Posts by Dave 126 10841 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
> Where's me 3.5 M-M stereo lead?
Best buy a job lot of a dozen off tinternet - they always get lost. I daresay some are available in hi-vis orange, which would be handy (so many cables are black, but both network cables and guitar/patch cables are usually of any one of a number of colours - for a solid usability reason)
Actually it's a case of form follows function: why not use the area of the phone that is in line with the camera and ear piece to display notifications? Indeed, LG did this in 2016 by placing a small monochrome auxillary display next to the camera, thus freeing up part of the main display for other content.
Pareto analysis suggests that most of the important information is imparted by a small fraction of the available icons - eg battery, cell signal, WiFi signal, clock, missed call, SMS.
Most of the objections to the notch concept are based on an individual's sense of aesthetics - I haven't read any objective reasons for disliking the notch. [ OLED panels, even rectangular ones, are laser cut - thus adding a notch only increases the tool path a small bit and doesn't require a whole extra process which would increase cost]
Some people of all sexes evidently enjoy pvc costumes. My issue with The GIMP is that it doesn't contain the word paint, photo, picture or image in its abbreviated form - an admittedly small hurdle for a novice user, but small hurdles do add up for someone who is learning.
I don't know why some advocates of GNU/Linux are loath to make the system easier for would-be users.
I didn't say Xiaomi's mechanical watch was competing with Apple - it's just a time piece. It does look like an Apple watch though.
The interesting thing is what the article said - Xiaomi crowdfunded it, and backers have the added confidence that the parent company has a decade's experience of bringing products to market.
> I suspect that what people want is for it to be cheaper, easier and quicker to get someone else to do it for them. That is the modern way, sadly.
Every job is quicker the second time you do it. If someone who has done the job umpteen times can do it in a fraction of the time it takes me, then what's wrong with paying them to do it? It's merely specialisation and it's far from modern, since it dates back to the development of agriculture and permanent settlements.
I haven't played with Bitcoin, but I'm coming to see it as a version 0.9, a first draft - something that others will play with and identify room for improvement. Examples include:
A few years back there were crypto currencies that attempt to sidestep Bitcoin's fluctuations - fixing the value to an established currency, for example, or a commodity good. I understand the Ethereum is moving from a proof of work to a proof of stake model, in an attempt to sidestep excessive electricity consumption.
Does the US Dollar value of one Bitcoin have much to do with Bitcoin's usefulness to a user? Or rather, was Bitcoin's previous high value not merely the result of speculation, speculation that was actually a barrier to its adoption as a practical means of paying for stuff?
In the physical world, a wallet is just as useful for holding 30,000 Dong as it 10 Quid.
> What did Windows, OS X, and Linux bring to the party apart from hardware improvements just to be able to run them in the first place?
As a '90s gamer, DOS was my main environment, and Windows was largely ignorable. RISC OS just wasn't available for my x86 machine. I'd used RISC OS at school just as I had used Atari ST and Amiga equivilents at friends' houses (and was jealous of their sprite based games libraries).
OSX seems to have served Apple and their users well, especially those (mainly DTP and music professionals) who hung on in there during the '90s. I've not heard of RISC OS being considered by Apple before they brought in NeXT.
> And I'll tell you what else. How about a nigh-on unhackable ROM-based, compact and lightning-fast but still fully-featured, and Open Source, OS to power the IoT?
It would, but the trouble with it being ROM based is how to patch a vulnerability that is undiscovered at the time of shipping - as we've just seen with Amazon's Free RTOS. To quote Douglas Adams "the problem with something that is designed never to go wrong is that it is a lot harder to fix when it does go wrong than something that was designed to go wrong in the first place".
Of course you could take a small RTOS and subject to it to much scrutiny, or take a mature RTOS on the grounds that any vulnerabilities would have been found by now. There's also active research in OS kernals that are mathematically proven to do what they're supposed to - Formal Verification.
> how much of the total energy budget for a Mac goes to just the CPU ?
How long is a piece of string? : ) A lot of the time the CPU is just ticking over but on occasion (rendering an image, compiling some code, running a simulation) the CPU might be operating up to its thermal limit. of course some of these tasks can be done by a GPU (on board, connected by Thunderbolt, over the network to a render farm, or on some rented cloud) but not all. And of course some tasks can be done on on both CPUs and GPUs and the software will fully utilise any computing resources it can find.
The Reg reporting of this story has perhaps more emphasis on Apple ditching Intel than other reports which don't rule out Intel being retained for some models.
Professionals with legacy software and/or greater power demands will pay for 'Pro' models with Intel and maybe AMD, consumers will be content with ARM and Apple GPU.
Feature complete Photoshop is coming to iOS in 2019, so there'll be a couple of years to demonstrate ARM productivity applications can work well.
Just make sure you have the right hardware, I guess. Lots of games are hardly worth playing without a discreet GPU, so why not games that won't run unless the machine has an x86 CPU?
In any case, different games place different demands on CPUs and GPUs, with many not requiring that much CPU power - so possibly more tolerant of x86 emulation on ARM. Possibly of note is that many MacOS Steam games are built with Metal, the same graphics API used in iOS on Apple's own silicon, includibg the usual big names:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_(API)
I try to keep my phone cool for the sake of the battery. My main concern is the case it sits in, which can't help heat dissipation. On a hot day with the GPS and maps running, I night splash it with water.
Still, I reckon an official Samsung battery replacement when the time comes will be cheaper than an official screen replacement should I drop the naked phone.
Yep, the lack of glass in the tea-drinking Middle Kingdom appears to have been an impediment in chemistry and optics. The wine drinking Europeans wanted transparent vessels.
In many other areas of technology China has been way ahead over much of the last few thousand years.
Yeah, I meant the Samsung phones. Each new phone released recently with a Samsung panel, be it Samsung, Apple or Pixel phone, has a slightly better screen - according to DisplayMate - than the last. One would expect the next Samsung flagship to regain the crown and the cycle repeat.
However, the differences aren't that big, and one may be a tad brighter and one may have ever so slightly better colour accuracy.
Apple use their own 10bit colour display adapter on the iPhobe XS that consumes enough power that even when displaying a black image the OLED panel's efficiency advantage over LED is lost.
Why bother? I'm not sure the Pixel hardware appeals to the Lineage OS crowd. Pixels main selling points are the camera software and co-processor to accelerate it, plus some extra Googley launcher. No SD card, no headphone socket. The screen is on Pixel 3 is superb*, but practically no better than the latest Samsungs - which are a more common target for alternative Android versions.
*In lab tests, the Note 9 had the best display crown, then the latest iPhone XS, now the latest Pixel. All panels made by Samsung (though Apple use their own display driver silicon)
A mono sensor without RGB filters above it would deliver a sharper image. Each pixel can record the total intensity of light hitting it, compared to an RGB sensor where the pixels alternate. In multi camera setups, the mono sensor is usually used in conjunction with RGB sensors to allow some post processing - sharpness from the mono sensor and colour from the RGB sensor are combined into the output image.
Pareto analysis suggests that 20% of apps are those used 80% of the time. Therefore, if this thing does notifications and fitness stuff well, it might not need that many extra 3rd party apps. Having few apps available has killed phone platforms in the past, but this dynamic might not apply to this generation of smart watches - especially if they piggy back off phones.
I've noted here before that Linux, good though it is, isn't the best starting place for all OSs. I made said remarks on a thread about QNX - which, like Huawei's LiteOS, is a Real Time micro Kernal OS. Unlike LiteOS, QNX is both battle tested (used in industrial control since the 1980s) and proprietary (bought by BlackBerry a few years back).
Because it would have a different number, making it harder for people to contact you.
This concept doesn't require a specialist phone though; some network operators offer a second SIM for the same number*, but none in the UK do, save for the Apple Watch's eSIM.
*A fellow commentard has noted that a German telco has offered second SIMs, usually for use in car phones.
The use case is that you can just grab one of two handsets as you leave the house, and still be contactable on the same number - without faffing around swapping your SIM. Say you use a 5.5" pricey phone during the day, but just want to carry a small cheap phone on a night out or muddy bike ride for calls, texts and WhatsApp.
However, this particular handset is just too pricey for this use case.
It's not that it does things that your main phone doesn't, it is that this concept could allow you to take a compact cheap phone on a night out on the piss, or on a muddy mountain bike ride, whilst leaving your bulky and pricey do-it-all phone safely at home, yet still be contactable on the same number.
The concept is sound, but the asking price for this handset (and possibly the tariff for the eSIM) is far too high.
The advantage is that you can just grab one of two handsets as you leave the house, and still be contactable on the same number - without faffing around swapping your SIM. Say you use a 5.5" pricey phone during the day, but just want a small cheap phone on a night out for calls, texts and WhatsApp.
The concept is sound. Where this falls down is that many people would want their second handset to be far cheaper than the £300 being asked for here - especially as basic Android phones can be had for around £30.
Give it time. Offering a second SIM for a single number might be a way for network operators to distinguish themselves in the market. Phones are becoming both more expensive and cheaper than ever before, so why not use a different handset for different situations?
The problem you describe has been solved, though either imperfectly in your S5 or, as you suspect, the case was to blame. I suspect your phone's case was blocking a second microphone.
The technique involves several microphones placed apart and some digital signal processing. This allows the phone to distinguish sound coming from your mouth (which is at a distance only a few multiples of the distance between the microphones) and background noise (which is many many multiples - of the inter-mic distance away.
> Folding parts wear. It's basic mechanics
Not necessarily. It depends upon the material and the minimum radius of the bend. Nor are pivots and hinges doomed to fail before other parts of a product.
True, caution, careful engineering and testing would be required to make it durable, but it's not impossible as you imply.
