Posts by Dexter

Re: Speedbump

My 12 year old iMac still works just fine. It’s not running the latest version of OSX but everything seems to still work

Re: Can someone explain.....

You are missing that most people never seem to back up anything at all

Re: Should they email you notices

SMS don't cost money to the network provider; they are the ones who are charging you!

Re: Trump doesn't get global trade

The most expensive parts of a phone will have been fabbed in South Korea (if using a Samsung chipset) or Taiwan (if using Qualcomm or Apple).

Not many wafer-scale fabs in Germany.

Re: cheapest option wins

Skagen large? They are very thin and light.

I have a titanium one on now, and it's great to wear a watch you can hardly feel.

Not a smart watch though, but I've never felt the need for one of those.

Re: These "new" iPhones

The iPhone SE is very reasonably priced, and has the merit of being the same size as the iPhone 5

Re: A company

Two google homes talking to each other:

www.twitch.tv/seebotschat

Currently offline, but scroll down a bit for various surreal conversations.

Re: Wishful thinking

The mBed is much too heavyweight and power hungry for really small devices like sensors, and probably too expensive for many cheap IOT devices.

Re: "on the UK island of Jersey"

The Celts only arrived sometime in the Iron Age (probably around 500BC), displacing the Britons who were already here. So they are incomers as well. The previous (non Celtic, and probably non-Indo-European) language still survives in some place names, but not much else.

Doubtless there were other waves of migration before that.

Re: These idiots woke me up TWICE !

Surely the best way not to be woken by your phone is to switch it off when you are asleep?

Or any other time you don't want to be disturbed.

Not sure why this seems to be impossible for many people.

Qualcomm is already a fabless semiconductor company. They use TSMC, Samsung and others.

NXP has a few (old) Fabs, but nothing cutting edge.

Re: "a 32-bit DAC, part of a burgeoning partnership with Bang & Olufsen"

AC wrote:

... and scientifically proven to be completely useless, in double-blind A/B comparisons (that was for 24-bit versus 16-bit).

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Shhh. Don't you know double blind trials are anathema to HiFi folks?

Re: Linux on the desktop

I tried Linux on the desktop for a while.

Then I discovered all the things which almost worked, but not quite.

Like printing photos.

Syncing music to an iPod.

Editing Word documents.

and on and on and on.

Got a Mac and things 'just worked'. All the good thing about Linux (Unix under the hood with all the usual command line tools), without the shitty UI and half-broken tools that never quite do what you want.

Linux is great for servers. Use it all the time for that. With a command line interface.

Linux as a desktop is always almost there, but not quite ready yet.

Re: Huh?

That's what homomorphic encryption is - it lets you operate on the encrypted data without decrypting it.

I suggest you go and read up about it; it sounds like magic, but it's just maths.

Re: Does it still hate the user?

sisk: Maybe I'm an oddball but I've always found Gimp's UI to be much more intuitive that Photoshop's.

Maybe I'm an oddball but I've always found both Gimp and Photoshop (and Pixelmator on the Mac) to be hideously difficult and unintuitive to use. It always takes ten times as long as it should to do anything, and involves copious use of 'undo'.

Re: So you've reached 0.5c...

How do you slow down?

Get someone to point a big laser at you from the other direction, of course.

Or just run into to something - that will slow you down quite quickly.

Re: C++ haters: What about performance?

Jake wrote:

"real time systems, network software and drivers"

All K&R and/or assembler, not C++.

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I must have been imagining all the real time systems and network software I've written in C++ over the last 20 years (device drivers I'll agree with, never seen one of those in C++). Many of those would have been exceedingly painful to do in C and would have resulted in unmaintainable code.

C++ is a solid systems language which gives the same performance as C but is much easier to write and maintain.

Just because you can't conceive of it, don't assume nobody else can.

Re: DAB...

> Since there is no compelling reason to change from FM

There is in our house. FM reception is bad and always has been. DAB is fine.

Re: It's all bollox anyway

I ditched my smartphone and went back to a Nokia candy bar after I realised I never used the phone for anything except calls and the occasional text. The Nokia is 1/3 the size and weight, and the battery lasts a week.

When you consider what high end watches cost from the like of Omega and Rolex, the Apple watch doesn't look so bad.

Re: Apple builds crap computers designed to fail after just a couple of years

My iMac is still going strong after 5 years.

I've seen Macs well over 10 years old still working fine.

Come to that, I've seen Windows machines over 10 years old still working.

Just because you once had a bad experience, don't assume it is typical.

Re: Imagined use case?

Having occasionally had to use AZERTY (as opposed to QWERTY) keyboards while in France, and indeed QWERTZ keyboards in Germany, I can attest to the fact that it causes constant irritation.

Most of the keys are in the same place, but just enough are not to cause brain-ache.

Re: complexity and obsequiousness

As someone from the Pascal and then VB camp (and SQL), I still prefer Begins and Ends over harder to see spidery litte { } things. Personal preference I know, but it's easier to see with my eyes.

-------------------------

#define begin {

#define end }

I sold my Palm IIIx (complete with fold-up keyboard) on e-bay last year.

Still working fine after 12 years of heavy use.

It sold for not very much, but I thought it better to let someone who wanted it have it than chuck it in the bin.

Re: To all the paranoid sheeple.

Yeah, everyone knows the NSA hide their stuff in Flappy Bird and other free games.

Re: 98.2% of Android devices run old OS versions

Even Nexus devices don't always help. I have a Galaxy Nexus which has Bluetooth LE.

I've upgraded it to Android 4.3, which has Bluetooth LE support.

Can I use Bluetooth LE? No, I can't because the kernel on the phone doesn't have a BLE driver, and Samsung say they won't release an updated kernel.

Possibly a custom kernel would fix that, but my experience with custom kernels has been bad - phone dead or refusing to boot.

Re: Retro, Meh

Re: Retro, Meh

Retro is good because it looks nice. If you don't like retro looks, don't buy it.

Re: Parallax??

The effect is the same on an iPhone, just much less noticeable because of the smaller screen.

What I don't like in iOS7 are the new spindly fonts, which I find harder to read.

Changing font sizes and setting 'use bold' in settings doesn't seem to affect most apps.