Posts by Tessier-Ashpool 178 posts • joined 6 Feb 2016
Should be ok. Retro rockets are tried and trusted technology, critical to every soft landing of astronauts returning to Earth on Soyuz capsules.
I’m looking forward to the day when we get to see real video of it happening rather than CGI. Surely that’s worth the few million dollars it would take to do that.
Dunno. But I share your dislike of adverts showing up on the TV. It’s a bloody liberty, that’s what it is. When you buy an expensive 4K TV you don’t expect to be advertised at by the manufacturer. Part of my Samsung setup was an innocuous request to enter my email address. Right, like I’m actually going to do that! Since I have my own custom domain I put in samsung@mydomain.com. Turns out Samsung have a rat odour detector and refused that. But the not-so-smart TV was happy enough to accept sumsang@mydomain.com. Every time the TV powers up from cold it cheerfully informs me that sumsang@mydomain.com is logged in. They’re probably thinking that a small percentage of their purchasers will sign up to their lacklustre streaming service.
I believe this is one of those counterintuitive examples of relativity. Whilst you will never see an object cross the event horizon (it will just be red-shifted to Kingdom Come to the point of invisibility) it’s plain sailing from the object’s point of view. It will just pass through the event horizon like it will in any other regular patch of space. Never to leave again, of course.
People of colour also means non-White in touchy publications such as The Guardian.
The thing is, it’s not been thought through very carefully. People of Southend happen to live in an Essex town. It’s a place. Colour isn’t a place.
People with colour would be more appropriate.
Nope. Apple don’t sell iOS, iPadOS or macOS. They can do what they want with it, as it comes free with the device. They are at liberty to adopt whichever html standards they choose.
They killed off the Flash plugin years ago because it’s a resource hog. Whether you like Flash or not (let’s hope not) you won’t see it running on an Apple device.
Why? Because it’s pretty good. I use it all the time. It does everything I need. When I flip screens between Chrome on Windows (which I have to for work) back to Safari on macOS, I’m really glad I’m back on Safari. No little spy icon at the top RHS to remind me who I am. Back to Chrome. Slurpy data slurp slurp. Ooh look, the internet knows about me! Back to Safari. Hey, the content blocker’s working great. What’s that? It’s running lickety split. Let’s have a bit of pinch to zoom.
I’ll stick with Safari, thanks.
x86 Windows cannot be virtualised on an ARM Mac. A virtual OS relies on the host device having the same processor instruction set. The best that could be done in the short term is emulation, which is a much much slower and very different kettle of fish.
There may be a time when MS produce a reasonable ARM version of Windows. Until that happens, you can probably forget using VMWare or Parallels Windows on Apple Silicon.
Partly. I believe only 32-bit though, to date. I expect that MS will likely have fully ARMed versions of Windows 10 in the not too distant future, as they too want to sell low power high performance gadgets.
My MacBook Pro is very powerful, but it runs hot as hell when it’s busy. I imagine the fans would spin a bit less with an ARM chip installed.
master with main across its services
Right, so how are you going to get your software installed on the massive user base who use iOS?
I normally give the Fruity company a general nod, but their App Store is just a money machine for them and verging on the monopolistic when you look at how many people use iPhones and want to install apps. Bad Apple. It doesn't cost them much to host an app on their store, but they regard it as a cash cow.
FFS, why isn't their cut something more reasonable like 1%?
Wasn’t the client profile option killed off years ago? I might be talking out of my arse - wouldn’t be the first time - but it wasn’t listed as a dependency option the last time I checked. I guess most people don’t live at the end of a 14kb/s modem any more, so Microsoft figure a few hundred megabytes here and there doesn’t make much odds.
Ah, yes, plastic door handles on white goods. They are rubbish. Mrs Tessier-Ashpool has wrecked the handles on our fridge, tumble dryer and the drawers in our freezer. OK, she is notoriously clumsy, but that’s not much of an excuse. It’s all a cunning plan to sell more stuff.
This is a stitch-up, like a re-run of the tragic Select Committee hearings on the Snooper’s Charter. If you remember that, countless experts gave testimony that the U.K. was about to embark on a fruitless endeavour capturing endless haystacks when it should be focused on specific needles. Testimony that was resoundingly ignored. The U.K. just wants to snoop, snoop, snoop. That’s how councils can search your browsing history if you let your dog poop on the pavement.
In this case, Apple & Google have kindly provided an API for helping to track Covid in an anonymous manner, but the U.K. have chosen to ignore it. Presumably because that would let a good snooping opportunity go by the by. Absolutely shameless behaviour.
I’ve only dabbled with Photoshop and the more reasonably priced Affinity Photo. But every time I’ve been asked to lift an image from a background, it’s involved a fair bit of work that’s much more involved than identifying an outline and cutting out the object. You can get spectacularly bad results, for example, if you try to remove the background from a model with flyaway hair unless you pay a lot of attention to what you’re doing.
I’m not so interested in the app > photoshop interaction as the ability of a neural net to convincingly remove a background. I imagine that in itself would be enormously useful to a lot of people if it turned out to be really clever at doing it.
What a wuss. I hope you aren't tasked with solving IT problems.
On MacOs, drop a pin and mark it using the favourite icon. It will go into your Favourites collection.
Pick one of your Favourites in the Map app. It isn't hard to do,
Click the information icon
Click the Share button
Choose Copy Link
In the URL that is copied to your clipboard, change 'apple' to 'google'. Anyone, including your friends, can open it in a web page.
For example, here is one of my favourites from a visit to Japan.
https://maps.google.com/?address=Tokyo%20Tower,%202-8,%20Shibakoen%204-ch%C3%B5me,%20Minato,%20Tokyo,%20Japan%20105-0011&ll=35.658585,139.745418&q=Tokyo%20Tower&_ext=EiQphvbLI0XUQUAx5CBTM9h3YUA5n6gP6FPUQUBBHt9Sudx3YUA%3D
If you have a lad who is a keen gamer, keep a keen eye on your router activity. When my boy came home from university I found out his PC was acting as a game server, absolutely clobbering internet bandwidth uploading dozens of gigabytes per day. I had to pull the plug on it - literally - in order to create any semblance of a work from home environment.
Well, it’s more accurate to say the screen is A trackpad now, since you can drag your finger around two surfaces.
I’m not saying that an iPad is a computer replacement, by any means, but for extended use on a desk I can see the benefit of mounting it vertically and handling user input on a horizontal trackpad, like a traditional laptop.
Not for me. My iPad is mostly for use when I’m reading in bed where, I have to say, it works admirably and ergonomically.
I agree that micro usb is the pits. Thank Christ that industry ignored the EU’s direction on that one. Just imagine if now we’d all been lumbered with that awful connector.
SCART is/was no good. Far too chunky, too many pins, pins inherently not strong. And polarised (if that’s the right word).
I always hated those D-Type connectors in the days when people used RS-232 or parallel printers. Unless you were looking head on it was actually quite tricky to see which way round you should hold the connector. If you added up all the hours of humanity spent fruitlessly banging a polarised connector against its counterpart, it would surely amount to many lifetimes.
I like USB-C. It works for me.
You may scoff, but only idiots break their lightning cables. Pull it out by holding the connector, not the cable, otherwise you are literally begging for trouble.
Some people.
I include my lazy son in that group. He has a habit of picking up his laptop by the screen, and lobbing it down somewhere, regardless of where the cable is. He’s the kind of person who will go on an Internet forum to complain about shoddy cables.
I’d like to know what a polished note is!
Not an audio expert, but can’t earphones be tested objectively by connecting them to the best microphones in the world rather than a human, and measuring what they produce compared with what they produce?
1. Unless you are an IT professional you are very unlikely to need huge amounts of RAM or internal storage. You DO NOT find hordes of users on the internet complaining that they are hampered by the capability of the device they bought. You DO find hordes of users moaning that they can't fiddle with the internals. Get a different device.
2. People's use may indeed change. If you need radically more RAM or internal storage, trade it in for a more capable machine.
3. A purchaser's problem is not your problem.
4. And your point is? You were the one moaning about storage.
5. With an inappropriate number of ports and slots, you can make a £2,500 machine look like something out of a 1980s scrapyard. This argument has been debunked time and time again. The MBP ports are absolutely fine for the vast majority of users. For every pro photographer who complains about the lack of sn SD slot, you will find a dozen users who really don't give a damn. Your use case is not everybody's use case.
6. If you're crazy enough, here's the cable you are after: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Belkin-USB-C-Cable-USB-IF-Certified/dp/B00WJSPB5A
7. So you keep on saying. But the point is they *can* be repaired and you get a lot of money back if you trade in. Much more so than you would with any other brand of laptop.
Zzzz, if you're an IT professional you should know - or at least have a very good idea - how much RAM and storage you will need for the life of the device. Which isn't forever, by the way. If you don't, trade it in; MacBooks have a fantastic resale value.
You can add as much external storage to a MBP as you like.
Apple absolutely made the right decision in providing four identical USB-C Thunderbolt ports. With appropriate cables or adapters, they are flexible enough to connect any peripheral you care to think of. Still missing that 3.5" floppy disk slot, are you?
It’s true that the recent MBP keyboards are horribly susceptible to dust ingress, which is basically an unforgivable design error. But in all other respects I like my MBP keyboard. I type on it quite effortlessly. And gracefully!
I attended an IT workshop a while back, and I lent my laptop briefly to a Windows user (I was running Win 10 on a VM at the time). Christ Almighty, I had to wince when I saw him thumping away at my keyboard like someone digging up a road with a pneumatic drill. It’s a miracle it survived the onslaught.
Jeez. Which part of ‘I don’t earn anything so Goldman Sachs won’t lend me any money’ do these people not understand?
If computer says no, it’s for a reason, and that reason likely has nothing to do with what’s between your legs. Here are some quirks of the credit industry:
If you are debt free, you may be given a low credit rating. Lenders love people who a) are in debt and b) regularly reduce their debt.
If you pay off your mortgage, your credit score is likely to be reduced. My guess for this is that the lenders love a borrower who has the potential threat of house repossession looming over them. Once you are mortgage free, the best they can do is send in a bailiff crew from Channel 5 to swipe your TV should you default.
Hyperbole much? Come on, it’s not that bad. The upgrade was a bit rough around the edges for me - I had to provide my iCloud password about ten times before it stopped badgering me - but I can’t say I’ve encountered any other problems. Some people are reporting that it can mess up Apple Mail. Hasn’t affected me.
Having said that, Apple are in a bad place by having this strictly regimented annual update of products. They feel obliged to bring out a new iPhone and OS each September. And invariably there are features like hand-off or sidecar that bring with them co-dependencies with MacOS. Meaning that MacOS update really has to come out in October, ready or not.
I’d care for their attitude a lot more if they just brought out new stuff a) when it’s ready and b) fit for purpose. They’re a trillion dollar company, for feck’s sake. Just tell the moneybags and marketing department to take a hike.
You *can* have a walled garden *and* a strong password.
I’d rather the rat was behind a stone wall than a picket fence, thanks very much. “Walled Garden” gets a bad press amongst geeks but for the overwhelming majority of users it’s an important way of playing safe in a hostile connected world. A ‘Register’ audience is not a typical audience.
In my opinion, blocking unauthorised OS updates is a good thing. Let’s just say, theoretically, that you managed to find a way to hijack the phone’s cellular firmware so that you could block nearby users from making calls. Should that be allowed, just because you have a desire to mess about with the OS? Should you be able to tamper with incoming messages and get someone in trouble with the law? Should you be able to remove copy protection and duplicate any old movie that you like? Would you be happy with bad guys walking through your picket fence and installing malware? Should you be allowed to waste Apple’s time by walking into an Apple Store with a fucked up device? The list goes on and on and on.
Sure, there are annoying limitations. I’d like to take screenshots of movies on my iPad. But I can’t because Apple block that from happening. I take the rough with the smooth.
If you want to do geeky stuff get some geeky hardware. There’s plenty of it around.
No, you are wrong. A vehicle registration is not personally identifiable information in itself. You would need to apply to (and be authorised by) the DVLA to find the registered keeper. If you were to do that and process said data henceforth you would be subject to data processing rules. Until then, not.
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