Re: Last laugh
Hardware? Sure, they can buy SoCs from plenty of Chinese companies.
I'm not sure how popular their phones are going to be outside of China without access to the Google Play Store.
280 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2010
I have to disagree. They're obviously not Google-good at updates, but updates for my Honor 8 have come in regularly every 3 months or so with the latest security patches. This is a phone that's over a year and a half old. If you're particularly keen, there is a beta firmware channel where they have an update for *every* monthly security bundle. I'm not sure why they can't be arsed to push that out to users.
Full on OS upgrades are another story, of course. But most vendors have been really slow to get Oreo out the door unless the phone launched with it. The H8 is due in May, which again isn't bad for a phone that old I think. (Though admittedly it took them about that long to squeeze a Nougat update as well)
They've improved. My Honor 8 is up to the Feb. security patch and I can see that the March patch is in testing. We're supposed to get Oreo by May, which while it is slow isn't much slower than any other non-Google vendor for a phone that's over a year old.
I can always wish for more and faster updates, but by the (poor) standards of the general Android marketplace, they're not bad. Not great either, mind.
I think Concorde already proved that there is a limit to how much people will pay for speed. Or at least a limit to how many of those people exist.
No it didn't. Concorde never turned an operating loss (the circumstances of it's birth and being sold to BA/AF for £1 not withstanding).
If that were true - and it's not, because as another poster pointed out Concorde very much did lose money earlier in its career - it still doesn't disprove the point. A hellishly expensive, high-tech engineering program that completely sated the world's market for supersonic passenger aircraft. All 14 of them. That is not a success, except in engineering terms.
Side-tracking for a moment, I can't imagine how Hyperloop will ever be built. If high-speed rail struggles to justify its cost, how on earth is something even more expensive going to fare? I think Concorde already proved that there is a limit to how much people will pay for speed. Or at least a limit to how many of those people exist. In the HL presentation I saw, safety issues were basically handwaved away as trivial...
To be honest, Amazon is already rarely the cheapest place to buy things. Okay, they're rarely *tremendously* more than the cheapest price elsewhere, but they've stopped the drive to undercut absolutely everyone, everywhere.
They keep their customers because of convenience and customer service. Which, poor as it is sometimes, is still worlds better than most of their competitors. I hate them for their tax wizardry and Victorian attitude to staff, but I'm still waiting for something else to come along and at least offer me comparable service (better would be expecting a bit much).
"particularly in the enterprise market Apple is so keen to grab"
They can't be all that keen, given their support offerings. My director's XPS13 dies at noon and Dell has someone on-site the same day. Another's Macbook Pro dies at roughly the same time and Apple show up 6pm the next day.
You can pick up an Honor 8 for ~£270 off one of the European Amazons. The 9 doesn't actually offer much of an upgrade over its older brother. It's better, but it's not *much* better. £270 is a helluva deal for any phone that's got a CPU more powerful than an A53.
I believe they *are* the same phone, with the exception of a different radio.
It's Google promising the updates, in this case. Granted, that tends to mean you're in the dark after 2 years but at least you get regular security updates and Oreo is supposed to drop for it within the month.
True the initial offerings weren't all that, but Xiaomi has a new Android One phone that's phenomenal value for money. Which is nothing new for Xiaomi, but what is new is having global radio bands and an OS that's base Android and updated by Google. You can pick up a Mi A1 for around £160 if you shop around and it's actually *officially* supported in Europe. £160 for SD625, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage and a base Android experience with guaranteed updates is really unbeatable in the value sector.
There doesn't seem to be much custom work at all in the Kyro cores vs. the standard A73/A53. Certainly Huawei doesn't pretend that they fiddle about with their licensed ARM cores much, and the Kirin matches or exceeds the SD835 in nearly every benchmark. I think the "custom" Kyro core is a lot of hot air. They've basically tweaked something in the front or back end to communicate with the rest of their systems and called it a fully customised core.
SD820 was fully custom, but you'd have been better off getting an A72 instead. The A72-based Kirin was better in most day-to-day tasks. Qualcomm made a custom core that excelled at things no-one wanted to do with it.
Further to that, the recent Victoria Line upgrade to 36 TPH made a surprising difference for what, in theory, is just a couple of extra trains. Victoria station has gone from "the next one is probably in 60 seconds" to "the next one is *definitely* in 60 seconds" and the change in people's behaviour is amazing. They're much less likely to cram themselves into impossible spaces and block the doors, which means the train leaves the platform faster. Add this to the effect of the extra trains and the service runs so muhc more smoothly than it used to. Few people appreciate how a behavioural change can make the service run better.
And yes, Londoners aren't too bad at it. It's rare to have to bulldoze someone out of the way in rush hour; it's much more likely to happen at other hours when the tourists are in full effect.
My current electricity meter isn't "smart", but it is supposed to keep its time updated over the airwaves. It's currently 50 minutes out, because it's in a closet on the interior wall of a concrete slab maisonette. If 30% of users can't get a signal indoors, then ~30% of households will get no benefit from a smart meter.
(Okay, it's only *one* reason why smart meters are a con)
"and that's why we try to do HTTPS and other end-to-end encryption everywhere"
Which is why El Reg hasn't bothered to jump on that trend (defaulting to HTTPS) yet. ;) C'mon, guys. Most of the larger sites have turned it on.
(Yes, I know the forums are using SSL but the whole site really should)
I think I'll remember his work fondly because I was a bit older when I got into the novels, so I was aware of the slant. And, as you say, he didn't bludgeon you with it as much as some other writers.
Heinlein, for instance, I read as a young'un. And so the slant only became obvious later on, and because of that it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I can't read Heinlein without being annoyed by it now. It's the same with the Christian iconography in the Narnia books - what has been seen cannot be unseen.
Seems silly. My boiler from 6 years back came with a remote thermostat so we can move it around the house as we see fit. Though, in practise, we leave it in the coldest room in the house and set the temperatures to the lowest bearable in that room. Basically, there's only one bedroom with two external walls.
What *should* be in there is entirely to taste, so long as it comes from a definitive list of acceptable ingredients (which has been discussed to death). I don't like tomatoes. Some people hate mushrooms. I'll only eat black pudding if it's the oaty, Scottish stuff and not the fatty Bury style. That's fine, so long as their replacements come from an accepted list. There's some arguing to be had (I like streaky bacon, but I don't think it belongs in the FEB), but I think we're fairly clear on what's OK. The closest thing to proper heresy I've seen here is that some people don't like tea.
What's more interesting to discuss is what *shouldn't* be in a Full English. Like omelettes, and chips. Not that an omelette with chips isn't a nice breakfast, but neither of the items have any place in a Full English. Or putting it all on something other than a fucking plate. Yes, I've eaten breakfast off a slate tile, and no I wasn't amused by it.
Qualcomm hasn't recently proven Snapdragon SOC to be a plus. Last year, the Huawei Kirin was a *better* choice than the 820. The 835 isn't very different to the current Kirin, being a tweaked A53/A73 combo and giving up on their custom cores. The big problem with non-Qualcomm was drivers, but against my expectations Huawei actually dropped the source so there are 3rd party ROMs for Kirin SOCs.
I've got an Honor 8. Up to the May security patch bundle of 7.0. Supposedly we're getting 7.1 (and presumably a security update) by end of summer. That's not great compared to having a Nexus/Pixel, but it's not awful by third party standards. Certainly it could be better, but expectations are low. I'd say I'm happier with my (cheaper) purchase than a co-worker with the OPO3t.
BMW used to be at the forefront of H2 cars - they saw it as The Future quite a long way back and were pretty much the ambassadors for it. How quickly we forget all the hydrogen powered 7-series ferrying people around at the 2012 Olympics.
But even they've been quiet on it lately and pushed out the nifty little i3 instead. I think that sort of puts the writing on the wall, when the technology's biggest pusher has quietly shelved it.
Huwaei Honor 8, similar to Samsung. Up to the April patches, but still 7.0.
To be honest, that's way more than I expected out of them. I bought the phone resigned to the fact that it may not get much in the way of patching, but since Goog's moved a lot of the Android core into apps update-able through Play I didn't care much.
I was even more shocked when they actually released source a few weeks back so that we now have drivers for the Kirin SoC.
Humans *are* the weak link in the chain, and the US certainly knows it and plans around it.
As in, no you don't need enough weapons to nuke the entire world 3x over, but they know very well that in all probability something like half of their crews will never follow the order to launch. The whole point is that the people with the keys have to go through all sorts of tests to prove they're sane enough to be in command of weapons that can bring about Armageddon - and yet, no sane person could ever follow the order to launch.
I'm sure it's been considered to replace the human element many times, but cooler heads have prevailed.
I quite like the OP3t, but if you don't mind non-stock Android (and most of the stuff can be replaced with Google versions if you want), I think the Honor 8 is a better buy at £100 cheaper. The metal body and fairly stock OS aren't worth £100 to me, and the Huawei has a combined SD card/second SIM slot.
Personally, it's worth stepping up to the ~£295 Honor 8 over the 6x. That's about what I paid for my Nexus 5 and it's a worthy replacement. Basically fixes all the issues I had with the N5 hardware (battery, camera, CPU a bit klunky these days) in exchange for no longer being stock Android, while still being pretty much the same size. I just wish they hadn't used an experimental frictionless material for the back of it.
As for the EMUI power notifications, one of the first things you should do is turn it off globally under power settings and only choose to turn it on for certain apps.
The Asus linked to seems not such a bad deal, until you realise it has:
- a slower processor
- a lower resolution screen
- a higher price
than Tesco's own Hudl 2 had over 2 years ago.
The truly sad thing is that there aren't really any better deals. You've got your premium units over £250 and the sub-£80 units (with all the trade-offs you'd expect), but there's nothing in the £100-200 range that's actually worth the price.
Personally, I snapped up a second Hudl when Tesco found a box of them at the back of a warehouse late last year and flogged them for £69. Since the first one was exclusively for the six year-old's use, I'd forgotten what a stunning screen it has next to the Amazon line-up.
For general use, I reckon you're right. But the Kirin chip in the Huawei is vastly more powerful than the Moto's 8xA53 setup.
My main issue with Huawei is that bastard of an "OS" they install. Easily one of the worst Android skins in existence. I'd buy one in a heartbeat if they made an AOSP build available for power users.
Target audience is a company that's mostly Oracle on Linux and is so fed up with Oracle's shit that they're willing to try MS. At the moment, we have a few Windows servers about for running SQL but the admin team isn't really well-trained for Windows (and it seems silly to hire an MCSE to run a half dozen servers). Migrating that to RHEL (or whatever) would make things that much simpler.
"(other major banks do not allow contactless transactions in foreign currencies)"
Blatantly untrue. In fact, Halifax (at least, quite probably others) are beholden to the contactless payment limit of whatever country they're being used in. In my case, I was regularly using contactless without issue up to the Canadian limit of $100 (~£60).
Unless you mean contactless foreign currency transactions *inside* the UK. Even Eurostar doesn't take euros at St. Pancras (annoyingly), and buying forex still counts as a GBP transaction.
Ten years ago, it was bleeding obvious that security was insufficient at almost all UK banks. That whole "Enter the first, third and fifth number of your PIN" nonsense that would be much more secure if they had enough brain cells to not ask for them in order each and every time. Halifax - for one - still does this, though they've at least moved to selecting from a drop-down list to frustrate the very simplest of keyloggers. HSBC moved to one-time codes and then inexplicably re-introduced the in-order random bits of PIN in their mobile application. Because Android is more secure than a desktop or something.
You can only conclude that they don't actually care.
I'm not saying it *is* as good as an F-16 at visual ranges, but all tests to date have involved neutered F-35s because the software and testing was incomplete. In the test you're most likely referring to, the F-35s were restricted by software to pulling 6Gs. Which is naturally going to lose you an aerial knife-fight.
We still don't really know its capabilities, or lack of them.
There are £200+ tablets and there are sub-£100 tablets. Both seem to sell well enough. But with both the Hudl 2 and Nvidia Shield off the market, there is no middle ground left. You either live with 1280x800 and 1GB of memory or you shell out more than twice as much. The Hudl and Shield in the £120-160 range both had lovely Full HD screens and ample memory. What's replaced them? Nothing, that I've seen.
Feel free to point one out, because I'm sure the six year-old will eventually find a way to destroy the Hudl. And I'm not going into the Amazon ecosystem if I can help it.
Based on the wording of it, they're lumping payments made *ON* mobile phones together with payments made *BY* mobile phones.
I pay my council tax and CC bills with my mobile banking app, so I would count as a mobile payment user. This is despite the fact that I have NFC, have AndroidPay installed, and used it all of once just to see if it worked. I think tap to pay has rendered NFC-equipped mobile payments pretty much obsolete before it got off the ground. (Outside the USA, at least)
Automated belts were extremely common in the States 25 years ago. At some point the Feds put in a law that the automakers had to introduce either airbags or automatic belts. Well, automatic belts were cheaper so... You can imagine the rest.
As it happens, people *hated* them and vastly preferred vehicles with airbags. A lot of it to do with the uniquely American notion that they didn't need safety belts if they had airbags. (Really. I'm not making that up.) Not only that, but as side airbags were introduced, the automatic belts interfered with them and were quietly dropped.
I'll add that they're really great for kids, but that market is essentially split two ways - people with spare cash buy their kids iPads, and people tight on cash won't go more expensive than the late, lamented (by cheap people with kids) Tesco Hudl 2. Which my 6 year-old has been using for the past two years, and there *still* isn't a better value proposition on the market. I think the Nvidia Shield was pretty close, but that's out of production as well now.