Not necessarily. I’m over 40 now and had a total of 3 cigarettes in my life, all of them in my twenties, parties, hanging out with people smoking etc.
Every time it was a terrible experience and I was amazed why people do this to themselves…
I don't think OP advice is wrong as a general advice though. I've also smoked very sporadically and never got really hooked (as opposed to my whole family), but plenty of regular smokers started with that first one. It's better to not take any chances.
Perhaps the clue is in the past tense "supported". Nowadays browsers support many formats, but in the "olden days" gif was the only way to get animations in browsers without plugins like Macromedia Flash...
I work in a place where we have about 100 phones in a server room that we use for automated testing of mobile apps.
A few phones get chucked out every year due to bloated batteries. We’ve even had one or two explosions.
We have them well cooled now and in fireproof containers.
We try to do some power management like automatically discharging them every once in a while etc…
A lot of phones nowadays are glued shut, you'll budget for a trained repair tech to do that. They also use the battery as a giant capacitor to absorb spike draws that wall chargers cannot provide, so the modified device will need that capacity as well. Finally, there will be some radio certification ambiguity as to whether it's legal for a legal company to operate.
That said... there are Chinese rackable phone KVM thing, available on Chinese e-commerce sites, intended for social media fraud farms(faking likes, aiding account thefts, sending scam DMs, calls, SMS, etc). Taking them apart should be already common in those scenes. Reportedly those are operating at some scales globally in various third world scam malls - shopping malls by architecture, but operated by gangs and inhabited by scam shops. So it's readily possible, if necessary.
any way to find those rackable phone kvm things? My quick search came up empty. I might get someone interested in that. However, we're a very big European corporation, so "let's use social media fraud farms" and "hire talent from scam malls to build them" might not fly in a meeting :P
Took me few minutes, but looks like one query that works for these on Alibaba/AliExpress/taobao is "click farming phone". "手机 主板 服務器"(phone mainboard server) might also work in some places.
I see bunch of multi GPU crypto mining style chassis as well as just USB mass charger styled ones. This is something I just came across randomly so I have no experiences or connections for these, but hope this helps. It's kind of cool looking if it weren't for scams.
edit: note, it's not clear if they come with the phone PCBs or phones are customer supplied. The "boards" mentioned in some of listing seem to imply that it refers to adapter boards for the phones, through subtle wording
This reminded me about the recent Google blog post where they made a server farm out of a bunch of old phones:
"Prior to deployment, smartphones must be processed to remove all but the motherboard, which contains the core compute functionality. Note that the motherboard is responsible for the largest fraction of embodied carbon (approximately 50% based on internal carbon footprinting assessments), so this effort targets the most impactful components."
And they accomplished the author's first goal to run real GNU/Linux on the phones.
How did they manage to run the phones without the battery? Apparently you need to desolder the BMS from the battery, and connect a power supply to it. And I guess simulate charging via USB and discharging so it doesn't turn off because it thinks it has drawn more than its battery capacity?
It’s Google turning Google Pixel phones into servers, they were able to call in the hardware design team to work out what was essential and how to strip the devices down, and then the firmware team to be able to boot a standard Linux kernel on them. This is a very different situation to most people’s experience of trying to do out of the ordinary things with a phone.
Was it so rare? I had A1200 and I think they were quite popular here in Europe. Don’t have any stats, though.
My parents bought it used for me and the seller also threw in Monkey Island 2 on 11 floppies and that started my great love for point and click adventure games :)
Later I’ve even added a hdd and cd-rom drive to it.
There are some per-model stats from Germany issued at the end of 1993 (so a few months before Commodore went tits up)[1], and they have ~1 million A500s, and ~100 thousand A1200s (plus circa 10k A4000s). So there's a fair few out there, but in the greater scheme of things, they're massively outnumbered by the original models (and, seemingly even the A600 outsold the A1200, at least at that point).
The A1200 was only released about a year and a half before the end of Commodore, and I doubt that there was a massive sales boost in the last few months, or the Escom phase of zombie-Amiga, so AGA is a smallish minority of Amiga in general.
Where have you seen Amiga in "all places" of ex-USSR? Amiga is quite unknown computer here. Hard to find anyone aware of Amiga at all. OS/2 and Classic Mac awareness is not that rare.
Many people knowing the difference between A600 and A1200, and being from ex-USSR, sounds like wonder
Is a Chinese robot vacuuming and mopping my floor every day? Yes it is. Could I do it better manually? Absolutely.
I still prefer the robot to do an ok job than to do it myself.
