Posts by Dave 126

Microsoft's new Surface laptop defeats teardown – with glue

Re: Does Microsoft offer an exchange program too?

Why would you throw it away instead of taking it back to the shop?

Apple et all aren't incentivised in any way to make a user-repairable device, but they are incentivised to make a more easily recyclable device (by statute in the EU and some US states). Whilst Reg readers prefer screws to glue, recycling is easier if you can just dissemble products in an oven before separating the nasties in the screen and motherboard (bulkier plastic and metal parts are separated from each other after shredding, but it's the rare or dangerous stuff in the screen and motherboard that causes worry). That's just the way it is - feel free to read up on it, if only out of courtesy to professionals in a discipline other than yours.

The repairability of a laptop has to be weighed up against its reliability in the first place, how long it will be actively used, how likely someone will be to actually repair it instead of just taking back to the shop under warranty, how easy it is to recycle etc. The only time a user has to repair a laptop is if it fails after the 3 year warranty period but before it so outdated as to be no longer useful - this becomes such a small factor that recyclability, reliability and useful function are given priority.

If you want to save the planet, the best laptop to buy is one from the most reliable manufacturers - you can Google who that is (judged by a range of metrics) for yourselves - and to use it for a long time.

Re: Add it to the pile of coal.

Around 25mph, they sound like tractors, are relatively expensive and are nicknamed 'cars for the blind' - none of which a French teenager wants. However, the French do let teenagers with L plates carry their girlfriend on the back of scooters, making rural life that bit easier for them!

Recycling difficult with screws

Sorry, link above should be:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0308/p13s02-sten.html

Bloody Google AMP keeps hijacking my search results.

Re: Recycling also difficult

Glued products are EASIER to recycle come end-of-life, because they don't require the labour involved in unscrewing a dozen bolts per machine. Instead, they can be batch processed in a low-temperature oven before the component parts are sorted.

The key is to move away from "fast and nasty" designs that use too many clips and fasteners and move toward products that are easily disassembled in bulk, says Joseph Chiodo, chief executive of Active Disassembly Research, "The more robust we make these products, the less expensive they are to recycle."

- https://www.google.co.uk/amp/www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/amphtml/2007/0308/p13s02-sten.html

Re: That's Surface crossed off my Christmas list, then!

The MS Surface Laptop isn't a tablet, it's a laptop. The clue is in the name.

It has a 3:2 screen, so other than Apple MacBooks (16:10) it's about your only choice if you don't get on well with 16:9 displays.

Insert coin: Atari retro console is coming back

Re: F*ck Atari

The Atari ST usually had good ports of Amiga games (from Sensible Software, Bitmap Brothers, Codemasters, Psygnosis amongst others), though the usually Amiga got them first. However, the Atari had MIDI ports built in, so lots of fun with keyboards, guitars and GM modules. As such it was usually found in the homes of your schoolmates whose dads left a strange herbal smell about the place.

What you describe is not dissimilar to a Steam Box, and the idea of a Steam Box hasn't been a wild success even with Steam being a huge presence in PC gaming.

If I go to my local ironmongers, I can buy wood-effect adhesive plastic by the metre and stick it on any PC case I want. For a few quid more, I could buy some real wood veneer and some contact adhesive!

Elon Musk reveals Mars colony rocket capable of bringing pizza joints to the red planet

Re: Carbon

There are other areas of human industry that use a lot of fossil fuels in a very polluting form - cargo ships, for example, use fairly dirty fractions of oil. Technologies exist that can reduce pollution from these sources.

Or indeed an urban network of smoothly concreted walkways, so people can scoot or skateboard efficiently in all weathers, whilst enjoying themselves and keeping fit (thus reducing medical costs as a bonus).

Changes in working patterns (see: autonomous technology) would play a part - if people have more free time they will be in less of a hurry to get places, and might choose to walk (and smell the flowers) instead of drive a car). What Bertrand Russel called 'Active Leisure' is good for the mind, body and soul.

Hence Musk's work on reducing the pollution costs of terrestrial transport - the Hyperloop train using far less energy than an aeroplane yet gets there faster (for some distances, due to its faster acceleration), his battery Gigafactory (which he's said he will open source in time) to reduce the cost of batteries, and Tesla to help popularise electric cars.

Re: So many flaws

> However the very idea is arrogant, elitist, unpractical. We need to make fairer (the USA, less than 13% of world population, consume 75% resources) and better use of this planet

We could do that (and indeed Musk puts effort into reducing the resource and environmental cost of terrestrial transport - Tesla, Gigafactory for batteries, and Hyperloop). But it'll be for nowt if a huge damned asteroid hits our planet.

Re: Plan details how to get 1m humans to Mars

1M-tall humans usually weigh less than 2M-tall humans, thus saving on fuel (and bed linen)!

Re: Old news

Destructive Testing of pressure vessels is fairly routine, so I imagine it was deliberate. If nothing else, the difference between the predicted failure point and the actual one is informative.

Re: Not optimal ...

Moon dust plays merry havoc with machinery - imagine razor sharp fractal-edged sand and you'll be close. It clogs, it abrades and pierces, it settles on solar panels and heat radiators...

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/chinese-missions-to-study-lunar-dust/8425898

Re: Venus is too nasty, Mercury too hot and the moons of Jupiter or Saturn too distant.

> Of course, the distance from Sun means some other energy source [ in Saturns clouds] would be needed

Could we not

just use mirrors to concentrate the weaker sunlight?

Re: Venus is too nasty, Mercury too hot and the moons of Jupiter or Saturn too distant.

> Yebbut, how nasty does Musk think Earth will get to ever make Mars preferable?

A whopping great lump of rock hitting the Earth at a stupidly high speed is not only plausible, but considered nearly inevitable on a species-level time-frame.

Perhaps our nascent ability to move bigger bits of hardware around the solar system might allow us to counter such a threat before it hits our planet, but that still leaves many other threats to human life on Earth.

If one were to list them (okay, nuclear weapons, disease, depleting resources such as fertiliser, uncontrolled technologies etc etc) they might be accused of being all doom and gloom, but the point is that such risks can be addressed with positive action. Well, we might as well try, hadn't we?

Ever wonder why those Apple iPhone updates take so damn long?

Re: They actually respect user's privacy.

Appearing to respect user data - most easily achieved by going some way to actually respecting it - is an important way for Apple to distinguish itself from Android handsets, and thus retain their large margins. Saying that Apple slurp and sell user data in the same way as Google just doesn't make any sense.

Essentially puzzling: Rubin's hype-phone ties up with… Sprint?

Re: Sprint is desperate, the other carriers are not.

Mechanically, the Project Ara was always going to result in a sub-optimal handset, in terms of size and ergonomics (you'd be using physical connectors many times bigger than the actual components that they connect), and not to mention dust ingress and the like. There were also issues such as matching a camera module with a DSP on the SoC to handle its output. An enticing concept, but just that that.

However, lots of people would like to slap on a bigger battery, a specialist camera, a good microphone, a keyboard or a gamepad to their phones - and they already do, via microUSB or Bluetooth - but again, these approaches can be suboptimal (eg placement of USB port). These addons are all supported in Android by the GreyBus standard, but currently the only sane physical connector is sadly proprietary to Motorola.

By contrast, the Essential phone just uses two power pins, and uses a wireless link to connect modules, limiting what the modules can do and presumably using more battery power than a wired link. Motorola's phones have been reasonably well received (even ignoring their Moto Mod connector), and the Moto Mod connector has been supported over a couple of generations of handset (unlike LG's modules) and has even sparked a crowd-funded project to make a Psion-style snap-on keyboard. If Moto can't make their modular system work in the market, what chance does Essential have?

The most popular modular phone was the perhaps the Nokia 6210 - its bottom-mounted docking plates continued into its battery bay, so new features such as Bluetooth could be added by buying a new battery with a Bluetooth chip in it.

Please do not scare the pigeons – they'll crash the network

Newspaper and other printed materials were often used to insulate rooms, pad old furniture and lag pipes... I can't imagine today's online news text resurfacing in a hundred years in such strange places.

Whenever the Reg might feel superior to the Daily Mail, remember that you can't use the Reg to light a campfire, wipe your arse or bulk out some drying boots.

Re: This ain't no shit ...

No poop was found *after* they installed a pigeon trap near their apparatus.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-scientists-confirmed-big-bang-theory-owe-it-all-to-a-pigeon-trap-180949741/

I made a mistake though, it wasn't a dish but a horn-shaped receiver that they were using.

Re: Re-crimp?

A temporary solution is just that. With luck it'll hold til someone with a different toolkit (hammer drill, anchor points, steel support cable and crimps, zip ties etc) can give it some attention.

Self-amalgamating tape is commonly used to waterproof cable junctions. And I've just discovered that if it is lightly wiped with a suitable solvent such as Sticky Label Remover, it works a treat for holding items on dashboards when semi-permenant is what you want. You can use it fashion tool handles, and many other things. A really, really handy thing to keep in your toolkit or car. Sometimes sold as 'leak repair tape'.

Pigeon poo, once described by a team of radio astronomers as a 'white dielectric material' on their telescope dishes. After discounting the effects of this shit, they went on to discover cosmic microwave background radiation, thus giving strong evidence to the big bang theory.

Biologists, I am sure, would have had a different term for it.

Science megablast: Comets may have brought xenon to Earth

Re: Oh thanks, now I'll have bloody Bomb the Bass stuck in my head all day!

You ripped-off Colin the shopkeeper? You bastard!

Re: Oh thanks, now I'll have bloody Bomb the Bass stuck in my head all day!

Well obviously - The PC version never reproduced the soundtrack well!

(Though on PC press F7 instead of Enter at the graphic mode selection screen, and then press i in game to toggle invincibility. Without that, I would never have seen the gorgeous artwork past level 2!)

DeepMind takes a shot at teaching AI to reason with relational networks

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08qy1sl

Desert Island Discs.

"Born in 1976, he was introduced to chess aged four and, by the age of twelve, was the world's second-highest ranked player for his age. With his winnings, he bought himself a PC and taught himself to code. "

Hats off!

One of the guys who founded DeepMind, Demis Hassabis was on Desert Island Discs the other week. It was quite astounding. He chose a Prodigy track to remind himself of how Cambridge had been a "holiday camp" to him - he'd been home schooled to allow him to train as a chess master, but at the age of twelve he had an epiphany that professional chess was a waste of human brain power. He then left home to become the chief coder on Bullfrog's Theme Park game. Therefore, Cambridge was the first time in his life he hadn't been working or training full time, so he partied. He still got a double first, though!

He comes across as a really warm, articulate guy.

Wow.

The harsh reality of Apple's augmented reality toolset ARKit: It's an incredible battery hog

Hehe! I posted such a comment a few years ago, only my implementation involved a fixed projector facing down onto the gaming table, taking input from a Kinect-like device. Not only could it provide special effects, but it could aid in the play - for example marking how far a unit could be moved on one go.

Re: Makes sense

MS's Hololens uses custom chips for scene tracking. Apple announced it will soon be using a GPU of its own design. Apple announces its AR toolkit.

I suspect battery drain will be less of an issue by the time AR comes to consumers.

Re: Improves with age?

Indeed. And let's not forget that Apple will soon be using GPUs of their own design and not those of Imagination Technologies'. When that news was announced, the more informed speculation was that it was because Apple wanted its GPU to do more than just shunt pixels, just as MS's Hololens has custom DSPs.

Apple gives world ... umm ... not much new actually

Apple could make a Surface desktop if they wanted, but they'd rather you use an iPad Pro in tandem with an iMac. For some workflows, it'd be the better solution for the user too (cost notwithstanding).

I'm with Hans - it's odd the article compared a Surface desktop with the upcoming iMac Pro - sitting between their respective releases has been new CPUs from Intel, which also have a bearing on maximum RAM available within a thermal design range. This stuff should be fairly objective and clear cut.

The subjective (or rather harder to quantify objectively) stuff is the ergonomics... One could have a workflow that involves using a stylus and a mouse and keyboard. A case could made for either using a separate tablet for the stylus input (I.e iPad Pro + iMac), or for integrating the stylus input into the desktop (I.e Surface). I suspect that software support (both 3rd party and native OS support a la Continuity) could well be a deciding factor. Other stylus input options are available!

I find these interesting questions. It's a shame to gloss over them just for the sake of oft-repeated snark.

Silicon Graphics' IRIX and Magic Desktop return as Linux desktop

Tangential note re GUIs of yesteryear

You can a quad core 64bit machine running AmigaOS!

http://www.generationamiga.com/2017/03/02/the-upcoming-amigaone-x500040-64bit/

No relation to SGI, I know, other than both systems were used for CGI back in the day.

Sons of IoT: Bikers hack Jeeps in auto theft spree

Re: Are Jeeps that expensive?

If you tried to build a car from its parts catalogue, it would cost you several times the cost of the new vehicle from the dealer. So, dont use the sticker price of a Jeep to estimate the resale value of its parts.

The price charged by manufacturers for replacement parts actually subsidies the price of the new car, because the price of a new bumper or headlight is often paid for by an insurer and thus not considered by a prospective car buyer on the forecourt. One you've bought a car, you're tied to one supplier of parts, much like printers and ink cartridges (okay, okay, I know that by law in the UK car manufacturers can't discriminate against owners who have 3rd party parts fitted by independent garages, but whilst several people make replacement coil springs or starter motors for my car, it is likely that only the original car manufacturer makes suitable headlights or bumpers, due to tooling costs)

Boffins play with the world's most powerful X‑ray gun to shoot molecules

Researching proteins that have gone awry is indeed an aim of this laser technique. Only last Saturday a protein researcher was on ABC's radio Science Show, talking about how his laser wasn't powerful enough but he knew a lab who would let him have a go with theirs: (link to page with MP3)

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/understanding-protein-structure-may-allow-treatment-for-amyloid/8561868

Boffins spot 'faceless fish' in strange alien environment

Re: Faceless alien

Dunno, but the Goblin Shark is pretty damned Giger-esque! It's found off the coast of Japan.

Here's GIF: http://imgur.com/pBGgLvn

Andy Rubin teases next week's launch of Essential phone

GreyBus is a standard that allows Android phones to treat peripheral resources as internal components, akin to how Thunderbolt allows peripheral components to be seen as being on the computer's PCIe bus.

USB Type C is a physical connector that supports various protocols. Thunderbolt is a protocol that has used USB A (Sony), Display Port (Apple and others) and USB C connectors (ditto) over the years.

The only issue (albeit a big issue) with Moto's Mods are that they are proprietary to Moto. Specifically, the physical connector is proprietary, built atop a standard called GreyBus.

USB C isn't as elegant a solution for adding a battery pack, keyboard, IR camera, 3D scanner etc as a magnetic connector on the rear panel of the phone is.

The revolution will not be televised: How Lucas modernised audio in film

Re: Beg your pardon?

Also, if the role of a director is to choose and direct the team on both sides of the camera, then Lucas getting John Williams to score the movie and going to pains to have it reproduced well in cinemas is worthy of credit.

Re: Beg your pardon?

He may have become the merchandising monster you describe him as, but it's wrong to say he was never a good director. American Graffiti, THX 1138 and Episode 4: A New Hope.

Industrial Light & Magic: 40 years of Lucas's pioneering FX-wing

> Sixteen years later, and by the time of The Phantom Menace computers had long become mainstream. The film introduced us to a Star Wars universe almost completely realised using CGI

It looks that way, doesn't it? However, there were a lot of physical effects in Phantom Menace, including huge miniature (yeah, I know) sets. The waterfalls on one planet were actually falling salt.

http://makezine.com/2015/10/07/the-surprising-practical-effects-of-the-star-wars-prequels/

Armstrong's moon-purse set for $4m bid-off

Moon dust - nasty stuff.

I enjoyed the following podcast from the public Australian broadcaster ABC:

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/chinese-missions-to-study-lunar-dust/8425898

"The dust is like fine sand, but with sharp edges. Despite being the biggest environmental hazard, organisers of the Apollo missions took little account of the dust. It was a real problem causing batteries to overheat. It pierced space suits, and clogged equipment. The Chinese have already deployed 3 robotic missions to the Moon. Brian O’Brien, a professor of space science who helped astronauts prepared for the Apollo missions says the Chang’e 3 rover Yutu which landed in 2013 moved 100m on its first day, but hasn’t moved since, due to the effects of lunar dust. Studies of lunar dust will now be a priority for future"

The IT angle is that Prof O'Brien had to dig out his old computer tapes of the data from his lunar experiments cos NASA had lost theirs.

Ur dumped lol: Folk may be able to leave mobile contracts via text

I'm on a SIM-only tariff. When I ran out of data three days before my monthly refresh, I was appalled by EE's top-up pricing.

Whilst leaving them by text is tempting, it takes the fun out of ringing them up and saying "Your top-up rates with no roll over are just customer-hostile. Up my monthly data allowance for the same money or I'm leaving for GifGaf."

Just buy your phones outright, even if you need to use a credit card to do so. It gives you greater consumer protection against the phone vendor (Sales of Goods Act) and gives you greater leverage over the network operator.

Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

I only noticed AMP the other day... and I tend to notice things more if they are irritating. I was commenting in a Reg forum and wished to paste in a link to another news article, but the results returned by Chrome Android weren't behaving as they normally did - I couldn't

find the address bar, let alone copy it. What the heck is going on?! I asked myself in frustration.

Self-driving car devs face 6-month backlog on vital $85,000 LIDAR kit

Yet again somebody here is suggesting that a device should be sold at its bill of materials, whilst wilfully ignoring development costs.

This isn't the only company making Lidar kit, yet its competitors aren't able to drastically undercut its current prices. That observation should cause a thinking person to pause and examine their assumptions before commenting.

DeX Station: Samsung's Windows-killer is ready for prime time

The serious CAD vendors are looking at browser-accessed cloud systems. The ability for several engineers to work on the same documents is of more use to bigger firms than it is to the amateurs and hobbyists, as indeed are the security advantages and document control. Serious CAD was largely mainframe-based until the very late nineties so the above conventions are familiar, and what CAD applications that were on the desktop then were dismissed as being toys.

There will of course be situations where CAD will be essential in areas of no internet, but for the large part engineers will get online - Bob can't design part B until Alex has finalised part A, so Alex has better connect to the company network as he is paid to.

I'd like all tablets to have the ability to be used as dumb monitors. Would be cute to extend a laptop's desktop onto a tablet.

By some definitions, yes. If we looked at 'most tasks done by most users' then browsers cover communication (email et al), organising travel (buying tickets, reserving rooms), chasing deliveries, checking inventories... the list is nearly endless across a wide range of jobs and trades.

CAD is moving to browsers - quickly deployable to users, OS agnostic, modest client hardware requirements, centralised file management for team working, no local files to be stolen, extra processing power on tap. Offline working isn't desirable when other team members need to work to changes you have made and vice versa.

> Wouldn't it be great to have a standardised mechanical form factor and electrical interface for a credit-card sized compute module?

Like Intel's Compute Card? They are trying to sell the idea to TV set vendors, as an easy way for users to upgrade the 'smart' innards. Of course, it is proprietary and not 'standard'. As I understand it, its capabilities are on a par with Intel's HDMI 'Compute Stick'

Re: ORLY?

The idea of using your phone as a desktop is cute, but the small size and low cost of a discrete ARM or X86 computer that plugs into a monitor and keyboard offer some advantages - for starters, you can pick up your phone to make a call, and also you have a redundant device should one develop a fault. Say you lost your phone - you could still use the discrete 'compute stick' to track or remote-wipe your phone.

Vigorous tiny vibrations help our universe swell, say particle boffins

Re: expanding from?

> If so, where is the center of the universe?

Point your right arm to your two o'clock, and just a smidge to the left... now up a bit, a bit more, that's it: about fifty gazillion yards in that direction.