I had one device who died after a couple of weeks: suddenly it refused to switch on. So I found the real source of pain from Pinephone project: the assistance. I sent a detailed report about the hardware failure and they sent me a message about how properly recharge the phone , something like : "you need the power supply, insert the plug in the 220V socket, insert the USB-c cable, etc", demonstrating that they didn't read my message at all. After some further rounds of nonsense instructions, that , anyway, I followed giving them feedback about the results, I asked for a replacement. At that point, they started to waste time, another department apparently stepped in. After my complaints, they asked me to send the device back without acknowledgment of receipt, via ordinary post service, in the USA (I'm in Europe and I received the phone from Asia), sending to an anonymous p.o. box. I told them that it was unacceptable because in that way I took all the shipment risks not having any proof that I sent the device nor that the parcel in case of problems. Luckily, I found a post service with proof of shipment, so I had at least a receipt proving I sent the device back. At the end, they refused to send me a replacement, starting to negotiate the amount of the refund, because they wasted so many time I risked to not be able to ask Paypal intervention, I asked Paypal to step in receiving a full refund.
On the initial response, in case it's the Pro that can be explained by a known hardware issue that manifests as an apparently bricked device if the battery gets drained and regardless of charger it takes several hours to bring it back to life[0].
Even so, that does not excuse the rest of the story and hopefully they can improve. A friend of mine also had some frustration with communicating with their customer service (which appeared outsourced or incompetent).
Hi, I'm am a pro. I have laboratory equipment and I did the needed checks before opening the RMA. As explained to the service the problem was elsewhere. It's exactly the opposite, IMHO, they treat me as an idiot consumer that wasn't able to recharge a phone. I think they don't realize that this kind of device often is purchased by people different from the average consumer, so yes, I had same impression of your friend. Moreover, I tried to access their on-line form to request the RMA: the only browser at time able to access and send properly the request was Opera. I tested, Safari, Firefox, Chromium: only Opera was able to do the job.
Your story sounds bad, but I would bear in mind, that they are not professionals for handling consumer cases.
They are mainly linux smartphone hackers. If I would buy a device, I would consider it a donation if something goes wrong and not expect something to be able to work with. But that part should probably be made clearer. I also cannot say they are fully to blame, I found their website clear enough that there is no real quality control or support. But if I would have believed certain internet enthusiasts, I would be sad because of broken promises regarding stability. At least basic working functionality by now would have been nice.
Still, things are maybe getting there.
"It's incredible... how much the PinePhone experience improved in the meantime"
Moreover, if you are producing a device for open source developers, people working for free , giving their free time to contribute to create a valid product, you can't spit on them when they have problem with the hardware they are contributing to develop, IMHO. At the end, I paid the phone, the shipment, custom duties, VAT, the shipment costs back in USA (why USA ???), a lot of my time, for nothing. So I felt was better to stop, spending my time elsewhere.
It is not about what you do, it is how you do it, and in particular what expectations you set.
If you sell it like a regular product, without saying clearly up front that it is not supported, then people will legitimately not like you.
IF you are just selling a kit without support, SAY SO. Then the people you want will come buy it, and if you did well on the parts that you claim to do well, you'd have happy customers (modulo the few Kens & Karens who expect everything for nothing).
I'm an hacker and I gave up with that platform after that experience because if you can't guarantee reasonable assistance quality , a basic replacement service if the device is defective and a procedure for RMAs in reasonable times, I feel is better to employ my time elsewhere. Two months asking a replacement and obtaining nothing, two months : we aren't talking about a service from hacker to hackers as it should be.
> I would consider it a donation
I'm also donating my time, for that reason I don't feel their behavior is justifiable.
Hi, I'm the author of this one ( I lost the other account password). I'm happy I found someone else doing this stuff to be able to talk about it. I discarded time related algorithms because I thought they could introduce sneaky bugs related to event dependencies. So, having had to work in the gamble industry, I opted for a simpler algorithm: roulette. I have a loop increasing a register from 0 to 15, when a particle is detected the value present in that registry is returned and it's used as an half of a 8 bits ( 1 byte ) random number and, after every extraction, the counter is restarted from zero. If anyone think the algorithm is unreliable, any suggestion to improve it's welcome.
It's pretty similar to mine, you could improve yours by relying on an hardware timer/counter that can go faster and thus provide more entropy.
Also you should not reset the counter at every event, this would lead to a poisson distribution if event ever became of comparable time scale to the timer
No he's a friend of mine, I also have my nuclear RNG based on different vintage counter. I think his project is older. I like your project too! This is him:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30252171
I don't think so, this command could be significantly slow:
cp myfile.iso /dev/sdb
compared with this one:
dd if=myfile.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=32M
because implementation of cp have a fixed buffer, so if the amount of data is big and the disks fast, using cp you are calling more read() and write() syscalls than necessary, slowing down the copy process.
I totally agree with Rossmann: the more important thing is that you can lease the equipment from Apple but there is no obligation. The equipment is intended to do a job compliant with Apple standard but, if you don't care to replace the water proof sealant, etc, you can use tools you already have or more cheap from your regular sources ( hardware stores, ebay, etc). The right to repair is a serious matter, without activist like Rossmann, who spent his time to speak to the US Congress, we wouldn't even have the spare parts from Apple: this is the real vantage, not the possibility to lease the tools.
I haven't read the article yet, but, judging the title, IMHO seems just another marketing balloon: under the skin only hot air. The "device absorbs CO2 emissions while it charges" : I don't think that something like that can solve the problem of global warming or even reduce the side effects in a way we can measure, justifying the hype about that characteristic.
EDIT: I've read the article: "is the size of a two-pence coin", so how many fraction of ug of Co2 can absorb of the "Around 35 billion metric tons of CO2 are released into the atmosphere per year" ? But the last part is fantastic: "The results from Temprano's contribution help narrow down the precise mechanism at play inside the supercapacitor when CO2 is absorbed and released", so when the battery discharge release the Co2 again , right? So what is the point of the whole article?
In that case you are heating and cooling a liquid in which the CO2 dissolves and then goes out of solution. In one phase you are removing CO2 from the waste gas stream, in the other one you are producing a stream of pure CO2.
That device works basically the same but with electricity rather than heat.
Ok, but, if I've understood correctly , at the end of article they suggest that the CO2 captured while the battery was in recharging state is released when the same battery is in use. In other words the battery doesn't capture permanently the CO2 as the gas stream method you just mentioned: the battery isn't like a black hole for CO2, it simply "breath" releasing the CO2 when it's discharging. So in what way that should be a solution for the global warming ? If they want capture the CO2 in discharging phase, they need to store a big number of coin size batteries in an industrial facility that needs batteries for some reason, plus you are using electricity that likely was produced burning fossil combustibles to remove CO2 from air. So no laptop or cellphone removing CO2 from our atmosphere.
The best answer right now for CO2 disposal is to compress it to 1500 psi and inject into a saline aquifer. The gas has to be really pure to do that and that kind of device could do that purification.
I read then link to the other article explaining the new technologies developed by Helion that should permit commercially viable fusion reactors, there are no words about Q plasma or Q total:
so the affirmation that "Nuclear Fusion Is Close Enough to Start Dreaming" could be other speculation of the press not supported by facts. Obviously I hope to be wrong.
I have some marbles and a crucifix ( that kind you hang on a wall) made of this material. I inherited them from my grandmother , the marbles was intended to be toys. The crucifix also is visible in the dark and it's the object with major emissions, but nothing dramatic. The marbles emit mostly alpha rays. Both can excite notably my Geiger counter, but, storing them in a metallic box, (i.e. that sheet metal box for biscuits ), no emission leaks. I'm using the marble in my DIY random number generator, based on a Geiger tube and an Arduino board.
So the crucifix is visible in the dark? This article makes it sound like a black light needed to observe the phenomenon, which strikes me as odd because I wouldn't have thought black lights were commonly available at the
time when these first gained popularity.
How old is it? Tritium has a half life of only 12.3 years, so if it's more than 60 years or so old, there's basically none left (around 3%), certainly not enough to make it glow.
Radium more likely. Tritium is produced in small quantities in nuclear reactors and is the fuel for fusion bombs. I doubt that was used to make a crucifix.
I was thinking to make it public, but it's based on an Arduino shield I purchased the day after the Fukushima accident, it is no more in commerce. I should make it more generic changing hardware. I think you can find online similar projects.
My device, as other implementation, use the particle passing through the Geiger tube as a "virtual coin" , given a sampling frequency, if one or more particles are detected the firmware returns 1, if no particle is detected, zero. In other words, the random numbers are built a bit at time. My configuration with the background radiation returns too many zeros, so I needed something more ... lively. Anyway, what is the point to use the natural radiation if you have the serious stuff ? :-) When I say that the device is a nuclear RNG, peoples smile but when I turn it on and they listen the characteristic sound of a Geiger counter, the average reaction is "WHAAAAAATTTT ????". It's funny.
John Von Neumann’s method of creating a uniform distribution of random numbers from a skewed source (too many zeros) was:
“(From a stream of) bits, (take) two at a time (first and second, then third and fourth, and so on). If the two bits matched, no output was generated. If the bits differed, the value of the first bit was output … (this) can be shown to produce a uniform output even if the distribution of input bits is not uniform so long as each bit has the same probability of being one and there is no correlation between successive bits.” (Edited from Wikipedia)
Thank you for your valuable suggestion. Because the interest shown here, I decided to build an improved version ( I think during the Christmas vacations).
I have serious concerns about purchasing one and being put on "a list".
But this city is lackadaisical at best when it comes to industry. And we've had incidents where radioactive materials have been found in construction near homes.
Having a counter, I think it's easy to found some source around, for example in surplus stores, etc. For example, old naval compass and clock are treated with tritium. You could find also rocks near the rivers with some interesting material.
My goal is to ensure I _don't_ have an interesting material near my dwelling. Considering I know of at least one case where some was discovered near a home and was probably there for 40 years.
You don't have to look very hard to find entropy, but finding it in a cool and fun way is rare. This is way higher on both the functionality and fun scales than a wall of lava lamps.
That argument relies on independent samples, but if someone's beaming radiation at the device to control its output, the samples will not be independent.
Anyway, why don't they exploit the more powerful potential of that technology ? I'm talking about backups. In the first motion picture, something went wrong with the transporter and a crew member was re-assembled like a Picasso's painting, that was stupid. They could save backups of crew members they are about to transport, I was thinking, and restore them if something goes wrong. They also could, in emergency situation, restore died staff members. Oh, by the way, if I have a red uniform, I refused to be transported on the first unexplored planet without a backup.
We're playing at sci-fi here, so don't take my response too seriously, but allow me to engage.
We know that e=mc^2, and so it's going to take a hell of a lot of energy to make enough mass for another copy of you. The only 'efficient' way to use a transporter therefore is to turn your 'original' body into energy, and use that energy to make the copy at the other end.
I don't think it's a problem in Start Trek universe: they use REPLICATORS to generate meals for the crew (to cook ?). So what's the problem there ? If Einstein is dead in the kitchen, he is dead everywhere. As you tell us, it's fiction, so the whole discussion can't be taken seriously, IMHO ;-)
Every time you are restored a part of your memory is lost ( the events happened between the last backup and the restoration ), this could be the risk. The backup isn't you. Plus, nobody want to die, backup or not backup.
