Posts by Mage

Google's crusade to make mobile web apps less, well, horrible

If they were serious

Fix REGULAR Android Apps FIRST!

1) No in App "reporting" to Google, other 3rd parties or seller

2) No in App adverts

3) Proper disclosure of App permissions, what they are for and reporting etc in the Playstore.

4) Proper disclosure of in App purchases (An upgrade to a different version is not the same as game add-ins).

5) Ability to turn off permissions per object, even if installed on older Androids such as 4.x etc.

6) info in Playstore if printing, screencasting, external storage etc is supported.

The user has too little information in advance of purchase and too little information afterwards.

Why so few Apps support printing and external storage? 1992 Windows and its applications were better thought out than the Android + Apps mess.

Top of the bots: This AI isn't a cold, cruel killing machine – it's a pop music hit machine

may be possible one day to ask AI to create songs

Why?

There are no shortage of humans doing it well, though record labels seem determined to promote the poorer ones, we'd be worse off with AI songs.

Humans are self replicating and to an extent self repairing.

There are probably useful things real AI might do, just as there are useful things that can be done with other tools. Probably boring and tedious things that humans don't want to do, like sorting rubbish, being a prison officer or changing nappies.

A cardboard desk? I won’t stand for it (actually I will)

Re: More testing needed

You need Blue Peter's Sticky Backed Plastic?

The legs look unstable.

The price seems high as I got nearly as much cardboard with my industrial 2.2m high MDF & steel shelving, which as the uprights are in two parts could make two standing desks. It's half that price too. Bolt free. No screw driver needed.

Russia to block LinkedIn over data domiciling issues

Linkedin are Spammers

Also encourage privacy theft. They encourage users to "share" their email address books / accounts with them.

Google: If you think we're bad, you should take a look at Apple

Market Dominance

If you have 0.5% or even 12% does a regulator care, compared to a Gorilla with over 80%?

Aside from the fact that Apple doesn't force any other maker to take their Apps and MS phones are irrelevant in the market.

The state of today's machine learning: Short, wide, deep but not high

Oh dear

Can we have it without the suggestive misleading jargon?

IBM: Why our Power9 CPU is going to make data centers great again

Alternatives are good

A CPU mono-culture is bad.

I hope IBM keeps supporting the Power Processor and that it's commercially viable.

Mines the one with list of CPU architectures in the pocket.

Chirp! Let's hear it for data over audio

licensing the technology

How absolutely trivial and basic. There is NOTHING about this worth licensing.

It doesn't seem very well thought out or secure either.

It's practically a scam.

WiFi pairing

Short range two way IR would make more sense.

What went wrong at Tesco Bank?

Re: With cloud computing, hackers have so many more points of entry

Your own servers you manage yourself, even if CoLo != "Cloud Computing", which is outsource to someone else's servers.

IoT worm can hack Philips Hue lightbulbs, spread across cities

Re: hollowed-out trade mark

They only really do lights and healthcare. The Philips badge for TVs and AV licensed to two Asian companies, so less connection to that stuff than Argos has to Bush (Argos decide which Chinese/Turkish stuff to stick the Bush badge on).

Semiconductors spun off as NXP and now getting extinguished for the IP by Qualcomm, I mean bought.

No idea who does the kitchen stuff that used to be Philips, the tumble driers, fridge, freezer, washing machine.

In 1926 they only made light bulbs and diversified into Valves (tubes) then Radio. They were once the largest Consumer Electronics in Europe.

Trump's torture support could mean the end of GCHQ-NSA relationship

Torture works?

Only in the sense of getting some answer rather than nothing. However it's usually made up stuff that the victim thinks you want to hear.

Not only is torture a crime, it doesn't even work.

Nor do polygraphs.

Trump's plan: Tariffs on electronics, ban on skilled tech migrants, turn off the internet

Re: What processer are you using

Probably an Intel made in Israel, Ireland, China or USA, packaged somewhere with cheap labour?

Assembly/test sites:

Chandler, Arizona, United States

Chengdu, Sichuan, China

Kulim, Malaysia

Penang, Malaysia

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Jerusalem, Israel

See also Intel's own website

Not all design is in USA either.

Is Trump in charge?

Program for a puppet

Maybe it will be "better" (for a limited sense of better) if he is a puppet.

Re: OMG! You mean I won't be able to buy, umm, errr, wait a mo, it'll come back to me

Intel has loads of Fab plants outside USA.

Non-US soy is often the main kind in Europe anyway as the USA soy is more likely to be genetically modified.

Is there a list of actually made or grown in USA products with no viable good alternatives? US branded doesn't mean USA made.

What's that, Adobe? A Photoshop for faking voices?

Re: Authenticity???

With cleverly added background hum that has frequency variations etc for the required time and place

proposed in 1970s

Biometrics

Biometrics, as understood now, are inherently worthless for access security / password replacement.

Japanese cops arrest serial 'foot licker'

Re: "When she sat down, however, Nishiyama sprung at her right ankle"

Except in Okinawa due to USA presence. They also manage to have 50Hz AND 60Hz electricity on same landmass (I forget which bit).

Used Japanese cars from Japan used to be popular in Ireland. The UK ones have been more popular in recent years.

Toblerone's Brexit trim should be applied to bloatware

Windows

Yes, lets have a XP/Win7 style Windows, ditch the crippled "Home" version and all the "Cloud" stuff and all the Telemetry / spying and all the eye candy (but proper shadow effect icons like Win 3.1 to Windows 2003). Even MS admitted that Aero was a mistake. Bring back a proper native Forms API, but move/keep GDI out of Kernel.

However don't drop important but little used features. Unlike never wanted (ribbon) or never used features, little used features might be important.

Instead of gold plating and adding features, reduce bugs, inconstancies and vulnerabilities. Write NEW kinds of software instead of version 15 of Word or 12 of Windows.

Sega MegaDrive/Genesis lives again, in Brazil!

the processors (68000 and Z80) are integrated into a single chip.

Maybe you can run Cromix on it then?

Anyone else ever have a Cromenco with Z80 and 68000?

Leaked paper suggests EM Drive tested by NASA actually works

Sceptical, but...

Lasers can work as propulsion, I can't see how this can be working, note the propulsion is so small that you can be looking at some sort of systematic error, like you can't shield from the effects of orbit or moving masses. They need three of them at right angles.

"One theory is that protons fired around the nozzle are providing thrust, but it's going to take a lot more testing to see if that's true."

Do you mean photons? Protons would use up the material of the engine.

IPv4 is OVER. Really. So quit relying on it in new protocols, sheesh

Meanwhile

Excellent points, Neil, that I really agree with, though I'm hoping someone is working on IP7, I don't like IP6, it seems to ignore too many real-world problems.

Browsers nix add-on after Web of Trust is caught selling users' browsing histories

Re: Protecting users from dodgy sites, ironically

Indeed, why is the setting on Firefox to block 3rd party cookies off by default? There is no reason EVER to allow 3rd party cookies.

Naming

DDR = German Democratic Republic. (Stasi ridden Communist East Germany)

Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea)

"Do No Evil" former motto of Google

National Socialism

etc.

Why would I trust an addon called "Web of Trust"?

Tesla to charge for road trip 'leccy, promises it will cost less than petrol

Tesla

Rich purchasers and rich owner subsidised by all tax payers.

Re: hint to Tesla owners

You can't deep discharge Li at all.

The Lead is 100% recyclable.

The ONLY reason for lithium is lowest weight. It's shorter life and more expensive to recycle and can't take ANY abuse or it goes on fire.

Re: hint to Tesla owners

Better to have a Lead Acid battery system for your PV panels than Musk's tiny "boil a kettle" model with fire risk (really no fire risk with properly installed Lead Acid).

Mirai scan tool unleashed

GRC

Is this better tool than Gibson Reseach's one (which maybe just looks for uPNP stupid settings, though they can scan all your ports.)?

https://www.grc.com/default.htm

Scroll down to ShieldsUp!

Compared to GRC's site they want far too many different domain's scripts enabled according to NoScript.

It also gives false positives!

"The scanner couldn't access the device on your IP address [redacted], possibly as a result of it being infected with the Mirai malware.

Please restart your connected device to enable scanner access. Why?"

Either it's incompetent or a scam to sell cloud services.

"Q: I restarted my device but the scanner still can't access it. What should I do?

Nothing, you're good. If after rebooting the scanner still can't access your device, it's because the remote access ports are closed and your device is secure from Mirai injection attacks."

Well, I don't have anything exposed by my Router/Firewall (Open WRT on a PCEngines SBC)

Facebook 'fesses up to WhatsApp privacy blunder in UK

Re: Bah - one look at the requested permissions was enough for me

The problem is that Whatsapp has all the phone numbers/contacts on a users phone.

The problem is people posting info and photos of other people on their facebook account.

Also people blindly following signup instructions like on Linkedin to share their email account with the so called Social Media so all the data can be mined and all the addresses spammed.

The Regulators are largely ignoring it all and only take notice if there is outrage on mainstream media. They are not proactive about misuse of clear single pixels, 3rd part cookies (both should be illegal), icons with tracking scripts etc.

Too late

It was too late when Facebook was allowed to buy Whatsapp.

Facebook has been totally disingenuous about privacy on their own site and the scripts in the "like" buttons that web sites add (just put a LOCAL icon and a link, the Facebook script breaks privacy!).

This is meaningless.

Why Oracle's Larry Ellison shelled out $9bn for NetSuite

Untold riches

"Analysts are predicting untold riches in enterprise cloud and ERP-as-a-Service thanks to the underlying switch from buying on-prem licences."

Maybe they are right, if so then really stupid people are making the decisions. People outsourcing core aspects or mission critical or private aspects of their operations to so called "Cloud" may not personally suffer (any failure claims by our customers will be less than our cost savings), but the human race will rue it when they can't buy food at the checkout or make calls on mobile (because EPOS is down and Billing is down, all backends on the "cloud" to save money).

Apple drops dongle prices to make USB-C upgrade affordable

Re: Ha bloody ha

Someone here suggested they only make laptops at all so that Apple staff aren't using machines with Dell or Lenovo badges.

I've been saying since they axed the Mac Server and "Computer" from their name, look at the profits. The Mac is a tiny niche, with little after market Apple income compared to iOS pads and iTunes, hence the experiment of the Apple version of Surface Pro.

So I don't expect them to axe Macs any time soon, but I think any feature not needed by their own staff is a very low priority.

Re: Ha bloody ha

I bought two 14" Lenovo laptops instead. No dongles needed.

Mythbuntu busted as last two devs working on media centre distro quit

Re: When you can

How do I connect my satellite dishes to a Kodi box? Most won't work a USB DVB-TV stick fully (MPEG4 (SD & HD)+ MHEG5 Interactive) or at all without hacking.

Re: That would be MediaPortal then?

MediaPortal is only win7 and later.

MediaPortal is no use for Linux. The MythTV is.

Kodi is primarily for streaming.

MythTV is primarly for Satellite cards and DVB-TV Sticks etc and can work VERY well on Linux. (ProgDVB on Windows is superior to any MS MediaCentre version for Broadcast and even does MHEG5 Interactive), but no use for Linux, and not free. However I'd pay something for decent Linux TV reception software that just works, like ProgDVB or other packages on Windows.

The problem with Linux is setting up the PCI satellite cards and USB TV sticks in the first place.

Is there a future for Windows with OEM sales of Win7 now ended?

Apple, Mozilla kill API to deplete W3C battery-snitching standard

Apple and Mozilla are leading the charge away

Good, this was a daft proposal.

I'm encouraged by the sudden breakout of common sense by those two, who haven't demonstrated much lately.

Google makes it to third base with Home digital assistant

Re: manipulating Google search results again?

I think Randell Monroe is the expert on that?

Or maybe Mrs Robinson.

Or Black Hat.

Re: These devices are game changers

There are 1 0 types of people.

It's evil

But so is the Amazon Echo.

I'm baffled why anyone thinks these "spies" in the home are a good idea.

They are not much better voice control than 20 years ago and horribly inflexible too.

Any questions? No, not you again at the back, please God no

Re: I LIKE the takeoff and landing - they are the good bits.

Yes, at least mildly interesting, the rest is uncomfortable and boring. It doesn't help those with chronic congestion, skin conditions, breathing issues etc that the aircraft are not fully pressurised. You need to drink stuff with water to avoid dehydration, with risk of drinking too much or not enough.

Wiki stuff on cabin pressure

"In a typical commercial passenger flight, the cabin altitude is programmed to rise gradually from the altitude of the airport of origin to a regulatory maximum of 8,000 ft (2,400 m). This cabin altitude is maintained while the aircraft is cruising at its maximum altitude and then reduced gradually during descent until the cabin pressure matches the ambient air pressure at the destination.[citation needed]"

IMO this little mentioned fact (apart from how little space there is and insufficient humidity for those used to the Emerald Isle, and how horrid airports and airport security is) goes a long way to explain why I hate air travel. I don't worry about safety, my car trip to the supermarket may be more dangerous.

Re: Dead elephant. MS-Office ripoff

I can't resist asking those sort of questions. My last boss deliberately took me to foreign vendor meetings when he wanted to unsettle the vendor before signing (or not signing) the contract.

Engineers are not so welcome at meetings when their own company is selling.

Re: Fear of flying

I don't have a fear of flying, I just hate it.

I do occasionally have a slight nervousness about take-off or landing when they seem unusual.

I've occasionally bought a ticket, but always had the expense refunded. I hate flying so much, I can't see why I'd ever want to spend my own money on it.

Anti-ultrasound tech aims to foil the dog-whistle marketeers

Or

A low pass filter on inputs (mic) and outputs (speakers).

The actual transmission channels can't actually carry true ultrasonic signals as they are limited to less than 22 to 24 kHz.

FM Radio to under 15kHz

Your weekends may be safe, admins – IT giants tout 'zero outage' tech

"meet certain criteria,"

Ha Ha Ha

Laudable but hilarious.

Windows 10 market share stalls after free upgrade offer ends

Re: As long as Win10 continues to be a piece of spyware...

Bought two Lenovo Laptops this week, they came with Win7 pro "free" if you ordered Win 10 pro,

Whatever about the "regular" versions, Vista Home and Win 10 Home at least seem like crippleware.

I see MS has only just ceased OEM Win 7 sales.

One at least will "dual boot" to Linux Mint + Mate, I hope (no SSD).

A British phone you're not embarrassed to carry? You heard that right

Re: With its first in-house design. Bet it isn't.

Maybe they sketched out the case and logo.

Depends what they mean by design. I did a 4G (not Wimax or LTE) VOIP only "handset" using a PCMCIA modem using a handmade case and catalogue industrial PCBs in 2007. In a sense I designed it.

Did they really pick the chips, layout a PCB etc, assemble it, debug, do the approvals etc?

Re: how "British" the company is

It's not UK software, it's Electronics design isn't in UK, parts and assembly are not UK.

But maybe some people think Roberts Radio is UK (Chinese OEM designed and built, badge / brand is owned by Glen Dimplex conglomerate). Or that Bush is British.

re: is likely to be unchanged

Because it's UK marketing, not really a UK phone, (but then I think Apple phones are barely American, though they do more designing than WileyFox who are really outsourcing the HW/SW design and perhaps only having some input on the cosmetics).

Standing out from the crowd with an Android phone? You and 90 per cent of the market

Profit and Apple

Only matters to Apple Shareholders, and indirectly to how much the buyer is over paying.

To shops, accessory makers, IT support, App developers, Malvertisers, black hats, people wanting support, it's market share.

Perhaps people are realising that Apple is almost x2 overpriced for what you get. Despite having only 13% of market, they have maybe about 70% of the profits. It's not due to especially clever manufacturing, though the glue helps reduce cost.