I've even had one arrogant turd of a doctor have a highly polished untouched stethoscope on display on his desk... unused.
You know a stethoscope serves usually to listen, e.g. to your lungs or your heart.
If you're constantly going to the doctor to pester him about this weird skin rash that you are regularily getting on your penis, the stethoscope will be of no use.
(And about the polishing : we are supposed to rub it with disinfection before and after each single use. Of course, it's going to look pristine and polished. Or would you prefer if we used it to help you exchange every possible virus and bacteria among all patients coming to the practice ?!)
Looks like a way for Nintendo to actually increase profits :
The base "Switch Lite" will be cheaper, but :
- The whole raison d'être of the Nintendo Switch and its success is the ability to seamlessly switch from portable console on the move to big screen in your living room.
- So you'll buy a separate Nintendo-branded official dock (because their USB-C connector isn't 100% standard-compliant, and some of the cheap 3rd party accessory don't actually work perfectly).
- So you'll buy a separate controller for the big screen mode if the "Switch Lite" doesn't have detachable controller. (Other wise you'll have to use the whole console tethered to the big TV screen as a giant controller, in the style of SEGA Nomad). And you can bet that Nintendo will find a way to have you buy preferably Nintendo-branded joycons, instead of any random Bluetooth controller. (e.g.: the proprietary gyro and accelerometers and other extra that a joycon has in addition to any no-name asian bluetooth gamepad)
etc.
- Of course all of the above will come with an extra "Nintendo tax" in the price. Because Shareholders/Profits/Why not.
(me ? sorry, but I'm already more than happy with my Pi).
The 10 USD he is spending isn't the total price for 2 games.
It's the extra money he has to chip in to make the difference between the two older games he has finished playing after a month and brought in for trading and reselling, and the two more recent pre-owned games he wants to buy.
i.e.: he might be trading the old games for 100 USD, and the newer games would cost 110 USD. definitely not the shitty games in the garbage bin.
the problem of this strategy is the "war against 2nd hand trading " that companies seem to wage.
so exciting I slept with the box next to my bed. Yes I was that pathetic in high school.
On the other hand, these sessions of "cobbling-together" computers have probably given you some problem solving and computing skills enabling you to have access to interesting hi-paying jobs, and the corresponding hi income is enabling you to have a much less pathetic life *NOW* than any of the guys you considered less pathetic back then.
If you're writing a book, and are mostly typing into a word processor, switching between typing and mousing to select text and change formatting is what slows you down.
If you're writing a book, you're doing *a lot* of writing, with that much experience you're probably used to not let the keyboard go and use [SHIFT] + maybe [CTRL] + [arrow keys] for selection (maybe word selection), and the various [CTRL] + [B, I, U, etc.]
If you're a professional writer (e.g.: not merely a book but multiple books), you've probably even completely ditched Microsoft's piece of crap, and are using some professional software that dissociate content writing and typesetting and don't even care about formatting anymore, you're just signaling which parts are what (title, chapter, etc.) and letting the typesetting system do everything else for you. (e.g.: If you happen to be a scientific writer, those tools are probably some derivative of LaTeX. Though some students are having fun using markdown instead).
hundreds of others which integrate(d) deeply with the browser.
If an extension is deeply integrated into the interface of the browser, you might expect that when this interface change, there'll be some work involved.
Tab Mix Plus
is in the process of being re-written (but still isn't on par with the classic on)
Hide Caption Titlebar Plus
...is a function that is now directly supported into Firefox with client-side decoration. No need for extensions.
Status-4-Evar
The interface of Quantum is based on Servo, it's not using XUL anymore, it's written in HTML/CSS. You don't control it the same way any more. It's like complaining that MS-DOS screen savers and always on top status-bar thingy don't work on the Windows desktop.
Quantum *does* support a permenent status bar, but currently there's no interface to configure it, you need to manually patch the CSS. It's not ideal, but there's no practical way ever to make Status-4-Evar work in Quantum.
DownThemAll
And meanwhile, the Firefox extensions used by JDownloader 2 to communicate does work with Quantum. In both directions (intercepts download pages and allows you to add them into JDownloader 2, or conversely has JDownloader 2 able to open pages in Firefox when a user interaction is needed).
For a download manager *IN* Firefox : the necessary API extensions are still being worked on.
You might have missed the bits where Mozilla took time to collaborate with extension authors (such as NoScript) in order to add extra functionality, so that critical things which were possible in XUL extensions could be ported to FireFox' flavour of Web Extension.
The only extensions that didn't make the jump were either abandoned, or those whose authors preferred to loudly complain and join sone "anti-WebExtensions resistance" instead of trying to work out a solution.
Yup this couple of tons dug in a hole are so much worse than the order of magnitude larger amount of pollution produced by burning fossils.
And said pollution - that comes from the fossils even contains small traces of radioactive elements. Except that, because burning fossils generate so much more emissions than using nuclear, these (proportionally) "small traces" end up being more radioactive emissions (in absolute) than nuclear power plants.
Or you could instead go nuclear if you were using a Russian boat. (No other countries operates non-military nuclear-powered vessels).
No range problems at all when you can generate your needed electrical power locally.
(Which is the whole point of why Russian icebreakers do run on nuclear. Hard to refuel a classical oil engine if the next port is 6 months away through thick ice).
I managed to find the sources of where does my vague remembering of MIDI joysticks comes back from....
Sidewinders never used MIDI.
They did, the force feed-back is sent as MIDI messages.
Instead, they did what everyone else did, and they used the second joystick inputs to add additional features. That gave two more button inputs plus two more axes, so even without doing anything tricky you could implement four buttons and four axes.
...which would still limit you to 4 axises and 4 buttons. Going exclusively from the joystick to the PC.
Sidewingers rely on MIDI-out for force feed-back (sending information from the PC to the Joystick).
(Meanwhile, Logitech ADI protocol relied on rhythmically querying the port in some pseudo-morse-like patterns to trigger behaviors)
But by using the four button signals to make a binary number, you could either send four-bit numbers synchronously, or three-bit values asynchronously. I believe both approaches were used, but I'm not 100% on that.
Several joysticks used "buttons" to encode the HAT position. "CH Flightstick Pro" used that. (If button 1 and button 2 signal both "pressed", that actually means the HAT is actueated, and button 3 and 4 encode a 2-bit number telling which cardinal direction is beting pointed at).
Some did try to encode digital informations on analog channels "Thrustmaster FCS" used that instead: while the analog 3rd axis is simply the throttle, the 4th axis jumps to specific position on the axis, depending on which direction the HAT is currently pressed.
These where apparently popular methods, because other stick tried to be compatible with these. Some MS-DOS simulators can recognize this kind of sticks and use them directly in the game without requiring any 3rd party driver.
Fun fact: when in analogue mode, the Logitech Wingman Digital can select whichever of the 2 above methods you'd like.
(or Logitech ADI specific drivers can send the correct "pseudo-morse-like probe" and request the joystick to switch into ADI mode, at which point it completely drops any backward compatibility and starts speaking its own digital protocol end sending packets using 2 buttons signals. But that requires specific drivers and is thus only available in Windows or Linux. Old classic MS-DOS games cannot use that)
I still don't get why they didn't just add a real MIDI port to the sound card.
Limited physical space on the card. You can't even fit MIDI connectors on an ISA slot.
(Even professional midi adapter back then used a flat connector between the ISA board and an external box that had the actual MIDI DIN connector. Using an adapter on the gameport wouldn't feel that out of place)
Also, back when the first Sound Blaster was launched there were many more gamers likely to plug a cheap $20 joystick into their cards, than gamers owning an expensive MT-32 MIDI synth. So it made much sense for Creative to make the game port ready to use, and as that port uses already half of the physical space of the slot, then find a way to route MIDI through the unused pins.
Pretty sure those were MIDI ports that we plugged joysticks into.
Back at the time of the IBM PC, these were dedicated game port, featuring 4 analog axis and for button (and thus usable for 2 players, with an analog stick and 2 button each, provided the correct Y splitter cable. Or much later more complicated 1 player peripherals, with the Gravis Gamepad being the first with such popularity). It came on a dedicated separate expansion card.
IT way much later, once MIDI got added to the port that a few jostrick decided to use it for extra feature (I think Microsoft Sidewingers ?)
That’s why they were on your sound card... or was that a joke
The idea of packing MIDI + Game port together came from Creative.
Like I said before, the game port began as a dedicated expansion card under IBM. This ate a whole expansion slot just for analog sticks.
So instead some manufacturer tried to make multi function expansions that packed together game ports with a few other functionnality (e.g.: my parents' 386 back hten had serial, parrellel, floppy and game all on a single expansion board, with a few extra headers to the ports that couldn't be held on the card's edge.)
Creative is the first one who had the idea of making cards for gamers, containing many functions on the same board. The first one was Sound Blaster: an OPL2 FM synth popular with the then popular AdLib, a game port, a DAC to playback samples, and a MIDI interface (for external synths such as the then popular MT-32 from Roland). Instead of needing 4 different expansion card eating basically every single available port, it's just 1 single card. A real space saver. (or even more, when they also started putting CD-ROM controllers).
Given the limited amount of space on the side of the ISA slot, MIDI was routed through game port pins, and required one extra adapter cable.
That's the point at which a couple of manufacturer jumped in and decided to use MIDI as one possible way to expand the possibilities of joysticks beyond the 4 analog + 4 digital channel offered by the port. (While at the same time still retaining compatibility with games relying on the classic interface).
(The other strategies where using a completely different port : some complex joysticks used a serial connection, but this was at the cost of lost compatibility with older games. Yet a different strategy was joystick communicating solely over the classic game port, but being able to switch into a proprietary protocole that send ditigal packets of data over the digital pins instead of straight 4 axis, 4 buttons - Logitech's ADI protocole is an example. This had the benefit of working with pre-MIDI game port, and still also be compatible with old games when the joystick isn't switched into ADI protocol mode).
All those probes that we send to planets should be designed with a longer operational life.
Yup, that's actually already the case. How do you think the mars rovers managed to stay so long in operation ? Engineer plan for the worse, put as wide margin as possible, and try to manage to meet the primary mission even in the case of giant string of unluck and problems. (Everything redundant, and other such backups - well within the limits of weight of what the launcher can put into orbit up there, of course). Often, mission gets lucky, there's no catastrophic event happening and the probe turns out to be useful for much longer than initially planned (there are still at least 1 backup/redundant part working even after the end of the primary mission.
When the primary mission is over they start a secondary mission:
That's already the case : as long as it's still miraculously working, keep using it!
See: New Horizon's recent flyby of Ultima Thule, and the pictures of it that the probe will be uploading to Earth over the next couple of years. (Interplanetary bandwidth sucks...)
The existence of that object wasn't even known back when the mission was planned, but once it turned out that New Horizon successfully completed its primary mission (Pluto) and still had enough functional systems to continue, it turned out the contact binary (that was discovered a couple of years ago) was a perfect target that happened to be within reach of the probe.
long term observation which includes special unexpected things like oumouamua
Planning specifically for extra planetary things like 'oumuamua is asinine:
- You can't *plan* for *unexpected* object. See Ultima Thule above, it's wasn't even known until recently. You usually have a more opportunistic approach: given the remaining capability of the probe at the end of its primary mission, what are the possibility that present themselves ? Are there targets that are on the trajectory of the probe (baring some micro correction that could still be achieved with whatever left-over capability is available) ? What you're basically asking is aiming a probe 15 years in advance at some empty spot, and hope that 11 years later an unexpected extra solar object will suddenly pop-up and luckily happen to go through said empty spot at the exact right time.... and speaking of time:
- Space is extremely vast and mostly empty (on a human scale. Of course on the grand scale of a galaxy we're still a pretty busy sector). You might be launching thousands to hundreds of thousands (*) of probes before another such extra solar visit even happen....and the probes that happen to be space borne at the moment might be at the wrong place, which leads to:
- Extra solar objects are weird (simply because they didn't form together with our solar system, by definition) and thus will have completely weird trajectory not even in the same rotational direction and not in the same plan to begin with (See 3d tracing of the path 'oumuamua. It's almost perpendicular to the plan of our solar system). Also, changing trajectory costs big amount of energy and fuel/mass, which in turn is heavy and would require even more prohibitively powerful rockets to launch. To be launchable with currently existing rocket technology, probes end up limited to only small corrections/burns (and use free gravity assistance as much as possible), they can only change trajectory slightly. Life isn't like in a video game where space ship can jump hyperspace portals all-over the place. Thus, there wouldn't be a practical way to ask a probe to veer completely of course and head for a completely different and unusual spot where a recently spotted extra solar object is expected to show up.
With the current state of tech (only relatively short distance at which we can sport interesting targets, limited range of probes, etc.) we can't do much for ob
that's until the company decides to reinterpret "lifetime" as "until we deprecate the device" which will happen 2 years later after you buy it.
And because this devices are locked and DRMed to the bone, you won't even be able to find community hacked upgrades as the older dedicated devices (see TomTom between modern NavCore version 10 and up, and the older versions until 9).
Seems like OpenStreetMaps and community developped apps (by people who actually need and use them and listen to other users) is our only hope.
i.e.: an object big enough to have some significant gravity, enough gravity so the heavier elements can sink to the bottom, while the water/ice remains on its surface.
(as opposed to commets which barely have enough gravity to hold the wet dust mud together)
if such moon gets ripped appart (getting to close and tidal forces) the ice will be relatively clean ( but then you'll also be having rock fragments ).
or the T-Mobile Sidekick with the modern network bands. That phone had an even better keyboard than the Blackberry
Gemini PDA by Planet Computer is trying to bring back the hardware keyboard to PDA/Smartphone. Okay, it's more Psion-style (clamshell) than slider, but it's something you can buy right now. (with a choice of different OSes, too - if you don't like being a lollipop for Google to suck).
Livermorium is currently working to bring a slider keyboard smartphone on the market soon-ish. With some patience you could have the slider formfactor you would like. (Some leaks here and there seem to point to some of the designers that had contributed to Nokia's sliders have been helping that too)
People are deleting the Facebook app in droves but not the Whatsapp app (sic).
And in fact WhatsApp is still rising in popularity, which was the entire point behind buying it (and Instagram) back then.
Zuckerberg has seen predecessors coming and going (thing MySpace's fall from popularity).
That eventually Facebook will wane out was absolutely totally predictable, it wasn't a question of "if" but "when".
So of course, Zuckerberg paid extremely close attention to emerging *future competitor* (instead of contemporary competitors), and bought them to be ready for the "Post-Facebook" era. WhatsApp and Instagram were the under-dog apps rising in popularity (specially among younger generations) back then, the Zuckerberg bought them, and had the "Post-Facebook" era insured. (And laughs anytime people are outraged and delete the Facebook App)
The problem is not Facebook (Zuckerberg is already prepared for that). The problem is what comes after the "Post-facebook" era, what will come after Instagram and WhatsApp, when people will start deleting *that* one. The "Post-post-facebook" era, if you will.
Snapchat and musica.li/Tiktok seems to be the one rising in popularity in the youngest generation (kids don't want to be on the same platform as their parents, but the same as their friends. Network effect in social media doesn't seem to last over several generations). The huge problem, the thorn in the foot of Zuckerberg's Machiavellian plan to perpetuity, is that the first one has actively resisted any attempt of buy out, and the second is doing its own merging and buyouts and becoming a sizable competitor in China (And who knows, might even end up being bought by Tencent, depending on how their current kerfuffle ends up).
So Zuckerberg sadly doesn't have any solid plan for after WhatsApp, the "Post-post-facebook" era. But then, by that time he might be retiring with his billiion and letting Facebook try to survive on its own (see Bill Gates and Microsoft).
I'm not sure you and some of the other commentators with similar points realize how dense 5g deployments have to be. 5g towers are sited every 500 feet or so and each one is typically connected via fiber because of the bandwidth demands.
In current 2019 tests, yes.
But isn't some mesh solution going to be available in the future? As in sprinkle a territory with multiple "cell tower in a cart" and you can establish some level of network (at least for emergency operations) ? (Or for situations of sudden huge crowds, like festival and other such mass public events ?)
If 5G doesn't have such a solution in the next couple of years, it's going to be pretty much useless...
Yeah, I can think of some weird scenarios where 5g could be used in an emergency, but fiber not be available due to paperwork or whatever, but if you're running the logistics of a surgery center at each end, they're unlikely to apply in 99.9% of the use cases.
Again, in my head "logistics of a surgery center" : could be one of those "hospital in a shipping container" type of things that are planned for emergencies.
I'm thinking that if you're a hospital/surgery center doing remote surgeries, you might want to go ahead and spring for a decent network connection for the hospitals at both ends.
The end (university hospital) where the skilled surgeon is sitting ? Sure, they'll probably have a dedicated fiber going straight to his console.
The other end where the robot surgery is happenning ? Depends, if it's a regaion that had undergone a catastrophe, the hospital itself is very likely to still have electricity locally (thanks to generators for such emergencies), but the region might be disconnected. Wireless is the easiest to re-built in case of emergency (just deploy a bunch of mobile cell-tower-in-a-truck over the region, like they do at some massively popular music festivals) So it's likely that that hospital will rely on wireless for its connection.
The point of this demo is to show that if said wirless is 5G, it might be adequate to perform remote surgeries.
Now think about the possibilities offered to "hospital-in-a-shipping-container" type of field deployment to be used in emergencies, etc.
I have 1/8" audio jacks on equipment that I've used every day for the past 8 years and they're still perfect.
...single anecdote...
If the manufacturer uses a good-quality 1/8" jack, you won't see the kind of degradation you're talking about.
Even if the quality of the jack is good:
- falls, hits, etc. and other such will put stress on the soldering of the jack. Eventually a bad connection might develop. Luckily, this one is simple to fix with a soldering iron
- dirt, pocket lint, etc. *will* get inside (unless your smartphone happens to have a cover over its connectors like some waterproof e-readers do, e.g.: Kobo H2O) and *will definitely* cause bad contacts (or the jack suddenly thinking that it is plugged in - if it uses some mechanical detection - and the speaker suddenly stopping to work, because the smartphone tries to route audio to a non existing jack). Luckily that one is trivial to clean up.
But still, my point is that down the line a jack might not work as well as on day 1, and most people being lazy, you know what's the likelihood they're going to fix it themselves vs. likelihood they're going to complain loudly (or worse, bring the device to a Genius Bar where the staff is trained to persuade everybody to just throw away their old hardware and buy a new one. This by itself will train people to think that jacks are a cause of expensive hardware replacement).
People listen to a LOT of music on their phones, and not just in their car.
Yup and only very few of those places to listen music into actually are bluetooth enabled. So yeah, I agree.
The fact that a 2019 flagship phone cannot deliver audio fidelity as good as a 2014 (or 2009) model is absurd.
audio fidelityon the day of their out-boxing.
2 years down the line and Bluetooth should more or less be the same crap quality as on day 1 (unless the manufacturer has pushed an update activating support for new codecs, but that's unlikely, mostly due to licensing issue around codec - as no Bluetooth speaker I know uses Opus nor FLAC)
2 years down the line and the audio jack has taken so much abuse that it's making bad contact and the audio has completely deteriorated.
The second would require hardware fixing which a phone manufacturing company would like to avoid (2 years is *still* within EU Warranty period, it would be mandatory for them to fix it for free), or so probably goes their excuse to remove the jack.
But in practice most aren't actually physically damaged but just extremely dirty, and sometime just cleaning them is enough to remove whatever was preventing the audio plug making good contact in the audio jack. Rendering the above excuse moot. (And the remaining can still be fixed simply with a soldering iron).
But the Arcade could always compete against the Console, because by the fact that they are so expensive to own, you can just have top of the line graphics and sound built in, always being a generation or two ahead of the Console.
That used to be the case a long time ago. (And even back then with a few exceptions, like NeoGeo MVS and AES being virtually the same hardware, and SEGA being very often inspired by their arcade hardware (System16, various Models, Noami) to make their home consoles (MegaDrive, Saturn, DreamCast) through with some cost to manufacturing vs. performance compromises).
Nowadays, if you look at the actual hardware: console, arcades and PCs have all more or less converged (look at the later iteration of SEGA arcade hardware) with a rather narrow spectrum of hardware, with consoles on the cheaper side, and high-end ehtousiasts PCs on the more expensive side.
Nowaday these platforms only differiates by the use case they want to target : - consoles are for the ease of use (just put the disk in the tray and don't care about compatibility) - home PCs are for the customisability and extreme hardware (you can fork multiple thousands of bucks and have the latest graphic card on which the game was just demoed at the last gameshow).
However what really was the killer was Multi-player internet connectivity. Part of the fun of the Arcade is playing with multiple people. Many game had duel or I have seen up to 4 set of controllers so people would play against each other. Now with internet connectivity people never needed to go miles away to interact with real people.
But $35 vs. $100 is not a meaningful comparison; a minimal RPi kit costs about $70
Not necessarily. This device is specially intended for geeks, and wanna be geeks. (i.e.: for/.ers and their kids)
People with usually lots of junk laying around.
(with enclosure,
Cool to have one, but not necessary. If you're careful enough (try to avoid shorting pins or whatever) you could begin using your Pi without one. And then any non conductive box (including random cardboad and plastic box) could serve as a good enough make-shift case in most situations.
(Been there, done that with my first Pi)
power supply,
The most common power supply that you are (or at least: "...were...", back when the Pi launched) going to have laying around at home is a micro-USB charger. Virtually anything uses them (smartphone, rechargeable gadgets, powerbanks, etc.)
So that's why the RPi went for a micro-USB connector instead of a barrel like some are complaining : because in a pinch you can grab whatever you have around and plug the Pi and at least boot it (even though you might not provide enough watts for the full 1-point-something GHz speeds of modern RPi 2 and 3 to be available, and might end up throttling down to base 600Mhz with "Undervolt" warnings. But you can still get some (albeit slow) work out of it)
Now with the industry shift from micro USB to USB-C, raspberry pi are probably going to shift to USB-C at some point in the future (Pi 4 ?) because now that's the one you'll end up having around.
and an sd card that can handle lots of small files),
everybody has tons of SD cards laying around given that's the format used by pretty much everything (smartphone, photo camera, portable gaming console, etc.) again you could grab one laying around. Whether it will handle the abuses of running an OS is a different matter (that's probably what you meant with 'that can handle...') or if it will die soon is a different matter. But that won't stop you from experimenting
and that's still without keyboard, mouse, and hdmi cable.
which are exactly of the type (USB HID devices) that you'll have around.
TL;DR: the type of people who are likely interested to experiment with a Pi have a high change of having hte (extremely standard) accessories laying around, and can progressively buy more adapted (e.g.: 3A power supply, SD card with ECC, etc.) at a later point in time.
Norway generates about 90% of it's electrical power via Hydro.
Yup. So do a couple of other countries (e.g.: Switzerland) and in the grand scheme of things, with a few key exceptions (of the top of my head: India, China and Australia - you can google to find actual studies on the subject) most countries have power generation mixes that make EV slightly less polluting than ICE over their lifetime. (Yup, even countries like the US that burn coal : turns out that big central optimized power plants are more efficient than an engine miniaturized enough to fit in a car)
That, and the fact the country could fit into Texas twice, you have the perfect place for electric cars.
Now, how does *that* has anything to do with EVs ?
Slashdot Mirror
I've even had one arrogant turd of a doctor have a highly polished untouched stethoscope on display on his desk... unused.
You know a stethoscope serves usually to listen, e.g. to your lungs or your heart.
If you're constantly going to the doctor to pester him about this weird skin rash that you are regularily getting on your penis, the stethoscope will be of no use.
(And about the polishing : we are supposed to rub it with disinfection before and after each single use. Of course, it's going to look pristine and polished.
Or would you prefer if we used it to help you exchange every possible virus and bacteria among all patients coming to the practice ?!)
Looks like a way for Nintendo to actually increase profits :
The base "Switch Lite" will be cheaper, but :
- The whole raison d'être of the Nintendo Switch and its success is the ability to seamlessly switch from portable console on the move to big screen in your living room.
- So you'll buy a separate Nintendo-branded official dock (because their USB-C connector isn't 100% standard-compliant, and some of the cheap 3rd party accessory don't actually work perfectly).
- So you'll buy a separate controller for the big screen mode if the "Switch Lite" doesn't have detachable controller. (Other wise you'll have to use the whole console tethered to the big TV screen as a giant controller, in the style of SEGA Nomad). And you can bet that Nintendo will find a way to have you buy preferably Nintendo-branded joycons, instead of any random Bluetooth controller. (e.g.: the proprietary gyro and accelerometers and other extra that a joycon has in addition to any no-name asian bluetooth gamepad)
etc.
- Of course all of the above will come with an extra "Nintendo tax" in the price.
Because Shareholders/Profits/Why not.
(me ? sorry, but I'm already more than happy with my Pi).
The 10 USD he is spending isn't the total price for 2 games.
It's the extra money he has to chip in to make the difference between the two older games he has finished playing after a month and brought in for trading and reselling, and the two more recent pre-owned games he wants to buy.
i.e.: he might be trading the old games for 100 USD, and the newer games would cost 110 USD.
definitely not the shitty games in the garbage bin.
the problem of this strategy is the "war against 2nd hand trading " that companies seem to wage.
so exciting I slept with the box next to my bed.
Yes I was that pathetic in high school.
On the other hand, these sessions of "cobbling-together" computers have probably given you some problem solving and computing skills enabling you to have access to interesting hi-paying jobs, and the corresponding hi income is enabling you to have a much less pathetic life *NOW* than any of the guys you considered less pathetic back then.
If you're writing a book, and are mostly typing into a word processor, switching between typing and mousing to select text and change formatting is what slows you down.
If you're writing a book, you're doing *a lot* of writing, with that much experience you're probably used to not let the keyboard go and use [SHIFT] + maybe [CTRL] + [arrow keys] for selection (maybe word selection), and the various [CTRL] + [B, I, U, etc.]
If you're a professional writer (e.g.: not merely a book but multiple books), you've probably even completely ditched Microsoft's piece of crap, and are using some professional software that dissociate content writing and typesetting and don't even care about formatting anymore, you're just signaling which parts are what (title, chapter, etc .) and letting the typesetting system do everything else for you.
(e.g.: If you happen to be a scientific writer, those tools are probably some derivative of LaTeX. Though some students are having fun using markdown instead).
hundreds of others which integrate(d) deeply with the browser.
If an extension is deeply integrated into the interface of the browser, you might expect that when this interface change, there'll be some work involved.
Tab Mix Plus
is in the process of being re-written (but still isn't on par with the classic on)
Hide Caption Titlebar Plus
...is a function that is now directly supported into Firefox with client-side decoration. No need for extensions.
Status-4-Evar
The interface of Quantum is based on Servo, it's not using XUL anymore, it's written in HTML/CSS. You don't control it the same way any more.
It's like complaining that MS-DOS screen savers and always on top status-bar thingy don't work on the Windows desktop.
Quantum *does* support a permenent status bar, but currently there's no interface to configure it, you need to manually patch the CSS.
It's not ideal, but there's no practical way ever to make Status-4-Evar work in Quantum.
DownThemAll
And meanwhile, the Firefox extensions used by JDownloader 2 to communicate does work with Quantum.
In both directions (intercepts download pages and allows you to add them into JDownloader 2, or conversely has JDownloader 2 able to open pages in Firefox when a user interaction is needed).
For a download manager *IN* Firefox : the necessary API extensions are still being worked on.
You might have missed the bits where Mozilla took time to collaborate with extension authors (such as NoScript) in order to add extra functionality, so that critical things which were possible in XUL extensions could be ported to FireFox' flavour of Web Extension.
The only extensions that didn't make the jump were either abandoned, or those whose authors preferred to loudly complain and join sone "anti-WebExtensions resistance" instead of trying to work out a solution.
Yup this couple of tons dug in a hole are so much worse than the order of magnitude larger amount of pollution produced by burning fossils.
And said pollution - that comes from the fossils even contains small traces of radioactive elements.
Except that, because burning fossils generate so much more emissions than using nuclear, these (proportionally) "small traces" end up being more radioactive emissions (in absolute) than nuclear power plants.
Or you could instead go nuclear if you were using a Russian boat.
(No other countries operates non-military nuclear-powered vessels).
No range problems at all when you can generate your needed electrical power locally.
(Which is the whole point of why Russian icebreakers do run on nuclear.
Hard to refuel a classical oil engine if the next port is 6 months away through thick ice).
I managed to find the sources of where does my vague remembering of MIDI joysticks comes back from....
Sidewinders never used MIDI.
They did, the force feed-back is sent as MIDI messages.
Instead, they did what everyone else did, and they used the second joystick inputs to add additional features. That gave two more button inputs plus two more axes, so even without doing anything tricky you could implement four buttons and four axes.
...which would still limit you to 4 axises and 4 buttons. Going exclusively from the joystick to the PC.
Sidewingers rely on MIDI-out for force feed-back (sending information from the PC to the Joystick).
(Meanwhile, Logitech ADI protocol relied on rhythmically querying the port in some pseudo-morse-like patterns to trigger behaviors)
But by using the four button signals to make a binary number, you could either send four-bit numbers synchronously, or three-bit values asynchronously. I believe both approaches were used, but I'm not 100% on that.
Several joysticks used "buttons" to encode the HAT position. "CH Flightstick Pro" used that. (If button 1 and button 2 signal both "pressed", that actually means the HAT is actueated, and button 3 and 4 encode a 2-bit number telling which cardinal direction is beting pointed at).
Some did try to encode digital informations on analog channels "Thrustmaster FCS" used that instead: while the analog 3rd axis is simply the throttle, the 4th axis jumps to specific position on the axis, depending on which direction the HAT is currently pressed.
These where apparently popular methods, because other stick tried to be compatible with these. Some MS-DOS simulators can recognize this kind of sticks and use them directly in the game without requiring any 3rd party driver.
Fun fact: when in analogue mode, the Logitech Wingman Digital can select whichever of the 2 above methods you'd like.
(or Logitech ADI specific drivers can send the correct "pseudo-morse-like probe" and request the joystick to switch into ADI mode, at which point it completely drops any backward compatibility and starts speaking its own digital protocol end sending packets using 2 buttons signals. But that requires specific drivers and is thus only available in Windows or Linux. Old classic MS-DOS games cannot use that)
I still don't get why they didn't just add a real MIDI port to the sound card.
Limited physical space on the card. You can't even fit MIDI connectors on an ISA slot.
(Even professional midi adapter back then used a flat connector between the ISA board and an external box that had the actual MIDI DIN connector.
Using an adapter on the gameport wouldn't feel that out of place)
Also, back when the first Sound Blaster was launched there were many more gamers likely to plug a cheap $20 joystick into their cards, than gamers owning an expensive MT-32 MIDI synth.
So it made much sense for Creative to make the game port ready to use, and as that port uses already half of the physical space of the slot, then find a way to route MIDI through the unused pins.
Pretty sure those were MIDI ports that we plugged joysticks into.
Back at the time of the IBM PC, these were dedicated game port, featuring 4 analog axis and for button (and thus usable for 2 players, with an analog stick and 2 button each, provided the correct Y splitter cable. Or much later more complicated 1 player peripherals, with the Gravis Gamepad being the first with such popularity).
It came on a dedicated separate expansion card.
IT way much later, once MIDI got added to the port that a few jostrick decided to use it for extra feature (I think Microsoft Sidewingers ?)
That’s why they were on your sound card... or was that a joke
The idea of packing MIDI + Game port together came from Creative.
Like I said before, the game port began as a dedicated expansion card under IBM.
This ate a whole expansion slot just for analog sticks.
So instead some manufacturer tried to make multi function expansions that packed together game ports with a few other functionnality (e.g.: my parents' 386 back hten had serial, parrellel, floppy and game all on a single expansion board, with a few extra headers to the ports that couldn't be held on the card's edge.)
Creative is the first one who had the idea of making cards for gamers, containing many functions on the same board.
The first one was Sound Blaster: an OPL2 FM synth popular with the then popular AdLib, a game port, a DAC to playback samples, and a MIDI interface (for external synths such as the then popular MT-32 from Roland).
Instead of needing 4 different expansion card eating basically every single available port, it's just 1 single card. A real space saver.
(or even more, when they also started putting CD-ROM controllers).
Given the limited amount of space on the side of the ISA slot, MIDI was routed through game port pins, and required one extra adapter cable.
That's the point at which a couple of manufacturer jumped in and decided to use MIDI as one possible way to expand the possibilities of joysticks beyond the 4 analog + 4 digital channel offered by the port. (While at the same time still retaining compatibility with games relying on the classic interface).
(The other strategies where using a completely different port : some complex joysticks used a serial connection, but this was at the cost of lost compatibility with older games.
Yet a different strategy was joystick communicating solely over the classic game port, but being able to switch into a proprietary protocole that send ditigal packets of data over the digital pins instead of straight 4 axis, 4 buttons - Logitech's ADI protocole is an example. This had the benefit of working with pre-MIDI game port, and still also be compatible with old games when the joystick isn't switched into ADI protocol mode).
All those probes that we send to planets should be designed with a longer operational life.
Yup, that's actually already the case. How do you think the mars rovers managed to stay so long in operation ?
Engineer plan for the worse, put as wide margin as possible, and try to manage to meet the primary mission even in the case of giant string of unluck and problems.
(Everything redundant, and other such backups - well within the limits of weight of what the launcher can put into orbit up there, of course).
Often, mission gets lucky, there's no catastrophic event happening and the probe turns out to be useful for much longer than initially planned (there are still at least 1 backup/redundant part working even after the end of the primary mission.
When the primary mission is over they start a secondary mission:
That's already the case : as long as it's still miraculously working, keep using it!
See: New Horizon's recent flyby of Ultima Thule, and the pictures of it that the probe will be uploading to Earth over the next couple of years. (Interplanetary bandwidth sucks...)
The existence of that object wasn't even known back when the mission was planned, but once it turned out that New Horizon successfully completed its primary mission (Pluto) and still had enough functional systems to continue, it turned out the contact binary (that was discovered a couple of years ago) was a perfect target that happened to be within reach of the probe.
long term observation which includes special unexpected things like oumouamua
Planning specifically for extra planetary things like 'oumuamua is asinine :
- You can't *plan* for *unexpected* object. See Ultima Thule above, it's wasn't even known until recently. You usually have a more opportunistic approach: given the remaining capability of the probe at the end of its primary mission, what are the possibility that present themselves ? Are there targets that are on the trajectory of the probe (baring some micro correction that could still be achieved with whatever left-over capability is available) ? :
What you're basically asking is aiming a probe 15 years in advance at some empty spot, and hope that 11 years later an unexpected extra solar object will suddenly pop-up and luckily happen to go through said empty spot at the exact right time....
and speaking of time
- Space is extremely vast and mostly empty (on a human scale. Of course on the grand scale of a galaxy we're still a pretty busy sector). You might be launching thousands to hundreds of thousands (*) of probes before another such extra solar visit even happen. ...and the probes that happen to be space borne at the moment might be at the wrong place, which leads to :
- Extra solar objects are weird (simply because they didn't form together with our solar system, by definition) and thus will have completely weird trajectory not even in the same rotational direction and not in the same plan to begin with (See 3d tracing of the path 'oumuamua. It's almost perpendicular to the plan of our solar system).
Also, changing trajectory costs big amount of energy and fuel/mass, which in turn is heavy and would require even more prohibitively powerful rockets to launch. To be launchable with currently existing rocket technology, probes end up limited to only small corrections/burns (and use free gravity assistance as much as possible), they can only change trajectory slightly.
Life isn't like in a video game where space ship can jump hyperspace portals all-over the place.
Thus, there wouldn't be a practical way to ask a probe to veer completely of course and head for a completely different and unusual spot where a recently spotted extra solar object is expected to show up.
With the current state of tech (only relatively short distance at which we can sport interesting targets, limited range of probes, etc.) we can't do much for ob
that's until the company decides to reinterpret "lifetime" as "until we deprecate the device" which will happen 2 years later after you buy it.
And because this devices are locked and DRMed to the bone, you won't even be able to find community hacked upgrades as the older dedicated devices (see TomTom between modern NavCore version 10 and up, and the older versions until 9).
Seems like OpenStreetMaps and community developped apps (by people who actually need and use them and listen to other users) is our only hope.
my suspicion: an ice moon.
i.e.: an object big enough to have some significant gravity, enough gravity so the heavier elements can sink to the bottom, while the water/ice remains on its surface.
(as opposed to commets which barely have enough gravity to hold the wet dust mud together)
if such moon gets ripped appart (getting to close and tidal forces) the ice will be relatively clean ( but then you'll also be having rock fragments ).
is there any speciallist that could help us ?
(cue in McCoy's "i'm a Doctro, Jim...")
local prefix="$(echo "$sha1" | sed 's/\(.....\)\(.*\)/\1/')"
local suffix="$(echo "$sha1" | sed 's/\(.....\)\(.*\)/\2/')"
For recent Bash versions that have built-in RegEx :
[[ "${sha1}" =~ ^(.....)(.*)$ ]]
local prefix="${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
local suffix="${BASH_REMATCH[2]}"
or the T-Mobile Sidekick with the modern network bands. That phone had an even better keyboard than the Blackberry
Gemini PDA by Planet Computer is trying to bring back the hardware keyboard to PDA/Smartphone. Okay, it's more Psion-style (clamshell) than slider, but it's something you can buy right now.
(with a choice of different OSes, too - if you don't like being a lollipop for Google to suck).
Livermorium is currently working to bring a slider keyboard smartphone on the market soon-ish. With some patience you could have the slider formfactor you would like. (Some leaks here and there seem to point to some of the designers that had contributed to Nokia's sliders have been helping that too)
People are deleting the Facebook app in droves but not the Whatsapp app (sic).
And in fact WhatsApp is still rising in popularity, which was the entire point behind buying it (and Instagram) back then.
Zuckerberg has seen predecessors coming and going (thing MySpace's fall from popularity).
That eventually Facebook will wane out was absolutely totally predictable, it wasn't a question of "if" but "when".
So of course, Zuckerberg paid extremely close attention to emerging *future competitor* (instead of contemporary competitors), and bought them to be ready for the "Post-Facebook" era.
WhatsApp and Instagram were the under-dog apps rising in popularity (specially among younger generations) back then, the Zuckerberg bought them, and had the "Post-Facebook" era insured.
(And laughs anytime people are outraged and delete the Facebook App)
The problem is not Facebook (Zuckerberg is already prepared for that).
The problem is what comes after the "Post-facebook" era, what will come after Instagram and WhatsApp, when people will start deleting *that* one. The "Post-post-facebook" era, if you will.
Snapchat and musica.li/Tiktok seems to be the one rising in popularity in the youngest generation (kids don't want to be on the same platform as their parents, but the same as their friends. Network effect in social media doesn't seem to last over several generations).
The huge problem, the thorn in the foot of Zuckerberg's Machiavellian plan to perpetuity, is that the first one has actively resisted any attempt of buy out, and the second is doing its own merging and buyouts and becoming a sizable competitor in China (And who knows, might even end up being bought by Tencent, depending on how their current kerfuffle ends up).
So Zuckerberg sadly doesn't have any solid plan for after WhatsApp, the "Post-post-facebook" era.
But then, by that time he might be retiring with his billiion and letting Facebook try to survive on its own (see Bill Gates and Microsoft).
I'm not sure you and some of the other commentators with similar points realize how dense 5g deployments have to be. 5g towers are sited every 500 feet or so and each one is typically connected via fiber because of the bandwidth demands.
In current 2019 tests, yes.
But isn't some mesh solution going to be available in the future? As in sprinkle a territory with multiple "cell tower in a cart" and you can establish some level of network (at least for emergency operations) ?
(Or for situations of sudden huge crowds, like festival and other such mass public events ?)
If 5G doesn't have such a solution in the next couple of years, it's going to be pretty much useless...
Yeah, I can think of some weird scenarios where 5g could be used in an emergency, but fiber not be available due to paperwork or whatever, but if you're running the logistics of a surgery center at each end, they're unlikely to apply in 99.9% of the use cases.
Again, in my head "logistics of a surgery center" : could be one of those "hospital in a shipping container" type of things that are planned for emergencies.
I'm thinking that if you're a hospital/surgery center doing remote surgeries, you might want to go ahead and spring for a decent network connection for the hospitals at both ends.
The end (university hospital) where the skilled surgeon is sitting ?
Sure, they'll probably have a dedicated fiber going straight to his console.
The other end where the robot surgery is happenning ?
Depends, if it's a regaion that had undergone a catastrophe, the hospital itself is very likely to still have electricity locally (thanks to generators for such emergencies), but the region might be disconnected.
Wireless is the easiest to re-built in case of emergency (just deploy a bunch of mobile cell-tower-in-a-truck over the region, like they do at some massively popular music festivals)
So it's likely that that hospital will rely on wireless for its connection.
The point of this demo is to show that if said wirless is 5G, it might be adequate to perform remote surgeries.
Now think about the possibilities offered to "hospital-in-a-shipping-container" type of field deployment to be used in emergencies, etc.
I have 1/8" audio jacks on equipment that I've used every day for the past 8 years and they're still perfect.
...single anecdote...
If the manufacturer uses a good-quality 1/8" jack, you won't see the kind of degradation you're talking about.
Even if the quality of the jack is good:
- falls, hits, etc. and other such will put stress on the soldering of the jack. Eventually a bad connection might develop.
Luckily, this one is simple to fix with a soldering iron
- dirt, pocket lint, etc. *will* get inside (unless your smartphone happens to have a cover over its connectors like some waterproof e-readers do, e.g.: Kobo H2O)
and *will definitely* cause bad contacts (or the jack suddenly thinking that it is plugged in - if it uses some mechanical detection - and the speaker suddenly stopping to work, because the smartphone tries to route audio to a non existing jack).
Luckily that one is trivial to clean up.
But still, my point is that down the line a jack might not work as well as on day 1, and most people being lazy, you know what's the likelihood they're going to fix it themselves vs. likelihood they're going to complain loudly (or worse, bring the device to a Genius Bar where the staff is trained to persuade everybody to just throw away their old hardware and buy a new one. This by itself will train people to think that jacks are a cause of expensive hardware replacement).
People listen to a LOT of music on their phones, and not just in their car.
Yup and only very few of those places to listen music into actually are bluetooth enabled.
So yeah, I agree.
The fact that a 2019 flagship phone cannot deliver audio fidelity as good as a 2014 (or 2009) model is absurd.
audio fidelity on the day of their out-boxing.
2 years down the line and Bluetooth should more or less be the same crap quality as on day 1 (unless the manufacturer has pushed an update activating support for new codecs, but that's unlikely, mostly due to licensing issue around codec - as no Bluetooth speaker I know uses Opus nor FLAC)
2 years down the line and the audio jack has taken so much abuse that it's making bad contact and the audio has completely deteriorated.
The second would require hardware fixing which a phone manufacturing company would like to avoid (2 years is *still* within EU Warranty period, it would be mandatory for them to fix it for free), or so probably goes their excuse to remove the jack.
But in practice most aren't actually physically damaged but just extremely dirty, and sometime just cleaning them is enough to remove whatever was preventing the audio plug making good contact in the audio jack. Rendering the above excuse moot.
(And the remaining can still be fixed simply with a soldering iron).
But the Arcade could always compete against the Console, because by the fact that they are so expensive to own, you can just have top of the line graphics and sound built in, always being a generation or two ahead of the Console.
That used to be the case a long time ago. (And even back then with a few exceptions, like NeoGeo MVS and AES being virtually the same hardware, and SEGA being very often inspired by their arcade hardware (System16, various Models, Noami) to make their home consoles (MegaDrive, Saturn, DreamCast) through with some cost to manufacturing vs. performance compromises).
Nowadays, if you look at the actual hardware: console, arcades and PCs have all more or less converged (look at the later iteration of SEGA arcade hardware) with a rather narrow spectrum of hardware, with consoles on the cheaper side, and high-end ehtousiasts PCs on the more expensive side.
Nowaday these platforms only differiates by the use case they want to target :
- consoles are for the ease of use (just put the disk in the tray and don't care about compatibility)
- home PCs are for the customisability and extreme hardware (you can fork multiple thousands of bucks and have the latest graphic card on which the game was just demoed at the last gameshow).
However what really was the killer was Multi-player internet connectivity. Part of the fun of the Arcade is playing with multiple people. Many game had duel or I have seen up to 4 set of controllers so people would play against each other. Now with internet connectivity people never needed to go miles away to interact with real people.
That on the other hand, I agree.
But $35 vs. $100 is not a meaningful comparison; a minimal RPi kit costs about $70
Not necessarily. This device is specially intended for geeks, and wanna be geeks. /.ers and their kids)
(i.e.: for
People with usually lots of junk laying around.
(with enclosure,
Cool to have one, but not necessary. If you're careful enough (try to avoid shorting pins or whatever) you could begin using your Pi without one.
And then any non conductive box (including random cardboad and plastic box) could serve as a good enough make-shift case in most situations.
(Been there, done that with my first Pi)
power supply,
The most common power supply that you are (or at least: "...were...", back when the Pi launched) going to have laying around at home is a micro-USB charger. Virtually anything uses them (smartphone, rechargeable gadgets, powerbanks, etc.)
So that's why the RPi went for a micro-USB connector instead of a barrel like some are complaining :
because in a pinch you can grab whatever you have around and plug the Pi and at least boot it
(even though you might not provide enough watts for the full 1-point-something GHz speeds of modern RPi 2 and 3 to be available, and might end up throttling down to base 600Mhz with "Undervolt" warnings. But you can still get some (albeit slow) work out of it)
Now with the industry shift from micro USB to USB-C, raspberry pi are probably going to shift to USB-C at some point in the future (Pi 4 ?) because now that's the one you'll end up having around.
and an sd card that can handle lots of small files),
everybody has tons of SD cards laying around given that's the format used by pretty much everything (smartphone, photo camera, portable gaming console, etc.)
again you could grab one laying around.
Whether it will handle the abuses of running an OS is a different matter (that's probably what you meant with 'that can handle...') or if it will die soon is a different matter.
But that won't stop you from experimenting
and that's still without keyboard, mouse, and hdmi cable.
which are exactly of the type (USB HID devices) that you'll have around.
TL;DR: the type of people who are likely interested to experiment with a Pi have a high change of having hte (extremely standard) accessories laying around, and can progressively buy more adapted (e.g.: 3A power supply, SD card with ECC, etc.) at a later point in time.
Norway generates about 90% of it's electrical power via Hydro.
Yup. So do a couple of other countries (e.g.: Switzerland) and in the grand scheme of things, with a few key exceptions (of the top of my head: India, China and Australia - you can google to find actual studies on the subject) most countries have power generation mixes that make EV slightly less polluting than ICE over their lifetime.
(Yup, even countries like the US that burn coal : turns out that big central optimized power plants are more efficient than an engine miniaturized enough to fit in a car)
That, and the fact the country could fit into Texas twice, you have the perfect place for electric cars.
Now, how does *that* has anything to do with EVs ?