more force which means harder bottom out. The way to reduce bottom out force is to not have any resistance, which is what linear switch is.
The most popular type of switch is brown because it's essentially a linear switch that is not marketed towards gamers. It's just sad.
Cherry browns are more like an average mechanical switch (and not in a bad way - they're a good middle ground if you use your keyboard for different things). Gaming oriented keyboards would use different ones.
I find the resistance to be a hindrance when typing. Fastest typing speed and comfort for me is my thinkpad keyboard which uses scissor switches with a very low profile - you need less effort per keystroke!
Right, that's why I recommend linear switches. But they're marketed as a gaming switch and they don't deserve this harmful reputation. They're simply the only non-stupid type of switch.
Low profile scissors are a compromise. They are tactile but it's for once functional as it compensates for the obvious lack of travel. The result is a mediocre but still above average experience. You can type fast on them but with more fatigue than high-profile linear.
Marketers want you to believe there's at least three different distinct switch types for different purposes because they want to sell you the same keyboard twice or thrice. But in reality there's linear and stupid. And some of them make unnecessary noise. Some of them make really sweet nostalgia noises like Alps switches but it's still a worse typing experience.
Both noise and resistance is something where mechanical keyboards can provide all desired options with the right switch choice. Gaming-oriented mechanical keyboards tend to have particularly low activation forces.
There really isn't any reason not to choose one except for price - and that's a fair consideration if you're fine with rubber domes or other alternatives.
You really only need dirty_ratio/bytes and dirty_background_ratio/bytes set to something lower than default. It also makes your progress bars show values closer to reality, especially when copying from fast to slow media.
Some distros already do set lower defaults, e.g. pop os:
> You really only need dirty_ratio/bytes and dirty_background_ratio/bytes set to something lower than default.
The vm.swappiness=1 was very necessary for me as well, and made as much difference as the dirties you'd mentioned.
I usually run Linus' master kernels (as I look for regressions in certain subsystems) and I know there's been some recent changes to the MM subsystem so this may explain some of the necessity for me.
> All they would have to do to support this is add a checkout field "VAT number" that shows up on a pdf invoice.
If only it would be that simple :)
In EU you have different procedures for B2C and B2B transactions. For B2B you need to verify the VAT number in VIES system and it’s not responsive like 50% of the time. I swear Germans literally turn off their servers when they go to sleep. If a customer provides a VAT number the flow might take even 12h+ to verify it. If you can do that verification you can use 0% VAT rate but if not you need to use a different VAT rate.
For B2C you need to support several scenarios: if company is outside of EU it needs to register for IOSS, if it’s a EU company that sells to other EU countries it needs to register for OSS or in each EU country for VAT separately but also a mix of both is possible. You can decide to no register to OSS special procedure but then there’s a sales limit before you have to register and you need to track it. Otherwise, you need to maintain special OSS registry with sales records and three pieces of proof that customer is based in the member country. Some EU countries have XML invoices (Italy, Romania, Germany soon) or mandatory invoice APIs (Poland), of course there’s actually no common EU standard so it depends on where the company is based.
Finally you need to choose a VAT rate for that country and they also change occasionally, e.g. Slovakia, Romania and Estonia all changed their highest rate just last year.
This is the bare minimum you need to support. There’s a lot of edge cases, e.g. it matters what country you actually ship from, and if you use e.g. fulfillment there are special procedures for that as well, or if you resell in B2B there are chain transactions which have their own set of spaghetti rules.
Much of that is at least for my company handled by our accounting company. We just print the correct VAT on the invoice, and report the same VAT to the accountant and they take care of the rest. The shop/payment processor etc doesn't need to be integrated to any of it. Though I have to post-process Stripe's reports, as they refuse to include the used VAT rate in there, despite them knowing it. Stripe does try to sell the tax service to us, but I refuse.
You can simplify for your use case (only B2C or you refund VAT afterwards for B2B, you only ship from one location, custom invoicing), but that’s what it takes to implement it correctly on platform level.
Yes, it will be ineffective, so then they will point at all those examples, but will they decide the law is stupid? Of course not.
The computers are not secure and they should only be able to run “verified” operating systems using attestation mechanisms. This was always where this was ultimately going. The idea has been fermenting since the DVD players had copy protections.
It’s the planet destroying asteroid. We know the trajectory, we always knew it was coming for us. But once you can see with the naked eye it’s too late to do anything.
> The EU is working on a type of digital ID that an age-restricted platform would ask for, which only gives the platform the age information and no further PII.
Sure, it might start out that way, but once adoption reaches anything critical the PII will be required to squash free speech as soon as possible. But by then the interaction flow will be familiar, hardly anyone will even notice, never mind care.
The EU has the best frog boiling experts in the world.
> ... will be required to squash free speech as soon as possible.
Maybe pointing the obvious but things happen if enough people care about them or do not care to oppose them.
From my perspective speech became "more free" lately - meaning everybody says all kind of incorrect, wrong things without fear of retribution even if there are laws against some of those, because people just don't care.
So maybe we should also focus on teaching people what is free speech, why is it good for them, why they needed, rather than worry about some hypothetical mechanism that someone will prevent it.
Of course both can be done, but I find it a bit funny that if the focus in mostly on not having mechanisms to prevent free speech, we might still end up in a situation that there are no such mechanisms but on the other hand nobody speaks freely because they don't care or only stare at their tiktok.
By this reasoning we should oppose every law in case it's a foothold to sneak in a different law.
The CA/CO parental controls API law is very reasonable. It only mandates each OS must have a parental controls API, the use of which is up to the parents.
Yep, the digital wallet will become the authoritarian, beating heart of your life. If you don't comply with the EU, you can say bye, bye, to your bank account, any online interaction, they block your right to travel and so on.
The corona passports showed the way to achieve ultimate control of the population, and the EU digital wallet will be a permanent corona passport.
The public sheep, in their ignorance, are cheering this on, without knowing what will await them. It is our responsibility as technologists to fight this, and to educate the sheep.
Go to [Settings] » [Apps] » [Special app access] » [Display over other apps] and check if any preinstalled carrier apps or anything suspicious has this permission granted.
Apparently this is handled by the privileged STK[1] service. It can launch browser which is I think what's happening.
GrapheneOS presently doesn’t do anything different in this case, they pull it from AOSP without modifications. However you can disable it using the frontend app (SIM Toolkit) as someone pointed out, but as far as I can tell this requires the applet on SIM card to cooperate (offer the opt out).
Otherwise you can disable the STK altogether with ADB but that will also block you out of other SIM card interactive functions, which might not be a big deal however.
Edit: "We plan to add the ability to restrict the capabilities of SIM Toolkit as an attack surface reduction measure. (2022)"[2] and open issue[3].
Residential network access is oversold as everything else.
The only difference with storage is there’s a theoretical maximum on how much a single person can use.
But you could just as well limit backup upload speed for similar effect. Having something about fair use in ToS is really not that different.
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