Re: Live From Network 23
The upvotes (inc. mine ofc) for your post, and the entire sub-thread, nicely illustrate how VERY specific a demographic the readership of El Reg is :)
382 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Sep 2009
I've been using YouTube Premium since it was in beta years ago as YouTube Red, and it's my only paid for media delivery service. For what I need, it's perfect - lots of language learning channels and howtos, all ad-free. What surprised me from the article was the price: I'm still paying the price I paid from day one, $9.99NZ - basically half the current US price. Good to know that, so far at least, AlphaGoogle has kept their promise not to raise that price.
You're right, and I have donated in the past, more than the amount mentioned in the article. But I still think that there may well be many users who, like me, can afford to pay a modest amount but would appreciate the comparative convenience of being 'billed' for it in one way or another over having to remember to 'throw something in the tip jar'
Calibre's interface is definitely not the most Spartan, but it's also worth noting that the viewer app can run separately, allowing ebooks to be read without starting the main Calibre app. And there's a very helpful "support crew", led the creator and primary developers, at the mobileread.com forums
I follow the JWST twitter account, and in response to to today's successful test of all the mirror segment motors (amazing to me that these motors work at -200C, my internal actuators barely function at 20C) and despite the patient, detailed explanation linked to in this article, there are STILL idiots ranting nastily about the absence of video footage, including this gem "how are you going to inspire kids if you don't show them?" My post title is, of course, an allusion to one of the 4,356,743,212 things ALLEGED to have been said by Einstein but whoever said it, they was right.
Also, there is no blue light radiation from an e-ink reader. El Reg forums are definitely NOT a warm and welcoming place for those of us who love e-ink readers. The active antipathy toward them is actually quite surprising given that it's likely a lot of El Reg users are, like me, in the 50+ demographic which is the bastion of e-reader use. For me, reading on my Kobo is MUCH more comfortable than dead tree books - especially when reading books in the 600-1200 page range. But that's just my personal preference, not an assumption of superiority, such as is often made by those who eschew e-readers.
I'm a big fan of what Space X has achieved, but nothing they've done yet comes close to the JWST for complexity.
"Where would the cameras go?"
"How would they be fitted in to something already folded origami style?"
"How would the actual science (not PR) instruments be shielded from potential interference?"
How many extra points of failure would they add to the 344 already itemised?"
And I'm sure there are plenty of other similar questions that could be asked to show why, for a project that was already WAY behind time and WAAAAAY over budget, adding video cameras for a TV audience was not considered worthwhile.
It really will be the easy bit. Just reading NASA's pre-launch info sheet, this staggered me:
"Of those 344 unfolds, 307 (87%) are critical, single-point failure areas" - if everything AFTER the launch works, including the 5 months of cooling before things really get started, THEN I'll raise a beer. Hell, I might even DRINK one, despite a severe alcohol intolerance. They'll have earned it.
" I discovered the paid personal plan is $10/yr, that's not much for supporting them."
This is exactly why I moved to the paid tier when I started using Bitwarden nearly 2 years ago. I don't NEED the paid tier's extras, but it's nice to be able to say thanks. I do the same with StoryGraph, the Amazon-free Goodreads alternative, pay for the Plus options as a gesture of support rather than out of need
"does the cost feel worth it ?" Frankly, no. I had a lot of extra work at the time, and decided to treat myself, so I wouldn't say that I regret the decision, but if I had the same opportunity again, I would probably not bother. From everything I've read, the new Libra 2 is a bigger upgrade of the H20 than the Sage is of the Forma.
That said, having 32GB instead of 8GB, and an 8-inch screen instead of 7, are nice enough upgrades to soothe the slightly underwhelmed feeling I got. Not exactly buyer's remorse, just a feeling that it was a bit of a gnabgib - although my wife loves the Libra H20 which was mine and is now hers. :)
"I find the Paperwhite a little too small and it doesn't offer landscape mode to offer an alternative grip"
The Kobo Sage addresses both those issues - 8 inches not 6.8, and with landscape mode. I recently moved from a Kobo Libra H20 to the new Sage, and have found the bigger screen size to be well worth the change. I left the Amazon three years ago, and while Kobo's customer service is bad on a good day, their devices are a very credible alternative to the presumption that Kindles are the only ereader game in town.
Another outstanding result, worthy of many beers! The Hubble Team really are amazing, and I hope that when the HST finally shuts its eyes for the last time, the same skills, devotion and determination can keep the JWST going just as long - even if there's a *SMALL* difference between LEO and L1. :)
No, that is not what I said,not at all. ALL books are real books, regardless of the delivery medium. The educator could have said that the kids were going back to paper book, but she did not, she said "real books". To call one type of book "real" is to say that other types are not. Paper books are real, but so are ebooks and audiobooks. I find it fascinating that making this point as I did in my initial comment generated so many down votes. I have nothing against dead tree books, but it seems many who prefer them DO have something against other forms of books
<rant> "They really fell in love with real books again" - I absolutely HATE that expression "real books". In the last two years, I have read over 350 books, every single one of them on my Kobo. They were very, VERY real, despite not being carved into the dessicated flesh of slaughtered trees.
"Real book" is a hideously judgmental phrase, implying (barely implict, actually) that any book not printed on paper is NOT real, and therefore inferior. An educator should realise that many people either PREFER to read by other media, or have physical challenges that make doing so necessary/easier. Or, as is true in my case both. < /rant>
Many are asking "didn't they test the software before sending it?". Since NASA is not Boeing, I'm going to assume they did, but it also seems reasonable to assume that conditions on the ground 15 light minutes away may not be replicable with 100% exactitude. If the slight hiccup was caused by a local variable that could not have been replicated Earthside, then rewriting the software to factor in the new data would seem to me to be evidence of sensible engineering, not the opposite
"HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM"
Flying a freakin' drone from 12,583,588,262.0564 brontosaurii away - that is JUST AMAZING! Yes, the world's a helluva mess, and just down the road from Mission Control, the bridges, roads and other basic infrastructure are all falling apart, but still, this deserves applause, and at least 2 Olympic Swimming Pools of beer
There is plenty of collaboration, by force of circumstance as you say, but despite following their interactions fairly closely, I've seen no sign of either side making any effort to "pretend to be best buddies while doing so". It suits each side to use the other more as a bogeyman than a faux friend.
In the spirit of this zombie lawsuit, Abe Lincoln should be suing Einstein for stealing his quote.
One of the main reasons I update today was the promise of the new Extension Manager interface. I am now running 7.1.3 and there has been no change at all to the Extension Manager. The Release Notes direct readers to a blog post about the new dialog https://yusufketen.com/post/2020-08-31-libreoffice-gsoc-final-report/ that seems to confirm the "lacks polish" problem. As I get older and lazier, I'm a big fan of "it just works", so even though I'm sticking with LO because it's "Local Office" not "Cloud Office", it would be nice if some of the sharp geeky edges could be smoothed a bit.
"For the paranoid there is Signal, and for the cautious but still like convenience there is Telegram"
A fair summary, I think. I installed Signal before Telegram, but the almost no-existent uptake among people I need to communicate with made Telegram a more viable option. It may not be as good as Signal, but it's definitely a better choice than anything owned by FB.