* Posts by Dave 126

10643 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010

Apple redesigns wireless AirPower charger to be world's smallest, thinnest, lightest, cheapest, invisible... OK, it doesn't exist anymore

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Kudos to Apple…

It seems that Apple wanted to sell a product - a pad that simultaneously charged a phone, watchband earbuds - that nobody else could make. This convenience would have been its unique selling point, and without that most users would be just as well served by a 3rd party Qi charging mat by Belkin, Logitech, Samsung, Xiaomi etc al, and there would be no room for Apple to put a good margin on the price tag.

The very difficulty that would have given Apple a USP has proved in fact to have prevented Apple from achieving it.

The announcement of the pad was premature but this is hardly unprecedented... it was touch and go that the first iPhone Steve Jobs announced on stage would get through the presentation without crashing. He took a punt that the bugs would be ironed out between the announcement and the release date, and the punt paid off.

Apple must have had a few teams working on wireless charging. They were late to join the Qi standard party because they had been attempting to create a better system (i.e, charging over a greater distance) and had failed.

Are you sure you've got a floppy disk stuck in the drive? Or is it 100 lodged in the chassis?

Dave 126 Silver badge

I wonder if that isn't half way possible... you made me think of Flexi discs - low quality 7" plastic discs to played at 45 rpm on a record player that were given away on magazines... and then made me think of the magnetic ink that uses to be used on cheques... and then if it would be possible to print a floppy disc with magnetic ink. Low low data density, obviously, and the drive would require custom firmware to read it. Hmmm. There was that bloke who used a 3D printer to print a record - the song was recognisable even though it sounded underwater.

Xiaomi's Mi-too attempt at a pholdable: Not one, but TWO creases of fail

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: someone explain where the camera goes?!

> we wanted thicker phones...

And Energiser heard you and has designed a 22mm thick phone with an 18,000 mAh battery.

https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/energizer-phone-battery-price-release-date-3665107

Personally I'll stick with a normal phone and an external 10,000 mAH battery pack for when I'm away from a 9v Samsung quick charger.

Netflix wants to choose its own adventure where Bandersnatch trademark case magically vanishes

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Scott Adams not a precedent??

Reading the comments here, it seems that some some of you understand Choose Your Own Adventure as being generic when in fact it is trademarked. And that is understandable. It tends to be those brands whose IP is in danger of being seen as generic by the public who defend it most the most. Take Hoover (TM), for example, when many people won't think twice about saying 'I'm going to hoover the floor' , and some people are even known to say 'I'm going to buy a Dyson hoover'. Wow, it's such a suitably onomatopoeiac name for an air sucking device that had someone actively chosen the name Hoover for their vacuum cleaner company we might call them a marketing genius, but in reality the company was just started by a man called Hoover. Such is life.

I once naively just assumed Portaloo was a generic term, until Portakabin Ltd told eBay to delist my 'site toilet'.

My dad is still not certain that any smartphone isn't an iPhone.

And does anyone (other than Blue Peter presenters) actually say sticky tape instead of Sellotape?

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Scott Adams not a precedent??

> I'm quite surprised that the Netflix lawyers didn't mention any precedents for a person choosing their own adventure

Read the article. It is not the concept that the complainants are objecting to (after all, there have been similar books) but the phrase 'Choose your own adventure'.

In the UK we had Fighting Fantasy books, originally written by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, with the tagline You Are The Hero. Their Trade Dress was a yellow banner bisected with a gold coin at the top of the cover. IT Angle: The pair went on to found Games Workshop, and Steve Jackson co-founded Lionhead video games studio with Peter Molyneux and others.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Rounded corners

> Wait, isn't it Apple who have patented rounded corners?

It's a 'Design Patent' (US), what we in the UK more usefully call Trade Dress (like the shape of a Marmite jar or the grills on a Rolls Royce) - and it's not rounded corners per se but the specific use of rounded corners of specific radii in relation to other design elements. Such terminology is the only way to describe geometric forms accurately in words in a court case. Try describing a Coca Cola bottle unambiguously in words and see how you get on. It's easier to understand in pictures. The context was whether Samsung's early iPhone competitor looked just like an iPhone when Samsung could have given it any one of a huge range of appearances without compromising its function. Look at pictures and judge for yourself.

More recently Samsung have been pushing their quantum dot televisions - nice enough sets, superior in bright rooms to LGs OLED TVs - as QLED in a typeface that looks like OLED. LG's OLED (where every pixelnis its own light source, and so black areas in an image are perfectly black) are hugely superior to QLED (which is just normal LED technology using quantum dots to filter the backlight) in darker rooms and carry a price tag to match. Is it coincidence that Samsung aren't actively helping to reduce consumer confusion when there's millions of dollars at stake? You judge.

TV piracy ring walks the plank after Euro cops launch 14 raids and shutter 11 data centres

Dave 126 Silver badge

"Don't buy a Ferrari"

I'd have thought that was the first lesson taught in the module Getting Away With It during the first term of Criminal College.

Apple's revamped iPad beams a workhorse in from Planet Ludicrous

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: USB

Bizarre. iPads are more or less big iPhones when it comes to USB functionality. I'm left assuming then that the sales team didn't use iPhones. But if the sales team didn't use iPhones, it seems odd they stated a preference for iPads. And then it seems weird that nobody asked them what they wanted them for before buying them, strange that just one iPad wasn't bought to test before buying a batch of them, and daft that they weren't returned when they didn't mean the users' needs. And wouldn't buying a 15 quid camera connection dongle be better than wasting a 300 quid tablet?

I've heard of unused piles of IT gear in offices, but it's usually to do with protecting the department's budget allocation.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Why would you bother with an iPad?

> Why would you bother with an iPad?

Horses for courses. It sounds like your wife's primary uses are doing some office work and watching video when travelling, and that's fine. Other people find benefit from the greater range of iPad software compared to Android tablet software (even Google is a bit luke warm about Android tablet software, focusing its efforts on Chrome OS tablets and possibly Fuschia for the future). iPads are updated for a longer period of time than competing Android tablets, and are well supported in various niche areas, such as Point of Sale, music production and education.

But for sure, if your wife just needs a portable screen for watching things on, a cheap n cheerful Androud tablet fits the bill.

You might note that the only Android tablets that are trying to compete with iPads, Samsung's recent offerings, are roughly the same price as iPads.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Waiting for a bus

Aaaand, one more thing. I never understood why Apple didn't play to their advantages and make iPads work as secondary Mac (book) monitors from the get go.

However, I understand that Adobe have an iOS app that places tool palettes from a MacOS instance of Photoshop onto iPads and phones, so there's that.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Waiting for a bus

To clarify: it's more important for outside screens to be scratch resistant and thus glass than it is for inside screens which, like traditional laptop displays, are protected in transit by being folded up.

For productivity applications a single large seamless display isn't always necessary- for working between two documents two separate displays work as well as a single big display. Of course it's rubbish for watching video, and many users might use a work device for entertainment purposes. Sony have made tablets with two side by side screens, Nintendo have made a mobile game console with two screens, and Microsoft researched but never made a productivity-focused clamshell tablet called Courier with two screens.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Waiting for a bus

It might be waiting on Corning to make a glass that can be bent through a small radius - near essential for a 'fold on the outside' design. Corning are working on it, but it's looking like 2020 and not this year. Samsung's the inside' design results in a tight crease that this week's photos show is still visible when fully open.

Meet games-streaming Stadia, yet another thing Google will axe in two years

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: So, latency

Latency is already an issue in any online multiplayer real time game, and that includes the popular genre First Person Shooters.

The difference is where this latest is manifest. On a local machine, moving the controller moves the cross hairs instantly but the remote player the cross hairs are aimed at might not actually be where your local machine thinks they are.

On a streamed gaming service, there will be latency in moving your crosshairs, but they will be more accurate with regards to the target.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Terrible News

You seriously think there are enough potential subscribers with fast enough internet that the traditional game (disc or download to local hardware) market disappears?

Let's be generous and say 50 percent of gamers have the required internet to use this Google service, the remaining 50 percent aren't going to be ignored by companies wanting to sell them games and hardware.

In any case, some games just aren't suitable for this, such as Street fighter or any VR game.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: alas, latency

A lot of games are already human Vs human, so the question isn't how long it takes the game to notice the players' actions, but how long it takes a virtual bullet fired by Brighton Bob to register as hitting Cardiff Charlie's helmet. This is a solved problem.

Indeed, the latency will probably be lower if the game is hosted by Google and not by Dundee Dan or one of the other players as is common today.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Who the hell would trust this...

We've had around 30 years of console games and PC games coexisting, with their respective strengths, genres and cost of entry. At no point has there been any threat of gamepad-based consoles dying out, and people are still spending big money on gaming PCs.

Classic single player games will always be available.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Who the hell would trust this...

Many games are only as good as there are other players to play against and servers to run the games. It tends to be that most of the people who played Halo 3 switched over to Halo 4 when it was released, leaving the Halo 3 servers a bit devoid of players. So, that's the 50 quid for Halo 3 disc, plus the ten quid a month for the Xbox live Gold subscription... for a game that itself gets superceded after a year or two... This staus quo doesn't sound much better for the player than just paying a monthly subscription.

Dave 126 Silver badge

> Only a company the size of Google could come up with such a stupid idea.

Eh? It's the same idea as has previously been implemented separately by OnLive, Sony and nVidea. The idea is sound, but there were technical hurdles preventing a great user experience, technical hurdles that Google seems confident it can mitigate.

Google's architecture isn't fixed like a games console - their system is designed so that multiple GPUs can be used to render a single instance of a game, allowing, for example, someone to pay a bit more for greater fidelity graphics.

It's worth noting that a lot of console games today are dependant upon 'a long piece of wet string' in that they are multiplayer across the internet, typically with one player's console acting as a host to coordinate the game. For this reason it may be that there's less lag (with regards Bob's bullet hitting Alice's helmet) in a streamed game than in a traditional console online shooter.

McAfee – the completely sane guy, not the biz – told to fork out $25m over 'torture, murder' of his Belize neighbor

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Both in the wrong tbh

I don't mistreat the pugs but I look at their owners with contempt for supporting the breeding of unhealthy animals. Some breeds have have difficulty breathing just to appeal to the aesthetic sense of idiots.

Mutts or carefully bred (i.e not inbred) working breeds are fine.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Something about Antivirus software

> Seriously, why does John McAfee still get tagged as an antivirus guy?

It seems to be a shorthand that an individual is noted for what first made their name unless they've achieved something bigger since. So Steve Wozniak is still referred to as Apples co-founder, whereas Elon Musk is known as that Tesla or SpaceX guy and not PayPal's co-founder. Just a theory.

Super Cali optimistic right-to-repair's negotious, even though Apple thought it was something quite atrocious

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Next on the list

@ Greg 38

I recommend you Google the John Deere DRM fiasco. By design John Deere tractors would refuse to start unless their parts were fitted by their field technicians, at $150 call out fee... not useful if the dealership is 40 miles away and you need to get the harvest in. So the farmers would get hold of pirated JD software that had been cracked by Ukrainians so that their local diesel workshop could fix their tractor. This was legal for the farmers to do as long as they modifications didn't exceed emissions controls. John Deere then started requiring farmers to sign a contract before taking delivery of a tractor so that they could sue farmers for breach of contract if they used the cracked software.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: RAT

Repairability is only a part of the equation, since one has to take into account durability and user satisfaction as well. I.e, it doesn't matter how easy it is to repair if it doesn't go wrong, and if it was a frustrating piece of trash to begin with then nobody will actually want to fix it.

Apple bestows first hardware upgrades in years upon neglected iPad Mini and Air lines

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Slipping

People have different requirements from a phone or tablet case, so allowing the end user to choose which case to use is just sane and sensible. And as a side benefit Mr Blogs doesnt accidently pick up Mrs Blogs phone as he leaves the house, since he's gone for rubber and she prefers leather.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Issues

3/ there's more devices in use today with Lightning then there are devices with USB C. This will change over time though.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Slipping

That's what a rubbery case is for, available for next to faff all from nearly anywhere.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: APPLECARE

There are similar scam emails going around purporting to be from Apple Care.

NASA: We need commercial rockets! SLS: Oh no you don't!

Dave 126 Silver badge

Big Fucking Rocket? Oh wait, that was named by a South African, who is also fond of borrowing names from a Scotsman.

I agree, the Americans have had some good names for hardware, and there's no shame in taking those names from ships of discovery from a previous age.

Can't do it the US way? Then we'll do it Huawei – and roll our own mobile operating system

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Just pick one of the open source phones

Again, that only gets you to base camp. The Open Source community would have a harder time writing apps for proprietary services such as banking, Uber, etc that many consumers would expect.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: I suspect its a clone of Android

> [ Tizen is ] still Samsung's back up plan though in case they get into a dispute with Google.

It's one of Samsung's back up plans, as well as being an option for Samsung in their Internet of Things. Another back up plan for Samsung is the Android Open Source Project but without the proprietary Google bits, hence their insistence on shipping phones with their own app store, however, email client etc duplicating the Google equivilents.

The HeirPod? Samsung Galaxy Buds teardown finds tiny wireless cans 'surprisingly repairable'

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Wireless?

You make a good point - wired headphones are less of a hassle with a dedicated and small MP3 player than they are with a phone which a, I might want to use for reading TheRegister or taking a photo and b, is a bugger to clip to my shirt pocket.

I have a physical job and I have come to hate my earphone wire getting caught in things when it is plugged into my phone. Back when I used a Sansa Clip the cable didn't get caught in things nearly as often.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Why bother?

> Because making every bit of technology disposable is choking the planet in plastic and dubious chemicals

Exactly. That's why it's important for stuff to be well designed and engineered before it is mass produced. It doesn't matter how durable a device is if the user chucks it in a draw ( or 'recycling' bin) because some bug or flaw makes it irritating to use. Flakey Bluetooth in 2019? Not acceptable.

Review found these worked well with some Galaxy phones, less so with an S10, and very poorly with a Pixel, though they noted Pixel phones have their own Bluetooth issues.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Why bother?

They might be easy to repair, but review of them as actual earbuds aren't great, citing mediocre sound and flaky Bluetooth connection.

This isn't picking on Samsung; it seems nobody has quite nailed this form factor with the possible exception of Apple (which by design don't isolate ambient sound - a feature if you're walking down the street, a bug if you're on a train)

Science says death metal fans delightful and intelligent people, great at dinner parties

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Context please.

Wanting to do so is normal, actually doing so isn't.

Apparently it's to do with the invention of captital punishment in hunter gatherer tribes weeding out the genes for being an unmitigated jerk. Humans don't fly off the handle nearly as often as chimpanzees.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Musically...

Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin play in a band, Them Crooked Vultures, with Dave Grohl of Nirvana and Foo Fighters fame. Dave Grohl also has a death metal band called Probot - presumably because he loves it.

But yeah, I suspect my musical tastes are more in line with yours, but I've always found punks, rockers, death metallers et al to be friendly folk.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Recently Keith Flint died, and he straddled both the dance music and punk genres, playing at the first Download festival ( a metal festival) with his side project 'Flint'. All reports suggest that off stage he was warm, chatty and supportive of everybody - a nice guy.

China still doesn't want iPhones despite Apple slashing prices, say market watchers

Dave 126 Silver badge

> As you can see selling to the average peasant can be very rewarding from a financial perspective

That's fine if you're KFC, not so much if you're Waitrose.

There are several viable positions in an ecosystem. The reason that lions don't run faster is that that position is already taken by cheetahs.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: I suppose they just need more and iPhones fall short of their needs.

The Chinese state retains the right to monitor its citizens, so the chief advantage of an iPhone in the West - that it doesn't run on a data slurping advertising business model like Android does - is lost on China.

'What's up, Skip?' asks paraglider – before 'roo beats the snot out of him

Dave 126 Silver badge

No ground to air missile?

Kangaroos in a military flight simulator fired missiles at trainees:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shoot-me-kangaroo-down-sport/

Dave 126 Silver badge

Marsupials haven't developed flight? Well, some can glide. The Sugar Glider for one.

Racist self-driving car scare debunked, inside AI black boxes, Google helps folks go with the TensorFlow...

Dave 126 Silver badge

We're just emerging from winter here in the UK, most pedestrians at night are still wearing winter coats if not hats and scarves too. As a driver I don't have time to wait til I see people's faces, I need to treat every shadowy shape as a potential human until I'm sure what I'm seeing. People could have green skin in this scenario and it would make zero difference to whether I perceive them as human.

I'm also amazed at how many people wear black costs in winter.

Galaxy S10's under-glass fingerprint reader, quelle surprise, makes mobe a right pain to fix

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Fingerprint/Home button

>Please, Sir, I know this one. The question was "How can we stop people buying cheap earphones and get them to buy much more expensive Bluetooth ones?"

Bluetooth headphones have fallen in price over the years, almost as if the silicon they are built around has fallen in price according to Moore's law. So I suspect it's a bit if both - yeah, Apple would rather you bought some pricey Bluetooth Beats, but at the same time a good number of users (not all by any means) had already abandoned wired headphones because Bluetooth earphones were cheap enough and they'd got fed up with detangling the bloody cables for the umpteenth sodding time.

I ran into an Asda the other day to buy some earphones (it was near the train station and I had half an hour, I wanted to listen to a podcast on my journey). Wired were £4, Bluetooth were £6. Yeah, I bought the wired ones, but still - it shows that the disappearance of headphone sockets can't be explained purely by a desire to upsell users to Bluetooth headphones.

Also, the last few pairs of wired earphones I've had have failed because I've caught the cable on something, or the cable has just died - making Bluetooth start to look like the cheaper option. Props to Samsung for using a *robust* 3.5mm socket though - the failure has always been in the earphones and not in the pricey phone. I once had a Creative Jukebox where the jack was soldered directly to the motherboard, leading to the inevitable failure.

Meizu ditched hole-free phone because it was 'just the marketing team messing about', not because no one really gave a toss

Dave 126 Silver badge

"You're using it wrong"

Richard Sapper, designer if the first ThinkPads, also designed an articulated desk lamp. Unfortunately it was found that some users might rest the head of the lamp against papers on tnekrcdesk, and the lamp being Halogen (no white LEDs in the 1980s of course) and hot there was a clear fire risk. So the manufacturers were forced to add a little stalk to the lamp head to prevent it touching things. Why do I mention this?

Well, the flat top of the G4 Cube was just too tempting a place for some people to place a paper document or cup of coffee. Users, hey? I guess the Trashcan Mac Pro's shape - also built around convection assisted cooling - discourages people placing folders on top of it, but might look like a nice place to keep ones coffee warm!

Steve Jobs had previously sold two other cube shaped computers, both designed by Esslinger (of Wega, Sony, and Frog Design), but they were aimed at brain surgeons (Pixar Image Computer) or whoever the hell the NeXT was aimed at. And all we got was Toy Story, the World Wide Web and iD Software's Doom.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: the inefficiency of wireless charging

And charging my phone over USB kills my FM radio reception, as does some LED light bulbs.

I could wrap the light bulb in tin foil I suppose, but it'd rather defeat the object.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Deal...

But some Moto phones do have swappable (and hot-swappable at that!) batteries via their Moto Mod system.

I can't help but think that if every poster here who cries out for swappable batteries actually bought said handsets, Moto would be selling a lot more phones.

As it is, one gets the impression that posters here just want a cheap way to keep using old phones. That is sensible and indeed laudable. However, it should be fairly clear to them why phone vendors aren't designing phones with their wishes in mind.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Deal...

I found myself using my phone's front facing camera to locate a screw hole underneath a cabinet the other day. It was handy to have, since I didn't have a mirror in my pocket.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Niche use case

I wasn't thinking of heat as the sterilisation method, but rather UV or chemical - there would be no nooks or crannies for microbes and viruses to hide in.

However heat could (though maybe not should) still be used without damaging the battery, since to sterilise it is only necessary to heat the exterior to a high temperature. If the temperature is high enough the duration of heating can be so low as to not raise the temperature of the phone's interior appreciably. That said, I can't see any advantages of using heat over say a quick dunk in peroacetic acid.

Dave 126 Silver badge

My phone looks like it has a cracked screen, but it's merely the replaceable glass screen protector. Assuming the protector has similar mechanical properties as the screen proper, it's saved me the cost of several new screens - i.e the original cost of the phone. Not to mention the drops in puddles, the bath and a stream which would have killed phones of old.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Deal...

You can retrofit a bezel to any phone: it's called a 'case'. You choose a case to suit you, slender, chunky, one with a pop out hand grip, one with a little stand for watching TV...

Dave 126 Silver badge

Just to say: there are 3rd party charging mats/docks that can wirelessly fast charge Samsung phones other than the overpriced Samsung ones. But research first.

Google got flak because their Pixel phones would only fast charge wirelessly if the mat gave the right DRM handshake.

Wirelessly charging a phone which is already in a potentially hot place (a car dashboard) isn't a great idea.

Consider making an old phone or cheap 7" tablet a dedicated car GPS, even without a data subscription it can get live traffic dsta from your primary phone. This way you don't have the faff of plugging in your phone, you don't care about high temperatures reducing your battery life, and in the case of the tablet you have a bigger display.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Niche use case

A seamless, portless phone would be easy to sterilise. Heck, in an all glass case the phone could sterilise itself with some integrated UV lamps. I don't know if there's anywhere in the healthcare sector that would benefit from this.