Posts by Wenlocke 40 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2018
The main thing to note there is that The Tango-Adjacent Ex-President just split out those capabilities and responsibilities from the Air Force, and gave them the new outfits, funky letterheads, and overly masculine verbiage. Its most likely the same stuff was being pulled under the auspices of the USAF, without all the fanfare.
The sponsorship ones can get out of hand though.
For example, thanks to their astroturfing of tons every niche hobby and gamer-related channel going, you couldn't pay me enough to play Raid: Shadow Legends. It might be the Best Game Ever, but the whole thing is waaaay oversaturated. Yeah sure, I might consider someone's opinion valid, but when 20 or 30 people I watch are all spouting the same thing with a few of the words swapped round, I tend to be skeptical.
I recognise that for some small content creators, these people pay good dollar so its a reasonable survival tactic, given how crap YT revenues have become, but it just means that any merits the game may have had have been obliterated by the tide of astroturfing.
That whole "employment gap" thing has always annoyed me tremendously. Because the implication is that unless you were productive pretty much continuously, then you're useless. It also buys into the whole "being unemployed is a failure of character" take that we get from, well, mainly people whose livelihood depends on there being people to work for peanuts..
I can kind of see a bit of suspicion in jobs where they do heavy vetting (does this person applying for a job in the security services have a nice large year off where they spent some time living somewhere suspicious? Might want to look at that,) but really, there's very little excuse for it outside of security and financial arenas.
We remarked on this. I have a suspicion that it's largely due to how we expect space launches to go, since the vast majority of public perception is based on film of either Saturn V or the shuttle.
Saturn V was 50odd years ago, so rocket tech has improved, and also stonkingly heavy (so takes more oomph to get going.)
The Shuttle had to balance out different start up procedures and different axes of thrust between the main engines and the SRB's, each of which had entirely different thrust characteristics. The whole stack was also stonkingly heavy.
There's footage of the Falcon Heavy launch where it takes a little longer between light-off and lift (albeit not much), but that involves the same engine types in the same plane so it's a lot simpler to work with.
While I'm no means an expert, and you could probably find better explanations, it does just seem to be mostly down to the much lower weight and the much simpler, but more advanced engine setup and layout meaning it can go from zero to launch thrust much faster.
The main selling point here, really, is the things the folding make possible. Spec-wise, it's more in the wheelhouse of the S10 than the S20 (which, as I have mentioned elsewhere, to me feels like a whole load of power searching for a purpose as I don't play high end phone games, and 5G is unlikely to be available in many of the places I need to go in the next two years.)
A phone with a screen I can watch movies on and with that size when closed for stowage? That's an interesting proposition, as long as the hardware holds up.
Also, a customer service bod at Vodafone claims they'll be opening this up for preorder later this month. YMMV.
....is it more use to me than my S9+?
So far, I have to say, it doesn't look like any of my use cases will be significantly improved over my imminently out of contract current slab. Even 5G doesn't impress me as I don't tend to go places that currently or soon will have it. So pending something really spectacular, that's about it down this line.
Now the Z Fold? That looks like something that I might actually find useful, if it proves durable enough, and that's largely because of the form factor. Travel and commuting, I find that I end up shuffling my phone around various pockets as I move, due to the size of the slab, and a phone that fits into that small package sounds like something I'd be interested in. the specs appear to be roughly equivalent to last years top tier, which is more than plenty for me. It will mostly depend on the battery life at that point. (or really push the boat out and wait until they release the rumoured Fold 2)
Our school had the best excuse for losing coursework. After the end of term but before the GCSE and A Level art work were due to be sent off to be graded, half the school got burnt down by some scrote. As I recall, they went by mock results for those subjects that year.
Clearly the NSA, despite being surveillance gurus, have never heard of the Streisand Effect
or.... maybe they have.
Tinfoil Underpants time, but maybe that's exactly what they want. They know people will buy it, they go after it to make it a huge seller... and they quietly net the proceeds. Okay, so it's peanuts in all likelihood, in the grand scheme of their budget, but someone somewhere has to be on the end of the slush fund.
There are other factors in the "lectric car shenanigans" area that cause problems.
"Charge overnight at home" is one of those fun ones that works very well, if you are lucky enough to live in a home, where because you have a drive, or because your street is big enough, you can park your leaf or whatever directly outside. In a lot of older towns (especially with a lot of terracing or other dense housing) it is frequently impossible to park your car directly outside your house or close to, so that becomes "how long is my extension cable" or "can I persuade the neighbour it ends up near to run a feed if they haven't already used it?" Urban parking density for housing is an issue as it is, let alone if all of a sudden, everyone needs to get outside their house to charge up their main vehicle.
The still vanishingly small second-hand market for electric vehicles (due to their newness, and other factors) means that the people who will spend a few hundred to a couple of thousand on a car because it's what they can afford simply can't get an electric vehicle at any point in maybe the next 20 years or so. Cutting off their options before new options are ready is going to price people out of driving at all.
I do recall at one point they were looking at fuel-station-swappable battery packs (calor gas cylinder model). You come in, the old pack is taken out of your car, a fresh fully charged one is slotted in, and away you go. The old one is charged again, and someone else gets it later on. Never sure what happened to that concept, unless it fell foul of battery tech problems.
"Urgency - Imposing a deadline on a sale or deal, thereby accelerating user decision-making and purchases."
Sad to say, I'm very well aware this works on me. I mostly blame a childhood where there wasn't as much money available as the other people in my local friends group, and usually the translation of "we'll go away and think about it" was a polite fiction for "we can't afford it, so we'll make our excuses and leave." The over-use of that particular euphemism left me heavily susceptible to "if you wait, you'll never get it."
Is when you've just finished fixing something tricky and long-winded for a customer, and they respond with "oh, while I've got you, I've got this other problem...."
Neatly bypassing all that First Line investigation, all the stuff that's designed to filter out crap, and all the stuff that shares jobs around amongst the team on a fair and impartial basis, so you're basically stuck with looking at whatever it is they've been forgetting to tll anyone about for three months.
The problem with edge has never really been the rendering engine itself. It's always been the UI and ancillary bullshit.
As a prime example, for the longest time (I haven't used Edge in yonks so I don't know if they finally changed it) there was this "feature" in edge and IE that would turn phone numbers into clickable links so you could skype people from a web page (or presumably on a winphone, just dial them). You could turn it off in IE's internet options if you didn't want to to do that. Edge, however, didn't listen to those settings, and just did that bit of formatting, whether you liked it or not.
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