Posts by Dave 126

The MX series mouses have a thirstier sensor in them than lesser mouses, so that's why the battery doesn't last for months. The sensor is excellent though, even works on glass. The power trade off is more than worthwhile.

What can I trust to have Britain's best interests at heart? Why, the British government of cou.... oh, wait. Ahh. Oh dear, this doesn't look good.

Re: Why would the US military use Starlink?

Even if the US DoD rolled their own constellation, they'd still want to have agreements and experience with Starlink - for redundancy.

Additionally, a lot of bandwidth used by the military is Netflix and Sype calls home by service personnel - handy for moral but not mission critical. The Navy might rather this sort of thing was routed over Starlink instead of any military satellite network.

Re: Not the usual tropes again...

> There are, of course, confounding issues (like contrast for some human gene adaptations, which make some faces harder to recognise for example

Also confounding is that cameras and film processing have been calibrated on people with lighter skin. The reference cards that Kodak sent to photo developers only had Caucasian people one them until the late 80s (IIRC, when Kodak brought out a new film). These technical issues could be worked around by a skilled photographer, but often weren't: a school year book might have headshots of the white students correctly exposed, and a near silhouette of the darker skinned students.

Okay, I assume this training data set didn't use photos from the 1970s, but similar issues exist with digital photography, and with lossy image compression that has finer tonal graduation in lighter pixels (hence why areas of dark mist or space can look banded on lower bit-rate video). Our human eyes (and the invisible-to-us data disposal, post processing and compositing that our brains do) are very good at getting an 'image' from subtle cues from a scene with high dynamic range when compared to film cameras. But then film cameras don't 'cheat' as our brains do.

Sidenote: Dang, I have a Samsung phone, the camera smudges any pixels it thinks are a face, because apparently waxy smooth skin is the fashion in Korea.

Re: At 1.97kg and 33.6mm x 340mm x 220mm it is heavy and bulky

It's also worth noting that many of the younger generation a, use cheaper, heavier laptops if they are skint or, b, choose a gaming laptop.

Then again, many younger folk don't drive cars, so may choose a lighter laptop because of their journeys by foot, bicycle or public transport.

In any case, saving a kilogram on the weight of a laptop is an extra litre of water in one's rucksack, a couple of texts books or a change of clothes.

Re: eWaste 'Я' US

Well, their phones' software last longer than most, their official battery replacement cost is roughly ten percent of the handset cost (in line with rival Samsung), recent hardware revision has been more durable materials.

The predictability of the iPhone resale market was such that people could already determine a cost per month for an iPhone if the latest model was their fancy.

Also, I haven't seen the data regarding who upgrades their iPhone each and every year. No point getting anecdotal here. It is possible that many folk are on two-plus year cadences. It is likely that the majority of people don't upgrade every year, so let's not phrase our comments as if they do.

Re: It appears to be difficult

The market for a phone that can be completely turned off is quite small. Those unconcerned with security won't care, and those people who are really concerned will place their phone in a Faraday sack or leave it at home - because if they can't trust the radio firmware they likely won't trust an off-switch either.

Re: Some serious questions.

Thank you. I didn't know about the Use Only The Parts You Need aspect of the optional extensions until you expressed it as you did.

I knew about the Open Source nature of the project, which I now see goes hand in hand with being able to leave out the parts you don't need when you're designing a chip for a task.

Re: He might not be stupid

> [Starlink] isn't likely to work very well in places where there are lots of people (where the money is).

Where you have lots of people you also have fibre optic, 4/5G and microwave links. Starlink, like other satellite communication systems, is intended for where there not lots of people

Re: I've started it but it won't stop.

Sorry, that was supposed to read Micky Mouse, not Mucky. It wasn't a strong joke in the first place, and my typo has only made it more confusing.

Still, better wirdsmiths than I ... Oh soffit, I give up for the day.

Re: Dickheads?

>Musk is never going to terraform Mars.

You are likely correct, terraforming Mars would take a minimum of centuries.

> Look at what we as a species are doing to this planet: the very opposite of terraforming.

Yes and no. Terraforming Earth means "changing Earth to resemble the Earth", so let's not take it literally. If were slightly looser in our definition and take Terraforming to mean "changing a planet to resemble an Earth that is suitable for sustaining human life", then yes, we're likely doing the opposite of terraforming here on Earth. However, the things we're doing on Earth would, if applied to Mars, would make it more suitable for humans, not less.

(I'm ignoring Mars's lack of a magnetosphere and other technical hurdles, large and small)

Re: Typo.

I know I know, it would have been more respectful* of me to email the correction. However, I made my post in the spirit of chuckling with the editor at a human oversight we're all capable of making, not laughing at them.

*Respect. Which is of course a cherished Vulture value. (Albeit a value that occasionally has a minus sign in front of it)

Re: Bitcoin miners have no emissions whatsoever

>E-commerce sites and AI systems do useful things

Citation needed.

Re: Because Apple doesn't

A few years ago a full list of all Apple suppliers was released as part of a court case... It's a long list of companies from all over the world.

(The company that left me scratching my head was Shimano, that many of you will know from mountain bike components and fishing reels - apparently they made pins that went into the old school Apple Magsafe connector. )

And not only did I go from 10 to 11, I also had Samsung's OneUI update itself from 4.0 to 4.1. Most noticeable change is that Samsung have decided to prevent the phone from displaying the screen upside in portrait mode. Great, now I can't rest the phone on its 'top' end in order to plug the power cable in from above. (Obviously resting the phone on the cable is unstable and unhealthy for the phone's only USB socket.).

I didn't mention it before because I was ranting enough already *without* touching on the subject of Samsung software.

Samsung camera's compulsory image processing... Urgh!! Stop it stop it just. Breathe.

Samsung Kies. Arrrghhh!

Re: Just charge for access

> Communists are often outraged when you tell them that fascism is just communism in which the slaves are given a little freedom.

Their outrage probably suggests that they didn't get into the communism game because they supported fascist policies. It suggests that their intentions might be broadly in the right place, but that more studying of history might be a good thing, along with economics, the management of supply and demand (which the Soviet model failed at).

I could write the same about capitalists, too. I don't think most are crypto-facists either.

I can't help but thinking that if you automatically assign the same Fibber score to all PMs regardless of actual Fibbing performance, it unfairly penalises the contestants who have taken Fibbing to a new level. Some PMs have clearly worked harder than others to advance the Fibbing sport, especially in the subfield of Brazenness, so it's only just that this dedication should be recognised by the judges.

Giving all the children a shared first prize just for turning up to sports day is unlikely to advance the venerable sport of Fibbing in this great country - and at a time when we are facing stiff competition from the former colonies, too.

> Actually 64K but with cheaper RAM chips that failed testing as 64K but were usable as 32K. Because Sinclair, gawd bless 'im.

That binning concept lives on - a chip designed with 9 cores might have a defect and so be shipped as an 8 core chip. Heck, Apple have based their M1x strategy around this - attempt to make big chip for premium model, but to be sure to have created lower models to put the 'flawed" chips in. I believe Nvidia and AMD have doing similar things for yonks, and likely other before such as IBM's Cell chip, thinking about it.

Still, there's an elegance in intending a use for parts that happen to fall at the lower end of the yield curve.

Re: Good on the face of it

Go to

https://www.logitech.com/en-gb/products/mice.html

Then click 'Filters'. The filters include hand size, and hand preference (Left, Right, Ambidextrous).

At first read there is a whiff of 'playing by the letter of the rules but not by the spirit of the rules' to this, since all stakeholders had effectively agreed that the 'rules' were whatever the system allowed them to do.

It's just that that big pot of money evidently motivated some people to think really hard, and lo, they had an idea and implemented a plan.

There was no 'referee' because the whole point of this system, being a decentralised finance project, was that it would not require one.

Quite how one does codify the spirit of something into the letter of something, I don't know. Maybe the poets might take a stab it. Proof is not Beauty, Beauty is not Love, Love is not Music, to paraphrase Zappa.

Sorry, I wasn't clear: I meant it *was* the reviewers job to mention glitches, but that it is beyond their remit to *diagnose* the cause of said glitches. The mere idea of diagnosing glitches makes me shiver in fearful memory of 1990s PC gaming because the fault could be hardware, drivers, Windows oddness, intermittent, and or never to be fixed. Urgh. I couldn't be arsed to troubleshoot that sort if thing, and I wouldn't expect the reviewer to faff around troubleshooting either.

My comment at how unusual it was to read of general glitchiness wasn't meant at a criticism of the reviewer. However, I can see how it could read as such, so I'm sorry that I left room for ambiguity.

I don't often read of vague glitchiness in laptop reviews, that is all. It seemed worth remarking on. I hypothesised, a, duff unit, b, immature drivers, c, duff windows update, d, random annoying shit the way of all computers ever e, unknown unknown, f, etc etc. g, cat...

Re: So... an idea like the engine a certain L. of Q. invented?

I wonder if their projectile could be accelerated with an electromagnetic rail gun? I'm assuming that their existing gunpowder and hydrogen 'gun' prototype is easier to build than a hypersonic rail gun, but thats just my uninformed assumption.

Re: Intel must be glowing with pride

Yes, because all other Intel silicon isnt being used to just write up dubious business plans, watch cat videos, cat pron videos, listen to podcasts in which the cat-owning status of the contributers is somehow considered to be of interest to the listener for some reason, complain about cats on Twitter, play video games (thankfully most of which don't feature cats) or otherwise benefit human kind.

Don't blame Acme Shovels for a gold rush.

(Maybe blame Heinlein for aspiring SciFi writers to think it's okay to include cats in their brief bio. Out of all the things they could have learnt from him, like writing a decent story for example, or having some spaceships, damn near every SciFi author today talks about their sodding felines instead.

Actually, don't blame Heinlein. A lot of that Q bollocks used his stuff to add texture to their tapestry of truthy nonsense. Heinlein did raise the question of "What is money"? with respect to different planets. Seafaring. Conrad. White City. The Company. Ridley Scott. Alien.

Okay, Ridley Scott can use a cat on set. And Terry Pratchett had cats, that's fine. But if you're not putting out their quality of work, I don't want to know. )

> Any Linux distribution is much better suited to engineering work than any Apple crapware

See "Linus Torvalds MacBook Air".

Re: I like the idea

High Viz? For sure, the workmen's jackets are a bright shade of orange... but so are the plastic road barriers and their 360 digger. *Everything* in their immediate environment is the same shade of orange. How can the digger driver see his mates if they are sodding *camouflaged*?!

Or maybe they're like zebras, they do it to confuse predators.

(Or whatever the latest thinking on zebra stripes is. I had heard it was to differentially heat air and thus create thermal currents for cooling. Or maybe it was to befuddle biting insects. )