Posts by eAbyss

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

HP is still a thing?

Are you sure they're actually creating a wait or simply covering up long wait times? 15 minute plus wait times due to insufficient resources turned into 'oh yeah, we're doing that on purpose'.

US Air Force chief software officer quits after launching Hellfire missile of a LinkedIn post at his former bosses

This goes beyond IT

My Mom had similar issues working as an RN for the Navy. Every two years the hospital would change commanders. Each time the commander would come in with a new vision of how things should be run and created chaos. By the end of the two years they'd get almost everything back to what worked at which point someone else would come in and screw everything up all over again. Two steps forward, two steps back, it's surprising that the military functions at all.

Congress to FCC: Where’s the damn report on mobile companies selling location data?

Re: Senate committee power to arrest --

This was a House committee which the Democrats control. It doesn't matter what the Senate says, the House is a separate body.

It's 4K-ing big right now, but it's NOT going to save TV

Everyone should know that the STATIC contrast ratio is the most important stat.

Google sues Mississippi Attorney General 'for doing MPAA's dirty work'

A US government employee doing big business' dirty work? No way.

Chromecast video on UK, Euro TVs hertz so badly it makes us judder – but Google 'won't fix'

Re: WontFix

Must buy.

This whole multiple refresh rate thing has been unnecessary for years. The reason for it was to eliminate noise and other issues by matching the refresh rate to the local power frequency. This was only an issue with analog TV though and digital TVs aren't susceptible to the issues this was meant to address. Just create a worldwide standard, problem solved.

Apple iPhone 6 Plus: GORGEOUS FAT pixel density - but it's WASTED

"It's difficult to explain without a diagram but doing it in one step would result in a jagged image since you'd be visibly dropping pixels.

By rendering in two steps - First at the imaginary 2208x1242 resolution and then scaling down, you can blend the dropped pixels into their nearest neighbours.

It's likely that the GPU can do this anti-aliased down-sampling operation in very little time."

Or you could just use a better quality scaler...

Of course the best fix would have been to outfit it with a 2208x1242 screen and forget about the down-scaling. It would have barely effected their astronomical profit margins.

Re: OS updates

You're angry when you're the one who rooted it? You chose to take it out of stock in the first place, you can't just pass the blame to someone else. All tools, tutorials, etc normally come with disclaimers that say that things may go wrong (especially when you're inexperienced) and that you alone are responsible. Sounds like you have an unlocked boot-loader and a custom recovery flashed, I don't know why you don't just flash a custom ROM.

Now that that's out of the way, everyone here is talking about STOCK updates which as everyone says Android's are at least as easy and stable as iOSs. The power user method of updating to a stock ROM is a little more complex but that's something YOU accept when you do it.

"Back to Apple I go, I miss usability and reliability."

Funny, that's what I'd miss after leaving Android. This usability, reliability, and innovation Apple's been pushing are all lies.

Usability: Apple's locked down, walled garden, you can only do and think what we want you to approach doesn't exactly lend itself to usability. With Android you can customize just about anything to your heart's content, make almost anything function exactly as you'd like, or even flash a different version of the OS. Google also is more relaxed with what can be added to it's store, while keeping it secure, and even allows apps that can compete with it's own, Apple keeps a monopolitive, iron fist approch blocking anything that can compete with it or possibly add functionality that iOS lacks.

Reliability: There is no evidence to show that one OS is more reliable than the other in recent history...besides the disastrous iOS 8.0.1 that is...

Innovation: What innovation?

-Larger screens? Samsung.

-Apple pay? Simply the EMV standard with Apple's name thrown on it.

-Screen? It's all rendered non-natively before being down-scaled to 1080p on the 6 plus. This decreases performance and the quality of the picture and would be completely unnecessary if Apple had moved to resolution independent apps like Android did long ago. The iP6 actually renders/up-scales everything at 1242×2208 then down-scales it to the screen's resolution 1080×1920.

Re: OS updates

You also usually don't have as many device breaking bugs as iOS updates do.

Re: Antennas

"I believe that the antennas *are* the actual external metal stripes around the edges, and the plastic stripes are simply where the antenna ends (plastic = insulators). I don't believe that the explanation that the radio signals are somehow emitted inside and then sneak out through the wee feisty plastic gaps is even the slightest bit valid. At least, not for the primary antennas (might be for GPS and/or bluetooth).

One design consideration is to keep the high-Z open circuit end of the antenna monopoles, opposite end from the feed point, away from the meat machine's nasty low-Z fingers. The iPhone 4 famous 'You're holding it wrong' problem."

It's actually not that far fetched. The early iPhones and iPods had a small black plastic rectangle on the back which allowed radio waves through to it's antenna just behind.

The antennas for the iP6 are actually the metal strips on the BACK at the top and bottom of the phone.

Anyone who's worked or seriously played around with video or images would tell you that you never rescale more than once unless absolutely necessary. The only case in which it would make an improvement is if you used rather old and rudimentary algorithms such as nearest-neighbor, bilinear, or bicubic. Any of the more modern algorithms would produce a far better result than rescaling twice.

-Unused resolution.

-Horrible rescaling practices for the illusion of a higher pixel density.

-Can be bent into the shape of a boomerang just by brushing up against someone or carrying it in your pocket.

-Overpriced.

-The plus costs Apple ~$15.50 more to produce than the basic iP6 yet costs $200 more.

-Locked down and less capable than it's competitors.

-Childish looking UI.

-An OS that keeps crashing apps.

-Have to deal with inappropriately named "geniuses" whenever something goes wrong.

-A company that steals other companys' ideas and then claims to have actually innovated them it's self.

-A company that marks up it's products 300%+ and still has the audacity to claim that it can't afford to produce it's products anywhere else than China.

-A 16GB phone produced only in order to be able to claim a lower starting price.

Sweet! Where do I sign up?

Apple iPhone 6: Looking good, slim. AW... your battery died

Re: Battery Life

"Why is it some people are so insanely angry about the idea of a telephone just being a telephone?"

Because we're talking about SMART phones not regular old dinky hard-line telephones. If you want a plain old telephone then get one, if you want a cell phone then you're going to have to cope with a more useful phone that can do much more than your grandmother's old rotary. People don't want a useless phone that only does phone calls, get used to it.

You probably would have complained when telegraphs were being replaced by telephones. Why is it some people are so insanely angry about the idea of a telegraph just being a telegraph?

"While we are at it, perhaps we can persuade Ford (et al) to charge the same price for a 6l engine as for a 1.25l engine - after all it has the exact same number of components..."

False equivalency.

More accurately it would be like Ford charging you $40,000 for a 6l engine when it only cost them $800.

Re: I'm trying very hard to give a shit

"Isn't that the point though? Apple and it's fanboys have cried "innovation" above all else and there simply doesn't appear to be any in their new doohickey."

There hasn't been much in the line of innovation in Apple devices for years now and each generation is less innovative and more behind the times than the last. Apple now simply takes someone else's innovation, slaps their name on it and calls it innovative. I think Apple's last true innovation was Siri and that was quickly surpassed by Google's Google Now and now even Microsoft's Cortana.

Re: If you choose to assume they're lying, that's up to you.

Apple collects the same information as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc, they're just more quiet and less transparent about what they do.

Re: @Vector

Nice try.

All of Android's NFC payments are made through 1st and 3rd party apps. Unlike Apple they won't have to re-write the OS in order to support other standards, just the apps. Many apps can already read the EMV standard. Once EMV catches on all apps will move to fully cover the standard.

Re: @Tom Chiverton 1

"Because your American bank account still doesn't even give you a card with a chip in it, let alone one with NFC? I don't know why the American banks have ignored the technology until now but many of the retailers have got the terminals. If Apple really are getting 0.015% per transaction then it sounds like an easy, essentially free way to generate revenue for them."

Because passive NFC (the kind found in ID cards, a few bank cards, the store's anti-theft tags, etc) is insecure and can be captured by anyone passing by with a NFC reader. Active NFC on the other hand (the kind found in cell phones and other powered devices) is far more secure. The main problem with passive NFC is that it's always on which means that you're broadcasting your info at all times to anyone with the proper equipment but active NFC gets around this problem by requiring user input before communicating.

Emma Watson should 'shut up, all this abuse is her own fault'

The incessant use of the "word" "commentard" makes the author no better than the people he's attempting to criticize.

Can anyone tell me what the point behind this "article" is besides rehashing comments that would have otherwise been justly forgotten?

Intel bungs PC on an SD: Tiny computer for Internet of Things and wearables

Re: It's x86

It'll probably have performance on par with smart phones. That means most likely Android and possibly Windows Phone. I bet Windows XP could be made to run on it although you probably wouldn't be able to do much with it.

From the sounds of it the limiting factor will most likely be the amount of RAM, not the processor speed.

Apple bags top Windows feature: Blue Screen Of Death arrives on iPhone 5S

BSOD?

Does Apple have any original ideas anymore?

Tim Cook: Wearable tech's nice, but Google Glass will NEVER BE COOL

He's grasping at straws.

Glasses can still be cool but nobody's worn a watch in 20 years, they just look at their phone. So how do you think that's going to work out for you?

What will an iWatch be able to do anyways? Tell time, do math, skip and play songs, tell the weather? Guess what, there's a device in my pocket that does the same and more. It's called a smart phone and guess what, it's still cooler than a watch.

Google's $1 fiber deal will cost Provo, Utah $1.7m

"Part of the problem, it seems, is that Provo has laid so much fiber under its streets since it started building out its network in 2008 that it no longer knows where it all is.

The contractor that originally buried the cables didn't keep records, so the city will now need to pay a civil engineering firm around $500,000 to find them."

With piss poor management like that no wonder why the company was operating at a loss.

$1.7m may seem like a lot but when you consider that Google supplies schools, libraries, etc with free Gigabit internet it's a steal. Also Google is putting up $18m of it's own money to fix and update the network so it's not like Google is getting this for nothing.

I personally can't wait till Google fiber is everywhere. I'm tired of cable companies, who have a conflict of interest, nickle and diming us for internet access. Time to catch up with the rest of the world when it comes to speed and cost of internet access.

Get lost, drivers: Google Maps is not for you – US judge

So what about the cops who regularly use radios and laptops while speeding. Don't you think that's a little distracting?