Posts by nanchatte

Tesla sued over Tokyo biker's death in 'dozing driver' Autopilot crash

Nah, Yeah... It's totally Tesla's fault that I fell asleep at the wheel, guvn'r...

China and Taiwan aren't great friends. Zoom sends chats through China. So Taiwan has banned Zoom

Makes sense

Considering how China will refuse to do business with any company or country that recognizes Taiwan as a sovereign state.

Taiwan also certainly don’t want the motherland gathering dirt on them since they will do anything to frame prominent Taiwanese citizens as political dissidents.

The show Musk go on: Tesla defies Silicon Valley coronavirus lockdown order, keeps Fremont factory open

Re: Simple question

He has explicit said, and I quote, "I for one will be coming into work"

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8122185/Elon-Musk-says-sick-staff-stay-home-going-work-day.html

Interesting that Quach failed to even mention the fact that just two days ago Elon sent a mail to his employees which said that at this point in time, work is effectively voluntary. If any staff feel sick or even just worried about the CV19, they don't need to come in...

Still, generally, when Quach writes about Tesla it's negative, so no real surprise. Seems their investigative skill is limited to scouring twitter...

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-elon-musk-tesla-workers-can-stay-home-covid-19-2020-3

Apple updates iPad Pro with a trackpad, faster processor. Is it a real computer now?

Re: Professionals?

as has been made clear in this thread, people often conflate “professional” with the “highest level of skill” or “highest demand”

But A professional is really nothing more than a person who makes money from what they do. If they are able to make a living from applying their skills to the real world, and they do this as a significant source of their income, then we could arguably call them a professional regardless of absolute skill level.

I’m a photographer But there are countless hobbyists and amateur photographers who are able to take far more artistic and creative shots than I do for my clients. Why? Because time, money, repeatability, reliability are not important to them. However skilled they are, they’re still amateurs: they don’t shoot for money.

Professionals usually just need to get the job done, pronto.. with minimum hassle and minimum cost.

But the rest can often take more Leisurely approach knowing that their lunch is not on the line.

Thus, I would say that the top iPad is really no longer a professional device as such, it is clearly moved into the lifestyle device with specifications, cost, critical function limitations and arguably unnecessary design flair that are generally unnecessary to the typical IT/information/office/video worker.

Coronavirus to decimate server supply chain, analysts claim: Sales to fall 10% as factories stay shut

Finally...

Came here as a poster above did to give my hearty support for decimated being used “properly!”

Next I wish they’d revert to using bricked to actually mean effectively turned into a brick like a firmware flashing error, etc. rather than just requiring a software reinstall/update a la Patch Tuesday.

Will Asimov fix my doorbell? There should be a law about this

Re: 3 laws for AI

Actually, the First law was broken by a R. Giskard Reventlov, A robot who self redacted his programming when he came up with the concept of the Zeroth law: that under certain circumstances it was acceptable to harm individuals if doing so would prove beneficial to society as a whole...

Asimov's books always asked the deeper questions about society vs. the individual, moral absolutism, war, idealism and societal stagnation...

Wonderful stuff...

Re: a recurring theme ... was that the three laws didn't really work all that well

Asimov was a fan of the detective format... The first full-on novels he wrote based in his "Foundation" galaxy (the Elijah Baily and R Daneel Olivaw books) are testament to that.

The Curse of macOS Catalina strikes again as AccountEdge stays 32-bit

Re: You're kidding right?

You know that the whooping cough and measles things are hardly even serious diseases anymore and our vaccines as kids were just more unnecessary chemicals in our bloodstreams. TBH.

Tesla has a smashing weekend: Model 3 on Autopilot whacks cop cars, Elon's Cybertruck demolishes part of LA

Slow news day, apparently.

Absolutely smashing: Musk shows off Tesla's 'bulletproof' low-poly pickup, hilarity ensues

Re: Turns out it was inspired...

You would be correct in your guess.. 3mm thick cold rolled steel is not easy to form into anything other than curves in one axis.

Just take a look at the carnage on Notepad++'s GitHub: 'Free Uyghur' release sparks spam tsunami by pro-Chinese

"When it's only we and they..."

And once that war is drawing to a close they shift the target on to another minority and another...

Until it's you in their crosshairs because you have ANY religion... the wrong sexuality... or the wrong coloured hair...

Bravo Mr. Ho!

The NP++ GitHub comments section is outstanding. Some of my faith in humanity has been restored... by a code editor...

But seriously, I warms my heart to see so many people standing up and applauding Mr. Ho's stance against revisionist history and tyranny and I'm pleased the response was clear-cut and not another typical 48%/52% that seems to be de rigueur these days.

Lest we Forget!

Honey lasts forever.

I love this place. It's amazing, the tidbits of information you can learn in The Register forums.

Re: "Julian Assange is undergoing a "weird" treatment, which breaks every law in Europe and the UK"

I thought it was a Scottish law and the legal age for boys to view mannequims was ten.

What is this, 2016? A rummage around in 7th-gen iPad innards shows repurposed tech within

The first iPad with retina screen (iPad 3) from way back in 2012 is still getting lots of use at home. Apple might be expensive off the bat, but they sure as hell deliver longevity-wise.

Cosmo Communicator: More phone than the Gemini, more pocket computer than phone

Almost...

I almost pulled the trigger on one of these but then I looked across at the pile of dusty gadgets already adorning my shelves and realized it would more likely than not end up nestled snuggly among them after a few months of post-midnight fiddling.

Apple tells European Commission it's nutty for slapping €13bn tax bill on Irish subsidiary

Re: Ireland would never get to keep the $13 billion

They would have to show they’re fighting it if receiving it would affect their relationship with their sweetheart, tho.

Scott McNealy gets touchy feely with Trump: Sun cofounder hosts hush-hush reelection fundraiser for President

Had to go back and take a look.

Indeed, chuckles were had!

This move by Dropbox will reduce users' files to tiers: Rarely, regularly accessed data now kept separate

Re: Youve blown it - so long dropbox!

Mac sparsebundles work very well. No problem in over a decade of using those.

Re: Youve blown it - so long dropbox!

Yes, google use AI image recognition and character recognition on any photos you upload to google photo and apparently they have implicit permission to scan any document for textual information and can obviously skim information as they see fit.

Even so, I use google drive... However, I sync using a sparse bundle comprising an AES 256 bit encrypted Volume.... Good luck trying to scan that, Google.

I have no idea if that's against the T&Cs, I never read them.

I had two Dropbox accounts.

One I use personally with nearly 1TB which I access almost daily... I'm really considering moving it to iCloud or OneDrive since I have both already as part of my iDevice backup policy and Microsoft Office 365 respectively... Both lying largely empty.

The second, account I had managed to max out by making multiple referrals to the students of a school I run, since I used it as the primary means of disseminating course material and receiving submissions.

I have now had to say good bye to that account since they limited it to three devices and when I upgraded to Mojave, dropbox asked me to reconnect, which I couldn't. If they assumed I would upgrade to a paid account, they assumed wrong. My school and about 50 or so students moved to an in-house server solution as of May this year and many of them will no longer be renewing their subscriptions to Dropbox.

Sometimes nickel and diming can come back to bite you in the arse.

Water big surprise: H₂O found in samples of 'dry' asteroid brought to Earth over millions of miles by plucky probe

Re: Handy to know

Suction doesn’t work in a vacuum.

Sorry. I’ll get my coat.

The peelable, foldable phone has become the great white whale of tech

Re: "Pholdable"

I’m finding this whole aphair all rather pericombobulating, to be honest.

FYI: You could make Tesla's Autopilot swerve into traffic with a few stickers on the road

Re: Glass overkill

“Rain sensing wipers are a solved problem, unfortunately Tesla decided to re-invent the wheel.”

There’s your problem right there. They used a wheel to wipe the windscreen.

Do not adjust your set, er, browser: This is our new page-one design

Almost as bad as the Rotting Dog Blog

... almost, but not quite.

I don't need massive pictures on the front page, I'm not a school kid.

It's a mess of margins and white space. Put it back.

The grand-plus iPhone is the new normal – this is no place for paupers

Re: Go AAPL go!

In 2005, a then new friend of mine with a wedge of spare capital was looking to invest in tech although he was not tech savvy. He came to me for some advice about what companies I thought were on the cusp of making it big.

Apple had just released the Mac mini or something like that, IIRC, and I was somehow convinced that this showed a new, refreshing direction for Apple and that they would suddenly break into the mainstream.

That sucker only went and bought about 2000 shares in AAPL. (I think he spent $10k at the time).

You know what they say, a fool and his money are easily parted...

...Oh hang on...

Re: Exchange rate

You're making assumption that the price difference basically consumer protection?

No, it's that people in the UK will pay that difference.

It's always been the case. Nothing to do with consumer protection.

All to do with UK companies fleecing the public over there and international companies doing the same by restricting after sale services to grey market devices.

I have found my sweet spot and it's two ranks down from bleeding edge Apple gear.

The iPhone 8 i got last year might be stuffy but in a 2 year contract with Japan Softbank it was half the price of the iPhoneX that a few of my colleagues purchased.

There was no way I was going to pay an extra 500 smackers in US money for what basically amounted to an OLED screen with a fucking great wedge cut out of it and an infrared LED.

I'll admit, I have always been liberal with my cash when it comes to tech - and perhaps a bit too liberal when it came to Apple - but recent fruity devices are starting taking the piss even more than usual.

Sorry, Apple, I moved to the second hand desktop/laptop market after you shat on your techie customers in 2012 by glueing everything together tighter than a nun's chuff so that nothing can be upgraded at home and now it looks like I'm moving to the second hand phone market, too.

$1T... Mental.

Who was it that hacked Apple? Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie, boy boy boy!

Idiot tax racket.

Still butt-hurt you never get invited to their shindigs, I see.

Classic Reg.

Re: Apple'sHack

To his credit, he’s 16.

Blast from the past: Boffins find the fastest exploding non-supernova star

I just have to say this from time to time... Bloody hell there are some smart people out there who think up these sorts of tests and investigations!

Click this link and you can get The Register banned in China

I couldn't find a western news site that was blocked. Even Infowars and such wasn't blocked,

That's because Infowars is a fantasy role-play site, not a news vendor.

Just how much of an...

... utter snowflake do you have to be to have your ego punctured irreparably by a simple picture of Pooh.

Beggars belief.

Chrome sends old Macs on permanent Safari: Browser bricks itself

Bricked? I think not.

Again, something is only bricked if it is rendered unusable without some serious hardware or firmware tinkerage or a return to the vendor.

Other things are merely broken.

Virtual reality meets commercial reality as headset sales plunge

My thoughts exactly. I got the Oculus shortly after release and have used it extensively since then.

However, I was fully expecting “round 2” at the beginning of this year and was extremely disappointed with the lack of progress with new hardware.

Basically, anyone who wanted VR and was satisfied with Gen 1’s marginal quality has it.

Price reductions would have brought a second, less enthusiastic wave of customers but on the whole the market will end up saturated.

To entice new users to buy in or current users to upgrade their current sets, true 2nd Gen devices need to be released.

Look at how popular the Pimax VR Kickstarter was. It generated double the funds of the Oculus KS.

I know the world has moved on and KS is more accepted today than back in 2015 but still there IS interest in VR, we just need compelling hardware to fire it up.

Apple: Our stores are your 'town square' and a $1,000 iPhone is your 'future'

FaceID

anthonyhedgedus, Agreed. I have no idea what they were smoking when they disabled touchID... A quite literal case of Facepalm to unlock.

Re: Can't wait

Don't bother, blotto... If Apple cultards are a thing then so are the idiotically anti-apple-and-too-cool-to-be-a-hipster regitards.

They'd rather sever their own todgers than admit that the world's most profitable smart phone producer are good at business,

Overpriced? Perhaps... But we'll soon see what the market will bear.

So when the govt. steps in to regulate pricing you guys are all like boo hiss govt.intervention etc... "let the free market speak."

And when a company sets an arbitrary price for something you're like "it's overpriced culttards."

How would you know if it overpriced? It's not even on sale yet. If you were a successful billionaire yourself, I'd be inclined to think you had some handle on the situation, but as you're writing an article for an online publication, I'll assume (perhaps wrongly) that you're not and you don't.

If you like the free market so much, let it speak and it will tell you whether the phone was overpriced or not. If it massively undersells and they end up marking it down after 6 months then, yeah, perhaps.

Oculus Rift review-gasm round-up: The QT on VR

As an experienced DK2 and head tracking user... aka. I have no life

Long post

Firstly: Head tracking.

The head tracking system clips onto your cap or headphone band and a little camera sits atop your monitor.

With non-linear curve settings, slight head rotation is magnified in game such that an experienced user barely needs to move his or her head to effect a much larger directional change in the view point, rendering the POV hat completely obsolete. Quite literally within the hour it becomes second nature, and you end up finding yourself doing amusing "Matt Parkman" head turns in games which don't support it.

Secondly: VR

I was given a DK2 by a wealthy friend of mine who said it gave him a headache. I have been using it for a couple of months with the killer app: Elite: Dangerous and it seems to suit me in that department. I am able to spend several hours at a time without discomfort. It was a bit heavy at first, but I think I have developed muscles to cope since I started using it.

It quite literally opens up a new dimension in gaming. Sure the DK2 has a ridiculously low resolution compared to my 4k monitor but it makes up for it by having a much "larger" canvas that you have to actually look around to see. You feel far closer to the action, nay, IN the action. Moreover the lack of resolution becomes much less noticeable when actually piloting because your head is constantly in motion and your brain's ability to overcome visual impairment is quite astonishing.

When other people are likely to be around, I go back to playing Elite with my regular monitor. The change is jarring, to say the least. It's like you've lost one eye and are staring at everything from far away. It's a far less convincing experience and honestly, the DK2 has quite literally ruined non VR compatible FPS and space shooters for me, even with head tracking.

I, personally, was impressed enough with the DK2 to pre-order the v1.0 product. I have since put the DK2 up for sale on Yahoo Auction and it sold the first day for 82,000 yen, just 10,000 or so less than what I will pay for the v1.0 when it ships. So it looks like the kit will certainly hold much it's value post purchase, at least for some months while numbers are limited. In fact, one could say that the waiting list is so long that you might actually be able to resell it at a higher price than you purchased it for if you decide you don't like it.

TLDR:

Head tracking. Fantastic solution to in game POV. Definitely the best bang for the buck. feels far more natural that you'd think.

VR: VR won't blow you away, but if you have GOOD software tailored to it, it will literally add an extra dimension. It's a case of how much money do you want to invest/waste now when you know that within two years a better bit of kit will come along.

FTC lunges at Kickstarter bloke who raised $120,000 – and delivered sweet FA

Wait till Star Citizen falls through.... It'all take the whole kickstarter model with it.

Boost your attachment size with this one weird trick

This article's title triggered...

..my innate Buzzfeed filter. I had to overcome the urge to ignore it.

China weaponizes its Great Firewall into the GREAT FIRE CANNON, menaces entire globe

I thought I understood what was going on...

...until I saw that diagram.

Samsung in second SSD slowdown SNAFU

Re: Return it as not fit for purpose

Where I am, there is a sticker on the inner wrapper that states opening the bag signals the user's compliance with the EULA. In the typically length EULA there is a statement along the lines of performance may degrade from the time of purchase after "continued use" and "depending on use."

Here in Japan, the govt. pretty much always sides with the business. No returns for that reason available here unless purchased through a foreign sent like Amazon.com

Re: Linux?

The article mentioned a new version of Magician is to be issued. Magician is a Windows only solution. I hope th e 830 series is not affected. I shall be avoiding the 840 in my next series of builds.

Elite:Dangerous goes TITSUP

Opinion?

"supposed" to be? Says who? You?

Formal link please.

What?

You didn't just report an outage. The formula for typical clickbait is this: Does an article get released after reporting mainly on anecdotal or lopsided opinions before confirming the full story?

And the major litmus test is this: Does an article link to inflammatory posts which are of no/little/tangential relevance to the current issue.

In this case, you linked to a number of negative pages about E:D... without once stating that the outage seems to affect only subset of users and that, on the whole, the E:D beta program and release was one of the smoother (apart from a short patch around Beta 2) releases.

THAT is what people are calling biased, not your "server down... some users cry" bit.

But still, look on the bright side, your article has whipped up a tonne and a half of feedback... Keep up the good work...

Re: A very poor article

A very poor article? What are you on about?... It's garnered 150 comments (as of writing at nothing -even the dodgy weekend edition articles comes close...) more than the expense of El Reg's reputation. It'd say its a winner. It's like "reading" a fucking buzzfeed.

PEAK APPLE: iOS 8 is least popular Cupertino mobile OS in all of HUMAN HISTORY

Re: Still refusing to admit

And you got 3 downvotes for being correct. Probably Jasper. Never let facts get in the way of a tasty bit of bait, huh?