* Posts by Dave 126

10622 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010

Meet games-streaming Stadia, yet another thing Google will axe in two years

Dave 126

> Only a company the size of Google could come up with such a stupid idea.

Eh? It's the same idea as has previously been implemented separately by OnLive, Sony and nVidea. The idea is sound, but there were technical hurdles preventing a great user experience, technical hurdles that Google seems confident it can mitigate.

Google's architecture isn't fixed like a games console - their system is designed so that multiple GPUs can be used to render a single instance of a game, allowing, for example, someone to pay a bit more for greater fidelity graphics.

It's worth noting that a lot of console games today are dependant upon 'a long piece of wet string' in that they are multiplayer across the internet, typically with one player's console acting as a host to coordinate the game. For this reason it may be that there's less lag (with regards Bob's bullet hitting Alice's helmet) in a streamed game than in a traditional console online shooter.

Apple bestows first hardware upgrades in years upon neglected iPad Mini and Air lines

Dave 126

Re: Slipping

People have different requirements from a phone or tablet case, so allowing the end user to choose which case to use is just sane and sensible. And as a side benefit Mr Blogs doesnt accidently pick up Mrs Blogs phone as he leaves the house, since he's gone for rubber and she prefers leather.

Dave 126

Re: Issues

3/ there's more devices in use today with Lightning then there are devices with USB C. This will change over time though.

Dave 126

Re: Slipping

That's what a rubbery case is for, available for next to faff all from nearly anywhere.

Dave 126

Re: APPLECARE

There are similar scam emails going around purporting to be from Apple Care.

NASA: We need commercial rockets! SLS: Oh no you don't!

Dave 126

Big Fucking Rocket? Oh wait, that was named by a South African, who is also fond of borrowing names from a Scotsman.

I agree, the Americans have had some good names for hardware, and there's no shame in taking those names from ships of discovery from a previous age.

Can't do it the US way? Then we'll do it Huawei – and roll our own mobile operating system

Dave 126

Re: Just pick one of the open source phones

Again, that only gets you to base camp. The Open Source community would have a harder time writing apps for proprietary services such as banking, Uber, etc that many consumers would expect.

Dave 126

Re: I suspect its a clone of Android

> [ Tizen is ] still Samsung's back up plan though in case they get into a dispute with Google.

It's one of Samsung's back up plans, as well as being an option for Samsung in their Internet of Things. Another back up plan for Samsung is the Android Open Source Project but without the proprietary Google bits, hence their insistence on shipping phones with their own app store, however, email client etc duplicating the Google equivilents.

The HeirPod? Samsung Galaxy Buds teardown finds tiny wireless cans 'surprisingly repairable'

Dave 126

Re: Wireless?

You make a good point - wired headphones are less of a hassle with a dedicated and small MP3 player than they are with a phone which a, I might want to use for reading TheRegister or taking a photo and b, is a bugger to clip to my shirt pocket.

I have a physical job and I have come to hate my earphone wire getting caught in things when it is plugged into my phone. Back when I used a Sansa Clip the cable didn't get caught in things nearly as often.

Dave 126

Re: Why bother?

> Because making every bit of technology disposable is choking the planet in plastic and dubious chemicals

Exactly. That's why it's important for stuff to be well designed and engineered before it is mass produced. It doesn't matter how durable a device is if the user chucks it in a draw ( or 'recycling' bin) because some bug or flaw makes it irritating to use. Flakey Bluetooth in 2019? Not acceptable.

Review found these worked well with some Galaxy phones, less so with an S10, and very poorly with a Pixel, though they noted Pixel phones have their own Bluetooth issues.

Dave 126

Why bother?

They might be easy to repair, but review of them as actual earbuds aren't great, citing mediocre sound and flaky Bluetooth connection.

This isn't picking on Samsung; it seems nobody has quite nailed this form factor with the possible exception of Apple (which by design don't isolate ambient sound - a feature if you're walking down the street, a bug if you're on a train)

Science says death metal fans delightful and intelligent people, great at dinner parties

Dave 126

Re: Context please.

Wanting to do so is normal, actually doing so isn't.

Apparently it's to do with the invention of captital punishment in hunter gatherer tribes weeding out the genes for being an unmitigated jerk. Humans don't fly off the handle nearly as often as chimpanzees.

Dave 126

Re: Musically...

Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin play in a band, Them Crooked Vultures, with Dave Grohl of Nirvana and Foo Fighters fame. Dave Grohl also has a death metal band called Probot - presumably because he loves it.

But yeah, I suspect my musical tastes are more in line with yours, but I've always found punks, rockers, death metallers et al to be friendly folk.

Dave 126

Recently Keith Flint died, and he straddled both the dance music and punk genres, playing at the first Download festival ( a metal festival) with his side project 'Flint'. All reports suggest that off stage he was warm, chatty and supportive of everybody - a nice guy.

China still doesn't want iPhones despite Apple slashing prices, say market watchers

Dave 126

> As you can see selling to the average peasant can be very rewarding from a financial perspective

That's fine if you're KFC, not so much if you're Waitrose.

There are several viable positions in an ecosystem. The reason that lions don't run faster is that that position is already taken by cheetahs.

Dave 126

Re: I suppose they just need more and iPhones fall short of their needs.

The Chinese state retains the right to monitor its citizens, so the chief advantage of an iPhone in the West - that it doesn't run on a data slurping advertising business model like Android does - is lost on China.

'What's up, Skip?' asks paraglider – before 'roo beats the snot out of him

Dave 126

No ground to air missile?

Kangaroos in a military flight simulator fired missiles at trainees:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shoot-me-kangaroo-down-sport/

Dave 126

Marsupials haven't developed flight? Well, some can glide. The Sugar Glider for one.

Racist self-driving car scare debunked, inside AI black boxes, Google helps folks go with the TensorFlow...

Dave 126

We're just emerging from winter here in the UK, most pedestrians at night are still wearing winter coats if not hats and scarves too. As a driver I don't have time to wait til I see people's faces, I need to treat every shadowy shape as a potential human until I'm sure what I'm seeing. People could have green skin in this scenario and it would make zero difference to whether I perceive them as human.

I'm also amazed at how many people wear black costs in winter.

Galaxy S10's under-glass fingerprint reader, quelle surprise, makes mobe a right pain to fix

Dave 126

Re: Fingerprint/Home button

>Please, Sir, I know this one. The question was "How can we stop people buying cheap earphones and get them to buy much more expensive Bluetooth ones?"

Bluetooth headphones have fallen in price over the years, almost as if the silicon they are built around has fallen in price according to Moore's law. So I suspect it's a bit if both - yeah, Apple would rather you bought some pricey Bluetooth Beats, but at the same time a good number of users (not all by any means) had already abandoned wired headphones because Bluetooth earphones were cheap enough and they'd got fed up with detangling the bloody cables for the umpteenth sodding time.

I ran into an Asda the other day to buy some earphones (it was near the train station and I had half an hour, I wanted to listen to a podcast on my journey). Wired were £4, Bluetooth were £6. Yeah, I bought the wired ones, but still - it shows that the disappearance of headphone sockets can't be explained purely by a desire to upsell users to Bluetooth headphones.

Also, the last few pairs of wired earphones I've had have failed because I've caught the cable on something, or the cable has just died - making Bluetooth start to look like the cheaper option. Props to Samsung for using a *robust* 3.5mm socket though - the failure has always been in the earphones and not in the pricey phone. I once had a Creative Jukebox where the jack was soldered directly to the motherboard, leading to the inevitable failure.

Dave 126

Re: Why I get disposable phones

I should note that despite my phone case - a Spigen Tough Armour that is a hard shell around a shock absorbing layer - my Galaxy S8 has taken a lot of drops, including bouncing down a cliff. The phone is unscathed so it would appear then that Samsung's use of glue is doing a good job of keeping the internal components together.

Dave 126

Re: Screen burn

That's the thing: the phone ups the brightness of its own accord - into the red area of the brightness slider - in sunlight. Whilst I was aware theoretically of the risk of OLED burn-in, the phone displays no warnings so I'd assumed that its firmware was designed to mitigate the risk - akin to the firmware in OLED TVs that mitigate the risk of burning in images of broadcaster logos etc. In other circumstances the phone does a very good job of combining the history of my past manual brightness adjustments with the ambient light.

Once Samsung replace the screen I will indeed be more cautious, and that'll be easy because it was only the one app, a game, that has left burn-in artifacts. I guess it comes from taking the occasional break from work to smoke a rollie and play a strategy game for ten minutes feeling the sun.

Dave 126

Re: Why I get disposable phones

I owned a brand new Huawei once, bought half price at an EE shop for £35. It was surprisingly fine at calls, WhatsApp, maps, browsing etc, and if I dropped it I didn't worry.

Now I have a pricey phone that lives in a tough case with a tempered glass screen protector. It's survived many drops into concrete, but a bit of worry is still there.

Dave 126

Re: Screen burn

You can but ask. I'm due to take my S8 in to have the screen replaced after going through the online chat process. They ask you to go to hardware test mode and describe the burn artifacts when the screen is displaying different solid colours, and they ask if your screen is physically damaged - but not if you rooted your phone.

My burn resulted from a single game, presumably from me playing it in sunlight occasionally when the phone itself ramps up the display brightness. Had Samsung been more conservative with the adaptive screen brightness *and* you had disabled such a safeguard by rooting, then they might have grounds for refusing to fix your screen, but they weren't and you didn't.

Dave 126

Re: I'm no fan of Samsung...

Yep, it's hard to fathom how the user will break the sensor without breaking the screen first. If the sensor malfunctions of its own accord then it can be replaced at Samsung's expense under warranty. This can be done within a day at a Samsung service centre, so if you live anywhere near a big city you don't even need to send the phone away.

Meizu ditched hole-free phone because it was 'just the marketing team messing about', not because no one really gave a toss

Dave 126

"You're using it wrong"

Richard Sapper, designer if the first ThinkPads, also designed an articulated desk lamp. Unfortunately it was found that some users might rest the head of the lamp against papers on tnekrcdesk, and the lamp being Halogen (no white LEDs in the 1980s of course) and hot there was a clear fire risk. So the manufacturers were forced to add a little stalk to the lamp head to prevent it touching things. Why do I mention this?

Well, the flat top of the G4 Cube was just too tempting a place for some people to place a paper document or cup of coffee. Users, hey? I guess the Trashcan Mac Pro's shape - also built around convection assisted cooling - discourages people placing folders on top of it, but might look like a nice place to keep ones coffee warm!

Steve Jobs had previously sold two other cube shaped computers, both designed by Esslinger (of Wega, Sony, and Frog Design), but they were aimed at brain surgeons (Pixar Image Computer) or whoever the hell the NeXT was aimed at. And all we got was Toy Story, the World Wide Web and iD Software's Doom.

Dave 126

Re: the inefficiency of wireless charging

And charging my phone over USB kills my FM radio reception, as does some LED light bulbs.

I could wrap the light bulb in tin foil I suppose, but it'd rather defeat the object.

Dave 126

Re: Deal...

But some Moto phones do have swappable (and hot-swappable at that!) batteries via their Moto Mod system.

I can't help but think that if every poster here who cries out for swappable batteries actually bought said handsets, Moto would be selling a lot more phones.

As it is, one gets the impression that posters here just want a cheap way to keep using old phones. That is sensible and indeed laudable. However, it should be fairly clear to them why phone vendors aren't designing phones with their wishes in mind.

Dave 126

Re: Deal...

I found myself using my phone's front facing camera to locate a screw hole underneath a cabinet the other day. It was handy to have, since I didn't have a mirror in my pocket.

Dave 126

Re: Niche use case

I wasn't thinking of heat as the sterilisation method, but rather UV or chemical - there would be no nooks or crannies for microbes and viruses to hide in.

However heat could (though maybe not should) still be used without damaging the battery, since to sterilise it is only necessary to heat the exterior to a high temperature. If the temperature is high enough the duration of heating can be so low as to not raise the temperature of the phone's interior appreciably. That said, I can't see any advantages of using heat over say a quick dunk in peroacetic acid.

Dave 126

My phone looks like it has a cracked screen, but it's merely the replaceable glass screen protector. Assuming the protector has similar mechanical properties as the screen proper, it's saved me the cost of several new screens - i.e the original cost of the phone. Not to mention the drops in puddles, the bath and a stream which would have killed phones of old.

Dave 126

Re: Deal...

You can retrofit a bezel to any phone: it's called a 'case'. You choose a case to suit you, slender, chunky, one with a pop out hand grip, one with a little stand for watching TV...

Dave 126

Just to say: there are 3rd party charging mats/docks that can wirelessly fast charge Samsung phones other than the overpriced Samsung ones. But research first.

Google got flak because their Pixel phones would only fast charge wirelessly if the mat gave the right DRM handshake.

Wirelessly charging a phone which is already in a potentially hot place (a car dashboard) isn't a great idea.

Consider making an old phone or cheap 7" tablet a dedicated car GPS, even without a data subscription it can get live traffic dsta from your primary phone. This way you don't have the faff of plugging in your phone, you don't care about high temperatures reducing your battery life, and in the case of the tablet you have a bigger display.

Dave 126

Niche use case

A seamless, portless phone would be easy to sterilise. Heck, in an all glass case the phone could sterilise itself with some integrated UV lamps. I don't know if there's anywhere in the healthcare sector that would benefit from this.

Dave 126

The Qi standard alone might not supply enough power for that use case. Individual vendors such as Samsung and Google have wireless charging solutions that can supply more power than the Qi baseline but you need to research which charging mat first. Example: to fast charge a Samsung phone wirelessly you need a compatible charging mat fed by a compatible power source.

Dave 126

Yep. The idea of a single cable from the Cube to monitor that carries power, video, audio and usb for mouse and keyboard has taken a long time to come around again. It the solution to a clear problem, one vocalised by my father thus: "Won't someone rid me of this fucking snakes' nest behind my desk?!"

Convection cooling too is a good concept.

Prodigy dancer and vocalist Keith Flint found dead aged 49

Dave 126

Re: Keith Vaz, it's on you now

Mark and Iggy are disqualified on the grounds of not being called Keith. Ditto Ozzy for the same reason.

Dave 126

Keith Vaz, it's on you now

I mean, we've lost Moon, Floyd and now Flint, so the onus of Keithly hellraising shirley falls upon the Honourable Member for Leicester East.

Dave 126

All the tributes from other musicians, such as Suede or the Chemical Brothers, emphasize that he was a chatty, friendly, gentle character.

Dave 126

Re: The Prodigy never again scraped the same level of chart-topping success

Topping the charts in 2018 ain't the same as topping the charts back in 1998 or whenever.

That's not knocking The Prodigy's recent efforts (of which I've heard good things), just an observation about the music industry and wider pop culture.

USB4: Based on Thunderbolt 3. Two times the data rate, at 40Gbps. One fewer space. Zero confusing versions

Dave 126

Re: USB colour coding

Well, Apple played nice with FireWire (aka iLink or somethingorover) and have helped the adoption of USB C and Intel's Thunderbolt.

Dave 126

Re: Use Case?

Audio hardware works better on a stream based protocol than a packet based protocol.

But yeah, external GPUs, external displays, single cable docking... it opens up lots of possibilities.

Dave 126

Super ~Street Fighter 2~ *USB* Hyper Turbo Edition

SpaceX Crew Dragon: Launched and docked. Now, about that splashdown...

Dave 126

Re: "At 4m wide and 8.1m high"

Can't you just use empty washing up bottles?

"You'll need a washing up bottle, but make sure it's empty first so check with whoever does the washing up. You'll also need a pair of scissors with a sharp point, so you'll might need to ask for help."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/joinin/bp-post-of-the-week-rocket

Dave 126

Re: Make them an offer?

A staging post might be handy for resupplying consumables such as fuel, water and food... not sure how the ISS would help there.

Boffins put the FUN into fungus by rigging yeast to squirt out the active ingredients in cannabis

Dave 126

I can't be the only one who has suspected this would happen for some time - the progression of genetic science has more or less obeyed Moore's law. That's not to diminish the fine work of these researchers who have encountered hurdles and overcome them.

Yeast being yeast, it's hard to see how this can be put to use at scale without the lab assistant or cleaner accidently on purpose taking some spores home with them.

What is scary is imagining the day when an off the shelf tabletop machine lets a mediocre and ill intentioned individual take the genes from a high mortality virus and put them into a highly contagious air born virus.

Why are there never free power sockets when my Y-fronts need charging?

Dave 126

Indeed. Savers in Cyprus had 50% of everything over €100,000 confiscated a few years ago. The USA did something similar with people's gold in bank vaults a few decades back. If you're in a politically unstable state and need to emigrate, you'd want some way of taking your money with you. In turbulent times people haven't been able to trust fiat currencies and have put their money into gold or diamonds.

Dave 126

As the value of commodities goes up, people look to up the supply. Whilst Bitcoin eats electricity, using gold instead has people digging mines, polluting rivers and investing in asteroid mining companies. Neither gold nor bitcoin is ideal, but we can't casually say Bitcoin is worse than the status quo.

I guess at least the asteroid mining has the ability to supply us with industrially useful minerals in addition to gold (gold is useful in industry, but we already have far more than we need for purely practical applications)

Another way to make money from the ability to capture and move asteroids is: "Give me 3/4 of your GDP or I drop this mountain on your capital city! Mwahhahaha!" [Strokes cat]

Dave 126

The other day I found a 1M USB A Male > USB A Female cable. Joy! It makes it so much easier to use and charge things at the same time once I've plugged whatever flavour of Male to Male cable into it. I think it came with a Logitech wireless mouse, one of the fancy power hungry darkfield ones that needs charging once a fortnight as opposed to once a year.

Danger mouse! Potent rodents 'see' infrared after eyeballs injected with nanoparticles

Dave 126

The authors cite the following paper for the molecules they use:

Amplified stimulated emission in upconversion nanoparticles for super-resolution nanoscopy

Yujia Liu, Yiqing Lu, Xusan Yang, Xianlin Zheng, Shihui Wen, Fan Wang, Xavier Vidal, Jiangbo Zhao, Deming Liu, Zhiguang Zhou, Chenshuo Ma, Jiajia Zhou, James A Piper, Peng Xi, Dayong Jin

Nature 543 (7644), 229, 2017

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:8Nj0yJ10RQEJ:scholar.google.com/&scioq=&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3D8Nj0yJ10RQEJ