* Posts by Dave 126

10643 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010

OnePlus smartmobe brand modelled on 'a religion', founder admits

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Nice phone but...

Now that Samsung phones have on-screen Back and Task Switcher keys, they can be easily swapped over to the normal Android positions.

My previous Android phones had all been close to stock Android (Xperia) or stock (Nexus), so I was pleasantly surprised to find my Samsung Galaxy straightforward to use (once I had disabled the hardware Bixby button of course) having been apprehensive about Samsung's TouchWiz UI.

Dave 126 Silver badge

The OnePlus return system is poor. They don't supply VAT invoices - something no reviewer mentioned. A few months after a OnePlus is released, Samsung's top offerings are reduced to much the same price ( see OnePlus 5T Vs Galaxy S8), and said Galaxy will offer waterproofing, wireless charging and greater support from 3rd parties (HDR certification, ARCore). These aren't essential features for everyone of course, but nice to have. I have no immediate plans to buy a wireless charging mat, but it's good to know I can in case I ever break my USB socket.

Tl;dr OnePlus are competitive, but they're not amazing value for money.

Boffins build smallest drone to fly itself with AI

Dave 126 Silver badge

I'd seen many a US coin used for scale next to a specimen in National Geographic (often next to a high contrast ruler) long before I first held a US coin in my own hand.

I've also known people to use 1p and 2p coin when weighing out small quantities of herbs, but that's a different matter.

Dave 126 Silver badge

> Non-fossil' Renewable power sources are very poor. They deliver low amounts of power, which is easily disrupted. No engineer in their senses would use them -

Engineers use renewables all the time. Regarding solar power, at one end we have low power untethered devices - calculators and wristwatches - and at the other we have roof-mounted solar panels and grid storage. Even fossil fuels are subject to the same demand spikes that requires grids to be overbuilt - and that grid storage has long been used to mitigate (e.g pumped hydroelectric storage).

If an engineer was tasked with designing, for example, a remote sensor, solar would be on his shortlist

And THIS is how you do it, Apple: Huawei shames Cupertino with under-glass sensor

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: an under-glass fingerprint sensor.

Qualcomm are working in an ultrasonic fingerprint t sensor, and likely Apple too.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: A removable notch, that's Genius!

Most mid to high end TVs sold today are capable of 3D output - it's largely a function of having a high refresh rate (used for 2d output)

Apple MacBook butterfly keyboards 'defective', 'prone to fail' – lawsuit

Dave 126 Silver badge

The MacBook Wheel

"With Predictive Sentence technology..."

Classic

You've got pr0n: Yes, smut by email is latest workaround for UK's looming cock block

Dave 126 Silver badge

Hehe! Bizarrely, the Mahna Mahna song from the Muppets was originally from an Italian soft core psuedo-documentary about Swedish sex life.

http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Mahna_Mahna_(song)

Make masses carry their mobes, suggests wig in not-at-all-creepy speech

Dave 126 Silver badge

> don't think any current model of phone actually has a way to turn the GPS transceiver off. Android (or I guess iOS) just controls access to requests for GPS info. So you're probably no saving any power

Really? In Android, the Location Settings are marked 'High Accuracy (GPS, cell tower and WiFi)' and 'Battery Saving (cell tower and WiFi only) '. When I first switch to High Accuracy (GPS) it'll take the phone some seconds to a minute (depending on terrain and availability of cell masts for AGPS) to lock on to enough satellites a clue that the phone hadn't been tracking satellites in Battery Saver mode. The GPS will deplete my battery quickly to the extent that the phone grows hot and my car stereo's USB socket won't keep the battery charged, especially on older phones I've owned such as Xperia P, Xperia Z3C and Nexus 5. These are phones running something close to Stock Android, but even my Samsung has its location setting marked this way. What phone are you using?

Dave 126 Silver badge

Get to fuck

See title

Virtue singing – Spotify to pull hateful songs and artists

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Spotify to pull hateful songs and artists

I thought running off on tour with a 15 year old girl and being cruel to groupies was a core part of rock n roll.

Fitness band-it Garmin adds mobe bank Starling to bonk-to-pay fold

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: "How "smart" does a "smartwatch" have to be?"

Yeah, the article didn't make mention of security measures such as entering a PIN, or requiring a PIN to be entered after the watch is removed from the owner's wrist.

Really, I think watches and phones are overthinking the problem... if cash/credit cards were roughly the width of their working parts ( let's say 12mm) they could be more easily carried ( i.e with a pocket in a belt, or contained in a watch strap or bracelet). I mean SIM cards were the size of credit cards, before mini, micro and now nano SIMs became standard.

Let's kick the tyres on Google's Android P... It's not an overheating wreck, but UX is tappy

Dave 126 Silver badge

If continuing updates are a priority for you, it's best to buy a phone that ships with Oreo (as opposed to phones offering Oreo as a Day One Update). The phones shipping with Oreo have to support Project Treble, a modular design that means updates don't have to wait for binary blobs from ODMs.

Apple to devs: Give us notch support or … you don't wanna know

Dave 126 Silver badge

It's odd - I have a notch-less phone with OLED display. My black status bar therefore looks like the black bezel if the phone, other than the icons. These icons look like they'd nestle neatly to the sides of the earpiece. The first vendor to place status icons in line with the camera and earpiece was LG with their V20 in 2016 - only they used a discrete secondary display.

However, my phone is a Galaxy so there's too many other sensors stuck up there for Samsung to use a notch, unless they ditch the IR iris scanner.

I like the 2:1 aspect ratio, it allows you to use the keyboard and see where you're typing at the same time - currently I can see six lines in this Regard comment box, having a notch would allow seven lines (or have a permeant number row on the keyboard).

AI crisis: Sony reports shortage of cute robot puppies!

Dave 126 Silver badge

Buddhist funerals for robot dogs

Contrary to what was stated in the article, some owners of first gen Aibos remained very attached to them. The funerals mentioned here are result of Sony ceasing to repair Aibos in 2014.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/03/japan-robot-dogs-get-solemn-buddhist-send-off-at-funerals

My PC is on fire! Can you back it up really, really fast?

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: I recall even my mum (a bit like Dilmom) telling me a fire story

We students used Zip drives at university, and I even got one in my home pc. The university computers had Windows 2000 which had an interesting bug: it would rewrite a zip disc with the contents of the previous Zip disc to be inserted in that machine. Grr.

LG's flagship arrives with <checks script> ... G7 what now?

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Apparently .....

LG didn't copy, they led: their V20 phone from 2016 placed the status bar info (notifications, battery and signal levels etc) at the the same level as the front facing camera and earpiece. LG did this by means of a small secondary display, but in terms of concept and purpose it was the same as a notch - it was just implemented by different means.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Another notch!

Copying Apple? The LG V20 had status bar information in line with its front-facing camera in September 2016, though it used a second display rather than a notched main panel. Rubin's Essential phone had a notch before the iPhobe X, and other solutions to maximising screen pixels come with compromises (e.g, the Mi Mix from October 2016 had a front facing camera on the bottom bezel).

> why have it in the first place?

Very simply, it comes from the observation that most people have unused pixels in the middle of the status bar - notifications sit left, signal and battery status sit right. By happy chance, this often unused space is roughly the same size as that required for front facing apertures for earpiece, camera and other sensors. By shifting the status bar up, more space is left for actual content without increasing the length of the phone. It's a sensible enough solution (especially since creating the notch doesn't really add much to the cutting path of the laser already used for cutting out phone panels of this size), but I appreciate some people don't like the appearance of it. It's fine at the same time as phone panels have moved away from 16:9 displays to 2:1 displays, since the smaller dimension is limited by the size of people's hands and ergonomics. Making the phone taller allows more text to be read with less scrolling. This is generally a good thing. I use the extra vertical pixels to have my virtual keyboard always display numbers and yet still be able to read what I've typed. YMMV.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: At Dave 126, Loudspeaker

Cheers Shadow Systems, I often did perch my Nexus 5 on my shoulder, especially when walking the dog across the fields! I find the Galaxy S8 to be louder, so now I can get away with a shirt or jacket pocket. In the kitchen, for example, I can pop Galaxy on the table and make tea and toast without missing any words in a podcast. When I leave s room I'll take my phone with me - easier than picking up the phone *and* an external speaker.

I do have some actually quite decent earbuds for the phone, but the cables can get caught in things.

Again, I only do this in situations away from other people.

The battery use of a phone's loudspeaker is an interesting one - I have recently noticed it draining faster than I expected it for a new phone, but I hadn't yet chased down other battery draining variables such as a marginal 4G signal. I suspect you're right that the pokey little speaker is consuming a fair bit of juice.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Imperfect notch hiding

Most of the Android implementations allow the user to hide the notch if they want (works best if the screen is OLED, capable of perfect black). It's iOS and Apple's App Store that lays down guidelines and rules about not hiding the notch.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Imperfect notch hiding

The software lets you hide the notch should you want to, but because the screen is LCD and not OLED you'll be able to see grey next to the notch.

Personally notches don't bother me, but I know they upset some people.

Dave 126 Silver badge

The LG G2 was the first Android phone to be able to play back 24bit 192Khz audio files natively (handy if you can't be bothered to transcode your music library). Some subsequent G and V models have boasted some very good ECC Sabre DACs and amps, but not always in the European versions of those models.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Loudspeaker

This G7 is said to have a big internal resonance chamber for its loudspeaker, and will sound even bassier if placed on a flat surface.

Now, I hate music being played from phones in pubs. However, I do like to potter around the house listening to podcasts (without carrying an external speaker from room to roim), and I've found my Galaxy to be loud enough to hear spoken-word content over a boiling kettle, or even in the shower. My Nexus wasn't loud enough for these use-cases. It's a small thing, but very welcome.

NASA demos little nuclear power plant to help find little green men

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Why don't they just use..

Yeah, but where do you get banana skins on Mars?

Exclusive to all press: Atari launches world's best ever games console

Dave 126 Silver badge

For more trips down an alternative history memory lane:

The consoles that nearly were and never were:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Vaporware_game_consoles

I've got way too much cash, thinks Jeff Bezos. Hmmm, pay more tax? Pay staff more? Nah, let's just go into space

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Bill Gates....

And not only is Gates giving nearly all of his wealth away ( in a seriously run organised manner, targeted at specific goals) but he is, along with pals like Warren Buffet, encouraging other billionaires to do the same.

Apple and The Notched One: It can't hide the X-sized iPhone let-down

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Grew revenue...

I've never quite grokked this concept of people with little expendable income giving financial advice to - or at least judging the spending habits of - people with lots of expendable income.

Reg man straps on Facebook's new VR goggles, feels sullied by the experience

Dave 126 Silver badge

You can side-load 2D and 3D movies to phones for use with VR headsets.

The following link may help. I haven't tried it myself:

http://i-loveshare.com/rip-3d-blu-ray-to-google-daydream-vr/

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Tech firms are putting huge resources into VR/AR at the expense of everything else

Hehe, you supplied the links before I asked for them, cheers AC!

Right oh, to clarify then, Sweeney by 'mainstream' is talking about everyone having a lightweight pair of VR glasses powered by a smartphone-sized brick in their pocket of roughly equivilent power to today's PC desktop, and a dozen years is how he's extrapolating Moore's Law to have that happen within reasonable power restraints.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Tech firms are putting huge resources into VR/AR at the expense of everything else

Ten to twenty years from mainstream adoption... that's such a long time frame that I feel that maybe some nuance has been lost from Mr Sweeny's context. Did he mean mainstream like a PlayStation ( common enough) or mainstream like a smartphone (near ubiquitous)? Many of the technological pieces are around two years away and are being developed for other applications (such as Micro LED displays, light-based WiFi etc)

Anyway, outside of Silicon Valley here in my part of England, there's some gentle but genuine interest in VR from some of the people who already have games consoles... a gentle interest in a 'wait and see' kind of a way. And just the other night I tried a Google Cardboard demo with a non-gamer (other than Scrabble in her iPhone) and she enjoyed it - in a way that I've seen the Nintendo Wii be fun in mixed company.

Tl;dr: Some hype, not purely hype.

We just wanna torque: Spinning transfer boffins say torque memory near

Dave 126 Silver badge

Safe around magnets?

Any ideas? I'm clueless.

Apple's latest financials are still pretty decent even though iPhone sales are slowing

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Only 4,000 Macs?

Above comment withdrawn because the correction has been made to the article.

Supercycle to su-'meh'-cycle: Apple iPhone warehouses heave with unsold Notches

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: It's not all gloom and doom in Fruitville

> Which makes one wonder why Google fiddles around with hardware sales at all - they aren't making friends for themselves amongst hardware manufacturers,

I've never seen a Pixel in the wild, and the first gen at least were only made in small numbers. At the price the second-gen Pixel range was sold at, it was only really competing against very top end Android phones such as Samsung Galaxy or Note - and Samsung sell so many phones that sales lost to Pixels are near insignificant to them - at least in the context of their historical frenemy relationship with Google. Equivilent Sony phones undercut the Pixel, LG keep tripping themselves up (boot loops, differentiating features missing from non-Korean phones of same model number).

Of course the flip side of your point is that by contracting the manufacturing of a Pixel phone, Google is demonstrating that if might not need the long-established phone vendors as once it did. The Chinese upstarts seem to be doing a good job of filling in the mid and lower end of the Android market.

Take-off crash 'n' burn didn't kill the Concorde, it was just too bloody expensive to maintain

Dave 126 Silver badge

Quality headphones going cheap

In the 2000s, a friend of mine had some Sennheiser HD 25 headphones with the British Airways logo printed in the headband. After the Concorde fleet was retired, the inflight entertainment headphones were sold online. DJ friends of mine swear by HD 25s.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Surprise Sighting

Filton one was flown in. Their was quite a buzz about its swansong flight. A friend of mine has some lovely big prints of photos taken of her above Clifton suspension bridge taken from a helicopter (either a police or press chopper, I forget)

Dave 126 Silver badge

A couple of engineers, when facing a measurement problem in designing the RR Olympus engines for Concorde solved that problem. They spun their solution, a touch probe, out into a company called Renishaw (a sponsor of the Filton Aerospace museum) , whose measurement equipment is today used in the precise placement of electronic components (Foxconn, Samsung et al), as well checking aerospace components, neurology and other fields. Their logo can be seen at 5 minutes into the official iPhone 5 video - it's the ruby-tipped touch probe checking the case chamfers after diamond cutting.

http://www.renishaw.com/en/concorde-completes-final-journey-to-new-gbps19m-home--40636

Motorised robo-coolbox biz Starship makes lunchtime pitch to campus-dwellers

Dave 126 Silver badge

Pot meet Kettle?

> Robo-coolbox firm Starship Technologies is now touting its services to campus-based universities, businesses and other places where people might be too lazy to walk to the shops for a bite to eat.

Or indeed to tech newsrooms where the staff are disinclined to walk to the bar?

NASA dusts off FORTRAN manual, revives 20-year-old data on Ganymede

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: After an extended mission...

Mankind is not only contemplating a landing, but is aiming to smash/drill/melt through the ice to place a probe in Europa's oceans.

It's one of the missions being used to justify the SLS. Only yesterday Boeing put a website comparing their yet-non existent rocket to Musk's demonstrated Falcon Heavy. For some reason aren't comparing their SLS to Musk's similarly not-yet existent Big Falcon Rocket.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Paper tape anyone?

If you can setup the mechanical side of things (reels and a motor), you could read in punched paper tape using a webcam and some software. Or perhaps you could dismantle a scanner and mate the parts to an Arduino.

A friend of mine has a Player Piano, which still plays back 'software' laid down in the 1930s (Fats Waller songs). If you visit a steam fair, you may see a steam orchestra playing even older punched card music.

During WWII, Hollywood star Hedy Lamar invented a frequency-hopping mechanism for controlling torpedos (so the signal couldn't be jammed by the enemy) based on a minuturised Player Piano mechanism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

Double double, soil and trouble, fire burn and heat shield bubble: NASA cracks rover, has dirty talk with ESA

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Why aren't we digging deep for signs of life?

An upcoming mission to Mars will include a drilling rig... around 2 metres deep, if memory serves. There's more info on the latest episode of The Sky at Night, which is dedicated to Mars.

Shaped charges use a jet of plasma pushing once solid material out of the way like it were liquid... it'd dig you a nice hole for sure, but 1, it'd damage your sample, and 2, you're still left with the problem of getting your sample out of the hole.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Safety and life

Candidate for best job title: Planetary Protection Officer.

It's a real job, and their role is oversee precautions against contaminating Mars with Earth-native bacteria.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: No news here ...

For bridges and other buildings, a safety factor of around 3 is common, for airliners where just adding more material would quickly make them uneconomical to fly a factor of 1.5 (150%) is used. Given a Mars mission has more constraints in common with an aeroplane than it does a bridge 120% sounds about right. Remember, the calculations are taking into account worse case scenarios and erring on the side of caution to arrive at a figure, and then this figure is multiplied by 1.2.

Paperback writer? Microsoft slaps patents on book-style gadgetry with flexible display

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Why?

> And why would you bother folding a screen, with all the challenges that creates, instead of the simpler rolling it up?

Minimum radius of bend, I'd imagine.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Life Cycle

> this looks like microshaft trying to stop other manufacturers doing anything because oof the patents.

Patents only protect a method of doing something, not the something itself. So no, it doesn't stop other companies making flexible displays.

We wanted a camera, they gave us the eye of Gemini – and an eSIM

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: I'm struggling to see the point of this new Gemini, all of a sudden, after a year of technolust.

I miss crazy Sony.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Why

A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say. However, I can imagine a lot of buyers of this Gemini will carry it as a second device, in addition to their standard smartphone - hence the optional nature of the Gemini camera.

Dave 126 Silver badge

A device, yes, but it's not a 'phone' as the Gemini is. The cellular iPads can't make normal phone calls, even with a valid SIM (either it's embedded SIM, a programmable Apple SIM or a normal SIM). Well, okay, the cellular iPad hardware is a 'phone' - and it can make emergency calls if needs be without a SIM as all other phones can - but iOS won't let it be a phone you can use normally.

What the iPad can do, voice-wise, is call other iOS owners using Facetime (or presumably WhatsApp et al). An iPad can also be used to make and take normal calls using an iPhone if it's on the same network. But it won't work as a phone in its own right - unless you need to make an emergency call.

Google Pixel 2 XL: Like paying Apple-tier prices then saying, hey, please help yourself to my data

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Pixel Camera processing...

The Pixel photo *processing* can be done on Snapdragon or Exynos SoCs. The extra *processor* in a Pixel 2 can be used to *accelerate* this processing, but it's not required - indeed, as the article notes the extra silicon wasn't enabled when the Pixel 2 was first launched.

https://www.xda-developers.com/google-camera-mod-exynos-portrait-mode-galaxy-s8-s7-note-8/

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Still with the removable storage thing?

It's the concept of tiered storage that some people want. iPhobe storage is very fast indeed, which is essential for some video capture modes and lets apps load near instantly. However, it's overkill for music and video libraries - where people will happily swap speed for capacity.

Generally, those phones that make a point of high-resolution slow motion video capture (high end models from Samsung and Sony, for example) will have very fast NAND storage.

Anandtech conduct their own tests of phone storage speed.