Posts by Baldrickk

Pull! Rocket Lab fires off another potential target as India joins exclusive satellite shooting club

by what?

Apple redesigns wireless AirPower charger to be world's smallest, thinnest, lightest, cheapest, invisible... OK, it doesn't exist anymore

Re: And still putting...

I still use one of those :P

It went in my laptop, which then broke, and so ended up in my desktop instead...

At some point, I'll buy an SSD

icon: looking for my wallet, hoping for some cash.

In the West, we're worried about shooting down drones. In Russia, drones shoot you

Re: Why do I care?

Indeed, something like this you could shove a few in the boot of a car and launch them wherever. something like a Predator, or a little more substantial like a F-16 drone requires an airport, support staff, etc

Re: I've known a few folks ...

That's not a cut, it's a pan.

Camera work could be better.

Re: feasible...

Only if you have a huge supply of bullets that only have mass when loaded into the breach and fired.

Bullets as fuel don't really give a high delta-v.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/21/ by the way

Are you sure you've got a floppy disk stuck in the drive? Or is it 100 lodged in the chassis?

Re: CDs were always noted as sub 5 year lifespan.

Home writeable CDs at least.

Thankfully stamped CDs are not subject to the same degredation, or I wouldn't have a physical music collection at all.

Xiaomi's Mi-too attempt at a pholdable: Not one, but TWO creases of fail

Re: Screen size

I'd be up for a Z-fold, but it would be thick, and I'd probably just use it for watching stuff. But I can stream to my smart TV, so...

UK pr0n viewers plan to circumvent smut-block measures – survey

Re: I sure would

He means that there is no way that he wouldn't circumvent it.

We fought through the crowds to try Oculus's new VR goggles so you don't have to bother (and frankly, you shouldn't)

Re: I can't handle 3D TV

You might actually find VR easier to cope with. For example, with a 3D TV, if your eyes are not level, the two images won't line up and you cannot properly resolve the image. With a VR headset however, that angle is accounted for by shifting the cameras in the 3D space, so it will always line up.

See if you can get someone with a VR set to let you have a go. It may be no better, but you never know until you give it a try.

Re: I used to do this for a living

I found that it was the mustyness of old books that got me, but only while in a moving vehicle. Newer books or electronic devices? no problem.

Re: Been waiting...

Do you not have the same when playing driving games in 2D, from the driver's seat camera?

Though I can see how it could be an increased sense - like with the uncanny valley as faces get more and more human - but with 2D, you get even less feedback/realism

Re: I used to do this for a living

They've come a long way in figuring out just what induces nausea, and what doesn't, and avoid that as much as possible.

There was a lot of experimentation I the early days, and they just didn't get it right.

My first ever vr experience was a occulus dev-kit running a banana boat /pirate ship (swinging theme park ride) simulation.

Impressive, but the input from my eyes in no way matched up with the experience the reset of my body was having.

That made me feel sick after a few swings.

Two tables away was another headset. Same model, but the simulation was of an outdoors space you could walk around using a controller.

Much better, but still didn't line up.

Later demos with roomspace, where it's ME moving within the environment instead of the environment moving around me? No nausea at all.

My sister still feels ill using them (her work uses vr too, but for different things) but I suspect there, it's that the headset isn't set up for her properly, IPD etc

Re: Perhaps I'm being naive...

It really is.

Full honesty here, I'm waiting until the right headset is released before I make the purchase myself (Rift S is NOT it, waiting on the Valve headset, maybe that will be, maybe the Pilax 5K+ once everything that goes with it is ready)

My work does have a number of headsets of different types and despite being a different dept, I've gotten to have a go on each, and I've experienced pretty much all the rest at various events.

And yes, it really is a game changer in terms of immersion.

Let's imagine a stupidly simple environment.

An empty room with a small ball on the floor in front of a sofa.

Standard computer game type environment:

You spawn in, you can move a control stick or WASD to move around. Maybe you can crouch or jump by pressing a button.

Moving a second stock/mouse shifts the view around in the monitor - a stationary window into the world

You look at the ball and press a button to trigger a grab animation to pick up the ball.

You can throw it by aiming at a location and pressing another button.

In VR:

You put on the headset and you are in the room.

You can walk around the room. When you walk, you do so in the game. The room is all around you and you can look up, down, all around at it.

You can lie down on the floor and look under the sofa, by lying down on the floor and looking. You move your arms around and your virtual ones move with them.

To pick up the ball, you bend down, put out your hand and grab it (granted, this is currently by holding a button to hold it, but that will change with Knuckles controllers with full finger tracking that you can let go of and grab as a real object), using the same physical motions you've been issuing since you were a baby.

You can turn your hand over and around to look at the ball from all angles.

To throw it, you pull your hand back and throw it with the same action you would really do (with the button caveat as mentioned before) in real life.

VR gives a sense of presence unlike anything possible with a 2D display.

There is a reason they say to have a clear space, and part of the setup is setting up a boundary, that you are able to see inside the headset when you get close to it. That way you don't just run into a wall or anything else.

Re: Been waiting...

A lot of vr racers are very happy. They already have steering wheels and pedals, so when they put the headset on, they are within that environment, the wheel is in front of them and they can reach out and grab it.

There are pictures all over the internet of a big dark spot on Uranu... Oh no, wait, it's Neptune

Re: Years

One Earth day or one Martian day?

Meet games-streaming Stadia, yet another thing Google will axe in two years

Re: Who the hell would trust this...

Video gets buffered. Games need to be low latency.

You typically don't watch a movie or series more than once. You watch it, you move on to the next thing.

Age of Empires II, a game released in the 90s has an active playerbase and competitive scene. It's an extreme example, but there are reasons to keep playing games that you have already played before. PSNow is ~£20 a month I believe. A game like Forza Horizon 4 is on the higher end of price, at ~£60. If you like racing games, you may very well want to play it for more than 3 months. If so, it's going to cost you more.

There are a number of reasons.

Normal multiplayer games don't have such a large amount of data sent down the wire.

Streaming, there will always be stream-delay - the time taken to encode, send and decode the video is always going to be additional to whatever you have in your local hardware loop.

Fine for some games maybe, but useless for anything that requires quick reactions, where fractions of seconds count.

There is a reason OnLive has gone the way of the Dodo, and I don't actually know anyone using the Sony or NVidia cloud solutions. They are not massively popular.

I know one person who uses NVidia's in-home streaming, and I and a couple of others have played with Steam-link.

Even purely on a local, wired, gigabit network, the additional lag is noticeable - and that's before you leave the LAN.

The knives are out for cloud gaming as Nvidia flashes blade-based box packing 40 RTX GPUs

Re: Hard to say how that flies

Agreed, my Steam-link over a direct 1Gb Cat 5-E connection has noticeable latency. Fine with the right games, and can even play Mirror's edge quite effectively, but driving games? nope. Too much latency, and steering becomes a positive feedback system.

I really can't imagine how bad it can get over the net.

Crysis

It'd still struggle to run Crysis, doesn't matter how much GPU you throw at it. The main issue is the single threaded engine. You need a beefier CPU.

OG Crysis was from back in a time just before we realised that 6-8GHz processors just were not going to fly, and was built with that future in mind.

icon:closest thing to the Crysis helmet icon used for the game (do we need a "but can it run Crysis" icon?)

They're BAAACK: Windows 10 nagware team loads trebuchet with annoying reminders to GTFO Windows 7

Re: Solving the Windows Issues

Linux runs on anything - you just need the correct gcc cross-compiler

On the eve of Patch Tuesday, Microsoft confirms Windows 10 can automatically remove borked updates

Re: flight mode

https://xkcd.com/651/

Hapless engineers leave UK cable landing station gate open, couple of journos waltz right in

Re: Not really secret

Haha, I love how my "you can do it this way" post gets more downvotes than up, but the following rant gets appreciated more.

I wonder if our two dvs are the same people?

Re: Not really secret

https://goo.gl/maps/DbTvADnpK5o would be better, as the /maps/ addresses are only used for maps, but nothing is stopping you from providing a Google Maps link, is there?

Crew Dragon returns to dry land as NASA promises new space station for the Moon

Am I the only one

Who keeps reading "Crew Dragon" as "Dragon Crew" and thinking "but we didn't put anyone in it!"

Re: Lunar Gateway Questions

Well, you'll be wanting the fuel and water regardless. It's more a case of where do you put it, rather than "lets take extra"

Re: Why?

But it would have the highest lift capacity - greater than Falcon Heavy without recovery of any cores (draining them all dry purely for ascent)

Uber driver drove sleeping woman miles away from home to 'up the fare'. Now he's facing years in the clink for kidnapping, fraud

Reason #4567 why I will not get an Uber anywhere.

The complete lack of proper vetting and oversight is appalling.

Freelance devs: Oh, you wanted the app to be secure? The job spec didn't mention that

Re: Security not wanted?

Ewww

'It's like painting with atoms'... Watch how boffins form armies of simple micron-sized bots from a silicon wafer

Re: Have these people never heard of gobblers?

I'm thinking more of generic grey goo.

Same idea as a paperclip maximiser, but on a smaller scale.

FBI warns of SIM-swap scams, IBM finds holes in visitor software, 13-year-old girl charged over JavaScript prank...

And they default to having UPnP turned on by default in a distressingly large number of cases.

Re: 13yo girls' prank pales in comparison to some oldies

I put javascript into my bookmarks sometimes, to create bookmarklets, as a cheap and dirty way of implementing a simple plugin :)

Thought you'd seen everything there is to Ultima Thule? Check this out: IN STEREO!

Re: Magic eye

Me too, I still do.

Am able to view both ways instantly :)

Fantastic

but a little (just a little) tweaking might need to be done to account for the disparity between the two viewing distances. There is enough alignment based ghosting to make my eyes ache a little (and makes them sensitive to the 60hz refresh rate of my monitor)

Edit: the full size cross-eyed one seems to be better aligned - I was looking at the parallel one before...

The fact that we can do this is amazing. It really makes it seem more real than a grainy black and white photo does in 2D.

Sure, we've got a problem but we don't really want to spend any money on the tech guy you're sending to fix it

I can't help but feel instinctively that flying should be more expensive - trains running on the ground are far more mundane, so should be cheaper right?

This isn't helped by my having worked on developing some systems that were destined to be used onboard aircraft, and seeing all the extra features we had to build in for safety etc.

I guess it doesn't help that I rarely travel to places with airports either.

I wonder if similar thinking is behind your predicament?

Meizu ditched hole-free phone because it was 'just the marketing team messing about', not because no one really gave a toss

Hmm. I have a Nexus 7 that could do this.

I'll need to flash a new OS onto it first though. The last official update it got tanked the performance

Re: Deal...

I remember when you didn't have a front facing camera on phones.

I have, somewhere, a little periscope device for using the rear camera as a front facing one - ok it also requires a tool to flip the camera 180 degrees, but it worked fine.

The protector will be weaker, and more likely to crack - but that's a good thing - it means that it breaks instead of your screen in a harsh incident, even if it is more likely to break than your screen alone.

From hard drive to over-heard drive: Boffins convert spinning rust into eavesdropping mic

I know you're listening

Re: using a hard disk's read/write head as a crude sounds generator

Makes me think of Floppotron

Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster

Re: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same

Where's a Doctor?

Uber won't face criminal charges after its robo-car killed woman crossing street

Re: Safety driver?

Hey AZump, you know all those sensors on automated cars. Guess what they're for?

They don't just turn them on when coming up to pedestrian crossings.

Re: Humans

So then UBER is liable for overloading the driver with tasks, to the point that they cannot perform the task that they are there for.

Not to mention that aparrently, they were watching a TV show instead of doing their damn job

Re: The video

Is completely non-representative of the road itself - it's actually a well lit area, as shown by numerous people who took their own dash-cam footage immediately following the incident.

Silent Merc, holy e-car... Mflllwhmmmp! What is that terrible sound?

Epic sax?

youTube or youTube

Re: Missed Option

That said, it's not always the pedestrians in Reading who are the problem! youTube

Linux 5.0 is out except it's really 4.21 because Linus 'ran out of fingers and toes' to count on

What about binary?

Surely he should be using binary? He could get to 31 on the one hand that way.

Official science: Massive asteroids are so difficult to destroy, Bruce Willis wouldn't stand a chance

Best option?

Probably the best idea for dealing with a collision that I've seen is to send a drill up there, mine blocks of the asteroid and shoot it out the rear of the drill.

Basically, use the asteroid itself as "reaction mass" (wrong word, I know) to cause a shift in the orbit, enough to turn a disaster into a near-miss.

Quite how the launching of this rock would be achieved, wasn't really addressed though. Still, it seemed a fairly pragmatic approach.

USB4: Based on Thunderbolt 3. Two times the data rate, at 40Gbps. One fewer space. Zero confusing versions

Re: USB colour coding

USB-mc²?

Ah, this military GPS system looks shoddy but expensive. Shall we try to break it?

Re: Kensington cable lock?

Like most locks, they are a deterrent to the casual thief, not the prepared/dedicated one.