Posts by Dave 126 10657 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
Mankind is not only contemplating a landing, but is aiming to smash/drill/melt through the ice to place a probe in Europa's oceans.
It's one of the missions being used to justify the SLS. Only yesterday Boeing put a website comparing their yet-non existent rocket to Musk's demonstrated Falcon Heavy. For some reason aren't comparing their SLS to Musk's similarly not-yet existent Big Falcon Rocket.
If you can setup the mechanical side of things (reels and a motor), you could read in punched paper tape using a webcam and some software. Or perhaps you could dismantle a scanner and mate the parts to an Arduino.
A friend of mine has a Player Piano, which still plays back 'software' laid down in the 1930s (Fats Waller songs). If you visit a steam fair, you may see a steam orchestra playing even older punched card music.
During WWII, Hollywood star Hedy Lamar invented a frequency-hopping mechanism for controlling torpedos (so the signal couldn't be jammed by the enemy) based on a minuturised Player Piano mechanism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr
A couple of engineers, when facing a measurement problem in designing the RR Olympus engines for Concorde solved that problem. They spun their solution, a touch probe, out into a company called Renishaw (a sponsor of the Filton Aerospace museum) , whose measurement equipment is today used in the precise placement of electronic components (Foxconn, Samsung et al), as well checking aerospace components, neurology and other fields. Their logo can be seen at 5 minutes into the official iPhone 5 video - it's the ruby-tipped touch probe checking the case chamfers after diamond cutting.
http://www.renishaw.com/en/concorde-completes-final-journey-to-new-gbps19m-home--40636
An upcoming mission to Mars will include a drilling rig... around 2 metres deep, if memory serves. There's more info on the latest episode of The Sky at Night, which is dedicated to Mars.
Shaped charges use a jet of plasma pushing once solid material out of the way like it were liquid... it'd dig you a nice hole for sure, but 1, it'd damage your sample, and 2, you're still left with the problem of getting your sample out of the hole.
For bridges and other buildings, a safety factor of around 3 is common, for airliners where just adding more material would quickly make them uneconomical to fly a factor of 1.5 (150%) is used. Given a Mars mission has more constraints in common with an aeroplane than it does a bridge 120% sounds about right. Remember, the calculations are taking into account worse case scenarios and erring on the side of caution to arrive at a figure, and then this figure is multiplied by 1.2.
A device, yes, but it's not a 'phone' as the Gemini is. The cellular iPads can't make normal phone calls, even with a valid SIM (either it's embedded SIM, a programmable Apple SIM or a normal SIM). Well, okay, the cellular iPad hardware is a 'phone' - and it can make emergency calls if needs be without a SIM as all other phones can - but iOS won't let it be a phone you can use normally.
What the iPad can do, voice-wise, is call other iOS owners using Facetime (or presumably WhatsApp et al). An iPad can also be used to make and take normal calls using an iPhone if it's on the same network. But it won't work as a phone in its own right - unless you need to make an emergency call.
The Pixel photo *processing* can be done on Snapdragon or Exynos SoCs. The extra *processor* in a Pixel 2 can be used to *accelerate* this processing, but it's not required - indeed, as the article notes the extra silicon wasn't enabled when the Pixel 2 was first launched.
https://www.xda-developers.com/google-camera-mod-exynos-portrait-mode-galaxy-s8-s7-note-8/
It's the concept of tiered storage that some people want. iPhobe storage is very fast indeed, which is essential for some video capture modes and lets apps load near instantly. However, it's overkill for music and video libraries - where people will happily swap speed for capacity.
Generally, those phones that make a point of high-resolution slow motion video capture (high end models from Samsung and Sony, for example) will have very fast NAND storage.
Anandtech conduct their own tests of phone storage speed.
Either generation ships or seed ships - where frozen embryos are brought to term in an artificial womb and the resulting children raised by robots. See: The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C Clarke.
Medical and psychological challenges. Presumably a seed ship can be smaller than a generation ship.
In countries with high levels of female education, good healthcare and access to contraception, the birth rate is more or less equal to the death rate (and that's without any top-down policies of the type tried by China or India). This means that the population size is fairly stable. It is an expanding population that has depleted our low hanging resources on Earth.
The evolution of language might depend upon the libraries of books,films and podcasts available onboard - and the appetite of the occupants for watching films set in alien (to them) environments such as cities, grasslands and mountains.
Slang terms will appear and rise and fall out of fashion - as they always do.
@Halcin
Whilst your broad point is a very important one, your opening paragraph about us not empathising with people 50 years ago might not be best argument for your case.
In human history, a lot of people have lived their lives in the same fashion as their great grandparents. Technological and social change tends to occur in fits and starts. We are living through such changes, just as our great grandparents did, but this is not true of all people who have lived.
Hehe, I was sitting in with an old boy with some Voigt single driver speakers, and a younger lad who was creating a cutting list to commission a carpenter so he could make his own. I pointed out to him that many timber yards will have a CNC router, and that the cutting services only add about 20% to the cost of the sheet material* - he was delighted! If you talk with the timber yard, they can even an angled cutting tool so your pieces have mitre edges. (I was quoted £100/h for their CNC router, but it's big solid and thus fast machine, individual sheets don't take long)
> Streaming is a young person's game. The over 50s have no interest
My dad streams over Spotify, I don't. He also has a lot of CDs, most of which he systematically copied over to his Brennan*. He listens to Radio 3 over FM a lot. If he hears a track he loves, he looks at the BBC website for that show, ticks the track he wants, and the BBC website generates a playlist that can be exported to Spotify.
Another over fifties family member with more money had some Bose jukebox multiroom system, but these days uses some iPhone and Sonos setup.
Don't forget that many over fifties have money to spare!
*A small device containing a laptop CD drive, HDD and amp. CDs placed in are automatically ripped, with track titles taken from its internal database. It's not connected to anything except speakers. It's a nice machine, but hard to recommend to tech literate Reg readers. The man who made it used to work for Sinclair Research and for Atari.
Unlike many items from Amazon which can be popped through a letterbox ( books, memory cards, cables etc) food needs to be put away in a fridge - the recipient needs to be present. This means that the supermarket delivery service is set up for delivering outside of business hours, dropping off to multiple recipients on a route.
> Indeed. This push for "no bezels" is not desirable. It's the exact opposite of desirable.
Eh? You can restore bezels by sticking your phone in a case. Having very slim bezels on a phone means that it can still be protected fron drop damage without messing the ergonomics up too much. I can't see the downside.
Lots of phones are going to have notches, especially the Chinese ones. Really, I don't get the fuss - on an OLED screen the black status bar is indistinguishable from the bezel anyway. Most people most of the time don't have an entire stutus bar full of icons, leaving a black areas in the middle. Why not stick the camera and earpiece there?
Phones are getting taller (2:1 is becoming very common) to allow users to read more text with less scrolling (the upper limit on the width of the phone being constrained by hand size), so the whole notched area of the screen is beyond that covered by the common 16:9 aspect ratio for video, never mind the 4:3 output of the phone's own camera.
I just haven't read anyone make the case for the downsides of a notch other than aesthetics - which are a function of the OS and software (Apple made a deliberate decision to highlight the notch, not every version of Android does). Again, OLED screens allow the notch to be invisible when just showing the status bar.
An interesting article about lasers, specifically the challenges in cutting OLED substrates. Notches don't really add to the difficulty, since serious engineering challenges had to be overcome just to produce high doing OLEDs at smartphone sizes:
https://www.industrial-lasers.com/articles/2018/03/manufacturing-challenges-in-laser-cutting-oled-displays.html
I'm much the same. I got a Galaxy S8 for around £500 due to then upcoming release of the S9. I guess that Samsung initially sold enough S8s at full price that they could afford to discount it before launching its successor. Other than the S9's potential future-proofing of Project Treble, I'm not missing that much - certainly not £300 worth of difference.
> Sorry, but that's just a racket and should be a criminal offence.
I dunno, my friend knowingly bought a Ninetendo Switch for the sole purpose of playing a handful of 1st party Nintendo games, starting with Zelda and then probably Mario and Mario Kart. He's very happy with his informed choice.
Undermining a console's defences to run emulators and such, well, that's what his his PS2 and and PSP are for.
> Scratch Earth-killer asteroid off your list of existential threats
An existential threat is a threat to the existence of humanity, not merely a threat to the existence of Dave. I might have another five decades left to me, but hopefully humanity will be around for far longer - so there's plenty of scope for the orbit of a bloody great space rock to become disturbed.
@Leed D
It is proven, in the same way as a mathematical thereom can be proven. Under its design, a buggy app can't be used to gain further access into the system. Nor are Apple the only customers for SEL4 - DARPA develop with it too:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/formal-verification-creates-hacker-proof-code-20160920/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family#High_assurance:_seL4
> Imagine what Steve Jobs would have done to that guy.
The announcement of the first iPhone was said be a scary time for some engineers - it was touch and go that it would make it through the presentation without crashing.
Still, I seem to remember a technical issue during a Jobs keynote that he handled well - I can't imagine him not having practiced such a response.
> An engineer stands almost motionless over a nearby wide-format inkjet
That's a *technician*, not an engineer. If we want more people to use their brains in society, then respecting the rank of engineer is not a bad place to start.
Countries like Germany properly recognise titles such as Engineer or Brewmaster as important - just as we do medical doctors - and not the sort of thing you grasp after a day's training.
Cheers!
With this Moto Mod phone you can snap a battery pack on the back. Not only does this mean you can carry spare batteries, but also your phone's internal battery isn't subject to as many charge / discharge cycles.
People should be aware that being in remote places - skiing, hillwalking - with poor signal will deplete their phone battery very quickly unless they they turn off 3G/4G. This can result in them not having enough juice for an emergency call. Using GPS too is an additional power drain.
> But it seems odd that a phone sold on its unique quality of a resilient screen needs some extra help like this.
Ain't physics a rascal, eh? Generally, things that are tough are not hard, and hard things are not tough. You gotta make a choice, I'm afraid. Motorola's engineers are just working with what the universe has handed them.
I'd recommend looking through forums to see how this phone performs with a toughened glass screen protector - they can sometimes have an adverse effect upon the screen's touch sensitivity. A toughnened glass protector will still likely break at some point if dropped, but cheaper to replace than a scratched phone screen.
Most phones that support wireless charging support use the same flavour of tech these days.
Failing that, USB C offers power plus video out plus USB peripherals.
Not sure why you want to run Windows/Chrome from your phone... maybe you're best off getting a headless fag-packet sized computer, either ARM or Intel ('Compute Stick'). Either way, they cost less than a midrange phone.
Samsung DEX offers a desktop environment with some mouse and keyboard optimised Android apps, including a browser and Office 365. The docking hardware is standard (it works for other USB C devices such as laptops and Nintendo Switch). A review and discussion of the setup is on the Reg. 3rd party docks are £20.
'Orient as a verb means to "find direction" or "give direction." The noun form of this kind of orienting is orientation.
Sometimes people in their speech will form an imagined verb from orientation and say orientate. At best, orientate is a back-formation used humorously to make the speaker sound pompous. The correct word is the verb orient.'
- http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000245.htm
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