Posts by Dave 126

iPadOS 14: Apple's attempt to pry fondleslab from toddlers' mitts and make it more businesslike

Re: Samsung Galaxy Note

I always saw Wacom as the chief forebear of stylus support on the iPad (especially the company Modbook who would take your MacBook and modify it by adding a Wacom digitiser behind the screen and optionally removing the keyboard - aimed at artists), and the Newton as chief inspiration for handwriting recognition - in concept if not execution. The Galaxy Note line I'm sure is good kit (I'm tapping this on a Galaxy S), but I don't see how it has that much influence on the iPad.

Remember that relatively few people with an iPad also bought the Apple Pencil - the main use case was for graphics work. The number of people who might buy the pencil for note taking was likely lower still. So, handwriting support was a low priority for Apple, and something they must do well if they are to do it at all or else risk people making jokes about the Newton. Ipad Minis are more likely note taking devices than the original iPad Pros, and the Minis received Pencil support only much later.

Re: Why not give the choice to people?

Well, I'm glad you acknowledge the pros and cons of giving the user choice.

Some things are particular to me, and i know they are, and I modify my tools to suit.

However, there are tasks where I cannot know the best or most efficient way of completing them until I have done them many times and effectively done a time-and-motion study on myself - which is as practical as it sounds! So there is a lot to be said for having these studies done by the tool vendor.

I hope that designers spend longer thinking about a product than I do using it. So I expect the designer's understanding of the general principles to be superior to mine. Naturally, I'm best placed to understand the specifics of my situation.

Re: Good news for android?

No, there is no great hope for Android on tablets. :)

The reason isn't just Devs focusing on where the greatest paid-for app revenues are found (iOS), or even the cheep n cheerful kids n TV nature of most Android tablets. The reason is Google's own Chrome OS. Or possibly Google's Fuscia OS in the future (details of Google plans are scarce).

Regardless, Chrome OS receives its updates directly from Google, not device vendors. It can run Android apps. It's often found on laptop and convertable big screened devices, so is a better starting point for using keyboards than Android.

Re: Samsung Galaxy Note

I'm assuming he means transcribing handwriting to editable text or mathematical notation. This is a feature the Note range has always had, and is a feature new to iPads, as per the article.

He might have taken care to appear less trolly, but is point stands (albeit a moot point, since the question of who did what first is irrelevant to a user's experience).

Re: The image that it's just a large phone

Being either for consumption or production is a false dichotomy. There are plenty of uses iPads have been put to, such as live audio mixing. Unless you count 'Netflicks in bed', there never was a single 'killer application' for iPads, but there are hundreds of 'bloody useful applications' .

Some tasks are better done with a keyboard, some are better done with a mouse. Some tasks are very well suited to a large multi-touch screen, but these tasks tend to be found more in the realms of audio and visual, rather than coding or accountancy.

iOS is supported by governance tools, including some from Blackberry. I'm saying that they exist, I don't know enough to rate them in any way. I know that the UK Ministry of Defence issues iPhones with Blackberry governance software.

https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/solutions/mdm-mobile-device-management/ios-mdm

Apple launches incredible features everyone else had more than a year ago – this time for the 'smart home'

Re: What's the true cost ?

> What do I lose by not having this tech at home ?

If you're able-bodied, you might be missing nothing by having no IoT tech. However, with a little imagination it is not hard to see some use-cases that greatly benefit some people.

One would hope that the market matures so that the security, privacy, ease of use, reliability and interoperability are such that those people who might greatly benefit from home automation can easily make use of it without worry.

Yeah, Apple appear to be playing catch-up in the home automation game, but I have sympathy for their original approach of requiring Home Kit stuff to contain an Apple chip. True, the chip added expense, Apple's certification of 3rd party kit took a long time, most 3rd party vendors didn't bother, and ultimately Home Kit didn't take off, but at least Apple didn't get associated with the insecure junk or blatant data siphoning. Such negsruve connotations would have had an impact on Apple's wider business. So, they didn't win, but they didn't lose, either.

If many consumers chose to buy insecure, privacy inclvading kit because it was cheap and easy... then that's on them, and Apple's approach can't really be labelled 'stupid'.

Context: I have no IoT kit. If and when it is secure, reliable and straight forward, and offered tangible benefits (energy saving, for example) I might consider it. Given the aging population in developed countries, there will be a role for home automation to make life easier for less abled people and ease the burden on home care.

Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length: macOS shifts from x86 to homegrown common CPU arch, will run iOS apps

Re: Why?

1, price of Intel CPUs

2. Security issues with Intel CPUs

3. Issues Intel has had with its stated roadmaps to new CPUs

4. Integration with other components. Apple's SoC isn't just a CPU, it has a secure enclave running a verified microkernel controlling access to webcam and mic, storage controller, neural net accelerator, Apple's own GPU, video codecs, modem, low power always-on if desired, etc etc

5. Battery life

6. Compatibility with old stuff isn't an issue for maintained software. For unmaintained software, there a several comparability approaches. And then, for users who whom even these steps are insufficient, Intel Macs will sold for a couple more years.

Re: Rosetta

I think the transition is that Intel Macs will continue to be available for a couple of years. If by the end of the year the ARM versions of your productivity apps are ready and well-tested, then why not MacBook Pro? It's also a statement - by releasing MacBook Pros and not MacBooks first, Apple is going against the messy image of Windows RT.

Health Sec Hancock says UK will use Apple-Google API for virus contact-tracing app after all (even though Apple were right rotters)

Re: World beating . . .

Indeed, like the Benson and Hedges Cup, or the Costa Prize for Fiction

What's the Arm? First Apple laptop to ditch Intel will be 13.3" MacBook Pro, proclaims reliable soothsayer

Some creative power users do most of their work in one or two applications, others have a less structured workflow. I'd imagine that nine months is enough time to test the hell out of the Apple and Adobe creative applications that are already compiled for ARM today.

Folk sure like to stick electric toothbrush heads in their ears: True wireless stereo sales buck coronavirus trends

Re: Are they good with earwax?

Not that most people bother, but one is supposed to wipe in-ear buds with hand sanitizer or ethanol or whatever before each use.

> Might have to get some [ear buds] in an attempt to eliminate feedback in zoom/whatsapp chats etc

It seems odd you're getting feedback when using those apps in 'loud speaker' mode, since modern phones use multiple microphones and other trickery minimise feedback and background noise. It might be worth making sure that your phone's secondary microphone (often looks like a small hole, akin to a hardware reset button one used to see on gadgets) isn't block by a case, a bit of dirt or your finger

If Fairphone can support a 5-year-old handset, the other vendors could too. Right?

Re aspect ratios

Taller screens mean less scrolling on many websites.

Re: I expect that I will be downvoted...

I've had no need to repair my phone in two years - but its waterproofing has saved it on several occasions. Using the last couple of years as indicative of my use-case, I can't sensibly choose a Fairphone. One would have thought that a fair chunk of the folk who place an emphasis on the environment are also outdoors types.

Just because your phone is friendly to the environment doesn't mean the environment is friendly to your phone!

ZFS co-creator boots 'slave' out of OpenZFS codebase, says 'casual use' of term is 'unnecessary reference to a painful experience'

Rather than argue about this, perhaps we should all pause and see if there have been any experiments conducted that shed light on whether the use of words influence our perception and biases?

Such experiments have been conducted, and I'll leave it to you intelligent people to find them, and to look at their methodology and results.

Cheers

NASA launches a challenge to fund AI systems for future spacecraft – hopefully without HAL-style errors

Re: The AI will just...

HAL didn't make any errors. It's just that he was given a clumsily-drafted set of orders just before the mission, a set that superceded his original mission and included the order to keep them secret from his crew. The problem was that the people responsible for the secret orders didn't trust the people who actually knew how to program HAL - or evidently simulate the ammended mission with an earthbound instance of HAL, for fear of revealing the secret.

Hey Mister Prime Minister ... Scott! Can you get off my lawn please, mate?

Re: Morrison

Wet farts in lifts are to be preferred to dry coughs in lifts, no?

Re: Morrison

I'd been led to believe that his reputation, shredded by his reaction to the fires, had been revived a little due to Australia suffering roughly 100 times fewer Covid cases per head of population compared to the USA. Of course the geographical factors helped Australia largely dodge the Covid bullet, but Morrison is at least seen as not actively fucking it up - or so I'm told.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/05/scott-morrison-is-now-very-popular-australia-he-hasnt-earned-that/

There was an Australian PM, Harold Holt, who drowned whilst swimming in the sea - I can't imagine that could happen to a POTUS with secret service agents clustered around. The Australians didn't build their late PM any statues, but they did dedicate a memorial swimming pool in Melbourne to him.

Foster's became famous in the UK due to a film called The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, in which an honest beer-chugging Aussie fella comes to the UK at the behest of his aunt to be patronised by the English, including Peter Cook. Foster's wanted to remove their product from the film - the first ever to portray full frontal vomiting - until Barry Humphreys threatened to switch to a rival brand. I don't think that the film could have helped Foster's reputation in its home country!

It was based on Barry Humphreys's cartoon in Private Eye at a time when Aussies such as Humphreys, Rupert Murdoch, Clive James, Germaine Greer etc felt that Australia was too much of a cultural backwater. The film features Humphreys as Dame Edna, though by a different name.

Attorney General: We didn't need Apple to crack terrorist's iPhones – tho we still want iGiant to do it in future

Re: This statement:

I haven't seen Chris Morris's latest film The Day Shall Come yet. Apparently it's a comedy based on the farce of real-life FBI sting operations. The premise of useful idiots being cajoled into extremism by FBI agents hoping to infiltrate a nonexistent terror network sounds like classic Tom Sharpe writing about South Africa in the 80s.

If it were a hardware device- hidden in the Lightening socket - it might be possible to log the owner's passcode by 'listening' to electrical noise. Heck, if the phone is in a case, a small bug with two microphones inside said case could determine the X Ys of a user's taps.

If the cops had more time, then whipping the phone apart and logging data directly from the screen digitiser might be an option. I don't know how current iPhones are built.

None of the above would require the phone's software to be compromised. These are just guesses though. This is not my area.

OnePlus to disable camera colour feature with pervy tendencies in latest flagship smartphone

Re: Some materials are see through in infrared

> using this tech to see if people gave weapons in public

Only people hiding guns under thin black clothing.

Re: Some materials are see through in infrared

Would a case that is transparent to Infra-red help dissapate heat from the internal components in any significant way? Enough to make the vents a tiny bit smaller?

If you don't LARP, you'll cry: Armed fun police swoop to disarm knight-errant spotted patrolling Welsh parkland

I was in a Cardiff pub many years ago when Arthur Pendragon announced his presence towards last orders. He then cajoled most of the drinkers into joining hands in a big circle and having a dance in the courtyard after kicking-out time. He said he was in town for an "inter-faith concert with the Right Reverend Lional Fanthorpe at Raja's Snooker Club" the next evening, obviously.

Ok, Arthur Pendragon is a druid (indeed, Britain's top druid) and not a knight, but still, as sightings go it seems in the same ballpark.

Meanwhile in Bristol....

A man has been seen walking around with a shed on his head. A shed that blasts music and has disco lights. Oh, and has flames coming out of the chimney.

https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/mystery-man-walking-down-bristol-2795702

Google says it'll pick up the tab – and stick it in a lovely colour-coded Chrome group

Does any browser have a feature to make temporary bookmarks of tabs that you close? By temporary bookmarks, I just mean a group of bookmarks that are presented to user as being different to the permenant bookmarks.

Breaking virus lockdown rules, suing officials, threatening staff, raging on Twitter. Just Elon Musk things

Re: Dear Elon ...

Yep, even when eating vegetarian food and hugging two tiny horses in his kitchen, Arnie seemed sane and caring.

Re: Dear Elon ...

-The Schwarzenegger Presidential Library?!

-Yes. Even though he was not born in this country, his popularity at the time caused the 61st Amendment...

Demolition Man, 1993.

Elon, like Arnie, wasn't born in the USA. You can be a governor of a state but not Potus.

Hmm, I wonder what Jessie Ventura is up to now... was in Predator, check, been a governor, check, born in the USA, check

Re: A possible explanation for sudden behaviour change.

Musk has been questioning the severity of the pandamic and the responses to it since the beginning, so again, it's not new enough to be attributable to new fatherhood - though I doubt it's helped.

Didn't he allude to his mental health in 2019, something about having taken too much on? I can't remember now.

As a businessman, his approach to the factory could perhaps be smarter - it's not good PR. Good PR would have been to go above and beyond reasonable precautions for staff - working distances, protective equipment etc - and then point it and request it be allowed to reopen in consultation with his staff.

Anyway, for a bit more context of his current state than can be gleaned from Tweets, he was on the Seth Rogan podcast last week.

Re: A possible explanation for sudden behaviour change.

> A possible explanation for sudden behaviour change.

That's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure that there is a behaviour change (sudden or otherwise) here to be explained.

Musk has got himself in trouble with tweets for a few years now - with the SEC for tweets about Tesla stock, or accusing a British of being a paedophile (a baseless accusation that came from a scam private investigator that Musk hired).

Still, I can't put him into either the hero or villain role... it seems that his impulses that make him do ill-advised things are likely the same impulses that lead to his successes.

No alien spaceship factory

His original plan was to have his factory far more automated than is the norm in the car industry, so full of automatic machines that there would hardly be any space between them for an (unrequired) human worker - hence 'alien spaceship'. That plan didn't work out.

Curiously, the German auto industry has gone the other way - spaces between production lines have been made wider to facilitate more ergonomic working conditions for its aging workforce. Not 'alien spaceship' but still a but sci-fi, with some workers wearing exoskeletons to reduce fatigue and strain injuries

https://www.ft.com/content/f1b294b8-9cbe-11e8-88de-49c908b1f264

Re: Einstein vs Newton? Where the hell did that come from?

Certainly Newton was more business orientated, aggressively pursuing the death penalty for a forger. I don't know enough about Newton's time to judge him for his belief in alchemy. It's fair to say he wasn't a particularly nice individual, but definitely very smart and self made. Perhaps not a person I would have on my company logo (See: Apple Computers' first logo).

Einstein comes across a nicer chap, but the popular image of him isn't accurate. For starters, the genius Einstein wasn't the white haired old boy as he is often portrayed, but the younger man.

Both men come across as fairly well socially adjusted compared to some mathematicians and physicists though!

Re: A possible explanation for sudden behaviour change.

We wish you luck in continuing to tune the best work life balance for you.

Plandemic? Oh well, another portmanteau that marks out the person using the word as holding the odd belief that an idea is true because they've invented a word for it. File with 'sheeple', 'feminazi', 'remoaner' etc

Press F2 to pay respects. New Xiaomi Poco Pro has 5G, top-drawer Snapdragon chippery, 64MP camera

Re: I'm a wierdo

Hmm, I might just super glue one of those Bluetooth tracking Tile dongles to my tape measure - seems like a practical solution! Having the wretched thing in high-vis fluorescent orange has proved to be only a partial mitigation against its tendancy to hide.

The Tony Starck-style workshop, where the room itself can scan and measure in real-time, will have to wait til next year!

I'm a wierdo

... so there is no feature yet available that is tempting me to upgrade my Galaxy S8.

I'm still waiting for accurate 3D scanning and measuring, be this done via a laser Time of Flight sensor or by using two cameras, a la Project Tango. I want to wave my phone around and grab real measurements I can take back to the workshop. Qualcomm and Sony, amongst others, have been pushing this for a few years now.

The biggest Galaxy S phone, the S20 Ultra Super Duper (or whatever it is called) has a VGA-resolution ToF sensor, as does the current 12" iPad Pro - leading to fair speculation that the next iPhone will too. The very pricey and unwieldy iPad is a strange place to put a sensor that requires the device to be waived around, but as a test bed for the tech before rolling it out on the iPhone it makes sense.

I suspect the Apple system will work better than the Samsung system, given the work Apple has done on making their GPUs suitable for this sort of task.

In the meantime I'll continue searching for a tape measure. Damned things hide for a hobby. I think they're shy.

However, I'll probably wait for the tech to become more mainstream in Android before going for it, when it will likely be cheaper, better supported and more capable than Samsung's first foray into it.

Re: 120Hz refresh rates

As Anthony said, it's reported to make animations and interactions feel more fluid. Most midrange+ televisions sold today can operate at 120hz or above - either for gaming, interpolating frames on 60hz sports broadcasts or alternating frames for 3D content.

I believe some chips and bits of Android provide the building blocks for varying the frame rate between 60 and 120Hz as required to save battery life, but I haven't heard if it actually being implemented in a phone yet

Incredible how you can steal data via Thunderbolt once you've taken the PC apart, attached a flash programmer, rewritten the firmware...

Re: A reason for all the glue?

Glue doesn't save a lot of money over screws during manufacture because jigs and machines can be set up to do it. However, during end of life dismantling, glue saves a lot of human labor - and thus cost. And you don't end up with steel screws contaminating recovered Aluminium.

A pile of glued devices can be placed on a conveyor through an oven and then easily pulled apart afterwards. I've just counted twenty screws in the bottom of my old style laptop, heavens knows how many more inside - or how long it would take someone to reduce it to component parts.

Re: more of a neat trick than infosec Armageddon

It's common practice for law agencies, when planning to arrest someone on cyber-related charges, to do so when they are at their computer. This attack vector might be a handy tool for them in some situations - certainly it seems less faff than cryogenically freezing the RAM.

Microsoft doc formats are the bane of office suites on Linux, SoftMaker's Office 2021 beta may have a solution

It's 2020 for Pete's sake, and despite word processed documents being mainstream in the home and office for thirty years we still have no guarantee that a document will display and print properly. What the hell humanity?

It's 2020 for Pete's sake, and there is still no guarantee that a word processed file will display and print properly across different machines. In thirty years of office and home computers being mainstream this shit us stil

It is unclear why something designed to pump fuel into a car needs an ad-spewing computer strapped to it, but here we are

Petrol pumps have a horizontal surface for placing the fuel tank cap with keys attached - a surface on which my local Gulf petrol station helpfully taped a tent-shaped advertisment for their loyalty card, leaving nowhere to put one's fuel cap.

I appreciate many vehicles have a hinged fuel cap that stays attached to the vehicle, but it would seem that the advertising team thought that *all* cars have them.

The iMac at 22: How the computer 'too odd to succeed' changed everything ... for Apple, at least

Re: The last cool Apple computer.

I think Mr Goldblum also hawked the G4 Cube, which was released a year or two later.

To make streaming TV and movies more comprehensible to your ears, a simple EQ tweak might not be the best route.

There may be software available that reduces the dynamic range of the audio, so that voices are loud but explosions aren't deafening.

There may be software that uses cunning algorithms that make voices clearer, such as the Dolby Atmos-branded audio settings on Samsung phones.

Extracting the centre audio channels from the stream.

Re: Nowadays Macs don't look different than PCs

The form of the iPod had nothing to do with Apple's choice of DAC.

I'm struggling to think of any contemporary MP3 as well done as the iPod. And I had a few.

I had an iRiver H320 - similar form factor as the iPod, same HDD and battery even, it had a colour screen, mic and line in, audio quality to appease snobs... But the UI didn't have a scroll wheel which made long lists of folders a chore to navigate.

Sorry Charlie, you're right, you didn't say that. The OP did, and I hit the wrong Reply button. Cheers!

Re: No comments about the one obvious failing so far...

Microsoft Arch mouse was released in 2008, so not desperately new :)

Logitech's MX series of mice (with darkfield laser sensors and free-spinning scroll wheels) are also superb, and they work well near any surface, including on glass.