There are plenty of novel and exciting uses for 3D printing. This is not one of them. Why? We've had concrete tilt-up construction for a long time now. So they do it with a 3D printer instead of molds, it's still concrete. It will still have problems in seismically active areas.
Oh I don't think twice about opening things, unless it's under warranty. Then I want to make sure that solving one problem doesn't mean losing that warranty, because where there is one design flaw, there are usually many and the Switch is no exception. So when I've tried to return something under warranty and was told "we'll ship you a part", I wanted to be damn sure that installing it won't void the warranty we obviously needed once already.
If that does become an issue, and you have a soldering iron, you can fix that by adding a better antenna to the left controller that isn't going to be blocked by your hand. There's at least one video online showing how to do it. The existing antenna gets blocked by the palm of your hand, which isn't as much of an issue with the right controller because everything is flipped and the antenna is near your fingers instead of your palm.
And immediately lose all warranty coverage because you have now modified the device to fix their design flaw. No, thanks. Unless they give me instructions to do it, in writing, and an authorization code to keep warranty protection, I'm not opening their hardware.
I have received such instructions and authorization to open up other electronic hardware and replace a part from other companies, but somehow I'm not expecting it of Nintendo to authorize such home fixes.
I didn't plan to buy one anyhow, but this is proof positive that Nintendo still has the sense of entitlement leading them to say "you'll take what we give you, and you'll like it". Getting rid of region locks might have been seen as a step to hand some control back to the customer, but refusing to accept that dead pixels are defects and have been considered such for at least ten years now is an admission that they either can't do better, or are honey badgers about what the customer actually thinks. Unreliable connections are defects too, even Apple wasn't able to get away with the "you're holding it wrong" defense for very long.
If they can't do better for technical reasons... well I'm not buying that. They can do better, because other device manufacturers are doing better. If they can't afford to do better, then they really should get out of the hardware market.
If you're hearing impaired do you really want to screw over millions of people who aren't just because you can't access something? I doubt it.
I've encountered people with exactly this attitude. "If you don't make it in a form I can consume, then you can't make it at all." It doesn't matter if it's free, and transcription would cost the creator money. It doesn't matter if it's music without lyrics, they want it fully described. (Frank Zappa famously said "talking about music is like dancing about architecture".) It led to a rather bitter exchange on Quora which eventually led to me picking up "content warnings" for stuff that had been there for months, because the Deafie went through all my old posts and flagged anything that could be considered even mildly disrespectful or in poor taste. That, and similar incidents leading to the suspension and banning of top posters, led me to walk away.
So yes, there really are people who would prefer to deny content to the world just because they can't have it themselves.
If I wanted a Chromebook to run Linux on, I'd just buy a Chromebook and flash the firmware. There's an Xubuntu-derived distro specifically for the purpose, too, GalliumOS.
Wait, did I say I would do that? Let me correct myself. I already have. It runs Windows 10 the majority of the time, but it does have Gallium installed and bootable via rEFInd.
Teenagers swallowing magnets happened because they were using them as fake piercings, not because they were sticking magnets in their mouths for the taste.
Fortunately, Dewar flasks and Thermos bottles weigh very little because they're empty space inside, and also can be left unattended without power for considerable periods of time. The trucks used to shuttle the goods from the warehouse or store to the building being served may be reefers and warmers, but the robots don't need to be. They just won't be in control of the food long enough for a lightweight, insulated package to fail.
As for efficiency of scale, there are two answers to low density: charge a lot, or only deliver on a schedule so entire regions can be served at once. The former is the Pink Dot model, and the latter is the method grocery stores have used for years. The only difference would be using a robot instead of a human to complete the delivery. Getting the model to make money is a solved problem, at least in some areas.
It's the arcology of SimCity 2000 come to life. Get everything you need without ever leaving the building. And it will work for buildings with enough people, though it seems to me it would make more sense to test it out in hotels first. Higher population density, they often have kitchens for room service already, and if people aren't pleased with the service they'll be gone in a fairly short period of time.
For smaller buildings (or less dense ones), perhaps the robots will only be around once or twice a week, and you have to put in your order the day before so they can cover the whole building in one pass, and with one delivery truck.
The main reason is money. Each generation costs billions to develop and produce, and manufacturers are going to make sure they get a return on their investment. These investments stretch back years, and designs have to be made with assumptions about what will be workable at the current process node at the time the chip is ready to produce. That said, not quite all the low hanging fruit has been picked yet. Ryzen could not carry a 50% IPC improvement over the FX if there was nothing left to work with. Maybe this means treating transistors as cheap and power consumption and time as the hurdles, and moving back into a true CISC paradigm. Less microcode, more dedicated logic circuits. There was a very long time when transistors were considered valuable, and designs tried to optimize so that they would all be in use as much of the time as possible. Now we have the reverse problem -- power is dear (on battery-powered devices), heat is a killer, but idle transistors are quite tolerable.
Meanwhile Intel chips away with 5% here, 8% there, and continues to make money hand over fist. Their main motivation has always been to make money, and since they have proven able to do so without amazing leaps, they'll ride the slow train of progress rather than staking the company on a complete overhaul the way AMD is forced to do every five years or so. I'm still sporting a desktop with a 1090T, and this is the first thing AMD has done since 2011 (when I built this) that actually makes me sit up and say "wow, I want that".
My laptop is on the slow side, but I didn't get it for heavy lifting. I don't see (currently, who knows down the line a bit) that AMD has done anything to make me want to change it. Nor has Intel. 5-8% improvement per generation, times four generations, would appeal if I needed the muscle, but I'm rocking a Haswell 1.4 GHz dual-core Celeron. Getting an i3 board (which can be had for about $100) instead would be much more cost-effective than buying new. Heat, noise, and battery life are all pretty well acceptable, even if they have continued to improve since.
Another major reason is that for massive number-crunching tasks, the CPU is no longer the most important part of the system. The GPUs (plural) are, and they continue to advance at a fairly impressive rate because they're several nodes behind. (Those old foundries have to do something.) When (not if) GPUs start hitting the process node wall the way CPUs already have, then they too will start to drag down the pace of improvement.
The only exception is where the consumer deliberately seeks out filters that discard the shitty ninety percent, such as only watching movies endorsed by Roger Ebert. This is not perfect, but man oh man, the troubles he's seen. He watched The Brown Bunny and The Human Centipede so you didn't have to.
I have seen complaints that the battery life is unsatisfactory, and there's a good chance a lot of those people are listening to them loud. Mind you this is not unique to AirPods. Even the headset I had, had an underwhelming battery life when cranked up full throttle. However, batteries have improved in the six years since I had those. At the same time, expectations have gone up. It's one thing to sell something that only lasts three hours at full throttle with a "three to six hours" claim, and another to say "up to N", N being whatever number Marketing wants it to be.
At the same time, adding more surface area in the form of a connection between the two will solve the "losing one AirPod" problem, the synchronization problem (which they have dealt with but it still expends power on the phone side), possibly the reception problem, and allow for a battery that should outlast the charge in the phone. It would also solve, or at least greatly reduce, any distortion problems that might be caused by the power rail to the amplifier being unable to match the input curve of the signal.
"Really loud" is relative. Unless they are noise-canceling, the only answer to not being able to hear your music over noise is to turn it up. Thus headphones that sounded fine in the store, and still sound fine when you get them home, can completely fall apart when you decide to walk to the grocery store or take them to the gym. This is easy to hear, but harder to measure because of the background noise obscuring the distortion of the signal.
If you have a headset with a higher capacity battery, then (to a certain extent) turning it up should just shorten battery life. In practice, most of them probably allow themselves to be turned up to the point where they distort, because (1) distorted is better than not being able to make out the signal at all, and (2) low input levels won't actually distort, so the extra gain can be used to even out from one track to the next.
No, not all Bluetooth headsets have tiny batteries. I had the kind with the wraparound strip in the back, and the battery was generously sized because it was in that strip on the back. In noisy environments, which is where they mostly got used, the sound quality was decent. I wish I could tell you what they were but I lent them out and the borrower managed to lose them within 48 hours.
The main problem was that the strip was in back, and putting the phone in a front pocket meant constant disconnections. It was fine if I left the phone on a table, and even if I walked 15 or 20 feet away, but the moment I tucked it in a pocket and the signal had to go through me, it was dropout city. Since I was forced to leave the phone on my desk, I walked away from it many times and lost the signal.
The problem here is that Apple is trying to solve a fashion problem with two separate earbuds, when a less fashionable but technically superior solution exists: tether one to the other, and hide more battery capacity there.
While we're talking about the exact same dinosaur squeezings, making petroleum into durable goods makes it a raw material, not fuel. You can believe in fossil "fuel" as a material while wanting to get away from burning it. It might even be because you want to make more stuff out of it instead of burning it.
But he's not wrong with his point. AirPods necessarily have tiny batteries, much smaller than the phone does. While their average current may be fine, they are going to "brown out" on peaks without something like a capacitor to back them up. This causes distortion very similar to that induced by a megaphone, which is highly undesirable for music unless your name is Tom Waits.
Anything with room for a standard HDD is not in this class. I also didn't mean that every laptop is this way, but the particular class that Apple is targeting -- thin and light -- is built this way no matter where it comes from. The RAM is fixed, and the storage often is as well.
You can yell at Apple for insisting that its MBP fall into the thin-and-light category rather than a Business Laptop. But once that choice has been made, these are the corners that are being cut by everyone playing in that field.
All "thin and light" laptops are like this. The RAM is soldered directly to the motherboard and is not upgradable unless you have a reflow oven. Apple is nowhere near alone on this point. I think the last machine I've seen that was field-upgradable in RAM is the Acer C710 or V5 (same time frame, just Chromebook vs. Windows). The next couple generations still had mSATA or M.2 slots, but even those are going away in favor of permanently attached eMMC. I think the upgrade to my C720 will be... a Core i3 motherboard to replace the Celeron that I have now. (They're about $100.) And maybe the touchscreen to convert it into a C720P. But the base unit is one I expect to have for a few years because everything since (save for the C740) has been shittier and non-upgradable.
So don't single out Apple. Everyone is shipping non-serviceable laptops now.
Did I have to pay attention to detail? Sure. But sometimes your best guess is exactly that, a guess, and then you bracket. This means burning through your film three or five times as fast, and you still may not get it right. Not only that, you have to wait until the processed film comes back before you can determine what actually worked.
If you use auto-everything and don't understand why it works most of the time or how to compensate for it the rest of the time, that's on your head. It doesn't matter whether you're shooting film or pixels.
I haven't even tracked if it still exists, so it has obviously been a long time since I shot Velvia. I was just going by my own recollection of it not being an ideal portrait film. Good, but not ideal.
Kodachrome can't come back without an E-4 lab coming back along with it. When it was discontinued, there was only one such lab in the U.S., and possibly in the world. What would go over quite well though would be a new film with the characteristics of Kodachrome, but using process E-6. I doubt such a thing is easy though, or Kodak would have done it decades ago.
Digital has been a great thing for people wanting to learn to do proper photography. The almost-zero cost per shot means more room to take chances and experiment, as well as an immediate chance to know if you got it right. I would certainly advise someone to get really good with a digital camera before they start shooting film, so that they can avoid the basic mistakes and get right on to dealing with the vagaries of chemical photography. That said, there is something special and visceral about taking a photograph on film and knowing that it's a purely physical process. I don't intend to go back to it because I just don't have the need, but it is different, and for some people, more meaningful.
Ektachrome was always a good choice if you had no access to a lab that would do process E-4. Also, the trade-off is color saturation for speed – Kodachrome was nicely saturated and sharp (small grain) but slow while Ektachrome was a stop or two faster at the same sharpness (though still slow compared to print film).
I haven't checked to see if it's still made, but Fujichrome Velvia was the pick if you wanted to work the cooler colors while retaining saturation. It is/was also slow.
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of novel and exciting uses for 3D printing. This is not one of them. Why? We've had concrete tilt-up construction for a long time now. So they do it with a 3D printer instead of molds, it's still concrete. It will still have problems in seismically active areas.
Oh I don't think twice about opening things, unless it's under warranty. Then I want to make sure that solving one problem doesn't mean losing that warranty, because where there is one design flaw, there are usually many and the Switch is no exception. So when I've tried to return something under warranty and was told "we'll ship you a part", I wanted to be damn sure that installing it won't void the warranty we obviously needed once already.
If that does become an issue, and you have a soldering iron, you can fix that by adding a better antenna to the left controller that isn't going to be blocked by your hand. There's at least one video online showing how to do it. The existing antenna gets blocked by the palm of your hand, which isn't as much of an issue with the right controller because everything is flipped and the antenna is near your fingers instead of your palm.
And immediately lose all warranty coverage because you have now modified the device to fix their design flaw. No, thanks. Unless they give me instructions to do it, in writing, and an authorization code to keep warranty protection, I'm not opening their hardware.
I have received such instructions and authorization to open up other electronic hardware and replace a part from other companies, but somehow I'm not expecting it of Nintendo to authorize such home fixes.
I didn't plan to buy one anyhow, but this is proof positive that Nintendo still has the sense of entitlement leading them to say "you'll take what we give you, and you'll like it". Getting rid of region locks might have been seen as a step to hand some control back to the customer, but refusing to accept that dead pixels are defects and have been considered such for at least ten years now is an admission that they either can't do better, or are honey badgers about what the customer actually thinks. Unreliable connections are defects too, even Apple wasn't able to get away with the "you're holding it wrong" defense for very long.
If they can't do better for technical reasons... well I'm not buying that. They can do better, because other device manufacturers are doing better. If they can't afford to do better, then they really should get out of the hardware market.
If you're hearing impaired do you really want to screw over millions of people who aren't just because you can't access something? I doubt it.
I've encountered people with exactly this attitude. "If you don't make it in a form I can consume, then you can't make it at all." It doesn't matter if it's free, and transcription would cost the creator money. It doesn't matter if it's music without lyrics, they want it fully described. (Frank Zappa famously said "talking about music is like dancing about architecture".) It led to a rather bitter exchange on Quora which eventually led to me picking up "content warnings" for stuff that had been there for months, because the Deafie went through all my old posts and flagged anything that could be considered even mildly disrespectful or in poor taste. That, and similar incidents leading to the suspension and banning of top posters, led me to walk away.
So yes, there really are people who would prefer to deny content to the world just because they can't have it themselves.
If I wanted a Chromebook to run Linux on, I'd just buy a Chromebook and flash the firmware. There's an Xubuntu-derived distro specifically for the purpose, too, GalliumOS.
Wait, did I say I would do that? Let me correct myself. I already have. It runs Windows 10 the majority of the time, but it does have Gallium installed and bootable via rEFInd.
Teenagers swallowing magnets happened because they were using them as fake piercings, not because they were sticking magnets in their mouths for the taste.
Fortunately, Dewar flasks and Thermos bottles weigh very little because they're empty space inside, and also can be left unattended without power for considerable periods of time. The trucks used to shuttle the goods from the warehouse or store to the building being served may be reefers and warmers, but the robots don't need to be. They just won't be in control of the food long enough for a lightweight, insulated package to fail.
As for efficiency of scale, there are two answers to low density: charge a lot, or only deliver on a schedule so entire regions can be served at once. The former is the Pink Dot model, and the latter is the method grocery stores have used for years. The only difference would be using a robot instead of a human to complete the delivery. Getting the model to make money is a solved problem, at least in some areas.
It's the arcology of SimCity 2000 come to life. Get everything you need without ever leaving the building. And it will work for buildings with enough people, though it seems to me it would make more sense to test it out in hotels first. Higher population density, they often have kitchens for room service already, and if people aren't pleased with the service they'll be gone in a fairly short period of time.
For smaller buildings (or less dense ones), perhaps the robots will only be around once or twice a week, and you have to put in your order the day before so they can cover the whole building in one pass, and with one delivery truck.
The main reason is money. Each generation costs billions to develop and produce, and manufacturers are going to make sure they get a return on their investment. These investments stretch back years, and designs have to be made with assumptions about what will be workable at the current process node at the time the chip is ready to produce. That said, not quite all the low hanging fruit has been picked yet. Ryzen could not carry a 50% IPC improvement over the FX if there was nothing left to work with. Maybe this means treating transistors as cheap and power consumption and time as the hurdles, and moving back into a true CISC paradigm. Less microcode, more dedicated logic circuits. There was a very long time when transistors were considered valuable, and designs tried to optimize so that they would all be in use as much of the time as possible. Now we have the reverse problem -- power is dear (on battery-powered devices), heat is a killer, but idle transistors are quite tolerable.
Meanwhile Intel chips away with 5% here, 8% there, and continues to make money hand over fist. Their main motivation has always been to make money, and since they have proven able to do so without amazing leaps, they'll ride the slow train of progress rather than staking the company on a complete overhaul the way AMD is forced to do every five years or so. I'm still sporting a desktop with a 1090T, and this is the first thing AMD has done since 2011 (when I built this) that actually makes me sit up and say "wow, I want that".
My laptop is on the slow side, but I didn't get it for heavy lifting. I don't see (currently, who knows down the line a bit) that AMD has done anything to make me want to change it. Nor has Intel. 5-8% improvement per generation, times four generations, would appeal if I needed the muscle, but I'm rocking a Haswell 1.4 GHz dual-core Celeron. Getting an i3 board (which can be had for about $100) instead would be much more cost-effective than buying new. Heat, noise, and battery life are all pretty well acceptable, even if they have continued to improve since.
Another major reason is that for massive number-crunching tasks, the CPU is no longer the most important part of the system. The GPUs (plural) are, and they continue to advance at a fairly impressive rate because they're several nodes behind. (Those old foundries have to do something.) When (not if) GPUs start hitting the process node wall the way CPUs already have, then they too will start to drag down the pace of improvement.
The only exception is where the consumer deliberately seeks out filters that discard the shitty ninety percent, such as only watching movies endorsed by Roger Ebert. This is not perfect, but man oh man, the troubles he's seen. He watched The Brown Bunny and The Human Centipede so you didn't have to.
He also wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, so his tastes could be suspect as well.
I have seen complaints that the battery life is unsatisfactory, and there's a good chance a lot of those people are listening to them loud. Mind you this is not unique to AirPods. Even the headset I had, had an underwhelming battery life when cranked up full throttle. However, batteries have improved in the six years since I had those. At the same time, expectations have gone up. It's one thing to sell something that only lasts three hours at full throttle with a "three to six hours" claim, and another to say "up to N", N being whatever number Marketing wants it to be.
At the same time, adding more surface area in the form of a connection between the two will solve the "losing one AirPod" problem, the synchronization problem (which they have dealt with but it still expends power on the phone side), possibly the reception problem, and allow for a battery that should outlast the charge in the phone. It would also solve, or at least greatly reduce, any distortion problems that might be caused by the power rail to the amplifier being unable to match the input curve of the signal.
Happy now?
"Really loud" is relative. Unless they are noise-canceling, the only answer to not being able to hear your music over noise is to turn it up. Thus headphones that sounded fine in the store, and still sound fine when you get them home, can completely fall apart when you decide to walk to the grocery store or take them to the gym. This is easy to hear, but harder to measure because of the background noise obscuring the distortion of the signal.
If you have a headset with a higher capacity battery, then (to a certain extent) turning it up should just shorten battery life. In practice, most of them probably allow themselves to be turned up to the point where they distort, because (1) distorted is better than not being able to make out the signal at all, and (2) low input levels won't actually distort, so the extra gain can be used to even out from one track to the next.
No, not all Bluetooth headsets have tiny batteries. I had the kind with the wraparound strip in the back, and the battery was generously sized because it was in that strip on the back. In noisy environments, which is where they mostly got used, the sound quality was decent. I wish I could tell you what they were but I lent them out and the borrower managed to lose them within 48 hours.
The main problem was that the strip was in back, and putting the phone in a front pocket meant constant disconnections. It was fine if I left the phone on a table, and even if I walked 15 or 20 feet away, but the moment I tucked it in a pocket and the signal had to go through me, it was dropout city. Since I was forced to leave the phone on my desk, I walked away from it many times and lost the signal.
The problem here is that Apple is trying to solve a fashion problem with two separate earbuds, when a less fashionable but technically superior solution exists: tether one to the other, and hide more battery capacity there.
While we're talking about the exact same dinosaur squeezings, making petroleum into durable goods makes it a raw material, not fuel. You can believe in fossil "fuel" as a material while wanting to get away from burning it. It might even be because you want to make more stuff out of it instead of burning it.
But he's not wrong with his point. AirPods necessarily have tiny batteries, much smaller than the phone does. While their average current may be fine, they are going to "brown out" on peaks without something like a capacitor to back them up. This causes distortion very similar to that induced by a megaphone, which is highly undesirable for music unless your name is Tom Waits.
Anything with room for a standard HDD is not in this class. I also didn't mean that every laptop is this way, but the particular class that Apple is targeting -- thin and light -- is built this way no matter where it comes from. The RAM is fixed, and the storage often is as well.
You can yell at Apple for insisting that its MBP fall into the thin-and-light category rather than a Business Laptop. But once that choice has been made, these are the corners that are being cut by everyone playing in that field.
If it has an optical drive, it is by definition not in the "thin and light" class that they're shooting for.
All "thin and light" laptops are like this. The RAM is soldered directly to the motherboard and is not upgradable unless you have a reflow oven. Apple is nowhere near alone on this point. I think the last machine I've seen that was field-upgradable in RAM is the Acer C710 or V5 (same time frame, just Chromebook vs. Windows). The next couple generations still had mSATA or M.2 slots, but even those are going away in favor of permanently attached eMMC. I think the upgrade to my C720 will be... a Core i3 motherboard to replace the Celeron that I have now. (They're about $100.) And maybe the touchscreen to convert it into a C720P. But the base unit is one I expect to have for a few years because everything since (save for the C740) has been shittier and non-upgradable.
So don't single out Apple. Everyone is shipping non-serviceable laptops now.
And I was limited by budget.
Did I have to pay attention to detail? Sure. But sometimes your best guess is exactly that, a guess, and then you bracket. This means burning through your film three or five times as fast, and you still may not get it right. Not only that, you have to wait until the processed film comes back before you can determine what actually worked.
If you use auto-everything and don't understand why it works most of the time or how to compensate for it the rest of the time, that's on your head. It doesn't matter whether you're shooting film or pixels.
Did I not say that? I was attributing E-4 (erroneously) to Kodachrome.
I haven't even tracked if it still exists, so it has obviously been a long time since I shot Velvia. I was just going by my own recollection of it not being an ideal portrait film. Good, but not ideal.
Kodachrome can't come back without an E-4 lab coming back along with it. When it was discontinued, there was only one such lab in the U.S., and possibly in the world. What would go over quite well though would be a new film with the characteristics of Kodachrome, but using process E-6. I doubt such a thing is easy though, or Kodak would have done it decades ago.
Digital has been a great thing for people wanting to learn to do proper photography. The almost-zero cost per shot means more room to take chances and experiment, as well as an immediate chance to know if you got it right. I would certainly advise someone to get really good with a digital camera before they start shooting film, so that they can avoid the basic mistakes and get right on to dealing with the vagaries of chemical photography. That said, there is something special and visceral about taking a photograph on film and knowing that it's a purely physical process. I don't intend to go back to it because I just don't have the need, but it is different, and for some people, more meaningful.
Ektachrome was always a good choice if you had no access to a lab that would do process E-4. Also, the trade-off is color saturation for speed – Kodachrome was nicely saturated and sharp (small grain) but slow while Ektachrome was a stop or two faster at the same sharpness (though still slow compared to print film).
I haven't checked to see if it's still made, but Fujichrome Velvia was the pick if you wanted to work the cooler colors while retaining saturation. It is/was also slow.