Posts by quartzie 100 posts • joined 3 Jan 2008
I would strongly suggest to refrain from using glossy paper in your Laserjet. It's designed to work with wet ink, not dry powder toner and certainly not made to withstand the baking process required for Laser Toner.
You might find that the lifetime of your printer has suddenly become much, much shorter.
I beg to differ.
If your airline is cheap enough to cram seats into non-reclining spacing, then it's a madness, but reclining seats are most certainly NOT designed to work only on half-full flights.
I'm 6"2", and will look for extra leg room seats where available, but I will recline, especially on a 10-12 hour flight, since I want to be in working condition at my destination.
In cramped short hauls, it's a matter of consideration, especially in local Asian island hoppers, but on long hauls and red-eyes I'll recline to keep sane. Fortunately, in my experience, these flights have generally been amenable to reclining.
Ay, there's the rub.
These questions are a stupid "solution" to a practical problem - Passwords, and their (often moronic) implementation.
Case in point: My reasonably computer-literate parents already struggle with the idea of keeping separate complex passwords for every account they use - and they use far fewer than I do. Remembering said passwords is a lost cause.
I'm trying to get them used to the idea of a password manager, but they are more likely to use pen and paper, so the complexity of the password is going to suffer.
Want to bet how many people don't really have anyone with at least rudimentary understanding of computer security they could ask for advice?
Because in some countries, the geofences are set up so rigidly it is virtually impossible to fly even in your garden.
Fortunately not the case in most of Europe, but DJI's geofencing has been known to fork up people's toys.
That, and because idiots want close ups of flying jetliners.
@John Savard: As a business oriented person, I found a fly in your soup, corrected below.
"They should be trying to make a product which can be sold at the HIGHEST ACCEPTABLE price, to benefit the maximum number of consumers."
Businesses are striving for profit, not just volume. High manufacturing volume @ near-zero margin can cover your production expenses, but not generate profit - see almost all current Android manufacturers for reference.
Almost all the profit in mobile phone market is generated by Apple, even though they do not have a dominant market share.
I had the same problem with an old Sony Z2 - it just wouldn't stop working well.
I wanted to upgrade to get some new features, but with reasonable maintenance the thing just wouldn't die - or underperform. Until one day the battery gave up ghost, ballooned and took waterproofing away - a downpour on the very same day proved deadly to the compass & IMU.
Took three years of fine performance and a freak coincidence to cripple the phone, otherwise another battery would have been good for another year, at least.
i never quite understood the fetish about cracked iPhone screens. Even with the high replacement cost, there are just too many such sheePhones around.
My S7 lives in a thin silicon bumper case and a glass sticker on the screen. I've had to replace the sticker a few times, but the screen remains spotless. Just why is iPhone equipped with a screen *designed* to be broken?
Mind boggles...
USB-C is in fact fairly compatible with previous standards, but also incorporates high power transmission option, which can be potentially dangerous over low quality cables. Unfortunately, the original standard doesn't sufficiently check cable quality and specs, creating a potential fire hazard
Windows 7 was a success, but it was aging and that showed in the cracks.
The old windowing system and rendering were completely useless on HiDPI screens, and many hardware enhancements were only possible by generally hacking drivers onto an aged kernel.
Windows 8 brought a lot of necessary new guts, with an unfortunate interface.
From what I can see on my Surface, Win 10 is basically an evolution of that, with many things I used to dislike in Win 8 resolved.
My pet peeve is probably about the forced updates, which I hate on both Windows and Android.
Unfortunately, that number is only the theoretical Mean Time Between Failures. Although it may sound confidently optimistic, WD castrated the idea by offering a paltry 3 year warranty on your archive drives.
Surely they must have another business case for this model?
There is a basic problem with the definition of driving in your response.
Technically speaking, you can sit in a car and make it move without ever going through driving school, but actually *driving* a car means you take into account road rules, traffic around you and general safety.
With those included in "driving", then no, it isn't easier to do when drunk.
Since the good fellow wants to have his cake and eat it too, I suggest we mandate a simple substitution cipher for all his private email.
Given that the weakest link in any encryption system is the human element, having a human-controlled backdoor to cryptography is akin to sending a partially sealed envelope.
Given their track record, it is unreasonable to trust any government to look out for the people. The US govt is just a case in point, openly paying homage to the highest bidders (er... lobbying parties).
I'd suggest "smajhenee seer" as the closest approximation in the Queen's tongue, with the final "R" borrowed from Spanish, rather than English. (try readspeaker.com for the real version)
My family's tradition definitely calls for a Camembert-style cheese, though almost any cheese with a stronger flavour will do. Feel free to experiment with diced/mashed spuds, but do not skimp on the tartar sauce, if you've already got a decent mayo. Just add some finely diced pickles and onion to bring the flavour out.
Given the meal's fat content, I wholeheartedly recommend a pint of your favourite Pilsner as a digestive.
I know they are busy with all those patent assertions of late, but there's at least one example of direct prior art here in the comments. Reckon a google search would have revealed that in about 10 seconds and thrown out this ridiculous iPatent as it should have been?
Two points.
Hadoop (and many other parallel/hybrid processing frameworks) cannot change the fact that some problems simply aren't very suitable for parallel processing. I believe Intel employs a good number of people who know their way around Hadoop, but they've also noticed not everyone is doing big data in their own garden.
That said, if you've attempted parallel processing on any larger scale, you would notice that getting the system to run efficiently, given a limited memory bandwidth, is a major task and often crucial for deployment on any cloudy distributed platform.
As interesting as the title seems, just looking at the graph shows that the *dreaded* memory effect is in fact minuscule in Li Ion batteries.
Talk about blowing a story out of proportion. Among the problems facing Li-anything batteries, memory effect is hardly worth mentioning.
Re: Pierre, I noticed that the general public is very prone to parroting any 'seemingly true' facts about technologies they don't understand. Do yourself a favor and check some actual research before believing everything in your first google search.
The key is in multicore & multithreaded hardware based decoding. If you ran a purely CPU based, software single-threaded (i.e. reference) decoder, you'd get nowhere near realtime decoding for full HD streams even using h.264/avc, not to mention HEVC.
Nobody sane does that, though - and today's CPUs and GPUs are proof of the fact, many supporting full decoding of h.264 using specialized instructions or dedicated HW. The real issue is going to be power-efficient encoding of h.265 streams in hardware, because there's no cheating the complexity even with specialized ASICs.
There is a broad alliance of patent holders behind h.264 and even broader behind HEVC. The difference that HEVC made was including HW and SW partners, so that it could be designed for easier processing using combinations of CPU/GPU. Also, the design goal was to produce a codec @ half of h.264 bitrate - this was close, though not quite there last time I checked a couple of months ago (while the reference codec was in Working Draft 6).
As for UHD content, there are suddenly large swaths of similarly textured areas in each frame (imagine a DSLR shot of someone's peachy complexion) - all the more suitable for larger quadtree-style macroblocks. The large resolution also calls for finer motion-estimation, which is responsible for a lion's share of the encoding complexity increase - actual "compression" in HEVC has been pretty much ported from h.264/avc, and this also means that developing solutions for h.265 is going to be that little bit easier.
For people unfamiliar with the process, a compression standard pretty much describes the format of a data stream - and leaves the actual implementation to the market. HEVC working group was actually kind enough to also provide a reference encoder/decoder software, modifications of which made its way into many scholarly papers and dozens computer science students' graduation theses.
The sad truth about free codecs is that the basic technology for video compression hasn't changed significantly since mpeg2 - and the elements in that are very much patented. VP8/9/10.... won't be any different.
I seriously urge NASA to use these last 40 days to re-check which part of the whole shebang is expecting its input in fractions of imperial units. Considering the thing was built and operated by engineers such as the one interviewed here, there's high probability of a non-metric bug stuck somewhere in the middle. Hopefully, it's not a 21 ft rope gently dropping the buggy from 20 m above surface...
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