* Posts by Dave 126

10643 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010

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

Dave 126 Silver badge

Pixel Camera processing...

...can be side-loaded onto some non-Pixel phones, according to threads over at XDA Developers.

That's no moon... er, that's an asteroid. And it'll be your next and final home, spacefarer

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: history will repeat itself

The young ones will just build some sheds on the outside of the asteroid and stick the grumpy old gits in there.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Either generation ships or seed ships - where frozen embryos are brought to term in an artificial womb and the resulting children raised by robots. See: The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C Clarke.

Medical and psychological challenges. Presumably a seed ship can be smaller than a generation ship.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: How about we work on this bit on Earth first...

In countries with high levels of female education, good healthcare and access to contraception, the birth rate is more or less equal to the death rate (and that's without any top-down policies of the type tried by China or India). This means that the population size is fairly stable. It is an expanding population that has depleted our low hanging resources on Earth.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Life Aboard A Colony

Our first 3D printers weren't printed... they were moulded, turned, extruded and milled. Follow it back...

How do we get from a piece of knapped flint to a precision machine tool?

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Will our Descendants Feel the Same Way?

The Orville, a recent TV series that is a homage (and not the spoof it was pitched to be) to Star Trek TNG, features a generation ship. The occupants don't realise they live within a ship, and have descended into a tyranical theocracy.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: The Heinlein story

And another, a BBC radio drama, called Earth Search. The story begins as four youths come to realise that the AIs they were raised to see as guardians might have been telling porkies about the meteorite strike that killed their parents and the rest of the crew...

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: I resemble that remark

The evolution of language might depend upon the libraries of books,films and podcasts available onboard - and the appetite of the occupants for watching films set in alien (to them) environments such as cities, grasslands and mountains.

Slang terms will appear and rise and fall out of fashion - as they always do.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Will our Descendants Feel the Same Way?

@Halcin

Whilst your broad point is a very important one, your opening paragraph about us not empathising with people 50 years ago might not be best argument for your case.

In human history, a lot of people have lived their lives in the same fashion as their great grandparents. Technological and social change tends to occur in fits and starts. We are living through such changes, just as our great grandparents did, but this is not true of all people who have lived.

$50 add-on can turn your mobe into a less misanthropic House MD

Dave 126 Silver badge

As a teenager the smartphone would be a Dougie Howser MD, Shirley?

Audiophiles have really taken to the warm digital tone of streaming music

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: High End Audio

Because it is only 4K screens that are offered with HDR. You'll get the benefit of High Dynamic Range even if your vision is a little soft focus. Whether or not it is worth it for you is for you to decide - YMMV.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Hehe, I was sitting in with an old boy with some Voigt single driver speakers, and a younger lad who was creating a cutting list to commission a carpenter so he could make his own. I pointed out to him that many timber yards will have a CNC router, and that the cutting services only add about 20% to the cost of the sheet material* - he was delighted! If you talk with the timber yard, they can even an angled cutting tool so your pieces have mitre edges. (I was quoted £100/h for their CNC router, but it's big solid and thus fast machine, individual sheets don't take long)

Dave 126 Silver badge

> Streaming is a young person's game. The over 50s have no interest

My dad streams over Spotify, I don't. He also has a lot of CDs, most of which he systematically copied over to his Brennan*. He listens to Radio 3 over FM a lot. If he hears a track he loves, he looks at the BBC website for that show, ticks the track he wants, and the BBC website generates a playlist that can be exported to Spotify.

Another over fifties family member with more money had some Bose jukebox multiroom system, but these days uses some iPhone and Sonos setup.

Don't forget that many over fifties have money to spare!

*A small device containing a laptop CD drive, HDD and amp. CDs placed in are automatically ripped, with track titles taken from its internal database. It's not connected to anything except speakers. It's a nice machine, but hard to recommend to tech literate Reg readers. The man who made it used to work for Sinclair Research and for Atari.

Happy having Amazon tiptoe into your house? Why not the car, then? In-trunk delivery – what could go wrong?

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Coal Bunker

Back in the year 2000 this problem was put to product and industrial design students across several UK universities.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Unlike many items from Amazon which can be popped through a letterbox ( books, memory cards, cables etc) food needs to be put away in a fridge - the recipient needs to be present. This means that the supermarket delivery service is set up for delivering outside of business hours, dropping off to multiple recipients on a route.

X marks the Notch, where smartmobe supercycles go to die

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: In defence ..

> Indeed. This push for "no bezels" is not desirable. It's the exact opposite of desirable.

Eh? You can restore bezels by sticking your phone in a case. Having very slim bezels on a phone means that it can still be protected fron drop damage without messing the ergonomics up too much. I can't see the downside.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Feature trickle down

Lots of phones are going to have notches, especially the Chinese ones. Really, I don't get the fuss - on an OLED screen the black status bar is indistinguishable from the bezel anyway. Most people most of the time don't have an entire stutus bar full of icons, leaving a black areas in the middle. Why not stick the camera and earpiece there?

Phones are getting taller (2:1 is becoming very common) to allow users to read more text with less scrolling (the upper limit on the width of the phone being constrained by hand size), so the whole notched area of the screen is beyond that covered by the common 16:9 aspect ratio for video, never mind the 4:3 output of the phone's own camera.

I just haven't read anyone make the case for the downsides of a notch other than aesthetics - which are a function of the OS and software (Apple made a deliberate decision to highlight the notch, not every version of Android does). Again, OLED screens allow the notch to be invisible when just showing the status bar.

An interesting article about lasers, specifically the challenges in cutting OLED substrates. Notches don't really add to the difficulty, since serious engineering challenges had to be overcome just to produce high doing OLEDs at smartphone sizes:

https://www.industrial-lasers.com/articles/2018/03/manufacturing-challenges-in-laser-cutting-oled-displays.html

Dave 126 Silver badge

I'm much the same. I got a Galaxy S8 for around £500 due to then upcoming release of the S9. I guess that Samsung initially sold enough S8s at full price that they could afford to discount it before launching its successor. Other than the S9's potential future-proofing of Project Treble, I'm not missing that much - certainly not £300 worth of difference.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: In defence ..

@ Tom 38

Reread Macjule's first sentence again.

Regardless of how he got the phone, he's ended up with something he appreciates - good battery life for his average use.

Good for him. My LG Nexus 5 battery was terrible; it didn't stop me considering an LG V20.

I got 99 secure devices but a Nintendo Switch ain't one: If you're using Nvidia's Tegra boot ROM I feel bad for you, son

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Isn't the ability to run custom code a feature, not a bug?

My mate used that to play Commodore 64 games on an emulator. Think he's too busy playing Zelda on his Switch these days.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Pwned? This is great!

Breath of the Wild is the reason my mate bought a Switch. Mario and Mario Kart are just a vague bonus to be considered down the line.

Otherwise his PS4 dies the job nicely.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Yawn

> So this dangerous exploitable hole I am going to get pwned through requires physical access?

As it's a portable console that could be taken into school, it's not impossible for a kiddy to mess around with their classmate's Switch.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Pwned? This is great!

> Sorry, but that's just a racket and should be a criminal offence.

I dunno, my friend knowingly bought a Ninetendo Switch for the sole purpose of playing a handful of 1st party Nintendo games, starting with Zelda and then probably Mario and Mario Kart. He's very happy with his informed choice.

Undermining a console's defences to run emulators and such, well, that's what his his PS2 and and PSP are for.

Scratch Earth-killer asteroid off your list of existential threats

Dave 126 Silver badge

> Scratch Earth-killer asteroid off your list of existential threats

An existential threat is a threat to the existence of humanity, not merely a threat to the existence of Dave. I might have another five decades left to me, but hopefully humanity will be around for far longer - so there's plenty of scope for the orbit of a bloody great space rock to become disturbed.

Brains behind seL4 secure microkernel begin RISC-V chip port

Dave 126 Silver badge

@Leed D

It is proven, in the same way as a mathematical thereom can be proven. Under its design, a buggy app can't be used to gain further access into the system. Nor are Apple the only customers for SEL4 - DARPA develop with it too:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/formal-verification-creates-hacker-proof-code-20160920/

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

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family#High_assurance:_seL4

Twenty years ago today: Windows 98 crashed live on stage with Bill Gates. Let's watch it again...

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Bill Gates

> Imagine what Steve Jobs would have done to that guy.

The announcement of the first iPhone was said be a scary time for some engineers - it was touch and go that it would make it through the presentation without crashing.

Still, I seem to remember a technical issue during a Jobs keynote that he handled well - I can't imagine him not having practiced such a response.

There is no perceived IT generation gap: Young people really are thick

Dave 126 Silver badge

You might have an answer to online age verification... the user is presented with an advertising jungle from the 90s and has to name the correct product to proceed. A similar system using the theme music to cartoons might also work.

Dave 126 Silver badge

> An engineer stands almost motionless over a nearby wide-format inkjet

That's a *technician*, not an engineer. If we want more people to use their brains in society, then respecting the rank of engineer is not a bad place to start.

Countries like Germany properly recognise titles such as Engineer or Brewmaster as important - just as we do medical doctors - and not the sort of thing you grasp after a day's training.

Cheers!

Motorola Z2 Force: This one's for the butterfingered Android lovers

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: At £500 it would be a steal

List prices aren't always accurate. Many brands are almost always available for substantially less than their list price.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Battery life for an "outdoors" phone

With this Moto Mod phone you can snap a battery pack on the back. Not only does this mean you can carry spare batteries, but also your phone's internal battery isn't subject to as many charge / discharge cycles.

People should be aware that being in remote places - skiing, hillwalking - with poor signal will deplete their phone battery very quickly unless they they turn off 3G/4G. This can result in them not having enough juice for an emergency call. Using GPS too is an additional power drain.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Physical keyboard mod

There's a physical qwerty keyboard Mod about to be released - various journalists had a hands-on test of pre-production samples in January 2018.

Dave 126 Silver badge

> But it seems odd that a phone sold on its unique quality of a resilient screen needs some extra help like this.

Ain't physics a rascal, eh? Generally, things that are tough are not hard, and hard things are not tough. You gotta make a choice, I'm afraid. Motorola's engineers are just working with what the universe has handed them.

I'd recommend looking through forums to see how this phone performs with a toughened glass screen protector - they can sometimes have an adverse effect upon the screen's touch sensitivity. A toughnened glass protector will still likely break at some point if dropped, but cheaper to replace than a scratched phone screen.

Europe turns nose up at new smartphones: Beancounters predict 7% sales drop

Dave 126 Silver badge

How so? Global sales of smartphones are still increasing, albeit slowly. And of the smartphones still being sold in Europe, who's to say they don't have more storage on board than equivilent models a year ago?

Dave 126 Silver badge

>you can always install them on Sammys.

On both the Snapdragon and Exynos varieties of Sammy?

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Keep on dreaming

Most phones that support wireless charging support use the same flavour of tech these days.

Failing that, USB C offers power plus video out plus USB peripherals.

Not sure why you want to run Windows/Chrome from your phone... maybe you're best off getting a headless fag-packet sized computer, either ARM or Intel ('Compute Stick'). Either way, they cost less than a midrange phone.

Samsung DEX offers a desktop environment with some mouse and keyboard optimised Android apps, including a browser and Office 365. The docking hardware is standard (it works for other USB C devices such as laptops and Nintendo Switch). A review and discussion of the setup is on the Reg. 3rd party docks are £20.

NASA's TESS mission in distress, Mars Express restart is a success

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: re-orientated itself

'Orient as a verb means to "find direction" or "give direction." The noun form of this kind of orienting is orientation.

Sometimes people in their speech will form an imagined verb from orientation and say orientate. At best, orientate is a back-formation used humorously to make the speaker sound pompous. The correct word is the verb orient.'

- http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000245.htm

Samsung Galaxy S9: Still the Lord of All Droids

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: S8 is now around £550

I use a Tate glass screen protector, slightly smaller than the screen as it's designed to work with tight cases like my Spigen. Already the screen protector has cracks radiating from an impact on the edge of the screen.

When I get around to getting another Tate protector, I'll try using some wax to seal the edges of it in the hope of preventing dust ingress.

Dave 126 Silver badge

It comes with Oreo and Project Treble... this means your previous experience with phone updates is not a good guide as to what to expect in future.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Still might buy one ...

Hmmm... you have 14 days after the phone arrives to send it back without quibble, yet they're asking you to wait up to 21 days to see if you receive the sweeteners you were expecting.

If there was no smallprint when you placed the order and you don't get the extras, you can return the phone for a full refund, since they've broken their contract. they can't retroactively amend the contract after you made the order.

Dave 126 Silver badge

As tools go, I really don't understand why he considers waterproofing to be a 'crap' feature.

You might go years without using it, granted, but it's good to have the option. Nobody plans to be in flood water, nobody plans to fall in a ditch, nobody plans to get caught in a sudden down pour without suitable clothing.

Give me waterproofing over a slightly louder speaker any day. Nor does waterproofing exclude a swappable battery, as some Galaxy Active and Xperia phones have shown.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: A grand for a phone

It's waterproof. If you drop it in the bog it'll be fine as long as you don't flush.

But then so is its predecessor, for several hundred quid less.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: "the after-market support"

The S9, unlike the S8, supports Google's Project Treble. Time will tell if this modularisation of the OS (so nobody's waiting on ODM binary blobs) will result in quicker and easier updates.

All phones sold with Oreo must support Treble, but some phones are sold with Nougat and promise day one updates to Oreo - beware.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Hmmm

If you are a business user, you can't reclaim the 20% VAT because OnePkys refuse to issue VAT receipts - this makes the Galaxy S8 cheaper.

The OnePlus 5T is highly rated, but in a few key points it falls short of the S8; waterproofing and wireless charging (both of these can protect your investment against a unplanned submersion or a broken USB socket), screen resolution and brightness (causing the 5T to not receive HDR certification), and camera quality.

These shortcomings could be cheerfully overlooked when the 5T was significantly cheaper than the S8, but now the S8 is heavily discounted it's a no-brainer: go Korean.

Dave 126 Silver badge

S8 is now around £550

And yeah, is also waterproof and has Qi charging (I haven't used the latter, but I like the idea that my phone will remain perfectly usable should its USB C socket break). Listening to podcasts in the shower is nice (speaker is just about loud enough, unlike my Nexus 5.

The S8 is working well for me.

Minor gripes are:

- fingerprint sensor location.

- difficulty in finding a case that really protects the long edges of the display, due to the curved screen.

- No touchscreen sensitivity adjustment. With a tempered glass screen protector, the phone was initially missing taps. However, and for some reason, turning off 'hard press on navigation bar to return to homescreen' makes the whole screen a bit more sensitive.

- Not being able to remap my Bixby button to something useful, like Flashlight. I don't want to use a 3rd party app to do so, and in any case such apps use the Bixby framework as a workaround.

- No Project Treble. This doesn't bother me yet, but the S8 unlike the S9 doesn't support Google's new modular approach to updates, so there's a chance it won't be supported for as long as phones that do.

Of my gripes, only two are fixed in the S9. Is that, plus better photos (S8 camera is good), several hundred quid? There is of course no one answerer to that!

That's about it, really. Because Samsung use onscreen navigation buttons, you can easily swap the Back and App Switcher buttons to Android standard positions instead of Samsung's default. It's a lovely looking phone, but then I never have it out of its chunky case. Battery is okay, much better than my Nexus 5, maybe not quite as good as my Z3 Compact (smaller low Res screen helped the Sony there).

The Samsung Internet app (based on Chrome) has done genuinely useful features. Night mode, and also taking internet video into a pop up window or fullscreen, with download option.

Best thing about a smart toilet? You can take your mobile in without polluting it

Dave 126 Silver badge

Problems no one has?

In Vietnam and Cambodia, every toilet has a (manually operated) flexible hose for washing whilst sat in the toilet. It's great. It's maybe due to older houses having sewage systems that don't cope with toilet paper. It maybe that the heat and humidity of that climate makes another way of keeping fresh desirable. Whatever, it's a far better solution than using 'flushable' wet wipes as some folk in the UK do.

And if you have any expectations of getting lucky that day, it's confidence-inspiring to feel clean and fresh below the belt.

The architecture in Japan often leans towards smaller houses and thinner walls. Having a toilet that produces sound effects (birdsong, waterfalls) is a way of maintaining a pretence of privacy.

The first mainstream waterproof smartphones were from Sony. I don't know if this is related at all. I usually start playing a podcast before I do my business, and pick it up again after washing my hands - so the waterproofing is mainly handy for listening to podcasts in the shower. That Sony made a waterproof tablet is useful, given how many people tablets them to display cooking recipes.

Sysadmin’s worst client was … his mother! Until his sister called for help

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Walls can be useful

Indeed.

I've often wished my friend's PC was similarly walled; he has enough knowledge to screw things up but not enough to fix them. Unfortunately he's wilful, too, so will insist on doing things his way and not mine.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Rubbish touch pads on cheap laptops cause all sorts of strife and user confusion. Some parts of the unmarked pad result in scrolling, some selecting. In these cases, it is not the user's fault if they want to throw the machine out of the window.

Thankfully, market demand is finally beginning to result in decent touchpads on laptops. There isn't always a mouse around.

(And indeed I'm reluctant to lend out my carefully chosen mice since someone threw one against a wall - it's handy Forward / Back navigation buttons caused to lose a long rant he was writing on a forum.)

Where's my free monitoring service, One Plus? – hacked-off customers

Dave 126 Silver badge

Customer Service at OnePlus isn't great, though they sorted me out eventually. They don't supply VAT invoices, wouldn't cancel an order the day before they shipped it, and gave conflicting advice about refusing the delivery. I cancelled the order because of their weird VAT position, and ordered a Galaxy S8 instead - actually cheaper (because of the impending launch of the S9) than the top tier OnePlus 5T, even before the VAT refund.

The weird VAT situation was not mentioned by any reviewer of the OnePlus 5T.

Google's not-Linux OS documentation cracks box open at last

Dave 126 Silver badge

Blackberry's microkernal OS could run Android apps - something about shimming in API calls as required - and Google have more sway with Android app developers than Blackberry did. Maybe Google will just encourage them to develop their apps with tools that easily allow Fuschia as well as Android (and iOS) apps to be built?

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Call me a cynic....

Amazon have tried replacing for Play Services, and Samsung too bundle their own equivilent to the Play Store, email, etc which whilst aren't completely ready once served as a hint to Google that Samsung might focus on them if Google's terms aren't to their liking.

The trouble is many 3rd party apps which use Google Play Services APIs (instead of ASOP), such as those for location.