Joking aside, I am having a hard time understanding why someone cannot just rotate the physical watch. Why do they have to wear it with the button on the wrist side?
Well, since you couldn't be bothered to read the link I provided, here's a for-instance:
It drives me nuts because this is such a simple little bit of coding, but neglecting it is **ahem**ing for full- and part-time lefties, and people with motor control difficulties.
I periodically get gangliom cysts in my left wrist (I guess I use my left arm and shoulder more for strength-based things, so there's more strain). This makes wearing the fitbit on the left excruciating (plus it wont exactly fit under/over a brace), and I simply cannot (painlessly) move my wrist to hit the stupid freaking button when it's on the left side of my right wrist.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Yep I thought that too until I bought a new camera which then produced files which couldn't be opened by it. We're not all playing with TIFFs and JPEGs here.
I deal with RAW files too. But not in Photoshop. That's the least reasonable tool for me to use for my photos. Lightroom (again, the most recent non-sub version) is presently the way to go there, and if that stops working, I'm already well on the way into developing a replacement.
I agree you don't want your data locked up by the application sw vendor (or a hacker) but what will you do when win10 is deprecated and your old software no longer works on win11...?
The answer to that, at least so far, is "run it in a VM."
I have all my Windows stuff running fine in a VM right now. In OSX, no less. The Windows is prevented from getting to the network, so MS can't screw it up and my stuff should continue to work well into the future.
Same thing for Apple: They're actively planning on screwing with 32-bit app compatibility. Well, I have a 32-bit-happy version of OS X running in a VM. I'll just move whatever I need to over there.
Sure, some time in the future this may all fall over. But we're not even close yet, and no matter what, I won't encourage subscription / rental.
I just quit giving Adobe my money. I own the most recent non-sub version of Photoshop, and that'll do fine for whatever I need to use Photoshop for in the future, and to work with what I have already used Photoshop for.
My position - both as a user and a developer - is that I am quite happy to buy software, including buying upgrades; I absolutely refuse to steal software; and under no circumstances will I rent software: I think the entire rent/subscribe model is profoundly toxic to the end user.
The general class of problem is that if I produce a document (such as a.psd) with software X, and then X stops working because [I can't afford to continue to pay || the company is out of business || the company is no longer supporting it || any other non-remediable reason] then my document may become frozen and/or impossible to access, depending on just how the version of the software I finally ended up with handles such things, something you can't really predict because these companies change their policies from time to time.
I can't, in good conscience, support the model / mindset that embodies the potential for such problems. I certainly won't create software that imposes such a thing on my end users.
You want to sell me software, fine, let's do that. You want to rent/subscribe it to me, you can toddle right the hell off without my money.
This is not blowing at all. [...] With sound, a particle of air oscillates but doesn't move on the average
Only if the sound is a purely mirrored wavefront - a pure tone. Even that, however, is not at all the same as "not blowing."
Put your hand in front of a subwoofer that's pumping a bit. A pure 20 Hz tone is fine. The air most certainly is moving. Quite a distance, too.
Think about it: Given an isolated mass of air, if the wind blows east for 1 min at 20 MPH, and then west for 1 min at 20 MPH, then the air, on average, as you say, the air hasn't moved at all. But it most certainly has moved.
The price for these capabilities of dropping well faster than half every three years.
Most people are generally terrible at dealing with / anticipating non-linear change. Those who can are often able to remain far ahead of the curve. But they're relatively rare.
And this change... this change is unlike any other that preceded it. That's why you see so many deniers claiming this wave of automation is essentially just like previous "no more buggywhips" events.
They simply can't open their minds far enough to see that the light in the tunnel is an oncoming, accelerating, train. It's going to hit them with very little warning, despite you standing by the tracks and screaming "Get off, GET OFF! It's a frigging TRAIN!"
JPEG enables lossy compression for a smaller file size, PNG does not.
Do we really need lossy compression for still images any longer?
The network is way faster, local memory, storage, and graphics card resources are all way less expensive, and data lost from an image is data lost forever.
What we need is fiber everywhere, or something of equivalent speed.
Lossless compatible photo format supporting layers.
PNG does lossless far better. TIFF does need to die. Aside from the poor compression, the format itself is a horrific mess.
I write image processing applications, and part of that is writing loaders - I know TIFF is a mess. Just go read the PNG spec, then the TIFF spec. That'll convince you if you are able to grasp the specs.
Oh no, I grasp it, all right. But Esperanto solves nothing, because there's no advantage conferred in actually understanding people in real life situations.
Tell you what... I might look into Esperanto when I get finished learning (Mandarin) Chinese. Because Mandarin is much, much more important in general as in there are large numbers of people who speak it, even here in the USA, and Chinese food is mostly awesome and it helps when ordering to be able to speak the language (and Esperanto lacks food traditions entirely, so phbbbt.)
Don't even get me started on Cantonese. Or other variants. Ouch.
The catch is... near as I can tell, I'll never finish learning Mandarin. Somewhere there must have been an emperor who ensured that Mandarin was going to be the hardest language to learn ever.
Turns out I have no plans to learn Klingon, either. Not until there are real aliens speaking would I be interested in such a thing. At which point, I would consider it my #1 priority, though. Because, you know, aliens!
Me thinks you severely underestimate the size of the required antennas.
No. I just understand that local AM radio is practical with a short wire like an earbud connection. It won't act like any kind of a DX machine, certainly, but you'll hear locals. I can pick up our local (10 KW) AM station very well by sticking a screwdriver into the PL-259 on my SDR. There are several ways to push a short wire into low frequency resonance, and not all of them require a large actual inductance. Gyrators, for instance are practical at AM BCB frequencies; I've done quite a bit of experimenting with them. The ability to have an ultra high-impedance load that still is quiet and provides significant gain allows antenna impedances that are not typically low to still perform well enough for many use cases. Doesn't hurt to have sensitivities down into fractions of a microvolt, either - you don't need a lot of signal, particularly at AM BCB.
The author of the link knows a fair bit about radio, including cellphone radios, being also the author of non-trivial SDR software and a long-term RF engineer.
The author of the linked article, OTOH, knew, and reported, that the device in question made available three bands that the radio in the cellphone is (a) not designed to operate on and (b) not permitted to operate upon.
In light of those facts, you might want to temper your remarks. Or not. Free-ish country and all that.
My Galaxy S7's FM radio has worked with NextRadio (FM broadcast band) for quite some time now. AM is possible, if they are so inclined to make that happen. Because...
Also interesting is that for an FM radio to be practical, you need an antenna, and so far, that's been the wire to the earbuds / headphones, which is decently longish. So very likely implicit in this "there will be FM radio" lies an "there will be an audio jack", and also, "if we want AM radio, we can do it." Ever since low power software defined radio has been possible, this stuff can be done. Particularly in a high-power availability device like a cellphone. It can be done the old way, too, but not nearly as well.
I suspect the whole "there will be FM" thing is known somewhat gleefully in the hallowed corporate halls at Samsung as "taking advantage of Apple's... courage."
And if there are 7 billion starving people outside the gates of their automated defenses? They will run out of ammunition eventually.
Impossible scenario. First you'd have a pile of dead too high to get over, then you'd have disease, and all of this assuming you could get 7 billion people to surround a compound, which is absurd. Further, the number of poor who would be willing to walk into heavy arms is not going to be large. There's little point trying to get food and shelter by killing yourself. You can say that some will defend the interests of others, and no doubt they would, but also this would be a very small number.
Then there's the "ammunition" thing. Bullets? Really? Will it be a question of bullets? Will a laser run out of photons? How about a tailored disease vector for which the rich have the countermeasure, and the poor don't? Area denial weapons? Chemical weapons? How about armored robots which can simply tear anyone in-the-zone limb from limb?
If the poor become a serious threat (by which I mean, violent), you simply can't argue that they can create and maintain a serious, widespread threat. The first time they go after the unarmed rich, that'll be the end of the unarmed rich, right there. You will almost instantly have armed rich, and now the context is completely different.
See, it's all very well to talk as if the poor were capable of exerting continuous unified force against modern arms, but the idea is utter nonsense: it doesn't stand up under even mild scrutiny.
The only solution to this that has any chance of working is social; government force, used top down, to disenfranchise the rich, and distribute the wealth much more generally than it is now. That's probably what will actually happen, too. If not, it's going to be a hell of a mess, and the poor will almost certainly lose in the process.
Until something happens where they need tradesman to survive because you know rich people don't really have a shit ton of skills. In the end, they still need the plebes to raise the crops, feed/slaughter the animals and maintain the infrastructure.
What part of "the rich will be the first to be able to afford and emplace comprehensive automation" did you fail to understand before you wrote that?
What they will need - and what they will have - is automation that can both do the jobs at hand, and produce more automation, and repair the automation in place.
The only relevant observation here is that the poor don't really need the rich; the rich, however, will have automated defenses, and so what the poor need or don't need may not be particularly on point.
The only difference is how society's production is apportioned to everyone.
Where "everyone" really means a little for most, and a lot for the rich.
This is why incomes at the lower tiers are barely subsistence level (and if you consider medical care and decent shelter as included in the definition of subsistence level, then it isn't even that.)
The imbalance is striking, but continuous social engineering has brought the masses around to the mindset that this is generally an okay state of affairs. To change it will require some other major social change as a catalyst.
Pervasive automation might serve, as it is very likely to rather suddenly alter the prospects of a very large number of people in a very short span of time. Getting them to accept that alteration may not be easy, or even possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, since you couldn't be bothered to read the link I provided, here's a for-instance:
Ah, Fitbit. The company that couldn't even get face rotation for the appropriate wrist done correctly.
No thank you. I'd rather not deal with outright incompetents.
I deal with RAW files too. But not in Photoshop. That's the least reasonable tool for me to use for my photos. Lightroom (again, the most recent non-sub version) is presently the way to go there, and if that stops working, I'm already well on the way into developing a replacement.
The answer to that, at least so far, is "run it in a VM."
I have all my Windows stuff running fine in a VM right now. In OSX, no less. The Windows is prevented from getting to the network, so MS can't screw it up and my stuff should continue to work well into the future.
Same thing for Apple: They're actively planning on screwing with 32-bit app compatibility. Well, I have a 32-bit-happy version of OS X running in a VM. I'll just move whatever I need to over there.
Sure, some time in the future this may all fall over. But we're not even close yet, and no matter what, I won't encourage subscription / rental.
I just quit giving Adobe my money. I own the most recent non-sub version of Photoshop, and that'll do fine for whatever I need to use Photoshop for in the future, and to work with what I have already used Photoshop for.
My position - both as a user and a developer - is that I am quite happy to buy software, including buying upgrades; I absolutely refuse to steal software; and under no circumstances will I rent software: I think the entire rent/subscribe model is profoundly toxic to the end user.
The general class of problem is that if I produce a document (such as a .psd) with software X, and then X stops working because [I can't afford to continue to pay || the company is out of business || the company is no longer supporting it || any other non-remediable reason] then my document may become frozen and/or impossible to access, depending on just how the version of the software I finally ended up with handles such things, something you can't really predict because these companies change their policies from time to time.
I can't, in good conscience, support the model / mindset that embodies the potential for such problems. I certainly won't create software that imposes such a thing on my end users.
You want to sell me software, fine, let's do that. You want to rent/subscribe it to me, you can toddle right the hell off without my money.
...aaand now you're right back to what I originally said:
So glad you agree. :)
Only if the sound is a purely mirrored wavefront - a pure tone. Even that, however, is not at all the same as "not blowing."
Put your hand in front of a subwoofer that's pumping a bit. A pure 20 Hz tone is fine. The air most certainly is moving. Quite a distance, too.
Think about it: Given an isolated mass of air, if the wind blows east for 1 min at 20 MPH, and then west for 1 min at 20 MPH, then the air, on average, as you say, the air hasn't moved at all. But it most certainly has moved.
Same thing with audio. Just a smaller scale.
Most people are generally terrible at dealing with / anticipating non-linear change. Those who can are often able to remain far ahead of the curve. But they're relatively rare.
And this change... this change is unlike any other that preceded it. That's why you see so many deniers claiming this wave of automation is essentially just like previous "no more buggywhips" events.
They simply can't open their minds far enough to see that the light in the tunnel is an oncoming, accelerating, train. It's going to hit them with very little warning, despite you standing by the tracks and screaming "Get off, GET OFF! It's a frigging TRAIN!"
Your thinking on this really sucks.
And anyway, technically, this isn't simple "blowing." It's vector addition of pressure wavefronts.
Low-bandwidth scenarios are not fit for use. This isn't 1992.
Respect your data. Don't throw away information.
Do we really need lossy compression for still images any longer?
The network is way faster, local memory, storage, and graphics card resources are all way less expensive, and data lost from an image is data lost forever.
What we need is fiber everywhere, or something of equivalent speed.
PNG does lossless far better. TIFF does need to die. Aside from the poor compression, the format itself is a horrific mess.
I write image processing applications, and part of that is writing loaders - I know TIFF is a mess. Just go read the PNG spec, then the TIFF spec. That'll convince you if you are able to grasp the specs.
Eventually he'll figure out that the opposite sex is also indistinguishable from magic.
I believe we can give ol' Tom a pass on this one. :)
Oh no, I grasp it, all right. But Esperanto solves nothing, because there's no advantage conferred in actually understanding people in real life situations.
Sad, but true.
Tell you what... I might look into Esperanto when I get finished learning (Mandarin) Chinese. Because Mandarin is much, much more important in general as in there are large numbers of people who speak it, even here in the USA, and Chinese food is mostly awesome and it helps when ordering to be able to speak the language (and Esperanto lacks food traditions entirely, so phbbbt.)
Don't even get me started on Cantonese. Or other variants. Ouch.
The catch is... near as I can tell, I'll never finish learning Mandarin. Somewhere there must have been an emperor who ensured that Mandarin was going to be the hardest language to learn ever.
Turns out I have no plans to learn Klingon, either. Not until there are real aliens speaking would I be interested in such a thing. At which point, I would consider it my #1 priority, though. Because, you know, aliens!
No. I just understand that local AM radio is practical with a short wire like an earbud connection. It won't act like any kind of a DX machine, certainly, but you'll hear locals. I can pick up our local (10 KW) AM station very well by sticking a screwdriver into the PL-259 on my SDR. There are several ways to push a short wire into low frequency resonance, and not all of them require a large actual inductance. Gyrators, for instance are practical at AM BCB frequencies; I've done quite a bit of experimenting with them. The ability to have an ultra high-impedance load that still is quiet and provides significant gain allows antenna impedances that are not typically low to still perform well enough for many use cases. Doesn't hurt to have sensitivities down into fractions of a microvolt, either - you don't need a lot of signal, particularly at AM BCB.
The author of the link knows a fair bit about radio, including cellphone radios, being also the author of non-trivial SDR software and a long-term RF engineer.
The author of the linked article, OTOH, knew, and reported, that the device in question made available three bands that the radio in the cellphone is (a) not designed to operate on and (b) not permitted to operate upon.
In light of those facts, you might want to temper your remarks. Or not. Free-ish country and all that.
Pretty close...
My Galaxy S7's FM radio has worked with NextRadio (FM broadcast band) for quite some time now. AM is possible, if they are so inclined to make that happen. Because...
Also interesting is that for an FM radio to be practical, you need an antenna, and so far, that's been the wire to the earbuds / headphones, which is decently longish. So very likely implicit in this "there will be FM radio" lies an "there will be an audio jack", and also, "if we want AM radio, we can do it." Ever since low power software defined radio has been possible, this stuff can be done. Particularly in a high-power availability device like a cellphone. It can be done the old way, too, but not nearly as well.
I suspect the whole "there will be FM" thing is known somewhat gleefully in the hallowed corporate halls at Samsung as "taking advantage of Apple's... courage."
I stacked rocks. If someone didn't like the answers I came up with, I threw rocks. This was the beginning of true multipurpose computing.
Impossible scenario. First you'd have a pile of dead too high to get over, then you'd have disease, and all of this assuming you could get 7 billion people to surround a compound, which is absurd. Further, the number of poor who would be willing to walk into heavy arms is not going to be large. There's little point trying to get food and shelter by killing yourself. You can say that some will defend the interests of others, and no doubt they would, but also this would be a very small number.
Then there's the "ammunition" thing. Bullets? Really? Will it be a question of bullets? Will a laser run out of photons? How about a tailored disease vector for which the rich have the countermeasure, and the poor don't? Area denial weapons? Chemical weapons? How about armored robots which can simply tear anyone in-the-zone limb from limb?
If the poor become a serious threat (by which I mean, violent), you simply can't argue that they can create and maintain a serious, widespread threat. The first time they go after the unarmed rich, that'll be the end of the unarmed rich, right there. You will almost instantly have armed rich, and now the context is completely different.
See, it's all very well to talk as if the poor were capable of exerting continuous unified force against modern arms, but the idea is utter nonsense: it doesn't stand up under even mild scrutiny.
The only solution to this that has any chance of working is social; government force, used top down, to disenfranchise the rich, and distribute the wealth much more generally than it is now. That's probably what will actually happen, too. If not, it's going to be a hell of a mess, and the poor will almost certainly lose in the process.
What part of "the rich will be the first to be able to afford and emplace comprehensive automation" did you fail to understand before you wrote that?
What they will need - and what they will have - is automation that can both do the jobs at hand, and produce more automation, and repair the automation in place.
The only relevant observation here is that the poor don't really need the rich; the rich, however, will have automated defenses, and so what the poor need or don't need may not be particularly on point.
Where "everyone" really means a little for most, and a lot for the rich.
This is why incomes at the lower tiers are barely subsistence level (and if you consider medical care and decent shelter as included in the definition of subsistence level, then it isn't even that.)
The imbalance is striking, but continuous social engineering has brought the masses around to the mindset that this is generally an okay state of affairs. To change it will require some other major social change as a catalyst.
Pervasive automation might serve, as it is very likely to rather suddenly alter the prospects of a very large number of people in a very short span of time. Getting them to accept that alteration may not be easy, or even possible.