* Posts by Mage

9252 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007

Chinese tat bazaar Xiaomi to light a fire under Amazon's Kindle with new e-book reader

Mage Silver badge

Re: Can Xiaomi make a go where Sony gave up?

The big Sony Digital paper models are for paperless offices. You Print PDFs to them. I think most or maybe all don't actually support ebook formats. Also they can only be loaded/managed via the computer application. Doesn't appear as mass storage like Kindle / Kobo / Nook etc.

Sony relied on their own bookstore. There are only a few niche brands today that don't, sadly. Sony customers were transferred to Kobo. Canadian Kobo's parent is Japanese Rakuten that also owns Viber, a decent alternative to Skype, Tencent's QQ and Whats App.

Mage Silver badge

Kindle eBooks

Apprentice Alf plugin on Calibre. Some people read Amazon ebooks on Kobo ereaders.

Also Amazon's KFX is evil. Download for "transfer via USB", never direct on the Kindle so you have a backup and don't get KFX. Amazon add DRM to KFX even when the Publisher selects "no DRM". The AZW format (KF8) is better. Also Amazon sells "Kindle" ebooks that are really like a PDF that only work on phones, tablets and PC/Mac; they don't work on a real Kindle ereader.

€13bn wings its way back to Apple after Euro court rules Irish tax deal wasn't 'state aid'

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

The Elephant in the Room

So called Intellectual Property. The USPTO is a big part of the problem. Many of the big multinationals have massive teams of patent lawyers creating both regular patents and "Design Patents" (what the UK calls Registered Designs, like the shape of the fluted coke bottle or a kettle). Companies like Starbucks and Apple assign these to an HQ at some Offshore tax friendly place (Like any British Overseas, or now even IOM or Jersey). Quite a few companies in Ireland (like Eircom aka Eir) have their HQ in Jersey.

Companies even "patent" or Register their Franchise, Trade marks etc and then pay "royalties" to the offshore HQ.

So it's possible that neither Apple or Ireland broke aid or tax rules. There needs to be a better definition of Intellectual Property and reform of Patents, Registered Designs etc and the possible "royalties" or this sort of legal tax evasion will continue. Apple should have been paying 10% tax, not 0.5 down to 0.005%

I can't see how the EU can win this if it's just Apple was "clever". The rules on IP creation and so called "royalties" on it need changed on a Global basis.

Dutch national broadcaster saw ad revenue rise when it stopped tracking users. It's meant to work like that, right?

Mage Silver badge
Flame

But can we trust Google and Facebook?

"The success of Facebook is based on the ability of advertisers to define an audience by location, age, sex, personal interests and more."

You mean their success is based on the fact that advertisers believe this.

1) Is it legal.

2) Is is ethical.

3) How accurate is the information?

4) Has anyone unbiased actually done meaningful measurements to prove Facebook and Google claims?

My understanding is that Facebook makes these claims because magazines, newspapers, billboards, radio and TV can't make them. They have been caught lying about video impressions.

Also fraudulent activity makes money for website owners with Google adverts.

Twitter and Facebook are full of fake accounts and bots.

If you wanna make your own open-source chip, just Google it. Literally. Web giant says it'll fab them for free

Mage Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: VHDL's still a verbose horror, then.

Certainly for digital / logic, the HDL is the only way.

Analogue, which this seems partially aimed at, does usually need schematics and spice models that also add parasitic inductances and capacitances.

Mage Silver badge

Re: I would like to see a flat architecture 32 or 64 bit design.

Test it with a FPGA evaluation board. No need for this chip program.

Euro police forces infiltrated encrypted phone biz – and now 'criminal' EncroChat users are being rounded up

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: Coercion is often called rubber-hose cryptanalysis

Obligatory XKCD

This is the link, but might not be a rubber hose

Happy privacy action day in California: If you don't have 'Do not sell my information' in your website footer, you need to read this story right now

Mage Silver badge
Devil

someone can opt-out of having their personal data repackaged and sold

Moronic.

As is CAN-SPAM.

The only ethical way is that you have to OPT IN.

MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: why are we deleting it?

Because it's too much work to fix it and we know why it's poor,

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Garbage in Garbage out

The problem is that humans, often biased or lazy or making mistakes, in reality have to check all images. There is no AI, just human "trained" and curated pattern matching.

It's stupid and unethical to scrape websites and social media. That will decrease the quality. Apart from misuse of data.

Then another issue the lighting, angles etc. Photos taken for personal reasons are likely to have better lighting, viewing angles and framing than images from surveillance systems. We need to totally abandon automatic people identification and truly autonomous vehicles on ordinary public roads till it can be done properly. Do ships, aircraft, trains and last, trams before ordinary vehicles. Use humans to review surveillance video. Most of it shouldn't exist anyway.

Linux Mint 20 isn't exactly bursting with freshness but, hey, there's kernel 5.4 and it's a long-term support release

Mage Silver badge

Re: QT support?

I use Mint 18.3 with Mate Desktop. Lenovo E460 i5 with gpu.

I don't remember Mint ever not supporting QT based applications. Maybe it didn't once.

I'm sure Viber and Calibre both use QT.

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Upgrading can be painful?

"Upgrading can be painful in Linux thanks to potential dependency and configuration issues so waiting for the official guidance is a good plan."

Hugely less pain than Windows, where going NT 3.5x, NT4, Win2K, XP, Vista, Win7, Win8, Win10 is best with a fresh install.

I've tested 18.3 -> 19.3 which needs 18.3 to 19 first. Much slower than a fresh install and needs command line. But works. The 18.3 LTS maybe runs out this October, so no rush, though for existing 18.3 rather than a fresh install, likely it's 18.3 -> 19 ->19.3 -> 20.0

And then there are Mac OS upgrades. They've called all the versions since 2002 or 2003 change from Mac OS 9 version 10.<something> even though some are a greater change than Win2K to Win10 (like no 32 bit).

So rather unfair.

One does not simply repurpose an entire internet constellation for sat-nav, but UK might have a go anyway

Mage Silver badge

Re: GEO satellite yes. LEO is a different kettle of fish.

Only reduces the latency and makes the capacity per area worse. The capacity is rubbish compared to more masts. There is also no excuse for no fibre if a location has mains electricity or mains water.

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Supposedly we have control of Trident

The UK did have their own nuke tech and close to delivery with the rockets being tested at Woomera, but USA persuaded the UK to ditch both. The UK is the only nation in the world to give up Nuke Tech and Sat / ICBM tech. The Trident is really sort of rented. It and F35 involve a subscription service.

Mage Silver badge
Alert

Re: general communications, and rural broadband,

Except when you spread the capacity over an entire county it's tiny compared to a fibre fed cabinet. But the capacity may indeed be the total capacity for the fleet / world and only a fraction of that even available in one place at one time.

There is a good reason why OneWeb has gone bust.

Satellite Internet is for users off the grid, in the wilderness, out at sea, in an aircraft. Not for British Rural. Not even these days for Africa (Mobile in rural areas, fibre in the cities).

NASA mulls going all steam-punk with a fleet of jumping robots to explore Saturn and Jupiter's mysterious moons

Mage Silver badge
Alien

Re: "Victory Unintentional" by Isaac Asmiov.

I wondered, because hardly any of his stories have actual "aliens". I read an explanation once by him as to why this is the case. It's suggested that the people in Nightfall (the original short rather than later expanded novel) are "aliens", not humans.

Aliens of course claim we are Tellurians or Terrans (from the Classical Terra and Tellus) as all sentient, tool using creatures with a proper extendible language are humans. Don't confuse an extendible vocabulary with a language. Rooks are sentient, self aware, can use tools and have a big vocabulary, but are not humans because they don't have Language,

Mage Silver badge
Alien

Ha!

Remember the old story with Earth & the "Aliens" (Jovians?) negotiating. Earth sends a representative to negotiate but neglect to mention it's a robot. The Aliens are shocked by the robustness of the "human" and surrender.

Short story. I forget the title and author, likely 1940s to 1960s.

Beware the fresh Windows XP install: Failure awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth

Mage Silver badge
Alert

Tabasco

Also chilli powder. Allegedly birds can't taste it. No furry animal will eat it.

The only way to rat proof cables as they can gnaw through a steel door to get meat from a freezer.

After 84 years, Japan's Olympus shutters its camera biz, flogs it to private equity – smartphones are just too good

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

Lenses

Certainly the phone has completely killed the market for snapshot cameras and now dedicated digital cameras are an expensive niche, but secure because a phone isn't going to have larger sensors, larger lenses (much larger anyway), a good range of interchangeable lenses, decent ergonomics (wrong shape) and a secure tripod mount for time-lapse or tracking exposures. I used to be fairly serious about photography and had a wide range of cameras (still have some), the last being an OM10 and big selection of lenses. I can't afford/justify film and processing for it, though in 1990s we had Photo CDs (not to be confused with seriously poor Picture CDs.) done at the lab from film, no prints, for our business. Yet I can't justify a decent digital camera and lenses. If the light is poor or the object needs a telephoto lens the phone camera is useless. Lack of a viewfinder on a phone also means accurate pointing in bright sunshine is impossible.

Here's a headline we never thought we'd write 20 years ago: Microsoft readies antivirus for Linux, Android

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: cool

Though MS Defender on Windows might be better than almost all the 3rd party AV software sold for windows. I think in most cases, and for zero-day, blocking scripts on the Browser is more effective.

Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length: macOS shifts from x86 to homegrown common CPU arch, will run iOS apps

Mage Silver badge

Re: ARM?

It will sell better than the first ARM based PC, the Archimedes. Was it 1987?

Still, my ARM based Android tablet outperforms the Atom based Windows XP Netbook (now with Linux) and Atom Win10 tablet.

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Then you "should" be okay with just a recompile

OK for devs, but not much good for Users. But the likes of Adobe etc only want to rent software anyway.

Mage Silver badge
Angel

Yes and No.

I said years ago that Apple would migrate the Mac to ARM. When it suited them. People laughed at me.

Perhaps big companies over use branding, like MS calling things "Windows" that are very different and may or may not be compatible for existing applications.

Apple "Mac" 68000, Power PC, x86 and recently x86-64 with 32 bit forbidden. Now ARM. Maybe all these families should have used different branding after the Mac 68K.

Also the Mac OSX is based on BSD via NextStep. A totally different (and better) thing to Mac OS9 and earlier. At least they didn't make the mistake with iPhone that MS made with PDAs and Phones and called the OS, iOS rather than pocket Mac OS.

Looking for a home off-world? Take your pick: Astroboffins estimate there are nearly 6bn Earth-likes in the Milky Way

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

re: radio waves will reach them!

If you do the sums, you'll see that the likelihood of our radio waves being detectable even at the nearest star is slim to zero. They might detect our oxygen, water, CO2, nitrogen and industrial pollution via spectroscopic analysis. SETI using radio is pointless unless Aliens arrive at the edge of the Solar system.

Mage Silver badge

Re: Venus and Mars

Venus certainly isn't. Antarctica, Sahara and our oceans are far more habitable than Mars, which realistically is no more habitable than the Moon. Basically a space station with gravity.

Mage Silver badge
Alien

In theory

Let's not repeat the European exploitation of Americas, or Arabs in Africa moving south. Ethically would it be right to settle without an invite?

It's likely anywhere able to really support life would be teaming with life of its own. Likely the existing plants and animals would only be good for fats, sugars/carbohydrates and maybe protein. They'd likely lack suitable vitamins and amino acids. Even here not all plants or animals can sustain humans, you'd likely die just living on rabbit. Animals here also have differing needs of vitamins, amino acids and things that are toxic.

However, as C.S. Lewis remarked, perhaps the interstellar distances are a quarantine system. We have no evidence that any sort of interstellar travel other than a mostly coasting Generation ship is possible. We need to sort out our own problems here instead of exporting people and their associated shortcomings.

Interesting science.

Gulp! Irish Water outsources contact centres to Capita for up to €27m over 7 years

Mage Silver badge

Re: four issues to deal with, leaks, quality, pressure and billing

Really very few people are actually billed. Their main issues is the slow progress on leaks and upgrading sewerage. I think still over 400,000 septic tanks and many treatment plants don't meet standards. They are supposed to be inspected. Maybe Captia could do it?

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: This sentence

Idiotic.

The new Government should scrap this and Irish Water. They are incompetent at fixing the leaks and what are they thinking of giving work to Captia. A non-EU company with a terrible reputation. No doubt Capita put the cheapest bid.

Smart fridges are cool, but after a few short years you could be stuck with a big frosty brick in the kitchen

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

No, don't check how long it will be supported!

Just buy a dumb fridge.

Which? missing the point.

Publishers sue to shut down books-for-all Internet Archive for 'willful digital piracy on an industrial scale'

Mage Silver badge

Re: But what about...

Many Libraries with real ebooks are still operating online.

Mage Silver badge

Re: Unusually

IA pay nothing.

Mage Silver badge

Re: Digital Era

DRM is evil and doesn't stop real pirates. It just "controls" the consumer, copyright and piracy are just thin excuses to impose DRM.

If you chose "download and transfer via PC" on Amazon, then the publisher decides if DRM is to be used. Amazon is illegally adding DRM when they deliver KFX, when the Publisher has decided to have no DRM.

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Ebooks are similar.

In most countries certainly you can resell, give away or destroy the book. The physical copy is yours. But for lending there is the concept of rewarding the Author. Authors get a small royalty.

For digital the library buys a licence to loan a certain number of copies simultaneously and royalty has to be paid. There is no physical copy.

You'll find you can't run a library for video or audio by buying a retail copy in most countries.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

IA is dishonest

"The Internet Archive is registered as a library but has asserted an untested (the publishers say “invented”) theory called “Controlled Digital Lending” (CDL), that argues libraries are not infringing copyright when they make digital copies of books they possess. "

Because REAL libraries do two things the IA has refused to do:

1) They buy a real ebook at a Library price. Can be more or less than retail.

2) They pay royalties based on how many times the book has been lent. Paper versions and audio also. The Author or whoever is the copyright holder, not the company with publishing rights, gets that.

The IA has been scanning for years and importing MS and Google scanned books. These are PDF images with OCR for search. The ebook formats are poor. Anyway, if you or I did it, we'd be in court. The stuff that's really public domain is in the regular IA archives, no "lending" even before. The claimed Education excuse is bogus as Unis have been making stuff available and most of the IA OL is fiction.

Boffins step into the Li-ion's den with sodium-ion battery that's potentially as good as a lithium cousin

Mage Silver badge
Flame

Re: How resistant is it to fire?

Sodium metal is stored under oil. It burns well and explosively underwater.

Lenovo certifies all desktop and mobile workstations for Linux – and will even upstream driver updates

Mage Silver badge

Re: Dell has offered Linux laptops for a very long time.

They started supplying Linux maybe as early as 1998 or 1999.

Western Digital shingled out in lawsuit for sneaking RAID-unfriendly tech into drives for RAID arrays

Mage Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Forcing us to the Cloud 'Solution' and Subscription Hell?

Written rather than pressed CDs and DVDs fade. In weeks if left on a windowsill. The dye reverts or something. Did bureau PhotoCDs use a different dye and reflective layer?

Mage Silver badge
Alert

up to 2TB, it makes no sense to go mechanical

Depends on your usage and how important random read access of small blocks is vs large file sequential r/w. Also the quality of SSD. Some are basically the same chip tech as cheap USB sticks but with a different bus interface. How much warning of failure vs mechanical HDD and what backup strategy does the user really have? What is powered down archive life?

That's really too sweeping of a statement.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Re: Another good reason to be an El Reg reader

Yes, It's basically fraud to not clearly label shingled drives or helium drives as such.

Visual Studio Code finally arrives on ARM64 Windows. No, you haven't woken up in 2017, sadly. It's still 2020

Mage Silver badge
Paris Hilton

Oh, why do most people want Windows?

ARM is great. But it's irrelevant to Windows as the main reason to have windows is existing business x86 programs (mostly for business) or x86 games.

Man responsible for least popular iteration of Windows UI uses iPad Pro as a desktop*

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Ha Ha

Laughs and points.

He didn't save windows, he crippled it. The Win7 was only a Vista SP and should have been free to Vista Victims, it happened despite Sinofsky. At least even on Vista you could turn off the eye candy and stupid services and make it like Win9x/NT4.0/Win2K/XP to use.

Microsoft brings WinUI to desktop apps: It's a landmark for Windows development, but it has taken far too long

Mage Silver badge

W7 level?

Win7 is really a service pack for Vista. Many might be happy with a secure ReactOS (32 bit and 64bit) with proper win32& Win16 support on 64 bits that runs anything Server 2003, XP and Win9x runs.

Mage Silver badge
Flame

developers to adopt the look and feel of UWP

Gross. The UI designed for phones and poor there. The Worst Desktop Windows GUI since maybe Windows 2.x

Mind your language: Microsoft set to swing the axe on 27 languages in iOS Outlook

Mage Silver badge

Re: Basque

Almost northern Europe. The Northern regions of Spain on the Atlantic coast are not much like Mediterranean Spain, southern Italy, Greece etc.

But yes you are right. It's a stupid decision.

Mage Silver badge

Re: Thank dog it’s iOS

Urdu is more associated with Pakistan, though it's the main language in some Indian states. The 28 Indian states are very diverse. Very many languages.

"Urdu is the 21st most spoken first language in the world, with approximately 66 million who speak it as their native language" Or the 11th most spoken language. Depends on source.

"Gaelic as the display language"

You mean the menu language. as long as áéíóú and ÁÉÍÓÚ work, any Latin-Roman regional setting works. Icelandic, German, Spanish and French have more characters not familiar to USA texts.

I've known people that make notes or write in Irish, German, Polish, French and Spanish with the Menus/OS Localisation set to US or British. Comments in German in programs. The Chinese even invented a way to write Chinese in Roman-Latin characters.

This is cent-pinching by MS.

Bizarre fact: The Irish Health service can't store accented names, Might not be too bad for some from Scandinavia, Baltic states and mainland Europe, but people here that don't much speak Irish will laugh at someone's name without an accent (Fada). Loads of words in Irish have unrelated meanings depending on if áéíóú or aeiou.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Re: I can type any language I want?

Even, Brahmic languages, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic based etc? Or just Latin-Roman? Anyone remember Wordstar, or Eudora mail or Amazon Kindles for many years?

No excuse for Eudora, it was a solved problem. Less even for the Kindle as the underlying OS had supported all of those for years.

The USA companies have a very US and English perspective. Many even seem to think only well off white adult males exist. Over 85% of the world's population is outside of North America. The average human has English as a second language, isn't white, has black hair, brown eyes and about 1/2 of them are women.

-

"but they've got some very large languages on that list. They were able to afford that before, they can continue to."

Greed and Arrogance.

Mage Silver badge
Flame

in order to maintain consistency

The mantra for wrecking since Windows 8.

Amazon has made their eink Kindle poorer to have GUI consistency with their iOS and Android app, and their Fire (really an Android tablet).

It's the stupidest reason ever.

Microsoft drops a little surprise thank-you gift for sitting through Build: The source for GW-BASIC

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: The only programing language I know

Unless the teacher was really good, people using Basic only learned Basic, not programming.

If you learn to program it's a few days to pickup any random language, but of course MUCH longer to learn to use the libraries, or in the case of C, which libraries not to use.

The same can be said of many courses on <insert fashionable language>, you're learning a specific language and not much about programming. Though one university course, used Modula-2 as if it was Pascal and taught nothing about co-routines, signals, mutexes, procedure variables, why it has stronger typing so only typed arrays and not anonymous arrays can be assigned, Modules, using public and private parts of modules to implement object orientated programming, doing device drivers using "magic" types. Generic procedures or functions, e.g. a Quick Sort that takes procedures as parameters so it can sort using a Compare passed in. No knowledge needed of types, or type conversion, or even take a parameters which are procedures to access a "table" or file of the data and one to store the sort indexes. Discovered this interviewing a graduate that could produce lovely looking code who had no clue how to program, despite the Honours.

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: If you used BASIC on

But I never did. I used Z80 Assembler, Pascal, Forth, Modula-2, 8051 assembler, NEC 78HC11 assembler. I learnt QUBAL at school and Fortran at college, then my wife, who studied from CAR Hoare, taught me how to program properly, even in Assembler. Macros and Forth like use of the stack let you use assembler better than Basic.

I wrote a static colour test card in Basic on the Spectrum and looked at the Basic on Apple II and IBM PC, Didn't use them. Wife got me to put UCSD-pascal on the Apple II to learn programming. You needed Modula-2 or Turbo Pascal (more like Modula-2) on the PC for actual applications. I had Modula-2, Prolog and others on the PCW. Controlled test gear with a veroboard interface and Forth on a Jupiter Ace.

Mage Silver badge
Windows

Only 45 years late?

The original MS Basic for CP/M etc was um "copied" from Dartmouth BASIC, a cut down version of ForTran. It basically founded their company,

I skipped on MS Basic till VB5. I used QUBAL, Fortran, Pascal, Forth, Modula-2, Prolog, Occam, Coral-66, C++ and C all before 1988 and before VB5, obviously, (short period) then VB6. It was the Forms and ODBC with data controls made it handy for in house stuff.

The GW-Basic was a seriously obsolete idea in the 1980s.