Posts by ThomH

Google unplugs AMP, hooks it into OpenJS Foundation after critics turn up the volume

The user experience is still the worst thing about AMP

My phone screen is about 10.5cm tall.

If I load an AMP page directly from its content publisher then initially I lost approximately the top 1cm to my browser's address bar, and the bottom 2/3rds of a centimetre to the navigation controls. As soon as I start scrolling downward, the bottom controls vanish and the top bar shrinks to about half a centimetre. So I've about 10cm of vertical space.

If I load an AMP page via Google then it loads up with the browser's address bar and navigation controls, plus an extra 0.5 cm of JavaScripty in-page address bar. If I scroll then Google's little pretend address bar goes away but the browser's address bar and navigation controls remain because Google has seen fit to force a reader shim between me and my article interactions, which fakes the scrolling in a way sort of like the OS would but not exactly*. I lose1 and 2/3rds cm of vertical space for a total of around 8.84 cm.

But, you know, I'm sure it gave someone something great to write in their performance review as a deployed product. So that's what Google internally considers a win.

* quite apart from the speed and deceleration not quite working correctly, the biggest tell is trying to scroll past the top of the article. The fake scroll bar alternates semi-randomly between vanishing entirely behind Google's fake address bar and being trapped inside the page content. Also if you grab the content before it snaps fully back into place after resisting your overscroll and try to scroll down, you'll find that you can't. The real OS has no such flaws: the scroll bar stays in its proper place, and you're not penalised into having to wait after daring to try to scroll too far.

So: AMP costs me almost 12% of my vertical space.

Openreach's cunning plan to 'turbocharge' the post-Brexit economy: Getting everyone on full-fibre broadband by 2025

Standard very specific observation: BT still hasn't figured out how to get broadband into most of Rotherhithe — London, Zone 2 — above 3mbps, despite more than a decade of claiming they're going to do something about it any minute now. So, as if anybody hadn't guessed, spoiler: give them money or don't, either way BT will not succeed at getting everyone onto full-fibre broadband by 2025.

GNU means GNU's Not U: Stallman insists he's still Chief GNUisance while 18 maintainers want him out as leader

Re: re: the downvotes are probably just howler monkeys with no sense of humor

I downvoted because my opinion about the RMS brouhaha is that regardless of the situation he is now primarily being used as a touchstone to pwn the liberals. So that post gets the same reaction from me as anything else that is overtly tribal.

I just miss the days when the strongest us vs them stuff in tech reporting was <Spectrum vs C64><Amiga vs ST><PC vs Mac><iPhone vs Android> (delete as applicable).

What, you mean you don't use GNU Hurd? It's going to be the best kernel ever, any day now.

Game over: Atari VCS architect quits project, claims he hasn’t been paid for six months

I was tempted by one of the joysticks

But two things stopped me putting money down:

(i) they're neon nightmares — the base has a light ring in it that insists on blaring out in different colours and combinations upon every action that you take. It's unbelievably ugly; and

(ii) realistically, I'd probably never get a joystick.

Re: All too rose-tinted for me

I realised with great sadness how old I was the other day through this observation: Shenmue is as old now as Lunar Lander was when Shenmue came out.

Re: Amiga

Yeah. The problem here is that Atari has to do all its screwing up on the CPU. Commodore has a blitter that allows it screw up while also doing other tasks.

UK Supreme Court unprorogues Parliament

To clarify: the courts are the wrong place to decide whether actions taken by the government are lawful? Implicitly, the government can do whatever it likes in between elections?

Re: Damning...

Pedant attack! Unlawful and illegal aren’t synonyms in their legal usage, e.g. the definition of murder requires that the killing be unlawful, plus some other requirements*. They approximately mean not according to the law versus directly contravening the law. Although not everyone even seems to agree about that. It’s a slightly fuzzy thing relating to the constitution not being particularly explicit in many areas.

Anyway, this was definitely the former rather than the latter. It’s harder to be lawful than merely legal.

* malice aforethought mainly, which, ummm, doesn’t really mean malice, just intent.

Lights, camera, camera, camera, action: iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip biz in new iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip shocker

Re: But I thought it was....

Both Apple and Hiawei first commercially-released phones with multiple lenses in 2016. This is Apple's first phone with three, not its first phone with more than one [facing the same way].

Re: Peak tech

The first iPhone to feature multiple lenses of differing focal lenses was the iPhone 7 Plus in 2016; I guess three is better than two — the wide angle is new — but it's incremental even within Apple's world.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson moves to shut Parliament

Re: So, to sum up. . .

I must have been dozing on the day that 17.2m voted to exit the EU with no deal in place, not allowing our elected representatives any say in the arrangements. Was that the "vote Brexit to give away control" campaign?

They say piracy killed the Amiga. Know what else piracy is killing? Malware sales

Re: Piracy killed the Amiga?

He took a lot of money from a legitimate enterprise so that he could hang out on boats in the Caribbean, and ended up sinking that source.

Sounds like piracy to me.

He's coming for your floppy: Linus Torvalds is killing off support for legacy disk drive tech

That's not entirely true; Disk2FDI can do it on a standard PC with two floppy drives.

The magic trick? Drive selection is external to the FDC and data is transferred prior to checking for CRC errors, so reformat the floppy in one drive to have really long sectors, start reading one of those really long sectors, change the selected drive behind the controller's back, drink in the Amiga data. Subject to possibly having to try a few times to get a serendipitously-timed switch re: clock versus data bits.

Re: I remember floppy disks

The Apple DOS 3.3 approach to the drive motor is one of the smarter ones, in my opinion: turn motor on, inspect the disk shift register. If it is still shifting, the disk is obviously still spinning fast enough from whenever the last time the motor was on, so continue. Otherwise wait for spin up. When done reading a sector, switch the motor off again (subject to a hardware 1-second delay).

GitHub builds wall round private repos, makes devs in US-sanctioned countries pay for it

Re: Blame Maxi-Boris

The future isn't really good concern; if there's a decent chance they won't backfire in the next year and four months, or at least not in a week when he hasn't come up with some other distraction, that'll do. And even if they do backfire before then, he'll just say that they haven't, and a thousand pundits will take to Fox to decry this unfair attack on the President from the hard left.

Re: What do we do now?

Quite a lot of people are trying really hard, including some of the 46% that voted for him last time. Unfortunately Twitter rewards whomever slings the best mud.

It's Prime Minister Boris Johnson: Tech industry speaks its brains on Brexit-monger's victory

Re: Disaster

Nature abhores a vacuum, and the exit from electoral success of the Liberal Democrats created a huge gap sucking Labour leftward, whereas the Brexit Party are doing a wonderful job making the Conservatives look moderate.

So it's whoever plays well in the shires for now.

Enjoying that 25Mbps internet speed, America? Oh, it's just 6Mbps? And you're unhappy? Can't imagine why

Re: Who are they accountable to?

Alas, 6mbps is more than enough for receiving disinformation via Twitter, so the government has no real motivation to act.

Hope to keep your H-1B visa? Don't become a QA analyst. Uncle Sam's not buying it: Techie's new job role rejected

Re: Not *entirely* unreasonable?

But on the other hand, this wasn't hiring somebody for a new job, it was promoting them to a new role. So I don't know how the couldn't-find-a-local rule applies to that, but you'd imagine it might be different.

I, luckily, obtained my green card just as Trump came in, but I'm not from India so it was a lot easier for me — the US differentiates based on the nationality of the applicant. There's currently a 12-year backlog of Indian nationals who have met the criteria and filed their paperwork but are waiting to emerge from that queue, and I don't think the backlog is getting any shorter.

Chrome on, baby, don't fear The Reaper: Plugin sends CPU-hogging browser processes to hell where they belong

Re: Full fat or skimmed

I'm not sure that's an operating-system-specific comment.

I have a project that's about ~60,000 lines in total. With the latest Clang, all optimisations turned up to the appropriate maximum, the binary it produces is 21,595,120 bytes in size.

I comment to a ridiculous volume, and write for legibility, avoiding code-golf-esque monstrosities, so suffice to say that the implied 360 bytes per line is somewhat of a surprise.

It's C++ but I'll use a template only when there's actually some generic behaviour to describe. At one of my previous workplaces I knew somebody who seemed to believe in templates to allow completely different code paths for almost all runtime selection — anything you'd normally pass to a constructor by value he'd try to work into the template directly. "For performance", obviously.

One of his ~30,000 line projects could no longer be built for 32-bit targets because the binary it produced was larger than 4gb.

Farewell to function keys and swappable SSDs in the new two-port MacBook Pro

Re: Function keys are useless, good riddance

Escape is the indispensable one, absolutely. I don't think there's even another default mapping for 'cancel a standard dialogue box', other than the obtuse route of enabling accessibility features and tabbing along to the cancel button, which would be impossible to commit to muscle memory other than separately for every possible dialogue box.

Re: Function keys are useless, good riddance

Or maybe the actual pros know that the F-key shortcuts are all available via other keys? But good work on contradicting the many people here who were arguing that pros click on things.

Re: Function keys are useless, good riddance

Can you name some of those professional applications?

Amongst those that don't use the F keys on a Mac: Photoshop or anything else by Adobe, Logic Pro, anything from Microsoft Office.

Of other big names I could think of, AutoCAD has three things available on F keys and not also via a more normal shortcut. So that's one.

Function keys are useless, good riddance

... but the virtual escape key is a real hassle, at least for vi. I've been trying to ween myself onto nano anyway but old habits die hard, and the simple fact is that sometimes you need to work on a remote machine with nothing other than a shell so the mere fact that all I ever use vi for locally is git commits isn't much of a comfort.

The Great IoT Protocol War may have been won: Thread's 1.2 release aims at business

Cost-cutting?

I'm going to take the guess that the home automation market is ripe for protocol consolidation as many of the parties currently offering solutions look at their sales figures and wonder whether they could somehow eliminate those pesky development costs, as the whole departments aren't exactly money spinners. Even smart watches seem to be enjoying better adoption.

Not that it helped much with home automation's most obvious immediate predecessor, 3d TV.

Meet the new Dropbox: It's like the old Dropbox, but more expensive, and not everyone's thrilled

Re: Do one thing really well ?

Does "providing an interesting future example of failed avarice for Business Studies students" count as one thing?

Re: What to move to?

Apple's own iCloud almost fits those criteria — though you'd have to use the web interface under Linux. On the Mac it's pretty much just a daemon that offloads and downloads files on demand, right there in the normal Finder. No DropBox-style homegrown Finder/Explorer replacement garbage.

The free tier is worse than useless though if you intend to use any of the optional other features such as automatic photo synchronisation or device backup.

The web client is also fairly bare bones, so it depends on your tolerance for downloading and uploading manually from the Linux box.

if developer_docs == bad then app_quality = bad; Coders slam Apple for subpar API manuals

No part of the API uses local time, so you can make a pretty confident guess on that — it's always timestamps relative to the epoch that can be converted into a time relative to a specific timezone if you request.

This I can say because the developer documentation used to be great — five or ten years ago all the information was present for each class on a single page that search engines could easily index and a quick command+f could quickly reverse. The last couple of times I've tried to search it's been a miasma of incomplete snippets of information served dynamically that seem impervious to attempts to bookmark.

It's almost exactly as if Apple just got the memo on Web 2.0, fifteen years late.

Mozilla tries to do Java as it should have been – with a WASI spec for all devices, computers, operating systems

Re: LLVM

I believe LLVM IR embeds architecture-specific assumptions about alignment and byte ordering.

We fought through the crowds to try Oculus's new VR goggles so you don't have to bother (and frankly, you shouldn't)

I used to do this for a living

Three years ago in my lounge you'd have found a Vive plus the tracking stations plus the ~$4,000 PC to power it, all courtesy of my employer.

You probably wouldn't have found me or my wife using them, since we both had a go once or twice and then left it all to collect dust: VR is isolating, uncomfortable and all-too-often nausea inducing, and any content that might make up for that eluded us. Tilt Brush was briefly engaging, but the novelty wears off quickly. On the plus side, as it seemed to be primarily the motion disconnect that caused sickness, that was the title either of us could endure the longest. With Google Maps at the other end of the scale — truly the worst piece of VR software we tried, completely ill-suited to the medium.

Maybe they can fix the comfort but I don't see the isolation or the nausea going away. Since the primary development goals of the companies seems to be better displays, I'm not even sure they're trying.

If you are a gamer with a strong stomach who usually plays locally alone, a headset might be a fun purchase. For the rest of us, probably not.

Apple's revamped iPad beams a workhorse in from Planet Ludicrous

Re: USB

What did they want the USB for?

If it was for mass storage, HID devices, ethernet adaptors or audio/MIDI devices then the dongle providing a USB socket was a $29 extra purchase, very misleading sold as the camera adaptor. Yet another dongle, but it might have been cheaper than junking the devices?

Re: "pholdables"

It's 2019 and I'm Still Playing Would You Rather.

Don't get the pitchforks yet, Apple devs: macOS third-party application clampdown probably not as bad as rumored

Re: But users don't have the same right?

It doesn't imply anything about Apple's thinking whatsoever, being a quote from Simeon Saëns, co-founder of development biz Two Lives Left.

Re: and the re$t...

To expand on this:

Join the developer programme and you get a certificate. With a certificate you can sign your software. If you like, you can also submit it to the Mac App Store, where it'll undergo further review as per Apple's fancy.

If you locally sign your software and give it to somebody else, they can install it and launch it. With the default security settings there'll be a single confirmatory dialogue before the first run telling you who signed it and asking whether you want to proceed. From then on it'll launch like any other app.

If you do not sign your software then under the default settings, for a first launch other users will have to right click on it and select 'Open', then confirm that they want to launch an unsigned application. It'll work like any other after that. If they just try to double click without having done the right click + open dance first, they'll be told they can't run the software as it is unsigned.

Apps that are being put in the Mac App Store must opt in to the sandbox. Self-signed and unsigned apps have the option but needn't necessarily do so.

So, supposing Apple were to keep everything else the same but remove the unsigned option, the main difference would be requiring that $99 payment to allow distribution by any means. On imagines they might also mandate the sandbox.

I don't know that I would remain a Mac user in either case.

So about that Atari reboot console... you might want to sit down. It's going to be late, OK?

Re: Still going better...

And one day we'll make it to Florida, AC. I just need to get over this terrible cough I seem to be suffering.

Re: WTF

Because it's an amorphous project vaguely intending to do a bunch of buzzwordy things — primarily it's a regular computer with the Linux kernel and enough other modules to provide a proprietary Atari storefront with heavy sandboxing all round, plus some sort of hypervisor so that you can boot a full Linux instead. Oh, and they've also chucked in some 2600 titles under emulation because it comes in a nice 2600-style case.

I would hope that most of those who have gambled $320 on the thing just want the nice case. It doesn't take a genius to project the future of the Atari store.

All this information I gleamed from a blog post I just found, which suddenly deviates into the recent health travails of the main system architect. You know, just like a real company's blog post definitely would.

Thought you'd seen everything there is to Ultima Thule? Check this out: IN STEREO!

Re: Not doing that again...

It doesn't appear to be a cross-eyed image; it's a relaxed-eyed one. I looked into it, and it looked into me.

The first ZX Spectrum prototype laid bare... (What? It was acceptable in the '80s)

Re: Ah, memories.

If it's not straying too far, I'm pretty sure that it was in an issue of Electron User that I first saw the argument that a circle turned on its side looks like an ellipse, so if you use sin and cos to calculate points on an ellipse and join them with lines, you can do a sort-of rotating polygon. Which sparked pretty much my entire first decade of programming.

Also, it made the centrepiece question on my maths GCSE, about equally-spaced carriages on a Ferris wheel, super easy to solve. That was lucky!

Re: Ah, memories.

It's the equivalent of about £600 now, according to the very first inflation calculator I found.

But I think you've also hit on the proper response to the article's "Not that there is an awful lot one can actually do with a 16k ZX Spectrum" taunt: it really depends on your imagination.

Insane homeowners association tries to fine resident for dick-shaped outline car left in snow

Re: Power unchecked @scrubber

Belated response; apologies.

In the UK we use manifestos to resolve the issue you raise. A set of policy objectives is annunciated by each party in a widely-circulated document; those are the policies that your local candidate for that party promises to work to bring into effect, and the prime minister is whomever the majority of them trust to do the same.

The system is set up to promote input on policies more than personalities. Compare and contrast with electing whomever was most amusing on reality television.

If you really insist that it must be about specific people: what proportion of the UK electorate voted for the Minister of Defence? And what proportion of the American electorate voted for the US Secretary of Defence? Or for any other cabinet member?

Re: Power unchecked

I take your point re: rerunning until you get the 'right' answer, and it's why I'm on the fence about a second referendum now. Technically it's a different question — mutated from "these are some hypothetical benefits, should we pursue?" to "this is the deal so far, shall we continue?" — but if you follow that path of logic then I guess you'd end up with at least three polls since even May's current deal is, at least in part, to establish a transition period during which the actual final agreement is obtained. So a different absurdity looms.

The chaos in parliament and the prospect of a no-deal exit, which is a thousand miles from what most leavers voted for (cf. Gove, Redwood, et al and their beliefs that a deal would be easy), is the real tragedy here. That's not delivering on the referendum. That's admitting that the thing was so poorly framed and ill-prepared for that the whole system of government has failed to find a way to deal with the result.

On the issue of substance, the 48% I'm in lost. Game over. Farewell, EU.

Re: Power unchecked @scrubber

I've obviously touched a nerve. But to ignore your "over 50%" request as neither 2016 candidate got over 50% (it was 46.2% for the winner, 48.1% for the loser, to 1dp), I can name zero elections in the UK in which the winner got fewer votes than any of the losers.

I was also pretty clear in slagging off both of the countries I have any association with. Both the one that sleepwalked into allowing a 52% majority kick off a constitutional crisis by taking their opinion only in the negative — much like the MPs are now doing every other week, they indicated what they don't want, without providing any indication on what they want and with no mechanism being in place to find out — and the one that allowed the candidate that got fewer votes to assume the highest office in the land, where he's busy ripping apart the constitution all on his own.

Re: Power unchecked

In the UK I'm disappointed that the 48% of the population I found myself a member of in 2016 had 0% of the major parties offering their preferred policies during the general election of 2017. Though that's a minor concern compared to my feelings about the negligible lightweight who was so certain of his political powers that he rushed the country into the events of 2016 without nary a moment's planning for what might happen if he wasn't god's gift to referenda. That was the time to be explicit about whether there'd be a second referendum should the government end up in the position of having to negotiate something concrete, I think.

In the US I'm still slightly aghast that the man who won 3 million fewer votes than his opponent gets to be in charge. As if the horrors of the US's primary system weren't bad enough: letting the hardcore fringe of each party pick the candidates is already fairly crazy, but then having the person who obtains a smaller share of the public vote assume power is outright bonkers.

Re: "Insane homeowners association"

Re: "cannot afford better housing", and speaking as a resident of the New York area, a quick glance on Zillow suggests that even the most expensive currently-listed apartment comes with an HOA: the property costs $88m (!), and HOA fees are $13,500/month (!!).

So I'm not sure that what you can afford necessarily comes into it. Living in a densely-packed area is enough, and if anything those tend to correlate with increasing cost.

My life in the UK was a lot easier. This sort of thing is dealt with via leasehold sales*, ground rent and quarterly service charges. I can't think of anybody with (i) a resident's association; that (ii) attempts to police morality.

* this is ownership when you're talking about something like flat (/'apartment'). You've actually purchased whatever remains of usually something like a 125-year lease, with the legal right to renew. But the obligations and rights that transfer with what is technically a lease but wouldn't with a freehold are pretty necessary when you're talking about multiple people owning parts of a single structure. It's a workaround.

Vodafone exec dons tartan tam-o'-shanter, clutches bottle of Irn-Bru, in snap shared with firm... just before Glasgow staff told of redundo dates

Don't be so pessimistic; HR compelled everybody here to sign up two or three years ago, and put in place the rule that everybody most post every Friday with an itemised list of the things they had worked on that week. This was to ensure transparency between teams, give us all greater awareness of the company's objectives, etc. It's other use was as the live host for town hall meetings, and the permanent location for their archival afterwards.

If you said: 'but if everybody posts what they've been working on every week, won't the system be 99% noise and therefore very quickly ignored?' then you've hit the nail on the head. That plan had died within six months, at which point Workplace became just the place for town hall meetings and seeing various bits of positive workplace propaganda from HR.

It otherwise having become a ghost town, they've now also moved the live town halls to an alternative platform, and are archiving them via a normal blog-esque CMS.

I'm pretty sure they've formally closed the company's Workplace presence since that, but haven't paid enough attention to be sure.

ZX Spectrum Vega+ 'backer'? Nope, you're now a creditor – and should probably act fast

Re: I can't stand this nostalgia junk recreating junk.

Those YouTubers sound to be like they're exercising their electronic diagnosis and repair skills in pursuit of a tangible goal, while providing a record of what they did that might help to improve the abilities of others. It doesn't sound any less reasonable of a way to spend time than e.g. working on an open source project which likely won't ever have more than a handful of users. It's also a thousand times more interesting than the usual YouTube stuff of people recounting or enacting perfectly ordinary events as though they were Beowulf, pausing only to gurn.

Re: Speaking of....

I kind of want to chip in for one of its joysticks, which are available separately. But even $29 feels like too much of a risk. Also, the faddish LEDs are mandatory, which is a shame.

Re: You can tell your kids...

If not 2014, for that's when the ZX Vega, the one that actually shipped, appeared for crowdfunding.

It's the "the people involved had successfully done this before" factor that makes this saga so unusual, I think.

Go, go, Gadgets Boy! 'Influencer' testing 5G for Vodafone finds it to be slower than 4G

Are you sure you didn't read that AT&T has extended its mislabelling of connections as '5G' from Android phones to iPhones?

Absolutely nobody has claimed that Apple intends to deceive. Indeed, anywhere reputable has reported the opposite.