Posts by goldcd 817 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jul 2010
https://unblocked.red/
I only stumbled across this after having found my favourite source of Linux ISO images had been blocked by my ISP in the UK.
I'd no idea that all this other stuff existed.
This internet thing seems pretty resilient for some reason.
Somebody should inform our representatives!
Evil fills any void.
Imagine you write a song and record it. You have a song.
Technical cost of putting that thought into a binary is falling by the day.
You can put it out on soundcloud, right now.
Jump through some more hoops, and you can make it available to millions/billions of people - at pretty much no cost to you.
Maybe they'll find it, maybe they'll like it, maybe they'll turn up to your local gig (big maybe, but possible).
Alterative - sign it all away to an existing music publisher, for cents on the dollar return if they can even be bothered pushing you.
Bluntly, you used to need an 'advance' - mortgage your art in the hope that somebody might pick it up. No way you could get your record into Woolies without it.
Now, no longer the case.
You have a choice - go with the labels and hope you're in the 1% that are popular enough to renegotiate something favourable.
Or looking at it another way - most of those that are protesting streaming, are those that survived their contract, renegotiated to make a wad, then got enough clout to get their labels to pull their music.
See any mid-range published artists getting their label to pull their recordings? Nope.
Labels get to see the money trickling in and can recoup their deductions for nil effort.
So the NSA admitted they couldn't crack something others could.
The FBI now admit they'd paid the "third party" to get absolutely nothing of any use.
I'm not pro-terrorism, but for some reason this all makes me feel smug.
I *think* it's because it symbolizes nicely that once again our governments are f'in useless.
And I'm not quite sure why that makes me feel happy either.
Best I can come up with, is that when I first strayed online I suddenly felt there was a 'new world'. A place beyond existing borders and control (I'd hopped on a ship and discovered ~the Americas). A place to be free (for better or worse - and mainly it was filled with lovely people).
Since then the existing world seems to feel it can encroach - and my gut instinct is to resist them for every inch.
The irony that it's America doing the encroaching, isn't lost on me.
Loved my M7, M8 was 'fine', never felt the urge to get an M9 - nor this one really.
From the sound of it, they've fixed the glaring issues with the older ones, but can't for the life of me understand why Boomsound has gone (feature you never knew you needed until you had it).
Not just gone, but weirdly borked with this treble on one side, bass on the other - we now have 'great mono!'
Boomsound was great to get a nice stereo effect when watching video in portrait mode.
Put the fingerprint reader on the back, the side, anywhere but where you did..
It does have SD support btw.
Those that took them home, ran them on sandboxed machines, negotiated salary hikes off the data contained... actually, I've got a much better idea.
Corporations should just flood their car -parks with non-malware sticks indicating your colleagues are earning minimum wage.
Keep the eejits quiet.
Should a small company go pop and vanish, usually there's a scramble from related companies to seize their ex-customers - so maybe a packaged transformation solution, some introductory pricing to tempt you to them over the other sharks that smelt the blood in the water.
I saw an article about an architect who'd open-sourced his plans for a sustainable house.
I downloaded and got some DWG files.
I clicked and had nothing installed that would open them.
Helpful popup, "want me to see if anything in the app-store can help?" - yes, I said.
Oh, there's auto-cad 360 *clicks and installs*.
Clicks DWG files and they open.
Now not a particularly mind-boggling interaction for most people here - but..
Of course it's f'in awesome to be able to own a box that makes physical objects appear in it.
Just there's two problems with this if you want it to be anything more:
1) I don't have the requirement or the ability to design items unique to me.
2) Even if I did, it's both cheaper and produces a more economic result for me to send the design to somebody else to print and mail to me next day.
Bluntly, if you want a large number of high quality goods, you're not going to print them.
If you want a small number of high quality goods, you're going to get somebody else to print them.
If you want a small number of crappy goods - then by all means get yourself a printer, but accept it's a hobby.
I like the internet, always have.
I can see how facebook and google conquered it to make their billions.
I can see how MS and Apple provided OS that made the internet easy and omnipresent.
I still to this day cannot see how Twitter is a valuable thing.
Closest approximation I ever came up with was "let's add a button to my email to make google be able to index it and feed it to the world".
But my emails have to be really f'in short as there was a thing called SMS once.
Actually it's not just twitter, I'll lump reddit in there as well. Half-arsed versions of the original internet, that made it a *bit* easier to use for the newbies - but compared to what came afterwards are positively archaic.
They seemed to capture a bubble of people a bit younger than me as they flew by (late thirties), but are eternally doomed to have to milk that generation as neither those on either side give a toss.
I loved my first plastic pebble.
Even liked the design aesthetic - chunky and functional plastic. Loved the apps that let me skip through my music and tweak my volume as I bimbled about the place. I understood the point of and would wear a smartwatch forever more!
And then I bought I Moto 360 that spanked my Pebble in every aspect apart from battery life.
Then Pebble brought out some 'hey it's colour - for no reason' and 'look at the f'in size of the bezel on this!' watches - and I've got absolutely no idea wtf would want to buy them.
Seriously. Irrespective of which side in the Apple/Google tussle for immortality you're on, why would you want a pebble?
I used to look forward to benefits in "a new CPU"
Currently have a i7 2600k in my desktop which is (consulting my receipts folder), a few months shy of 5 years old - and I can see naff all reason to upgrade. Didn't really need the power when I bought it and still don't now, the odd spot of video-encoding aside.
If it were a laptop, then it'd be worth it for reduction in power consumption - but..
Bluntly the greatest requirement for CPU anybody really needs is for gaming, and it's GPU that's the bottle-neck there. Next step is surely to get beyond basic 'integrated' graphics and bang out a populist chip that will give you 1080p performance of a current gen console.
AMD are pretty well placed here with both new architecture coming in, and making all current gen console chipsets.
If you don't game, I'm bemused as to why you'd need to upgrade anything at all. iPhone/Pad have proven than if you can get the tech into people's hands, they do tend to use it.
(well actually my sister has it now) - here's the full exciting text you missed:
Dear customer,
Your Kindle Keyboard (3rd Generation) requires an important software update to continue downloading e-books and using Kindle services.
This important update applies to Kindle e-readers released prior to 2014. Visit our Help page for a complete list of impacted devices: https://www.amazon.co.uk/ku2016?ref_=deveng_eicert
Follow these steps to receive the update:
1. Plug your Kindle in to charge during the update.
2. Connect to Wi-Fi.
3. From the Home screen of your Kindle, select Menu or tap the Menu icon. Then choose Sync and Check for Items.
4. Leave your Kindle connected to both power and Wi-Fi overnight, or until the update is complete.
The software update will download and install automatically, even if your device is asleep. Your device may restart multiple times during the update process. You will get a final confirmation letter on your device when the update is complete, which can be found in your Kindle Library.
If you do not update the device software by March 22, 2016, you will no longer be able to access Kindle services or get the update via connecting to a wireless network. To resume access, you will need to manually update the software on your Kindle. Please visit our Help page for more details on how to update automatically: www.amazon.co.uk/ku2016?ref_=deveng_eicert
!-----
Frequently Asked Questions
What if I no longer have or use my Kindle e-reader?
If you no longer have or use your Kindle e-reader, deregister it from your account today. After logging into your Amazon account, click on the Your Devices tab and select the Kindle e-reader you want to deregister. Click Deregister.
How do I connect to Wi-Fi?
You can find out more about connecting to Wi-Fi on our Help page (www.amazon.co.uk/ku2016).
How can I get help updating my Kindle e-reader?
For more information, visit our Help page (www.amazon.co.uk/ku2016).
!-----
Thank you for reading with Kindle, and be sure to connect your device to Wi-Fi regularly to receive all future software updates.
Sincerely,
The Amazon Kindle Team
© 2016 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Amazon, the Amazon logo and Kindle are trademarks of Amazon.com Inc. or its affiliates.
Amazon.co.uk is a trading name for Amazon EU S.a.r.l. (Luxembourg Registration Number B-101818, VAT Number LU 20260743) and Amazon Media EU S.a.r.l. (Luxembourg Registration Number 112767, VAT Number LU 20944528). Each company is located at 5 Rue Plaetis, L-2338 Luxembourg.
Once they finish off the APIs, my extension can run on Chrome and Edge - Double the market...well OK, browser support.
Of course Chrome could update their API to 'break' stuff, but how would that make the devs feel about Google?
If FF pulled their finger out and did the same, they'd be defacto universal-extensions, that google then broke.
Sources blah blah blah tell me "Apple developers have been reluctant to work on certain iOS projects "
I applaud Apple's corporate position, but don't' for one f'in moment think this article is based on a natural uprising of lowly devs.
And neither do you, you disingenuous journalist, you.
Hang your f'in head in shame.
Can you imagine what a whistleblower would actually have to come out and said they'd done, for the FBI (and NSA) to have their net connection confiscated?
I can't.
Somebody gets shouted at by a panel of politicians and maybe they're told to stop/be more discrete - but that's pretty much the worst that can happen.
"Sir Hossein Yassaie was the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Imagination Technologies where he worked from 1992 to 2016."
I bought a PowerVR card way way back in the say (Matrox m3D) - and he'd been there from way before that purchase.
My guess is would be that MIPS is dead and they're gearing up to flog their IP and some people to Apple. Just a guess mind, but when your multi-decade CEO decides he's given up the fight..
I tried it in the US - and it was perfect.
Tried it in Australia - and much less so. Maps was fine, but youtube and spotify were most definitely not. Admittedly I got the important stuff I actually needed, but became suddenly aware it was a very constrained service. TraceRTs seemed to show my data bouncing randomly around the planet, so wasn't sure if it was a glitch or 'functioning as it was supposed to'
Vodafone might be great on £3 a day, but certainly adds up over a couple of fortnights.
ID the carphone warehouse brand, seems to now have a roaming-friendly plan. You're paying for it, but has pretty good European/US coverage.
The Nexus 6P is a great phone - but I'll grant you as I look around I would prefer the (hobbled) SD of S7, the slightly better camera and the water-proofing.
We all want different phones - after a couple of HTC ones, I'm seriously predisposed against those without front-facing stereo speakers for example (not that most people seem to care).
As a tablet I just picked up an nVidia K1 (with lovely speakers and an SD card that works) - but then got very annoyed I couldn't 'double-tap' the screen to wake it etc etc.
Android today is a mess. Hardware is (rightly) splintering all over the place - but when choosing hardware, we have to consider sword of damocles that's never getting an update ever again.
Microsoft. They get bashed a lot. But they nailed the above problem years ago.
Nobody ever got denied an update as they had an HP logo on their box, or an nVidia card installed - it was all about the OS.
I'm somewhat bemused why a slightly more formal structure couldn't be imposed.
Hardware makers of screens, CPUs, modems, whatever create physical items and provide driver support. Manufacturers assemble the hardware they want (linking to drivers). They then slap on custom software (we all are crying our for Touchwiz, aren't we) and out pop custom ROMs for the phone in your pocket.
Can't happen overnight, but maybe a handy stick in this process would be google rankings of their manufacturers.
One axis the Android critical patches and OS bumps, the other the date of when this was made available on your phone. Name and shame.
Nexus used to be budget and it's now premium solely for the software support we know we'll get, rather than any unique cutting edge hardware.
Other alternative would be more "Google Play editions" - you don't like the support you're gettign from Samsung on your new phone - click a button and cede ownership of maintenance to Google.
but then on reflection, couldn't actually think of what Motorola had that itself Google doesn't.
Motorola had a name once - but Apple aside, I'm not actually sure anybody in an ecosystem buys their next phone based on vendor loyalty any more.
The chips inside the Motorola phones are made by another company, licensing designs from another, running software from Google blah blah.
Nexus phones used to be cheap and great value - Google backing allowing us to overlook the cycling of vendor to focus on what could be done.
Current range are most certainly "not cheap" - pretty sure currently the most expensive android phone is now the 128G Huawei 6P. I ever so nearly bought it - simply because the Nexus brand meant I'd get updates until the hardware was obsolete.
Bluntly, as it stands today, the Nexus brand is the one that gives you the longest lasting lifespan for your phone.
Buy a non-nexus phone and you're entirely at the mercy of your manufacturer as to whether you get a critical core-update. None of them have showered themselves in glory here.
I can see nothing stopping Google going out and making a Nexus by themselves.
As a final thought, a couple of months ago I bought an Nvidia Shield TV and have been very impressed with it. Today my Shield tablet arrived - I am likewise very impressed.
Good prices, ridiculously powered home-baked silicon and very very close to stock-Android with the accompanying quick updates that brings (turning it on I got the upgrade to Marshmallow, then a point release on that) - so felt very "Motorolary"
I disagree - it's entirely expected.
Can't think of anybody who'd like the idea of providing the "output of their keyboard" to anybody they didn't intend to.
Even amongst those that like the idea of 'surveillance' (to catch those pesky paedophile-terrorists) - I've never noticed anybody campaigning to get their own data captured.
Snowden basically confirmed fears.
Greatest beneficiary of Theresa May's current quest will be the security services getting a massive bump in their income (I'm sure in no way influencing their backing of her..) and the proliferation of consumer-friendly VPN services to overcome the snooping.
Whole world seems to have lost their rational mind over this.
This device exists, it can be made, it has been made.
The price is high because people are willing to pay for it - Samsung has spent gazillions on R&D, fabbing and all the rest that they need to recover - but the actual cost of physically producing these things is I suspect pretty reasonable.
I can't see spinning discs ever beating this on capacity. They can shingle, they can fill it with Helium, but magnetic drives are now officially dead. I'm calling it.
I will not mourn their passing.
OK, bit off topic, and really just a plug as I'm so impressed with mine (but it does have lovely marshmallow, working encryption and a good fit to replace a Fire as a media consumption device).
Main pitch is stupidly powerful processor, good screen, front-facing stereo speakers that go loud, SD card slot, working 'unified storage' (i.e. SD card can be used for any app), great reviews.
Also it's a bargain at £150 - which means it's playing in pretty much the same ballpark as the Fires, despite kicking them on every spec.
Fingerprint scanner aside, I can't think of any other android tablet at any price that's better.
One thing to note though, is that the tablet SKU is literally "just the tablet" - cover, stylus and even a charger are additional extras. I sprang for the cover, which *ahem* is a bit ipaddy in design, but with addition of magnets to allow more angles rather than relying on geometry of the folds.
Is the feeling I walked away from this story with.
Thinking about it, actually doesn't seem entirely crazy (has Bill ever expressed any party affiliation?)
He's got the Trump-trump-card of actually having enough cash to run without being beholden to backers - but with the bonus of not coming across as an egotistical-cock and actually having a track record of using his money to do some good.
Of course "the not being an egotistical-cock" is also his Achilles heel.. Voters are idiots.
I've managed to kill two phones by using the beautifully long (and piss-poorly made) Kindle USB cables I'd accumulated (smokey smelling USB ports on the phone and darkened insulation on the cables).
They really should have a word with whoever it is that's shaving the pennies off the bundled accessories on the pretty solid products.
Maybe that's where Apple actually do seem to have an upper hand - everything in the box you get seems to have come under the same rigorously judgemental eye.
But then, I'm not sure anything else would. As the article mentions, there's been a continuous cycle of the the free to play devs rising to the top on one or two games, before crashing back down.
I guess the current leader is Supercell bringing in eye-watering sums of money and with a quite mind boggling valuation attached to them - but they like the others before them, will crash back down.
I think bluntly the problem is that none of them do anything special that can't be copied.
They might be really really good at what they do - but with thousands of imitators in the wings, one will better them.
Strange change seems to be the reliance on advertising.
First noticed this when I heard the Candy Crush music coming out of my TV.
That's now moved onto Arnie hawking a game everywhere I look (Mobile Strike I found after googling) - I've seen the adverts, but I've not got a clue about the game (apart from the presumption is a new and shiney reinvention of what went before).
My personal feeling is that this will all be "looked back at with interest" as a weird bubble with a few winners. Hopefully it'll pop and we'll get back to stuff like Minecraft. Weird little indie game, furiously supported by players and devs, that naturally gained market-share by word of mouth.
The glaringly obvious problem with the pay-to-play games is that something better will come along, and the only thing left that makes you 'sticky' is the amount of cash that people have used to buy in.
are the bane of my interviewing life.
"Somebody" goes to market for my employer with a piss-poor high-level job spec - and the interviewees CVs turn up with them for a chat.
Most of the time they seem lovely people, good fit for the advertised role, but not who we actually need to do the job.
Continually amazes me that nobody actually bothers putting effort into writing the actual details into the advert - and that's before you've pulled out all the "quality" and "team-work" guff out of the two paragraphs.
Just try and run an APK you downloaded, you'll get a popup telling you basically "this isn't from google play, do you want to enable third-party installs", say yes, and you're away.
It's a benefit (I can compile my own stuff and run it) or I can install Amazon's, rather than Google's app market place - but seemingly some people consider this an ideal way to install hacked apps from random Chinese servers. Reap what you sow.
Never owned an LG phone, but they were always in the running for my next one. They just seemed to have lost the plot here (piss-poor "we can do VR too" and "that looks like a Ricoh 360 camera" being the most evident parts of their recent announcements).
I can *almost* see the benefit of having a family of add-ons - until it appears you have to rip your battery out of the phone to use them.. I loathe Samsung (after their piss-poor handling of a faulty S3), but did like their approach of a few flavours of the same phone depending on if you wanted something useful (zoom camera) or flashy (edge screen) over the basic flagship.
What would interest me is something along the lines of the new fairphone (https://www.fairphone.com/phone/) - but backed by a big-name (OS updates and hardware updates for the next 5 years guaranteed etc)
Just to go back to LG and their insanity. I do care about how music sounds of my phone. My ear-buds cost about as much as a flagship - and there is no-f'in way I'll buy the G5 whilst they're gunning to sell me an add-on, that'll noticeably improve the sound. Just put the decent DAC in your phone in the first place and I might have bought it - moment you sell this as an add-on, I'm assuming you hobbled the phone to make this add-on have any purpose. Oh, and you chose B&O as your 'brand partner' - fucking Beats-for-Audi-drivers.
Genuinely I'd never heard of him before.
Maybe my fault.
Certainly sounds like we need to have his every action reported and compiled in some detail to assist his removal - and ensure he isn't replaced with a similar puppet.
Might a suggest the tag for this journalistic process of "de-Gurry-or-type"
and you switch to their "adoptable storage", where you just get the higher capacity item as your total.
Never quite managed to get a decent understanding of how it was supposed to work, even when turning it on my my M8.. I turned it off shortly afterwards (might have been a bad implementation from HTC).
Maybe the modern paradigm is a kickstarter campaign.
Sinclair never invented anything, he got smart people to assemble stuff into a package he could sell quickly and cheaply.
Large companies were flaying around trying to do the same, and adding massive markups that their overheads necessitated - and rocked up the the market with a price driven by their overheads, rather than building something to a price from the outset.
To me the modern Sinclair is a company like Xiaomi. Not "the best" - but packaging up good-enough to a price that's hard to compete against.
Sinclair never 'invented', he had a knack of looking at a desirable product - and making a version that was an order of magnitude cheaper, for only a slight detrimental removal of functionality.
The Spectrum was possibly the worst of the "home computers", but this was massively outweighed to me at least, by being the only one I could afford. Without Clive, I'd have had nothing.
Why I'd want to but this thing, when practically *anything* I could buy today for less could do the same better is a mystery. Sole selling point is nostalgia.
Surely the 'delays' in releasing new versions of Android onto a vendor's older handsets, and then the eventual twilighting at 2 years (the length of your average contract), is a pretty transparent ploy to flog you newer handsets.
The original Nexus devices google put out, were to demonstrate that you could get a good device at a great price. This segment is now nicely filled by premium Chinese brands.
The current Nexus devices aren't cheap - 128Gig Nexus 6P is £579 partly due to the annoyance of not having a separate SD card, previously a deal-breaker for me (I've given up on expecting a removal battery). The main reason I was looking at it though, was because I can expect to get quick OS updates on it until the time the hardware is ready to die. Nexus is now a quite ironic name.
I never liked "The Greats of Literature" - made to read them, perform them, comment on them - but frankly I never liked them. Came back many years later as a non-grumpy-teenager to review my position, and up there with piano lessons I still have no love, and definitely am not "thanking anybody later".
My personal feeling is that there's nothing wrong with Shakespeare. You can consider it a great leap forward (e.g. the jew demanding his pound of flesh is portrayed with sympathy) - for its time.
Fetishing Homer, Shakespeare, Shelley, whoever is wrong - they were important for their time, like great battles, but are just interesting points on a continuum. Pivotal in their time, but lessening in interest as we continue.
Not expecting others to agree, but then there's plenty that I love (Biology) that book-wavers dismiss.
I can get myself worked up into paroxysms of wrath over people not caring to even attempt to understand how their own meat-bag works.
Physics I can't relate to, but I wish I could (it's on my to-do-list) - the world, the everything.
I can read, I hasten to point out. I love reading. Richard Feynman is surely somebody who manages to bridge a gap - to explain something important to you. Or, should you not want a lecture, Primo Levi.
I guess my point is, "What's the point of literature?"
Value is within the context - "Hey, maybe Jews aren't completely evil!?!". Context changes, values shift, and that should impact the literature that comments upon it - not to disparage it for what it was, but we should recognize what it is.
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