Posts by onefang

Re: Did you say Android Pee?

'That would be an "Emergency Pee"'

Google are dancing around, trying to hold it in, but they are not sure when they'll burst, and are trying to make sure that when they do burst, they don't make a big mess.

"So, developers are going to miss out their (northern) summer holidays"

Not every country has a bunch of holidays during that time. Australia, the Land of the Long Weekend, has a holiday period roughly from shortly before Christmas eve to shortly after New Years, which is summer for us, and obviously not (northern) summer. This is not an official holiday period, other than the usual Christmas and New Years holidays, the rest is simply "Meh, we are closed for a couple of weeks" for the majority of companies / government departments. Or the silly season as it is known. I suspect a lot of other countries also close down most things during that period. We don't have any lengthy mid year holiday seasons though, officially or unofficially.

Other than Easter, the rest of our holidays tend to be moved to the nearest Monday or (not so often) Friday, hence Land of the Long Weekend.

School kids get a longer break at the beginning / start of the year, and if I recall (and it's not changed since I went to school) two shorter breaks during the year of two weeks each I think. Yes, I live within earshot of three schools, you'd think I would have noticed the differences in noise levels during my twelve year stay here. I've not really paid much attention.

I understand Europe has a lengthy period during August, where people bitch about all the tourists coming to their locality, so go to some other European holiday destination to get away from them, and go annoy the locals there.

I may be wrong, but I think USA has their famous school summer holidays, that a lot of movies are made about, which sounds like a lengthy mid year break. The movies are the only reason I know about this. I don't put a lot of stock in the accuracy of anything coming out of Hollywood though.

Other countries, and there are a lot of those, make up their own minds about their holiday periods. May or may not match up with USA, Europe, or Australia, purely coincidentally, or to align with international business needs.

So, some developers are going to miss out on their (northern) summer holidays, and some, even in the north, wont have holidays during that time to miss.

Re: One area of concern/complication - long lag time environments such as space

The main problem with your "transfer lags of minutes, hours, or even days" is the two minute timeout of TCP/IP. By the time there have been enough minutes to earn the plural designation, the sending system assumes the packet got lost. Forget about hours or days.

A different base protocol will be needed, possibly based on something that is currently being used in deep space missions. Then all the protocols for the next layer might need tweaking, if they assume TCP/IP timeouts.

I'm guessing these sorts of things are already solved problems in deep space spacecraft, their clocks likely have to be in sync with ground based clocks, so they know to send their collected data at the right time, or miss completely, know to fire their rockets at the correct time, etc.

Re: Simply fit all computers with sundials.

"A good plan with one flaw. If a pendulum needs winding twice a day....

How are you going to know when to wind the pendulum?"

I was just pointing out that a stopped clock is correct twice per day, seems the perfect solution to your problem.

Re: Simply fit all computers with sundials.

"your sundial will always read the same time."

They say a stopped clock is correct twice a day.

Re: Simply fit all computers with sundials.

"simply let your pc sit in the sun for an hour or two"

My super powerful pocket computer ... er I mean my two year old flagship smartphone, is entirely solar powered. So I do that all the time anyway.

Re: Feature or "Feature".

"So when I tell people that my nose is my best feature, I should be shutting up then?"

Only if you put "feature" in scare quotes, feature noses are fine.

Re: Notch isn't so bad

"Secondly many are designed to look all pretty, but really need to be cased."

My Motorola Moto Z came with a "bumper", plastic thingy that covers the edges. It also came with one of the "style Moto Mods". If you are not familiar with the Moto Z series, the have a modular hardware system they call Moto Mod. One type of mod is called "style", basically just a plastic back that looks fancy, comes in many styles. The one I got in the box is fake wood grain. Together the bumper and the style mod make a reasonably protective case. I've dropped it several times, and it's been dropped by others. Typically one corner of the bumper takes most of the impact, it tends to fall off, as does the style mod. Not a scratch on any of those three items.

Other mods are available, some third party ones, YMMV with those other mods.

I also added a third party screen protector, and camera protector on the rear camera. They have worked well to.

"Thirdly, why must the screen be so naked? Why can't we have bezels that protect the screen?"

Yep, that bumper extends a millimeter or two past the front of the phone, providing effective "bezels that protect the screen". Which brings me back to ...

"Firstly too many phones are made out of horribly slippery materials."

The naked Moto Z is indeed slippery, the bumper and style mod not so much. You can feel the fake wood texture. Nicely matt.

Re: Charge by wire

"wireless charging is only about 75-80% efficient"

Which is a big problem for me, I charge my phones from a solar powered battery, and it's the middle of winter on this side of the planet. At this time of year, due to the position of the large house next door relative to the only useful place I can hang my small solar panel out of a window, I don't get much sun past 3 PM, none at all past 4 PM. During summer, the sun sets further south, where there is empty street, so I get lots of strong sun until the late sunset. So this time of year I sometimes have to be careful with my phone power usage, especially if there's lots of cloud. Wireless is out, too much power loss, I don't like it anyway for the reasons others have pointed out above.

If I was living at the north end of the building, this would not be a problem. I have to move in the next two months, sun position in winter will be one of the selection criteria for the new place.

I have successfully kept three phones entirely solar powered using my little panel and battery for several years. The last two, the only time they where not solar charged was at the factory, they had a charge in them when I bought them new. The same with any Bluetooth devices I use with them.

"I dislike how they allow the phone background to extend up there though, making the notch obvious."

If the notch isn't obvious, how can you show of your fancy expensive new phone with the fancy expensive feature that only 22 percent of flagship phones are copying?

"And I think they should extend the display to the sides, the back, the phone cover, the charging lead and the box it came in. But what do I know?"

Give them time, there's a few technical issues to solve before they can put a decent display on a charging lead. A string of Christmas tree lights is just too low rez.

Re: Tautology?

"There was a Goldwing with a folding trailer - to act as breakdown rescue to make sure motorways are flowing."

That reminds me of the day I saw a big road bike driving past, with a small kids sized motorbike strapped to it. Not sure if that was an emergency bike in case the big one broke down, or it was being delivered somewhere.

Re: Tautology?

It was a very long time ago, early '80s, and to be honest, now that you ask me, I can't recall if it was my 250 CC dirt bike (Yamaha or Honda, I had a slightly bigger road bike at the time, one of each brand, not sure which was which) or my mates 750 (Honda I think). He had the power, but I had the traction, I've climbed up near vertical rock walls on it. It wasn't towed very far, just had to be moved several meters to the left, and no one had a car handy. It was the oversized caravan type mobile home. Wasn't moving fast enough to get enough momentum going to overcome friction when we cut it loose, it just ground to a stop fairly quickly.

Back to towing 313 kg of meth in a diplomatic bag, I have no idea how much space that occupies, so may need something bigger than a bike trailer. How big do they make diplomatic bags?

Re: Tautology?

For 313kg, your gonna need a bloody big bag, and something a bit bigger than a motorcycle to help carry it. Though considering I have towed a fully furnished mobile home behind my motorcycle once, I guess you could stick it in one of those bike trailers.

"In the goold old days it was perfectly acceptable to send far-flung friends and family a card every Christmas."

Today that works well enough for my family, birthday emails, unless there's something specific we need to chat about.

Re: XDA IIs / IIi Today?

"Then navigate to F-Droid and just download non-slurp open-source alternatives to everything"

While that is my plan, I've not spotted any VR apps on F-droid, and there's a few other gaps (no pun intended) in their app coverage. Yes, I do intend to write some and put them on F-Droid, some day, eventually. I have a TODO list that is just a pointer to all my other TODO lists.

Re: Very nice.

"it has a GPS tracking so somewhere there is a hard drive with all the telemetry of every journey she has made (probably) so her car could potentially be used as evidence against her if she was to be caught speeding !! but you have to weigh the good up with the potentially bad..."

If she's well aware of that fact, it might stop her from speeding, which might prevent an accident. I can't see the bad in that at all. Other abuses of telemetry on the other hand...

I had a machine sitting on my desk with two hot swappable drive caddies. I don't recall why, but I do recall at one point pulling out the one I thought was not currently in use, but instead pulling out the one the OS was operating from. Luckily no damage, and nothing critical was running at the time.

Re: shutdown silliness

"It enabled us to build in various extras such as inhibit new database connections during the grace period. Good luck doing that with halt."

That's the sort of thing the previously mentioned molly-guard is for, either available in other flavours of OS, or you could roll your own using similar principles.

Re: Long uptimes are a disaster waiting to happen

That is precisely why I reboot computers after anything that is involved in the reboot process is involved in an update. I want to test that right now, not at some random point in the future where it might be important for it to reboot quickly and smoothly coz the boss is breathing down your neck and the customers are waiting for normal service to return after the week long power failure that drained all your UPSes. That's exactly the wrong time to find out you need to reboot into repair mode to repair some random update that happened months ago, and it might take some time to fix.

Re: Halted machine on other side of the planet

"Not a lot you can do about that when you're five thousand miles away."

This is the sort of thing that Intels IME is actually good for, remote control of the power button, even for turning on accidentally powered down servers. Though generally you need a server class computer to use that sort of thing, even if it is in most / all Intel CPUs these days.

"* In absence of evidence to the contrary assume O stands for Orifice and you won't go too far wrong."

You can probably assume the C stands for another word for a certain type of orifice.

Re: If its mission critical

"If you don't own the infrastructure that you make money from, then you deserve what you get."

Or as an old boss of mine used to put it - always own the means of your own production.

Re: If its mission critical

"But why do you trust disk drives that someone else has built?"

You don't, which is why things like RAID and backups exist. One thing you can trust is that if a hard drive fails, the other hard drives from the same manufacturing batch are likely to fail soon to.

One thing I can trust is that any type of flash storage will fail sooner rather than later in my home, but that's coz the use cases I have for them are rather abusive of their limitations. Meh, that ones on me.

"...and your mother as a large mass..."

...who is eyeing off the mess you made on the rubber sheet and shaking her head. Expect a cosmic hosing off soon.

Re: This is not making physics any easier

"If there was no on-going radiation pressure Sol would collapse due to gravity relatively quickly, in the order of a few seconds, iirc. We'd get the news about eight minutes later."

And we would begin crapping ourselves nine minutes later. Whether we would finish crapping ourselves coz our crap has frozen, before the panic babies get born, is something I'm not equipped to calculate, but my moneys on no panic baby births. Many other things would kill us all off before that nine months elapses.

"nausea is caused by the lack of accurate frame of reference in fully immersive VR"

Only partly correct. The main reason is what has already been pointed out to you, so I wont cover that here.

Developers have found out that if there is a fixed frame in the VR scene, like the cockpit around you in a car or spaceship for example, that tends to reduce nausea. There are many other software tricks that help as well, and some types of VR scene that make it even worse.

Then there is what is known as "getting your VR legs", similar to "getting your sea legs" for those that get sea sick. Since the nausea is for basically the same reason in VR and sea sickness, not everyone gets it, and those that do can reduce their nausea by repeated exposure. Use VR for a few minutes, give it a rest, maybe a few more minutes, maybe wait a day or so. Eventually you might get used to it, and no more nausea.