Posts by Richtea 29 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jul 2017
I was under the impression that techies were smarter than the average bear - you know, logical, creative, open-minded. This comments thread blows that idealistic view of the world out of the water.
My thanks go to all those that have bothered to downvote the obvious dross being spewed out here.
You sentient, thoughtful people out there - good on you.
> "people who were 'just doing the limit' quite often get themselves and/or others killed."
> By what mechanism? Is it by impatient drivers breaking the law and killing them?
Inattention. Drivers look but don't see. Especially if they're bored. SMIDSY - "Sorry Mate I Didn't See You"
Driver education would solve this, i.e further teaching on how to recognise and react to hazards.
Long term, advanced driving courses would help. Short term it would take too long to implement across the country, it's too expensive (the gov will not factor in that its good for life), and drivers would be up in arms because, as we know, everyone drives better than average.
You still need an Apple dev account, a Mac to run Xcode, and some Apple devices to test on (you can wing it with emulators, but I'd recommend against that if you're serious).
Android Studio running on a Mac builds and install an .ipa using XCode and scripts.
So it's 'legal'.
This won't save your Apple-related outlay, but it saves you time. For newer devs, it might also save you having to learn Swift.
We've been using it for a couple of months, to solve the Android/iOS dichotomy. I'd say at this stage - a whisker before the app's release - it's pretty good, with only a small number of wrinkles that need re-reading/checking.
Pros:
- It does what it says on the tin, i.e. build once deploy twice instantly. In our native app world that's about 30-40% dev time saved.
- reasonable performance - good enough for casual apps with some animated widgets/'congrats', but not for gaming
Cons:
-a new development pattern. That's harder than a language swap IMHO, because you can code bits in old school patterns, and then you'll get pulled up halfway through the project, and have to rework.
- when you need to go low level, you're back into the ugly world of native code (examples are decent splash screens, flexible app icons, etc)
- min APK size seems to be around 15Mb. An equivalent native app would usually be 4-8MB.
- You can hook Swift and Kotlin into Dart, but not into Java. You can go the other way (integrate a Flutter module into Java) but that's only good for Android devices, of course.
> My smartphone has data and location services turned off most of the time, and the cell phone tower data is not available to the police without a warrant.
Not true in the UK, in 'special' cases. You ring on Android, they know your location - and you didn't opt in:
https://crisisresponse.google/emergencylocationservice/how-it-works/
> I have smart phone, GPS and wifi is always off until I actually need to use it.
You do realise that it's not beyond the wit of Google to enable location without your permission, right?
https://crisisresponse.google/emergencylocationservice/how-it-works/
It fires an SMS with your location to the emergency services. You won't find the location SMS that was sent in your outbox, it's supressed. Nice and silent.
In this case it's definitely for 'the greater good', Sargeant Angel, but there's no opt-in or opt-out.
The feature is driven by on-device logic built into Play Services, but it would be very little effort to target an individual device with one more flag: 'track this user on any interaction and send location SMS to emergency service 5').
> At last Britain has another chance of being Great Britain again.
This IS sarcasm, right?
From the excellent link earlier to the Sir Ivan Rogers Cambridge speech
Page 20 extract:
As Xavier Bettel, the Luxembourg PM, summarised Brexit in a sentence better than anyone: “They were in with a load of opt-outs.Now they are out and want a load of opt-ins”. Spot on.
And also well worth reading are the '3 brief confident predictions' - mid-page 20 onwards.
Why wouldn't you want the maximum display area?
On a OnePlus 6 if you really object to notch aesthetics, in settings turn the notch area black, and you won't comprehend what is notch and what is black background, but the status info remains. Everybody happy!
Theory #1: Notch haters haven't tried a notch phone for more than 30s.
Discuss.
> In a functioning marketplace, surely that would have encouraged third parties like Amazon to enter the market. In short, why is that 30 per cent still 30 per cent?
Amazon App Store:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000644603
It also takes 30%. Who would have guessed.
The one disruptive bit they did do well was Amazon Underground, where popular paid apps were free, in exchange for Amazon popping up adverts of their choice. We made some significant income from that, but they've now pulled the Underground feature from recent devices.
Back in the distant past (2001 - 2008) before OS-based mobile app stores it was normal for the developer to only get 25% of the published price.
The split was roughly 45--55% to the mobile network, with the remainder split 50-50 with the 'aggregator' - a 3rd party quality gate / company used by mobile networks who didn't want to get involved in app stores, they just wanted the income.
I'd say losing a mere 30% is reasonable, but for the fact that its barely possible to charge for an app nowadays. Its just pixels and bytes right, so why do I need to pay for it?
1Mbps down this morning, before the Openreach engineer visited. 9.8Mbps down after he finished. Livin' the dreem.*
How long before it self-caps back down to 1Mbps? Answers on a postcard - it will be quicker than replying here.
* 2.4km copper line to next village, but the fibre cabinet is a mere 300m away in our village. Not cost effective to connect us. But then again, 4 engineer visits in 6 weeks isn't really 'cost effective' either.
> I also seem to recall the higher frequencies are better at penetrating buildings.
Other way round. Low is generally best for building penetration and long rural distances, hence why Three obtained some much-needed low spectrum a few years back. But higher frequencies can support higher throughput, which is what you want on crowded high streets. You need a mixture to build a national network.
As ever, those spectrum allocation figures indicate that the Three-O2 merger would have been 'fair' - based on percentages.
If you have 4 operators, isn't it fair to offer them all ~25% each? They should pay of course, but the chance for the smaller operators to buy and re-balance the share of spectrum should be available.
Or drop to three operators and then 14%+15% becomes a sustainable competitor. Oh - rejected.
Otherwise, I can see operator failure 5 years down the road.
BTW - does the 37% limit mean BEET needs to give back their extra 5% longer term?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
