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Posted on 19-05-21, 05:34 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
Dinosaur

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Posted by Nicholas Steel
Posted by Kawa
Funny. From reading the No$ docs on the PSX and looking at footage I'd say it was better at 2D than 3D.
Is that taking in to account that PS1 games were heavily optimized for CRT colour bleeding to enhance the visuals?

Also it was really dumb of Sega to entice developers to *not* make 2D games on the Sega Saturn. "3D is the future, it'd look silly to still be making 2d games!" is what they presumably thought.

That was actually Stolar's Sega of America despising over 2D games because he believed he knew better than the average American gamer, and one of the many, many reasons the Saturn flopped hard outside Japan. The guy really hated the RPG genre, in particular (where the Saturn had quite some decent titles that never saw a chance in North America just because Stolar)

...and it was him that came with the famous "Saturn is not our future" remark that eventually led to his firing shortly after (or before?) the launch of the Dreamcast.

Mind you, prior to landing at Sega, Bernie Stolar was spewing the same shit on Sony, as he was the first VP of the newly-founded SCEA, and his focus was "3D 3D 3D!!!! 2D is oooooooooold!". Imagine if this guy were let to put the red light at Final Fantasy in the West...

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Posted on 19-05-21, 11:50 in Blackouts
Dinosaur

Post: #342 of 1282
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It gets even worse than that, dude: currently, getting ANY bank to issue you a new debit card (for whatever the reason be: lost/stolen/damaged/new account) ranges from very difficult to impossible, as among the imported things in eternal shortages are smartcards. As usual, some shitbags that work at certain branches have turned the scarcity into a business: debit cards are free, but get expected to pay hard currency in some cases the next time you lose your debit card or if yours stops working for whatever reason. Yes, that's very illegal. No, the authorities do not care.

Even if we go back to magstripes (which is yet another bag of hurt: no ATM reads magstripes since The Big Switchover, and the very last magstripe-only cards issue over here were barely magnetized, which often involved a lot of cursing with endless card reader errors), said cards still have to be imported.

Fun fact (and by "fun" I mean "totally NOT!"): the commies are finally loosening their tight currency exchange controls - now they allow banks (both private and state-owned) to buy and sell greenbacks, at "market" prices. It's still a PITA full of hurdles and gotchas, it's not for everybody, it's not a real floating exchange rate system, and with the impending death of our banking system as we know it, it's unlikely we will be buying food or phones on Amazon with our (now dead) credit cards anytime soon.

Country-specific payment processors are nothing new: China has a couple of their own because they're China. Japan has JCB. The "E" in "EMV" is for Europay. If we go to Latam, Chile has RedCompra (with is ridiculously goofy TV adverts which make me think that Chileans do hate debit cards). But all those services didn't started uo as fly-by-night popups that were up and working in a couple weeks with a few unpaid interns - they're DECADES-long operations with HEAVY investments onto equipment, software, and people. No way in hell a bunch of communists that only own a bunch of banks because they seized them is going to come up with the next Maestro, much less to get their own AID running on (non-existing) chipcards for the next year! This is going to be like the Sovereign Bolivar reconversion (where they gave unrealistic tight deadlines that had to be extended TWICE, and it only somehow worked because of the previous Strong Bolivar drill a decade ago... and even then it was a PAIN IN THE TESTICLES for anything coded since then - yes, I had to endure that one, and I still see some fallout to this date)

If this (and the current ongoing gas/fuel shortages, but that's another whole can of worms) doesn't get the people out to the streets to finally sack Maduro for good (because noone else cares, since "diplomacy" is pure bull fucking shit), well... nothing will do. Not that we're going to need banks for the next year anyway... in the country where food sellers at the streets ("bachaqueros") not only no longer take anything but hard currency, they even REJECT anything under $10 banknotes! ONLY IN VENEZUELA™, people: the only country where not every greenback is welcome!

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Posted on 19-05-21, 18:27 in Blackouts
Dinosaur

Post: #343 of 1282
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Posted by sureanem
Posted by tomman
Even if we go back to magstripes (which is yet another bag of hurt: no ATM reads magstripes since The Big Switchover, and the very last magstripe-only cards issue over here were barely magnetized, which often involved a lot of cursing with endless card reader errors), said cards still have to be imported.

Wait, what? Just how scarce on resources are you?
Magstripe cards do not exactly have strict tolerances. You could probably achieve something barely passing with VHS tape and cardboard, or just re-use old cards - I assume the banks at least have their embossing machines left.

Completely unironically, why can't they just use phones? It works even in Africa.

<DiabloInmortal>DO YOU EVEN HAVE PHONES?!</DiabloInmortal>
Not if a SIM card costs way more than a kilo of beef (just asked today: a SIM card costs VES 35000, a kilo of meat, ~25000. Minimum wage starts at 40000, and ATMs only give VES 3000 daily, when they work). Also, Can You Hear Me Now?™ is our standard of mobile service. Mobile payments ARE a thing, when they work they do beautifully (be it over mobile pay apps for smartdevices, or if you're lucky, your bank will allow you to pay via SMS. At least on this one, we're miles ahead of USA... but so are nearly every other country in the world where banks and OEMs don't rule the show, but the public interest). But that's not on the banks but on our fragile mobile networks, victims of neglect and frequent vandalism.

Posted by sureanem

Not that we're going to need banks for the next year anyway... in the country where food sellers at the streets ("bachaqueros") not only no longer take anything but hard currency, they even REJECT anything under $10 banknotes! ONLY IN VENEZUELA™, people: the only country where not every greenback is welcome!

Huh, what's the story on this?

It's called "total and complete anarchy", the terminal phase of your average communist regime.
Read it up online and weep.

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Posted on 19-05-22, 15:00 in I still HATE smartdevices
Dinosaur

Post: #344 of 1282
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This ZTE shit came with Fuckbook preinstalled (an app and a "services" thing).

I'm NOT allowing this turd to join MY WLAN (or any network) without addressing it first. If it turns out impossible to permanently erase (because noone cares about budget Chinaware devices unless they're flagships), I'll ensure this phone NEVER works as a anything but an ol-fashioned dumbphone (that is, calls and texts ONLY).

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Posted on 19-05-24, 23:59 in I have yet to have never seen it all. (revision 1)
Dinosaur

Post: #345 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

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Posted by CaptainJistuce
https://youtu.be/FvvZaBf9QQI
And in America, we have a trailer for the Sonic movie.

FUCK YOU IT'S CANCELLED DELAYED:
https://twitter.com/fowltown/status/1131937685700980736

Why bother, Sega?! Cancel the movie, write off a few millions in liabilities, and continue business as usual.
(In other news, Sega just ruined next Valentine's day)
No amount of CGI edits will fix this disaster. If only you had listened to your fans...

Posted by A Slashdot
Those people are the target audience.

Regular movie goers have 0 interest in sonic the hedgehog.

You take the same CGI model from the video games, and you make the movie plot "little johnny finds his grampas enchanged Sega MegaDrive (Genesis in North AMerica!) and he plugs it in and ZAMMO he gets sucked into the Sonic world!"

That's how you do your fish-out-of-water video game movie.

Instead we get another soulless attempt to build a "cinematic universe"

Now THAT'S a proper plot for a videogame-based movie. Hire this guy NAO!

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Posted on 19-05-25, 00:14 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
Dinosaur

Post: #346 of 1282
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Ah well, will wait for the lawsuits to happen then. At least that will ensure the popcorn will not go to waste.

In the meanwhile I heard Nintendo just got another License To Print Mon€y™ with its Detective Pikachu movie, as it's doing reasonably well in theaters right now.

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Posted on 19-05-25, 12:42 in I still HATE smartdevices
Dinosaur

Post: #347 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

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All of our networks are mostly Huawei and ZTE since... well, forever. Nothing new under the sun, this is just mindless clickbait (also: this is not the politics thread!)

2G barely works. 3G is a joke. 4G is nowhere to be seen, despite having been deployed in select zones since 2015 by all three mobile telcos (the state-owned Movilnet was late to the 4G party, to the point that they don't even advertise it despite being active since 2017)

I could care less about EVIL CHINAZ spying on my mundane phone calls with my family, and more about being able to talk to people for more than 5 seconds without the customary "CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW!?!?? *call dropped*" shit.

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Posted on 19-05-25, 15:20 in GNOME: "Please don't theme our apps"
Dinosaur

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https://stopthemingmy.app/
(wow, a sponsored TLD - how fancy of them)

In another chapter of "UXtards disregarding the wishes of end users", GNOMEs want to pretend that their UI/UX abominations are pixel-perfect, and therefore are planning to rip out app theme support completely. To distract people while they achieve their goals, they came up with this tirade highlighting the "risks" of themes, why downstream should not have the freedom to picking their own visual identity (which can be easily overridden by the end user!), and claiming that anyone that DARES deviating from the Adwaita Way™ should be eaten by a grue, no matter if the blame resides on GTK+ (which 90% of the times, it is) due to intentional sabotage from another art school dropout too poor for affording a iDevice.

They're welcoming feedback, but we know that their echo chamber is already at full throttle, as can be seen here: https://github.com/do-not-theme/do-not-theme.github.io/issues/3 - most comments are being flagged as off-topic (mine was even flagged as "disruptive", and not in the "Silly Valley sharing economy" meaning of the word). Sounds familiar? It's because it is! Everybody and his dog has been engaging in the same bullshit since the dawn of the smartdevice age.

Looks like those guy actually don't want to develop FOSS anymore (or they conveniently forgot what was the meaning of "free software licenses"), and instead are itching to make the jump to Mac/cellphone apps, where they follow the Henry Ford School of Design: "you can have your app in any theme you want, as long as it is Adwaita with our pixel-perfect icons". Really, this is the kind of crap you would listen from anyone deep hard into that design school thought, where "hamburger menus", "mystery meat navigation" and "shareable design" are core design principles to fight for to death, and anyone that doesn't like them should be barred from using their bloatware.

Man, fuck GNOME. I'm glad that I stopped using GNOME "apps" years ago... too bad I still have to endure the UI/theme breakages on other GTK apps: just ask the Clearlooks-Phenix theme developer, which ragequitted last time the UXtards at GNOME broke themes for the millionth time (and now I have to live with horrendous status bars on Pluma, for example. Still beats Adwaita, I guess)

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Posted on 19-05-25, 22:05 in I still HATE smartdevices
Dinosaur

Post: #349 of 1282
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The more I research about my Z835 (because I think that "Maven 3" is a stupid market name, just like pretty much every non-flagship USAian phone) rooting/modding options, the more I hate the device, its OEM and original carrier, while questioning the intelligence of whoever bought it ("butbutbut it's just a phone!!!"):

- There are a few ROM builds out there: V1.0.0B13, V2.0.0B10, V2.0.0B12, V2.0.0B13, and the latest AT&T release, V2.0.0B14 (which is from late '18, as the device is now considered abandoned and unsupported). Full stock ROMs are only available for V2.0.0B12 (including the proper ZTE/QCOM boilerplate stuff for its flasher tools), and someone who uploaded a V1.0.0B13 rip from an actual phone (noone has ever tested flashing it back to a phone). My phone has the oldest of all ROMs, V1.0.0B13.

- Rooting is possible for V1.0.0B13, V2.0.0B12 and V2.0.0B13. But noone seems to have figured it out how to get full RW access to /system, hence no way to debloat (you technically can "uninstall" system apps including Fuckbook and AT&T junkware, but there is no way to get rid permanently of those). People have reported problems when rooting V1.0.0B13 devices, requiring to swap boot.img between variants.

- There IS a TWRP test build for the Z835, but the one and only brave soul that dared testing it only got a bootloop (thankfully a recoverable one). This info conflicts with guides on other places that claim that all you need to flash this TWRP build is to unlock the bootloader and use adb/fastboot. Fun.

- Improperly flashing stuff to this phone may (will?) break the "phone" features, as it will corrupt the IMEI (!!!). Fixing this is possible, but requires access to VERY EXPENSIVE service boxes as the supply of IMEI "repair" tools has been traditionally tightly controlled by the phone repair mafia (not to forget mentioning that said tools can be used for "illegal" purposes too).

There is little to no interest from anyone at XDA-developers for a 2017 carrier-exclusive budget phone which has been already phased out, so I'm pretty much on my own on this, and unlike Allshitter/Mediatek/ChinaSOCs which are unbrickable by design, instead you got the embodiment of mobile evil, Qualcomm, where bricking IS a service!

Oh, this phone uses nano-SIMs. NANO! As in "you can't just use scissors to trim the extra plastic" because even if you don't damage the delicate bond wires while trimming the metallic contacts, you also have to deal with the thinner plastic too. There are plenty of guides on Internet on how to damage your phone mod your SIM card, but I'll trust the folks that actually made those in first place, thanks.
Went to Movistar, they wanted me to buy a new SIM card despite already having service with them (in the pre-hyperinflationary era they would have just swapped it for free). SIMs cost nearly a minimum wage I don't earn, and since they aren't edible... well, that phone will remain on its box for the foreseeable future.

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Posted on 19-05-25, 23:16 in Dear modern UXtards...
Dinosaur

Post: #350 of 1282
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CLOSED WORKSFORME WONTFIX YOUREDOINGITWRONG NOLONGERWELCOMEHERE

Jeff Asswood thinks you're a dinosaur.

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Posted on 19-05-26, 03:35 in I still HATE smartdevices
Dinosaur

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Turns out these Snapdragon turds have some unbrickability abilities, known as EDL (Emergency DownLoad)

Basically: for taking advantage of EDL, you need a signed RAM downloader (Qualcomm calls this "Firehose") for your phone, which is nothing but a good ol' ELF executable, SoC-specific (for the Z835 that would be prog_emmc_firehose_8909.mbn). The trick is to actually find it, as Qualcomm don't release those to end users. Luckily they leak from time to time (and some OEMs even bundle then with their firmware updates, like Xiaomi), and the V2.0.0B12 firmware package ships with the proper prog_emmc_firehose_8909.mbn for this phone.

Even better: there is a Linux flasher that speaks the QCOM-specific "Sahara" protocol, so all you need is your Firehose blob and your firmware files (rawprogram0.xml/patch0.xml + a bunch of other shit):
https://www.96boards.org/documentation/consumer/guides/qdl.md.html
https://git.linaro.org/landing-teams/working/qualcomm/qdl.git/
Just like Mediatek, there is no need to deal with driver shennanigans (unlike Windows, where QCOM's driver installer set my W7 laptop to Test Mode without asking me because they were stupid and neglected to sign their driver file! Fortunately there is a older package out there which is properly signed, but... ugh, Qualcomm!)

ZTE's proprietary ZPST for AT&T devices can also flash those QCOM images, as it ships with the required Firehose blobs, but that requires that your phone actually BOOTS. EDL works even if the flash IC is completely borked as it is baked into the Snapdragon boot ROM.

I'm still wary of the whole "IMEI corruption" issue, which tells me that this firmware is a piece of fragile shit. Another thing that I couldn't find is that if flashing a full firmware image would re-lock the phone to AT&T SIMs (I don't have the unlock code - supposedly whoever bought this phone had it unlocked). Getting this shit relocked would mean a fate even worse than bricking it!

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Posted on 19-05-26, 05:40 in I still HATE smartdevices
Dinosaur

Post: #352 of 1282
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OK, so there is a easy way to insure yourself against losing your IMEI (and effectively bricking the "phone" part of your smartPHONE): backup the EFS (which is Qualcomm-esque for a special filesystem dating back to their CDMA dumbphone era, where a bunch of information about your phone modem lives... including the ESN/MEID/IMEI). For that you need yet another Qualcomm service app (QPST), and the proper diagnostic port drivers. This way, you get your precious phone setup bits safely backed up, and when shit hits the fan, it's just matter to restore from your backups.

Nothing has really changed since we used QPST back in 2007 for backing up NAM programming on CDMA handsets (if anything, tampering with ESNs was actually tough as that area was well secured - I'm surprised IMEIs are so vulnerable on such recent chipsets!): set phone to COM mode, plug, backup, done.

...hahahahahahahaNOPE, that's now how shit is done on the smartdevice era! Those newfangled devices hide the diagnostic port for your own safety! Unfortunately I've been unable to find the proper secret codes for enabling the diagnostic port on the Z835 (all I've found so far is the Engineering Mode code *ZTE*OPENEM#, but nothing else that actually works on this model). Booting the phone to FTM DOES expose a diagnostic port... but that's ZTE-specific, and won't work at all with QPST!

The other option is to root the phone, which allows to forcefully enable the diag port through adb, or simply dd the three relevant EFS partitions (modemst1/modemst2/fsg) to the SD card. But rooting involves flashing, and flashing involves risking to damage your EFS! Nice catch-22 we've got there: we must destroy the planet in order to save the planet!

...fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck you ZTE! And fuck you very much too, Qualcomm!

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Posted on 19-05-26, 13:32 in Board feature requests/suggestions
Dinosaur

Post: #353 of 1282
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You're on mobile? Oh, that's different™

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Posted on 19-05-26, 20:47 in I still HATE smartdevices (revision 1)
Dinosaur

Post: #354 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

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Found a partial compromise: https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatware-without-root-access/

You can tell the phone to pretend to uninstall carrier bloatware for the active user. The app will be GONE (not just merely disabled, but completely out of your reach), albeit its APKs will be still there, eating precious storage. Not great, but this does not require rooting the device, the risk is minimal, and changes are easy to undo (just do a factory reset if you screw up things badly)

At least Facebook is now safely defused... among the pile of AT&T spyware, and even a couple of moronic ZTE bits:
cn.wps.moffice_eng
com.aetherpal.attdh.zte
com.amazon.mShop.android.install
com.amazon.mShop.android.shopping
com.asurion.android.mobilerecovery.att
com.att.callprotect
com.att.mobile.android.vvm
com.att.myWireless
com.carrieriq.iqagent
com.drivemode
com.dti.att
com.emoji.keyboard.touchpal
com.example.chromecustomizations
com.facebook.appmanager
com.facebook.katana
com.facebook.system
com.google.android.apps.cloudprint
com.google.android.apps.photos
com.google.android.apps.tachyon
com.google.android.keep
com.google.android.music
com.google.android.videos
com.lookout
com.matchboxmobile.wisp
com.synchronoss.dcs.att.r2g
com.ume.browser.northamerica
com.zte.assistant
com.zte.selfie
net.aetherpal.device
com.android.chrome
com.google.android.youtube


Still, this is no substitute for real rooting. Hope that for when (WHEN, not "if"!) this turd shits the bed (forcing me to risk my balls with a reflash), the rooting/recovery situation have improved (HAHAHAHAHAHAnope, who am I lying to!?). Either that, or maybe communism will be over and I'll be able to buy that KaiOS-powered Alcatel flip phone (with real numpad!). Or a box of refurb V9xs, since I actually have no use for 4G, micro/nano SIMs, or anything beyond Solitaire and Tetris :P In the meanwhile, there is no real reason to root this ZTE turd, unless you need a mobile hotspot because AT&T would want to gouge you for that instead.

UPDATE:
> com.carrieriq.iqagent
WOW! That shit is still kickin' alive despite the shitstorm raised over it nearly a decade ago, when it was deemed as ACTUAL SPYWARE!?
Apparently AT&T now owns the IP and software:
https://techcrunch.com/2015/12/30/att-snaps-up-assets-talent-from-carrier-iq-as-phone-monitoring-startup-goes-offline/
...and they're still bundling that spyware on their phones! But no, evil ZTE, evil China, eeeeeeeeevil!

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Posted on 19-05-26, 22:18 in I still HATE smartdevices
Dinosaur

Post: #355 of 1282
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Are there any smartdevice OEM left at 'murica, aside of that fruity company that makes expensive phones assembled in China?

- Motorola: now owned by Lenovo => China
- Cisco: does not make cellphones
- RCA: only the brand survives, leased by whatever Chinese OEM they can find for cheap this week
- General Electric: does not make cellphones
- Microsoft: exited the market not long ago
- Google: does not make its own cellphones, only software
- Atari: is no longer an American corporation, last time I bothered checking. And they don't make cellphones
- IBM: Only made one cellphone (Simon, the original smartdevice, back when there was nothing but 1G!)
- Oracle: Do you even want of all corporations, specifically them making cellphones?!
- Disney: does not make cellphones, and their mobile phone provider ventures have been complete failures

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Posted on 19-05-27, 12:16 in I still HATE smartdevices
Dinosaur

Post: #356 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

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Posted by sureanem
HP and Garmin are as American as apple pie, and they both make smartphones every now and then.

According to Wikipedia, there are also some other obscure brands I've never heard of, like BLU ("the first Latin-owned mobile phone manufacturer aimed at a Latin population"), Firefly ("a cellphone aimed at parents to give to their children aged 5–12 years"), and a few more too obscure to even have a Wikipedia page.

I suppose I don't get it. How would smartphones for "a Latin population" be different from those aimed at any other? Fine if they're aimed for the local markets, but in America?


HP has ventured into the cellphone market several times. All of them have been sound failures for various reasons (don't forget how they finished Palm's job of burying WebOS). Never heard about Garmin phones, but then, "cellphones" is not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the name Garmin, a corporation widely known for its main product line: standalone GPS receivers.

BLU indeed is Miami-based, which fits with their Latin focus. But I hardly consider them as an "American" OEM as they only rebadge noname chinesium phones made from whatever cheapest Mediatek SoC they can find this week. You won't find flagships there, but they nicely cover the lower end of the spectrum with offerings like this:
- Dual SIMs
- FM radio
- Removable batteries
- Headphone jacks
- CHEAP
- Not tied to a brand name that artificially hikes the price even on low-end junk *cough*Samsung*cough*

This is why they're very popular in Latam, where the model of subsidized phone is not exactly popular. But I do get your concern there: USA is the land of "free phone with lifetime slavery contract", and most people (including Latin folks, some of which aren't the brightest lightbulbs on the socket) simply buy whatever your AT&Ts and Verizons "give away". Still, I somehow see those phones selling modestly in Latin-populated zones among budget-conscious people - after all you can also buy next-to-free SIM cards on the very same places that sell phones there...

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Posted on 19-05-27, 22:11 in GNOME: "Please don't theme our apps"
Dinosaur

Post: #357 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

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> Unicode was a mistake, and it just keeps getting worse and worse (emoji, RTL, Chinese characters breaking BMP). The Europeans already had ISO 8859-1, the Russians KOI8-R, and for the web there was HTML entities.
Classic feature creep, but I'll still take Unicode over Shit-JIS or mojibake or other borken legacy encodings any day of the week. Still, not every character ever made doesn't NEED to be in a codemap (case in point: EMOJI, a disease that should have never left Japan)

> Since everyone who uses the Internet speaks English anyway, computer localization is just a waste of time and money and unpleasant for generally everybody. It would be far easier if you knew that everything everywhere would be en-US, no surprises.
Fuck you.

No, serously, fuck anyone that says that "en-US is the only locale ever", that's so shortsighted like the Adwaita Defense League.
If your software is intended for a GLOBAL audience (like any serious non-CLI application should be), it MUST be localized. No "ifs", no "buts". If you intend that I interact with your user interface everyday, it must speak the same language as me - computers are intended to serve my needs, not the reverse! I say this as someone that has actually contributed localizations for several open source and proprietary applications in the past.
(I set CLI aside as those are intended for a more technical audience, but then there are some specific applications that really benefit from localized UIs: text editors being a good example)

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Posted on 19-05-28, 03:20 in I still HATE smartdevices (revision 5)
Dinosaur

Post: #358 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

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Soooo... I finally hooked this shit to my WiFi.

But I'm not letting it use my Google account. This poses a problem, because I actually want to be able to update the preloaded apps I left installed, and install new apps without hunting for .APKs on shady sites.

This looks promising...
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.yeriomin.yalpstore/


UPDATE: Fuck, let's install F-Droid anyway.

UPDATE 2: Yalp just hit the nail in the head: same functionality as Google Play (since it just piggybacks on its services), it let me upgrade the few Google bits I choose to leave. Now I need to install a web browser (that isn't Chrome or Firefux), my mobile banking apps (which are another clusterfuck of pure failsauce, but sadly I need them for paying for shit), and MAYBE a decent Solitaire app. Suggestions? (Mobile Deluxe's Solitaire Deluxe is right out of the question, as it contains ads and other crapware)

UPDATE 3: ...sadly Yalp is no silver bullet: for looking for new apps it goes from "meh" to "completely useless". Tried to use it to install my mobile pay apps, and only found one. I don't know if Google Play performs regional lockouts (as those apps are useless for anyone outside Venezuela since the commies ordered to geoblock the fuck out of our lameloid banks). But after reading the reviews on two of the apps I'm actually trying to install, might as well pretend that Yalp is doing me a favor by preserving the physical integrity of my handset (oh banks, the only ones that actually come up with mobile payment apps where you can actually pay to nobody due to unfixed frontend bugs!)

UPDATE 4: A workaround for broken search in Yalp is to know the package ID for the app you're trying to install. Or switch to Aurora, its replacement. But then, Aurora really wants you to create an account with them. How about no? It haz Anonymous mode, so yeah.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 19-05-28, 12:49 in I still HATE smartdevices
Dinosaur

Post: #359 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
Last view: 1 day
It's fine - as I seriously despise cellphone apps, I won't be hitting the "appstores" that much (if at all) after the initial setup.

I left the Google Play app intact, and the GSF crap. Google already knows I have a new cellphone (as they scrub these board posts), but that's all I'm letting they know. No crapps on my history (beyond search results), no email (for that I already have Thunderbird, as I'm not in Japan and emails belong to Real Computers™), no rage-inducing bullshittery (beyond the preloaded stuff), and more important of all: NO ADS.

What I've installed so far:
- Total Commander (with the FTP/SMB/SFTP plugins)
- F-Droid
- Aurora (ended ditching Yalp)
- Droid Info (system info app to figure out what DPI is my phone, for APK downloading purposes)
- VLC
- All mobile web browsers are a pile of steaming garbage (and Opera Mini is kinda pointless on a device that can actually render desktop webpages), so I ended installing Firefux. Go Team Doom.
- All of the available mobile payment apps from my banks, even if they're broken

Google bits allowed to survive:
- GSF
- Play Store (unactivated)
- Google Maps

For whatever reason, if you sideload Google Maps (either from a downloaded APK or using Aurora) the UI will end in English, no matter your device locale! (Only a few bits will get translated, like maps themselves). I also noticed it on the Blu phone I reflashed recently. If updates are uninstalled, the preloaded version works properly with regards to localization. Does noone debug this shit properly nowadays?! HAHAHAHAHnope.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 19-05-28, 14:00 in GNOME: "Please don't theme our apps" (revision 1)
Dinosaur

Post: #360 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
Last view: 1 day
You're clinically insane.

"English is the only language that matters". Got it.

Next time you're going to suggest to do away with media dubs and subs for any language that it is not English because "fuck your cultural heritage, you're an animal if you insist on speaking that arcane non-English language".

And FYI, VS/GCC do have localized error messages. In the case of VS, it's pretty easy as each error message also has a error code associated to it, so you just look for the error code. In the case of GCC it's always tricky because they're *NIX graybeards that hate error codes for whatever reason, but Google often helps in that case.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
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