I wouldn't want to be the one to have to design ethnically diverse emoji's. Politically correct/stereotyping minefield.
Posts by dannymot
26 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2011
Apple vows to add racially diverse EMOJIS after MILEY CYRUS TWITTER outrage
Audiophiles: These Wi-Fi speakers have a stereo drift of less than 25μs – good enough for you?
Britain's costliest mistake? Lord Stern defends his climate maths
How to find OS X Mavericks' 43 hidden photogenic beauties
Report: Android malware up 614% as smartphone scams go industrial
Master Beats: Why doesn't audio quality matter these days?
lack of balance
Audio is such a mistrusted subject now. It is for me as I find so few opinions that go along with what I experience. I imagine that allot of people are finding the same thing.
My source is a passive low power PC with my music stored on SSD. In its music playing state it requires less than a dozen watts to power. No hard drives or fans as I found them to be too noisy. The music plays on JRiver media player using WASAPI event style. My PC connects to an m-dac then a roksan power amplifier and finally a pair of Spendor SE1's which are well positioned in a room size they were designed for (small to medium). The house has low background noise.
All my own music is in a lossless compressed format. I can hear no difference and measure no difference between them and uncompressed lossless. I have played lossy formats and struggle to hear the difference between them and lossless or uncompressed as long as they are not encoded at minimal settings. However my brain doesn't seem to find them as interesting.
I don't care that much about loudness wars as most offenders are aimed at chart/radio which is not my cup of tea anyway. There is some annoyance that a handful of interesting albums have fallen victim. Largely the loudness change happened as more could be added without negative effects when mastered for CD rather than vinyl. It was introduced more and more as vinyl became less and less popular. They all get tarred with the same brush as offending albums when trying to prove the loudness wars though. Oh and 80's albums do not sound better just quieter. There are more poor 80's albums quality wise than 90's or 00's when used with digital equipment. If you take the poorest of any decade they will make any other decade look like is was a Nirvana. It is just unfortunate that the poorest as the years moved on is the stuff I'm slapped with across the face with most often from radio or TV.
I have expensive digital cables, interconnects, speaker cables and a star earthed power cable. They have added nothing to the experience except for the speaker cable which is visibly much better looking.
For my laptop and phone I have some AKG headphones which are perfectly fine and certain hi-fi magazine recommended bluetooth headphones which are terrible. I have owned a quality headphone amplifier in the past as well as some Grado's and Sennheisers phones which were great but I didn't listen to them enough to justify keeping.
DAC chips are cheap and mostly good quality nowadays. The poorness comes from what happens before and after the chips. They still need a decent clock and some kind of amplification with few interference creating parts nearby (good luck mobile phone) before going into an amp or headphones. For easy to drive headphones though most mobile players are adequate.
Beats audio headphones are overpriced and not well balanced, but why trust the music enthusiasts when they can't even come close to agreeing on lossless, lossy, analogue, digital, cables and stands, or an article that brings up audio quality and then Apple as the answer.
Relaxed Windows 8 rules hint at smaller slabs to come
Next from Microsoft: 'Blue', the Windows 8 they hope you don't hate
2 copies of windows 8 pro removed and trying them made me appreciate windows 7 so so much. Now give me a windows 8/9/whatever that has all the under the hood improvements but allows me to use my mouse/trackpad and keyboard in the way that has successfully evolved over decades.
If you wanted to improve the start menu create a way to mass remove selections that I don't click from the start menu on a regular basis silverlight/adobe reader/read me files/uninstall files/folders that advertise the company name/an unnecessary wi fi program that installed with the wi fi driver/intel pro something or other/web site links, and refine it to only be used to load programs that actually require loading.
Maybe don't install that groovy pirated Android keyboard
that isn't an accurate reflection of google play
Google play houses 800,000 apps.
Google play housed 68,740 malicious apps.
So 8.6% of apps could be malicious in some way.
However it is incredibly easy to post apps on google play.
Malicious apps don't necessarily stay up for long.
Malicious apps rarely have a chance of getting noticed or found by a user as most apps have to develop a popularity to be easily found.
You would often have to either try to search for them knowingly or make a mistake with a search to find one. They often have misspelled or similar names to popular apps so that they actually have a chance of showing up. Similar to sending your bank details to a link on a spam email from an address such as security@hsbc.org.uk
Actually realistically accessing malicious apps from Google play is not a large scale issue. I don't trudge through 100,000 apps on Google play let alone trudge through the several hundred thousand required to get to the murky stuff at the bottom.
Here's the $4.99 utility that might just have saved Windows 8
Ran windows 8 on an htpc and a laptop and I hated it. Everything I wanted to do just took longer and I use too many different OS's to remember shortcuts to speed it up.
I tried classic shell and it didn't always disappear when it was meant to.
I tried Start8 and it worked better but the task bar didn't always close on full screen videos.
Then I backed up all my data and clean installed windows 7 on both again. It doesn't have the speed and nice tweaks that have been added under the hood to windows 8, but it runs all my apps and media well which has made everything so much quicker overall. Windows 7 re install all the way.
Apple seeks whopping $2.525bn Samsung patent payout
I'm sure a portable media device which is a rounded corner flat box shape became popular with the Sony Walkman. Screen technology advanced. Stick it on. Atari Lynx and Sega Gamegear. Screen technology advances again. Stick it on like the first colour mobile phones. Screen Technology advances again. Stick it on for touch screen phones and tablets.
There has been no innovation in that design.
Global warming: It's GOOD for the environment

Right so hardwood trees take a long time to grow, but according to you they are just going to start popping up and we need not worry...hmmm
Oh and grass and CO2 are hardly the main factors limiting tree numbers it is deforestation and land use.
No we don't know what all the mechanisms are, we just know that overwhelming numbers of them that are studied have worrying possibilities...but as long as the odd mildly positive possibility pops up articles can constantly spout drivel which lacks any perspective.
War On Standby: Do the figures actually stack up?

This is all very silly.
A trust I have never heard of producing a report I have never heard of on one side. Idiots trying to claim everyone who switches off appliances rather than leaving them on standby then leaves electric showers on unused. Equally poor proof on both sides.
There is nothing wrong with a general message of; switch off what you can when you can, try not to use high energy use products longer than necessary, and choose low energy versions of products when shopping for electrical goods.
No tree hugging, reports, or adolescent level retorts necessary.
Android Jelly Bean won't get Flash Player
been very happy with flash on my android over the years. I don't need to pray for a quick death. My phones will happily adapt with the times. Flash will still be useful for a good while after the iPhone 4 is an out of date bag of !"£$. Nothing visionary about not putting it on your phones that Flash will outlast.
Arcam rPac
Well I have I an Acoustics degree and a £5K HiFi. I don't have a rpac but I have the rdac and several pc soundcards. As the sound is essentially very similar between them all it is difficult to categorise how much an improvement is worth when switching between them.
However a more solid sound with more punch when the music needs it and more control when the dac needs to pull the sound back. Airy silence around the thumps and the strums and the energy going towards the notes the system is trying to reproduce rather than all over. A more natural pleasing sound to the vocals that conveys more emotion and subtlety. A better organised sound with a more correct timing between sampling points making it easier for the brain to process. All these things are worth hundreds upon hundreds to me. It takes sitting back and relaxing for me to sense whether I value a product in my system or not over hours, days or weeks.
I have bought wires costing more than the rpac per metre to connect my kit and I can't hear the difference. With a good dac chip surrounded by good analogue components:- a good power supply section, a good low level amplification section, separation from interference ridden pc components and biased to my tastes though and omg it is worth the money.
...but its all about how much the dac chip costs and how many features and the SN ratio isn't it...
iPad app that lets mute kids speak menaced by patent lawsuit
How on earth can you patent buttons doing what buttons do?
Creating a bunch of buttons with pictures and symbols on is only an extended version of a menu system in practically every computer game or mobile phone OS.
Allowing the user to create their own buttons is a part of the development environments of practically every programming language.
Globe slowly warming, insists 'Hansen's Bulldog'
Climategate: A symptom of driving science off a cliff
Acoustic trauma: How wind farms make you sick
How windfarms make you sick ... go on then, how?
What are the convincing facts?
I have a pretty good grasp of the science related to acoustics and health factors. I was hoping to be able to comment on any findings. So where are they?
We live and work amongst roads, railways, airports, music venues, factories, offices and wind farms. We have plenty of specialists in acoustics in the UK and a ton of data.
So where is the substance?
Samsung-Apple Wars: Galaxy blocked Down Under
Patents have to much power
All tablets look like miniature flat panel TVs with a smoothed back “or walkmanned”. They all use a mixture of button touches similar to 1980s touchscreen computers updated to touches that emulate modern mouse controls. I really don’t think they offer enough to be classed as inventions. They are the product of what modern technology can do with ideas that couldn’t be fully realised in the 80s. Patents shouldn’t be given so easily. Apples strength is just a case of America protecting its own.
'There's too much climate change denial on the BBC'
ha ha ha ha
Ha ha that's it. Have a go at the typos. 1st class degree, A's in English GCSE and an IQ of 168. My education and intelligence is just tickety boo thanks. The thing is. I posted a quick comment designed to put across ideas. That is it. If you struggle with the the simple concept of quickly putting across ideas and the simple concept of appropriate grammar for appropriate situations that is your problem. Struggling to see the wood for the trees aren't we? Grammar is a servant of language and not its master.
the usual journalistic scum style reporting
Dr Jones clearly has his head screwed on correctly. As usual the sceptics confuse the whole umbrella of climate change as a simple temperature increase.
Orlowski could do with actually taking in some of the Doctors comments instead of twisting every article about the environment into pathetic drivel.
There is an immense amount of evidence collected from unrelated scientists throughout the world that shows that we are living dangerously. Scientists happily point out the areas that are only theories based on facts.
The responce from people with zero scientific knowledge. To ignore the facts and demand conclusive proof on the areas that are largerly theoretical. To ingore the facts and write articles criticising the areas that have already been highlighted as being theoretical for...being theoretical.
Stupidity knows no bounds when it comes to journalism.
Chinese coal blamed for global warming er... cooling
When the boundaries of science and retarded journalisn collide
When retarded journalism and scientific data concerning an almost infinitesimally complex subject collide. Don't concentrate on the wealth of worrying studies. Just concentrate on the fact that scientists don't understand everything and are taking many many small steps. Then conclude that not understanding everything casts doubt on all the masses of worrying studies and falsely creating a stupid and non existent believers versus non believers scenario amongst scientists. Pretending it is balanced journalism.