Posts by JaimieV

Ah, you are aware but don't understand it. Ok.

I dunno about other modern systems, but on Mac/iThings the friggin' copypaste actually works when you try selecting text out of a photo in the Photos app. Mostly. Usual caveats for OCR % accuracy, I had to correct one character in a 16ish char wifi password last week.

Re: CUPS?

Banging the current Gutenprint bundle on solves so so many macOS printing woes. I have to use it as HP dumped macOS support for my battletank of an LJ 5N and Canon for my MP600 about four years ago, and I recommend it to anyone who has a printer in the huge supported hardware list.

Re: Storing PII Data in AWS (S3)

London's leaving the UK?

The A12 is not "on a par with all but the fastest X86 CPUs". It's slightly faster than some i3 chips. What it does is compute far more efficiently in both power and cycles, with the A12 benchmarking pretty evenly against an i3-7350 - which is a 130W TDP package and can boost all the way up to 4.2GHz.

Check out the positions on the Geekbench graph at https://weborus.com/apple-a12-bionic-intel-processors/

Pretty much all i5/i7/i9 chips are faster than that, with the top end being about five times faster than the A12. And beyond that, there are no A-series equivalents to an 18 core Xeon W in ECC support, RAM quantity, number of PCIe lanes - there's more to being a Xeon than cores. The iMac Pro and future Mac Pro won't be ARM.

Yet.

All that said, the A12 kicks the crap out of the Intel Core m3 CPU powering the low end 12" MacBook. Look for A-series chips there next. I'll be only mildly surprised if they pull an A-series Mac out next week.

Re: If this was an Apple product

How the fuck? The user account I'm typing this from was first created in Tiger in 2005 and has been migrated through all the intervening releases. The other half's account is from 2006. They've both travelled through different chains of hardware from Minis to MacBooks and Pros to iMacs and back to Mini again.

I've even run a bunch of those migrations through beta releases of OS X/macOS. How is yours so flaky?

Re: good looks

Cambridge Analytica doesn’t actually have anything to do with Cambridge, city or university. It’s just a word in the name.

The Go is a stand-alone Android device, so orthogonal to your PC-gaming based questions. The Go does play casual VR games though.

Your old laptop won’t drive a Rift or a Vive, the gpu will be about six years too slow.

Re: What happens to Time Machine?

You can point multiple Macs at one destination TM target. Each Mac creates its own sparsebundle to backup into. They cope with the inevitable running out of space okay.

Re: In defence ..

>The double action required to free up memory

>(slide up until the apps show, then hold and wait

>for the red delete button to appear),

Don't do that. There's no point at all in hitting the red button on apps that aren't even running because they've been hibernated. It just costs more battery power to launch them from scratch next time. iOS is far better at memory management than you are.

Closing apps need only be done if you have something that's wedged, or needs terminating with extreme prejudice like the Facebook app.

Re: Ducks

If you don't at least download the installer using your appleID, it'll not show in the store later when it is replaced with the next iteration.

You can still get them off Apple as a direct download, but its a faff.

Re: So how does one lock a Mac when stepping away?

In addition to the above useful things, if you have lock-on-screensaver enabled then control-shift-eject or control-shift-power will take you straight to screen sleep, depending on keyboard.

Possibly gone in High Sierra, but If you launch the Keychain Access app you can go to its prefs and add a lock icon to the menubar.

Used for various things, as the BASIC editor rightly woudn't let a user select/edit line 0. Protecting copyright notices, avoiding anyone adding an earlier line with pokes in, having line 0 be a decryption routine or indeed the whole program... all clever stuff, admittedly in a "security through obscurity" manner.

Re: How difficult is it for Cupertino to ascertain ...

They already do that - you can't apply iOS9 to an iPhone4, for instance. It'll just refuse.

The tricky part is defining the dividing line between the "definitely not" and "just about OK" hardware releases. For some people's use the 4S apparently should have been on the "not" side of the line. For others, it's fine.

Don't remind me

I spent about eight hours solid poking that Skinner box a few weekends back. I ran down to 40% on battery about six hours in and continued playing while plugged in. Then I deleted it at the 8 hour mark as I realised what I was doing. Free!

Can't wait til the real Fallout 4 though.

Re: One Day Late and a Dollar Over

The watch is IPX7 rated, which is 1 meter for 30 minutes. Says so at the foot of the health and fitness page of Apple watch fluff.

Re: Gravity Boots

Two harpoons and a screw (aka a good night out on a whaling boat)

Re: Why?

For all the same reasons as people watch sports commentator shows?

Game videos only tend to have the player in a corner anyway, it's not like you're only watching their reactions. So it's more like watching sports, which are also being commentated.

Except with games there's a lot more personal interest. Unlike vegging out on the sofa watching the footie and shouting occasionally, you may be deciding whether to buy the game and play it yourself, or learning tips and tricks to get better at a game you already play, or you've finished the game and don't want to go back and play for another 40 hours to discover all the secrets and hidden things and alternate endings.

Re: False Sense of Security

Those considerations need to be mediated by the fact that many people *are* now using security because of TouchID, rather than having no passcode at all. Your notes above apply only to the few people who are already using 2FA.

Re: Beyond RAID

Since the array is accessible and usable while rebuilding, and you *of course* have a backup of it because RAID IS NOT BACKUP GUYS, how is a bit of speed loss while it's rebuilding an issue?

Re: NFC woes to come

Apple gets between 0.15 and 0.25% commission per transaction. Compared with 2-4% for the card company.

Re: Wow, shilling much?

"since iCloud backup doesn’t even work with the lowest (free) subscription."

Rubbish - I've been backing up my phone and ipad to it for free ever since it was offered. Currently using 3.5gig of space.

Otherwise I agree with everything you say.

Re: Use gift cards.

And again. "None" is an option. http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2534

This is the "sync contacts and calendars" directly between computer and iThing option in the Info tab, which disappeared with iTunes 11 but is now on the way back.

iTunes still has backup+restore functions.

Re: Well...

This seems to be a lie from MS. I installed a new XP VM today, and MS Update both offered MSE and downloaded today's update for it. It's sitting there happily, having done an initial scan.

Re: ARM vs x86?

The OS is already ported - not only is iOS over half of OSX's codebase running on ARM, but there have been persistent rumours of ARM MacBook sightings for a couple of years, and Apple would be mad not to be running those experiments. OSX was on Intel for years before the switch in chips, so they have form. They have iOS on Intel experiments too - the dev emulator runs on Intel with native executables.

The trouble with going to ARM chips in laptops is that even the latest gen is slow compared with what we have now. Unlike the PPC to Intel change, where the Intel chips could emulate PPC code as fast as - or even faster than - the previous generation of Macs, ARM chips would run Intel code at ~quarter native speed. Crunchy, and Apple are highly allergic to crunchy UX.

And iOS on a laptop would be a horribly crunchy experience. I've used Windows8 on a nice 10" touchscreen laptop, and I've used an iPad Air with a nice Logitech keyboard case. They were both reasonably unpleasant halfway houses, neither laptop not tablet. I'm really not seeing iOS in a laptop form at all.

The point of jumping would be (a) power consumption, which Intel pretty much already have in hand for laptop class chippery, but also (b) moving the CPUs in-house, which I'm sure Apple would love to do. The groundwork is all in place, going ARM64 was one of the last required steps, but it's a couple of years and a couple of chip generations down the line yet.

Not trying to defend the cost, but...

If you (or your workplace) already has an Office365 subscription for your use, then the iPad apps are included in that. There's no extra fee. And the sub you make for the iPad version includes the desktop versions, likewise.

Re: Re:Linux running most of the world's servers

It's using what was available and known at the time - similar to modern kit that uses TCP/IP to talk to the server *and* USB to signal the hardware.

@Harston - You don't have to be logged in as admin. Code run as your user will have access to all your files, and all files (eg on network shares) that you have access to - unsurprisingly.

What it won't be able to do is encrypt eg server-side databases that you have front-end access to, and that sort of thing. So you can trash the department's spreadsheets, but not the accounts database system. Unless it's a local copy of Sage...

@Dave - malware like this may have access to your backup destination, depending on how that's implemented. If it's a local HDD, or a permanently attached network share that has stacks of backup files in, then your hourly backups could easily get mashed.

In summary - any file that *you* have rights to delete, can be encrypted by this malware. No admin rights required.

Re: Crystal cove

It definitely has a camera to supply the position tracking, whether it has LEDs or not isn't so obvious. But you do get those extra three degrees of freedom, yes. Hurrah!

Re: You've made me renew my subscription.

Lesticles?

Re: PC version not censored

The consensus seems to be that the censored versions are slightly funnier than the non-censored ones, as Trey and Matt do voiceovers explaining what exactly was censored.

Disclaimer: I'm playing it this weekend.

Re: Psion 5mx

Seriously. Bang in a modern phone's guts and it would be soooo goooood.

Re: It seems there's no fix for my iPhone4

I finally updated my iPhone4 from iOS6.1.3 to 7.0.6 on Monday, for the same reason that Apple are nannyingly disallowing installation of 6.1.6 on them.

And it turns out it's faster than it was with 6 on, smoother, and less crashy. I know, surprised the hell out of me, I thought I was going to be spending the next day messing around with reinstalling 6 against Apple's wishes.

It;s no panacea, it still has pauses on app switch/startup, but it's no slower and the transitions are less offensive than they were in 6 because 7 does more papering-over-the-cracks stuff with pictures of the last app screen and restarting apps in exactly the same place you left them.

So, all good - for me, anyway. Except Podcasts, which is a bit less crunchy than it was in 6 but buggily doesn't think I've finished any episodes. I've replaced with PocketCasts which is a lot smoother.

Re: I'd love to get a couple.

Readyboost only relies on read speeds - it's a bootup cache technology, read only after the initial fill (and occasional topup).

They're certainly no replacement for an SSD, though. And as mentioned elsewhere, there are way faster SDcard or USB sticks that would be better for Readyboost use.

This wasn't an SSL weakness as such

but a copy and paste error that never got picked up in Apple code review. Or by anyone else - this is in open, publically published code.

https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/02/22/applebug.html

Bot traffic?

In an iPhone game? I'd love to hear you justify spreading that rumour.

Non-legit ad revenue gets recalled whether or not the recipient is in business at the time, so quitting has no effect. And don't think we didn't notice your "fact.... speculating" contrivance, either. This sort of intentional nastiness is surely the guy's reason for getting out.

Re: On the contrary; you are the one expecting too much from the stock price

Right, no reason. The billions of extra dollars Apple has banked in the meantime don't signify.

Stock prices are not closely related to the actual worth of the company they're attached to. Look at the numbers of share pumps in companies that are named a bit like a company that's been in the news, let alone the times a company (like Apple has at least once) has more in cash than their market cap. Apple shares go down on almost every product announcement (to much crowing) - then bounce back up (to much silence).

Stock traders, en masse, appear to be a functionally retarded organism.

They still build them

And sell them to the educational and semi-embedded systems markets, as controllers on kit that uses the old 30pin iPod connector like tills, and even in-shop intelligent signs and product catalogues. Single function, no need for hi-res displays.

Remember all those Psions used in warehouses in days gone by? That sort of stuff too.