* Posts by Dave 126

10643 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010

Huawei Mate 10 Pro: The unfashionable estate car wants to go to town

Dave 126 Silver badge

Using 18:9 instead of 2:1...

...makes sense because it clearly communicates that the screen is just a smidge taller (in portrait orientation, obviously) than the 16:9 screens that most users will be using for reference.

That said, with a variety of aspect ratios it is the expression of screen *size* by the diagonal measurement that is less helpful - being told the width of the screen and phone gives a clearer idea of the phone's size (with respect to thumb reach and pocket-friendliness.)

Dave 126 Silver badge

For sure, for some users. Other users were attracted to the Note range for reasons other than the stylus, such as SD card slot. It's interesting that no other vendor sells a phone based on good stylus support.

For keyboards, the Qwerty Moto Mod keyboard looks interesting, and IMHO a detachable keyboard makes more sense for a phone than a permanently attached one. (If keyboard develops a fault it can be swapped out, phone vice versa, keyboard can be used on the train but then left in your bag when you go to the pub).

Damian Green: Not only my workstation – mystery pr0n all over Parliamentary PCs

Dave 126 Silver badge

Well great Lee. Are you suggesting that MPs hoik around their own personal laptops for skyping their children in their lunch hour? Seriously, I want my elected representatives to be able concept Tate in their job, not to cart 2Kg of secondary laptop around for no good reason. I'd rather they make their decisions without worrying about the crick in their neck from carrying around unnecessary shit - and the chiropractor's bill is unlikely to be cheaper than a laptop.

Hell's teeth, MPs waste far more time jumping through hoops for the press and doing tricks for their constituents than they ever do watching porn.

To paraphrase Bill Hicks: would you rather an MP be locked in their bathroom watching porn, or hanging over a war vote with an erection they can't get rid of?

Dave 126 Silver badge

Bernard Woolley: That's one of those irregular verbs, isn't it? I give confidential security briefings. You leak. He has been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: pron on the cp

> Seeing a load of porn sites being accessed in his browser history, mixed with accesses to his email account, is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.

The copper himself has said he had no proof. Relying upon the word of a single witness is NOT beyond reasonable doubt. In any case, 'beyond reasonable doubt' is for criminal courts, and nobody is saying a crime has been committed, not even Knacker of the Yard 'imself.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: pron on the cp

The copper himself has said he has no proof.

Dave 126 Silver badge

> No filter on the gov network?

Have you actually thought about what you've just said? These are the people who decide our laws - so placing power in the hands of the white/black list curators (who are....?) is not a good idea. Read some Jonathan Swift (Flappers), and read some more, possibly some treatise on logic, politics, human nature, keep reading, and maybe get back to us.

Okay, so you haven't bothered? Well, the flappers were people who held flaps over the ears of the powerful. Nobody seeking an audience with the powerful would get far unless they got the favour of the flappers.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Er, the burden of proof is on those making the accusation, not the accused - for criminal cases. So why should Green present a defence?

For civil cases it's a balance - but who is the wronged party in this case? Exactly.

Sheeiit, the French are far more civilised here - they just assume that every politician is having an affair and so continue discussing the actual policies (or else rioting or protesting as their mood suits... but nothing as dreary as discussing unattractive people's sex lives).

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: So Many Questions

> They all need to be fired on all sides by the sounds of it! Green for porn on his machine,

The copper himself said he can't prove that Green watched porn in his computer. How do you square your statement with 'innocent until proven guilty'? Do you really want a situation where democratically-elected representatives can be got rid of based on a single individual's say-so without evidence?

Hell, it's like you don't remember the CCTV footage that didn't agree with the policemen's account of the words exchanged during Plebgate'.

Habeas Corpus. Show me the body [of evidence] (or please remain quiet. There's too much noise around already). Ta muchly.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Much whataboutery about nothing

> For most employees, it is a sackable offence though

He's a representative of his constituents, not an employee. If 75% of his constituents approved of hardcore unicorn BDSM (for example, obviously), why the hell should their elected representative be sacked? And sacked by whom? Where would the power of the sacker come from? Shieeet, and here was me thinking that IT folk could examine systems usefully...

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Poor excuse for a politician

Just ignore UT, if you quickly check his posting history you'll see why.

Brit MP Dorries: I gave my staff the, um, green light to use my login

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: I don't understand this

MPs can't be sacked in that conventional way because they are appointed by their constituents. If material found on a computer were grounds for an elected MP to be suddenly dismissed then there might be a chilling effect on democracy - it'd be too easy for a motivated party to place such material on the MPs computer if a change of MP suited their ends. They're elected as representatives, not as expert white hats.

What's insidious about this Green affair is that the copper himself says he can't prove anything - in which case, why even mention it?

Dave 126 Silver badge

> Every single time I have been upstairs to look at a the PC of a person important enough to have a secretary PA, the PA knows the password.

Indeed, and an 'important person' often has staff with access to snail mail and paper files too.

There is the issue of a constituent having a reasonable expectation of correspondence addressed to an MP only being read by the MP or by a very limited number of others - five or six seems excessive. However, if a topic is really sensitive or confidential, then perhaps seeing the MP in their surgery is a better option. Or, as in one episode of Yes Minister, hiding in the bushes outside their front door.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the failest mobe of all?

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Missing information

Well, the data just reinforces what some people already do - avoid Touch Wiz and steer towards a more stock Android - so Pixel, plus Sony and Moto don't stray too far.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Apps not platform

> I would consider that badly written programs are developments problems not hardware problems.

iPhones and Android phones aren't just different hardware though. They are different OSs, with different development environments and tools. I'd assume that these factors have some bearing on app reliability.

Dawn of The Planet of the Phablets in 2019 will see off smartphones

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: A numbers game

I'm not sure that people are blinded by Megapixel numbers as once they might have been. Some folks happily just buy the newest Samsung Galaxy or iPhone every couple of years because they feel the previous incarnation served them well enough and life's too short. Both the high end Galaxy and iPhone phones are considered to have good camera systems, and the iPhone's camera has remained at 12 megapixels for a while now.

Of the remaining folk, some choose a handset for another feature (cost, SD card, stylus maybe.

Other numbers are creeping into phone adverts, such as minimum aperture and photoreceptor size.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Health Risk?

I remember some poor fella falling a couple of foot into his arse at a house party after the log that formed the seat of a rope swing snapped. Unfortunately for him, he had a glass bottle in his back pocket, and he sustained cuts to his cheek. Luckily for him, it was a 35cl bottle of rum so at least his lacerations were sterilised.

The End of Abandondroid? Treble might rescue Google from OTA Hell

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Does it really matter?

It's not only Nexus and Pixel phones that get updates. It was only those phones, plus Project Silver phones, that were guaranteed updates though.

The whole point of this article is that any Oreo phone should be easier to update because some of the updates can now be applied independently of chipset or phone vendor.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: They don't regard the extra pennies on making a phone even a little bit future-proof as worth it

My Xperia P received updates to 3 Android versions, my Xperia Z3C a couple (before I dropped it). Whilst @heyrick might have a point about older Sony phones, any prospective buyer would do well to go beyond his single comment and get the lay of the land from reading threads in XDA Developers or sonesuch.

If anyone here knows of a site that has tracked manufacturer updates of phones over years, please do share. :)

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: always wondered why..

Google can't - prior to Treble, an Android update for a specific handset required binary blobs (developed for a Google-issued update for a specific chip) to be sent by the chipset vendors to the original device vendors.

SurfaceBook 2 battery drains even when plugged in

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: "fessing up to the problem and fixing it"

> I'm guessing the electronics handling the charging in the SBook 2 won't be able to handle the surge.

I believe it's a function of Microsoft's power connector, rolled over from previous Surface models.

Remember the 'budget' iPhone SE? Apple plans an update – reports

Dave 126 Silver badge

@John

I think you may have missed the point. No matter.

Not all video content requires or benefits from a big screen like Lawrence of Arabia does. People's use-cases for phones have evolved since the original iPhone, in line with cellular data speeds and cheapness, processing power and screen resolution.

I actually like the SE form factor (my last phone was at the time the only full power compact Android phone, an Xperia Z3C)

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: £300 refurbished? You've been ripped off.

A two year old Apple A9 SoC is still a very capable chip, aided by very fast NAND storage, too. See the Anandtech benchmarks. Looking at the silicone alone doesn't give you the whole picture though - how a device performs is a function of software and hardware.

Dave 126 Silver badge

The SE is the width of a playing card. The larger iPhones, and many Android phones, are the width of a postcard. Both playing cards and postcards are 'mature technologies', with the former being designed to be easily held and manipulated in one hand whilst showing some limited information clearly, whilst postcards are designed to display more information, a photograph, in more detail.

The original iPhone replaced phones that were largely used for calls, SMS and other text-based messaging services. Since then though, people use their phones for a wider range of tasks, many of them photo and video based.

Apple quietly wheels out 'Voxelnet' driverless car tech paper

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Opel Automobile GmbH

FFS, it's a pet name for a system, not a consumer-ready feature that requires a snappy trademarked name. Strewth, if you really want to rehash the most tired of jokes rather than discuss an interesting technological approach then you are a borish pillock.

Phone fatigue takes hold: SIM-onlys now top UK market

Dave 126 Silver badge

Also also, if you are on a SIM-only Pay Monthly, you have the upper hand over your network operator if they mess you around, or if you want a discount. "Oi. EE. Give me another GB per month or I'll leave you for Vodaphone."

Dave 126 Silver badge

Also, if you buy your handset outright then you are protected by the Sales of Goods Act - if it proves to be unfit for the purpose for which it was sold, such as malfunctioning through no fault of your own - you have the right to refund or replacement. This is not the case if you get your phone from your network operator, who might insist on sending your phone off for repair for a few weeks.

Linus Torvalds 'sorry' for swearing, blames popularity of Linux itself

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Good!

> Personal goodliness is not correlative with software development ability.

ReiserFS?

Arm Inside: Is Apple ready for the next big switch?

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: "Problems looking for a solution"

It's not a 'must haven't feature, but I can see it being useful for music and graphic applications. Still, the secure CPU side of it is interesting, especially in the light of Intel security flaws and hidden 'management engines'.

It seems that Apple have been canny or lucky in not trusting Intel with user's biometric data:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/intel-warns-of-widespread-vulnerability-in-pc-server-device-firmware/

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Speed

And one assumes that those vendors with capable iPad apps won't have much trouble rolling out an ARM Macbook application - it'd largely just be changes to the UI.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Problems looking for a solution?

If read AOs sentence in context, you'll see that is what he meant and what he wrote.

In any case, creativity stems from waste and redundancy - it's more fun to have an excess of processor power than vice versa!

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: bootcamp?

Genuine questions for a more technical bear than me:

Is it feasible to have OSX run on ARM but offload some tasks to an x86 processor as required? Or:

Is is feasible for OSX to run on ARM, and then Xwindows (or whatever the equivalent is) into an x86 instance of OSX that is spun up when required?

Either way, the ARM chip is primary, but the computer contains an x86 chip to be used occasionally.

It seems to me that the applications that people use 80% of the time (Safari, email, LightRoom etc) are those that can be quickly compiled for ARM by Apple or others, leaving the x86 chip for legacy applications on occasion.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: About time, I think

It's a question of how to roll it out to the public. You could imagine an ARM Macbook and x86 MacBook Pro range, for example... or maybe not. I really don't know. Apple like to keep their message as simple as possible.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Complete rethink

> Some famous engineer is reported to have told his disciples: "Simplify, and add lightness". Damn right. That's the kind of rethink I'd love to see.

Unfortunately, he didn't add security - a few of his racing drivers died in crashes.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: I hope...

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple and killed off the clones, he wanted to make an exception for Sony VAIO computers, though in the end Sony were too far down the path of building x86 Windows machines. The first x86 builds of OSX were demonstrated to Apple management on VAIO laptops, and it only took a small team a few days - but then NeXTstep was always designed to run on a variety of CPUs.

- https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/5380832/sony-vaio-apple-os-x-steve-jobs-meeting-report

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Will it run Crysis?

The Touchbar on the MacBook Pro has been made to run Doom*... it's not Crysis but ya gotta start somewhere!

* What hasn't been made to run Doom?

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: I suspect Apple has reached peak frustration with Intel's mobile graphics

The hybrid Intel AMD chips are possible because of:

Intel announced its EMIB technology over the last twelve months, with the core theme being the ability to put multiple and different silicon dies onto the same package at a much higher bandwidth than a standard multi-chip package but at a much lower cost than using a silicon interposer.

No technical reason Intel can't combine an Intel CPU with an Apple GPU, if that was something Apple want.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: bootcamp?

And course OSX was made from NeXTstep which itself was designed to be ported across CPU architectures.

Back to the Fuchsia: The next 10 years of Android

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Android One

Oreo is more modular than previous versions, in theory allowing updates to be created without ODM binary blobs, so it should hopefully result updates being supplied for longer.

See: Project Treble

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: anarchic, fragmented, insecure, with a user base that lags far behind the latest code.

@AC

If you don't think there is a problem, then why the hell do you think Google have tried so hard to rectify it, with Silver edition phones, the Nexus and Pixel lines, and the long overdue modularity of Project Treble in Android Oreo?

I'm not going by what I've read - the inherent architecture of Android that has traditionally made updating reliant on a multi-partner process of binary blobs and roll-outs means that I have Android tablets stuck on versions (3.x, 4.2) that demonstrably do not run the apps I want them to.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Smartphone rather than the OS

For an illustration of a phone OS that had *many* but not *all* apps available to it, look no further than Windows Phone. Even just the chance that your new phone might not run [ favourite niche app] might put a prospective buyer off.

Samsung do have their own phone OS, but they don't have full replacements for all Google's services. Samsung phones ship with their own version of many Google apps - eg a Samsung email client, map app, app store etc. - which gave the impression they were at least considering dumping Android as a contingency plan (or using the threat of doing so as a bargaining chip).

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: anarchic, fragmented, insecure, with a user base that lags far behind the latest code.

Why would he be - he's not responsible for the situation.

Dave 126 Silver badge

The creator of Apple's Swift language went to Google a little while back.

https://www.theverge.com/google/2017/11/20/16681556/apple-swift-language-google-fuchsia-os-open-source

From Vega with love: Pegasus interstellar asteroid's next stop

Dave 126 Silver badge

Normally yeah, but in this case Rama has evidently decided we're not worth braking for!

iPhone X: Bargain! You've just bagged yourself a cheap AR device

Dave 126 Silver badge

Google struggle to get their more recent Android versions out to users. Even the OnePlus phone reviewed on the Reg today isn't running the latest Android version yet. Any new Android feature takes longer to get to a decent percentage of users phones.

Apple's competent marketing department has its work made easier by other decisions Apple make.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Apple FAIL

Hehe, it's like what have the Romans ever done for us! "Yes okay, but besides the low audio latency, rich app developer ecosystem, strong 3rd party peripheral support and regular and sustained updates, what have the Romans ever done for us?!"

- sent from my Nexus

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: AR Skeptic

There's nothing wrong with an honest acknowledgement that one can't see a 'killer app'. And hey, if you did, would you be daft enough to post your online? :)

I might suggest that there's no one killer app for the current near-ubiquitous touch screen smartphone.... but the smartphone does lots of things well enough. From an alarm clock to a podcast player, a camera and a flashlight, an atlas and a calculator. Whose to say that more environment-aware phones won't follow this same 'lots of little things' pattern?

Me, I have a hunch that online retail and the DIY markets will both benefit. But that's just my speculation.

Regards

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Show us the money

30% of the price of the app, just as now.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: This is Apple's beta test for AR hardware

It's been rumoured already:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-14/apple-is-said-to-target-rear-facing-3-d-sensor-for-2019-iphone

Apparently they've looking at using a time-of-flight laser system, as opposed to their current distorted IR grid method.

Qualcomm's IR sensors -being touted at Android OEMs - are intended to be mounted on the rear of phones.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Thumbs down, thumbs up.

You left out that episode of Community where students award each Meow Meow Beans; the college quickly ends up resembling a shiny Sci-Fi distopia in the style of Logan's Run :)