Posts by Mage

Nokia 9210i

It's what might have been in 2007 from Nokia, if they'd not lost the plot in 2003-2004.

Though probably the earlier 486 communicator was inspired by a Psion.

9210 used ARM, 9100 series a kind of 486.

N9210 CCFL backlight

N9210i, LED backlight and ungraded modem, though my ISP could only do 14.4K (one call charge) or 28.8 K (double charge rate). It was contract data packages, started by Apple, that made smartphones usable for non-corporates on the Internet.

Sure it's niche, but it's choice. There are not many decent alternatives to 5" to 6.6" slab of touch screen with volume buttons only if you are luck to even have them. I don't want a Doro.

All about the intellectual property

"The IP portfolio means that when someone does finally crack AR’s tough technical issues, whoever holds Magic Leap’s patents will be able to demand healthy royalty payments."

Mostly because the USPTO operation is totally broken.

1) Nothing to do with Software should be allowed. That's covered by copyright.

2) There should be a higher charge for rejections, about x10 higher than acceptance.

3) There should be proper search of Prior Art.

4) Nothing easily cooked up by anyone expert in the field.

5) Most things should have a prototype.

6) No business processes or franchises.

7) Nothing essentially based on maths. i.e. FM radio should have not had patents.

Also stop calling cosmetic design / shapes a Design Patent. They should either be copyright or Registered designs because of a unique appearance, like the fluted coca-cola "coke" bottle. Not simply rounded corners.

The present system is biased in favour of companies with teams of patent lawyers and a small amount of technical people doing almost no research and less development. It also encourages companies to buy up and destroy companies just for the IP. See Google and Qualcomm acquisitions.

The USPTO makes money from accepting applications and doesn't "waste" money on Prior Art searches. Their theory is that existing IP holders will sue in court and get the invalid patent thrown out. Except that favours rich USA Corporations and Lawyers.

The fake IP also aids offshoring via fake royalty payments (Starbucks, Apple etc).

Edison hounded people over stuff he patented which was already invented elsewhere. Eventually the US Government had to invalidate his "motion picture" patents. The US has known about this problem for over 100 years, but chooses to favour the biggest USA corporations rather than small companies or consumers or foreign companies.

Great.

No need for graduated title bars, or excessive 3D. Even a slight 3D hint 1 pixel is better than flat!

It may not cool or pretty but the win9x/NT4/NT5 style is EASY TO USE!

I never liked graduated title bars.

I've found that the classic 3D borders work on Mint 19.3 on themes, but not so well on 18.x, so I'll update from 18.3 to 19.3 soon. Tested it on a different laptop.

Why has everyone forgotten how to do buttons, tabs, check boxes and option (radio) buttons?

It's worse on recent ereader GUI updates than Win10.

FLAT and the same style for everything DOES NOT WORK. Fake slide switches for checks and/or options do not work.

Same style for check and option doesn't work.

Skinny flat scroll bars for content that actually pages doesn't work.

FLAT and over-simplified Icons are as evil as too much skeuomorphic or Vista Candy. You could tone down NT 5.1 (Windows XP) to be very like 3D Win 3.11/Win9x/NT4.0, Win7, the fix for Vista not so much. The Classic shell only fixes the Win 10 start button a bit. There is also the whole stupid distinction on Win10 of two sets of "Programs", the traditional ones, and the tablet friendly apps, often from store. The Win10 tablet experience is ghastly to do real work, a bad copy of Android. MS has turned Windows into a lackluster chimera of desktop WIMP and tablet touch.

An App?

1) People have to install it.

2) There needs to be massive real ongoing testing or who do you trace?

3) Will it even work?

4) Presumably people would need to have data on?

5) Contact Tracing or Notification of someone nearby? Totally different.

This isn't a solution, except to gather info on people.

which groups of neurons are activated in a model when it processes an image

They are NOT neurons in any biological sense. Can we have a proper name for this and stop pretending it's like how a brain works and stop using misleading terms like Learning (it's storage of curated data) and AI (It's artificial, but not intelligent or stupid).

For a brief moment I wondered was it some sort of a scanner examining actual brains.

Though the tool sounds interesting.

re: very unique

It's not like Hilbert's Hotel. Either it's unique or not. Or very <something> as well as unique.

Good

This is good.

The less people using thieving, parasitical Google services the better.

This is a data grab.

Self selecting?

Google's reCAPTCHA service should be illegal on any non-Google site.

Also don't you need a large selection of coughs that are NOT Covid-19 and proper verification of the data or else it's useless research.

Data gathering disguised as research?

SM platforms need to be regulated!

Well meaning comment from the New Statesman:

"Platforms such Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram could delete these posts themselves, listening to warnings from users on cases of misinformation and introduce a specific tool to report fake news on coronavirus." -- https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/04/how-celebrities-became-biggest-peddlers-5g-conspiracy-theory-coronavirus-covid-19

Add WhatsApp, LinkedIn, YouTube.

That doesn't work. Accounts need to be PRE-MODERATED by humans till they prove trustworthy and then a link on EVERY post to report to Moderators. Just like every decent Forum.

But SM sites hide behind "Safe harbor" [sic] because they are not really providing a service like Forums, but purely monetising personal information to sell adverts. So they will not do anything that reduces posting volume or requires human labour without being forced to by law.

Starship?

It's probably not even able to leave the Solar System.

I also think Musk has watched too much Thunderbirds.