Posts by Dave 126 10844 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
To add to @ecarlseen's point:
When Apple released its first M1 Macs, Autodesk didn't have an M1-native version of Fusion 360, but Autodesk themselves posted to say that Fusion 360 performance on M1 Macs under Rosetta 2 was superb.
Compare to this article's observation that "AutoCAD on [Windows on] Arm is, at best, clunky, and, at worst, unusable"
> You forgot the evil empire... called Apple.
He didn't forget. From the article:
"NPUs do add efficiency, particularly in mobile devices where every watt saved is valuable"
Apple's NPUs started on the iPhone to assist Apple-written software, particularly on the camera side of things. Apple's engineers evidentially determined at some point that an NPU would aid them in delivering a product that would sell (in this case, a phone that does fancy trickery to improve photographs without depleting the battery). Google then followed suit and added NPUs to its Pixel phones, which were sold on their photography chops.
The article is about CPU vendors adding an NPU of dubious utility to a laptop chip and then asking more money for it. Whilst Apple's M series chips do feature an NPU, they don't use it as the main selling point.
> I also don't see why it would have been a problem to put the button on any of the other sides.
The smaller size of this Mac means there would be a chance of the user accidentally pressing the power button when trying to insert a cable or thumb-drive, if the power button were located on any of the sides. Such an event could very annoying, whereas lifting up the Mac to access the power button might only be slightly irritating.
If I needed to use the power button with great frequency, I could always just place the Mac on a book.
If your definition of 'shit' is a relative one, then yes, laptops are shit since they can never compete with with equivalently priced desktops.
In absolute terms however, laptops with enough grunt to play fun games at acceptable frame rates do exist. This is not a 'shit' experience, it's a known trade-off between convenience and computing power, likely made by an individual who isn't a moron. Oh, and they can be quite handy as Mobile Workstations too (provided you dodge two common real problems with gaming laptops, low res screens and teenage boy aesthetics)
The moron is the one who can't enjoy a good game because he's too busy thinking of how much better it would look on a bigger machine.
No, it isn't.
Inertia is not friction.
Inertia is the same as momentum, as far as the maths is concerned. The energy require to accelerate 1 kg inert object from rest to 1 m/s velocity is the same to decelerate* a 1 kg object from 1 m/s to 0 m/s velocity.
Unit of momentum is Kg * (M/S). Kilograms times Metres per Second.
Friction is a Force, unit Newton ( = Kg * (M/(S*S)). Kilograms times Metres per Second Squared.
Different unit. Different thing. Certainly they have a relationship, but they are not the same thing.
Inertia isn't friction. Inertia is the inverse of momentum. To accelerate an inert object to a certain velocity requires Work applied for a period of Time. Work is Force applied over a certain Distance.
If you lean against a car parked on tarmac, it won't move - because you are not applying enough force to overcome its static friction - which involves rubber tyres and rough tarmac. If the car was parked in a puddle on a frozen lake ("assume friction to be zero"), it would move if you leaned against it.
It looks to be this:
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution. Or, equivalently, the low-end/high-volume hardware technology almost always ends up climbing the power curve and winning. The economist Clayton Christensen calls this disruptive technology and showed in The Innovator's Dilemma [Christensen] how this happened with disk drives, steam shovels, and motorcycles.
- http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch02s04.html
The OP might have been aware of the convention of referencing economists and others by their surname rather than by their first name, and then chose to ignore that convention.
... I personally hanker after a mobile browser that displays images (after a text search term) in a way that can be easily viewed.
My phone has a 6" screen, but searching for "cat" results in tiny thumbnails, clicking on a thumbnail displays an image that is not much larger. Rotating the phone to landscape mode doesn't help much, either.
I would love to be able to search for "cat", and then be able to swipe through one full screen image (without the address or title bar) after another.
Anyone who remembers the desktop online image browser Cooliris will have an idea of what I'm after.
Cheers
To avoid the exasperating reboots in Win10, you can use Group Policy Editor. However, if you have a Win 10 Home version, you first need to find a trusted copy of GPE and copy it to some windows subdirectory. This method worked for me. Other people suggest using Regedit or Powershell.
Sorry I can't remember details, but I found my solution after searching "windows 10 turn off restart after update"
Scissors – by Allan Ahlberg
Nobody leave the room.
Everyone listen to me.
We had ten-pair of scissors
At half-past two,
And now there’s only three.
Seven pair of scissors,
Disappeared from sight.
Not one of you leaves
Till we find them.
We can stop here all night!
Scissors don’t lose themselves,
Melt away, or explode.
Scissors have not got
Legs of their own
To go running off up the road.
We really need those scissors,
That’s what makes me mad.
If it was seven pairs
Of children we’d lost,
It wouldn’t be so bad.
I don’t want to hear excuses.
Don’t anyone speak.
Just ransack this room
Till we find them,
Or we’ll stop here… all week
Cross-chanel car ferry, Portsmouth: If I arrive on a bicycle with toolkit, I'm waved onboard with cars and caravans, easy. If I travel as a foot passenger, I have go through a metal detector and have my Victorinox confiscated "Oh, but £25 we offer a service where we post it to your home address".
Once on board the ferry, the knives in the cafeteria are a pastiche of Laguoile knives, i.e a pointed 6" blade. I daresay the caravans that are just waved onboard have knives and possibly hatchets in them.
Once in France, half the newsagents sell Opinel knives, technically prohibited in the UK because of the locking collar mechanism.
>Back in the 90s... ...I always wondered why I didn't have to check them in and they weren't ever inspected
There's your answer. You could carry knives on board flights prior to 2001. Worst case, you'd be asked to surrender them to a flight attendant and receive them back upon landing.
> Remember the space shuttle going boom? That's because instead of NASA building solid rocket boosters they outsourced it to a for-profit corporation.
You're being a bit simplistic here. Even Karl Marx wrote that his ideas were only possible because of the surplus production that had been enabled by the tools that capitalists had created.
The ill communication between public officials and private sector managers (of companies who were not operating in a free competitive market) was to blame for the incorrect decision to launch the Space Shuttle when the weather was colder than the O-rings had been specified for. The decision to launch should have been made by engineers.
SpaceX, by the standards of their industry, have an unprecedented track record of reliability. Ignoring for a moment that they are private, we should note that their products are largely created in-house which can only aid in trouble shooting.
JPL is public and does great work, but their internal work order system creates perverse incentives. Woe betide an engineer who solves a problem in a week when the work order was for three months. The reasons for this stem from efforts to account for their spending to the public.
Coca Cola distribute cans with ring-pulls that are incredibly reliable, neither bursting open in transit or being frustrating to open by the consumer.
Apparently it's not just the connectors that aren't compatible, but the suits with the seats. The suit and the seat are designed as a system to protect the astronaut.
However, an astronaut would likely survive reentry without a suit, the suits are a redundancy should the capsule lose pressure, as tragically happended on Soyuz 11 during re-entry, killing the three unsuited cosmonauts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11
No, fit is not the issue - should the two astronauts come back to Earth on a Dragon capsule, suits made by SpaceX that Butch and Suni will be sent up first. SpaceX has already identified suits that will fit them.
The issue was that suits made to be worn inside Starliner don't work in Crew Dragon, and vice versa. Apparently the connections for air and comms are different.
The mess you describe of clothing sizes is common in civilian clothing, but Suni and Butch will have been measured before their flight.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/yes-nasa-really-could-bring-starliners-astronauts-back-on-crew-dragon/
> We aren't aware of any disaster stories about drones dropping out of the sky during emergency responses or the like
You've gotta compare thae safety to that of the alternative solution, which would often be a manned helicopter. If a helicopter fails, it risks the human crew. The chances of a failing drone falling on someone's head are very small, especially if it's deployed inspecting power lines or otherwise above unpopulated areas.
It's space - use whatever tape is available. If you have a choice, use whatever tape is best for the conditions.
Here's a list of every time cloth backed tape was mentioned by Apollo crews as a possible solution for situations, both on the lunar surface and within vehicles:
https://www.nasa.gov/history/alsj/WOTM/WOTM-DuctTape.html
> Good thing I'm not an astronaut.
Don't be too hard on yourself. Duct tape, and four maps, were used to fashion a replacement fender on the Apollo 17 lunar rover.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/duct-tape-saves-day/#:~:text=Duct%20tape%20comes%20in%20handy,which%20the%20fender%20was%20made.
> Keep something that's redundant?
In this case, the sensor hasn't been used for the majority of Falcon 9 second stages - it was only fitted at the request of a previous customer, according to Walker.
SpaceX haven't been using data from this redundant sensor.
Apple aren't fussed about which OS you run as long as you buy their hardware. They even made noises about helping Microsoft make a version of Windows for Apple silicon, but MS didn't get back to them. Apple haven't done anything to stop Ashai Linux, event if they haven't actively lifted the kimono on their GPU drivers. Linus Torvalds has been known to use a Mac laptop and its native OSX.
Besides, running an OS that has been designed hand in hand with the hardware it runs on has its advantages.
Computers have made real hardware cheaper to produce and more reliable. Structures used to be overbuilt because it wasn't practical to do all the calculations using tables and slide rules - and that was assuming we had enough understanding to know which calculations to do in the first place. So we built models - systems of calculations - which are updated and refined with real experimental data. These refined models in turn lower the cost of producing real hardware to test, resulting in more data to further refine the model. Rinse and repeat. A reduction in the cost of sending probes and telescopes into space is just one result.
> So, why was it installed in the first place? What (probably bleeding obvious to everyone else) have I missed?
"During a news briefing Thursday, SpaceX director Sarah Walker said this sense line was installed based on a customer requirement for another mission. The only difference between this component and other commonly flown sense lines is that it has two connections rather than one, she said. This may have made it a bit more susceptible to vibration, leading to a small crack."
- https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/spacex-roars-back-to-orbit-barely-two-weeks-after-in-flight-anomaly/
The Titanium PowerBook G4 was the Apple laptop that broke the curvy plastic mould in favour metal rectangles. Polycarbonate, albeit white, would live on for a bit in rectangular Macbooks and iMacs, colourful polycarbonate having a last hurrah in the iPhone 5C... Curiously, I didn't know the following:
Sadly, little is known about the design process and who drove it. Three people - Jory Bell, Nick Merz, and Danny Delulis - are typically credited, though the standardization of that order of mentioning them in every article, and the lack of any other details makes it seem like everyone is just repeating the same original source (whatever that was). That may very well be correct, but it’s difficult to discern their specific roles, or who else may have been involved. It’s hard to believe that Apple Industrial Design Group chief Jonathan Ive had no role in such a tent-pole product. But as some have observed, it bore little resemblance to anything else that Ive designed
- https://www.massmadesoul.com/features/tibook
> they're either too big to be portable and with me all the time, or too useless to do anything except consume media.
Whilst not perhaps as streamlined as a tiny computer with built-in keyboard, fold-up keyboards do exist. Android and iOS are not lacking in productivity software such as spreadsheets.
A review of five fold-up keyboards:
https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-mobile-keyboards/
> I always felt that once you'd seen the Psion 5, the iBook looked a little lame.
Your reason to compare those two machines isn't immediately obvious to me. One was designed to be carried everywhere by businessmen and last for ages on batteries and provide a fairly good typing experience given its very small frame, the other was a colourful though conventional laptop with a full desktop OS aimed at students doing coursework at a desk, and it weighed five times as much. Have I missed something?
Comparing the Psion 5 and the Apple eMate seems more interesting, both released in 1997, both long lasting on battery power due to CPU, lightweight OS and monochrome display. In which case I'd agree, the eMate wasn't very inspiring. Moot though, since eMate was only released to the education market. I'd forgotten how big the eMate was - nearly 1.5 Kg, compared to the Psion's 400 grams - having only seen one once at school (a teacher got one, we didn't).
> The Luddites thought so as well, and they were wrong too.
They weren't wrong. The technological changes that put them out of work *did* result in more jobs - but only after 50 to 100 years. Too late for them.
https://timharford.com/2023/06/what-neo-luddites-get-right-and-wrong-about-big-tech/
Intel's NUC Mini, and various similar things from other vendors, might be an option. They actually have a smaller 'footprint' (depth x width) than a laptop, but they are invariably thicker - starting at around 4 cm. The total volume might be bigger than a laptop sans monitor, to improve the cooling.
That might have been it... this was a time before USB mass storage* was common and XP had trained me to 'safely remove hardware'. In my defence, the ZipDisk eject button wasn't mechanical like a floppy disk drive eject button was - so it's possible that I assumed that pushing the eject button would be akin to 'politely' asking the system to eject the disk when it was ready to.
Also, the rewriting of ZipDisks didn't occur on NT 4.0 or Win 98 machines. I'm not sure I would even have known to unmount media on PCs. With floppy disks we just closed the folder and waited til the lights stopped blinking.
* USB 1.1 wasn't really fast enough for storage, and solid state memory was expensive.
> ‘The upper stage survived the anomaly and was deactivated as usual’
I 'deactivate' a car by turning off the ignition and applying the handbrake. But if I wanted to make the car as inert as is practical, I would also discharge the battery, drain it of fuel and other volatile liquids, disconnect the airbag system, and deflate the tyres... and I might want a word to describe these processes taken as whole. 'Passivate' seems reasonable.
A general problem with these adaptive systems is that we people are also adaptive systems. We're pretty good at adapting to something if it stays still for long enough. If you have an adaptive system (person) trying to adapt to an adaptive system (electronic device), and vice versa, literal chaos can ensue.
And knowing this, I wouldn't even start trusting my (hypothetical) smart fridge enough to leave all the ordering of milk to it... until it has a solid track record of ordering milk... which it's not going to get because I don't trust it to order milk.
> It speaks volumes about the dysfunctional culture at NASA that they've spent so much resources (from brain power to finances) on their logo
The logo redesign came from Nixon's Federal Design Program not from NASA, and across the US gov it *saved* money on printing costs (less paper, fewer colours of inks, clarity, ease of reproduction) and making gov communication clearer.
https://www.wired.com/2015/09/nasa-graphics-standards-manual/
https://info.ksiadvantage.com/blog/how-the-u.s.-government-had-groovy-design-but-seemingly-lost-it-and-how-to-get-it-back
Exchange between James Fletcher, NASA’s administrator at the time [of the Worm logo's introduction], and his deputy George Low during an early presentation of the graphics system:
Fletcher: I’m simply not comfortable with those letters, something is missing.
Low: Well yes, the cross stroke is gone from the letter A.
Fletcher: Yes, and that bothers me.
Low: Why?
Fletcher, after a long pause: I just don’t feel we are getting our money’s worth!
https://www.wired.com/2015/09/nasa-graphics-standards-manual/
Have you any evidence that the later Start Menus were designed by experts to be usable? It seems more likely that they were designed to drive adoption of Microsoft services such as One Drive and Bing.
What I'm urging is caution against judging a whole professional field based upon something from Microsoft.
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