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Comment Re:Pure Poettering inspired incompetence (Score 3, Insightful) 306

Absurd comments like this highlight why Red Hat and all major distros no longer care about enthusiasts. They do something ridiculous (adopt systemd, break 40 years of Unix conventions, creating a tightly coupled architecture) and your first instinct is to start whining about Microsoft.

Comment Re:One Size (Score 1) 85

You should like Samsung's unlocked phones then. TouchWiz was redesigned in 2017 and is now called Samsung Experience, and is by far the best custom Android skin. Having used Samsung Experience 8.5 and 9.0 on my Note8 since last September, I'm shocked how fast and lean it still is.

"But why would you sully the greatness that is Android with a custom sk-"

Google now change Android's UX conventions every year, culminating in the mess that is Android P, whose phones will feature no less than 5 generations of icon, menu and app design. Samsung are at least consistent, and provide tons of features not found in stock Android (e.g. a healthy themes store full of free content, customisable Always on Display, secure folders, Kid Mode, edge lighting, a far superior Bluetooth stack, dual messenger app accounts, etc. etc.).

They also courageously equip their phones with features not found on Pixels/iPhones, such as a 3.5mm jack and an SD card slot.

Comment Why is his daughter still posting? (Score 4, Insightful) 326

Watched the video expecting it to be a 12-year-old, but no, it's a grown woman. How on earth could she not have known that she'd get into trouble for posting this before release? Did she think she was entitled to a world exclusive hands-on preview of the device because her dad is an Apple engineer?

Simply put, it's the father's fault for letting his daughter handle an employee device. Letting family use a top-secret company prototype is reasons enough for dismissal, but the family member then posting videos to YouTube of this *unreleased* product really takes the biscuit.

Apple have done some terrible things (e.g. getting the police to raid Gizmodo after they legally acquired a pre-release iPhone) but I see no issue with this firing. The fact that the daughter posted a follow-up video really says it all. Let me guess, she wants to be a social media star?

Comment Re:The Megahertz Myth is alive and well (Score 5, Insightful) 91

In real workloads, the 16-core Threadripper (16 cores, 3.4GHz) @ $1000 destroys the 10-core i9 (also $1000)

The problem for Intel is it also destroys the the 12-core i9 ($1200) and 14-core i9 ($1400). In all likelihood it's going to match the 16-core i9 ($1700) and lose overall (by a small margin) to the 18-core i9, which is $2000.

The fact that PCWorld haven't explictly mentioned price, or even implicitly mentioned TR's 64 PCIe lanes and the other benefits (a stable socket, cheaper boards, lower power draw than the i9s by a huge distance, etc.) is just testamanet to how much the mainstream tech press shill for Intel.

There is essentially no reason to buy the i9s. If you want the best workstation performance, you buy Threadripper. If you want the best gaming performance, you buy the i7-7700K. The i9s are an absurdity, and a panicked reaction to AMD's massive performance gains.

People forget that Intel had only planned to release a 10-core i7 based on Skylake-EP. Once they got wind of Threadripper they bolted on a 12-core, then a 14-core, then a 16-core, and finally (when TR was shown to have incredible workstation performance) the $2000 waste of space that is the 18-core 2.6GHz i9-7980XE with only 44 PCIe lanes.

Meanwhile, for half that cost AMD give you 16 cores @ 3.4GHz, 64 PCIe lanes, cheaper motherboards, and most importantly amazing workstation performance. It's not even a contest.

Comment Re:Well that settles that (Score 2) 161

It's 50% anti-consumer BS and 50% incompetence. The 3DS and its spawn were exploited many times via save game glitches and it seems this is what Nintendo's afraid of.

Couple this with Nintendo's terrible understanding of hardware outside of the base console and what you get is local-only save games, no way of backing them up to SD cards, and no cloud sync support.

Comment Re:It's Just Facebook Data Mining (Score 1) 69

Ironically it'll be the EU who kick up a fuss about Facebook trying to harvest addresses, if they ever roll out election reminders in Europe. As you said, there's no reason why you couldn't simply enter a ZIP code which FB uses to determine which voting district you're in, with the possibility of manual override if you think you're wrong.

It's not like they need your address anyway. They can already geolocate people on Android/iOS clients via GPS, and even without GPS they can fix your location to within a few miles using your IP address. The home address is useless to FB itself (what are they going to do, send you spam in the mail?) but I'm sure it'd be of interest to FB's advertising partners...

Comment Re:"We shouldn't tell people there's an election." (Score 1, Troll) 69

We should be grateful that you're at least honest in your desire to disenfranchise Democratic voters - Republican politicians aren't as candid, instead opting to blame non-existent polling day voter fraud or "lack of demand" in Democratic districts.

I see from your other post you think reminding people to vote is "socialism" - I hope you don't make use of publicly funded roads, bridges, hospitals, schools or the internet, all of which are cornerstones of socialism.

The stupidity of the alt-right never ceases to amaze. They post rants railing against socialism on the *internet*...which was designed and built by government, paid for by tax dollars. They also worship the military, but can't seem to comprehend that a publicly funded military where everybody gets "coverage" is socialist.

Is it any wonder these people are shooting up pizza parlours?

Comment "We shouldn't tell people there's an election." (Score 0, Troll) 69

Let's be honest - the argument against this is, "It's unfair, because telling people there's an election coming up will help the Democratic Party more than the Republican Party."

In an age when Republicans are hell-bent on making it difficult for Democratic voters to actually cast a ballot, by...

* Cutting voting hours on election day
* Cutting early voting
* Shutting down poll booths in heavily Democrat areas e.g. Indian reservations
* Requiring voter ID in Democrat-leaning districts but not Republican-leaning districts
* Falsely telling ethnic minorities they need a photo ID to vote when there is no such requirement in the state ...Facebook reminding people about local/city/state/national elections is a public service.

Comment Re:Wow... (Score 1) 17

Putting aside your rhetorical sarcasm, we have a huge number of ISPs (several dozen) who provide ADSL...but the majority of customers are on 12/18 month contracts and *can't* switch if they're merely dissatisfied with the service on offer.

If I pay for a service and it's unavailable to me for 3 days in a month, I'd expect to be automatically refunded for those 3 days. That's precisely what the new laws will guarantee.

This is the state ensuring capitalism works correctly. What this effectively means is a loss of service is breach of contract, and the legislation introduces a statutory compensation clause which can result in a refund of up to £30. Most people pay anywhere from nothing (12-month £0/mo offers) to £45 (Virgin's 200Mbps) so it'll cover the vast majority of outages.

Comment Re:Where is the User choice in all of this (Score 1) 203

"no software at all for Linux."

I'm assuming you mean desktop Linux, because Microsoft Office is available for Android and is free on that platform. Android has what, 99.9% of the Linux market?

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote are all freely available on Google Play and do not require Office 365 subscriptions - they're fully featured regardless.

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