* Posts by JDX

6847 publicly visible posts • joined 28 May 2010

Xiaomi what's inside: Wow, teardown nerds find debut smartwatch isn't actually a solder-and-resin nightmare

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Re: Repairable but

Thinking a bit more, I suppose you can always get other peoples' broken/discarded units for 2nd-hand parts.

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Repairable but

It's all well and good that you can in theory repair it, but do these things use components one can actually buy, or special bespoke parts made just for them in their own factory?

Is there much of a market for such components?

Hey GitLab, the 1970s called and want their sexism back: Saleswomen told to wear short skirts, heels and 'step it up'

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I'd be glad they told me the dress code

As a developer I own one suit that I bought for my wedding. I haven't worn "black tie" since university and I definitely don't have a clue what cocktail casual is.

Is the issue they dared to suggest women should traditionally wear a dress, or that it should be a short dress? I see no outcry the men have to wear a blazer... which is equally outmoded.

Contractors welcome Lords inquiry into IR35 before tax reforms hit private sector but fear it's 'too little, too late'

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It is a very large legal difference which affects day-to-day working practices. Not semantics.

Astroboffins may have raged at Elon's emissions staining the sky, but all those satellites will be more boon than bother

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My friend the astrophysicist would rather disagree. They talk not just about getting in the way of telescopes but also a vast increase in space junk leading to the possibility we run out of safe orbits in which to put things without them getting pulverised by tiny bits of broken satellite.

Space is big. Really big. But apparently space we use for putting things in and travelling through is rather limited and as yet nobody has a way to 'sweep up' so we are reliant on not making it messy to begin with.

Outdoor WiFi PtP Bridge

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Outdoor WiFi PtP Bridge

I've been looking at these things to get a bridge to an outbuilding to which cabling isn't practicable (list pre-sorted to 2-part outdoor kits):

https://www.broadbandbuyer.com/store/wifi-links/?t=218,734#content

Distance is 20m LoS with the plan being these get fixed on the outside of each building facing each other. In my house I'll have CAT6 wired from the main hub to the device, them bung a WAP inside the outbuilding.

My needs are modest, one or two devices and a WiFi security cam. No need for 4k streaming video etc.

We're rural so no issue with a zillion other WiFi networks fighting for airwaves ;)

Will a basic kit near the top of the list work? You can spend a bomb on this but I don't need a 2km link. Any recommendations on brand or products or anything else?

Is Chrome really secretly stalking you across Google sites using per-install ID numbers? We reveal the truth

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Re: Getting everyone to do everything on the web

Email? OK grandad. It's all Zen-bots and Tweets these days.

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Re: WHY anyone uses Chrome is completely beyond my comprehension

I could re-phrase: people use Chrome because it WAS by far the best browser and they haven't had the motivation to switch.

People use X, it's crap

Y comes along and is much better, people switch to Y

X catches up with Y, people don't switch back

Of course for the people here who prefer to turn most of the browser off, it's different. But you really need to get this into your heads: you are not the target user. Your mum is.

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Re: WHY anyone uses Chrome is completely beyond my comprehension

>Regardless of any of its other characteristics, the fact that it spies makes it a terrible browser.

In your opinion. In many peoples' not so much. They care how well it can run FaceBook and Amazon and iPlayer as their top priority.

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Re: The only reason Chrome exist is as a data harvester/marketing tool.

This is not true. Chrome (also) exists because it was in Google's interests to make the web-browsing experience better for computer users, so they would use it more and therefore see more ads in a more polished way.

Getting everyone to do everything on the web gets ads more visibility.

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Re: WHY anyone uses Chrome is completely beyond my comprehension

Because as a side-effect of stealing your information, it is the best web-browser out there.

RIP FTP? File Transfer Protocol switched off by default in Chrome 80

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I like FTP

But I am used to using a dedicated client for it. Just the other day people were complaining that modern browsers are distracted from BROWSING with WASM et al. Surely the browser was never really intended as a FTP client either? I mean it's handy but generally browser implementations are really lame.

Right tool for the job.

Boss planning to tear you a new one? Google Glass is back: Weird workwear aimed at devs, but on sale to all

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Re: Privacy of others

I thought it was fairly clear from the article that it doesn't send everything to Google, but lets the organisation deploying them control all that via whichever custom application they develop/install.

GitLab can proclaim diversity all it likes, but it seems to have a real problem keeping women on staff or in management

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Re: Katrinab

And WHY do you think women don't want to work in STEM, if not for the institutional dominance of men and the kind of disparaging comments about affirmative action "oh, you must be here due to AA"? Perhaps you think women just aren't cut out for it?

AA should be a temporary thing only, to kick-start some momentum. But the fact that a whole gender feels they are not welcome in certain fields implies a wider problem in our culture which is more important than profit.

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Re: Something smells wrong

We shouldn't have to incentivise people like you to hire people who aren't white men. And yet, it just so happens that's who you keep hiring while telling us how sexist you aren't.

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>Sorry to all the white, male, heterosexual Christians out there. Worse still, if you're over 50, you're somehow to blame.

The very point that hiring women is seen as diversity demonstrates an issue - women are still treated as a minority in many ways.

Very little helps: Tesco flashes ancient Windows desktop on Scan-As-You-Shop device

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Re: Mouth-Breather?

You sound worse.

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Seems a harsh reaction to the AC. I am all for anything that keeps me in the shop less time. Queuing at a till (whether self-serve or the human kind) is a drudge and the rigmarole of putting shopping in your trolley, only to then unpack and repack it all...

They've had these scanners in the UK since the 90s - Safeway used to have them - and it seems amazing they have only recently become mainstream. An actual improvement to the shopping experience.

That said I generally find the checkout operators pretty friendly, especially those who are older and working a few hours to supplement their income/retirement.

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RDP

That Remote Desktop shortcut is looking very tempting to me...

Will Asimov fix my doorbell? There should be a law about this

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Re: a recurring theme ... was that the three laws didn't really work all that well

I don't think that's really true. The stories focus on the rare instances when things go wrong, and are seen as abnormalities against millions of robots not causing any fuss.

To say the Robot stories demonstrate the Laws work badly seems to me like saying modern medicine doesn't work all that well based on watching Dr. House's TV show.

Vendor-bender LibreOffice kicks out 6.4: Community project feel, though now with added auto-█████ tool

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>I'm never concerned about what an interface looks like as long as it is clear and reasonably intuitive to use.

What it looks like obviously affects how clear the UI is, and also how intuitive it is to an extent... do the icons make sense, are they grouped in the places I might expect to find them, etc.

TBH I never found Ribbon unintuitive except for more advanced features. People put more effort into deliberately not understanding it than in just figuring it out and getting on with their work, in my view. People using Word every day and ranting for hours about something they could just google in 2s.

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>A smart teenager who like usability and doesn't care for needless change? I'm good with that.

No. Coders do NOT as a rule understand usability. Interfaces put together by coders are generally horrible for anyone who isn't a coder, sometimes for anyone but THE coder who wrote it. They take the view "just learn how it works" or "once you learn these 35 key shortcuts it'll be fine".

The Libre interface is mainly only dated stylistically but most FOSS projects are far worse.

As a coder myself, I understand the value of using someone skilled at UI/UX and using graphic designers to make the functionality usable by casual users.

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>Where as the ribbon looks like it was coded by an alcoholic who dropped an acid tab while munching on a fist full of Valium.

I think you mean designed. Coding the thing would have been a lot of very skilled work.

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I do like Libre (though I only use it as a Word replacement) but it really does epitomise FOSS... the interface looks like it was coded by a teenager in 2006. At least on Mac, I haven't run it on Windows for years.

What is WebAssembly? And can you really compile C/C++ to it? And it'll run in browsers? Allow us to explain in this gentle introduction

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Re: Heard all these promises before.. about 25 years ago...

>As for WebAssembly, my attitude remains "wait & see". I have not seen any applications running in the browser that would compel me to show more interest yet. When/if I ever do...?

I think this is reasonable. I've worked in this area (though my background is much more traditional app-dev and server-dev) and what CAN be done in the browser these days is really astonishing. However that still doesn't mean the browser is the BEST way. As a nerd it's really interesting just to play with but there are substantial hurdles, in our experience more related to content delivery since offline storage is VERY limited.

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Re: Heard all these promises before.. about 25 years ago...

It is for browsing but that is not all it's for. I doubt anyone puts much work into that aspect because it's basically been solved for some years. Sure work continues on CSS but HTML5 and JS and all these APIs like WebGL are really focused on interactivity and rich content.

Even basic stuff like streaming video via the browser is totally apart from "browsing" it is using the browser in a totally different way than originally designed.

You can put your fingers in your ears and run NoScript if you so choose but that doesn't change the fact that the people who make the browsers disagree, and so do the vast majority of those using them.

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Re: Of course it completely ignores the main problem of any program code in the browser...

I fail to see how this argument is any different from JS. That can suck your battery too.

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Re: Heard all these promises before.. about 25 years ago...

Browsers WERE designed from the ground up to browse. Then the people who make browsers (well mainly Google but others followed) decided to prioritise all the other stuff... WebGL, HTML5, Canvas, etc. All designed so you don't have to hack HTML to do such application-ary patterns.

The idea that your browser is only able/designed for browsing HTML/CSS is really only showing that you are out of date.

Comparing Java plugins from decades ago is really not a valid comparison either.

>>Some people just got to learn the hard way. All over again.

And some people learn something once and refuse to ever accept anything else.

Well, well, well. Internet-of-Things speaker biz Sonos to continue some software support for legacy kit after all

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That's nice. Most of their customers are younger than your amp so they probably can't fall back on such things.

A decent DAC+amp+speakers probably costs the same as Sonos, especially if you want to add a media streamer.

I'm a fan of Chromecast Audio to bring my kit into the modern world but it's still not as slick as Sonos and some people like that slickness.

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Re: It's easy to lose customers.

How is this 'bribing'? Many companies will give you a discount on new kit in return for the old kit back. Apple stores are an obvious example.

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Re: Drop support, make it open source

We don't know they have the legal right to open their codebase, and of course doing this will take time and therefore cost Sonos money.

Interesting idea though.

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Re: Drop support, make it open source

Well pointed out. This would actually be illegal, I believe. It's still a weird solution rather than getting you to return the old gear.

If the words 'new', 'AI', 'for', 'the', 'physical', 'world', 'accelerate' and 'Facebook' scare you, click this headline

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Probably that's pretty trivial. Signs are generally quite similar in style and this makes them easy for an AI brain to notice. Reading the text is not hard at all.

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Re: Robots and Pizza, I don't think so

Why do you think giving it an ambulatory body makes it worse at stealing your data? Your phone already does this and you carry it to every room with you.

Don't mention the seam! Microsoft releases Surface Duo Android SDK, more on Windows 10X

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Re: Full fat

And Azure.

And XBox.

And Surface.

And these modern things called "lap tops"

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I find it weird that seemingly the displays are presented to the developer as one screen, with a bunch of 'dead' pixels for the seam? I can see that makes pushing stuff from one to the other work nicely but also raises some limitations.

Remember that Sonos speaker you bought a few years back that works perfectly? It's about to be screwed for... reasons

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Re: Why indeed...

Oh get off your smug high-horse.

"sound quality that is barely acceptable if your target audience is a bunch of very, very drunk people at a party, but that's about it."

You're talking out of your backside. I challenge you to a blind test. They just sound like typical consumer speakers.

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A friend has a fair bit of their stuff and it sounds good enough to me. It wouldn't be my choice at the price-point but if you have money sloshing around then the convenience is quite nice.

EU declares it'll Make USB-C Great Again™. You hear that, Apple?

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Re: I don’t see how USB-C solves the charger-zoo problem......

I just find a cable which fits my device and a charger which has USB-out. Or a power socket with USB built in. And connect them together. I don't necessarily get things charging as fast as they perhaps could, but it always seems to work.

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Every USB-C cable I currently own is only C at one end, and 'regular' USB at the other. Which makes the implication the electricity gushes from big->small :)

How a Kaggle Grandmaster cheated in $25,000 AI contest with hidden code – and was fired from dream SV job

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Re: "Harnessing the power of data"

One corollary of this is the AI can detect which animals are never going to get adopted and they can euthanize them early to save resources...

...is an example of when AI can actually be scary, because their models presumably literally do predict which animals will be put down and it only takes a human to decide this is the logical outcome.

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I miss the part where they said they would lie about the animals.

Change to front page

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How can I directly go to the forums indexes if there isn't a link? I often come here to see my comments and check for replies/discussion.

Are you saying you expect users to bookmark the page? Why not put it at the footer if you want a cleaner top-bar?

World's richest bloke battles Oz catastro-fire with incredible AU$1m donation (aka load of cheap greenwashing)

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Re: Cheap stunt for a company that doesn't pay the correct amount of tax

Unless they are breaking the law, they are not paying in the incorrect amount. Just not the amount we think they should.

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Re: Nothing new

Charities and non-profits often get services like AWS for free.

Fire services are part of the state, why on earth should the government be given services for free? They have to pay for fire engines and buildings and protective gear, why wouldn't they pay for IT?

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Re: The problem with small-scale private philanthropy by the wealthiest is that it achieves little

How on earth is it immoral? THat's like saying taking a 20% pay cut is immoral because it means you're depriving the state of tax.

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Re: claiming the tax back

If you give money to a charity as a UK tax payer, Gift Aid means the CHARITY gets the tax you paid on that income. You don't get it yourself it's just as if you never earned that money for tax purposes. e.g. you give £1000 but the charity gets £1200.

It's a great system.

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I have no issue with a billionaire "only" donating a million but then to tell everyone about it is in poor taste.

Equally I find a lot of the "charity auctions" a bit said - someone really rich gets other people to give their money.

Of course there are ALWAYS disasters so even a billionaire can easily end up skint of they go in big.

OpenAI's GPT-2 secret life as a pawn star: Boffins discover talkative machine-learning model can play chess

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Except they keep improving it. And I'm fairly sure SF are jumping on the self-learning bandwagon too.

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AlphaZero famously is really really good at learning to play chess, but proprietary from Google and runs on specialist hardware.

Leela Chess Zero is a hobby/OS project based on the same principles which has gone from being (relatively) terrible to beating many advanced engines in the space of a year or so, which is pretty fascinating.

StockFish represents the old guard of chess AI.