Useful invention, that
if the external magmount antenna ever catches on, a whole lot of old iPhone4s could start a new life as... phones.
2711 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2009
> a digital camera doesn't have a shutter
A phone camera doesn't have a shutter. All serious digital cameras do have a shutter. Some noisier than others, but... see next remark.
> (though there were film cameras essentially silent in operation without all this fuss)
the main cause of noise in cameras is not the shutter it's the mirror, which exists only in SLR cameras.
> i confronted her and told her to stop or her camera was going for a swim (I should have called the cops).
Better not to, as you were the only one doing anything objectionable (threats like that? Psshhh!).
Taking pics in a public place (as I expect the beach was) is perfectly OK. Now you can politely ask them to stop as it is making you uncomfortable, and they will likely stop. Being rude in a case like this makes you the asshole. Being _threatening_ in a case like this most likely make _you_ the outlaw (depending on your local legislation).
> The average person using a consumer device to take photographs needs to use their hand(s) to point it at the subject. If they want clear and reasonably sharp images free from extraneous clutter then they have to use both hands and or hold the thing in a position that makes it obvious what you're doing.
Of course not. I take most of my "street" pics with my camera around the neck, belly height. It has a leaf shutter, almost completely silent, which helps.
That's when I'm not using my huge and noisy Mamyia RB67 Pro SD... which, appart from being a superbly reliable setup, attracts a lot of attention; some good, some bad.
Generally speaking I don't do "street" with my 35mm SLRs or my "35mm" dSLR as I find it too "middle ground". In the street I find I take better pics when I'm either completely unnoticeable or extremely obvious.
I often have to review mind-numbingly large image collections*, so I'm always looking for a better image viewer. So far, one of my all-times favourites is called "pornview". I would install and recommand it more if it was differently named... compa4red to that, "jerky" is very SFW.
*microscopy images if you must know
US lawyers have already all but stopped innovation in the US with the patent nonsense, turned the entertainement industry into a shark pool of recycling old (and mostly, bad) stuff, and now seem to be set on stopping what little research escaped the budget cuts.
Once they are done with that, what will they put their mitts on? Food? Surely there is something to do there, all these people processing food items that they only bought a licence to, surely that's illegal. On to of that they use it to produce toxic bacteria-laden waste, so that's the Green AND the terr'ist angle covered. This one should create enough work to get them busy for a while before they can get to the REAL threat: breathing.
> how would this go on phablets?
Not too smoothly I expect. There's a few years of developpment ahead before it can take advantage of this kind of hardware. Even on generic machines for which it has been developped the support for "fancy" hardware is embryonic at best.
I suppose you could run it on a phablet in a virtual machine with less fiddling, although the benefits in terms of speed and weight are not obvious...
>It's not White Knightery. I just thought it was all a bit piss poor and ladz magz. And I'm not at work. The comments are however even more cringey than the article. I'm almost embaressed.
When you're at work, you must be in a very machistic environment to blow off steam like that during your free time. Or perhaps you liked the previous hundreds of installments in which the BOFH and PFY explored in excruciating details how to mangle, mutilate and utterly destroy, mentally and physically, all the men who get in their ways. I never thought of these as misandrist; did you?
Yes, I'm routinely forced to dumb down my passwords to accomodate for the dimwitsenforcing this kind of rules. Worst thing is, there is no chance in hell of me remembering the resulting mess of mixed-case number-and-symbols-containing nightmare, so I have to write it down somewhere, making it all the more, erm "secure". Not that it matters anyway, as any decent rig would crack it in roughly 12 seconds, due to these rules not being fit for secure password generation.
Not that anyone would want access to my Yahoo accounts of course: I give them away to spam-spaffing outfits exclusively. Interestingly, that includes the US' Customs and Border Protection (every once in a while you bump into a zealot deskjockey who insist the "email" field in these forms must be filled; invariably this is followed by a few hundred spam messages being sent to the addy over the next week. Not too bad, as spammers go, but you'd think the US government wouldn't sell their databases to penis enlargement pills outfits. And you'd be dead wrong).
And even within your own sucky analogy you manage to be wrong. In civilized countries ("pinko commie tepid ball-less countries" tou you yanks) there are a number of cases in which you just cannot "stop [homeless junkies] using your property".
There are also cases in which unused ("hoarded") dwellings are requisitionned "for the greater good". So there.
As for the validity of your analogy, well, suffice to say it's a bit like if I bought a car, you see, and then the petrol station decided to rent a new house, and then someone stole his movie and the Chinese took it.
> to provide the necassary rules for our language in order keep it pure, eloquant and capable of handling the arts and sciences. [...] The others will be fulfilled externally to the Acadamy, of which these works, in their own manner, will become authorative.
Not quite. The real translation would be as follows: "to provide clear rules for our language, and to make it pure, expressive and capable [...] The other points of the programme will be fulfilled outside of the academy by works which in themselves will be authoritative".
The spirit being to establish gather language uses and habits across the french-speaking world to provide a "catalogue" of recommended use for people who wish to be understood by everyone (this part is made abundantly clear in the foreword and the first articles of the statutes). It's just a formalization of the worldly uses; it expressely doesn't concern itself with slang and regionalities (again, clearly stated in the statutes), but doesn't condemn them either. The last part you cite is actually pretty clear (although your mistranslation means the opposite!)
To be fair, a great deal of English (or its barbaric derivative from across the pond) speakers seem to think that words like "chef", "entree", "deja-vu" etc are English words; "dealer", "shit" and "parking" (used for parking lot) are bona fide French words now, too. Language does evolve, and borrowing foreign words is part of the process. Lunchtime now, you'll excuse me, my pork chop is waiting for me. Or is it a pig chop? Ha-ha!
> I think I'm righ
AFAICT you still need spaces to separate words don't you? The real test is, can you either strip all white spaces or randomly add some, without modifying the way the program runs? It is far from impossible to define a language in which whitespaces are insignificant; there may be one or several out there, too. I just haven't met one yet. AFAIK even the likes of BrainFuck and SegFaultProg will usually dislike the "random insertion" test.
Technically white spaces are significant in any and all programming language I've met. Their level of significance, on the other hand, does vary. Depending on where they are they can be quite the bummer in Python for example, and not so much in Lisp.This has the interesting side-effects of making almost any python script instantly human-readable on anything able to display plain text, while your average C program requires a specialised piece of software for humans to make sense out of it (a bit like that last sentence, then...).
It's also great for spacebar vendors.
> Most of the pirate copies of movies were taken with small handheld video cameras. They aren't mounting those on a tripod.
Yes, in most cases they are. When the cam is not on a tripod it is stuck between seats so that it won't move. Footage from a head-mounted cam is guaranteed to be absolutely unwatchable, and I'm not even talking vibrations or small movements here. I encorage you to test for yourself: if you pay attention, you'll notice that at times you actually look away from the screen.
http://www.brython.info/index.html?lang=en
Joke appart, I find the rumours of Python's death a bit exagerated, especially as people are moving away from Java and there are things that you jus can't do in a compiled language (and for which JS is grossly inadequate; I'm thinking "anything serious" for example ;-) )
OpenBSD are giving fish away to BEEELLIONS of people, for free.
As for your snarky remarks about old kit, in the real world there are applications that just can't run on a tablet; support for older kit is not only welcome but necessary (very extensive backward compat is part of the reasons why projects like this exist in the first place).
> they move it arbitrarily backwards or forwards every now and again depending how brown the trousers are.
Yes, I get that; maybe _my_ wording was less than clear. As a gauge, you can set it very close to Armaggeddon, and move it arbitrarily backward and forward one minute at a time, as they do, thus ensuring that it's always within 10 minutes of Apocalypse Day.
Or you could use the whole space, set it a 1, say, right after the G8 when all the powers that be are happy with each other, and at 11:30 when Snowden does his thing. It's not like the "clock" is important for anything anyway, it could be discontinued overnight and it wouldn't have the slightest hint of a consequence on anything. It used to be a fear-mongering device to keep the good people of the US and A in fear of the doombringer commies, but now? Perhaps useful in an attempt to steer the public opinion on the NSA thing; "see, we are right to spy on you, it's to prevent the impending apocalypse". In my opinion it's too old and stale to really work.
Of course it really only depends on when the "virtual clock" started, and how fast you move it, doesn't it? That's the beauty of such symbols: they are both ominous and completely devoid of any real meaning. You couls set it at 3 picoseconds before midnight and move it one femtosecond ahead every year, and you would have millenia to live, or you could set it at 1-32 AM and move it 1 hr forward every year and only haveless than 23 years. But it would look less dramatic, at least initially.
Whining against a court-mandated remedy is not usually the best way to win the legal system's favours. Apple tried that in the UK with their infamous non-apology, and got slapped. They are trying again in the US, they just got slapped. They will appeal, and they will get slapped again. All it does is make them look like they don't give a fuck about court orders, which is usually not a good idea when your business model relies on heavy litigation tactics.
> If Metro got in the way, you were doing it wrong. Metro is no more annoying that a start menu.
Yes, yes it is. Unlabeled or badly-labeled "active zones" are a pain to use with a mouse (especially when the luser's dumb setting mean that you need to move the mouse for 2.5 miles to reach across the screen).
I also don't care terribly much about their friend's updates on FaceBook or Tweeter, so copping a facefull of that along the disinfection process is definitely what I'd call "getting in the way".
> Aw - I'll bet you think Exchange only does email, don't you? That's so cute...!
Have you ever tried another collaboration platform? They are pretty much all better* than Exchange. With some of them using Exchange's native protocols, for those dumb clients that can only talk to Exchange.
* less of a ressource hog, easier to maintain, easier to taylor to your needs and/or more stable.
> I think most people would consider that a great idea if it wasn't MS pushing it.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong. I spent a couple hours removing a nasty thing (not recognised by our antimalware) from a several computers 2 weeks ago; 2 XP, 1 Win7, and 1 Win8 (same nasty, spread by a single user's USB drive). On the XP and Win7 machines it was a fairly annoying but straightforward job (stop the nasty process, delete its install directory, remove all related keys from the registry, reboot, check that it was gone). On the Win8 machine it was very frustrating, with the Metro UI constantly getting in the way. No more difficult, but considerably more upsetting. I don't care who pushed for it, or what the reason were, or if it seemed like a good idea at the time. All I care is that it gets in the way. It is a touchscreen UI designed for small displays. On a non-touch 3840×2160 24" monitor it's very annoying and makes you want to throw the thing out the window.
> No one wants to be accused of being a cheat,thief and a liar, and then shown and proved to be exactly that. Samsung realise the game is up...
Of course you DO realize that Samsung previously obtained an injunction banning the patent-infringing iPhone 4, only it was overthrown by the White House because it was "not in the public interest". You win some, you lose some. But Apple can't really lose in the US, of course, as has been shown by the aforementionned get-out-of-jail-free card.
> operating an unofficial price-fixing arrangement as used to operate in all Western countries (and still operates in places like France)
Bollocks. No place has a "prefered nation" clause like the one that got Apple in hot water.
> Amazon demands massive discounts on the books it sells. That means the authors see their income collapse by the same percentage
The relationship between sale price and author remuneration depends entirely on the editor, and then on your contract with the editor.
> (we tend to be paid based on net receipts)
Who's your editor? Most contracts I've seen are of the "variable upfront payment + small amount per copy sold"; I don't think I've ever seen one that actually mentionned the editor's net income. But obviously I haven't seen them all.
> So personally I'd infinitely prefer to see Apple and others being allowed to set their prices at an economically sustainable level.
It's not what Apple and others were caught for. Don't be fooled, the agency model they were going for would have allowed Apple to pressure the editors as much if not more than what Amazon is doing. Amazon is driving the price down (partially) by subsidizing the books (selling at a loss), which means that the publisher is getting more money than what the end customer pays. Apple would have driven the prices down by pushing for a lower price from the editors (while keeping a bigger cut for themselves, of course). That's demonstrably worst for the customer and potentially worst for the publisher too (although it could be better for the publisher, depending on how benevolent and selfless Apple would feel).
> If OO wants to compete with Word then it should be be transparent to the user, it isn't, it's as simple as that.
I don't think OOo wants to "compete" with MSWord. I am no LaTEX fan but I don't think LaTEX wants to "compete" with MSWord either.
You could argue that since you are used to MSWord, you'd rather use it. And if you did, I'd agree with you. But you did not; instead, you claimed that the alternative is bad, because you, personnally, fail at using it. That is particularly weak. OO may not be transparent, but your argument , on the other hand, is.
> Last time I tried open office, which wasn't very long ago, it couldn't handle correctly something as simple as a table which spans multiple pages.
I don't use OOo anymore; in 2007 I was using it and it handled multipage tables perfectly (although I do remember wrestling a bit with ODBC connections, that needed to be reset sometimes for no apparent reason). Back then it was significantly better than MSOffice for big tables (or anything big at all, really). Object anchoring worked a little differently from MSOffice which led to minor trouble for collaborative work with people who used MSOffice, but OOo's way meant that I was able to do overlays that MSOffice couldn't do, so I ended up finalizing documents for MSOffice users from time to time. On the other hand OOo's GUI was a bit ugly at that time. I'm told it improved.
I also wrote a couple technical reports on Abiword and Gnumeric back when they were definitely feature-light (2003? I don't recall precisely) because I was temporarily sans desktop computer and that's what was intalled on the students' room iMac; I'm pleased to let you know that the end result was pretty good (certainly not LaTEX-grade but at least as good as MSOffice).
One's failure to use a tool is not necessarily the tool's fault.
> Microsoft Office is the only option in that case...
Ignoring the obvious troll*, people who feel they absolutely need MSOffice should be made to buy it. I'm sure it would go a long way towards re-evaluation of one's perceived needs. Hey, you may even go as far as actually trying an alternative instead of spouting nonsense on El Reg.
And spare us the "we have mission-critical VBA macros at work" crap. If that's the case get your employer to pay for the turd it forces on you.
*I'm pretty sure you could even do with Vim -and a few scripts- whatever it is you're doing with MSOffice, and more. Well, maybe _you_ couldn't, but that doesn't tell much about MSOffice vs the competition now does it?