* Posts by JDX

6847 publicly visible posts • joined 28 May 2010

iPhone price cuts are coming, teases Apple CEO. *Bring-bring* Hello, Apple UK? It's El Reg. You free to chat?

JDX Gold badge

Re: so

No. Well, it might delay one upgrade cycle but people who stay with new iPhones are not going to suddenly keep an old phone for 5 years instead of 2. People have/will be pushed wireless whether they want it or not, especially since all the big Android companies are/have gone this direction too.

JDX Gold badge

Re: The reasons for the iPhone sales slump were threefold

They have arguably been doing that for several generations while sales and profits continued to grow so that clearly cannot be the whole answer.

I expected lots of "Apple is going to collapse as all the sheeple finally wake up" comments, clearly Apple might shrink - to a few hundred billion. They are still THE premium smartphone.

I'm sure they'll be around for a while longer... iPhones and iPads might be moving to slower upgrade cycles but they ARE still being upgraded, the Mac has never been more popular against the PC.

The reason Apple is shrinking/stalling is there isn't really anywhere else TO grow. They sold to nearly everyone who they want to sell to and now they are a bit stuck.

Peak Apple: This time it's SERIOUS, Tim

JDX Gold badge

Re: "and failed to honour the cynical tradition of built-in obsolescence"

How many iterations behind is the 4S... 2011. The 5 was 2012. That's really quite old.

JDX Gold badge

Re: Too late

Love how all the upvotes suggest this is some revelation. Everyone always knew this, or never will.

Microsoft vows to destroy Office, er, offices: Campus to be demolished and rebuilt

JDX Gold badge

You can still refactor classic ASP (or port to something modern) without throwing it away completely.

JDX Gold badge

Wow, there are a lot of people reading this who don't know squat about software development based on the votes.

When you throw away old cold, you throw away years and years of bug-fixes. If you genuinely start from scratch you have to find and fix all these things again.

Lots and lots of companies have made this mistake, and many of those never recovered... they lost years working on it only to have something that was not as good as the previous iteration despite looking shiny.

Typical! You wait ages for a fast radio burst from outer space, and suddenly 13 show up

JDX Gold badge

Or Unix even?

Before dipping a toe in the new ThinkPad high-end, make sure your desk is compatible

JDX Gold badge

Re: the monitor is nice

Don't sit so close to it

JDX Gold badge

Re: Bah

Why does a large touchpad serve no purpose? Do they still not support all the cool stuff Mac's MAgic Trackpad do?

Excuse me, sir. You can't store your things there. Those 7 gigabytes are reserved for Windows 10

JDX Gold badge

At the risk of not being utterly negative about MS, this seems fairly sensible to me. Except that of course it means those running 32Gb SSD tablet-PC things are screwed (and I actually have used one of those quite happily in the past). It seems like Windows could use a bit of logic to realise that if your disk is tiny, the amount of temp files and other dross is likely to be smaller.

Low-power chips are secret sauce behind long-life wearables

JDX Gold badge

Engineering query

So we all know in the analogue world you can get self-winding watches which harvest energy from the user moving around. And just yesterday I saw an old Tomorrow's World clip from 1981 about a thermocouple-powered watch.

How many Wh can you generate using such technologies in a watch? And how many Wh does a more conventional smart-watch use? Never mind how you store the energy in your battery, I just wonder how far apart these numbers are that we could ever conceivably see a self-'winding' smart watch? A fitbit that relied on the owner to exercise to keep it charged...

This is the final straw, evil Microsoft. Making private GitHub repos free? You've gone too far

JDX Gold badge

Re: Not impressed

You think things move so fast that MS has infiltrated its developers into GitHub?

Does it work with Chrome? Then you're just paranoid.

JDX Gold badge

Re: Industrial espionage?

How are you going to find the innovative code when 99.9% of what's on there is just dross?

JDX Gold badge

Re: Free! For up to three collaborators!

Um, apart from all the 1-man bands creating software for their little business ideas or just for fun. I have an old bitbucket account that did this when I was writing games for fun - I wanted it private.

Lots and lots and LOTS of big name companies started out as 3 guys coding in their basements.

JDX Gold badge

Re: As ever

99% of Linux users never write any code for it (made up stat).

There are a lot of brainwashed sheeple here regurgitating memes. ALL the major commercial Git (and other) VCS providers provide free tiers, though some only do it for FOSS... do you think they do that out of some altruistic duty or that FOSS repos don't consume resources like private repos do? The majority of cloudy software have free tiers for 1-5 users, etc.

They do this to get brand awareness and so that when developers are in a position to need paid services, they'll go with who they know/like.

It's not a million miles away from the shareware paradigm. Even MS have been doing free versions of VS for years and years and these are all GOOD for FOSS and GOOD for helping kids get into coding.

JDX Gold badge

Re: That didn't take very long.

Stats please.

This inference sounds like crap. People paying for private repos are the sort of people least likely to hate MS, to make a blanket statement. It's the demographic using GH for open-source (already free) stuff who are more likely to distrust/hate MS enough to change platform merely due to the owner.

My 2019 resolution? Not to buy any of THIS rubbish

JDX Gold badge

Re: Hmm

1)It's smart because it connects to my phone/whatever... that's all 'smart' means in 2019 and you know it.

It does also have the function to learn how long rooms take to heat up and cool down, so you tell it when you want the room to be warm and it knows how early to turn on/off to achieve that. Haven't used this much ourselves.

2)It's cheaper because our heating costs are reduced since we fitted it.

3)It's more comfortable because the rooms we spend time in are now warm despite 3) when previously, we spent all day shivering to avoid crazy heating bills.

4)It's more convenient because we can control every room separately. Our bedroom can be set to be warm when when we're in it, my home office can be set to be warm 9-5, our living room can be set to be warm 5-11. The rooms we don't use much can be set to be cool by default, for instance we have a dedicated film room so we only turn the heating on when we want to watch a film.

For all those downvoting just because it's IoT or 'smart', well I don't have to connect it to the internet at all and can still set schedules per room, etc. But, it is actually convenient when we're both out and deciding what we want to do in the evening, to press a button on my phone "watch a film" and the tV room heats up for 2 hours.

I was dubious of it before and we only got it for the cost benefits because we live in a large Victorian house with many rooms - even with TRVs either rooms are colder than we want them or warmer than they need to be. But as well as objectively making our house cheaper and warmer, I actually find it useful. Those with tiny new-build flats and/or limited imaginations wouldn't benefit from a multi-room heating system for sure.

JDX Gold badge

Re: Hmm

Yeah, there's absolutely no way they can listen to you now. Nobody would snoop on you.

People who are worried about the implications of services like Siri but trust their phones can't be tracking their every action?

JDX Gold badge

Hmm

You're worried about your smart speaker listening to you but you own a mobile phone which can do the same thing (even if you ask it not to)? I was very disparaging about them but friends have an Alexa and while I'm not swayed enough to buy one, I can see some benefits as a glorified Siri.

As for IoT I'm not sure exactly what counts but I have a smart multi-room heating system which is genuinely a huge improvement in terms of convenience, cost and comfort.

I don't yet have smart sockets/bulbs but I do have a little IR remote which can turn a bunch on and off (been around for decades I'm sure) and this IS very handy for things like Christmas lights so I am strongly considering upgrading to a phone-based one (it'll probably be worse but I won't keep losing the remote).

For me IFTTT and Google Assistant is key to them being really useful because I don't have to launch some cruddy 3rd party app on my phone which takes longer then walking to the switch... I just say "OK google turn the Christmas lights off" or "OK Google I need to work for 2 hours" and it just works.

Florida man stumbles on biggest prime number after working plucky i5 CPU for 12 days straight

JDX Gold badge

Yes but we can have a list of which have been checked and of those which are primes.

IIRC this one is 8 digits so the list is well under a billion items, quite manageable (if you just want to store flags not the actual number written out longhand)

JDX Gold badge

If they're ann 2^n - 1, surely we have a list of which ones are found?

Happy new year, readers. Yes, we have threaded comments, an image-lite mode, and more...

JDX Gold badge

Collapsible comment tree?

Many thanks for the improvements, I was slightly taken aback to see the threading but it's much appreciated.

The only real thing that would be neat is ability to collapse a thread, now we have them. So feature request logged :)

Apple blew my mind – literally, says woman: MagSafe plug sparked face-torching blaze, lawsuit claims

JDX Gold badge

Especially the US plugs. I'm always amazed what a shoddy system that is. Not sure if UK plugs spark as badly but it's hidden inside though?

Crystal ball gazers declare that Windows 10 has finally overtaken Windows 7

JDX Gold badge

Re: "I spend too much time looking for things I used to know the location of,"

Is this definitely the OS and not you getting older? If it was 5 years earlier would you have found it as tricky or taken it in your stride, the way teenagers "just know" how tech works and their parents struggle?

JDX Gold badge

Re: Right. Sure. Whatever.

Amusingly, it was meant as 'Linux' not 'Linus'. It wasn't intended as a slur on Mr Torvald.

Your GUI _is_ the lipstick of the OS though.

JDX Gold badge

Re: Right. Sure. Whatever.

Whereas Linus doesn't bother with the lipstick

Google-whisperers beat reCaptcha voice challenge with 90% success rate

JDX Gold badge

Re: idiots like this

If they can be defeated so easily, maybe people will stop using them.

The Great British Curry: Put down the takeaway, you're cooking tonight

JDX Gold badge

"The only ingredient you may struggle to find here is garlic and ginger paste."

But garlic paste, and ginger paste, are available fresh in toothpaste-style tubes in the vegetable section of most supermarkets as is chilli. Fresh pureed stuff - I assume this is suitable? Or do you need lazy ginger?

London Gatwick Airport reopens but drone chaos perps still not found

JDX Gold badge

This is the same argument pro-gun folk use in the USA to explain that the apparent correlation between their massive number of gun-related crimes/deaths and the lax restriction laws is actually just a coincidence... the Bad Guys would get guns either way after all.

If you can only get a drone with difficulty, then of course they'll still be used by criminals but only by more organised, serious criminals. Like guns in the UK... of course you can get one if you know where to look but most burglars do NOT have guns. Casual criminals... some chav flying a drone for a lark... will not make the effort.

If you REALLY clamp down on things, then you have to find a smuggling ring just to get the things into the country. They get much more expensive and you have to associate with really murky types. Genuine terrorists are really quite rare compared to idiots or those who seize the opportunity because it's easy to do so.

Slap for Slack chat app after US, Canada chaps zapped in Iranian IP address map whack

JDX Gold badge

Re: Did I read that right ?

Racism is discrimination based on race, not nationality.

There are lots of totally legit examples where people from specific countries are banned from holding certain jobs or positions or whatever in other countries though that seems rather a tangent here.

A year after Logitech screwed over Harmony users, it, um, screws over Harmony users: Device API killed off

JDX Gold badge

Re: Making Users Afraid Of Updates Is The Opposite Of Responsible

>99.99% (at least) of users won't even have known these undocumented APIs existed let alone used them.

I don't know Harmony specifically but this might not be the case. These smart systems tend to be bought by more tech-savvy people because they are not simple to set up and use. I use the Honeywell Evohome system and there is quite a large community of people doing stuff with their APIs. Their APIs are unofficial but their own staff are involved in the community - and yet they also could just turn them off.

JDX Gold badge

I know Google discontinue products but I can't see Google Home suddenly disappearing. Of course they could just drop support for loads of devices or release a new API which old devices never get updated for.

JDX Gold badge

>making them rely on a third party server does not give any benefits to the people using these devices. The entire reason companies do this is to be able to collect more data on you. That's it.

That's not entirely true. They offer the ability to control your devices from your phone outside your house which has to go through some server fairly obviously. But then they don't give a second option for when you're ON your WiFi.

This could reasonably be attributed to laziness, and penny-pinching as well as malice. We should never lose focus on the fact that: Most of the time things suck this is not due to evil, but incompetence.

JDX Gold badge

>If you are relying on anything that accepts updates from or relies on a server you don't control, you have to realize that it can be turned off or broken tomorrow.

Quite. While undocumented/unsupported APIs are a bad thing to tie your horse to it only highlights that in many of these systems you don't have control. It's like a PC game where they turn off the server and you can't play multiplayer, only this is important.

I was looking the other day at a WiFi powered switch. Only to realise the one I liked had its own app and server... you couldn't control the damn switch without going through some 2-bit company's server. At least with Google/Amazon et al you have a fair guess it won't disappear overnight.

The fastest, most secure browser? Microsoft Edge apparently

JDX Gold badge

I'm sure I definitely never had a security risk from Edge

You know, since I never launched it

It's official. Microsoft pushes Google over the Edge, shifts browser to Chromium engine

JDX Gold badge

"standards compliance?"

Last time I dipped my toe in web-dev, code was full of browser-specific checks even for the most standards-compliant ones... because they use un-ratified standards and additional features. I can't remember if these were chromium or webkit but it was a mess and that was without IE kludges.

One possible downside of a monoculture is that Chromium becomes the de facto standard and they just implement what they want. Not unlike MS in the IE6 era.

Naked women cleaning biz smashes patriarchy by introducing naked bloke gardening service

JDX Gold badge

Re: Why is it sexist

What a surprise, a male-dominated readership is in favour of the idea of naked female cleaners.

It's sexist, just off the bat, because their cleaning service only supplies female workers. That means their hiring policy is sexist. We don't even have to go into the crass objectification of women to see it demonstrably sexist.

For that matter, a gardening business which only hires/supplies male gardeners would be sexist. Why can't I have a naked male cleaner or a naked female gardener?

Perhaps less important than debating the definition of 'sexism' here is just to comment on crass objectification and the general awfulness. Because really, how many of these cleaners do we think are happy for a bit of cash-in-hand for extra services (it has to be cash in hand, they have no pockets).

And for all those men rushing in to gallantly defend and empower women's rights to do what they want with their bodies (for your pleasure), you're happy for your wife/daughter to do those things? If not then you're not defending women's rights, you just like the fantasy of a woman with her jugs out as she cleans.

I was once one of you, F1 star Lewis Hamilton tells delighted IT bods

JDX Gold badge

Re: Alternatively...

Yeah no women who work there would be interested in a hot billionaire

JDX Gold badge

We do realise that by getting rid of grid girls, we have decreased the number of women working within F1.

JDX Gold badge

Re: What a knob

Quite a lot of women work in F1. If you watch it on TV you see them all the time.

Also this is a stupid comment. Lewis isn't the CEO making hiring decisions.

LG: Fsck everything, we're doing 16 lenses in smartphones (probably)

JDX Gold badge

Coming soon from Apple... "you won't believe what we just invented"

Black Friday? Yes, tech vendors might be feeling a bit glum looking at numbers for the UK

JDX Gold badge

Shall we Brits just wait until Boxing Day/New Year sales then?

None of this American sales nonsense :)

Reverse Ferret! Forget what we told you – the iPad isn't really for work

JDX Gold badge

Re: Ipads @ work

The vast majority of people who use a computer for their job don't need a "a reasonably powerful desktop with multi screens". A mid-spec laptop has plenty of grunt (just work out what a £400 Dell is comparable to in 2010). A proper keyboard and mouse and a nice screen if you use it hour after hour. A 2nd screen depending if you multi-task a lot. A proper desktop only if you are compiling C++ or video editing or running VMs.

It costs a bit more but decent laptops can usurp desktops outside a few specialist jobs, and you can trick people into taking them home so they'll do work on them.

I've worked in a software shop who has always worked on laptops (ThinkPads IIRC) + dock and to be honest, it was just fine.

Analogue radio is the tech that just won't die

JDX Gold badge

I like DAB myself and don't experience terrible issues with it though obvious coverage can vary. It's great to be able to receive a much wider selection of channels.

That said, see no reason to get rid of FM just because DAB works (or doesn't). Most cars don't have DAB and these are surely where most radio usage happens, not in houses.

Thanksgiving brings together Apple's Siri and Google Assistant

JDX Gold badge

Re: This is not the future I was promised

Um, didn't he say "KITT, ..." to initiate control?

JDX Gold badge

Re: All inclusive exclusion

Interests like posting self-congratulatory comments on internet forums about how full your life is?

JDX Gold badge

Re: Stop the world, please.

Also even on mobile phones it's quite easy to avoid. You just don't say "Hey Siri". You don't even have to turn it of.

I'm finding voice control is quite good as long as I think carefully what I want to set up. "Ok Google I need to work late 2 hours" will keep the heating on in my home office 2 hours longer thanks to IFTTT. That saves a fair bit of dicking around launching an app, tapping on the screen and is genuinely useful. Equally "OK Google we want to watch a film" turns on the heating in our TV room so we can do that while on the way home.

OnePlus 6T: Tasteful, powerful – and much cheaper than a flagship

JDX Gold badge

Re: Dumb dumb dumb

>Oh, and I also run a webserver on my phone that I use to quickly distribute information to others

Well clearly then everyone needs SD. This is a very common use for a phone.

So, you can't get USB->Ethernet adapters for phones? I suppose I'd assumed phones would support USB3 these days anyway but maybe they don't.

JDX Gold badge

Re: Dumb dumb dumb

>Really? Disparage? What on earth for? Just because your use case doesn't mandate the necessity of those things...

Because these small minority of people continually rant and rail Apple et al won't build their devices around their specific needs. The VAST majority of users do not want removable storage or battery, El Reg is in no way representative of the wider world.

Whereas, regular normal people DO want to use 3.5mm headphones. OnePlus even have the data showing this.

JDX Gold badge

Re: surely a purchase of a 3.5mm to USB-C adapter

I can't see that working well when it's in my jeans pocket?

Also there's the issue of charging while using. Not a problem for me but surely common.