Posts by Dave 126

I seem to recall having WAP on a 3310... or maybe I'm thinking of the 6210 I had a couple of years later!

Yeah, I can't think of what data would need to be stored such that 256GB would be required. For sure, having the last ten hours of several HD video streams would be handy for collision dispute resolution, and car diagnostic logs.

Cars will generate a shit ton of raw data, especially with autonomous systems, but that data will largely be used on the fly - only a fraction of it would be useful to store.

Differentiating between lanes separated only by height is an issue for the map data - the GPS unit itself can give you a 3-dimensional location coordinate. If the map data is in 3D - or more likely a format derived from past traffic GPS data, eg the upper lane eventually veers East) - there's no problem.

Re: Battery Material Source

Lithium is extracted in Bolivia, amongst other places. It's fairly widespread worldwide, and as demand continues to increase further sites will be developed. It may be the case that someone perfects a scalable way of extracting lithium from seawater, or another battery chemistry is developed.

Re: rolling out to all users over the course of the day

The word used three times in the first two paragraphs is 'default'.

It is changing the default search engine. Users can choose others, just as they always have.

Have another coffee!

Re: Odd....

What gives you the impression that the iPhone only records high frame hi resolution in short bursts? I found no mention of such a limitation in any reviews. Obviously the NAND storage will fill up quickly, but it is quick enough.

If you revisit the list from which you copied and read down, you'll see 'Slo-mo video support for 1080p at 120 fps or 240 fps' - though apparently you need to switch the codec to HEVC.

Re: Ben Hur Moment.......

I've always observed taxi drivers driving in the way you describe of Prius drivers. I'd always assumed that taxis were slow to accelerate in order to save on fuel.

Watching taxis do entertaining U-turns has, for the last twenty years prompted me to mentally sing "Because Iiiii'm a taxi!" to the tune of of Baby Bird's 'You're Gorgeous' (Well, the Mark Radcliffe and Boy Lard's homage 'You're a bastard', but the tune is the same)

I've always been on Android, but now the iPhone 6s is priced at where the Android upper-middle range was a couple of years back, at around £450. That's £250 less than the iPhone 8, and most of what the 8 offers over the 6s is tweaks to the camera, and sensor and silicon stuff that largely benefits AR. Oh, and likely a longer update support period of course.

Still, I'll probably wait til next year and see what cunning stuff active IR 3D scanning stuff Qualcomm come up with (niche, but a niche I sometimes play in... would encourage me to dust off my RepRap 3D printer), or see how Google get on with their hardware efforts. Or see what the latest Chinese £200 special is like.

Logitech have just released their first trackball in years. Pricey, but I've never regretted spending good money on the fancier Logitech mice:

https://www.logitech.com/en-gb/product/mx-ergo-wireless-trackball-mouse

> All software should be reliable. There is no excuse for unreliable software.

In an ideal world, for sure. However, many people if given an informed choice between a rock-solid local-only music player and a Spotify-enabled device that crashes once every hundred hours might choose the latter.

In fact, it's a choice many of us have already made in the home, choosing to listen to Spotify in houses where the Wi-fi might occasionally misbehave instead of just listening to an old MP3 player. Any gadget tinkerer has occasionally traded stability with for features. That's fine for gadgets, but obviously not cars.

> Won't be the same with HTC but little reason at the moment to suspect that Google wants mimic Apple, because control of the supply chain and customer service is more important than hardware designers

The evidence is that Google has been selling phones under its own name. More evidence is that Google has been hiring SoC designers so that it has software and silicon expertise in house, as Apple does. Tight OS and SoC integration seems to have served Apple well, and is worth learning from. It might be that Google want to fully design their own chips as Apple does, or merely have its own SoC experts to better liaise and plan roadmaps with the likes of Qualcomm.

But yeah, leverage over the supply chain is important.

Re: Comparison with the Planet Gemini?

Not all Gemini devices will have SIMs. Without having even a monochrome display on its outer lid I'm not sure how practical it will be as a phone - it seems pitched more as a companion to a phone, a laptop replacement but not a phone replacement. Various small Bluetooth headset devices with screens and call buttons exist - these could help.

Gemini can run Linux or Android.

Re: Bad Idea

It isn't that pressing three keys at once is inherently awkward, it's that pressing *those* three keys is awkward. I can do it with one hand, but it requires a weird contortion to bring my middle finger under my palm.

That might be acceptable for an occasional system freeze, but isn't fun for a login many times a day.

Bluetooth devices advertise to others which functions they are capable of, so, for example a phone never tries to connect to a keyboard as an audio playback device. A Bluetooth device can also listen out without advertising itself (the 'Make this device discoverable' setting).

Re: "you'd have almost no apps"

> The inevitable conclusion is that today's programmers, or at least the millennials, are lazy, uneducated and incompetent, and the centrepiece of their workflow is something that would look more at home in Toys R Us than at a software engineer's desk.

Okay... why single out the "millennials" when we've experienced stuttery computers for decades? Might the answer instead be that the grasp of people's home computer systems always exceeded their grasp?

It's the Red Queen effect. As soon as one feature is perfected someone (be it the user, the seller, the marketeer, the enthusiast) thinks of adding another, and at ever higher bitrates, pixel count and density, adverts per page, frames per second, milliseconds saved in latency, always ever faster faster faster. The coder might not have time to tie his shoelaces up if he's always running!

Re: Ugh

And there has never been a version of Civilisation released for Android. The closest I've come is to install a Nintendo DS emulator on my Nexus and try to play that version of Civ... but playing a game written for a two-screen device on a phone isn't fun.

Re: Nuke it and start again

Well yeah, just restore the Time Machine system image. One would hope that that the sort of user who plays with Betas knows how to back up.

If you want to save battery, use the FM radio on a Sansa Clip. If you want access to an FM radio for emergencies then a phone really isn't suitable - the battery on a standalone FM radio will last weeks of occasional use.

Re: @Geoffrey W

Oh, I should add that I've only ever been a Linux dabbler. I installed Mint years ago from a mass-produced CD on an old Thinkpad with weird sound hardware - my mate and I did it for the challenge. A few years later I tried the Live CD (Ubuntu) route on a desktop and it was painless.

But hey, as a pure Windows user

I should note: if you create an Image Backup, you've got nothing to fear. You should create one even if you don't touch Linux. Linux is unlikely to bork (fuck up) your system, but there's no harm in erring on the side of caution.

The only real utility I've used Linux for is get_iplayer and to reset a Windows XP password (I forget why I'd forgotten it). I have used a few weird GNU graphics applications under Windows though, because I hadn't the latest Photoshop.

Re: Warning

Re proofreading:

"What ya mean? I said mouse! Is your hearing damaged from too much loud mouse?!"

I knew damned well I'd written mouse, but mouse cancelling amused me. If someone here was unable to get the meaning because I substituted one word for another they must be hard of thinking.

However, of I ever use if instead if of, that'll be a typo on my part and yeah, I shoulda proofread my post!