Posts by Dave 126 10844 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
Yes, iPhones haven't always supported all bits of the Bluetooth standard. *However*, in this specific case it's worth noting that Samsung Buds don't play as nicely with non-Samsung Androud phones as they do with Samsung's own handsets.
If I were ever to buy an iPhone, I would have no worries at all of having a wide range of 3rd party, fully iOS-compatible earphones to choose from. Samsung buds just work better with Samsung phones, is all.
>Guaranteeing the names you choose are innocuous in every language in the world is hard
On a simple level, a list of naughty words, slangs terms and phonetic variations- at least in a dozen major languages - shouldn't be too hard to compile. Then it becomes like a spell checker. Of course this would never be a replacement for having real local knowledge- there are many cultural hazards to trip over.
Store of value.
You can't bet against humanity if you wish to collect your winnings. The best things in life require functioning societies - no matter how decadent or virtuous your tastes. Is there a way of creating a store of value, a la gold or btc, that is based on removing carbon from the atmosphere?
Kim Stanley Robinson explores this in his excellent Ministry for the Future.
"[The City of London] does have a role in specialist retail too, the sort where drugs, weaponry, fake ID, hacking data stashes and dubious services [ and people, undue political influence, money laundering, holding money embezzled from poor countries etc etc] are traded"
Just to compare one thing with another thing. The article read as being narrow and selective... no doubt more due to the constraint of the short-form format than any fault of the author.
Rocket science is: Action, reaction, ballistics.
Rocket technology is: rocket science AND materials science, complex fluid dynamics, chemistry, manufacturing, testing, data collection, metrology, meteorology, finance, regulatory frameworks, etc etc
Of course the concepts of science and technology are artificial, and the history of rocket development saw theory and practice intertwined.
Macbooks Pros, VAIOs and other pricier laptops (including I think Toshiba) have had similar battery-saving charging controls. Of course they may vary in how much they present to the user.
This is the reason I've seen Macbooks still keep a respectable charge after years of having been mostly plugged in, yet my cheaper laptop couldn't hold a usable charge after only a couple years. (If me trying hard to not overcharge it)
The same feature was (is?) found on Sony phones- a user-defined upper charge level, at which the phone will stop charging the battery.
With electronic devices in general: after exposure to water, a single night is not long enough to ensure thorough drying. Muster all of your patience, for the longer you can resist pressing the power button, the better the chance of it working. Give it a few days, ideally weeks.
(Obviously size and construction of device, ambient temperature, humidity and airflow etc are factors in determining how long is long enough to leave a device to dry.
Of course you may be unlucky and your device is bricked the moment it gets wet. However, often the damage only occurs when the user attempts to start-up the damp device)
How well a certain screen ratio works for a task can affected by the UI of the software being used. I.e, a horizontal 'Ribbon' or Command Bar with chunky icons will eat up a lot of the screens vertical pixels, making the area available for the document [even] more letterboxed.
The degree of flexibility and customisation the user has over such UI elements (command bars, tool palettes etc) can vary wildly between application software.
The worlds of earphones and hearing aids appear to converging in some ways. Examples of this include:
-The balanced armature drivers, used in higher end In Ear Monitors (IEMs) were first used in hearing aids.
- Making moulds of a customer's ear canals for custom-fitted earphones is now a more widely available service (including from a well-known chain of UK high street opticians).
- Using a smartphone to control hearing aids.
- Earphones with microphones and DSP ( for noise cancellation... But similar components are required for hearing aids).
Indeed. I thought I was being sensible buying both the tools required (heat pad, spudger etc) and a battery required from iFixit to give my Galaxy S8 a new lease of life. The 'new' battery lasts no longer than the 30 month old battery it replaced. So that's 35 quid and a couple of hours wasted.
iFixit do good work, but they are a business often presenting themselves as a consumer advocacy group. The Reg is curiously uncritical of them, and often takes their position as gospel.
By the way, official Samsung battery replacement service is roughly the same price as the official Apple service. I.e, roughly ten percent of the original cost of the device.
Well yeah, VR headsets are a better match for headphones... but the there'll be occasion THUMP arghDAMNthathurt as someone trips over a coffee table or cat.
Meow! Well you shouldn't have been sitting there should you!!
Okay, VR goggles for cats. I'm now eliciting round one investment to develop this concept. Please send money. Please don't send cats.
I can see some good productivity applications for AR/VR, but the current stuff looks like Windows XP Tablet Edition hardware... I only ever saw one XPTE machine in the wild, strapped to the arm of a hard-hatted surveyor in the middle of a city.
The tech - lower power processers, more suitable OS and UI etc - wasn't quite ready for the masses. Now of course iPads and even touchscreen Windows machines are everywhere.
Also: fuck Facebook.
There are some intermediate options inbetween 'all processing done on headset' and 'all processing done on central server'. Processing could be done on a device carried by the user, or by a machine in the same room or building without appreciable lag (the thing about light is that it's fast. Really fast. Etc)
I have no interest in this Facebook Meta project. Hopefully Apple's upcoming ARVR project will deprive Facebook of an initial commanding market share in any 'metaverse'. Apple have the reputation, silicon, and the in-depth approach to offer something better Facebook. Even Apple's graphic APIs are currently a good fit for foveated rendering, using defferred tile-based rendering as they do.
I guess a saving grace is that the failure of any one port won't render the machine unusable - it'd merely an inconvenience that may require a dongle to sidestep. i.e, should Magsafe fail then the laptop can still be charged through one of the USB C sockets, HDMI and SD card slot ditto.
Microsoft have been *trying* to go the ARM route for years now. Currently, there are some native applications for Windows 10 ARM, emulation for legacy applications seems to work:
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-on-arm-this-is-how-well-64-bit-emulation-is-working/
Interesting, but not ready for primetime might be fair assessment.
It should also be noted that for years Apple's iPhone SoCs have been distinct from rival ARM offerings from Qualcomm, Samsung et al, by having stacks of cache and super wide memory doodads. MacOS / iOS graphics API is designed for Apple silicon and vice versa, the CPUs and GPUs sharing all RAM radically saves power. Not off the shelf stuff. I don't believe Qualcomm have an M1-rivalling chip just waiting for Microsoft to jump on.
Google doesn't have a major market share of subscription music or subscription video services. The situation is very different to Internet Explorer being bundled on Windows when the OS had an overwhelming market share.
I'm sure there are aspects of Google's (or Alphabet's, whatever) business that are of interest to monopoly regulators... just not the areas areas you outlined.
(Spotify, Apple Music, Netflicks, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, etc all appear to viable at present)
A model called the Mac Mini M1 Max has far too many Ms in it.
Also, if Apple had gone with the rumoured name of M1 X, it could be read as 'MIX' - which might be too close to other consumer electronics branding, such as Mii Mix.
These new chips are clearly too related to the M1 chip to deserve a version jump to M2, another rumoured name. Yes, version numbers can be arbitrary, but if so then it suits Apple to save the M2 moniker for when it can bring most attention to a new feature jump.
The £19 cleaning cloth is meant for the Apple XDR Display, the one with the fancy (yet apparently delicate) anti-reflective nano coating. The cloth is included with the pricey display.
Yes, Apple will be putting a healthy mark-up on the cloth. However, they will have invested time and money in examining the supply chain to ensure that there is never a bad batch of cloths - a harder fibre than spec in the cloths might wreck the fancy coating on very expensive monitors. And Apple would be liable for replacements and endure bad press. Not good for Apple, worth their while avoiding)
The gap between 'hardly ever goes wrong' and 'damn near never goes wrong!' can be as expensive as you want to go, engineering wise. How do you ensure the conveyor belt in the cloth factory can never sprinkle metal shavings from a damaged bolt onto a batch of cloths?
Apple don't tell MacBook and iPad users to buy this cloth; for these devices Apple only recommends a generic 'soft, lint-free cloth'.
Apple's presentation of these new M1 Pro / Max chips is in keeping with how they presented the properties of the original M1 a year ago... claims that were later vindicated by independent benchmarks and performance reviews.
So what if the graphs are fuzzy? There's no advange to Apple by making their presentation resemble an Anandtech article... those who really care about the nitty gritty numbers (or benchmarks of their specific choice of software tasks) are the sort who wouldn't buy *until* they'd read lots of independent reviews anyway.
Heck, if you really want to be sure before buying, you wait six months or two years to see if any hardware issues are unearthed by real world users.
AutoCAD Fusion 360 has been on MacOS for years - last I looked, a year ago, Autodesk said that it ran blazing fast under Rosetta 2 on the M1 in their benchmarks.
Solidworks has never been on MacOS, but its engine is used in an iOS solid modeller, oddly.
Fusion is probably the better fit for many Mac users anyway- it is a blend of the parametric and the free-form paradigms, the latter having greater crossover with many a Mac user's workflow (i.e modelling a dragon before painting it in Photoshop, animating it in whatever, and compositing the results in something else).
Apple are still releasing Intel machines, a la their stated two year transition roadmap.
The real big CAD doesn't run on Windows anyway, but on servers. Any heavy simulation runs on render farms (typically Linux based) or on rented compute so the OS that the client application runs on is largely moot.
Anyway, Apple's Mac Pro in last decade has been focused on stupid fast IO (for video)- not something that CAD really requires. One wouldn't pick a Mac for CAD work unless other parts of one's workflow benefitted from the hardware choice. i.e, creating video from a solid modeller and then colour-grading it to match some other video source.
Benchmarks of last year's M1 GPU by Anandtech:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3
They found it to be the equal of a low-end discrete GPU but far more power efficient.
It should also be remembered that after the independant benchmarks of the M1 came in, Apple were seen to have been straight in their their presentation about the M1's performance.
Hi jake. Using automated tools to separate subjects from the background of an old photograph - and then using other tools to fill in the 'missing' background - is often used in televisual history documentaries these days. The illusion of parallax twixt foreground and background when the virtual camera is slowly 'panned' really helps the old photographs 'come to life'.
If you look out for this effect you may spot it.
Wireless charging can allow a device that has a damaged port (through wear, accidental damage whatever) to see years more life. You say that wireless charging isn't 'green'. I suggest your statement might be better supported by some calculations. I.e, energy used to manufacture a phone vs difference in energy used between wired and wireless charging of a phone over X years. Obviously there are other factors that make the assessment more complicated, but that should only give one pause before making sweeping statements.
Tell me about it. Before Micro USB A then USB C, I had several Samsung phones and not one of them used the same connector as another. Plus, the cables are usually built into the wall adapter. At the and time, I know Sony Ericsson used several different connectors, as did Motorola. Not to mention that at the time it was normal for phones to use proprietary connectors for earphones and headsets.
By contrast, Apple seemed liked saints with their 30 pin connector seeing use from the iPod through to the introduction of Lightning. What's that, two connectors in twenty years (three if you include tablets and USB C)?
Criticise Apple for things they have done, for sure. But this particular issue isn't of their doing.
I've had plenty of USB C cables that have failed, just as I've seen friends with did Lightening cables. Whilst anecdotal, it might be worth mentioning that these poor quality cables were often bought in a hurry from a petrol station or supermarket. I suspect that had I done some research and bought some cables of a reputable brand online my experience would be better.
Thankfully though the USB C connector on my phone is working fine after several years. Similarly, I haven't heard of Lightening port failures from my iPhone-owning friends.
Sidenote: with all cables, USB or Micro USB, I've found that braided cables tend to be less durable than normal-looking cables. I therefore suspect that the braiding is just cosmetic.
This is just my anecdotal evidence, offered in response to similar.
No culture or civilization that doesn't act in its own good doesn't tend to last for very long.
However, that doesn't necessarily mean that what is good for ET is bad for us. We don't know what the game is, be it zero-sum or otherwise.
And the converse is true - if we're a nasty belligerent future threat to ET (when we develop bigger toys) then the sensible thing for ET to do is to glass the Earth from orbit or preferably from much further away. It could be the only way to be sure.
I'm not sure what ET could gain from a sight-seeing tour of Earth. He's not short of technology, and natural resources are easier to obtain if they're not sitting at the bottom of our gravity well.
Yes, these issues need to be understood - and the us Navy is no doubt working with their contractors to do so.
However, the US Navy isn't allowed to talk publicly about their radar and other sensor systems (and bugs and issues pertaining to them), since they are classified. The US Navy isn't allowed to publicly debunk these UFO theories
IT Angle: one of the better debunkers of these UFO videos is a retired video game programmer, Mick West. He often uses video game-like simulations to demonstrate that what looks to be far away (and thus impossibly fast) can actually be close and slow.
Okay Dougal, one more time...
...are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven't made interstellar contact yet and buzz them, meaning that they find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul nation state-level military organization whom no one's going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises
- with apologies to DNA
> Companies like Apple, et al, like the "here's a new shiney" even if there's no real improvement.
The iPhone 13 doesn't offer a great improvement over the 12, but it does over the iPhone 8 or 9. Most iPhone users won't buy a new phone each year. The same is true of Samsung's competing phones. How many years iPhone buyers go between new handset purchases varies of course. (The pictures of people queuing outside Apple stores likely do not fall near the centre of the bell curve, as I'm sure you good data-respecting people suspect)
So, it doesn't matter if a new model offers little over last *year's* model, only that it offers something over a user's last model.
Though there is currently a musical production of Back to the Future on in London that is lots of fun, according to a critic from the Times.
Yeah, I know, not as much fun as a hoverboard, I'm sure. But then I'd likely fall off and break my arm anyhows. Hmm, a broken arm doesn't seem too bad compared to what might happen if an enthusiastic tinkerer tried to mod a Mr Fusion unit.
You might want to look at Ninite.com. It's been years since I last used it, but I remember that you are presented with a long list of popular applications (such as VLC, 7zip, Firefox, Magic ISO etc etc) against tick boxes. Simply select the applications you want and proceed to download a single installer that installs all the applications you chose. I seem to recall that it just installs the applications and not some of the cruft that a native installer will dump on you if you neglect to uncheck a tick box.
Other readers here may have a more up-to-date opinion of Ninite* that they might care to share.
*EDIT: corrected Minute back to Ninite - an autocorrect error.
See Kguttag.com for an expert's in-depth reviews of pre-production AR display technologies... None of them seem ready for a prime time product yet.
Time Cook is on record as saying that the technology just isn't there yet for a polished consumer-grade AR device.
It isn't in Apple's nature to give rolling updates on its progress with upcoming products.
If I were Apple and wanted to release an AR display device in x year's time, I would start as they have done by beginning to introduce lidar / laser TOF sensors and accompanying silicon to the higher end models of existing devices such as iPads and iPhones.
>I guess the difference between Psion and Apple was that the former was too small / financially timid to drive component suppliers to do the expensive R&D to miniaturise parts. Whereas Apple had the financial clout / bravery to go for it.
The iPod was inspired by 1.8" HDDs being promoted by their manufacturers to anyone who had a use for them. The first gen iPod was made more user friendly than a competing device might be because it used FireWire for data sync and charging at a time that the latest USB version 1.x was not fast enough for the purpose. It is true that Apple's financial strength played a role: development of the 1st gen iPod cost $200 million.
Note: all of the above - the money, access to components, use of FireWire, and experience with jog wheels - also applied to Sony in 2000
Here's the thing: Apple can calculate the cost of n% of iPhone users having need of an emergency satellite text message each year. They have the data. Apple, with their locked-down OS, can prevent people from using the satellite message service for events other than emergencies. If Apple, who also do consumer finance, move into health insurance, they can offset the cost of a satellite message against the huge costs of a search and rescue operation.
For decades, lots of physicists in the US would routinely write '...and may have military applications' when applying for grants since the money largely came from the DoD.
WW2 in the US was known as the physicist's war, not because if Oppenheimer et al, but for the huge effort to train ordinary soldiers in the high school physics required for the mechanised battlefield. Radio operation, echo-range finding etc.
I suspect that hearing aids will become better integrated with consumer technology over time, not least because wealthy and tech savvy baby boomers and Gen X in USA and Europe getting older. As the market gets bigger, one would expect the price of hearing aids to come down.
The first 'made for iPhone' hearing aids were in 2014, and iOS would automatically switch between the user's custom profiles depending location, if desired.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/apple-collaborates-on-worlds-smartest-hearing-aid/
If cost no object, gold is still a good material for electrical contacts, even on digital cables. The advantages of gold are corrosion resistance, high conductivity even over a small contact area, and low friction. A cable that has corroded contacts may damage a socket's contact surfaces.
A gold plated usb cable won't sound better, but your kit *might* last a little bit longer (though all the USB sockets on my ancient laptop still work, so whatever)
How thickly to plate the contacts depends upon the use environment, insertion cycles, etc.
https://advancedplatingtech.com/blog/gold-plating-thickness-connectors/
> Asimov was describing it in 1941.
A lavish colour illustration depicting the receiving station of such a scheme was used as an advertisement for a company near me who are famous for their marine diesel engines. The advert was in, iirc, the brochure for the Festival of Britain 1951.
The copy was along if the lines of "In the future we may have energy beamed down from space. Until that time, you can rely upon the proven power of Lister diesel engines"
And similarly, the idea of a Jobs-lead NeXt not researching mobile devices doesn't ring true: there's a 1983 audio recording of Jobs describing his vision for an always-connected book-shaped device (not unlike the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), and that everything Apple does will be just stepping stones towards that eventual goal.
Convenience can lead to better quality data: Some of the first CCD imaging be sensors better used in the eighties for astronomy. Whilst the resolution was paltry (compared to film), the continuous recording nature (as opposed to film) meant that composite images could be created - handy for skies intermittently covered by clouds.
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