The Computer Thread

Does anyone know if a defective battery would cause a laptop to shut off every time I unplug the adapter? I bought a Dell Latitude E5470 with Linux Mint pre-installed. Even though the battery health is showing at 90% and fully charged, the adapter still has to be plugged in all the time.

Either that or the battery is not connected properly. It definitely sounds like that is the issue, though.

If it won't even start without the adapter plugged in, yes. Something is faulty or disconnected.

If it starts normally but turns off when the adapter is disconnected, check your power management settings?

Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 23rd 2020 at 5:09:56 PM

Yeah, I have to have the adapter plugged in to even turn on the laptop. The power management settings seem fine, but my laptop still shuts off when unplugged.

How hard would it be to open up the laptop and replace the battery myself? Looking at Youtube, the connections seem finicky.

Batteries aren't normally difficult to remove,the cost of replacing them though can be hefty,in general batteries are probably one the few things you can replace easily on a laptop,eveything else internal on a laptop is much harder to fix when it would be easier to get a new laptop

Edited by Ultimatum on Sep 23rd 2020 at 7:42:45 PM

Well, some laptops the RAM isn't soldered in and the storage can be expanded.

Battery it might honestly just need taking out and putting back in. Worth checking that first.

Nvidia is trying to make as much of a hash of these launches as possible, having decided to focus entirely on the 3090's gaming performance and therefore deliberately disable workstation optimisations in the driver, despite that being the only practical use for having that much VRAM. Because the price jump over the 3080 for ~15% performance just looks silly, and practically nobody has an 8K TV to care about the things.

Why they don't just discontinue the Titan line (which this de facto does) and leave the top-end geforce as the middle ground I don't know. It's not like it's going to eat into the quaddro market all that much, everyone knows how businesses make purchase decisions and "is this also a good gaming card" is not one of them.

It gets particularly odd because it makes it sort of yoyo in performance depending on very specific workloads.

I still need a card that can do ML acceleration, which it's going to be far better at than what I currently have (nothing), but it doesn't make it any more obvious that it's a case of blatantly limiting performance to target... nobody in particular?

Though I've also seen that the AI performance is ~ on par with the A100 parts, which directly precede it in the professional market. Can't find any actual comparative results for that, though...

Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 24th 2020 at 8:18:09 PM

So Win XP’s source code leaked online today.

Like yikes. Potentially unfixable vulnerabilities that could be exposed and might carry over to other versions.

Or just overlooked ones that security analysts will probably be all over and send to MS.

Really depends where the bugs are found, they have rewritten a lot of things multiple times, especially anything low-level because of hardware changes.

The first ruling in the inevitable conga line has returned, with the judge coming out of it decidedly in favor of Apple, with the following key points being made as to why.

A) That micro transactions are NOT a separate product from the game that they are sold in, so unlike Epic was trying to claim no tying occurred.

B) That by not acting in good faith Epic's actions counted as a security breech even if some people would see them as heros, and that by creating a security breech they actually made apples entire case about how the closed garden prevents that for them... since they were then removed closing the breech.

C) The key difference between this case and the ones about Microsoft in the 90s is the thriving electronics industry that backdrops it, there is no harm to them if Apple tells them to leave and that they can't sell on there storefront, since they can just go to... Microsoft, Sony, Google, Nintendo, or any number of other companies instead and sell there.

TBH I am not sure how C) came out of the left feild to any one, there is nothing that says Wallmart has to stock your product and that if you want to sell it and they won't well then you have to go some where else... so why would a digital store be any different?

its A) That I am particularly interested in however....

That microtranactions are not separate products from the initial purchase... this one seems like it could have many farther reaching ramifications then just this.

Edited by Imca on Sep 29th 2020 at 2:15:02 AM

Do you have a link? I very much like this ruling, but it would be nice to get some details.

As for C, yeah... you cannot compel a retailer to sell your product, unless that retailer is acting as a monopoly by exclusively selling its own competing product, and Apple doesn't have its own version of Fortnite.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 29th 2020 at 5:17:22 AM

CNN Article

And the CNN legal analysts personal take on the situation

The biggest disagreement I have is that Apple is creating, at the hardware level, no meaningful distinction between their larger computers and their mobile devices as they're working on making silicon for both of them and allowing everything to run the same applications. But they're not locking down the computers to the same degree. What makes the phones so special that only Apple-approved software should run? I believe the original distinction they made was that it wasn't a general computing device. But that distinction stopped making any sense a while ago.

Oh, and before this happened Epic and other publishers also went the "make an industry group to protest apple" route. I think Spotify and (for some reason) Protonmail signed on.

1. You don't have to have an Apple device to play Fortnite.
2. Epic can get Fortnite back on Apple devices by agreeing to the terms of its store.

Ergo, there is no monopolistic behavior occurring.

Okay, I read the Twitter thread and am skimming the article. I have to say the judge makes some good points, but this is going to trial. We'll find out if the preliminary injunction is granted fairly soon.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 29th 2020 at 6:08:27 AM

You don't need to run Windows to access the Internet either, but that hasn't stopped them repeatedly losing lawsuits for not going out of their way to offer you a browser option. The judge's argument that there's only one mobile market is simply inconsistent with technological reality, and does of course pave the way for Apple doing the same thing in other sectors. Especially weird since Apple explicitly records the app store as separate from the hardware, so it's clearly not the same product from their financial perspective...

Though I think this may be a jurisdictional difference; large corporations are a lot more likely to lose monopoly suits in European courts for restricting the existence of competitors even indirectly.

It's not about the App Store specifically; it's about Apple's right to charge fees for selling apps on its devices. The judge held that in-app payments are inseparable from the purchase of the app itself, and so there is no difference between the two for legal purposes.

Ergo, Epic has no inherent right to decide not to pay Apple for the privilege of selling apps on its devices.

To me, this seems like the beginning, middle, and end of the argument.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 29th 2020 at 8:36:09 AM

I do wonder if the ruling that in-app purches are inseparable has other legal consequences though, since to me that very much seems like one of the things that could affect plenty of other things down the road.

Wasn't that only part of the case Epic was making? I was sure there was another point about how nobody can set up a competing app store—you can't sell things for the hardware without being locked in. Which, obviously, is where my point about it actually being a market in and of itself comes in.

As for that argument, my question is if Fortnite has accounts that are usable between various devices (and such applications in general). If that is the case, then no, the judge is wrong on a common sense level; payments within the application are clearly separable from payments for the application.

Which is something that Apple already lets some companies get away with, they'll open a web page you can buy a subscription from or whatever there and it won't go through Apple. How the hell that inconsistency didn't factor into it mystifies me.

Well yeah, just look at the knock on effect on non-device locked accounts or anything transferable. Causes really bizarre interactions where accounts aren't device or device user locked, but supposedly the payment is identical to payment for an application... which isn't transferable?

Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 29th 2020 at 1:42:32 PM

It's not about the App Store specifically. Microtransactions and in-game content are part of the game. This seems so obvious as to be inarguable. If you spend $10 buying Fortnite (on any platform) and $500 in the shop, you have spent $510 on Fortnite. Those combined purchases are what you pay to play the game. They are not separable.

Let's say you have an Android device and an iOS device and you install Fortnite on both. You spend $100 on the iOS app buying stuff and $200 on the Android app buying stuff. They all go on your account. Apple and Google take 30% of those respective payments. If you buy stuff on PC, then presumably Epic gets the whole payment.

There's no inconsistency here, no fancy legal trickery. Apple says that if you sell stuff on its platform, you pay it a fee. In-game purchases are stuff sold on its platform. Apple has the right to do that because you're using its hardware.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 29th 2020 at 9:55:06 AM

This is a business model that goes all the way back to razors, and the blades you need to buy to use them.

I'm not sure I agree with that per se. At least, the two situations are not perfectly analogous.

When I compare them, I think of the razor handle as the video game, and the blades as the purchases made to "enhance your experience" of that video game. The analogy to Apple or Google in this case would be the store that sells these products, and I don't think anyone argues with a grocery story's right to control what's sold in it.

Epic's position would seem to be that it should be allowed to put its own display of razor blades in the store and collect all the profit from selling them, without giving the store a cut.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 30th 2020 at 10:45:16 AM

If epic wanted to make the same point without being a jackass/breaching there contract what they should have done is just raise the price of vbucks by 30% on checkout from the apple store.

And explain that that is the cut apple takes from the purchase, so they raised there price to compensate.

Consumer gets the memo and the action is probably way more defensible then the one they took.

Still, 30% is the industry standard cut, so I am not sure I would agree its too high given the amount of work that goes into maintaining a storefront, but like.... it would have been a better way to let customers know where there money goes.

Then Apple would get 30% of that raised price.

Point, but I don't feel like doing math right now.

Just raise the price to the level that epic gets its 10 dollars for 10 dollars of vbucks, even though the math is going to actualy work out to 14.30 or some uneven number.

Edit: I did the math, it seems to be 14.29, soooo...... close enough.

Edited by Imca on Sep 30th 2020 at 6:39:42 AM

Ars Technica: Custom-made UEFI bootkit found lurking in the wild

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have identified the second-ever UEFI malware: a bootkit found on the laptops of two Asian diplomats. This sophisticated program contains code to restore itself if critical parts are deleted and rapidly downloads fresh malware as soon as an infected device boots up. It appears to have been custom-made for espionage.