Posts by GraXXoR

The iPhone 15 has a Goldilocks issue: Too big or too small. Maybe a case will make it just right

Re: Phones are lovely but they'd be much better without cameras

My Nikon Z7 does that. It has a companion app on my iPhone which sits in the background using one of the low energy Bluetooth protocols (not sure which one but it doesn’t impact battery life of either the phone or the camera to a degree that’s noticeable by me)

It does the following.

* Sends the correct time to the camera’s RTC.

* Sends current GPS location either whenever a photo is taken or at some minimum time interval to reduce battery use — This data is added to the photo’s metadata.

* Trickle receives 2MP versions of the photo to the iPhone’s photo gallery in the background via LE Bluetooth even with the camera switched “off”.

* It also has adhoc wifi mode which can send larger or full-size versions of the photos back to the photo gallery.

I never even imagained what a game changer it would be until I actually used it. My Z7 goes with me now far more than my smaller D3500.

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

Re: So Musk has blood on his hands

You’re forgetting that complete spanner called Trump. If he gets in in 2024 we know exactly what he will do and Russia will be basically free to cement their hold and redraw their maps.

Beijing's silent treatment topples Tower Semiconductor merger with Intel

You’re seriously trying to compare an apartment block collapse in the US to a multi trillion dollar collapse of an entire economic pillar that is the China real estate Ponzi?

P.s. occupied buildings collapse, burn down, explode, fall over all the time in China. It’s so common it’s hardly even news at this point.

IT needs more brains, so why is it being such a zombie about getting them?

Zombies…

… have traditionally been pretty adept at acquiring brains.

I’ll get me coat.

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

It scares me that so many people around the world are still beholden to massive cults in the 21st century.

And that they have real influence in politics and society.

Tech vendors have been hiking prices by up to 24% amid inflation

Re: "...20 percent increase for on-prem software"

Salaries here in Japan are stuck at levels they were at the end of the bubble when I arrived in the 90s.

Since then we’ve seen commodity prices double and the value of the yen slide by anywhere up to 30%. And city rents are astronomical and seem to increase annually since land prices have been rising these last 20 years after losing most of its value in the late 80s with Tokyo property regaining a large portion of its bubble value.

This is the toughest it’s ever been to eke out an existence. This last year alone, a lot of consumer items have hit all time high prices. Some daily necessities such as fresh groceries hiked as much as 80%

But what makes it hurt worse is reading the financial reports of many of these large companies who’re cutting staff left right and centre, raking in obscene profits with TOPIX hitting new record values never seen before, seemingly every week and bosses salaries shifting from “merely” tropopausal to truly stratospheric levels.

Something has to give at some point.

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

Re: A bit unfair

"learning the lesions of life."

Learning the lesions of life... I know them well... and bear many scars.

AMD undercuts Nvidia's 4060 launch with a $269 GPU

Re: Tiers

Because Nvidia and AMD are launching their range of prestigious 720p cards next.

Substack copied Twitter so Twitter is copying Substack

Re: Talking of Substack...

His April 1st article was very ammusing, too.

Diving DRAM prices are a problem not even AI can solve

greed > inflation.

It's corporate greed and price hiking in so many sectors that's adding to the pain of lack of overall capital, causing any elastic markets to suffer.. It's not like putting up prices will allow all companies to gather more revenue in total from all customers in anything but the shortest term.

With everything and their dog going up in price well above the supposed rate of inflation, consumers are looking for bargains and abstaining from purchases... This greedflation, as I like to call it, mixed in with aggressive "restructuring" forces people to smarten up their consumer practices and purchase with much more care and attention.

As an aside, here in Tokyo, I see very few people with new iPhones for example, when just three or four years ago, the iPhone was a yearly replacement for most and biennial for the rest ... And none of my friends have replaced their graphics boards in three years. Yet on Kakaku.com (a price aggregator) we can see that higher capacity SSD and larger DDR4 RAM module sales over here are doing very well indeed, as people place their dwindling money on products they perceive to be reasonably priced.

We're in a situation where bigger and bigger hands are trying to snatch fewer and fewer remaining candies. But if the bag is empty, you can have hands like Lana from Archer and still not grab much.

/rant

China crisis is a TikToking time bomb

There was also that woman with the improbable name… Victory Lap or something. Who was basically jailed for whistleblowing.

Problem is, these are the ones we know about.

Just like Bertrand Russell’s teapot, there are likely ones who have been put away -or even been done away with- that we just don’t know of… but since the trust has already been broken so many times we can easily believe it to be the case.

Our lot are the lesser of two evils… barely.

Utah outlaws kids' social media addiction, sets digital curfew

While I understand where this law is coming from, I've always been of the opinion that it should be up to the parents to educate their children and teach them boundaries and balance rather than foisting that responsibility onto lawmakers who may or may not have the kids' best interests at heart or who have marginal knowledge on the subject and just create some kind of knee-jerk law that carpet bombs an entire lifestyle choice or aspect of technology.

I know this is a super edge case, but in a country where even seeking out abortions or the "morning after pill" can come loaded with criminal baggage in certain parts of the land, isn't it important that young adults have anonymous access to information regarding what options are open to someone who has made a mistake and needs help?

If you have to opt in to named account and that information can and will be handed over to local law enforcement then I forsee this having quite a serious impact on the willingness of young people to ask for advice on reproductive health, a subject which can be difficult enough to broach at the best of times.

ChatGPT, how did you get here? It was a long journey through open source AI

Re: Where is Robin Hood?

I’ve come across your comments these last few days and can’t help thinking you got GPTchat to craft them for you. The language structure is incredibly stilted and right at the bottom of the uncanny valley. .

Winnie the Pooh slasher flick mysteriously cancelled in Hong Kong

“Cancelled? How odd!” said Pooh, looking from side to side guiltily.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” replied Alice, concerned.

Oh wait. Wrong franchise. This is apparently the real world.

Mine’s the surreally large pint of honey mead.

Google staff asked to share desk space in latest cost purge

Re: Office

How did I get here?

Intel slashes shareholder dividend by two-thirds as cash crunch bites

Good, because the world would be better off

without bottom-feeders taking a massive chunk of everything.

Yukon UFO could have cost unfortunate balloon fan $12

Half a mil for a $12 target.

Even for the military, that’s a poor cost performance ratio. Lol.

Take the blue pill: Keanu Reeves has had enough of AI baloney

That long?

Here’s a quote from one of the scariest YouTube channel:

“Just two more papers down the line.”

Uncle Sam backs right-to-repair battle against Big Ag's John Deere

“The farm equipment maker, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment,”

So they replied after some unspecified delay…?

Microsoft promises smaller Windows 11 updates with UUP – but there's a catch

Hundred time used stock photo shows a ridiculous looking model drinking cappuccino in a naturally lit office using some gods-know-what mock up interface... on an iMac.

Every time I see a photo from this particular series, I'm left with the smell of cold, corporate checkboxing...

Still, at least he wasn't wearing a red, checked shirt and ankle length trousers.

/rant... sorry. I'll get my coat.

helloSystem 0.8: A friendly, all-graphical FreeBSD

Re: Don't get this MAC is simple thing

The problem here is, who is the gatekeeper on what is "sound" and gets to determine when work on a second build should commence?

Re: Don't get this MAC is simple thing

This is what happens when people conflate “I lack experience in this field” with ”this field is very difficult.”

I would be at a loss to fix anything of depth in a Linux distibution. Hell, half of the time I can’t even get a touch screen to line up with the cursors or the the screen to rotate 90 degrees without having to delve into xrandr and cast a bunch arcane terminal spells dredged up from some pit of early 2000s pre-Reddit knowledge.

I will admit that even after using well over a dozen linuxes since Mandrake back in the mid 90s on maybe a hundred boxes or so (yeah, my beard isn’t long and tangled enough to say… ‘boxen’) I will still be first to admit I’m an eternal noob.

Re: ...Meanwhile, the Linux world has a profusion of rival distros, desktops, and packaging formats

Nature has proven time and time again that monocultures usually end up dominating for a bit and then dying a horrible, unavoidable death somewhere down the line.

If Linux ever dwindles to a single distribution, heck even a single digit’s worth of distros, it would mean there’s something very rotten in the State of Torvalds.

Re: ...Meanwhile, the Linux world has a profusion of rival distros, desktops, and packaging formats

Used Be at University in an experiment that used their file system metadata as a sort of database. It was afascinating but expensive system, IIRC.

I’m not entirely sure that your assessment that it was based on NextStep or OpenStep “metaphores” is entirely correct.

BeOS was in development at the same time as NextSTEP and the two products felt quite distinct.

If anything, BeOS was more targeted towards MacOS 9 users and shared some similarities with that classic OS.

Today, Haiku, true to its roots is still a young OS at heart, with almost zero baggage other than some BeOS binary compatibility in the 32 but version. Thus it excels at being incredibly simple compared to some of the more intense Linux distributions with multiple frameworks and desktop environments. It is relatively transparent and logical, too.

As for the user, well, it’s very easy to master the desktop and features with possibly the lightest graphical interface I’ve ever used on any OS bar Minuet.

Wow, turns out cloud sales can slow down – eh, Amazon, Google?

Continual accelerated growth.

What I've never understood is where this eternal growth is supposed to come from... Sure, in the 60s, there was a boom in the productive workforce and thus disposable income in society, so increased revenue was almost a given.

But in an age where there are fewer and fewer wealthy people entering the marketplace and with even fewer predicted in the future, how do companies expect to continue raking in the money?

Recent data from the US (and not to mention the UK, the only G7 economy to show actual direct decline) has indicated the largest drop in "relative disposable income" since the Great Depression almost a century ago.

We have seen tech companies' and the energy market's approaches: Increase the price of equivalent or lesser products and reduce availability.

Hence the fact that companies are ratcheting up the price brackets to compensate for losses in sales volumes even while raw costs are starting to fall. (Energy being basically non-elastic is especially egregious in this respect).

But that is eventually self defeating since it mearly redistributes finite expenditure elsewhere. Add this to the reality that even what actual money there is now more and more tends to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands: the hands of the owners themselves rather than their customers'.

Thus at some hypothetical point in the future, there will likely be more money within the special club itself than outside and options for future growth will become increasingly sparse, if not entirely absent.

Here's a few sobering articles:

https://www.heritage.org/markets-and-finance/commentary/gdp-report-reveals-ominous-great-depression-warning-sign-not-seen

https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/press-releases/articles/consumer-disposable-income-confidence-falls-to-record-low-as-rising-cost-of-living-takes-hold.html

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/30/groundhog-year-uk-disposable-incomes-to-fall-by-38-in-2023

Semiconductor world in for a rough ride as chip bubble bursts at the high end

And despite this collapse, the consumer price indices remain at historic highs combined with other sectors of the market raking in record profits for their shareholders.

So it’s no wonder then, that the consumer and indeed many end user businesses including mine are carefully guarding the smallest pot of disposable income seen in years… Second half of 2023? This train wreck is going to take a lot longer to right.

This is like one of those things you might hear in a pub after a flew pints of bitter.

A moment of silence for all the drives that died in the making of this Backblaze report

Re: 1980s Hard Drives

We used to call them soak tests, IIRC.

All our machines were run for 24 hours using an automated test suite that marked off all the bad sectors found on the disks and also was good at picking up failures in the SIMMs or CRT.

Apple sued for promising privacy, failing at it

I don’t have much of an issue with a company that doesn’t promise privacy to any extent whatsoever, using metrics in a legal fashion, within the context as laid out by common law.

What I don’t like is a company that is actively selling privacy as a feature and positive sales point of the said brand doing the same.

User was told three times 'Do Not Reboot This PC' – then unplugged it anyway

I was more surprised that the she became a he in subsequent weeks.

Apple releases Lisa source code on landmark machine's 40th birthday

Re: Architecture and Morality.....anyone?

Have you seen the state of some of the kids wondering around on the streets?

Same thing.

As wafer demand dries up, foundry revenues head for a cliff, we all celebrate

The last thing to ever drop

Is the price to the consumer.

Prices for pretty much everything electronic are still sky high.

And everything non-electronic has been hit with shrinkflation.

Twitter tweaks third-party app rules to ban third-party apps

And when Twitter Twats it's last Twit.

...I hope it's Elon who finally gets a bowl of petunias dropped on his head.

Version 5 of the Endless OS enters testing

Re: Another interesting project!

Jeez, I've been out of English language circulation far too long.

Just like it took me far too long to realise wtf those girls were actually on about... LOL.

I live in Japan... We have a type of snack called Collon, which looks like a slice of tripe... filled with rich, dark... chocolate.

Nothing like dipping a few lengths of chocolate stuffed collon into your coffee in the morning...

Apple just cut Tim Cook's pay by 40%. How ever will he get by on that $50m?

Re: Obscene riches

All CEOs are on obscene compensation. More than ever before. (At least 2022, was).

Even while the world is in a major downturn, CEOs and their respective companies were raking in record profits yet worker’s salaries are in the gutter.

Haiku beta 4: BeOS rebuild / almost ready for release / A thing of beauty

Re: You ran it on WinCE and..a..Dreamcast?... Really?

Why all the hate for WinCE?

At least it was true to its name in how it made the users feel...

Re: Great for revitalising old netbooks!

There were no 486 grade eeepcs.

What goes up must come down: Logitech sales tumble amid PC slump

Cutting prices?

Looks like Reg is cutting something… into their tobacco.

Prices for anything remotely desirable are through the roof where I live and there is no sign they are coming back down to earth.

Graphics cards, motherboards, hell, even just cooling fans are stupid price right now.

Cisco warns it won't fix critical flaw in small business routers despite known exploit

I always find this sort of lack of flexibility a little disheartening. Where is the customer concern? Where is the humanity? Surely, offering a post cutoff patch would go a long way to generate goodwill and publicity.

Though playing devil’s advocate, it might raise future expectations and even set them up for legal challenges if the good-will code has some unforeseen side effects. No good deed goes unpunished, etc.

Probably best just to say “fk it! yer on yer own!”

Apple accused of censoring apps in Hong Kong and Russia to maintain market access

Re: Woods

Is it weird I read that in a Russian Accent.

This is the end, Windows 7 and 8 friends: Microsoft drops support this week

In the end

… be it a Mac or otherwise, every computer in my business ends up with Linux on it eventually when it initial OS runs out of steam, and by steam I mean is purposefully made obsolete by Microshaft.

My current main gaming PC and prior one are currently fully 11 capably. The one previous to that is limited to Win 10 since it has no TCM and hacking stuff in windows to work is a fool’s errand.

I gave up win 7 a long time ago, so all the rest are on an ungodly mixture of FreeBSD, AntiX, MX or Mint and continue to perform even better than they did under their final windows guise.

Tributes flow as Creative CEO Sim Wong Hoo - the mind behind Sound Blaster - passes aged 68

Re: SIM-Wrong-Who

are you 12 or something?

jeez.

Perfect Naming

I remember laughing at the name of the AWE32 when brought the box back to my flat.

Me and two mates got to work installing it and hooked it up to an AUX input on my hi-fi, another pricy hobby I had at the time.

I actually do remember the three of us feeling actual awe at just how good the polyphonic sound was. The included demos were very convincing.

But it was in game music and sound effects that really did it justice, since this was still before the days of just streaming music from the hard disk.

Doom II and one of the Wing Commander titles sounded amazing.

That was the last discrete sound card I ever bought.

Samsung expects profit dive as demand for memory and devices continues to slow

69 percent down?

Interesting decline.

That’s the same amount of decline the iPhone 14 series has faced here in Japan compared to the heady heights of the iPhone 12 days.

It’s not just Samsung facing the post pandemic pinch.

I’m seeing the same thing happening in the ripen graphics card market, too: wistfully priced, high-end Nvidia parts sitting in the shelves gathering dust.

After roasting Nvidia for overheating issues AMD now has its own

At the rate modern computer gubbins' power ratings are increasing, we'll soon be watching Youtube videos on Seasonic MCCBs vs Corsair MCCBs and discussing the pros and cons of employing two-step stored energy mechanisms on Reddit.

Coat is rubber lined.

LockBit: Sorry about the SickKids ransomware, not sorry about the rest

Re: see these bastards experiencing tarring and ...

... and ironically encrypt on compression with a random 256 character string.

Google warns of commercial Heliconia spyware hitting Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Defender

Disappointed naming convetion.

We got Noise and Soft, but no Spring, Summer or Winter, then?

I'll get my thick, winter coat with the missing "l" in the pocket.

GPU shipments saw biggest nosedive since noughties recession

So is this what is happening to prices?

There is less demand, so we are selling less.. so we have to put the prices up to compensate.

Or is it more likely that inflation, leading to price rises, is causing the slump in sales.

Either way, this feels more like stagflation than inflation... A lose-lose situation for consumer AND maker.

Not good. Not good at all.

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison

Re: How long before she ...

The female instinct in her realised she won’t find much in the way of fortune action for the next 11.25 years so she might as well try now.

But the curmudgeon in me simply thinks it was an utterly cynical, CEO level play for juror sympathy.