Posts by AIBailey 446 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jul 2014
They could even ship the completed PCB's, the case halves with the screen already installed, and the batteries as seperate parts, pay someone in the US minimum wage to snap it all together, and hey presto, you've earned an "Assembled in the USA" sticker. Everyone wins.
At least until you look behind the curtain and realise that the levers are still being pulled over in China.
Not really.
SOME people now in their 70s and 80s literally invented computers and computing.
Also, people forget things and technology moves on.
Both my parents are in their 80s. My father is a retired chemistry and physics teacher. He used to bring computers home over the holiday period, and so my first introduction to computing was using a RM380 Z, a TRS-80, a Video Genie and a BBC. He taught me to build my first PC, and is still a clever fellow.
However nowadays he's flummoxed by a lot of tech, can't really get the hang of a mobile phone and considers networking to be a black art.
And my mum, while having more success with her phone, can only use a PC if she's following a list of instructions (click here, press this button, chose this menu etc.)
So I'm unclear what your point is, especially why you think the previous comment is any way a generalisation of all elderly people. Unless you're specifically looking to create something to be offended at?
I miss the days when Technic Lego (and the other ranges) worked their wizardry with a comparatively limited stock of infinitely-repurposeable standard parts.
I completely agree. I had the car chassis kit myself, and was always impressed by the fact that the "spark plugs" were actually repurposed taps from Lego kits that featured kitchens!
Betamax was the better format, assuming you were happy with a tape that could only record for an hour, until the Beta I recording mode was dropped.
The vast majority of Beta machines supported only Beta II and Beta III, which were close enough to VHS quality.
The long held myth that Beta was vastly superior to VHS is based on the original technical specifications. The visual advantage that original Beta spec offered came at the price of short recording time. Once Sony moved to the slower tape speed of Beta II (and removed the function to record in Beta I from their machines), that visual advantage was lost.
It seems clear that 99% of the people that go on about how much better Beta was, haven't actually used one.
Quickest fix : in the late 90's I was asked to go and look at the laptop of one of our MD's. He'd been in Hong Kong for the past week (on work) and hadn't been able to get any sound from his (Windows 98) laptop for the whole time. This was, of course, urgent.
I won't spoil the story by telling you how I fixed it, though will point out that the laptop in question was (IIRC) a Toshiba Satellite Pro 440. And I'll also point out that on the front edge of said Satellite Pro 400's was a thumbwheel to control the volume.
During Obama's 8 year span, the US military dropped just over 92000 bombs, an average of 11500 per year. In 4 years of Trump rule, the US dropped almost 75000, an average of about 18750 per year.
But please, remind us about how "Trump = peace"?
(taken from Ask The Pilot)
And what do terms like “automatic” and “autopilot” mean anyway? Contrary to what people are led to believe, flying remains very hands-on operation, with tremendous amounts of input from the crew. Our hands might not be steering the airplane directly, as would have been the case in the 1930s, but almost everything the airplane does is commanded, one way or the other, by the pilots. The automation only does what we tell it to do.
...
People would be surprised at how busy a cockpit can become, on even the most routine flight, and with all of the automation running. Tasks ebb and flow, and granted there are stretches of low workload during which, to the nonpilot observer, it would seem that very little requires the crew’s attention. But there also are periods of very high workload, to the point where both pilots can become task-saturated.
...
Fewer than one percent of landings are performed automatically, and the fine print of setting up and managing one of these landings is something I could spend pages trying to explain. If it were as easy as pressing a button, I wouldn’t need to practice them every year in the simulator or review those highlighted tabs in my manuals. In a lot of respects, automatic landings are more work-intensive than those performed by hand.
And if you’re wondering: a full 100 percent of takeoffs are manual. There is no such thing as an automatic takeoff anywhere in commercial aviation.
Plenty of people simply have no idea of what "autopilot" really means.
Then came the day he must have restarted it & it was no longer on the network - Three years later, when I left with still no clue as to it's location, or indeed how the union rep got his very important files off the locked down NT4 machine with no USB access.
From some of the experiences that I had doing IT support, there would still be a few ways of getting data off that machine.
Depending on the configuration, there could be a SCSI card in there, so an external CD burner or Zip drive could be an option. There may even have been an internal CD burner, or he could have used a parallel port Zip drive.
Hell, even good old floppies were still viable in the days of NT4. Even dozens of word documents could fit on a handful of disks.
If you worked in an IT department of any decent size, you'd probably be using a Windows 95 volume licencing disc - no licence key needed. I remember we used to get regular deliveries from Microsoft, dozens of disks in burgundy sleeves, with everything from the current OS installers (95, 98, NT and XP etc) and the Office suites.
Also, from memory, Windows 95's idea of multiple user accounts on the same machine was pointless, as hitting escape on the sign-in screen would just take you straight in anyway.
I used PoV (Persistence of Vision) on my Atari ST to render an example file as a 640x480 background image for my dad to use on his PC.
It took all night and much of the following morning, but I was rewarded with a ~900KB file on my hard drive.
Unfortunately, the file was too large to fit on a floppy disk, and also too big to zip down (not enough memory on my 1MB ST once GEM and a zip program were loaded) so I've no idea what it eventually looked like...
...but I'd actually like to see a decent, no-frills reliable T9 keyboard for Android.
My fat thumbs mean that I definitely rely a lot on auto correction and word prediction, but the muscle memory that I built up working my way through the ranks of early non-smart phones means that a T9 keyboard is still probably the fastest way for me to write a message.
...and this is a perfect demonstration of just how stupid the patent system is, especially in the US.*
Remember when patents used to be to protect ideas that were genuinely interesting, innovative or simply completely unlike anything that had gone before.
I don't have any particular opinion on either Sonos or Google in this instance, but the fact that someone can patent changing volumes across multiple devices is nonsense.
* - Other countries may have equally daft patent systems, I genuinely don't know.
You're right. In the very early 80's, the issue facing computing wasn't so much size as cost.
By the time the Spectrum launched, the Atari 8-bit line had been around for 2.5 years, the TRS-80 Color Computer for 18 months, the VIC-20 for a year or so, and other too.
All of those offered colour graphics, some quite limited, but in the case of the Atari, the palette went up to 256 colours, They also offered multiple sound channels.
On paper, they all blew the ZX80/81 away, and should have been significant rivals to the Spectrum. Some (especially the Atari) were theoretically in a different league altogether.
But the issue they had was cost. All of the competitors represented a massive outlay, whereas the Spectrum, whilst not exactly launching at pocket money prices, was something that could be put on a Christmas list.
This was Clive's expertise. He never strived to make the best systems full stop, but he did know how to make a good system on a budget.
Not even that.
NS-16 reached an altitude of just over 65 miles, a quarter of the 260-ish miles needed to reach the ISS.
Crucially, however, the maximum velocity that New Shepherd reached whilst on that jaunt was around 2200 miles per hour, far short of the ~17,000 miles per hour needed to attain orbit.
Granted, BO are taking incremental steps towards full orbital space flight, but when you consider that back in the early 1960's NASA was flying the X-15 faster and higher than Bezos has been, and the fact that SpaceX have already demonstrated they have the speed and the altitude to do "real space" rather than just pretending, the gulf between Blue Origin and SpaceX becomes vast.
Hmm.
SpaceX : Regular launches, placing satellites into LEO, launched an object into heliocentric orbit, ferrying astronauts to the ISS, safe return to earth of said astronauts.
Blue Origin : Single launch on ballistic trajectory, just cleared the Karman Line, total flight time of just over 10 minutes, of which I guess 1 minute of that was technically "in space".
Whilst neither company have experience of lunar missions, one has a proven record of putting "things" into space (both human and mechanical), the other is just a jumped up fairground ride.
It's no surprise where NASA felt more comfortable putting their money, regardless of the differing bid prices.
Sadly, it's also no surprise that the loser reaches first for their cheque book, then when that's rebuffed, they reach for their lawyers.
VB6 was the only programming tool I had to hand many years ago, when I found, abandoned in the corner of one of out IT store rooms, a receiver to pick up the time signal transmitted from Rugby. It was unused simply because it only had a support driver for Netware, and we already had time sync on the Netware network provided from another source. I think there was a Windows driver available, but at a fairly hefty cost.
The instruction manual included details of the protocol it used, and so using VB6 I knocked together a program to read the stream from the serial port and set the system time on a Windows NT Lotus Notes admin server at regular intervals (I can't remember if it was overnight or weekly), meaning that our email system got proper synchronisation*
VB might not have been a great system, and my program was a bit of a cludge, I guess, but it worked.
* - I should say "mostly proper synchronisation", as despite the fact that there were CRC checks in order to ensure that the time signal was correct, I arrived to work one morning to find people were complaining that many of their emails he become unread, and new emails were appearing out of sequence. I assume that in some circumstances it was possible that the signal noise to occasionally flip enough bits so that the time signal and CRC value were both wrong but matching, and the server date and time had changed to something several years earlier. I fixed this by requiring the program to validate three successive time messages before making any clock changes.
My first car was a Lada Niva (the 4x4) that was handed down from my Dad.
It was almost bulletproof - it once went through a stone wall in Derbyshire without so much as a scratch, and always started straight away on even the coldest morning.
The thing that always amused me most was that, should the starter motor ever fail, there was a hole in the front bumper to allow the use of a starting handle.
The only keyboard I've ever lusted after - Optimus Concept
Later Commodore Amiga's suffer badly with capacitor leakage. The A600 and A1200 were the first Commodore computers to use surface mount components, and the capacitors are more than happy to try and eat away the circuit board from within.
The earlier Amiga's are largely safe, due to having through-hole capacitors instead that seem to hold up much better.
Apart from the A500+, which included a Varta rechargeable cell to provide power to a clock circuit, and also has something of an electrolyte incontinence problem.
Bah, a plague on both your houses.
To be fair, I expect that the percentage of people that regularly jailbreak Apple devices is barely a blip on the radar for Apple.
Whilst your suggestion would/could result in several TLA's (or FLA's in the case of the UK) getting access to some i-devices, I don't think in the grand scheme it would be many.
Absolutely.
I don't know what Huawei's plans are for HarmonyOS, but if they licence it freely to other manufacturers then it might gain traction.
OTOH, with AOSP also available, HarmonyOS may well end up as just another minor OS of interest with a tiny market share compared to Android (See Fire OS, Tizen, Sailfish OS etc.)
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