* Posts by JDX

6847 publicly visible posts • joined 28 May 2010

The Nokia 3.2 is a phone your nan will love: One camera's more than enough, darling

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Re: Eh?

2 lenses on one side == one camera shirley?

Firefox 72: Floating videos, blocking fingerprints, and defeating notification pop-ups

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Re: Creepy, Crappy and FF

I thought IE had already been phased out in favour of Edge.

No horrific butterfly keys on this keyboard, just you and your big, dumb fingers

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Yeah it sounds great fun but with limited uses. That said I think it would be far more user-friendly than trying to type on your screen on a tiny keyboard since this gives you proper space to type on your table or whatever.

Stack Overflow makes peace with ousted moderator, wants to start New Year with 2020 vision on codes of conduct

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This has nothing to do with the actual story. The mod in question supported the policy.

Let's try to keep our views on the policy, and on the story, separate... I don't agree with the policy either but that is their decision to make. Of course the intersection of the two is that I don't think the policy itself was actually put to the community, but dropped on them from On High which is counter to the ethos of the site.

It's an example of the problems when you run a community and want to also make money from it. Your business interests may not align with what the users want.

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Re: Epic number of downvotes

Having followed this story on the site, there is clearly a LOT of ill-feeling from the SE community (including moderators) towards the corporate/business people. This is one example about how the people using the site feel like they are ill-treated and not listened to. Which is a shame since the creators of the site come from this background themselves.

I hope it gets sorted out because the story according to the most active users, who make the site actually useful, describes quite serious cracks starting to form in the whole thing.

Hate speech row: Fine or jail anyone who calls people boffins, geeks or eggheads, psychology nerd demands

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Re: Elon Musk

The initial "pedo guy" - sure I can see it's like how many of us grew up on the playground where "gay" was a generic insult.

But he later posted something like "someone should check, it's true" or words to similar effect so I'm a little surprised he was cleared.

But by the logic I can insult someone with a very emotive pejorative term, should I be able to shout "shut up you stupid n*****" as just an insulting term? Or "quiet down fag"?

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Re: Free speech is offensive by definition.

On the other hand, isn't it tremendously useful to be able to contemptuously dismiss anyone who shows compassion or stands up for someone else as "virtue signalling".

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Re: Free speech is offensive by definition.

If you can't offend someone without deliberately using charged pejoratives you're not trying very hard.

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Re: Elon Musk

No it's OK in S. Africa.

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A bad as the N word

Says an academic in a nice cosy little sub-reality, mostly detached from the real world.

The IoT wars are over, maybe? Amazon, Apple, Google give up on smart-home domination dreams, agree to develop common standards

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DON'T WANT it to have to go via the internet

I find it most frustrating that I have two devices in the same room and they have to send messages to each by bouncing them off the internet.

I'm not sure if these new proposals will mean that or not - maybe things on the same network will discover each other?

The other thing about all IoT devices being WiFi... hmm. Many IoT devices are deliberately very low-power and use RF to a hub to run for months off a AA or 2. I don't want a dozen radiator smart TRVs each connected to my Wifi...

iFixit surgeons dissect Apple's pricey Mac Pro: Industry standard sockets? Repair diagrams? Who are you and what have you done to Apple?

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Re: Proprietary Flash

Nice to see an honest question getting flamed by the community in the voting. Thanks at least one person could be bothered to help.

Not all of us know the ins and outs of computer hardware.

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Can maintain your BMW Series 3 Hybrid with ease?

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Indeed, everything is on the up

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Proprietary Flash

I am not sure what "Flash storage" is in this context. Do we mean RAM or something else? How long before whatever it is sees 3rd party alternatives?

FUSE for macOS: Why a popular open source library became closed source and commercially licensed

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Re: fairness

Big companies who rely on FOSS typically want to improve on it. Assuming the license requires them to contribute changes back they are paying back.

Often, they want to benefit from the main branch so will be active members of the projects anyway, driving them in directions they find valuable.

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Re: Seems fair

Lots of the big projects have people working on them from major companies who use them e.g. Google might put an employee on a OS project.

Otherwise it's done for love as far as I can tell by people who use the software themselves, or just find it interesting.

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Re: Bus factor

Sometimes you see projects which are open-source but not free for commercial use, I thought(?) I wonder if anything like that could be possible.

What do Nginx, Twitch... and the English Premier League have in common? Russians. It's always the Russians

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Re: I get a bit bored

You can surely be aware of high-profile live streams and keep a look out for those hand-picked streams live. You can check the stream title/description and try to fingerprint and have some human operators checking suspect streams.

You might not get them all but you can then argue you are trying. And I for example would quickly get bored if the stream I was following got canned every few minutes making me look for another one repeatedly.

Heck you can even just have human operators trying to find the streams like normal 'punters' do - clearly these streams aren't hard to find. How many streams can one person take down in an hour - a lot?

LightAnchors array: LEDs in routers, power strips, and more, can sneakily ship data to this smartphone app

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For sheer boffinry

This is just lovely geeky Sci-Fi come true. Sure a lot of it is not actually very useful but it's still extremely cool if you're into coding and so on.

If smart-glasses had ever taken off this could be really neat, as it is the problem is you'll 99% of the time point your phone at something and nothing will happen, which will make it not worth trying.

Things Microsoft will be glad to never see again: Windows 10 1809 and Windows Phone Office

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Re: @JDX - Question: is there a new version of Windows in development?

I'm just interested.

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Question: is there a new version of Windows in development?

MS typically has its new generation of Windows in progress for years but I was just thinking I haven't heard anything about silly OS code-names for ages.

Since W10 effectively gives you major OS updates periodically, does this mean W10 just IS Windows for the foreseeable future... or is W11 being worked on in secret?

The Windows Phone keeps ringing but no one's home: Microsoft finally lets platform die

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A lesson in how to f*** it up

I loved the WP interface - what a breath of fresh air - and the hardware was very nice. But there were just too many missing things, or things that they made worse in 'updates'. WP7 was beautiful but didn't do much, WP8 had a lot more functionality but watered down the interface, etc.

I clung on to my yellow 1020 as long as I could for the wonderful camera but eventually gave up and switched to OnePlus.

Kind of amazing how badly and consistently they managed to screw the project up.

Samsung Galaxy S11 tipped to escalate the phone cam arms race with 108MP sensor

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time-of-flight (TOF) sensor

If the industry talk is to be believed, this will come with three additional sensors, including an ultrawide-angle lens, a 5x optical zoom and a time-of-flight (TOF) sensor.

A what now? I am assuming this has little to do with aviatics?

Elon Musk gets thumbs up from jury for use of 'pedo guy' in cave diver defamation lawsuit

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So we can safely all go on TWitter and call Elon "pedo guy" if we wish?

Newly born Firefox 71 emerges from its den – with its own VPN and some privacy tricks

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"With the holidays around the corner, the FPN couldn’t come at a more convenient time"

Indeed, lots of people bored at home this time of year.

Just in case you were expecting 10Gbps, Wi-Fi 6 hits 700Mbps in real-world download tests

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Re: My Mantra

Wired when you need it, whatever is easiest otherwise. I do not see any issues with my TV that are attributed to wireless for instance, and generally speaking my internet connection is the bottleneck not my internal network at home.

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Well yes, the capability of Wifi in a paper mill is directly reelvant to most users.

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Surely worst-case is live-streaming/video-chat 4K because then you cannot buffer like you would with streaming video.

BBC tells Conservative Party to remove edited Facebook ad featuring its reporters

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I happened to see the ad on Youtube and one can hardly say it portrays the BBC as being pro-Brexit. It's clearly a bunch of tiny clips edited to form actually quite an effective ad. If Labour ran one to highlight their points I'd be fine with that too.

Stand back, we're going in: The Register rips a 7th-gen ThinkPad X1 Carbon apart. Literally

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Shame about the soldered RAM

Since they have seemingly gone out of their way to make it accessible, why solder the RAM in? Is this sort of thing generally done to make them non-upgradeable, or does it offer a more robust / cheaper construction with nothing to come loose? It must take time/money to do glueing and soldering components so what are the reasons, realistically?

Bloodhound gang hits 1,010kph, retreats to lab to work on smashing the land speed record

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Re: I heartily agree!

Surely it's really entertainment like Top Gear or Mythbusters... dressed around science/facts but only as an angle to make a good show.

A small minority might like a 10 minute single-take scene where they grease a steering rod but a prime-time TV slot needs to attract the mass market in the same way that Planet Earth is weaved to tell stories and cut to the money shots.

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Apart from slight drifting to the right caused by crosswinds, the car handled well.

At 600mph that rather downplays things I'd imagine.

Physicists are rather giddy after creating a rare type of laser using laughing gas

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All the components required fit inside a shoe box

Funding really is an issue these days.

Labour: Free British broadband for country if we win general election

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Re: For a given value of "free"

So you'd like to pay for your driving per-mile, pay for private bin collections, etc?

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Re: Welcome to Cloud Cuckoo Land

Well duh. The argument is whether you should pay for what you use, or we all contribute for a shared service. Exactly the same argument as whether you want all schools to charge fees in return for lower taxes since not everyone has kids. Most people, even most Tory voters, would prefer free schools.

You do diminish your credibility talking about 'stealing' like a 9 year old though.

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Re: Only nationalise OpenReach

Yeah I'm kind of on-board with infrastructure being government controlled, though I have no issue with them contracting work out to private companies. I wouldn't say I'm clamouring for it but I can see the argument.

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Re: The bigger picture

How does super-fast internet let you buy more stuff than regular fast internet? I rarely find my amazon purchase rate limited if I have 2Mbps rather than 32.

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Free FULL FIBRE?

I've seen this specifically mentioned in a few places. Is that the same as fibre-to-your-door, i.e. something most of us don't have (and don't have equipment for) or does it include what most of us have as "fibre broadband" e.g. a bit of regular wire up your drive?

Complete with keyboard and actual, literal, 'physical' escape key: Apple emits new 16" $2.4k+ MacBook Pro

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I like the spec - 1Tb SSD is nice - but until I'm buying it with someone else's money I'll pass!

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Re: But...

Your keyboard seems to have its own issues. You press SHIFT+A and it types Cra

ZTE Nubia Z20: It's £499. It's a great phone. Buy it. Or don't. We don't care

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Re: But fuck it. It's £499. You could do worse

That's nice Lee. But I don't think someone who uses a 9yo budget laptop for "gaming" is really in any position to lecture us on technology.

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Re: Not a Yotaphone

I loved that idea.

I do not see the point of this device at all. Here's a really great screen, if you want you can turn the phone the other way round and use a much worse version.

If you could use both screens at once I could see some niche applications for gaming or something, but as it is I've got nothing other than the selfie screen so you can selfie with your main camera. Now that's handy I suppose but still a weird idea.

Helen Fospero makes yet another Brit telly presenter to win IR35 case against taxman

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Re: This is going to hurt Britain

What? Who are the contractors who accept payment in cash, up-front? Contractors typically work on 30 day payment terms so you get paid several weeks after the end of the month rather than on the last day of the month. It's not uncommon to work on 60 day terms.

Your Ltd has these obligations but the point is, as an employee you still get paid when ill or on holiday or bank holidays. A typical employee is perhaps getting paid for being there about 85% of the time, and that's not counting maternity or paternity or longer illness.

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Re: This is going to hurt Britain

Depends which people you mean. If they've been there years then probably. Just a few months, no.

Not having holiday and sickpay, etc, are quite big things

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>>Most of the contracts I was on, stated that you could not substitute yourself for another (Cheaper) individual.

You want to avoid clauses blocking RoS (right of substitution) in contracts and fight to remove them if at all possible.

Of course RoS clauses normally include wording "suitable" or "mutually agreed" which means if you can't be available, you OFFER a substitution but they do not have to accept it.

Google forks out $2.1bn for Fitbit – and promises not to exploit all that delicious health data to sling ads (honest)

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Re: Advertising is a self-sustaining -- and meaningless -- ecosystem

No. Nobody has ever checked if spending £millions and £billions is worthwhile. All these companies trying to manage a razor-thin profit margin have never attempted to measure if there are benefits or ROI for their advertising spend. Bean-counters querying how many pencils an employee can reasonably use in a year or how to shave 1p per employee from toilet paper usage are happy to accept massive advertising bills without caring if it achieves anything.

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Waze

I haven't used this but have heard it's really good. I never knew it was bought by Google - doesn't it compete with their core Maps products? Are they planning to integrate it as part of Google, or do they just own it?

Not just adhesive, but alcohol-resistant adhesive: Well done, Apple. Airpods Pro repairability is a zero

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Re: That vendor's track record for reparability is miserable

They don't care if they can repair something that will be obsolete in 2-3 years. If it broke they are going to get it sorted by Apple, not dig out their spadger and eye-glass.

Try for one moment thinking from others' viewpoint before judging them, dum-dum.

It's back: The mercifully normal-looking Moto 360 smartwatch

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Re: Benefits?

I agree little notifications and so on are handy if you're someone who likes to check every email and messenger message constantly. I had a cheap only Microsoft wearable until it died and was surprised to find I quite liked it.

But not enough to buy another one.