Posts by AIBailey 421 posts • joined 29 Jul 2014
...but I'd actually like to see a decent, no-frills reliable T9 keyboard for Android.
My fat thumbs mean that I definitely rely a lot on auto correction and word prediction, but the muscle memory that I built up working my way through the ranks of early non-smart phones means that a T9 keyboard is still probably the fastest way for me to write a message.
...and this is a perfect demonstration of just how stupid the patent system is, especially in the US.*
Remember when patents used to be to protect ideas that were genuinely interesting, innovative or simply completely unlike anything that had gone before.
I don't have any particular opinion on either Sonos or Google in this instance, but the fact that someone can patent changing volumes across multiple devices is nonsense.
* - Other countries may have equally daft patent systems, I genuinely don't know.
You're right. In the very early 80's, the issue facing computing wasn't so much size as cost.
By the time the Spectrum launched, the Atari 8-bit line had been around for 2.5 years, the TRS-80 Color Computer for 18 months, the VIC-20 for a year or so, and other too.
All of those offered colour graphics, some quite limited, but in the case of the Atari, the palette went up to 256 colours, They also offered multiple sound channels.
On paper, they all blew the ZX80/81 away, and should have been significant rivals to the Spectrum. Some (especially the Atari) were theoretically in a different league altogether.
But the issue they had was cost. All of the competitors represented a massive outlay, whereas the Spectrum, whilst not exactly launching at pocket money prices, was something that could be put on a Christmas list.
This was Clive's expertise. He never strived to make the best systems full stop, but he did know how to make a good system on a budget.
Not even that.
NS-16 reached an altitude of just over 65 miles, a quarter of the 260-ish miles needed to reach the ISS.
Crucially, however, the maximum velocity that New Shepherd reached whilst on that jaunt was around 2200 miles per hour, far short of the ~17,000 miles per hour needed to attain orbit.
Granted, BO are taking incremental steps towards full orbital space flight, but when you consider that back in the early 1960's NASA was flying the X-15 faster and higher than Bezos has been, and the fact that SpaceX have already demonstrated they have the speed and the altitude to do "real space" rather than just pretending, the gulf between Blue Origin and SpaceX becomes vast.
Hmm.
SpaceX : Regular launches, placing satellites into LEO, launched an object into heliocentric orbit, ferrying astronauts to the ISS, safe return to earth of said astronauts.
Blue Origin : Single launch on ballistic trajectory, just cleared the Karman Line, total flight time of just over 10 minutes, of which I guess 1 minute of that was technically "in space".
Whilst neither company have experience of lunar missions, one has a proven record of putting "things" into space (both human and mechanical), the other is just a jumped up fairground ride.
It's no surprise where NASA felt more comfortable putting their money, regardless of the differing bid prices.
Sadly, it's also no surprise that the loser reaches first for their cheque book, then when that's rebuffed, they reach for their lawyers.
VB6 was the only programming tool I had to hand many years ago, when I found, abandoned in the corner of one of out IT store rooms, a receiver to pick up the time signal transmitted from Rugby. It was unused simply because it only had a support driver for Netware, and we already had time sync on the Netware network provided from another source. I think there was a Windows driver available, but at a fairly hefty cost.
The instruction manual included details of the protocol it used, and so using VB6 I knocked together a program to read the stream from the serial port and set the system time on a Windows NT Lotus Notes admin server at regular intervals (I can't remember if it was overnight or weekly), meaning that our email system got proper synchronisation*
VB might not have been a great system, and my program was a bit of a cludge, I guess, but it worked.
* - I should say "mostly proper synchronisation", as despite the fact that there were CRC checks in order to ensure that the time signal was correct, I arrived to work one morning to find people were complaining that many of their emails he become unread, and new emails were appearing out of sequence. I assume that in some circumstances it was possible that the signal noise to occasionally flip enough bits so that the time signal and CRC value were both wrong but matching, and the server date and time had changed to something several years earlier. I fixed this by requiring the program to validate three successive time messages before making any clock changes.
My first car was a Lada Niva (the 4x4) that was handed down from my Dad.
It was almost bulletproof - it once went through a stone wall in Derbyshire without so much as a scratch, and always started straight away on even the coldest morning.
The thing that always amused me most was that, should the starter motor ever fail, there was a hole in the front bumper to allow the use of a starting handle.
The only keyboard I've ever lusted after - Optimus Concept
Later Commodore Amiga's suffer badly with capacitor leakage. The A600 and A1200 were the first Commodore computers to use surface mount components, and the capacitors are more than happy to try and eat away the circuit board from within.
The earlier Amiga's are largely safe, due to having through-hole capacitors instead that seem to hold up much better.
Apart from the A500+, which included a Varta rechargeable cell to provide power to a clock circuit, and also has something of an electrolyte incontinence problem.
Bah, a plague on both your houses.
To be fair, I expect that the percentage of people that regularly jailbreak Apple devices is barely a blip on the radar for Apple.
Whilst your suggestion would/could result in several TLA's (or FLA's in the case of the UK) getting access to some i-devices, I don't think in the grand scheme it would be many.
Absolutely.
I don't know what Huawei's plans are for HarmonyOS, but if they licence it freely to other manufacturers then it might gain traction.
OTOH, with AOSP also available, HarmonyOS may well end up as just another minor OS of interest with a tiny market share compared to Android (See Fire OS, Tizen, Sailfish OS etc.)
Any chance of any kind of consistency? Are these pixel densities sharp or crap?
Vivo X51 review -
Flip it over, and you catch sight of the X51 5G's 6.56-inch AMOLED display, which is bright and vibrant, but with a resolution of 1,080 x 2,376, it's not as high-res as others at just 398 PPI density.
ASUS ROG Phone 3 review -
ASUS saw fit to clad this device with a 6.59-inch AMOLED display, with a resolution of 1080 x 2340 pixels and a squat 19.5:9 aspect ratio. As you'd expect from an AMOLED panel, this looks amazing. It's bright and sharp, with great colour fidelity.
Until the release of the Xbox One, it was fairly understandable.
Then the Xbox One (the later one) meant that I didn't know what to call my Xbox one (the one before the 360). Xbox Original? Original Xbox? just Xbox?
Whoever has been in charge of product identity after the Xbox 360 really needs to be shot.
Plus, this whole "upgrade the spec in the middle of a product lifecycle" thing just adds to the confusion, and Sony is just as bad.
That screen resolution gives a pixel density around 268ppi.
Apple have been merrily putting the "Retina Display" moniker on many products with lower pixel densities than that, including all recent iPad's, iPad Pro's, MacBook Pro's, and the Pro Display XDR.
So no, there won't be chunky pixels.
You may see a slight difference between that and phones with pixel densities in the realm of 400ppi, but for general use it'll be perfectly serviceable.
I've been impressed in the past with Huawei phones (I've had one, my wife has one, my son had one and now has a Honor).
However, it was only recently that I discovered that in later version of EMUI. they've intentionally removed the option to install apps to the SD card. This was found out the hard way when Mrs B was no longer able to install anything without deleting other apps first.
There's no workaround short of rooting, and by doing that you probably lose access to online banking from the phone.
I was considering a Honor for my next handset, but unfortunately this restriction has put me right off.
Twitter haven't suppressed what Trump has been able to say, they've merely added a flag to point out that what he's spouting may not be grounded in any kind of fact at all.
He's still free to say what he wants, but that doesn't meant that anyone else has to take it as gospel. What's really wound him up is that he might not be able to post a bunch of lies any more without it being openly called into question.
Your memory does you credit - taken from ST-Amiga Format, issue 13 (1989), an article on software piracy:
"There is a story doing the rounds of a lad who hacked into Ocean's Operation Wolf, which in ST format comes on three disks, removed a bug on level five which caused the game to crash when a particular object is shot and compressed all the code to fit on one disk. Disks aren't cheap - Ocean would have been extremely happy to have left two disks out."
Of course, the original ST version would have been on single-sided floppies, where the cracked version would be double sided.
It's great to see the scale of performance numbers being floated around, and the idea of supercomputers has always held a mystique, but I can't help but feel disappointed that this continues the trend set many years ago, where supercomputers are just rack mount machines in rows and rows, where the only distinguishing features are the design on the doors and side panels.
Bring back the spirit of the 70's and 80's, supercomputers looked other-worldly, instead of looking like any other data centre.
Google cannot supply the code for Google Mobile Services to Huawei in China for them to include in their phone build. There's nothing that says that a user of a Huawei phone in another country (e.g. Australia) can't use US-centric apps though.
Netflix (to use another example) may not be able to provide code directly to Huawei, so the Netflix app can't be embedded in the phone from the factory, but again, nothing prevents a user in another country from installing the app.
If I was to suddenly become the owner of a Huawei phone without Google, installing the Amazon App store and F-Droid would probably get me 95% of the apps that I have on my current phone. *
*- ...at a guess. I already have some apps that I've obtained from the two sources above, and know that a great deal of others that I've downloaded from from the Play store are available in at least one of the alternatives.
Simply place the backup tape next to the drive array, and wait for some kind of data-osmosis to occur.
Of course, verifying the backup will be difficult, but I'm sure it wouldn't be the first time that backup integrity checks have basically consisted of crossing your fingers and hoping really hard.
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