Re: Apple control freaks @DougS
Apple has had their share of power supply / USB-C cable recall programs.
The differenct between Apple's control freakery vs others is that the consumers pay 5 times more.
Posts by Sandtitz
1711 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2010
Page:
Ankers away! USB-C cables recalled over freakin' fried phone fears
Microsoft redfaced after Bing translation cockup enrages Saudis
Tuesday 30th August 2016 21:23 GMT 
@macjules
Google translate has been equally poisoned several times since users are able to "correct" the translations. Earlier this year Russia was translated as Mordor, and the Clitoris Festival was a delightful snafu. :-)
Larry Page snuffs out ‘too expensive’ Google Fiber project
WhatsApp is to hand your phone number to Facebook
Microsoft's kinder, gentler collaboration war: Evernote, you're first
Monday 22nd August 2016 20:15 GMT
Re: Google is eventually going to take down Microsoft
"Yeah but they can play on the "big brother Google knows all about you, complete lack of respect for privacy" angle what with its relentless collection of information about browsing and emailing habits."
No, no, no... Google respects everyone's privacy to the fullest, and if they should *ever* be caught doing the opposite (like collecting Wi-Fi traffic for years - or placing unwanted cookies in Safari browsers), they were just actions of unidentified rogue coders.
I'm not saying Microsoft is in any way better.
Monday 22nd August 2016 19:58 GMT
Re: Google is eventually going to take down Microsoft @AC
"Microsoft is up to their usual tricks. Paying people to convert to Office"
...say WHAT? I'm not seeing MS paying anyone to convert Evernote users to their O365 offering. They've just developed conversion tools for their existing Evernote competitor. Scary, isn't it?
'"DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run" was a Microsoft phrase'
That myth was apparently debunked over 10 years ago.
I'm sure you would laud *Google* as a great benevolent force if they offered a low cost or a Google Apps bundled Evernote competitor.
Little ARMs pump 2,048-bit muscles in training for Fujitsu's Post-K exascale mega-brain
Monday 22nd August 2016 18:00 GMT
Re: Impressive stuff
"Nah. Intel will just hand a large wad of cash to Microsoft and lo, Windows 11 will have compatibility problems (well, MORE of them) with AMD, as much by accident as DR DOS had problems."
Too bad you can't use the black helicopter/tinfoil hat icon while AC?
Crushing AMD doesn't benefit Intel that much since AMD just caters to the low end (=low profit) on desktop/laptop and the Opteron Server market is pretty much dead already. Besides, Microsoft is in bed with AMD for the next several years because of Xbox. Microsoft has their hand full in trying to keep the PC market alive and having Intel gain monopoly and raising the prices again will not play into their hand.
"And it'll still take 5 minutes to boot."
It's about 10 seconds from cold boot to desktop on my 3 year old Windows laptop. Try harder next time.
iPhone: Apple's Mac battle with Windows rebooted
Saturday 20th August 2016 11:41 GMT
OSX core
"...but OS X is in the odd position of being the conservative, no-faffing-about-with-tablet-mode alternative to Windows 10 (or alternatively the world's best-made Linux distribution, but with software support)..."
I agree with your message otherwise but do note that OS X is not Linux and has nothing to do with it, except that the BSD based OS X core has a somewhat similar free software license.
Windows Phone dives into irrelevant-like-BlackBerry territory
Saturday 20th August 2016 00:05 GMT
Re: Not surprized at all
"my current 950 is a piece of crap. Windows 10 mobile is crap and the device is generic and cheap."
I think almost all phones these days are generic. How does the crappiness of the OS manifest itself?
Missus has a Lumia 640 which was upgraded from 8.1 to 10 and she hasn't complained about the changes in UI. Daughter has a cheapo Huawei (€100 or so) and I expect the much older 640 to still get OS updates once Huawei decides to ditch support.
You shrunk the database into a .gz and the app won't work? Sigh
Ancient radioactive tree rings could rip up the history books
Wednesday 17th August 2016 19:53 GMT
Re: Does it really matter ?
"5 watch their heads explode"
No, see them explode into an argument how the omnipotent God has *planted* the evidence.
Conversion to atheism is a long gradual process where you need to plant ideas that don't support their beliefs. People just don't lose their religion on the spot.
I think a better way (than this carbon dating) to challenge the "6000 year" belief is to ask whether the person first accepts the scientific facts that light travels at a near constant speed in space, and that the universe has stars and galaxies that are further than 6000 light-years away. If the universe was only 6000 years old then we could possible not observe any star beyond the 6000 ly radius, right?
I'm sure the entrenched mindsets can explain all this with the "omnipotent god playing tricks", but since the light speed is common knowledge this will be one of the easiest ways to plant these conflicting ideas.
Microsoft to overhaul Windows 10 UI – with a 3D Holographic Shell
Wednesday 17th August 2016 07:52 GMT
Re: 3D UI yes... useless crap VR headsets NO! JUST NO !
"They pushed out a touch-oriented UI with Windows 8 and encouraged everyone to migrate, even though most Windows devices weren't (and still aren't) touch-capable."
Aye, that they did. MS was pushing touch because back then (2012 or so) the market was changing and iPads and other tablets sold a lot and Windows 7 just isn't that usable in a tablet. Perhaps they anticipated people to buy touch screens which obviously didn't happen.
In any case, I was responding to Joerg, who wrote 'forcing users to get a VR headset ???'
If he honestly believes that MS is forcing people to buy VR headsets come next year then he is frankly an idiot.
Tuesday 16th August 2016 21:02 GMT
Re: 3D UI yes... useless crap VR headsets NO! JUST NO !
"forcing users to get a VR headset"
It's a tech demo. May never even materialize. I see no mention that it will be forced upon users and they couldn't do it anyway - people who are going to own the Hololens thingy or other 3D headset apparatus will be a tiniest minority for a long time for many 1st gen reasons (pricey, lack of software, motion sickness, cumbersome, etc.)
"The VR headsets facade is going to die quicker"
I am not least bit interested of 3D UIs, but this 'augmented reality' stuff has a good momentum due to Pokemon. More than likely these headsets are going to be used in games, social media chats and who knows what killer app may (or may not) materialize. Good for you for knowing how fast fads will die.
The article states that MS and Intel are working on standards which I believe is a good thing - Rift/Gear/Vive are all incompatible with each other which is understandable on this gold rush, but that isn't good for the end users at all. This whole project is still peanuts on grand scale and Microsoft/Google/Apple/FB can afford these skunkworks. Failed projects won't make a dent in their bank accounts.
Cue the downvotes.
VeraCrypt security audit: Four PGP-encoded emails VANISH
HPE StoreVirtual gets low-cost ARM-powered variant
Monday 15th August 2016 17:54 GMT 
ssd options
"Wonder what the cost for an HP 800GB enterprise grade SSD is? Is it still in the $2,500~$3,000 mark that it was a few weeks ago?"
It is (and even more) if you want a 12G SAS with features like power loss protection, dual ports or ludicrous write endurance (up to 25 DWPD!).
If you can settle for basic 6G SATA drives then the base price for an 800GB read-intensive drive (i.e rebadged Samsung consumer drive last I saw them) is something like $500.
Russia is planning to use airships as part of a $240bn transport project
$200,000 for a serious iOS bug? Pfft, we'll give you $500,000, says exploit broker Exodus
Thursday 11th August 2016 10:16 GMT
Re: Good.
"Really? I don't see anyone who committed themselves to the Microsoft brand end their use of their products because of a new vulnerability, however severe. Microsoft knows that long term users are by now more or less numb to the fantastic amount of fixes that land every week on their doorstep"
Replace Microsoft with Android and replace the "fantastic amount of fixes" with "fantastic amount of zero fixes". The hordes know nothing about security and don't care - Android ecosystem is the living proof.
I've noticed a fantastic amount of fixes landing on my Linux installations every week, and I'm content in having those fixes than not having them.
Breaking 350 million: What's next for Windows 10?
Monday 8th August 2016 13:25 GMT
Re: Can't even give it away
"Everyone knows Windows isn't worth $199 anymore. By giving it away they've permanently devalued windows as a brand, and it will be perceived according to loss-leader economics."
They gave it for free to select non-enterprise users with Windows 7 onwards for a limited time. Windows 8 was available for Windows 7 users for $15 for a limited time. Before that Windows 7 had a limited time discount offer for Vista/XP.
I can't get a free Windows 10 license for a blank computer. It is still not a free licence. It requirer an underlying Windows7/8 licence which was paid in some form (e.g. part of cost of computer)
Windows is actually last to the free OS party on desktop. OS X has been free for years, so is ChromeOS, Android, IOS, Linux etc. Did OS X lose value when Apple started to give it for free?
Linux 4.8 rc1 lands, with Surface 3 support promised!
Monday 8th August 2016 08:52 GMT
Re: Keep on hacking
"As for forthcoming Surface support. We'll probably get it just as Microsoft announce [...] they are stopping production of all Surface devices."
Microsoft has already announced that Surface 3 will be EOL'd at the end of this year. By then it will be a 2-year-old Atom Soc design already and you just can't sell old computers for full price unless you're Apple. :-)
Three times as bad as malware: Google shines light on pay-per-install
Saturday 6th August 2016 19:03 GMT
Re: @ShelLuser
"It's not so much the browser though,"
I think it is. I'm primarily using Firefox and Adobe is offering the McAfee/Intel crap combo for it. I also tried Vivaldi and it is also getting the McAfee/Intel treatment. But if I use IE/Edge then only Chrome is offered. I tried this with each browsers' private browsing feature just in case.
So Why Opera is also getting Chrome along with IE? No idea.
The developer died 14 years ago, here's a print out of his source code
Friday 5th August 2016 11:40 GMT
Re: Wonderous story @Steve 3
"Just wondering... Does the company that Earl tried to do this work for still exist?"
According to the article it happened earlier this year. If the company can live without accounting software for months they sure can still do it... :-)
A couple years ago I was asked to replace a network card at a local pharmacy. I strolled in equipped with a couple different PCI cards (just in case) but I honestly told them to seek help elsewhere when I saw the PS/2 machine with MCA slots and OS/2 1.3.
Apple joins the bug bounty party with $200,000 top prize
Samsung Note 7: Probably the best phone in the world. Yeah – you heard right
Wednesday 3rd August 2016 15:25 GMT
Re: Smartphones are horrible phones
"The only thing my old 6310 did better was have longer battery life."
It did. (I had a 6310i and it was good)
Replacing the battery was also very simple, and I obtained a personalized name plate for it from Nokia!
I however didn't use it for gps, email, internet, films, camera, books, games; it didn't have background tasks; it had a 0.006Mpixel mono display; those are probably the reason why the battery lasted easily for over a week. If you had used it for occasional 2.5G tethering (as I did) the battery was depleted much faster.
Disable data and force your current phone into 2G mode (and disable all other radios and data, minimize the background light and only use your phone for SMS and calls. Feel the difference.
Post-Brexit spending freeze in UK is real, says enterprise distie titan
Upstart big iron storage supplier maintains monolithic momentum
Windows 10: Happy with Anniversary Update?
Tuesday 2nd August 2016 10:46 GMT
"Fragmentation is still a problem"
From Windows 7 onwards the OS does defrag in the background and refuses to run on SSDs. You are still able to manully defrag HDD's of course.
Fragmentation is a problem with Linux as well. Claiming that btrfs, ext*fs or any other is immune to fragmentation doesn't understand fragmentation. They can be defragmented manually just as well. The AC was posting misinformation.
"Many people have had CPU failures"
Extremely rare. It's probably the most reliable electrical component in a computer.
I can remember less than 10 cases in the thousands of all sort of computers I've managed and dabbled with in this century alone.
Tuesday 2nd August 2016 10:26 GMT
Re: 'Nix is good when it works but damn hard work when it doesn't. @kryptylomese
"Linux nowadays has WAY drivers than Windows, and it is supported by hardware manufacturers."
Still doesn't work with switchable graphics. Or did you mean to write "WAY LESS"?
Which drivers are available for Linux but not for Windows? X.org still supports the supervga cards I was using 30 years ago, but what else is there?
"Linux has been able to drive winmodems for a long time."
Whoop-de-doo for the 5 people still using them. Does it also support the recently released Logitech Scanman?
Windows 10 pain: Reg man has 75 per cent upgrade failure rate
Saturday 30th July 2016 17:56 GMT
/home partition @CompUser
"The installation doesn't suggest it.[...] People do it because they don't want everything lost if a newer or different version of linux is installed. It just makes life easier.
It sure makes life easier when you're reinstalling, but the original question was about "less knowledgeable" users. That would include people who know nothing about partitions or who don't know the difference between /etc or /proc.
If you allow Ubuntu or Mint to automate the installation, (which I guess most non-geeks would choose) is a separate /home created?
Apple's Car is Project Titan
Saturday 30th July 2016 15:13 GMT
Re: Is it all that different from selling phones?
"If anything, licensing software instead of making hardware is totally against Apple's corporate identity. They've become the most profitable company in the world by controlling the whole stack, not carving out a piece for themselves in something someone else sells and supports."
Apple Carplay goes against your argument. If you're having problems with it you don't call Apple or drive to Genius bar - the support is provided by the car manufacturer.
I have no idea what the supposed project titan is as this is all unconfirmed rumors. Supposedly they could go to car business but they could just spend the 10 billion to buy an established car marque (e.g. Volvo) and go from there instead of starting from nothing like Tesla has done.
Google and Microsoft are playing catchup with AWS's cloudy power
HPE promises users Itanium server refresh next year. In Dutch!
Did Donald Trump really just ask Russia to hack the US govt? Yes, he did
McCain: Come to my encryption hearing. Tim Cook: No, I'm good. McCain: I hate you, I hate you, I hate you
Friday 15th July 2016 22:19 GMT
Re: Banning encryption won't stop an attack like the one in NIce @AC
"So what in a civilised country is the alternative to a bit more policing?"
France has been policing more and more lately. Didn't help with a crazy individual.
Education, fighting poverty, better (mental) healthcare would be the first steps for mass movements like ISIS.
Single mentally insane actions can't be prevented until we're all under total control or someone can predict the future. The latter is fiction and the first is the "bit more policing" scenario North Korea is striving for.
Microsoft silently kills dev backdoor that boots Linux on locked-down Windows RT slabs
Friday 15th July 2016 11:18 GMT
Re: Who in Their Right Mind.... @Avatar
"But all three of your examples [Billions of iPhone, Android, PlayStation] are still supported and so have value. M$ fondle slabs. Erm... Don't
Maybe you didn't read the article - RT is supported until 2017 or 2018. So surely it has some value.
No Android device ever has had support for as long as even these RT devices have already had. Would you say that any Android device from 2012 (birth of RT) are without any value?
Shocker: Computer science graduate wins a top UK political job
It's 2016 and Windows lets crims poison your printer drivers
Thursday 14th July 2016 00:11 GMT
Re: Win10 fixed this for me
Funny, I can't see Canon UK offering any Win10 drivers for the model.
Canon didn't apparently even offer Windows 8 drivers for MP600 (bastards!) but installing the drivers in Win7 compatibility mode should do the trick and allow the Scangear software to install and work. YMMV of course.
Brit Science Minister to probe Brexit bias against UK-based scientists
Wednesday 13th July 2016 15:59 GMT
Re: Look to elsewhere (e.g. China and India) PLEASE!
"China/India- working to reduce corruption and branch into the world trade."
Zimbabwe and Russia - working to reduce corruption and branch into the world trade!
So far India's and China's promises have been lip service. Transparency International deems in their reports that corruption in China or India isn't diminishing. The Indian court system is famous for being slow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_of_India#Pendency_of_cases
Sociology student gets a First for dissertation on Kardashians
Microsoft: Enterprise Advantage will be 'a step in quite a long journey to modernize our licensing'
Wednesday 6th July 2016 14:38 GMT
Re: Re:No Danger Will Robinson, No Danger! @John Sanders
"Your computer is technically not yours any more."
What's that supposed to mean? You're a) free to install the company supplied O365 on personal computer and b) free to uninstall it. The computer is technically still yours. If the O365 installation requires you to uninstall your old Office (for technical reason) you're free to reinstall it afterwards once you're no longer part of the company.
Monday 4th July 2016 18:59 GMT
Re:No Danger Will Robinson, No Danger!
"Not so bad you might think but one of the technical requirements on first logging in/"installing" 365 is that under this scheme it requires you to uninstall any version of MS office on your PC before it can run."
Office 365 refuses to co-exist with Office 2013/2016 but can exist with Office 2010 and earlier. That's nothing new.
"and of course you no longer have your old version of office installed to fall back on."
I think it should be very obvious that you are not entitled to your former employer's software licenses when you leave the company. In which case you are to remove O365 and re-install your earlier, personal copy of Office if it was removed during O365 installation.
"And of course many users will have opted in ignorance to put their files "in the cloud" for convenience's sake, thus making it even harder to continue independently."
The files "in the cloud" can be downloaded to your personal computer or another cloud. with the earlier Office version the user probably used local files and that's what he/she can always revert to.
What exactly is the problem?
Now Intel swings axe at sales, marketing peeps
Tuesday 28th June 2016 22:33 GMT
"AMD is well positioned with Zen and Polaris so I hope to see some traction there."
Since Zen is unreleased we don't know whether it'll deliver. Zen has been hyped up for some time but for the last several years AMD has seriously under-performed on the CPU side. High power usage and low performance (comparable with e.g. Core i3) may not matter with consumer desktops but with portables they've been painful products. I'm used to have at least 6 hours of battery time with my i7 ULV laptop, and tablet users are accustomed to even more.
Polaris is their current GPU model and I'm not sure what you're saying since Intel has for long time delivered only "good enough" graphics. I'm actually quite happy with Intel graphics apart from poor drivers.
Disco, Pogs, and the Microsoft Surface 3
Saturday 25th June 2016 23:57 GMT
Re: Ummm...what?
"If demand and customer satisfaction is strong, why are they stopping production?"
Perhaps Microsoft cannot source the components for it? Come end of December 2016 and the technology will be about 2 years old. Surface 3 has an Intel "Cherry Trail" Atom SoC and its successor ("Willow Trail") was already axed couple months ago when Intel cleaned up their mobile (phone&tablet) offerings.
Redesigning for other Intel architectures is possible but they're all more expensive and the tablet would be called something like Surface 4 then since it would be a different beast.
Thunder struck: Apple kills off display line
Friday 24th June 2016 21:22 GMT
"Among the failures to come out of Cupertino were the ill-fated FireWire"
Ill-fated, yes. But a failure?
Firewire was hardly a failure even if it is pretty much dead now. For a decade or so it was the only practical way of transfering digital audio or video where all the other external buses were really slow or just complicated - SCSI comes to mind...
FW connected DV cameras worked really well in my PC (not Apple), and after the analog-era video grab cards and tools it just worked like never before. You could command the DV CAM with your video editing software, rewind, select the specific video frame where to start grabbing and so on. Connecting computers via FW gave you a 400Mbps network when gigabit ethernet was really expensive and only found on servers. FW enabled external 3,5" drives without external power brick.
FW was expensive (license fees), and was really used in specialized equipment like pro audio/video stuff. USB was "good enough" and every computer still had to have USB ports for mice, keyboards, printers, scanners, thumb drives etc., so the writing was on the wall when USB 2.0 materialized.
Zuck covers up mic and webcam because sharing isn't always good
Intel's Knights Landing lands
Tuesday 21st June 2016 09:07 GMT
Re: Superior nerdities needed
I'm no expert on this either, but I can give a few shots in the dark why someone would choose Intel.
The coming Phi CPU will however fit into the next gen (Skylake-E) LGA 3647 sockets, and it is just a specialized x86 Xeon with extra cores. It can boot the OS and be used as an ordinary x86 CPU. So it's not a co-processor or an add-on card. If you are ordering a server with only a Phi CPU you can deduct the price of the cheapest possible Xeon (2603v4, $213). The top end Phi is only a 1.5GHz product, so single thread performance will be weak.
The 5.3 TFLOP P100 requires a mezzanine connector which I've only seen in blades. Perhaps the density optimized servers is the target market for it. Of course the more common PCIe x16 card with 4.7 TFLOPs still beats Intel in raw numbers. Bear in mind that both Intel and Nvidia numbers are theoretical maximums, and Nvidia has likely optimized their cards for CUDA, not OpenCL nor OpenACC.
The Phi has its own RAM (slower and smaller than in P100) but it has a much faster connection to the system memory, whereas P100 uses the PCIe bus which is several times slower. Depends on the computing scenario I guess. Also, if you are parallelizing beyond a single P100 or Phi processor, the bandwidth and latency between the computing units is much better between multiple Phi's than with P100's through PCIe.
The Phi processor is also "shipping in volume" (per article), but the P100 will be available in Q4. Nvidia pricing is also unknown at this point.
Microsoft joins battery-saving browser bandwagon with Edge claims
Tuesday 21st June 2016 06:20 GMT
Re: Great
"Seriously how many people are going to put battery life based on browsing before security and configurations features."
The great masses are quite unaware that the browser can be configured beyond changing the starting page, and know nothing about security. Most seem to use whatever browser is the current default - I've seen cases where Chrome was inadvertently installed in place of IE/FF and it didn't bother the user since it imported the bookmarks.
Opera was (still is?) pretty secure and configurable yet its user base was minuscule. Each Chrome update brings plenty of security patches and is only somewhat more configurable than Edge. Chrome is at the moment the most popular browser AFAIK. I think both these points contradict your argument.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
