Posts by Dave 126 10660 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
> stylii. If you need them, you've failed.
It doesn't *need* a stylus, any more than the first iPhone or any phone today does, any more than a PC *needs* a joystick or graphics tablet. It's just a useful addition for people who like to sketch, need to annotate diagrams, use some written languages or need to write mathematical formulae.
> Except it's not 845, it's last year's 835. For $650. They're mad.
Well as I outlined, there's little point in powerful Android tablets when the range of power hungry software (games, productivity apps) is limited. The OSs for productivity on ARM are Chrome OS, iOS (feature complete Photoshop coming soon) and possibly Windows (though i haven't looked recently at what decent productivity Universal Apps are available). Even Google are looking away from Android to Chrome OS for productivity.
As for mad, well yeah, Samsung are asking similar money as Apple do for a 10.5" iPad, give or take (Apple stylus optional extra), yada yada. But it should be telling that no other Android device vendor is bothering much with tablets.
>"Since the the Note 9 has Treble, comments about Samsung's historical update record are irrelevant."
>>That remains to be seen
The historical record is irrelevant regardless of whether Treble works as intended. It's a logic thing. Strewth, I've read here of Sony being rubbish for updates, but my Xperia P was updated through three versions of Android, my Xperia Z3C through at least two: Vendors can - and have - changed and improved over time. So regardless of Treble, past performance isn't a great indicator. Sheeit, at least Samsung will still be in business in a couple of years.
Curious that someone above ditched Samsung for OnePlus over this issue - historically OnePlus have been poor at updates, and recently have only *promised* to be better in future. This suggests that with little to distinguish between handsets these days (I value waterproofing, you might not, you might want wireless charging, I haven't bothered yet), vendors are upping their game and addressing the update issue. Or at least making the right noises.
Oh, you can buy many brands of phone from UK based retailers and be covered by the Sales of Goods Act, but OnePlus insist you buy direct from them, based outside the EU and shipped from Poland. They appear to try hard on customer service but drop the ball. No VAT receipts. Read their forums. But hey, they might grow up and get better in future, so in a coupla of years time when I need a new handset I'll consider them again.
My friend had an Android device with 512GB storage years ago - it was an Archos PMP with a spinning rust HDD in it. Fortunately Android behaves itself now - there was a time it didn't support more than X thousand individual files. This caused him issues cos he filled the HDD with mono MP3s he'd transcribed from vinyl.
> ...more likely they're just too bloody expensive.
They are when they launch. However Samsung sell enough of them that they can heavily discount them after around nine months - around the same time as internet rumours about the next model start up.
I bought my S8 for the same price as a OnePlus 5T. The 5T is a decent enough phone, but for the same money I went for the better screen, waterproofing, better support, wider compatibility and wireless charging.
It's a weighing up of many factors, including what they use the phone for, the clothing they wear, the size of the hands etc etc. Jo Public has gone through a few generations of phone since the first 'Phablets' arrived on the market, and so he has more than enough first-hand information (his previous phones, handling his friend's phones to get an idea of the size etc) to make an informed choice. All design is compromise.
There are two longstanding products I like to equate to smartphones. Playing cards are designed to fit in the hand easily, like an iPhone 4. Postcards are a good size for displaying a more detailed image, like a 5"+ smartphone.
We used to consume our news on a 24" 'screen' that could be stowed in a jacket pocket. As a bonus it could also be used to wrap our chips, swat flies or scrunched up and placed in wet shoes. It was called a newspaper.
You might want to look at the Galaxy S4 Tablet, Snapdragon 845. It has DEX - see recent Reg articles about that - and will act as a second monitor when doing so. DEX optimised software is limited in range, but includes Office 365.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/08/galaxy-tab-s4-review-a-solid-android-tablet-a-too-quirky-android-desktop/
Really though, Android tablets have always been limited in quality software, since most people who use tablets for more than watching stuff have an iPad - and developers know it. It's too easy to sideload apps onto Android, so developers don't see much return.
It's not just Apple's fault that Android tablets are neglected - Google is working in combining / replacing Android on Tablets with Chrome OS or Fuschia.
S8, my first Samsung since feature phone days. Interface is fine - easy to swap softkeys back to Android default, Bixby not hard to disable, some Samsung stuff actually useful. I had been on Nexus before and had been fearing TouchWiz, but Samsung's Android is fine these days. Crazy right?
Received OTA update to Oreo, receiving regular security updates, expect Pie down the line but not fussed about it. Sadly no Project Treble on S8 ( unlike the S9 and the Note 9). Since the the Note 9 has Treble, comments about Samsung's historical update record are irrelevant.
If I could natively remap the Bixby hardware button to Flashlight, that would be lovely. As it is, I've taken a scalpel to my phone case, slicing off the bump above the Bixby button to make the volume bumps easier to locate by touch.
Still, it isn't necessary to install Lineage OS to get rid of Bixby.
> Well IoT which is dumbed down so that even idiots can use it is usually the problem.
No, it's the poor design of the kit. People will assume that a piece of kit is fit for the purpose for which it is sold. The company making the kit employs experts who should (and actually do) know better, but they often aren't given the time and money required to do a good job (competing on price, competing to be first to market).
Apple cares about security in HomeKit, but they just haven't been that enthusiastic about HomeKit generally - little updating of a clunky UI and insistence on an Apple TV acting as a hub. I might be that their analysts saw something like ARM's mBed platform or a joint venture gaining more traction, or they were just playing the wait and see game.
3rd party HomeKit gizmos had to contain Apple chips and pass Apple's scrutiny - costly and time consuming for vendors, especially if they saw people buying cheap insecure stuff.
I don't need home automation... yet. But I'm still young. We've seen medical devices such as pacemakers with security vulnerabilities, but the answer is not to stop making pacemakers (obviously!), the answer is to improve security. With an aging population Tele-Medince, which is a form of IoT, will have a role to play, as will a bit of home automation to ease the lives of the physically frail.
Indeed, what these researchers have done is very far from novel - information about communication can be valuable to an adversary even if they don't know its contents - but I'm sure their work is still valuable.
The concept is even in popular culture - "I'm detecting a lot of chatter over the Covenant battle net" says Cortana in the video game Halo, i,e, I have reason to think the enemy is up to something even if I don't know what they're up to.
By all accounts the HomeKit stuff was secure, but it came at a extra cost, and Apple taking a few months to certify a gizmo discouraged kit makers. Also, Apple just didn't seem to be that enthusiastic about it, and hadn't put much effort into the HomeKit UI.
The relative popularity of Alexa caught Google and Apple by surprise. It might also be that the flood of cheap and leaky IoT gadgets on the market gave the sector a bad name.
> Apple bought multitouch technology buying a smaller company. Breakthroughs not always happen in big R&D centres.
For sure - that's my point: Apple know what others in the industry are doing, from big rivals, through Original Equipment Manufacturers, to tiny interesting start ups. If for example there's a company doing interesting stuff with optics that could be applied to AR, Apple will have noticed. I wasn't saying it will be Apple that will create the first really good AR system, I said Tim Cook's comments that the tech required - industry wide (display, optics, silicon performance ) - isn't there yet has been vindicated by Magic Leap's lackluster developer units.
Apple combined FingerWorks' bought IP with the fruits of a Touch UI skunk works team from within Apple. - a big R&D budget means you can employ people to explore avenues that initially look unpromising. Similarly, the iPod was based around another companies HDDs. The combination of good ingredients is a skill - and often an expensive process - in itself.
A lot of what makes this headset expensive ( the AR lenses and room tracking) wouldn't benefit it use for flight sims. A VR headset would be a better match, and far cheaper. If you're interested, I'd hunt for some flight simulator forums, see how others have got on with it.
- there's a really cheap option, an IR emitter you wear on your head to track where you look. I hear it works well with flight / space sims.
Developers needs hardware, and the current price isn't crazy compared to developer workstations or the MS Hololens.
However, this version bears out Tim Cook's comment from last year: "The technology doesn't yet exist for an AR experience that isn't rubbish". And there's the thing - what does Magic Leap have that others can't do once the technology improves? A patent here or there maybe, but there's more than one way of skinning a cat (patents are for the *how*, not the *what*.)
Microsoft are taking the sober approach, targeting professional markets with long standing form for buying pricey visualisation kit (architecture, plant engineering etc).
Apple.. well, they've been spending silly money on R&D year on year. They have the custom AR silicon engineers, are researching Micro LED production (very high dpi displays), have form in working with content studios, a proven ability to sell pricey gear to the public, a mountain of cash to buy in any tech they need. If Tim Cook says decent AR goggles aren't possible yet, I'm inclined to believe he knows what he's talking about.
Thanks Dan 55! Can't remember model numbers, but i was thinking of Nokia with circular keypad, Nokia with scroll wheel instead of keypad, and Nokia that looked like a cubic lipstick with no keypad at all. Strewth. See the Nokia documentary on BBC iPlayer for how non-native Nokians were screwing things up.
You were only likely to see the lipstick phone in the wild if you kept the company of young women at the time.
I wasn't thinking of the N8; can't remember which Nokia it was that couldn't charge through its Mini USB data port, which is why I deliberately used the word 'some'.
Only drawing 500mA when in data mode was common to a lot of devices back then - many devices would only draw more if they detected the data lines on a cable were shorted, supposedly to protect a computer. This wasn't the case with the Nokia in question (during the era of a gazillion Nokia models, c. 2006) - it just wasn't charging through mini USB at all.
Some Nokia phones that had both round pin and mini USB ports couldn't charge through the mini USB port - it was for data only (trust us, we tried). You're right though, compared to others Nokia was well behaved over its power connectors - and a Nokia charger could be found nearly anywhere. However, there was still a period when their lower end feature phones didn't have a 3.5 mm headset socket.
The Nokia phone prop used in the Matrix film was modified with a spring opening mechanism that wasn't present in the stock model.
I liked the slider form factor - there was a Samsung feature phone c. 2005 (when Samsung ran billboard ads for three models, proclaiming the world's thinnest slider phone, candy bar phone and flip phone) I had that I got on well with - save for faults common to every phone vendor ( Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson) back then - no 3.5mm headphone socket, and never twice the same power connector even between similar phone models.* When you finished a call you slid the keyboard cover back with a satisfying thunk - no pocket calls.
* Til the EU pushed for MicroUSB. We'll see more of this topic later today, because the EU is now pushing to mandate USB-C on waste reduction grounds, even though wall chargers haven't typically incorporated the cable for a decade. As for wall chargers themselves, were seeing incompatibility, since we have Qualcomm's adaptive charging (seen in Samsung phones, even the Exynos versions) and incompatible weird stuff from the likes of OnePlus. They'll all charge at 5v 2.1 A, but they won't fast charge (at 9v in the Qualcomm case) incompatible phones. Android phones have always been a mess with their connectors, since not all have supported USB OTG over micro USB, and USB - C is already muddied, with some phones not supporting USB Audio properly.
I'm an Android user, and so I note with interest the range of quality 3rd party Lightning peripherals, such as 3D scanning, audio and imaging peripherals.
I don't follow your case you make for abolishing copyright. What you're saying is that there are so many images available of any subject that it should be trivial to find a non copyrighted image of the desired subject. This seems no reason to abolish copyright, since market forces would suggest that you can find a suitable copyright-free image, or one you can licence for 1p.
> I think that if your work is copyright then it is your responsibility to ensure that whoever you authorise to use it makes that clear or you add something to image indicating this.
There are many end uses for images where it is undesirable - or impractical - to have a copyright notice. Not only images - imagine a music radio station or Spotify where every music track was followed by a voice stating "Copyright 1996 Polydor Music Inc Unauthorised Reproduction prohibited without explicit permission..." Or similar.
1, it's unclear that they were forced to leave or 'dug their heels in' - the relevant Reg paragraph isn't supported by the source article. The original article merely says that after being contacted by the police the nursing home arranged return transport.
2, There's no mention of these guys' mental capacity - since they are evidently physically fit enough to make it to the festival, one assumes that they might reside in a nursing home due to dementia. Neither the police nor the nursing home may have seen it as their place to disclose the men's medical conditions unnecessarily.
3, It might be that two men didn't have tickets for the festival. That's usually cause to be escorted from festival grounds.
Given that released software does contain genuine bugs, it is evident that software devs can't find them all. This suggests bug scanners - and other methods of finding bugs - can't find all bugs all the time.
So if you suspect you have some genuine cracks in your castle wall it does you no harm to paint some some fake cracks as well.
When I first read the article, I was reminded of honey traps - the technique of having fake fake servers that resemble the real thing, so that a, you can detect an attack attempt, and b, attackers waste their time (or if you were being super cunning, come away with fake data that it suits you to have them believe is genuine)
Pie will come to your Pixel in the next couple of weeks without your intervention. If you want Pie now, you need to opt into the Android Beta Program to get an OTA update:
https://m.androidcentral.com/how-get-android-pie
There's also a side loading method for Pixel phones if you don't mind a bit of command line.
As a well-intentioned but imperfect human, it makes more sense for me to assume that I have biases that I might be aware of - and try to fix them them - than it does for me to assume I'm perfect already.
We meatbags are complex adaptive information gathering systems, and if we're aware of the myriad ways that the information that reaches may be skewed, and also that we don't live in the same circumstances in which our perceptive tools evolved, it seems that biases are not only possible but very likely.
As one black American once said: "I'm not African American. Elon Musk, now, he's an African American"
And he's correct. In populations such as Brazil where people have mixed for a few generations, skin colour isn't an indicator of ancestry - dark skinned Brazilians are no more genetically related to people who left Africa in the last few hundred years than paler Brazilians. It's demonstrably true that Elon Musk was born in Africa and lives in the USA. Whereas it seems odd to use the name of another continent to describe someone whose grandparents were born in the USA just because they have dark skin.
There might also be some cultural sensitivity in Hollywood around using actors whose ancestors were enslaved to portray robots. The meaning of the word 'robot', coined in a play by Karel Capek, is derived from a Czech word meaning 'forced labour'. For analogous reasons Louis Prima was chosen by Disney to voice King Louis in the Jungle Book instead of Louis Armstrong.
In Anime, black androids are rare probably because Japan has an ethnically homogeneous population.
Capek's robots were actually androids, akin to those in Nolan's Westworld or Blade Runner (organic and squishy, but assembled not grown). Conversely, Google's Android logo is actually a robot. And annoyingly, Google's GBoard doesn't present a 'C with upside down hat' ( unicode U+010C ) for Capek's name.
Indeed, most androids / gyndroids in visual fiction are either Caucasian or Asian - specifically Japanese due to their real robotic research and popular culture (Anime). I'm struggling to think of any black androids in film or television, other than Maeve in Westworld, mistress of the withering put-down; though of course in that fictional universes she was created to be abused. Of the Japanese Gyndroids, many of them - the Major, Battle Angel Alita - are of the capable of responding to abuse more than in kind.
I swear at toasters when they trap my toast, swear at self-service checkouts, swear at a screwdriver if I drop it. I'm unihibited in verbally abusing inanimate objects *because* I know they're inanimate unfeeling objects. I like to think I'm normally polite to people.
Such a device should ideally accept two pass phrases - one opens up your whole wallet as standard. A second passcode that you can enter when under duress will open it to reveal the equivilent of just $12.
It's the digital equivilent if carrying a second wallet with a fiver and old library card to give to muggers.
Ah, some answers: recovery options should one lose a hardware dongle associated with a Google account. Options include printing off some security codes to keep safe and secret, these can be used in place of the dongle (and in conjunction with your passcode)
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185834?hl=en&ref_topic=7189195
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