* Posts by Dave 126

10622 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010

Riding in Sidecar: How to get a Psion online in 2023

Dave 126

Re: Very interesting

The plot of a 1990s Iain Banks (no M) novel involved a family secret being held on a 1980s non-standard floppy disk format. It was something like a Hong Kong knock-off of an Amstrad PCW that the protagonists father had bought on a work trip.

I won't say which novel.

NASA may tap SpaceX to rescue ISS 'nauts in Soyuz leak

Dave 126

Just wondering what the worst-case effect on a crew member would be if they came back to earth in a Dragon capsule without the tailored SpaceX suit. Possibly:

-Pressure sores

-Risk of deep vein thrombosis and strokes if the astronaut's circulation is restricted

- Reduction of protection from fire

- Reduction of astronaut temperature regulation

But those are just my guesses, and I'd like to know more. If a cloud of space debris on a collision course with the ISS was detected tomorrow and all the 'nauts has to evacuate the ISS, would they risk a Dragon reentry without the suits?

Crypto craziness craps out – and about time too

Dave 126

Re: Blockchain next..

> Can we take a moment to ask why an incredibly inefficient, slow to update and questionably secure distributed database might ever be chosen over known, mature and trusted solutions?

Current solutions are only trusted because it would take more money for a bad actor to corrupt them than they could hope to gain from doing so.

A centralised database can be secure, but only for the person holding the keys. Most of the time that's fine. I rely upon the other party to value my trust - and my further custom - so our interests are aligned. That dynamic isn't always at play. So we have systems institutions, courts, regulators, to dissuade bad actors from taking my money and running. But those systems can be evaded and corrupted too.

Evaded: crypto schemes that by design fell outside of the established financial markets and their codes, rules, compensatory schemes.

Corrupted: lobbying to starve regulators of resources, making your own people regulators, being 'too big to fail' and getting bailed out by the state, all the stuff that the East India Company did and Wall Street epitomised.

The Blockchain is an interesting light by which to look at the concept of trust.

I suspect it's a question that isn't going away in a hurry, in areas of institutions, journalism, elections...

By 2026, total AR/VR goggle sales will trail a single quarter of current tablet shipments

Dave 126

> high quality games presented on a flat screen and controlled with high precision input devices

Or low precision input devices, in the case of the commercially successful Nintendo Wii.

The Nintendo Wii did a few things differently from the PlayStation and Xboxes of the time, and did well for it.

Dave 126

Re: No it isn't

> "Augmented reality has long been the domain of standalone headsets geared towards commercial use... "

>That's utter rubbish. The Quest 2 has 85% of the market

The Quest 2 is a VR device, the paragraph you refuted was about AR.

VR, all light entering your eyes is from a computer display.

AR, you see the world around you as you normally would, but with computer generated imagery superimposed on top. AR is much harder to accomplish technically, but it has found applications in industry.

Dave 126

You've missed the point @iron, but thank you for pointing out that 2005-era tablets didn't have the same shortcomings as the VR goggles of 2022 do.

2005-era tablets had their own shortcomings, which, when improved in the subsequent years, changed the balance of utility versus faff to a point where many more people bought and used them.

The current shortcomings of VR you list aren't necessarily inherent to the concept. I don't feel sick looking at the real world, suggesting there is a level of visial fidelity / refresh / focus that doesn't make me sick... It's not immediately obvious to me that technology can't advance closer to this ideal, perhaps past a threshold that is comfortable for most people.

VR can stop you interacting with people around you, true. But so do books, quiet rooms, earphones, sunglasses, hooded sweatshirts, and long walks... It can be a feature, not a bug.

But then AR might actually aid interactions with people, as a whiteboard or a boardgame does.

As for Zuck? I didn't mention Meta or Occulus, (nor would I buy their products, of course) because I was talking about the future in general when other VR / AR systems will be available. If I was a betting man, I'd put money on Apple's MKII or III AR product succeeding over Meta's. Apple have the chips, the vertical integration, a better reputation for privacy, a better reputation for knowing which consumers have spare cash, etc etc. (Their MK I device is widely rumoured to be very expensive and aimed studios developing AR content - not a mass market product. )

[Upon re-reading my previous comment I see I led with VR and ended with AR, which may have confused. My apologies. ]

Dave 126

Re: No it isn't

> That's utter rubbish

The article said Augmented Reality was geared to commercial use. You refuted it by talking about Virtual Reality. Perhaps you misread?

Head-mounted AR (as opposed to say Pokémon Go on a tablet) has not yet been successful amongst consumers, largely because overlaying CGI over what a user sees of reality is very hard to do from an optical engineering perspective - so devices currently have poor image quality and are expensive compared to VR. Lots of money is being spent to close this gap, however.

AR is, however, already used in industrial and military settings.

Dave 126

> VR can not and will not be mainstream in its current form

Indeed. The same could have said, just as truly, about tablet computers in 2005. People could kinda see how a Win XP TE device might occasionally be useful for some tasks but also saw that they weighed a lot and had limited battery. So people largely didn't bother. They didn't take off. But with just some evolutions of CPU efficiency, battery and screen technologies, the form factor has done well. The pros outweighed the faff.

Notably, the market at that time, though small, did exist for tablets. Digital artists were paying to have a company called Modbook retrofit Wacom touchscreens to their Macbooks. WinXP TE tablets were used for surveying or for controlling machines.

Perhaps the pros of AR will come to outweigh the faff for many consumer. In the time, there are niche users for whom this is already true.

Why would a keyboard pack a GPU and run Unreal Engine? To show animations beneath the clear keys, natch

Dave 126

Re: Cat hair and crumbs

> What kills off using it for individual legends is that the spring and central moulding are smack in the middle of the key

Yep. If I had an unlimited R and D budget to throw at this I'd look at using optical waveguides moulded into the keycaps to display sharp clear images from a source mounted below. This approach would not affect the mass of the keys.

How big an RnD budget is it worth? I feel there is some productivity benefit to be gained from helping people learn hotkeys, for example.

Dave 126

> They say you can monetize the effects, but then they say you can share them.

They video used the word 'swap' not 'share', suggesting that if you have a paid-for skin and then link it to your friend's Steam account then you yourself can no longer use it.

Study finds AI assistants help developers produce code that's more likely to be buggy

Dave 126

Re: AI generated code is pointless.

> All well and good until that fateful day when he gets distracted ever so slightly and misses that "one word in a line of text that otherwise it had generated perfectly" because it didn't generate an error

Surely thats just as valid a concern for code where every character has been tapped out on a keyboard?

See you in the pub for a riot. See you in the pub for a pont. Both are errors, one T9-like inserting a valid but incorrect word, the other fat fingers transposing o for i. Both are easy to spot and correct if you have the intended sentence in your head anyway.

Dave 126

Re: AI generated code is pointless.

Of course I appreciate that just because one developer can use Copilot responsibly ( i.e as an aid to typing, not as an aid to thinking) doesn't mean that it can't lead other developers astray.

Dave 126

Re: AI generated code is pointless.

I heard Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, extolling the virtues of Copilot to Lex Fridman the other day:

"Copilot... I use it everyday and usually it's slightly wrong but it still saves me a load of typing, cos all I have to do is, like, change one word in a line of text that otherwise it had generated perfectly"

Qualcomm talks up RISC-V, roasts 'legacy architecture' amid war with Arm

Dave 126

Re: Fine with me

> Microsoft's reluctance to ship products for ARM must surely be a commercial choice, not a technical one.

Microsoft and Qualcomm had a secret exclusivity deal for a while. Windows on ARM was only sold on Qualcomm devices.

In praise of MIDI, tech's hidden gift to humanity

Dave 126

Re: works mostly...

I believe that latency was higher on x86 architectures than it was on the Motorola CPUs that were used in Atari ST and Macs at the time, so musicians used these machines. Recording studios (along with DTP shops) were where Apple hung onto life through the 90s.

Because those users develooed a need for a fast interconnect for audio capture (or high Res scanners,) Apple worked with Sony to create FireWire. The first iPod used FireWire because USB wasn't fast enough at the time. The iPhone comes with Wireless Midi baked in - it's child's play to use an iPhone's screen and g sensors as Midi controllers.

Android had terrible latency for years, now it's tolerable. iPhones had a low latency of around 12 milliseconds from gen 1 onwards.

Amazon, Games Workshop announce Warhammer 40k film deal

Dave 126

Re: The Emperor is a rotting corpse!

> IP like Bored of the Rings, Rings of Power, Altered Carbon etc were butchered in the name of wokeness,

Yet more evidence that people using the word 'wokeness' would do well to define what they actually mean by it. Otherwise it just becomes a tribal badge. As in "Woke is whatever I don't like and I don't have to tell you why".

The Altered Carbon books I haven't read for years, but one thing I do remember is a powerful female antognist who is as casually dangerous to our hero as the Pharaoh's wife was to Joseph. The whole premise is that rich people can inhabit any physical body they can afford, male, female, whatever. It doesn't matter if you're richer than god and nearly immortal, and poorer humans are your playthings, as disposable as tissue paper. The TV series conveyed this well, and violently and graphically to boot.

But again, I don't know what you actually mean by 'woke', so can't specifically refute it.

Dave 126

Fighting Fantasy books were all stand-alone, if I recall, with no common setting or characters.

I recall wrong: Wikipedia now tells me:

Most early Fighting Fantasy titles were set in locations later revealed to be on the same continent called Allansia. Later a whole world named Titan was developed, with subsequent gamebooks set on three main continents—Allansia, Khul and the Old World.[5] Other titles are set in unrelated fantasy, horror, modern day, and sci-fi environments.

Dave 126

Re: Tax Avoidance

> They've turned the cameras on to themselves and going to produce documentaries

Haha, for sure! The possibility of such a project easily turning meta (with a small m) wasn't lost on me.

Springtime! for Bezos and Amazon!

Winter! For etc

Or, having turned the cameras on themselves to create reality TV, they then add some AR malarky to make Mixed Reality TV. Let's see if they can digitally recreate Gene Wilder from the Producers and Bob Hoskins from Who Framed Roger Rabbit and insert them into the filmed footage.

Roger Rabbit is rendered photorealistically and Mr Hoskins is rendered as a 'Toon.

Dave 126

Re: Tax Avoidance

Just musing... It's appropriate that Amazon produce 40K, an authoritarian universe. So maybe the best producers of a Banks Culture movie series series will distributed, an ad-hoc anarchistic collection of skilled amateurs, creating good work for the love of it, assisted by machine learning and proto Minds.

Dave 126

Re: Tax Avoidance

> Look at the recent Amazon releases - they are universally carp. There is no value in what they do, but somehow they spend a ton of money on it. That doesn't sound right.

Aw, bless you. Look, it's usually a matter of luck that a production works artistically or is a market success, even with the best will in the world and with the studio bosses kept at a safe distance.

However, your conspiratorial view of world could be fun.... I'm imagining a retelling of Mel Brook's The Producers, done in the style of Mike Judge's Silicon Valley, in which the eponymous show runners, in order to pocket the financiers’ money, devise show so offensive that it is guaranteed to be a flop.

Dave 126

Re: Tax Avoidance

> Tax Avoidance. If they produce cringe, low quality but expensive movies

Correlation is not Causation. Or, don't jump to assume conspiracy when cock ups are more likely.

However, I do agree that Amazon's recent Lord of the Rings series has made me wary of Amazon's approach to TV and beloved source material. I was disappointed when the Frank Kelly-helmed Consider Phlebas project was cancelled, since Kelly's other work shares sensibilities and concerns with Iain Banks's non-genre fiction, and his visual style was superb too. The project was cancelled by the late Banks's estate. Maybe they saw something in Amazon's studios that put them off the idea, and I should feel relieved that the Culture was not brought to the screen by Amazon. Maybe the trustees of Banks's estate just looked at Amazon's treatment of warehouse staff and couldn't square it with their late friend’s values.

Dave 126

> leaving the path open for a future trip to the Old World [ plain Warhammer, traditional orcs and elves and halflings etc], too.

That's unlikely at this time - it would get confused by the general public with that World of Warcraft movie from a couple of years back, if not with Amazon's own Lord of the Rings TV series.

That sort of commercially aware reasoning is why Guillermo del Toro chose not to to make an adaption of Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness - because a film with a similar setting (ancient alien ruins on Antarctica hiding eldritch horrors) had recently been made. Sadly, that movie was a hack job called Aliens Vs Predator.

Carmack quits Meta, brands it inefficient and unprepared for competition

Dave 126

Re: The joys of big orgs...

> I'm not sure Facebook was the right company to buy Oculus. Carmack took the money anyway, though.

It wasn't Carmack's decision. Carmack was only the Chief Technology Officer at Occulus, he wasn't its founder, and he didn't run the company. The founder was Palmer Luckey.

EDIT: Carmack joined Occulus early on, and his presentations and tech demos probably got more public attention than Luckey, so I can see why you might have the impression he was the founder / CEO.

Plaice in spaaace: NASA boosts astronauts' cognition with piscine diet

Dave 126

Re: Cannabis

In one William Gibson novel, the residents of a space station grow their own in Earth orbit.

What did Unix fans learn from the end of Unix workstations?

Dave 126

Re: HDD removed +

Making HDD cages could be a good candidate for 3D printing... there's a sporting chance there are already some models on Thingiverse. Some self-adhesive copper tape might be handy if the earthing is done through the cage rather than the power cable.

Voice assistants failed because they serve their makers more than they help users

Dave 126

Re: The same applies to tv series and games

> I have some bad news I'm afraid, the Foundation books and Foundation TV series are only really related by the title and the names of some of the characters.

I'd have thought that was good news for @Aaiiee, since the TV adaptation which he didn't enjoy won't ruin the books for him when he comes to read them. :)

Having read the books (yep, all of them including the bolt-on prequels) I'm not sure how a strictly faithful TV adaptation could work, so I gave this show's creators some dramatic licence.

The other good news for fans of what the Foundation books can evoke, namely awe at the scale of a Galactic empire ruled from a city planet, is that other recent film and TV projects have portrayed similar settings. That's is, Denis Villeneuve's Dune move and the Andor TV show.

Dave 126

Similarly, I want express my high regard for Filippo's post above, well reasoned, good examples, cheerful style.

His conclusion is concise, and think I largely agree with it - for some values of Useful [Personal Assistant] and of Strong [AI]. It is possible that useful applications for voice recognition could become widely adopted, not by an advance in the AI but by better curation of the data sources it uses. The present situation is that even a real human personal assistant, if asked to book trip for their boss, must know to ignore the first Google result and avoid other traps. This human PA would have an easier time of it if the only results returned were from a whitelist of ten travel operators that their boss had previously approved.

So, say that a virtual personal assistant was actually owned by the user (it only ran on the user's hardware, didnt share data it shouldn't) and the user could modify this virtual PA, teach it, correct it on which data sources it uses... maybe some genuinly useful applications with emerge.

My guess is that they will emerge in environments other than offices, for in an office you already have a keyboard at your fingertips. People who are driving do not, nor do people with food on their hands; play music, start timer. Or surgeons. A sewing machine uses a foot pedal because the operator's hands are full of cloth.

I think the trend to on-device processing may have begun, anyhows.

Dave 126

Re: "... they serve their makers more than they help users"

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

SpaceX chases government cash with Starshield satellites

Dave 126

> the government/military would absolutely use their own encryption on government owned equipment

For sure, but that equipment has to be built by some company if not by SpaceX. Either way, all steps in the chain would have to be audited, down to tracking the provenance of microchips. I can't think of any *inherent* reason why the US DoD / CIA would find it harder to supervise / audit a manufacturing cell at SpaceX rather than at Raytheon or at whoever currently builds communication gear for the US government.

Dave 126

Re: So those Jewish space lasers will exist after all?

Strewth, it's as if Mel Brooks wrote Spaceballs.

Two signs in the comms cabinet said 'Do not unplug'. Guess what happened

Dave 126

So someone left plenty of signs, but didn't think to leave an empty socket so the boiler technician could do his job?

Okay.

Dave 126

Re: A helpful hint to the readership at large ...

And whilst you're at the hardware store, pick up an inexpensive 4-socket extension cable and leave it plugged in and empty, for the convenience of cleaning staff.

Dave 126

Re: Don't forget mischief

> A sign saying "Do not switch off" or "Do not unplug" simply draws the brain to the possibility that there is something that could be switched off / unplugged

Thank you @jmch, finally someone here with a pragmatic viewpoint.... Everyone else here is exasperated that the things they know don't work ( Don Not Touch signs, duck tape etc) don't work.

Nobody has yet suggested a different approach:

Always leave an empty 13 A socket in an obvious and convenient place for the cleaner. This could be done by plugging in a short, empty 4-way extension, one with a little orange light on it to show it is live, so the cleaner can see it on the floor.

Enquire of the cleaner if the socket is in a place convenient to them. Would it make their life easier if the 4-way was attached to the wall instead, and if so at what height? Doing so would also show the cleaner that you see their job as important, which it is since computers don't like dust and fluff.

You and the cleaner are on the same side, you're allies. The real villain is the person who didn't think of the cleaner's job when they designed the room.

Dave 126

Red Dwarf did it.

An episode from Season IV begins with most of the crew on the bridge of the eponymous space ship during a red alert, frantically battling with their consoles. Suddenly all their computers go blank. Terror. Then the Cat strolls in using a hair dryer that he's just plugged in in place of all the battlestation consoles.

NASA awards $60m to Texas biz for 3D printing future Moon base

Dave 126

And the dog hair that will inevitability end up in the feedstock will make the concrete tougher!

UK bans Chinese CCTV cameras on 'sensitive' government sites

Dave 126

Re: Doing it wrong

If your CCTV camera is attached to the internet it isn't a Closed Circuit Television Camera anymore, by definition.

Study suggests AI cruise control could kill traffic jams by cutting out the 'intuition' factor

Dave 126

Obligatory

https://m.xkcd.com/2684/

Dave 126

Re: Stick with the lane the trucks are in works for me

On some motorways I use, the tarmac on the inside lane has two parallel depressions, presumably from heavier vehicles... I'm assuming that would lead to extra tyre wear on one's car.

iFixit stabs batteries – for science – so you don't have to

Dave 126

Re: Talk of the devil!

I wouldn't intend to stab a battery with a screwdriver. However, it is wiser to acknowledge that I can make mistakes and to safeguard against them. I might slip with the screwdriver.

Sometimes big boo-boos can come about from a succession of tiny errors.

Dave 126

Re: Hmmm

> ISTR someone here, many years ago, relating a story whereby someone had dropped a big screwdriver or spanner and it landed across the contacts of a car battery

Possibly me, though my experience was of dropping a spanner across the contacts of a 24v truck battery. There was a loud flash and bang. The spanner did not weld itself to the battery (it was kicked away too quickly by the bang or bounce). It did blow off the outer layer of the spanner though.

I don't know if dropping a spanner across a 12v battery would weld instead of bang. That's a question I'll leave to the experimentalists to answer.

Dave 126

Re: Yawn ...

> The general golden rule for safety has always been "remove the power source before working on the kit".

The article was about fire hazard from the chemical properties of an object.

Your golden rule is a response to electrical hazards ( unplug the toaster before trying to prise out a jammed piece of toast), mechanical hazards (isolate the lathe from the power supply before changing the tool, because you don't want it starting up accidently when your fingers are inside it), and to avoid damaging circuits. [Also, merely isolating some electrical items does not render them electrically safe, since capicitors store charge]

Electrical safety isn't really an issue when dealing with low voltage, low current batteries as used in phones and toys. Nor are phones a mechanical risk to the user should they start up unexpectedly.

The chief risk of a phone battery to a user is that of combustion, so iFixit recommended reducing the charge to 25% before working on the device.

Oh, and batteries are glued instead of screwed because doing so more evenly distributes the mechanical forces acting on the battery (and also makes for quicker dismantling for material separation come the end of the object's useful life).

Chemical risk: don't eat the battery.

Mechanical risk: don't drop the battery on your foot.

Only iPhone 15 Pro models will have higher data transfer speeds on USB-C – analyst

Dave 126

Re: Lightning

> How many people use wired data transfer to/from a phone nowadays anyway?

Most people don't, but those who do will appreciate the extra speed.

The 2015 iPad Pro featured a Lightening USB 3 host, but the only USB compatible accessory was a camera adaptor. Clear market and use case - photographers in the field using cameras that create large uncompressed files. Not most people.

Non 'Pro' iPads only had a USB 2 host.

That of course is iPads, importing big files to be viewed and edited. I suspect iPhones are more likely to be exporting big files generated by their cameras.

Nvidia, Lockheed team up to build digital twin of the Earth for climate researchers

Dave 126

Re: 'Digital Twin'

> The latest buzzword for a 'computer model'...

A digital twin is specifically a computer model that is continually updated with sensor data to mirror its real world counterpart.

So, you'd build a computer model of a building before you construct it. This model would let you you calculate and simulate temperature and airflow, for example. That's a model.

A digital twin is taking that model and combining it with live data, such as sensor data from the security systems, what the actual weather is that day, and which staff are where.

You might find that running costs are higher on Thursdays when the ambient temperature is below 10 degrees C, and that the front door is jammed open, and Bob the receptionist is on duty.

I'm happy paying Twitter eight bucks a month because price isn't the same as value

Dave 126

Re: He changed his mind again on Official within hours

> phallic shaped rockets shooting to the heavens, some of sort of penis envy or inadequacy going on there I think

I'm curious as to just what shape you think rockets should be.

Musk sells $3.95 billion in Tesla shares, paid eleven times more for Twitter

Dave 126

For several years we've heard about the problems that arise from social media companies being funded by advertising; namely, advertisers want to see evidence of 'engagement' and the easiest way of getting users to engage is to have them outrage each other. It is hard to imagine any advertising business model that doesn't result in this negative behaviour.

Twitter was already a negative force for people's health and happiness. I want to read other peoples opinions (what I really want is to read people's *ideas*, but hey), but I'm frustrated that so much of the current commentary is written as if Twitter and its algorithms have been nothing but good for people.

Xiaomi reveals bonkers phone with bolted-on Leica lens that will make you look like a dork

Dave 126

Sony had a different take on the idea, just a lens and sensor that clip into the phone, the phone effectively serving as screen and storage.

The highly reviewed QX-100 still commands a hight second hand price nearly a decade after its release.

Dave 126

I like the flamingos! :)

Similarly, I've tried holding my phone's camera to my binoculars, and like you get vignetting on the edges of the image - but have managed to get a pleasing photo of a heron on a lake. Herons are considerate creatures and often stand very still so that this photographer awkwardly align phone and binocular lens.

Producing a similar result, I recently screwed a Nikon 3x Tele Converter lens (made for an early Nikon digital camera) onto a Lumix LX-5 (via the Lens adaptor tube and a 52-28mm step down ring). It can only be used at the camera's full zoom (3.5x) without excessive vignetting, so the images are roughly what you'd frame if you made a circle between your thumb and forefinger held at arm's length.

It isn't the right tool for any job, but I'm enjoying the constraints!

Qualcomm predicts 2024 is the year Windows on Arm goes large

Dave 126

Ummm...

The only reason many people buy PCs over Macs is because of games and legacy software support... which WinARM isn't good at. And if you just want to do web stuff and emails, a Chromebook will do.

So, given a choice of Wintel, WinARM, Chromebook or Mac, the case for WinARM today is hard to make.

9front releases new version of Plan 9 OS fork: The Golden Age of Ballooning

Dave 126

The Front Fell Off

Watch it, you'll thank me.

John Clark, RIP. When he died, Robyn Williams (with a Y) of the Science Show on Australia's ABC Radio National played one of his skits after every show for a month. Curious that my introduction to John Clark, AKA Fred Dagg, should come from the world of sci tech.

The Pythons have mused that they owe much to the Flying Circus being a colour television show, and thus stood up to being repeated and broadcast in the US - Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's Not Only But Also was only a few months before, but being in black and white it wasn't revisited much.

Fred Dagg was one of the earlier colour TV shows made in New Zealand.

Machine learning research in acoustics could open up multimodal metaverse

Dave 126

> just be a straight-up maths problem, no ML required. The audio equivalent of raytracing, if you like.

Curiously, both nVidia and AMD use ML to increase the perceived quality of raytraced (and of other rendered) images in games. If we are to continue your analogy, we might consider the possibility a similar hybrid approach might be applied to spatial audio.