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Comment how to install old apps compatible with older iOS (Score 1) 109

Here is how we solved that problem.

We still use our iPad 2. Yes, it's an old iPad, and big and clunky compared to the newer more portable iPad minis. But its large size made it perfect for displaying piano music, which doesn't need any sophisticated features of the newer iOS's. Unfortunately, the built-in PDF reader requires horizontal scrolling, is unable to display the bottom half of the previous page with the top half of the next, and resets the zoom level every time you turn the page. We wanted to install Foxit PDF reader.

Unfortunately, the iPad 2 maxes out at iOS version 9, and Apple has said it will never upgrade it to iOS 10 or beyond. Foxit Reader required iOS 11 or newer. But I found on the web how to get the App Store to install an older version of the software.

You need an iDevice (iPhone, iPad) that has an up-to-date version of the iOS, signed into your account. We happened to have an iPhone 6, which does get updates to the newest iOS version. If you don't, you might want to borrow a friend's, and temporarily sign on to your Apple account on the App store. Then install the newest version of the app (in our case, Foxit PDF Reader) on the newer device, which *is* able to accept the newest version.

Then you sign on to the App Store with the old device, e.g. our ancient iPad 2. Instead of searching for the app by name, browse through your already purchased apps. There's an icon to download the app in question (Foxit Reader) since you have already "purchased" the app (even if just for $0 in our case). Then a message pops up: "Awww, poor guy, this app is too new for your iOS version! But you *are* entitled to a copy, so how about we give you an older version as a consolation prize?" And there it was, an older but compatible version of Foxit PDF Reader on our old iPad 2 that we use daily for piano music.

This only works if there is still an older copy of the app on the App Store. I hear that some app developers take down the older copies or force you to upgrade, and then I don't know how to get around that.

Hope this info is useful for you.

Comment visit all the cities vs visit all routes inbetween (Score 2) 169

How is that different than the Travelling salesman problem [wikipedia.org]? Surprisingly I've never seen the Seven Bridges scenario.

Really? This is rather well-known. The Travelling Salesman requires that you hit all the vertices (destinations). The Seven Bridges problem requires that you traverse all the edges (the routes between the destinations).

Comment Why not both face and PIN unlocking? (Score 1) 11

What I don't get is, why don't they combine the various unlocking methods?

I don't like fingerprint unlocking, by itself. But I would love to have a setting where, after I enter my PIN#, my phone still doesn't unlock unless it detects my finger on the fingerprint sensor. Or, in a similar vein, it would detect my face -- or maybe it's really just a photo -- but then it still needs the PIN#, my fingerprint, or some other source of authentication.

Comment Dual SIM phones easy to find on Amazon, $50-$800 (Score 1) 45

5) Two Sim cards are not in demand because businesses do not want you to combine your personal and work phone. They would rather you keep them separate so they can easily confiscate your work phone without worrying about you having transferred stuff from your work sim to you personal sim.

Aren't Dual SIM phones easy to find? I've been getting them, and I neither specifically looked for nor use that feature.

Here, at a casual browse from Amazon, are some dual SIM phones:

Here's one that's cheap, about $50

https://www.amazon.com/BLU-Adv...

Don't want a no-name brand? Here's one from a Well-Known Korean Manufacturer:

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung...

Not expensive enough? Here's one that's north of $700

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung...

After my last two cheap phones, I got a Google Pixel 3XL, and it's technically a dual SIM because it can use a virtual eSIM and also accept a second physical SIM card.

You're welcome.

Comment xpinstall.signatures.required fix works for FF 62 (Score 1) 311

Setting xpinstall.signatures.required to false has worked on my FF v62.0.3
I haven't tried adding more extensions yet -- some comments are saying that it won't work -- but at least I get my browsing back.

This is ridiculous that my browser depends on some online certificate. What if I take my computer offline camping/on the airplane while I use my browser to look at some local file? (E.g. I generate my own photo thumbnail index as a HTML file that I view in Firefox.) Whenever there is a feature that relies on something online, there should be at least a warning and a choice to mitigate ("Continue in insecure mode anyway?") rather than just having everything fail.

This is going to piss off a lot of users.

Comment see The Underhanded C Contest (Score 1) 148

I can't believe no one has mentioned this yet.

"The Underhanded C Contest is an annual contest to write innocent-looking C code implementing malicious behavior. ... The goal of the contest is to write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function. To be more specific, it should do something subtly evil. Every year, we will propose a challenge to coders to solve a simple data processing problem, but with covert malicious behavior. Examples include miscounting votes, shaving money from financial transactions, or leaking information to an eavesdropper. The main goal, however, is to write source code that easily passes visual inspection by other programmers."

Some of these entries are downright scary.

Comment Why I have to use GVim and not just Vim (Score 1) 308

Yes, there's a role for GVIM.

I got called out for this on the Vim forums, saying: You're such a wimp using GVIM! Just use a terminal like a real man! They challenged me to name a single case where a real geek would need to use a GUI for VIM instead of doing on the terminal.

So I told them my use case.

Then they shut up.

The use case is: sometimes I switch from the Latin alphabet to Chinese. I need to change the font and the font size. At the usual font size for Latin characters, the Chinese characters are not clearly legible. If I increase the font size so that they are legible (in fact, my own preference is to increase it to where they look calligraphically beautiful), the Latin letters are far bigger than they need to be, and you can't squeeze enough information into a screenful -- which is not a problem with Chinese text since each character contains so much more information.

So I have a quick keystroke mapping to switch to a given font with ":let &guifont = g:guifont_chin" etc., and we're happy. Not sure there's a way to change the terminal font from within Vim, and even if there were, that's not the role of Vim to control the terminal font, anyway.

And I don't use a mouse.

Comment So you agree that competition is being eliminated (Score 2) 220

"From where I sit, it feels like there are new competitors coming up every day, and we buy them up before they can become a serious threat"

You do understand that getting acquired is one of the most popular exit strategies for venture funded start ups, right?

So, if I understand you correctly, you are agreeing with GP's premise that Facebook is eliminating competition?

To be sure, you are saying that the competition is happy to be eliminated, but that's not the point. Otherwise, whenever some evil villain did something dastardly, like build a fracking CFC-manufacturing plant that spewed acid rain, you could argue, "But it's okay, they paid the city tons of money so they were happy to rezone the area to allow this plant."

Comment Natural consequences of actions aren't the cause (Score 1) 53

No, I would disagree with your statement, although it is technically correct.

When we look for the cause of something, we are looking for an event or action that is the least reasonably expected, and/or one that was by least coerced choice.

For example, if some sniper shoots a car driver and the car swerves into a deep ravine, we don't say that the crash was caused by the driver slumping over the wheel as s/he died, or by the presence of the ravine, because slumping is what a dead body naturally does, and the presence of a ravine is reasonable. We say that the shot from the sniper caused the crash, because that is not a reasonable expectation of driving along a ravine, and also because the sniper took deliberate action.

If you asked, "Well, if there wasn't a ravine there, the car would not have crashed down a ravine, right?" the answer would have to be yes, but to consider that as anything even near to the principal cause of the crash is to mislead one from the true and overwhelmingly unexpected cause of the crash. By that yardstick you could do reductio ad absurdum and say that the cause of the crash was the car manufacturer or the mother who gave birth to the driver.

When we refer to crime and punishment, an event can be considered "reasonable" if it follows morally, even though the chance of that event might not be very high.

When Google does something nasty for which it probably won't be caught, but actually ends up being caught, the cause of the reputation loss is not due to the reasonable prosecution of the nasty action, which follows and is more or less obligatory, but by Google's choice to do the nasty thing in the first place, something it could have chosen not to do.

It's the crime, not the punishment; to say otherwise would be as ridiculous as Anonymous Coward's delightfully sarcastic answer (currently modded 0): "And falls from great heights don't kill you, it's the sudden stop at the end."

Comment Not rock salt, just salt, to shoot flies, insects (Score 1) 61

Not quite what you're thinking of, but I love the Bug-A-Salt, which fires a near-invisible puff of table salt at flying insects. Better than a flyswatter, doesn't splatter the bug, but brings them down. Also good for spiders that sends my lady screaming. Nowadays, when she sees a spider, she screams, and then grabs the Bug-A-Salt and downs the spider. Take that!

It's so great that I actually hope to see some houseflies around the home. Disappointingly, they have generally steered clear.

Comment How do you find NextCloud? Better than OwnCloud? (Score 1) 89

Question about NextCloud: What do you think of it?

I use OwnCloud. This was just before NextCloud became practical. I considered going to NextCloud when an OwnCloud client for my aging iPad2 "upgraded" and stopped working. Ultimately I stayed with OwnCloud just to minimize complexity.

How is NextCloud in terms of maturity? Is it a drop-in replacement for OwnCloud, or does it have issues? Do you find yourself using features not available in OwnCloud? (Not that I know what those are, but the marketing text sounded promising at the time.)

Comment Jack replaced by useless plastic, not speaker (Score 1) 193

[the headphone jack] takes up more space that could be dedicated to battery or another function.

Yes, that space is sooooo valuable that when Apple removed the headphone jack, they filled the space with a piece of molded plastic.

That's incredibly misleading. Sure, it's a piece of molded plastic. What you fail to mention is that it is a functional piece of molded plastic - part of the speaker.

But that's not what the quoted article says. They said: "teardown [of the new iPhone] reveals what's in place of the headphone jack that Apple removed. In short: nothing complicated. Just some plastic. No speaker, and no electronics."

Comment Agree! uncountable nouns, especially "email" (Score 1) 12

Thank you for pointing this out, but the most grievous disregard for the difference between countable and uncountable nouns is "email", as in "I received 3 emails this morning." But no one says "I received 3 mails this morning," since it's quite apparent that "mail" (and hence "electronic mail", or "e-mail") doesn't take any plural form.

This is a ignorance that really bugs me. :P (And if anyone wants to say that I should have said "AN ignorance", warn me first so I can barf.)

Comment No, clearly +50% is percentage of OLD amount (Score 1) 262

Since when is +50% the same as x2?

Well, it depends on your point of view
if the price in 2007 was 50% of what it is now then it has doubled

I would beg to differ on your attempted "it depends on what you mean"-type excuse for misinterpreting what is generally a socially accepted translation of those words into a mathematically expressible meaning.

While your statement that "if the price in 2007 was 50% of what it is now then it has doubled" is, by itself, correct, this is not at all what GGP said. Saying that the price has gone up by +50% definitely does NOT mean "the price in 2007 was 50% of what it is now". To me, and I would wager most Slashdotters would agree with me, when one says "the amount has gone up by p percent", that is a percentage before the change; that is:

p = (NewAmount - OldAmount) / OldAmount
        where p can be (but doesn't have to be) expressed as a percentage
I've never seen anyone use NewAmount as the denominator when only the change is mentioned.

Of course, if you say "that's p percent of the new amount," then it explicitly gives the denominator to be NewAmount. But just to say "a change of p percent" is to use the old amount.

In other words, if a certain price increases by 300%, and then drops by 75%, and then the cycle repeats itself several times, you might think that the price is rising rapidly (since 300 sounds so much more than 75) but you still end up with the same price:
        Price2 = Price1 + Price1 * 300%
        Price3 = Price2 - Price2 * 75% [which is the same as Price1]
        Price4 = Price3 + Price3 * 300% [which is the same as Price2]
        Price5 = Price4 - Price4 * 75% [which is the same as Price3, and so forth]

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