Posts by FlippingGerman 141 publicly visible posts • joined 9 May 2016
I really want these things to do well, mostly because of the battery life improvements - and extra competition doesn't hurt either. But Qualcomm and Microsoft together seem to be doing their best to stop the current attempt and Windows on ARM from getting all that far - crappy developer support being the biggest issue. They even had Apple's example to learn from, although without the benefits of a dictatorial (in the original sense) ecosystem.
Something I do with my computers is disable the power button in Windows (set as "do nothing"). I shut down in software, but I did that anyway. A laptop I would sleep by closing, if you're willing to trust "modern standby" not to cook it. Press and hold will still force a shutdown for emergencies.
"Full-auto" handguns in particular are fairly pointless; even the specialist police forces and military units don't seem to have a use for them. It wouldn't surprise me if they're *less* effective at hitting a target than a normal one - perhaps the DoJ ought to be encouraging them?!
It is inherently difficult to restrict such devices; automatic firearms often have even simpler mechanisms than semi-autos. 3D printing certainly lowers the bar for entry for making these things - far easier and cheaper than learning to become a machinist.
One of the few genuinely really useful consumer machine-learning things I've seen is RTX Voice. It's noise-cancelling for your microphone (i.e. calls) that runs on your graphics card, and it's bloody good. Getting that working on more efficient, less general-purpose hardware would make it useful in laptops, where you're more likely to actually be doing such calls and where the probably rather high power consumption is less of an issue.
"AI", which isn't (machine learning is a much better term), really does have uses. Sadly the hype is absolutely awful and people (well, businesses) are going crazy about things no one wants or that aren't even specified - like the Copilot+ (why plus?) PCs.
I'm more pissed off that "Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows" turned out to be false advertising. I paid for the copy on my desktop - it came on a USB drive in a shiny box! - but support has not been as long-lived as I'd like, despite the hardware being more capable than the majority of computers on desks.
I've recently fallen in love with the Zeros - I've gone from 0 to 6 in about two months... - because they're cheap, small, can do all the electronics stuff (cameras included) and generally fast *enough*.
If I were buying a new proper Pi for electronics it would at most be a 4; I doubt I would need more computing power than that provides, and wouldn't feel like spending the extra (and needing a heatsink) on a Pi 5. Perhaps for server-like applications they have a place, but the high-end ones with added extras are comparable in cost to a cheap mini-pc and much less powerful - less RAM, no storage - and a little thing from Minisforum serves (literally) quite well.
Normal water cooling doesn't use much water at all; you just use it to transfer the heat away from the hot bits efficiently to somewhere you can easily cool it, like radiator.
Do datacentres not do that? Are they just piping it straight back out again, because it's easier and cheaper? Or perhaps they *do* in fact reuse it, but the increase in datacentre water cooling just means more use in general.
More to come - power densities are going up and up, and water cooling seems to be the only way to deal with it - c.f. Nvidia Blackwell racks that use a mind-boggling 120kW.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/21/nvidia_dgx_gb200_nvk72/
I had this issue at work recently as the person most likely to solve computer problems. I actually did manage to convince an old Mac to go to a newer - not current, it’s about 12 years old - version and then restore everything. It required fully wiping and reformatting it, then updating the “to” Mac.
It was certainly harder than I wanted and even expected, given how easy TM is to set up.
I’ve never had to do the same to Windows; I don’t imagine that’s great fun either.
Reviews of the new ARM laptops have mostly been pretty happy - performance in general decent enough and battery life is better than x86.
Then there’s this article, and notably a video from Level1Techs that points out that sure, the above is true, but the user experience is somewhat crappy - again - and MS really isn’t doing enough to support developers in changing that.
Contrast Apple’s transition to ARM on Macs, where they had a clearly defined transition period and lots of support, and things worked pretty damn well by the time any users bought anything.
Separately, I’ve been wondering how well Qualcomm is going to support here chips. They famously aren’t great for long term support of Android SoCs; have they committed to doing better here? Maybe it’s just not an issue for reasons I don’t understand, or maybe these laptops will stop getting updates after three years for no apparent reason.
Or, presumably, sit, if you lack the ability to stand. Not that I wish to imply that only those requiring wheelchairs are disabled.
I’m being silly but the example in the article make about as much sense to me as this - if you take away everything but literal language then you destroy a languages character.
If you look at Przewodow on a map, it's plausible that a missile could alunch from within Ukraine, be on course to intercept a missile inbound from Russia (or more likely Belarus), miss, and fall into Poland. Last-minute terminal manoeuvring in particular could suddenly throw its course westward.
I was leaning very heavily towards replacing my current phone with an iPhone. I'm now leaning so far the other way that I have a concussion.
This all makes me very sad. Just when I was starting to trust that actually, maybe Tim Apple really cared, bam, only joking, we're gonna check through your private stuff to make sure you're not a paedo.
Their adverts are inane, "um I'm in a forest, I don't know where I am". If your phone knows where you are THEN USE BLOODY GOOGLE MAPS! Either get coordinates (heard of those?) or send someone a fucking Google link, it's brilliant, you can then go straight to directions!
Fuckers. Stupid solution for a solved problem for stupid people.
"harder for visually impaired people to interact with Dell's platforms than it is for sighted users" - well, yes. Being visually impaired makes things harder, that's why it's classed as a disability, so I'm not sure why he bothered saying this.
But they have a legal and social responsibility to make their site usable for visually impaired people too, so I wish him the best of luck.
That said, Dell's website is simply hard to use in general, and I'm pretty sure that's at least partly by design. And ever since LinusTechTips recent video, where they try to buy a PC and are actually scammed by their sales team, I've been pretty unimpressed by Dell.
They really shouldn't use the "unlimited term" - if you can't handle the extreme users, you're not really offering it.
I use Backblaze, which unfortunately uses the same word, and I'm at about 2TB, which is unlikely to grow. Decent company, it seems, but I'd quite like them to stop saying that. I wonder if saying "up to 5TB" makes people want the ability to pay less for less storage?
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