Posts by Dave 126 10843 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
> How robust?
These TDK cells are layers of solid electrolytes sandwiched between ceramic layers, and they resemble surface-mounted microchips. Robust.
Li-ion batteries are slightly squidgy sacks of gel, prone to bring punctured unless contained in a robust shell.
You don't have to walk far along the pavements of Britain before seeing a vape that has been run over by a car, squishing the li-ion battery and exposing its contents.
The charging circuitry is likely to be built into the device that the cell is intended to go in. Indeed, TDK's existing solid ceramic cells have been surface mounted to a PCB.
In some scenarios such as devices intended for near continuous operation (e.g hearing aids), it might be desirable to have swappable batteries - so perhaps a charger can be incorporated into the hearing aid case, much as wireless earbuds are charged today.
> More like they have no idea the volume of the cell inide a button battery and neither do you.
Nobody was talking about the inside of the cell! The Reg said they "didn't know the power density of button cells."
The shiny things that go in watches and hearing aids are not batteries [of cells], they are cells.
As for case of the cell not having have zero volume, you'll see Pete 2 and I mentioned that hours before you turned up.
They messed up up the colour temperature - it's too far into the blue. Its more dazzling than incandescent bulbs, and leads to greater eye strain for other drivers. The EU is investigating.
It's hardly an insurmountable problem, it just requires different phosphors in the headlight assembly.
Good catch!
We can't rule out that a decimal point got shifted in-between the lab and and press release. Or maybe the marketing department read that it being good for 1,000 charge cycles makes it 1,000 more capacious.
In fact if you dig further through TDK's product pages and PDFs, they don't really boast of its capacity, and instead are selling the tech on its high operating temperature range, its inability to leak toxic liquids, and its fire resistance.
The first product to incorporate the tech was a Bluetooth cooking thermometer that you leave in the oven.
"what was that website last week?" isn't solved by default - websites get updated, neglected, DoSed, and forum posts get deleted etc. I'm not saying an OS-wide screen grabber from Microsoft is the answer, but the problem does exist. If it didn't, we wouldn't need archive.org or the Wayback Machine.
I can think of lots of genuine use-cases for Recall-like functionality if implemented in a more limited fashion and under the user's informed control. I.e, opt-in, per app basis, only active during certain hours of the day, whitelists and black lists of sites, data only stored and processed on local machine, Dara deleted after a period of time, not coded by Microsoft etc etc.
Maybe because cynicism requires less thinking than scepticism? And that the end result of the two are often in alignment, so your brain's tendancy to efficiency pushes you towards cynicism by default. But don't worry, often a fuzzy mental jpeg is good enough.
The satellite data is only a proxy for the ground truth, the number of cabbages in the field. Which is proportional to the quantity of cabbage that will be available to consumers, x days in advance. If there looks to be a glut of cabbage 7 days in advance, consumers can be persuaded to eat more by means advertising or price reductions. Alternatively, a commercial kimchi (fermented cabbage) producer has a few days notice to ramp up production. Whatever, different parties are incentived to find efficiencies, and they'll have more data.
If the satellite data doesn't bring any net advantage because it is priced too highly, then stake holders (farmer, distributer, retailer, consumer, kimchi producer) wouldn't bother with it. Or a competing service can step in.
Our market economic system justified as a means of information transmission to determine prices.
https://xkcd.com/196/
Cueball: Last night I was watching videos with this girl and my monitors kept turning off - even though I had disabled power save.
Friend: Odd.
Cueball: However! I wrote a command to jiggle the mouse pointer every couple minutes to keep it from going idle.
Friend: Not the first hack I'd try, but see? Linux has problems, but it gives you the tools to deal with them - and save your date!
Cueball: Actually, I was half an hour into the pointer scripting documentation when she got dressed and left.
> What about all the other scientists who contributed to voyager who have passed away getitng a mention ?
Those scientists will have been glad that Voyager was a success, and grateful to Dr Stone for successfully managing it. I doubt they or Dr Stone were motivated by dreams of fame or fortune. Most great human achievements, like Voyager, can only be accomplished as a part of a team.
Whatever methodologies he used for managing these teams, it worked. Even if the teams largely managed themselves, that's still a positive testament to whoever initially chose the team members and then left them to get on with it.
The unsung scientists of which you speak evidently respected the man, so why don't you?
Isaac Asimov wrote 'Sucker Bait' decades ago, a story about the dangers of increasing specialisation in science.
However, there are reasons beyond just the cultural / systematic for this specialisation, not least of which is that we know more about everything. There's punctuated equilibrium. The low-hanging fruit has been taken. And then there is the question of how we perceived and define 'progress' ( a human construction, the universe doesn't care).
We shouldn't sniff either at science problems which are successfully tackled by large teams, and remember that culturally we're conditioned to celebrate the achievements of individuals (Nobel prizes are only awarded to individuals or partnerships, for example).
It might have been a screen saver... There were screen savers that would animate creatures and other effects over your desktop and workspace, done in such a way that over a period of time of maybe ten minutes every pixel would be changed, therefore fulfilling the purported purpose of 'saving' your CRT.
> That was the coolest thing I ever saw a computer do until [3D Pipes]
It sounds like demos and the demoscene may have passed you by! :)
(Coders showing off their skills by packing an audio visual demo into an arbitrarily small file such as 64k, or on a computer with limited RAM such as a Commodore 64 or Atari ST. I came across then sideways, because the Amiga demoscene spawned Tracker audio files - sequenced audio files embedded with samples - which people later used to show off the Gravis Ultrasound board on PCs)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
Solidworks is also from Dassault, but unlike Catia it built atop the Parasolid 3D kernel which is licenced from Siemens, a competitor.
Solidworks enjoys the network effect in small to medium businesses - i.e lots of companies use it because lots of engineers know how to use it, lots of engineers learn it because lots of firms use it. Solidworks users are complaining that Dassault hasn't been squishing bugs, improving the UI or introducing features for a few years, instead trying to push customers to a web equivalent thst doesn't licence its kernel from Siemens.
OnShape, an OS-agnostic CAD program, is in large part a response to this.
Catia is aerospace and automotive, high quality surfaces and as you say, lots of simulation. If you want to design a submarine and the factory to build submarines, you likely use Catia.
Currently, 3D parametric CAD is underrepresented on MacOS, AutoCAD Fusion being the exception. Autodesk have pushed it hard in the hobbyist 3D printing market, with free or low cost licences available. Autodesk also bought the hobbyist website Instructables.com some years ago.
Anyway,that's all just background and context.
Why would Apple want in to the high end CAD market, the 3D printer market, and what do they think they could bring to the party? I'll brainstorm here, erring on generous:
- lack of CAD on Mac is a barrier to buying a Mac to some people
- Apple have a lot of 3D scanning / AR experience, having built ARkit for years, putting ToF scanners in iPhones for years, work on the AVP headset, and likely a lot of relevant work done for the now-cancelled Apple Car.
-The Apple Vision Pro needs an application.
- Staff at Apple have experience of using 3D scanners, printers, CAD etc to develop products. They likely will have customised and developed these tools for their purposes, too.
- 3D printers aren't a mature product.
- iPads are already used as UIs for industrial kit in this sector.
There are lots of reasons that Apple won't want to get into this game, but I'll leave those as an exercise for the reader.
My apologies then, I was going to say to that I hadn't had enough coffee when you first posted, and there was a lot to read through.
Rather than a response to Apple's legal team, it seemed plausible that the Reg mods deleted your posts just because of their length - anyone else wishing to comment on the article had to do a lot of scrolling.
Getting into selling 3D printers would be a bit of turn for Apple. Current printers are fiddly, messy, noisy, and most households don't see them as essential. You did outline some methods that might be used to address these points. Some of which were plausible, but not the whole toolbox.
There were also some things that didn't add up:
-700 USD isn't cheap compared to the free licence of Autodesk Fusion that is available for hobbyists. Solidworks too offers a Start-up licence, free for a year to new customers in start-up customers.
-Apple employees making test items like trainers is a sign they own 3D printers, not necessarily a sign that they are preparing to sell 3D printers.
- software updates to improve the performance of a 3D printer would not be on its BIOS.
- is a full-frame camera sensor the best approach for monitoring a 3D print run? Multiple iPhone-level cameras would offer more flexibility, lower cost, and inference of the 3D form through photogrammetry.
Yeah, Stargate, I noticed. Just think, if you and I had had MS Recall installed, we could now be reviewing that lunatic's deleted ravings at our leisure!
I can only assume Apple 3D Printer post was LLM-generated. It was complete bollocks, but didn't feature the spelling misteaks, poor grammaring and CAPITALS that usually mark out the earnest nutter.
> Which is why you hang up and make sure that you dial the bank's landline number,
It is best to wait at least 5 minutes before calling them back to ensure your telco has actually disconnected you from the scammer (or call a friend inbetween). There was a scam a few years ago that took advantage of this technical idiosyncrasy.
> ....maybe M$ Money would work fine with Linux/WINE?
A cursory glance at some forums suggests it won't. Ditto Lightroom - some folk have working under Playonlinux, but they report deal-braking performance issues.
That said, it might be worth you digging deeper because these discussions were a few years old. I don't know if the advances over the last few years in running Windows games on Linux might be applicable to other applications.
It is possible that the inflatable part of the assembly (coated on silicone adhesive in the successful NASA test) doesn't get any hotter than 450 deg C. I'm basing this on the info found below, that silicone products becomes brittle at around 300 deg C, and autocombust at around 450 deg C - at which point it becomes silicon dioxide, a white powder with insulating properties.
The information below is for standard industrial uses of silicone formulations. I don't know if clever chemists have tricks for increasing the maximum temperature silicones can withstand for extreme applications.
https://www.vikingextrusions.co.uk/blog/silicone-rubber-temperature/#:~:text=Silicone%20does%20not%20have%20a,temperatures%20of%20over%20300%20C.
> I assume it's ablative
Possibly not. Again, from the NASA LOFTID test:
"When the recovery team hauled the aeroshell out of the ocean, they were surprised to find that the outside “looked absolutely pristine,” said John DiNonno, LOFTID chief engineer at NASA Langley. “You would not have known it had a very intense reentry,” he said. In fact, the inflatable structure is in such good condition, it looks like it could be reused and flown again, DiNonno said, but it needs rigorous testing before making such a determination."
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/17/world/loftid-heat-shield-nasa-success-scn/index.html
I don't know about this ICARUS model, but the earlier NASA LOFTID had a flexible head shield of woven silicon carbide (spun into fine filaments and then "woven with the same machine we use to make jeans"), under which were "two insulating layers", then the inflatable bit which was covered in "high temperature use silicone adhesive".
https://web.archive.org/web/20230525004458/https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-inflatable-heat-shield-finds-strength-in-flexibility
> the giveaway was that the message was far too cheery for that editor to be real.
I love it as a security protocol. How to scale it up... it's tying electronic communications to things only known to the humans in meatbag-space:
"Mike, you ugly bastard, I need the updated figures for last month ASAFP. Oh, that tie you were wearing last week looked like someone vomited carrots on a pair skid-marked Y-fronts"
The challenge is adapting it for the customer relations team.
> Interesting that all the posts but this one are congratulating Starship.
Readers of a tech blog are drawn to the new and the novel. Starliner has only just achieved what another system, Crew Dragon, has being doing for a few years now. Starship OTOH is trying something that has never been done before. It's exciting.
None of us want the Starliner mission to be exciting. We're wishing the Starliner crew a safe and boring* mission.
*Relatively speaking, of course.
Cheers Atomic, by 'structure' I did mean a tall tower with 'chopsticks'. However, I had earlier mentioned Falcon 9's platforms and barges, which is why John Brown thought that's what I meant. Which was a fair reading, because I see now I i was ambiguous.
Even IF there had been a platform AND Starship had toppled over, SpaceX would still have considered the flight a success. Why?
Because they already know they can land rockets on their tails with Falcon 9 booster, and are confident they can make it work with both Spaceship and it its booster. What they are really concerned about, because they haven't had the data before, is the heat shielding during re-entry.
Elon Musk, in reply to Cmdr Chris Hadfield:
“Thanks Chris! A fully and immediately reusable orbital heat shield, which (as you know) has never been made before, is the single toughest problem remaining. Being able to iterate with many ideas on many ships is key to solving this.”
Hey guys, let be charitable to Pascal, he was probably getting mixed up with SpaceX's early attempts to land Falcon 9 boosters on floating platforms. That almost seems like it only happened yesterday, such has the rate of progress been, so a casual observer could be forgiven for confusing the two.
Unlike Falcon 9 boosters, there was no sea platform or barge involved here. SpaceX's plan was to have the upright Starship come to zero velocity at zero altitude on a patch of naked ocean - which it succeeded in doing. They used the term 'virtual landing pad' which was just that, virtual. There was never to be any scenario in which it would not then topple over once the engines shut off.
The Reg use of the term 'splashdown' might be a bit misleading, as we associate it with parachuting capsules using the water to cushion the final bit of deceleration. This isn't what happened here. Starship actually hovered with zero velocity relative to the ocean. Objective met, the engines then shut off.
Had there been a structure in place, it wouldn't have toppled over.
I didn't mean to doubt your chronology, but my 1980s seemed to me (and my likely ignorance) to be a bit early for wireless mice and keyboards. So, idle curiosity engaged I spent ten minutes trying to find "what was first wireless keyboard" and "when was first wireless computer mouse" etc, and I've found the internet is (surprisingly) useless on this front.
One source says Logitech made a IR wireless mouse in 1984 and its first RF wireless mouse in 1991. Which isn't definitive, of course.
Additional reason the unauthorised WiFi may be frowned upon:
1, The unauthorised WiFi would deprive the uplink of bandwidth for official purposes
2, Crew might send information about the boat that might be use to adversaries. Eg, a dismantled gun turret in the background of a photo of me and my pals I emailed to my mum.
'Ceramic' bicycle rims are PVD - Physical Vapour Deposition, a process in a vacuum which condenses molecules onto the work piece.
This ASUS princess sounds more akin to Hard Anodisation, which you might have seen on some bicycle chainsets back in the day. However, there might be some extra chemistry going on, I can't tell from their vague description.
The concept of 'jaywalking' was invented in the USA in the 1920s by automobile clubs and manufacturers to designate roads as a place for cars and not other road users. One PR tactic was a song to suggest that pedestrians who didn't give way to cars were merely unsophisticated country yokels.
The damage that cars have done to Americans (46,000 road deaths on US roads in 2022) and American communities is just staggering.
Meanwhile, back in the land of the free (rural England), coppers won't arrest you if you risk damaging a large truck with your fragile body by crossing a road where you want to.
Google 'Irradiated hands':
Injuries common in earliest days of X-rays. Slow onset (over years or decades) radiation injuries to the hands of dentists and surgeons up until around 1960, by x-ray or fluoroscopy operation.
Horrible series of images of a hand that has been exposed to 50Sv becoming a stump over six months.
We don't know how powerful an industrial x-ray machine is compared to those used historically in medicine, but we assume much more powerful in order to bring on symptoms within days rather than years.
An increasing number of humans are having difficulty driving round the single lane country roads round here. They don't know how to reverse, they don't know where the passing places are, they don't want to risk the meerest hedge scratch on their shiny hire purchase car.
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