* Posts by Piro

2242 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Nov 2008

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

Piro Silver badge

This isn't Google's fault.

They can't ensure their maps are perfect at all times, it's a free service that's best effort.

There are two parties at fault here:

1) the driver, for not seeing a collapsed bridge in front of him.

2) the owners of the road, for not putting a jersey barrier on either side of the collapsed bridge, with signage a few yards before.

Google is a very distant third. It's not great their maps were inaccurate, but there can be no reasonable expectation of flawless mapping.

Lightning struck: Apple switches to USB-C for iPhone 15 lineup

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That's a lot of downvotes for official advice from many fire services. Oh well.

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Re: Not so green

It's good to move to USB-C from lightning. Let's move past it.

I've never seen a USB cable with a blackened connector. Odd.

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Eh it's not recommended to charge your phone when you're asleep for safety reasons, even though everyone does.

I know what you did next summer: Microsoft to kill off Xbox 360 Store

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Haha

LTSC doesn't have it.

I had to manually install it because I wanted to download some games that needed the Windows store. I had to hold my nose, but such is life.

Start rummaging: Atari's new 2600+ console supports vintage cartridges

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Re: Maybe this will sound harsh...

Of course, that's an important point. It wasn't a post that could cover everything.

It was more just the rose tinted glasses need to be very strong when going back to the 2600.

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Re: No shipping

It was popular enough. I remember playing on one as a kid.

Piro Silver badge

Maybe this will sound harsh...

... and I'll be downvoted to oblivion, but I've always felt that the 2600 is just too old, too simple, to be truly enjoyable these days, and even as a child I remember it being extremely crude.

Maybe there's a reason everything crashed until a decade later when Nintendo and SEGA showed the way, with graphics that good enough that you don't need a fantastic imagination to read them.

Don't get me wrong, I've read Racing the Beam, and have respect for what was done with so little hardware, but that for me doesn't really translate in to an experience that I have much desire to re-live.

But for many it will be, so it's great that they're catered for.

Intel seems to think Wi-Fi 7 is too cool for old-school Windows 10

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Hm?

Aero is just a design style.

You're probably thinking of Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly known as Avalon

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Confusion in article

2021 LTSC IoT gets 10 years of updates

2021 LTSC only 5

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

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Immutable backups? Immutable storage snapshots? Offline backups?

My guess is there's a backup guy who was constantly telling the bosses that investment needed to be made, only to be shot down.

Sad. Listen to your backup guy.

High severity vuln in WinRAR could allow code to run when files are opened

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Yeah, rar is king if you want to protect files in the long run

Internet Archive sued by record labels as battle with book publishers intensifies

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Leave them alone, damn

The internet archive is one of the greatest resources on the planet. It helps keep people honest by caching so much data.

Tesla hackers turn to voltage glitching to unlock paywalled features

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Re: I need heated seats like…

Eh, such cynicism. Heated seats and steering wheel are incredibly nice when you first jump in you car in the depths of winter. I wouldn't want to be without.

Tesla steering problems attract regulator eyes for second time this year

Piro Silver badge

But they did break

"Tesla features did not help stay in the lane or break in an emergency."

The features clearly did break.

Oh, you mean brake, a completely different word and concept.

Aspiration to deploy new UK nuclear reactor every year a 'wish', not a plan

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Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

There's not enough network capacity to sell it, which is why it gets so cheap. Sometimes they stop the turbines.

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Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

Denmark. Minus the taxes.

The tax per kWh is the highest in Europe, but in the middle of the day, when the wind is blowing hard, the base price is often 0, sometimes negative.

And we only had to cover the country in eyesores that will have to be landfilled at end-of-life.

When the tax was reduced for a while, there were people who could use power and get paid for it. It happened a few times. That also meant those with solar panels PAID to put their energy in to the grid.

Panasonic liquidates its liquid crystal display business

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Re: So who does actually make panels these days?

Lucky Goldstar is your best bet

Indonesia blocks Musk's X.com over its X-rated past

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PayPal was originally X.com as started by Musk, and he wants Twitter to be more of an "everything" "app", so he's moving it in that direction.

As tacky as the whole thing is, X.com branding is not new for Musk.

Biden urged to completely cripple AI chips to China

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Re: But I *Liked* the Z80! ...

OK that's just cool

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It's nothing new. Just look at the encryption technology export rules of yore

Piro Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Last Fall

No, never accept it!

Broadcom asserts VMware's strategy isn't working and it basically needs rescuing

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Re: VMware is Legacy Tech

VMware's problem is mainly price

Piro Silver badge

Re: VMware is Legacy Tech

What other virtualisation platform is as mature?

It's not legacy if it's being steadily updated and is widely deployed, and still being deployed in greenfield installations.

Samsung’s midrange A54 is lovely, but users won't feel seen

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Re: Reviews are pretty pointless these days

Something charming Xiaomi will still offer you (last I checked) was the IR blaster. Fantastic for messing with hotel TVs and the like.

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Re: "But at $450, outright, its flaws are easy to overlook"

Exactly, $450 is not cheap.

My current phone cost (with 25% VAT) the equivalent of $280. (barely over $220 without VAT)

I won't be convinced that $500+ phones are the norm or reasonable for the vast majority.

InfluxData apologizes for deleting cloud regions without performing 'scream test'

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Re: "Your number one expectation as a cloud database provider is to keep data safe and recoverable."

The "cloud" is the new "external hard drive", in that sense that both are places people leave data, expecting it to be entirely safe, contrary to all reason.

Firefox 115 browser breathes life into old operating systems

Piro Silver badge

Ehh.. I highly doubt supporting Windows 7 would need any extra work. It's a business decision not to test any more.

But it could surely be forked, or even better, forked with an automated patch that ignored the OS check in some manner. Manually maintained forks can all too often be dead-ends and security nightmares.

SAE says yes to making Tesla EV chargers an American standard

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Re: Not sure about calling it a win

The switching has provably worked fine as long as Teslas have existed, for over 10 years.

Look at USB these days, for years now we've had chargers that could deliver way higher than 5 V, when negiotated, but stay at 5 V if no handshake is done. Also has demonstrably been fine.

Using extra conductors consumes a lot of material, presumably copper, increasing the cost of the cables and connectors appreciably. All whilst increasing the likelihood the cables might be stolen.

FYI: Tor Browser is very much still a thing and getting updates

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Re: Firefox

I'd be concerned that Tor nodes will be loaded down by an excessive amount of adult video streaming.

They're probably used for worse filth anyway, but still.

'We hate what you’ve done with the place – especially the hate' Australia tells Twitter

Piro Silver badge

What type of "hate speech"?

Seems like definitions are hard to come by.

Opinions far from your own don't count.

Death threats and other direct threats on individuals would definitely count, and I guess you could build out a little from there.

As long as it doesn't just mean "opinions that are currently deemed unacceptable".

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

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Love it

The USB-C rule was great, forcing Apple's hand, but this is even better, as it forces the whole industry away from horrendous device construction.

It feels so sketchy heating up devices with lithium-ion batteries in them just to be able to get them apart. And then the battery feels like it's epoxyed in place. Let's get away from that.

Piro Silver badge

Re: UK specific model?

My phone has a removable back cover and a quickly swappable battery (XCover 5) but is also IP68 rated.

Don't buy the marketing crap. There was never a need to remove accessible batteries or headphone jacks to achieve the ratings desired.

Piro Silver badge

Re: UK specific model?

There are plenty of phones with trivially replaceable batteries and full IP ratings. I have one, Galaxy XCover 5.

All the way back to the Galaxy S5 in 2014 was this a standard feature.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

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Re: Thanks El Reg...

I mean, I read it, I can comprehend it, but it hurts to read.

Actively unpleasant to read.

Thousands of subreddits go dark in mega-protest over Reddit's app-killing API prices

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Re: Reddit is nothing without its users

Old.reddit.com

I don't know how anyone uses the new interface for two seconds

Google snubbed JPEG XL so of course Apple now supports it in Safari

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Re: Google's insistence on not learning from past mistakes...

Nobody wanted to lose an SD card slot, 3.5mm jack or removable battery. Keyboard, yes, that's very niche, but there would be buyers if there were offerings.

Many decisions have been taken in the pursuit of getting you to buy extra crap (new phone because your battery died, wireless headphones because you can't plug yours in any more, more storage at a higher cost upfront because you can't expand). Don't confuse those decisions with ones people actually want.

For the record my phone has a removable battery, 3.5mm jack and microSD slot (dedicated, can still run dual SIM alongside).. but that's not an easy combo to get these days.

Piro Silver badge

Re: Webp?

OK, how about lossless compression comparison?

https://heystacks.com/doc/385/lossless-image-formats-comparison-jpeg-xl-avif-web

Piro Silver badge

Re: Webp?

But what's the source image?

Whether we like it or not, the majority of photos are spat out of phones and cameras as standard JPEG.

Further lossy compression is always going to create unacceptable degradation. The idea JPEG XL can losslessly compress a standard JPEG further, saving diskspace and bandwidth, but also can reverse the process to serve JPEG XL naïve clients with standard JPEGs is something so useful that it basically renders any other reasons as being firmly secondary.

Piro Silver badge

Re: Webp?

There's a fantastic comparison here:

https://cloudinary.com/blog/time_for_next_gen_codecs_to_dethrone_jpeg

Piro Silver badge

Re: Webp?

Have you seen the advantages of jpeg xl?

The bit about losslessly compessing standard jpegs even further, and being able to bit-perfectly reverse that process is ultra-compelling

Rackspace datacenter infrastructure took 12-hour nap in London, Sydney, Hong Kong

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Re: CDT?

I think the best is probably tyre sizes: width in millimetres, a ratio of sidewall height to width and internal diameter in inches

Who on earth came up with that?

Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

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Don't forget that if you're missing cigarettes, and you wish to acquire one, it can get even more risqué:

"Can I bum a fag?"

Ford in reverse gear over AM radio removal after Congress threatens action

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Re: The only question remaining is ...

Better to follow the example of their neighbouring Finland instead, where they had a DAB switchoff in 2005.

There are a fair few that have switched off DAB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Broadcasting#Countries_where_FM_to_DAB(+)_radio_transition_is_cancelled/postponed

First ever 64-bit version of Windows rediscovered … and a C compiler for it too

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Maybe he uses it as a ramdisk to install the game on.

They *are* getting huge these days

Samsung's Galaxy S23 Ultra is a worthy heir to the Note

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Re: No expandable storage, no deal

Developer options, force allow apps on external

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Re: Shrug….

It needs to be one device, usable as a phone.

Add-ons don't come close to meeting the requirement.

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Re: Shrug….

My wife is still using hers, I just swapped the battery from a Cosmo that was faulty. Have an astro slide ordered, but Planet is very slow to deliver.

Their support is very poor and software release schedules unbelievably pathetic.

The hardware can be decent, but they just don't keep supporting it as it deserves.

Sadly, if you want a proper keyboard, nobody else is competing, so what can you do?

India calls for all mobile phones to include FM radios

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Re: still a bit bigger than I normally like them.

If you want to forget all about durability and serviceability (and dual SIMs WITH microSD, as on XCover), and you want to spend a lot more money, then there are two others the same size: ASUS ZenFone 9 (3.5mm jack) and Samsung Galaxy S23 (no 3.5mm jack).

But I'd rather not pay too much for my phone, and I'd like all the ports, with durability and serviceability. But smaller? Nope, as you said, that's the size floor these days.