Posts by Dave 126

Re: Makes sense

MS's Hololens uses custom chips for scene tracking. Apple announced it will soon be using a GPU of its own design. Apple announces its AR toolkit.

I suspect battery drain will be less of an issue by the time AR comes to consumers.

Apple could make a Surface desktop if they wanted, but they'd rather you use an iPad Pro in tandem with an iMac. For some workflows, it'd be the better solution for the user too (cost notwithstanding).

Re: Are Jeeps that expensive?

If you tried to build a car from its parts catalogue, it would cost you several times the cost of the new vehicle from the dealer. So, dont use the sticker price of a Jeep to estimate the resale value of its parts.

The price charged by manufacturers for replacement parts actually subsidies the price of the new car, because the price of a new bumper or headlight is often paid for by an insurer and thus not considered by a prospective car buyer on the forecourt. One you've bought a car, you're tied to one supplier of parts, much like printers and ink cartridges (okay, okay, I know that by law in the UK car manufacturers can't discriminate against owners who have 3rd party parts fitted by independent garages, but whilst several people make replacement coil springs or starter motors for my car, it is likely that only the original car manufacturer makes suitable headlights or bumpers, due to tooling costs)

Researching proteins that have gone awry is indeed an aim of this laser technique. Only last Saturday a protein researcher was on ABC's radio Science Show, talking about how his laser wasn't powerful enough but he knew a lab who would let him have a go with theirs: (link to page with MP3)

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/understanding-protein-structure-may-allow-treatment-for-amyloid/8561868

Re: Faceless alien

Dunno, but the Goblin Shark is pretty damned Giger-esque! It's found off the coast of Japan.

Here's GIF: http://imgur.com/pBGgLvn

GreyBus is a standard that allows Android phones to treat peripheral resources as internal components, akin to how Thunderbolt allows peripheral components to be seen as being on the computer's PCIe bus.

USB Type C is a physical connector that supports various protocols. Thunderbolt is a protocol that has used USB A (Sony), Display Port (Apple and others) and USB C connectors (ditto) over the years.

Re: Beg your pardon?

Also, if the role of a director is to choose and direct the team on both sides of the camera, then Lucas getting John Williams to score the movie and going to pains to have it reproduced well in cinemas is worthy of credit.

Yet again somebody here is suggesting that a device should be sold at its bill of materials, whilst wilfully ignoring development costs.

This isn't the only company making Lidar kit, yet its competitors aren't able to drastically undercut its current prices. That observation should cause a thinking person to pause and examine their assumptions before commenting.

The serious CAD vendors are looking at browser-accessed cloud systems. The ability for several engineers to work on the same documents is of more use to bigger firms than it is to the amateurs and hobbyists, as indeed are the security advantages and document control. Serious CAD was largely mainframe-based until the very late nineties so the above conventions are familiar, and what CAD applications that were on the desktop then were dismissed as being toys.

There will of course be situations where CAD will be essential in areas of no internet, but for the large part engineers will get online - Bob can't design part B until Alex has finalised part A, so Alex has better connect to the company network as he is paid to.

Re: expanding from?

> If so, where is the center of the universe?

Point your right arm to your two o'clock, and just a smidge to the left... now up a bit, a bit more, that's it: about fifty gazillion yards in that direction.

Re: Eh?

Just wondering - would it have been possible for the NSA to have developed a patch at the same time they wrote the exploit? I'm just thinking of old movies where the moustache-twiddling villain has the poison, but also the antidote should he or his incompetent henchman mishandle it.

I'm thinking of an image of Dick Dastardly and Mutley.

In the implementation described, this kit is working with officers, not supplanting them. Today, you could have traffic cops read every number plate manually and compare it to a list... but that process is probably too slow to be useful in real time. It's a job best automated, leaving the officers' eyes available for other tasks.

That said, many people anecdotally talk of how their spelling has deteriorated since they used spellcheckers for most of their writing. Could it be that using a system that flags known bad guys might make human officers less vigilant? I don't know.

Re: Define laptop

> Define laptop. What is a laptop?

That's moot my friend. The original ban explicitly barred Kindles and iPads by name, as well as other devices bigger than a smartphone, including portable games consoles.

Its been a common practice for CGI rendering workloads (which are suited to distributed across GPU/CPU resources) for a few years now - you install client software on machines on your local network to use their CPUs and GPUs to do the job quicker.

For example, Keyshot is a real time ray-tracing program. Input a 3D model and assign materials and lighting, and the output is a photorealistic image:

KeyShot Network Rendering allows you to take advantage of your network’s computer resources for rendering images, animations, and KeyShotVR’s. After the simple installation process, any user with KeyShot can send a “job” to be rendered on the network. The jobs are organized into a queue that all users can view. Jobs can also be sent from the internal KeyShot queue to network rendering.

- https://www.keyshot.com/features/network-rendering/

I didn't read the article as meaning that the the nVidia cloud will use *your* compute resources, a la Seti@home or Folding@home :)

> drones were a passing fad with consumers

Read the source article. Parrot do well serving the agricultural and construction industries with drones costing in excess of $10k, whereas DJI lean more towards cinematography. This new range of Parrot drones include a model for 3D mapping of the landscape, and another for thermal imaging.

Tools that save you money are not fads.

Re: Loss of freedom

I don't think it has to *rely* upon this method. Traditional desktop applications already have multiple ways of achieving a single command - menu bar, context menu, alt keyboard menu navigation, ctrl keyboard shortcuts, touchpad gestures, mouse button modifiers, radial menus.

You are right that this control method can't be used all the time, so the return on investment of developing 'muscle memory' will be lower... but it appears to be an easily 'discoverable' input method.

Indeed, the main issue people had with MS's Ribbon interface is that removed the traditional menus. I use an application where a Ribbon-type control palette is an option in addition to menus, and I use both.

Re: Disney

Knee-jerk reactions aside, there are potential application in toys and theme parks. Disney have also done some research into wireless power transmission - https://phys.org/news/2017-02-wireless-power-transmission-safely-devices.html

The downside is that that your room needs to have metal walls, floor and ceiling, and feature a pole in the centre.

Re: Why I feel uncomfortable...

Plastics like ABS will burn too - but burning cardboard is easier to brush off your skin than burning ABS or nylon.

I don't know how hot RPis get, but I've heard of no injuries from them. Given they are marketed at youngsters and sold without a case, it would be a massive design failure if they did hot enough to cause injury. Of course, chip temperature isn't the only fire hazard - higher temperatures can occur locally on short circuits (perhaps if a child dips the microUSB power connector in liquid before plugging it in) but it would take an unlikely placement of dry fluff (tinder) for that to cause any sort of risk to the user.

In short, the soldering iron offers orders of magnitude greater risk, and even then burning your fingers is an educational experience!

But hey, it's better to start out paranoid (and design out or eliminate risks) than it is to be blasé. :)

Windows 10 on the computers that were upgraded from 7 & 8 doesn't have the Windows S limitations that were outlined in this article, regardless of what you or I define as a 'version'.

Re: drunk posting again

Also: young people less likely to be in employment than older people, and beer has been taxed to the point of being of nearly unaffordable for them.

Re: "opening a browser or an application or a program"

Indeed. Language is an ever-evolving thing, so I prefer to err on the side of clarity. For that reason, I use 'application' for a desktop program, and 'app' for a phone or tablet program. In time, the distinction will become less useful as more applications run on ARM, and more predominately ARM OSs play nice with mice and keyboards. Hey ho.

( I also use 'program' for computer software, and 'programme' for theatre and television shows.)

Re: S is for Spyware

Idiots yes, but also anyone who requires some specific 3rd party applications not available on non-Windows platforms - so that includes a good many engineers at present. Not a hard concept to grasp.

And are you sure that 'idiots will flock to it'? I'd have thought these 'idiots' that concern you just use what comes installed on the machine they buy.

Windows S phones home just as Windows Pro does - as the article notes, there is little difference between the two other than a few settings.

(Curious observation - my stock Android keyboard just 'auto-corrected' Windows S to Windows Server)