The only reason for Microsoft to release "Edge" is for exposure.
Not quite. It's about synchronisation too. That's one of the reasons I use Chrome on Android even though it's by all accounts slower than Samsung's own browser from what I can tell, I get my desktop bookmarks and history automatically synchronised.
I can see this push of Edge onto the mobile platforms as a way to promote Edge on Windows with seamless integration,... assuming they have it... and I sure as hell won't bother testing it.
Pretty much the truth. Now/. Reports on non-tech news.
You just read a summary that the most talked about and popular post of all time was in 2004 when CmdrTaco was still very much in charge, and that story about republican politics had nothing to do with tech.
Fantastically strong and clean power source from lithium batteries, essentially most modern delta-sigma or advanced segment DACs are difficult enough to tell apart by measurement let alone listening, all it comes down to is a tiny bit of silicon with most of the differences related to actual implementation and dependent on the skill of the person doing the silicon work. Frankly I'd take the skill of the people doing board design on complex devices like phones over those "audio experts" any day of the week. 90% of the dollars you spend on sound would be best placed in the headphones. You basically start looking at upgrading your source if there's something seriously wrong with the one you have, or you've run out of things to buy.
If anything you could make a better one if the software on the phone supports digital output from the USB
Actually quite wrong, not absolutely wrong, but most likely wrong. USB is a horrible way of transferring audio. The normal method of transferring audio is to do it synchronously. With the USB master clock deciding the timing. The problem is that this is not a multiple of any normal audio clock frequency and is pretty much guaranteed to produce the worse possible clock jitter on the DAC input which has a measurable effect on the output (see above about scepticism whether you can hear all but really messed up implementations of this). The solution to this is asynchronous clocking and typically doesn't have much standard support given that it isn't part of the standard USB audio profiles, or a heavy amount of digital filtering and asynchronous sample rate conversion. Bottom line is it is it's very difficult to make USB sound better than a DAC which brings all it's own requirements along with it and simply tells the OS what to do rather than being sent a bucket of shit and told to polish it.
Closing one of the last analog holes means that your music an only pass through digital approved devices.
Sorry but that doesn't pass the pub test. You can't actually close the analogue hole in any way at all because the signals required to produce sound are perfect for recording. It makes no difference if they come from the phone and go directly to a headphone driver, or if they come from a phone over wireless to the headphones via a built in DAC and then directly to the headphone drivers.
The analogue hole can't be closed, not without fundamentally changing the way human ears work.
chipset manufacturers mandating the feature be deprecated
No such thing. There's nothing stopping anyone from adding DACs external. There certainly isn't anything stopping someone ordering something by the millions from requesting the feature on an SoC which is already bespoke.
To be fair, you also didn't have a phone that was so thin it needed one, so power-hungry it needed one, and you could actually replace the battery if you needed to so it wasn't an outright horror if it couldn't make it through the day.
I don't have one now that needs it. Heck my Galaxy S5 has no problem lasting 18 days when I enable the power mode that makes it feature comparable to my old Nokia brick. Nothing "needs" it. We "want" it. Modern technology "enables" it.
Oh, and you could also opt for a higher-capacity aftermarket battery and back.
You can do that with pretty much every modern phone as well if you're happy with the extra bulk. It's called trade-offs. They haven't changed in last 20 years.
Welcome to the future, where "better" means "we milk the consumer ever harder."
Please go back to the technology you had back then. At least that way we wouldn't have to put up with your undiagnosed clinical depression, dismissing the wonders of the modern world and not appreciating anything you have. We'll even sing you a goodbye song video record it on our small pocket devices and upload it to youtube. Maybe sometime in the next year you can download it over a shitty internet connection and transfer it to your phone over a period of one month using the IrDA interface and then watch it on your 2 in wide black and white screen.
Also, goodbye 3.5mm audio jack.
There's more than one phone on the market. I certainly still have a 3.5mm audio jack. The worlds best selling Android handset also still includes it, oh and best of all, thanks to the wonders of modern battery life, you don't actually need it.
Because it is an example of the care and thinking that went into the Unicode support of earlier OSes. You know, the comment that half the shit breaks, it was a bolted on after thought, and doesn't really work for more than one language set at a time?
Kind of the point is: Unicode support in windows XP basically doesn't exist.
In fact I remember Chinese/Japanese and Korean support being flawless even in the Windows 2000 days.
You're showing your age. Not because of the version of windows you were using, but rather from your poor memory.
Asian language support in XP was a disaster of glued together fixes which often left a system completely messed up if you had to support multiple languages at once. God forbid you actually change the primary language at some point rendering software non-functional and directories inaccessible. Unable to browse c:\????????? anyone? But I typed the right number of ?s in! Oh but they aren't ?s, they are just one of the symptoms of Unicode support being fundamentally broken.
Its time to FIRE the EU, and go elsewhere. Do NOT trade YOUR OWN GOVERNANCE for EU rulers. You'll Regret it.
The EU isn't above anyone. It's just a plain trade agreement. If they weren't part of the EU and signed up to a trade agreement banning what they did they'd be in a same position. This is how international trade works. Break an agreement you made, expect the other person to come knocking.
But hey you could cut yourself off from a trading bloc of 800million people. No one is forcing you to do business with very low tarifs or restrictions. The UK at least had some sway, if Ireland left we'd all just happy wave at them on the way out, like kicking out a smelly housemate who comes up with a new excuse every month of why they can't pay rent.
I assume since Slashdot is American, that so are you. You should be entirely comfortable with the concept of whining to the court every time you feel hard done by anyone for anything.
and those nations were fine with what was being paid
Just like you're fine with buying a clearly stolen TV out of the back of a van? In many places you're non the less committing a crime.
The nations made illegal deals with specific corporations, and that's the problem here. Accomplices to crimes are punishable in nearly every jurisdiction on the planet. You can't pretend that Apple and Amazon are completely innocent in a deal created specifically for them knowingly in breach of rules that ensure that corporations are treated equally within the bloc.
I didn't kill him your honour. The assassin did. I only did a normal business transaction of paying money in exchange for services rendered!
Because Apple is betting the farm on their reputation as protectors of users privacy and SO FAR there has been no indication they have been lying.
So has Google, which is why they are an advertising company rather than selling your data to any third party.
In terms of who's privacy is best covered, so far Google is one of the few companies who haven't let personal information get out.
Yahoo, breached. MS, breached. Most of the ISPs openly sell data rather than advertising access. Samsung, sell data. Apple, breached (and in quite a personal way too thanks to their shitty iCloud security).
Google's value proposition is based on collecting data about you and advertising to you
No, Google core business is that. The value proposition here is a device with a very premium price. They aren't selling a lossleader.
And yes people have installed various flavours of Linux and even Windows on Chromebooks. You just enable the development mode via the official method provided by Google and you're free to do whatever you want.
It would be pretty useful for tourist stuff though. asking prices, directions etc. I've seen some quite good demos of on-the-fly translation in that context.
This right here is the key bit. Language translation doesn't need to be perfect, or even sensible in order to be incredibly useful.
The only thing it needs to do is make enough sense not to negate meanings. I have on occasion seen that, where a translation has come through with the exact opposite of the original meaning, but that rarely happens through similar languages. But when you look at a country like Europe with 23 official languages, even many more unofficial ones, and yet the vast majority fall into 3 similar classifications: Italianic, Germanic, and Slavic. Within those classifications translations are incredibly precise. Between them translations are still good enough to convey context free meaning.
Split across the continents though and you start needing context in order to understand the translations. Though it is funny to see Chinese restaurants called "Frank food. Come eat do!"
That is just a completely stupid statement. None of that information provides context into a current conversation as they are situational dependent, and not dependent on your personal information.
Translators can get far more context into translating language without knowing any of the above information.
Anyone who speaks more than one language will tell you that context is one of the biggest hurdles in translating language. It's not just straight word for word translation, the context might not be given until you get to the end of the sentence, so it is actually impossible to translate language in real time.
Even for native speakers of multiple languages you have to wait until the end of the sentence before translating. So the TFS is fucking bullshit (again).
You'd be right if you weren't wrong, or at least partially. Word for word translation often gets you very far through if you have the ability to recognise what is being said through a damaged sentence structure. Google translate has done this for a long time already with its image translation feature.
If you use the live translation feature it will offer word for word replacement. If you take the picture and select the words it attempts to translate with context. Depending on the differences in the languages it may or may not make much of a difference.
Providing the languages are similar (e.g. a West-Germanic language like English to a North-Germanic language like Norwegian) the translation works just fine word for word and even with the resulting buggered up sentence structure it is still understandable. Much of the "context" of language doesn't come from the language itself but rather from the situation in which it is used.
That makes this kind of translation device incredibly useful even if it doesn't convert Mandarin to perfectly sensible Oxford English.
Or will this work with any bluetooth headphone supporting device? I don't see how it could.
I think this may be vendor lock-in. There doesn't seem to be any capability here that isn't part of Google translate with the exception of doing it with a button from the headset.
Translation does not happen on the phone. All what you hear will be sent to Google
Precisely. Unless you simply download the small language pack in Google translate enabling it to work on video, audio and text completely offline. You know, like when you're in another country without mobile coverage.
We all know that processing is not done on the phone.
Indeed you're right, unless you simply click the "download" button on the language pack in Google translate allowing you to use all of the features including audio and video live translation offline without any data connection. You know, like a person who is in another country is expected to be able to without incurring roaming charges.
I know sorry, doesn't fit your anti-Google narrative. Damn those pesky facts.
Or did you think you've always had 3Ah batteries capable of producing an insane amount of current and being charged in 30minutes sitting in a device that is 7mm thin in your pocket?
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason for Microsoft to release "Edge" is for exposure.
Not quite. It's about synchronisation too. That's one of the reasons I use Chrome on Android even though it's by all accounts slower than Samsung's own browser from what I can tell, I get my desktop bookmarks and history automatically synchronised.
I can see this push of Edge onto the mobile platforms as a way to promote Edge on Windows with seamless integration, ... assuming they have it... and I sure as hell won't bother testing it.
It's interesting that you heard about it here first, but you tried it here last :)
Pretty much the truth. Now /. Reports on non-tech news.
You just read a summary that the most talked about and popular post of all time was in 2004 when CmdrTaco was still very much in charge, and that story about republican politics had nothing to do with tech.
You did read the summary right?
Did you understand the summary?
Should we summarise it for you?
how good was a DAC on a phone anyway
Fantastically strong and clean power source from lithium batteries, essentially most modern delta-sigma or advanced segment DACs are difficult enough to tell apart by measurement let alone listening, all it comes down to is a tiny bit of silicon with most of the differences related to actual implementation and dependent on the skill of the person doing the silicon work. Frankly I'd take the skill of the people doing board design on complex devices like phones over those "audio experts" any day of the week. 90% of the dollars you spend on sound would be best placed in the headphones. You basically start looking at upgrading your source if there's something seriously wrong with the one you have, or you've run out of things to buy.
If anything you could make a better one if the software on the phone supports digital output from the USB
Actually quite wrong, not absolutely wrong, but most likely wrong. USB is a horrible way of transferring audio. The normal method of transferring audio is to do it synchronously. With the USB master clock deciding the timing. The problem is that this is not a multiple of any normal audio clock frequency and is pretty much guaranteed to produce the worse possible clock jitter on the DAC input which has a measurable effect on the output (see above about scepticism whether you can hear all but really messed up implementations of this). The solution to this is asynchronous clocking and typically doesn't have much standard support given that it isn't part of the standard USB audio profiles, or a heavy amount of digital filtering and asynchronous sample rate conversion. Bottom line is it is it's very difficult to make USB sound better than a DAC which brings all it's own requirements along with it and simply tells the OS what to do rather than being sent a bucket of shit and told to polish it.
Closing one of the last analog holes means that your music an only pass through digital approved devices.
Sorry but that doesn't pass the pub test. You can't actually close the analogue hole in any way at all because the signals required to produce sound are perfect for recording. It makes no difference if they come from the phone and go directly to a headphone driver, or if they come from a phone over wireless to the headphones via a built in DAC and then directly to the headphone drivers.
The analogue hole can't be closed, not without fundamentally changing the way human ears work.
chipset manufacturers mandating the feature be deprecated
No such thing. There's nothing stopping anyone from adding DACs external. There certainly isn't anything stopping someone ordering something by the millions from requesting the feature on an SoC which is already bespoke.
To be fair, you also didn't have a phone that was so thin it needed one, so power-hungry it needed one, and you could actually replace the battery if you needed to so it wasn't an outright horror if it couldn't make it through the day.
I don't have one now that needs it. Heck my Galaxy S5 has no problem lasting 18 days when I enable the power mode that makes it feature comparable to my old Nokia brick. Nothing "needs" it. We "want" it. Modern technology "enables" it.
Oh, and you could also opt for a higher-capacity aftermarket battery and back.
You can do that with pretty much every modern phone as well if you're happy with the extra bulk. It's called trade-offs. They haven't changed in last 20 years.
Welcome to the future, where "better" means "we milk the consumer ever harder."
Please go back to the technology you had back then. At least that way we wouldn't have to put up with your undiagnosed clinical depression, dismissing the wonders of the modern world and not appreciating anything you have. We'll even sing you a goodbye song video record it on our small pocket devices and upload it to youtube. Maybe sometime in the next year you can download it over a shitty internet connection and transfer it to your phone over a period of one month using the IrDA interface and then watch it on your 2 in wide black and white screen.
Also, goodbye 3.5mm audio jack.
There's more than one phone on the market. I certainly still have a 3.5mm audio jack. The worlds best selling Android handset also still includes it, oh and best of all, thanks to the wonders of modern battery life, you don't actually need it.
Why are filesystem issues relevant?
Because it is an example of the care and thinking that went into the Unicode support of earlier OSes. You know, the comment that half the shit breaks, it was a bolted on after thought, and doesn't really work for more than one language set at a time?
Kind of the point is: Unicode support in windows XP basically doesn't exist.
Err the download button is immediately to the right of the language select button, next to the word "Greek".
Silly users don't fit the narrative very well.
In fact I remember Chinese/Japanese and Korean support being flawless even in the Windows 2000 days.
You're showing your age. Not because of the version of windows you were using, but rather from your poor memory.
Asian language support in XP was a disaster of glued together fixes which often left a system completely messed up if you had to support multiple languages at once. God forbid you actually change the primary language at some point rendering software non-functional and directories inaccessible. Unable to browse c:\????????? anyone? But I typed the right number of ?s in! Oh but they aren't ?s, they are just one of the symptoms of Unicode support being fundamentally broken.
Its time to FIRE the EU, and go elsewhere. Do NOT trade YOUR OWN GOVERNANCE for EU rulers. You'll Regret it.
The EU isn't above anyone. It's just a plain trade agreement. If they weren't part of the EU and signed up to a trade agreement banning what they did they'd be in a same position. This is how international trade works. Break an agreement you made, expect the other person to come knocking.
But hey you could cut yourself off from a trading bloc of 800million people. No one is forcing you to do business with very low tarifs or restrictions. The UK at least had some sway, if Ireland left we'd all just happy wave at them on the way out, like kicking out a smelly housemate who comes up with a new excuse every month of why they can't pay rent.
I assume since Slashdot is American, that so are you. You should be entirely comfortable with the concept of whining to the court every time you feel hard done by anyone for anything.
and those nations were fine with what was being paid
Just like you're fine with buying a clearly stolen TV out of the back of a van? In many places you're non the less committing a crime.
The nations made illegal deals with specific corporations, and that's the problem here. Accomplices to crimes are punishable in nearly every jurisdiction on the planet. You can't pretend that Apple and Amazon are completely innocent in a deal created specifically for them knowingly in breach of rules that ensure that corporations are treated equally within the bloc.
I didn't kill him your honour. The assassin did. I only did a normal business transaction of paying money in exchange for services rendered!
Because Apple is betting the farm on their reputation as protectors of users privacy and SO FAR there has been no indication they have been lying.
So has Google, which is why they are an advertising company rather than selling your data to any third party.
In terms of who's privacy is best covered, so far Google is one of the few companies who haven't let personal information get out.
Yahoo, breached. MS, breached. Most of the ISPs openly sell data rather than advertising access. Samsung, sell data. Apple, breached (and in quite a personal way too thanks to their shitty iCloud security).
Google's value proposition is based on collecting data about you and advertising to you
No, Google core business is that. The value proposition here is a device with a very premium price. They aren't selling a lossleader.
And yes people have installed various flavours of Linux and even Windows on Chromebooks. You just enable the development mode via the official method provided by Google and you're free to do whatever you want.
I don't want a tablet and a laptop. I want one device that does both. I want it to be useful out of the box. I don't want a full desktop OS.
There's a lot to like about this product.
It would be pretty useful for tourist stuff though. asking prices, directions etc. I've seen some quite good demos of on-the-fly translation in that context.
This right here is the key bit. Language translation doesn't need to be perfect, or even sensible in order to be incredibly useful.
The only thing it needs to do is make enough sense not to negate meanings. I have on occasion seen that, where a translation has come through with the exact opposite of the original meaning, but that rarely happens through similar languages. But when you look at a country like Europe with 23 official languages, even many more unofficial ones, and yet the vast majority fall into 3 similar classifications: Italianic, Germanic, and Slavic. Within those classifications translations are incredibly precise. Between them translations are still good enough to convey context free meaning.
Split across the continents though and you start needing context in order to understand the translations. Though it is funny to see Chinese restaurants called "Frank food. Come eat do!"
That is just a completely stupid statement. None of that information provides context into a current conversation as they are situational dependent, and not dependent on your personal information.
Translators can get far more context into translating language without knowing any of the above information.
Anyone who speaks more than one language will tell you that context is one of the biggest hurdles in translating language. It's not just straight word for word translation, the context might not be given until you get to the end of the sentence, so it is actually impossible to translate language in real time.
Even for native speakers of multiple languages you have to wait until the end of the sentence before translating. So the TFS is fucking bullshit (again).
You'd be right if you weren't wrong, or at least partially. Word for word translation often gets you very far through if you have the ability to recognise what is being said through a damaged sentence structure. Google translate has done this for a long time already with its image translation feature.
If you use the live translation feature it will offer word for word replacement. If you take the picture and select the words it attempts to translate with context. Depending on the differences in the languages it may or may not make much of a difference.
Providing the languages are similar (e.g. a West-Germanic language like English to a North-Germanic language like Norwegian) the translation works just fine word for word and even with the resulting buggered up sentence structure it is still understandable. Much of the "context" of language doesn't come from the language itself but rather from the situation in which it is used.
That makes this kind of translation device incredibly useful even if it doesn't convert Mandarin to perfectly sensible Oxford English.
You didn't need anything fancy, it works through any bluetooth headset.
Or will this work with any bluetooth headphone supporting device? I don't see how it could.
I think this may be vendor lock-in. There doesn't seem to be any capability here that isn't part of Google translate with the exception of doing it with a button from the headset.
Translation does not happen on the phone. All what you hear will be sent to Google
Precisely. Unless you simply download the small language pack in Google translate enabling it to work on video, audio and text completely offline. You know, like when you're in another country without mobile coverage.
Oh what, didn't fit your narrative?
We all know that processing is not done on the phone.
Indeed you're right, unless you simply click the "download" button on the language pack in Google translate allowing you to use all of the features including audio and video live translation offline without any data connection. You know, like a person who is in another country is expected to be able to without incurring roaming charges.
I know sorry, doesn't fit your anti-Google narrative. Damn those pesky facts.
Really? Because 15 years ago I certainly didn't have 3Ah battery capable of being charged in 30min and only 4mm thick sitting in my pocket.
It has, constantly.
Or did you think you've always had 3Ah batteries capable of producing an insane amount of current and being charged in 30minutes sitting in a device that is 7mm thin in your pocket?
I'll pay you a full pound for your "medieval english coin worth 1/3 of a pound". Hell I'll pay you 2. Good deal right?