Wow. I had to look it up, but you are talking about the arrest of Stern Hu, who was born and raised in China, then got an Australian citizenship in his 30's, and he lived in China and was arrested in China for violating Chinese law. And he admitted to bribery. The Chinese did not kidnap a foreign national who was making an airplane connection in some random place. They arrested someone living in China for violating Chinese law. Well, they arrested four actually, the fact that one of those four at the Chinese office held an Australian passport should not make any difference.
Did he specify which Christmas? I mean I can promise you anything to happen "by Christmas" if I don't specify the year... And so far their track record has been disappointing. No, they are not competing with SpaceX et al, they are trying to do something much simpler (reaching orbit is a couple of magnitudes harder) and they still haven't made it. I mean, yeah, it is great that they are trying, and I'd love to see more companies compete in this new sort of "space race", but Virgin Galactic is definitely not one of the most impressive entries in that space.
You realize that you simply doubled my size? Which means I'd need to be 1m away from the 100" to be able to "see" the 4k resolution. I can see me sitting at about 2-2.5m from it, which would allow me to "see" a resolution between full HD & 4k and would fill my field of vision, but I don't think I'd sit any closer without feeling less comfortable.
OK, this is just silly. Apart from the fact that we switched from vertical to horizontal resolution to get bigger numbers, 4k was already beyond the limit of the resolution I can discern without sitting unusually close to a monitor. I don't know if the rest of humanity has some sort of super-vision, but from my own experience I find that I certainly can't see better than the 1 arcsec resolution often quoted - probably a little worse. And this resolution, for a 50 inch 8k TV would mean I'd have to be sitting at 0.5m away! Sure, if you are one of those who claim they can "see" 0.5 arcsec detail, you could marvel the same 50 inch TV from as far away as... 1m! It all seems to me like the ol' "fuck it, we'll do 5 blades" gimmick. I could see some value in 8k media, which is reportedly about the full effective resolution of 65mm negative film stock (only IMAX 70mm is higher res at around 12k, as it runs the same 65mm film horizontally instead of vertically), for example for Cinema projection, or for allowing zooming in on details for smaller monitors. But 8k TVs are just silly. And you just know somebody will eventually manage to put 8k on a phone screen and boast about it..
Given that their workers are making around $3/hour, why would they even have $150k/year managers? Never mind the fact that virtually every company in the world has a larger manager/employee ratio than what is healthy...
Bad developers can create security exploit in whatever is the language of their choice. Sure, with C/C++ you need to be more careful/experienced because they allow this particular type of bug, but in general where C is used it is possibly for a reason and you can't start talking about Java/Python etc (but maybe Rust?), which might be "safer" for a less good programmer.
The basic premise for the need of DRM is false. It assumes people who would buy the game the moment it comes out are the same group as the people who would pirate it. Which is quite sad, the companies basically believe their customers are pirates and they would not pay if they were given the chance. Which has been proven false in many ways. In fact, from personal experience, the people who would pay for a game would only pirate it if there is a reason, like DRM making their life difficult. I know I am just preaching to the choir here...
Remember when an assembly worker had hammered-in the Proton-M sensors upside down? And instead of looking at their QA process they announced something in the lines of "don't worry, we found the worker and fired him"? I remember it was discussed here how this mentality would lead to more control issues, and it does appear they have learned nothing.
Eh, they were effectively cheating. They had Altivec-optimized filters running against non-optimized ones on Intel (yeah, Intel being a different architecture didn't have Altivec obviously, but they did have SSE which was conveniently not used). Also in the P4 era it was quite easy to find tasks where a PPC was faster than Intel, just as long as you did not throw in an Athlon 64 in the comparison. The funniest thing was when Apple was switching to Intel, for a while they were selling both Intel and PPC so they had, at the same time, a section of their website showing how PPC is faster than Intel and another section showing how Intel was faster than PPC!
They are kind of niche apps. Xasteria is a weather app with features for amateur astronomers and Polar Scope Align is mainly for polar aligning equatorial telescopes, along with some tools for observers and astrophotographers.
Same here, but it is very slow, limited, and many non-Apple apps don't run these days especially when developers removed their older versions from App Store. Local iTunes doesn't even back them up since iOS v9!:(
That's very annoying. I develop some weather & astronomy apps and I go out of my way to support devices as far back as possible, even keeping them updated with new features. I had managed to keep iOS 6 compatibility until this June, and now I am still releasing iOS 7 compatible updates, until Apple makes that impossible as well.
Huh, I still have a 4S with a non-working radio (wifi/gps/gyro)... Maybe it can be fixed now? Interesting story, it was the 3rd in a row, the first was replaced in warranty because it lost its wifi (greyed out), the replacement had the same occur right outside the warranty, so I had to pay for a third one. I am not a masochist mind you, it was for development purposes, so it had to be a 4S. The third one had the same thing happen in about a year and a month (on a 1-year refurb warranty). Apparently, Apple had a thermal sensor in the wireless module that would malfunction easily and think it is overheating and disable the entire module. Ebay at the time was full of iPhone 4 & 4S with non-working wifi, and people could get them to work for a bit with a "thermal shock", i.e. heating the phone with a blowdrier or an oven then putting it in the freezer, but it would fail again. For me the craziest thing was that if you had the original iOS that the iPhone 4 came out with (4 and 4S both had that same sensor) and did not upgrade your OS, the sensor was not read by the system, it was a feature added afterwards, so your iPhone would not fail! Apple could fix it in software if they wanted to, but despite forums full of people with the problem, in typical Apple customer behavior the focus was on how to make them work again with crazy "thermal shock" stunts rather than something productive like demanding that Apple fixes it. Another company would have gotten sued hard...
That's what happens when your CEO posts lots of internal information on Twitter. Musk is the one making public promises about production targets, forthcoming features and the like.
His companies have been the most consistently delivering companies in the "pioneering technology" area that I've ever seen. As you say, "he makes promises about production targets", is there any doubt those are not his targets? In fact he is widely known for setting too high targets, which is why he usually hits them later than he expects. It is not actually illegal to be an optimist as far as I know. So it seems that this is just the usual FUD he gets hit with, with huge interests against him, as they are looking into his "targets" and not the actual production, as we know the latter is accurate (Bloomberg e.g. is tracking the vehicles sold in various ways). Even if Tesla eventually fails (I don't think it is very likely), it has already succeed at moving the entire car industry to EV, which was actually Musks intention from the start, so he has already won.
Oh, actually I looked at the lock clip you searched for. That's not what breaks. The lid has a flimsy little plastic thingy that goes into this clip and that is what breaks. I can find that bottom clip part cheap, the lid it secures is the problem (which is UK specific as well).
I can't get it from ebay.com. I posted prices in £ because I am in the UK, so I (sadly) have a British version where dashboard parts are mirror-image. So, ebay.co.uk has the "repair kit" for £15, and 3rd party lid for £30. Which is why I'll have to go to a scrap yard to get something under £10.
Yeah, everything's the techs' fault... No, it is just one of the excuses, in fact any part, regardless of the "tech" it has will be sold to you for a ridiculous markup, especially if it is an original part. Take my Ford Focus for example, it has a known flaw in that the dashboard compartment lid plastic lock breaks easily. Then, for that plastic lid they charge you £90. That's probably a 10,000% markup. I wish someone would do a sort of "reverse-ifixit", i.e. calculate how much it would cost you to build a car if you bought all the parts separately. Bigger parts have a lower markup than that little piece, so the Focus won't end up costing £2 million as the lid might indicate, but still I expect parts sell several times their cost on average. A great consumer friendly law would be to limit the manufacturer part prices so that the cost of all the parts together are not more than say 2 times the cost of the car. Anyway, some wishful thinking there...
P.S. If you are curious, the grey market lids are still at around £30, because they just have to compete with a £90k part, so that opened a market for a little piece of plastic which you glue to replace the piece of the lock that breaks for everyone, and they charge you £15 for that!!! I.e. I have to go to a scrap yard to find something in my case...
Down-market image? Er, Xiaomi is exactly the opposite of that. It is the luxury Chinese brand with top build quality, but a 5% profit margin which gives you great phones at a low price. They are quite "Apple-inspired", as their target market for quite some time now - high-end Chinese users - is fond of Apple, but they've been making some industry leading devices for a while now. E.g. their first Mi Mix was the first really thin-bezel phone of note. I have the Mi Mix 2, which is even better (and I came from expensive Samsungs which always sort of disappointed me). The only issue was that you couldn't easily find them outside China, although they now are imported in some European countries. And if you are worried about Chinese spying, you are being spied anyway, does it matter that much if it's the Russians or the Americans or the Chinese?
Thank god for AMD. Intel faces stiff competition once again and still charges 50% more for a 10% faster CPU. Remember the days before good competition? The P66 was introduced at $1000 in 1k quantities back in '94, which is about $1800 now. I mean even the terrible P4s were being sold at a premium (ok using dubious means, but still).
I just updated the 2010 Mac Pro to a 6-core last year, the most it can take. It is such a nice machine, currently upgraded to 2xSSDs, 2x3TB HDs, usb3, esata, 32GB RAM, waiting until Apple comes out with something similar, something ACTUALLY Pro. I also have the upgradeable Mac Mini, at least with 16GB RAM it is not doing bad, but, yeah, an update would be great.
Although it is still a QWERTY, I found that the original "split" Microsoft natural/ergonomic keyboards would increase my speed of typing and my comfort after getting used to them. An old girlfriend gave me an MS Natural Keyboard Elite as a present 20 years ago. I didn't find it that "natural" to use, but as it was the gf's present I kept using it and after around 6 months I decided I am never going back as it had increased my typing speed and there was less strain as well. Now, while I am never going back, Microsoft sure is, since they have abandoned the split keyboard style with their new "curved" ones, which are not nearly the same thing and are actually not that good keyboards. So it is quite hard to find keyboards like the Elite or the Natural Keyboard Pro that came after it... I have one from Perixx, but then I bought recently their current updated version, and they dropped the build quality, so now I don't really know a good source for such a keyboard...
I know what you mean, I also made it to the last total eclipse and all kangaroos must have been huddled together somewhere, cause we couldn't see any of them!
That video was just an advertisement, it praised all the features, including: "the battery life has been solid, lasting a day and a half" ! And it claims this is a good investment for older people who need fall detection, just because the $400 device did detect a falls they tried. Will the older people remember to charge it every night? How will it detect their falls when they go to the toilet during the night charging time? At the same time there are specialized fall detectors for the elderly, how about doing a comparison? Many Apple slashvertisements lately...
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. I had to look it up, but you are talking about the arrest of Stern Hu, who was born and raised in China, then got an Australian citizenship in his 30's, and he lived in China and was arrested in China for violating Chinese law. And he admitted to bribery.
The Chinese did not kidnap a foreign national who was making an airplane connection in some random place. They arrested someone living in China for violating Chinese law. Well, they arrested four actually, the fact that one of those four at the Chinese office held an Australian passport should not make any difference.
Did he specify which Christmas? I mean I can promise you anything to happen "by Christmas" if I don't specify the year... And so far their track record has been disappointing. No, they are not competing with SpaceX et al, they are trying to do something much simpler (reaching orbit is a couple of magnitudes harder) and they still haven't made it.
I mean, yeah, it is great that they are trying, and I'd love to see more companies compete in this new sort of "space race", but Virgin Galactic is definitely not one of the most impressive entries in that space.
You realize that you simply doubled my size? Which means I'd need to be 1m away from the 100" to be able to "see" the 4k resolution. I can see me sitting at about 2-2.5m from it, which would allow me to "see" a resolution between full HD & 4k and would fill my field of vision, but I don't think I'd sit any closer without feeling less comfortable.
OK, this is just silly. Apart from the fact that we switched from vertical to horizontal resolution to get bigger numbers, 4k was already beyond the limit of the resolution I can discern without sitting unusually close to a monitor. I don't know if the rest of humanity has some sort of super-vision, but from my own experience I find that I certainly can't see better than the 1 arcsec resolution often quoted - probably a little worse. And this resolution, for a 50 inch 8k TV would mean I'd have to be sitting at 0.5m away! Sure, if you are one of those who claim they can "see" 0.5 arcsec detail, you could marvel the same 50 inch TV from as far away as... 1m!
It all seems to me like the ol' "fuck it, we'll do 5 blades" gimmick. I could see some value in 8k media, which is reportedly about the full effective resolution of 65mm negative film stock (only IMAX 70mm is higher res at around 12k, as it runs the same 65mm film horizontally instead of vertically), for example for Cinema projection, or for allowing zooming in on details for smaller monitors. But 8k TVs are just silly. And you just know somebody will eventually manage to put 8k on a phone screen and boast about it..
Given that their workers are making around $3/hour, why would they even have $150k/year managers? Never mind the fact that virtually every company in the world has a larger manager/employee ratio than what is healthy...
Bad developers can create security exploit in whatever is the language of their choice. Sure, with C/C++ you need to be more careful/experienced because they allow this particular type of bug, but in general where C is used it is possibly for a reason and you can't start talking about Java/Python etc (but maybe Rust?), which might be "safer" for a less good programmer.
The basic premise for the need of DRM is false. It assumes people who would buy the game the moment it comes out are the same group as the people who would pirate it. Which is quite sad, the companies basically believe their customers are pirates and they would not pay if they were given the chance. Which has been proven false in many ways. In fact, from personal experience, the people who would pay for a game would only pirate it if there is a reason, like DRM making their life difficult.
I know I am just preaching to the choir here...
Remember when an assembly worker had hammered-in the Proton-M sensors upside down? And instead of looking at their QA process they announced something in the lines of "don't worry, we found the worker and fired him"? I remember it was discussed here how this mentality would lead to more control issues, and it does appear they have learned nothing.
Eh, they were effectively cheating. They had Altivec-optimized filters running against non-optimized ones on Intel (yeah, Intel being a different architecture didn't have Altivec obviously, but they did have SSE which was conveniently not used). Also in the P4 era it was quite easy to find tasks where a PPC was faster than Intel, just as long as you did not throw in an Athlon 64 in the comparison.
The funniest thing was when Apple was switching to Intel, for a while they were selling both Intel and PPC so they had, at the same time, a section of their website showing how PPC is faster than Intel and another section showing how Intel was faster than PPC!
They are kind of niche apps. Xasteria is a weather app with features for amateur astronomers and Polar Scope Align is mainly for polar aligning equatorial telescopes, along with some tools for observers and astrophotographers.
Same here, but it is very slow, limited, and many non-Apple apps don't run these days especially when developers removed their older versions from App Store. Local iTunes doesn't even back them up since iOS v9! :(
That's very annoying. I develop some weather & astronomy apps and I go out of my way to support devices as far back as possible, even keeping them updated with new features. I had managed to keep iOS 6 compatibility until this June, and now I am still releasing iOS 7 compatible updates, until Apple makes that impossible as well.
Huh, I still have a 4S with a non-working radio (wifi/gps/gyro)... Maybe it can be fixed now?
Interesting story, it was the 3rd in a row, the first was replaced in warranty because it lost its wifi (greyed out), the replacement had the same occur right outside the warranty, so I had to pay for a third one. I am not a masochist mind you, it was for development purposes, so it had to be a 4S. The third one had the same thing happen in about a year and a month (on a 1-year refurb warranty). Apparently, Apple had a thermal sensor in the wireless module that would malfunction easily and think it is overheating and disable the entire module. Ebay at the time was full of iPhone 4 & 4S with non-working wifi, and people could get them to work for a bit with a "thermal shock", i.e. heating the phone with a blowdrier or an oven then putting it in the freezer, but it would fail again. For me the craziest thing was that if you had the original iOS that the iPhone 4 came out with (4 and 4S both had that same sensor) and did not upgrade your OS, the sensor was not read by the system, it was a feature added afterwards, so your iPhone would not fail! Apple could fix it in software if they wanted to, but despite forums full of people with the problem, in typical Apple customer behavior the focus was on how to make them work again with crazy "thermal shock" stunts rather than something productive like demanding that Apple fixes it. Another company would have gotten sued hard...
That's what happens when your CEO posts lots of internal information on Twitter. Musk is the one making public promises about production targets, forthcoming features and the like.
His companies have been the most consistently delivering companies in the "pioneering technology" area that I've ever seen. As you say, "he makes promises about production targets", is there any doubt those are not his targets? In fact he is widely known for setting too high targets, which is why he usually hits them later than he expects. It is not actually illegal to be an optimist as far as I know.
So it seems that this is just the usual FUD he gets hit with, with huge interests against him, as they are looking into his "targets" and not the actual production, as we know the latter is accurate (Bloomberg e.g. is tracking the vehicles sold in various ways).
Even if Tesla eventually fails (I don't think it is very likely), it has already succeed at moving the entire car industry to EV, which was actually Musks intention from the start, so he has already won.
Oh, actually I looked at the lock clip you searched for. That's not what breaks. The lid has a flimsy little plastic thingy that goes into this clip and that is what breaks. I can find that bottom clip part cheap, the lid it secures is the problem (which is UK specific as well).
I can't get it from ebay.com. I posted prices in £ because I am in the UK, so I (sadly) have a British version where dashboard parts are mirror-image. So, ebay.co.uk has the "repair kit" for £15, and 3rd party lid for £30. Which is why I'll have to go to a scrap yard to get something under £10.
Yeah, everything's the techs' fault...
No, it is just one of the excuses, in fact any part, regardless of the "tech" it has will be sold to you for a ridiculous markup, especially if it is an original part. Take my Ford Focus for example, it has a known flaw in that the dashboard compartment lid plastic lock breaks easily. Then, for that plastic lid they charge you £90. That's probably a 10,000% markup. I wish someone would do a sort of "reverse-ifixit", i.e. calculate how much it would cost you to build a car if you bought all the parts separately. Bigger parts have a lower markup than that little piece, so the Focus won't end up costing £2 million as the lid might indicate, but still I expect parts sell several times their cost on average. A great consumer friendly law would be to limit the manufacturer part prices so that the cost of all the parts together are not more than say 2 times the cost of the car. Anyway, some wishful thinking there...
P.S. If you are curious, the grey market lids are still at around £30, because they just have to compete with a £90k part, so that opened a market for a little piece of plastic which you glue to replace the piece of the lock that breaks for everyone, and they charge you £15 for that!!! I.e. I have to go to a scrap yard to find something in my case...
Down-market image? Er, Xiaomi is exactly the opposite of that. It is the luxury Chinese brand with top build quality, but a 5% profit margin which gives you great phones at a low price. They are quite "Apple-inspired", as their target market for quite some time now - high-end Chinese users - is fond of Apple, but they've been making some industry leading devices for a while now. E.g. their first Mi Mix was the first really thin-bezel phone of note. I have the Mi Mix 2, which is even better (and I came from expensive Samsungs which always sort of disappointed me).
The only issue was that you couldn't easily find them outside China, although they now are imported in some European countries.
And if you are worried about Chinese spying, you are being spied anyway, does it matter that much if it's the Russians or the Americans or the Chinese?
Thank god for AMD. Intel faces stiff competition once again and still charges 50% more for a 10% faster CPU. Remember the days before good competition? The P66 was introduced at $1000 in 1k quantities back in '94, which is about $1800 now. I mean even the terrible P4s were being sold at a premium (ok using dubious means, but still).
He is useful as the fourth player for bridge.
I just updated the 2010 Mac Pro to a 6-core last year, the most it can take. It is such a nice machine, currently upgraded to 2xSSDs, 2x3TB HDs, usb3, esata, 32GB RAM, waiting until Apple comes out with something similar, something ACTUALLY Pro.
I also have the upgradeable Mac Mini, at least with 16GB RAM it is not doing bad, but, yeah, an update would be great.
I thought the Pied Piper platform already uses ML to improve compression, right?
Although it is still a QWERTY, I found that the original "split" Microsoft natural/ergonomic keyboards would increase my speed of typing and my comfort after getting used to them. An old girlfriend gave me an MS Natural Keyboard Elite as a present 20 years ago. I didn't find it that "natural" to use, but as it was the gf's present I kept using it and after around 6 months I decided I am never going back as it had increased my typing speed and there was less strain as well.
Now, while I am never going back, Microsoft sure is, since they have abandoned the split keyboard style with their new "curved" ones, which are not nearly the same thing and are actually not that good keyboards. So it is quite hard to find keyboards like the Elite or the Natural Keyboard Pro that came after it... I have one from Perixx, but then I bought recently their current updated version, and they dropped the build quality, so now I don't really know a good source for such a keyboard...
I know what you mean, I also made it to the last total eclipse and all kangaroos must have been huddled together somewhere, cause we couldn't see any of them!
DST doesn't end until November 4th.
Let me guess, you are an Apple developer?
That video was just an advertisement, it praised all the features, including: "the battery life has been solid, lasting a day and a half" !
And it claims this is a good investment for older people who need fall detection, just because the $400 device did detect a falls they tried. Will the older people remember to charge it every night? How will it detect their falls when they go to the toilet during the night charging time? At the same time there are specialized fall detectors for the elderly, how about doing a comparison?
Many Apple slashvertisements lately...