Posts by nkuk

Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field

Re: systemd-free distros

The age restriction check is not the end goal, the "think of the children" step is just the first boiling frogs step in implementing ID verification.

There are so many checks and restrictions already and it's never enough.

The same people implementing this will say as you have done "look at all the people managing to work around our law, we have to go a step further" until they get to the end goal of a copy of the Chinese system of ID checks for online access and all your activity tied to the ID with punishment for doing anything deemed out of line. That is where this is heading.

OPPO's Reno 2, aka 'Baby Shark', joins the deepening pool of high-spec midranger mobes

I had a OP6 and now have the 5G version of the Reno. In day to day use you wouldn't know the differences in the software between the two. Pull down options screen is a little different but in general use of the phone there really are minimal inconsequential differences.

The Outer Worlds: Ever wished Fallout 4 was more like New Vegas? Here ya go... in spaaace

Re: You Missed The Elephant in the Room

You know AAA gaming is really in a mess when buying something from the Windows Store is the preferable option.

Microsoft has made an Android phone. Repeat, Microsoft has made an Android phone. A dual-screen foldable mobe not due until late 2020

Re: Apps?

Yes, this is bound to be the usual MS vaporware. They have a long history of announcing projects years in advance that never materialise on the date they were supposed to, or are missing most of the required features.

Lights, camera, camera, camera, action: iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip biz in new iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip shocker

Re: Peak tech

To be fair, having multiple lenses with differing focal lengths in a phone is huge technical innovation. Its not Apple innovation, Android phones have had these, and even 4 tiny lenses, for quite a while.

Once you use a phone with ultra wide and 5x optical zoom in addition to a standard lens there is no going back, it really is a game changer as far as leaving a DSLR at home and just making do with a phone. To fit the lenses in such a small space requires some clever tech like periscope lenses, and the image quality for such minute sensors is a technical marvel.

July is here – and so are the latest Android security fixes. Plenty of critical updates for all

Potential vulnerabilities and actual in-the-wild exploits are two completely different things though. It could have a million vulnerabilities but that's not a problem unless they can actually be exploited.

Want a good Android smartphone without the $1,000+ price tag? Then buy Google's Pixel 3a

Re: You mean I have to PAY Google so that they can spy on me?

Hey Siri, how naive do you have to be to believe that Apple can provide similar user data dependent services without access to, storage and processing of, user data.

Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc, they're all the same.

Buffer the Intel flayer: Chipzilla, Microsoft, Linux world, etc emit fixes for yet more data-leaking processor flaws

Re: Intel's illusionary advantage

There have been so many of these bugs now it makes you wonder if they are actually bugs/flaws or ways that the Engineers/chip designers found to squeeze more performance out of the chips due to not being able to move to a smaller process node.

Ethiopian Airlines boss confirms suspect flight software was in use as Boeing 737 Max crashed

Re: I would expect a longer process for re-certification

It makes you wonder what other shenanigans and shortcuts have been going on in other areas if there is a huge reluctance to recertify and shift certification from the Authority onto the manufacturer.

Long phone is loooong: Sony swipes at flagship fatigue with 21:9 tall boy

Re: "Huawei and OnePlus stole much of their thunder"

Same here, my OnePlus 6 is far better engineered and reliable than the Xperia Z2 I used to have. The X2 was one of the worst phones I have ever owned and the screens had a bad reputation for an unresponsive touchscreen, brittle glass front and back and overheating problems. I was so put off I will probably never buy another Sony phone.

How do you like them Apples? Tim Cook's iPhones sitting in the tree, feeling unloved by the Chinese

Re: Asking for a friend...

They're pretty niche these days but Blackberry still put security front and centre.

Scumbag hackers lift $1m from children's charity

Re: Who are the criminals here?

RSPCA is one of the worst offenders for this, they have executives on massive salaries and the local centres are franchises that have to do their own fundraising.

I avoid donating to any large charity that is a business in all but name and tax status.

Microsoft has signed up to the Open Invention Network. We repeat. Microsoft has signed up to the OIN

This is the gotcha, it is not a fair swap, they are getting the Linux patents but not giving the Windows patents.

"Now, that's not all of Microsoft's 90,000-odd technology patents. It's keeping the ones that cover specifically Windows and other products."

In other words they're giving away their chaff for others wheat.

Let's kick the tyres on Google's Android P... It's not an overheating wreck, but UX is tappy

The whitespace is not compulsory, if you set a dark wallpaper the rest of the UI follows a dark theme.

Re: All that bloody whitespace

Android P does have a black/grey night mode.

Avengers: Infinity War: More Marvel-ous moolah for comic film-erverse, probably

Re: Miserable old git

"My question to you though is, why do you care? If the films aren't for you, don't watch them."

I care because virtually all the Hollywood money is being pumped into formulaic comic-book pap, cheap horror movies and animated kids films. Theres precious little films of any substance to watch any more, and almost nothing coming out on Blu-Ray worth watching. I used to have a cinema card and used to find something to watch weekly. Now I go to the cinema probably twice a year. At least its saving me a load money.

Reg writer Richard went to the cupboard, seeking a Windows Phone...

Re: I use windows phones (because no one else will)

More the mark of a fool.

Re: Apps

It was the apps..

..and being years and years behind the competition feature wise, and leading their customers up multiple dead ends with incompatible software versions, and un-upgradeable phones, and un-upgradable apps, and screwing their developers over multiple times, and the horrendous UI, and the clunky animations that slowed everything down, and burning their bridges with the phone manufacturers and ISPs, and the useless solution in search of a problem Continuum, and the un-navigable Store, and lack of search features in the Store, and the huge amount of crapps. And the epic lack of apps.

WP was probably Microsofts biggest ever cock up, 8 years of ineptitude.

Spring is all about new beginnings, but it could already be lights out for Windows' Fluent Design

Re: re: The Microsoft View of the world

Surely by now developers are sick and tired of the moving target for Windows UI design, by the time their app would be written the guidelines would have changed. Haven't they been burned too many times already by Microsoft?

Also as a user, who would want a constantly shifting UI. I think its an indicator that Microsoft has run out of ideas. Just like Office, Windows is now so mature that the only way to keep selling "new" updates is to shuffle the icons and redo the UI.

Sony Xperia XZ2: High-res audio but no headphone jack

Re: I have experience repairing

Agreed, the build quality of Sony phones is lacking. I've owned many brands of phones and by far the worst have been the Sony phones I've owned. The screens have a tendency to shatter far more than any other phone I've had. I wouldn't ever buy another.

Game of Thrones showrunners to make Star Wars flicks

the spacecow milking continunes

Disney sure is milking the franchise for all its worth. Its already become too diluted and dull. If you are making a conveyor belt of movies for the sole purpose of making money, it loses its prestige and appeal.

China has already had enough of the IP, the rest of the world is losing interest movie by movie, so by the time these are released there may be few people that care enough to make it worthwhile.

Timeout everyone. Y'all know that Musk's $500 'flamethrower' is literally a Boring blowtorch?

Re: Here’s to honesty!

He is planning to make bricks out of the excavated material.

Microsoft works weekends to kill Intel's shoddy Spectre patch

Re: The WinTel Cartel...

Microsoft do have liability. They should properly test their patches before they deploy them en-mass. Releasing a data destructive update through their forced update system is their fault.

Microsoft whips out tool so you can measure Windows 10's data-slurping creepiness

Its not a storm in a teacup compared to Facebook and other social networks. Those social networks only harvest what you choose to feed them. On the other hand Windows 10 has access to all your confidential data, keystrokes, what applications you use and when, full telemetry of your browsers and all the data that is coming in and out of your PC, etc, etc.

Lumping in crash reports with all the other harvesting is disingenuous, it could, should, and used to be completely separate.

Its also not anonymous.

Ice cliffs found on Mars and NASA says they’re a tap for astronauts

So it could be distinguished from zero with unavailable means :) Even infinitesimally small is an infinitesimally little bit bigger than 0.

He is making an assertion about all the microorganisms in the universe and assuming that they all behave in the same observable way as Earth microorganisms when he has no way of knowing that. He's saying that he knows all the unknowns, which he doesn't.

Re: Don't drink the water!!!

But thats taking Earth science and microorganisms and applying it to a different planet with different characteristics. The branches of evolution (if any) and pathogens may be totally different to what we have observed on Earth.

The article is taking huge leaps of logic about many unknowns, and also is contradictory -

"The chance that an alien bacteria would have evolved to stick to that protein is infinitesimally small." So not Zero as he claims after all.

Hold on to your aaSes: Yup, Windows 10 'as a service' is incoming

Linux has made huge, huge, strides in gaming. The platform itself isn't the problem, there are thousands of games on Linux and I no longer have a Windows partition for gaming.

The only blockers at the moment are companies like EA, Activision and Ubisoft not releasing a Linux version of their games. They will say it's because of a lack of marketshare (which is fair enough) but it creates a chicken-and-egg situation where a large percentage people won't move because FIFA and COD aren't available, and they're not available because the big userbase isn't there.

I have more than a lifetimes worth of good/great/exceptional games on Linux so as long as you don't expect everything (and having a console to fill in the gaps can help) its perfectly viable for gaming, depending on the games you like to play.

We translated Intel's crap attempt to spin its way out of CPU security bug PR nightmare

Re: Daily Telegraph hackette on the BBC World Service this morning @Archtech

? The BBCs article on the subject does have a comments section: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42561169

Re: KAISER, huh?

I predict a riot.

Windows Store nixed Google Chrome 'app' hours after it went live

but they would be using edge, with a Chrome logo. Scummy Microsoft forces anything in the Store to use its web renderer, meaning that Chrome would be Chrome in name only and Edge in function.

Ads watchdog tells Plusnet: There's no way unlimited business broadband costs £4.50

"Plusnet defended the ad, claiming that because the adverts were aimed at business users, who they described as having a "higher level of competence and knowledge than a typical consumer", the exclusion of line rental from the headline price was acceptable."

That's a nice assertion from Plusnet that their "consumers" (I dislike that word, why are we never "customers" any more!) are less intelligent and more easily misled.

ATM fees shake-up may push Britain towards cashless society

Works well elsewhere

It works really well in Iceland, you can pay for virtually anything and everything with a card, even the smallest of purchases, and it really does make things simpler.

The only downside is that you become even more of a data-mined product than you already are.

US voting server in election security probe is mysteriously wiped

Re: Actually the Dossier started with the Republicans...

"that the only thing the trump campaign really came out with against Hilary was the email saga and some potentially dodgy money coming to her foundation says to me that she's relatively clean (on a politicians scale of cleanliness)."

Thats got to be the funniest thing I've read all year. There was a lot more than that. I dislike Trump as much as the next person, but Hillary is as corrupt as they come. The US election was about choosing the lesser of two evils once Bernie was out of the running.

VR-bonkers Microsoft yanks plug out of Kinect

Re: Can we have reminders of Microsoft hype for kinect

Its just like the "power of the cloud" nonsense that the Xbox talking heads at Microsoft were hyping up during the launch, of course it amounted to nothing.

Forget One Windows, Microsoft says it's time to modernize your apps

Re: Act in haste, repent at leisure

Windows Phone was already long dead before Nadella arrived at Microsoft. He did the right thing in stopping pouring money down the drain in a fruitless endeavor. The failings of WP started more than 7 years ago.

'We've nothing to hide': Kaspersky Lab offers to open up source code

Re: Worth nothing

You're trusting the company that couldn't secure their OS to secure their OS? MS AV is proven over and over again to be the worst in independent tests.

Windows Fall Creators Update is here: What do you want first – bad news or good news?

Re: Windows 7 ... missing features

@Updraft102, I completely agree with your comment. Windows 10 is a major step backwards.

The migration is already happening and Windows is dying, Windows 10 only has 29% marketshare even after force-feeding it onto PCs and giving it away free. Windows 7 still has almost double the marketshare at 47%. Windows 7 share is static and Windows 10 usage has stalled and even dropped. (https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0)

Windows mobile is also dead. The future is mobile except old legacy programs and niche markets, most people in business and at home do not need a Windows PC any more to accomplish their work / hobbies / gaming / research / etc.

Re: Inivitably!

Its Microsofts fault for putting the obnoxious feature in in the first place, not the Admins that have to do extra work to disable it.

I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing Gluon: Amazon, Microsoft hope easy AI dev tool sticks

Shirley what they're calling AI isn't real AI?

Star Wars: Big Euro cinema group can't handle demand for tickets to new flick

Re: it's up, but doesn't work

Agreed, there seem to be too many Verruca Salt "I need it NOW" types caught up in the consumerism.

Microsoft's foray into phones was a bumbling, half-hearted fiasco, and Nadella always knew it

Re: Awwww shut up and quit your whining.

They tried to pay them, their VP even tweeted that they went so far as to write their apps for them, and they still weren't interested.

Microsoft silently fixes security holes in Windows 10 – dumps Win 7, 8 out in the cold

Re: If they cared about security at all

Gaming and security? That would be Linux.

2019: The year that Microsoft quits Surface hardware

Re: The intern says: This news is not true

Unless your colleague is able to read senior executives minds, he does not know the future of the product.

It's official: Users navigate flat UI designs 22 per cent slower

Re: A serious question.

To illustrate your point, even the three small lines have been reduced to three small dots in chrome.

Re: A serious question.

Hi Shadow Systems, your second hypothesis is correct, the flat UI style is similar to a piece of paper with all the elements drawn on the same plane with no 3D, shading or embellishments.

The design typically has all the text, graphics and the UI elements within flat rectangles on the flat 'paper', and the icons as just more text within another rectangle. Kind of like a piece of paper with various rectangular post-it notes of different sizes arranged on the paper containing the text, images, and navigation elements, but the post-it notes have been ironed perfectly flat onto the paper so there is no visual cue to any depth or priority. Opening another page typically lays one flat element on top of another flat element, and the scroll and navigation bars are also flat so it becomes more of a challenge to navigate around the user interface. In addition to this, the icon design has also become flat in the same way, and the colour palette has been reduced to mostly primary colours to un-necessarily simplify the user interface.

I hope I have described it adequately, someone else may have another description.

I'm not surprised that flat user interfaces are slower to navigate than interfaces with more obvious visual cues. That's a no-brainer. What does surprise me is that "creatives" just follow the trend like zombies when its obvious its a step backwards. Microsoft makes a UI style change for the worse and the industry mindlessly follows like sheep.

So what's in the new Windows Insider build? Bug fixes, an AR goof-around, and a font

Re: Also...

I think even the most ardent of Microsoft fans have given up on it now, and have moved on to thinking the next vapourware "Andromeda" is going to somehow right all the wrongs of the last 7+ years even though all the developers, customers and mobile providers have given up and moved on.

Google's Android 8.0 Oreo has been served

Re: So still can't do what Microsoft could do?

What about the multitude of handsets that Microsoft merrily abandoned during each upgrade? MS was just as bad, if not worse, at leaving customers behind.

PC sales still slumping, but more slowly than feared

Even gamers are getting off the endless upgrade cycle. Graphics have plateaued so there isn't a need any more for a new PC/graphics card every few years, plus with an increase in Indie games, and the big budget AAA games being developed as cross platform and generally not pushing the limits of PC's, there isn't a good financial reason to upgrade so often.

Steam survey stats show the vast, vast, majority of gamers have lower spec PCs than high spec/"modern" PCs.

Got a Windows Phone 8 mobe? It's now officially obsolete. Here's why...

Re: Microsoft's big mistake was in not filling their app store.

They already did that, paying developers to develop apps. It didn't work out as no-one bought the apps, and each update of WP made the apps obsolete and they had to be redeveloped. Developers got sick of developing on a platform made of shifting sand. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.