Posts by DropBear 4735 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
It's just unfortunate it was looking like a... no, like three bricks duct-taped together. And it looks like they liked it, because the Pyra doesn't seem any different. I'm not a fan of the modern smartphone ultra-thinness craze, but as far a thickness goes these guys are in a league all of their own...
Just because it's an established economic policy to restrict existing identical capability for pricing purposes does not make it acceptable - not in my book. It's your choice to put something in there or not as you see fit, but if you DO put it in and then try to keep it from me two things are going to happen: a) I'll learn how to unlock it in short order and b) I'll never ever do business with you again if there's any way in hell I can help it.
...except VR really IS dead: for quite a while Kickstarter used to have a "Virtual Reality" pseudo-category / hashtag / thingie you could browse by - they've quietly deleted it just a few days ago. Poof! Gone. As it's no doubt a stats-based decision, it should tell you all you need to know about the interest of the public at large in VR, when it's not being aggressively pushed by some megacorp in their "me too!" collective hallucination of VR grandeur.
"I'll watch the video again, and this time, I'll try to ignore the SECs and pay more ATAN-tion to the skin tones..."
There's a direct connection to ATAN insomuch every programmer unfortunate enough to have dabbled in geometry-handling maths knows it's an unreliable bitch - you really should use ATAN2 instead...
Easy to misunderstand issue, because _on face value_ the way it's stated in the article is flat out ridiculous (_of course_ there are problems that are hard to solve but easy to check, we have a list of examples, with factoring to primes right on the top); that said, even in that form, the question is actually perfectly valid, asking whether there really is no easy way to solve such problems, ever, or whether it's only hard because we have no idea how to do it easily, yet.
"I had to prove that 1≠2"
While this is understandably startling for the layman, a mathematician would just immediately propose the opposite assumption ("1=2") and drive it straight into the nearest impossibility using only rigorous logic on the way. Done. Not that I have any idea what that might be, mind, but hey I'm not a mathematician...
I find this level of personal information access disturbing too. In my (East-European) country, you can walk into a supermarket, pick up a TV set, pay with cash, and just leave (as far as I know - didn't try to buy one lately though). If you actually want warranty as well, you're expected to walk over to a counter - of your own accord, nobody should be forcing you - where your name and address will be recorded on the warranty papers, but there will be no checks of it against anything (at least not there and then).
Sage advice, but these days it's quite literally only calculator or torch apps that don't insist on having Internet access, and I'm not even sure about those either these days... there are entire classes of apps I have to stay away from because no matter how long you search, there's not a single one that doesn't want everything all the way to your sock size.
More than that, there are umpteen SoCs these days that can boot off several sources (such as SD card or USB drive) pretty much on their own, starting from zero - it's ridiculously easy to make _unbrickable_ systems with them since no matter how badly one screws up any internal storage, an appropriate update delivered via a service SD or USB socket can bypass it, boot, and fix it; and I expect lots of people would be able to follow simple instructions to "download this, run it on a windows PC, point it at an empty media, remove media, insert into TV, turn TV on"- so why the heck are they not doing things this way...?
Actually, "stop" immediately "grated on my ears" as well as soon as I read it. The implication that they would be otherwise exploding left right and centre is just too strong, even if it's a somewhat subjective interpretation. What isn't already moving doesn't need to be stopped after all. And frankly, "prevent" isn't much better - it carries much the same connotation of altering the course of something that was already going to happen. I'd personally prefer something along the lines of "Airbus eliminates fuel tank explosion risk factor" but I do concede it isn't as snappy a title, all this largely being splitting hairs anyway...
Absolutely - it's unthinkable to have terrorists out there with brains we can't lobotomise at will with the press of a button from a remote cloud! All those terrorist-producing wombs must be declared illegal as soon as possible unless fitted with a pre-birth YippieKayYay cortical bomb / TruPatriot mind reader implanter!
I have an 8cm (prop tip to prop tip diagonal) _toy_ quad (obscure OEM, not DJI), and there is open source firmware I can flash right into it if I want - there's no way to ever return to stock because that can't be read out and nobody has it, but a $5 ST-clone dongle and five wires can push the open source version onto it, and it will carry on operating just as before except now I can mess with all the PID settings. It's all to small to matter of course, there's no "cloud connection" or any way to officially update anything - but if I can do this, it's almost impossible there not to be similar firmwares for things as popular as DJI...
Right now they don't seem to be offering anything that would make me want one (oh do come on - nostalgia for a brand that has essentially zero to do with its roots right now? Yeah, I have some, but I'm not THAT stupid...). Now, IF they would offer either a) a proper landscape hardware full qwerty keyboard, or b) delightfully bold and innovative takes (like they used to) on the incredibly stale slab form-factor or c) a truly astonishingly good camera on the phone (I've seen samples, the ones for the 8 are rather kinda "meh" - just look at how mid-distant foliage gets mangled...) or d) a stowable screen, whatever form factor as long as it opens to at least twice the size of the phone itself or e) at least a second high-res e-paper screen for reading e-books (hello Yotaphone) or f) a battery life of three full days (a weekend of dying of boredom in the middle of nowhere - if I wanted to carry a zillion extra power packs I don't need Nokia for that...) of semi-continuous use (light browsing etc., not video playback or calling), or... or... SOMETHING that isn't just a false use case invented by marketroids completely severed from reality, THEN I'd be quite interested...
Your need to do whatever* does not make you exempt from regarding other human beings as human beings and treating them accordingly, with at least a modicum of professionalism and respect. No, you're not the centre of the Universe even though you clearly think you are. If you think you have been wronged and/or neglected you're welcome to complain, but your self-assigned importance absolves you of precisely nothing when you're plainly being an over-the-top asshole. And if you choose to be one, getting the same in return is the absolute minimum you deserve. Actually, what you deserve for that is more in line with "I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers". A single line of snark is actually a superhumanly reserved reply for any attempt to demean a fellow human being. But when you look around you clearly see servants instead of people, so feel free to carry on defending childlike histrionics and entitlement...
*You clearly identify strongly with Newt's "client"; the tone of the following, rather than being personally directed, merely accommodates that choice. Well, except the last sentence. That's squarely on you.
"It is the job the IT department"
Wrong. If you're the kind of "user" that is used to flush / flappy door handles on cars and gets confused and unable to enter the vehicle when presented with one of the protruding grab-handle types then do kindly fuck right the fuck off and abstain from using cars. Same applies to a trivial concept called "collapsing stuff" and IT.
"Except as a 'normal user' just because i can look at the source code, doesn't mean it makes any sense to me, or that i can fix it."
Except the point of the code being open ISN'T that you, a 'normal user' can look at it (well, you can if you feel like you can grok it but it likely won't help you much). The point is that someone independent, OTHER than the manufacturer can look at it and point out flaws that the manufacturer might not be inclined to look for, fix, or publish all that much. Open source is not some golden guarantee of flawlessness, but rather a guarantee that IF something is important or interesting enough to attract scrutiny, the flaws can be found. And you're indeed free to do that yourself, if you happen to be a security researcher, or able to hire one - otherwise you'll just have to rely on other interested partiers. No more, no less. But that's not the same thing as openness of the code being useless to you, as a 'normal user'.
"How can one be sure reviews are really reviews and not ads in disguise?"
Oh come on, that's "how to internet 101", seriously. You just disregard absolutely all positive reviews all products of interest and only look at the negative ones. If several are complaining about a similar issue, especially on different sites, it's probably real. If the complaints are about small stuff of little substance or the big complaints look like isolated outliers, it's probably an almost decent product. Not that this is foolproof, but I have never heard of a truly concerted effort / smear campaign in the real world that could have defeated it.
Well yes the biggest problem with concept of "average" is that there are so many different ones (like the mentioned "median"). Yes of course I do realize all of these are actually different things and have perfectly good and rigorously defined mathematical meanings, as long as you admit that laypeople (very much including me in this case) have no clue which one is which, which one they're talking about, which one they would want to be talking about, or even that they're different things at all. Most of us just think of it as "that value in the middle" never bothering to rigorously define either "middle" or "middle of what exactly"...
"Which is why my front door is a manual number lock"
Depending on how mortified you are or are not in the mood to become, do or never do check out a few Youtube videos demonstrating how easily and quickly a typical* "number lock" gets pwned by anyone who also watched the same videos, using nothing but a thin "feeler" pick showed in next to the dials...
*there are things that can be done to prevent a lot of this, but it just doesn't seem to be present in the vast majority of these locks - "we don't give a shit" is not exclusive to IoT...
Except in today's "chemistry sets are evil incarnate and the work of the Devil himself" EVERYTHING is a "danger to the public", Elon. I appreciate the achievement, but remain seriously unconvinced your machine "thinks" in any sense at any level, regardless of which definition of the word we use. I do like your rocketry work, but I don't want to live in a world where box cutters need to be registered.
Patreon (or some other equivalent if you don't like it and can find one) is the only way to go. A low three-figure sum should not be particularly hard to reach; if you can't even do that much then maybe what you do is of not that much interest after all, and you're doing the online equivalent of vanity book publishing, in which case you're quite welcome to support the entire cost yourself. If it does work, you're also welcome to note up-front that you won't be expanding even if you end up netting five-figures a month (as if...) - most people will understand, and these things tend to somewhat self-regulate anyway - I'm much less likely to join supporting a creator already making five figures a month than another one struggling with two or three. If some people still complain after that, blame your thin skin not them - there will always be people complaining, welcome to the internet and the 21st century. Sane people don't publish Youtube videos then complain that "people are mean" in the comments any more than try shouting at the tide...
"funding a company doing R&D of a new project is a risk"
No, not really. Crowdfunding campaigns are not supposed to hinge on any kind of "R&D" (except any final product-for-manufacture details) seeing as how (at least on Kickstarter, which is, oh, only the biggest name in this game) you're supposed to have a complete and demonstrably functional prototype before you even launch a campaign. How that works out in practice is a different matter entirely which I'm not prepared to discuss without swearing profusely, but as a general rule of thumb, you're not supposed to get money for developing something that is a mere "idea".
...unless your concern is that without supporting the campaign the $thing_of_interest might not come into existence at all. It's a bit far fetched of course to imply that your single, individual decision would have even one iota of impact on that, but hey - for some strange reason I swear I'll never understand nobody seems to have a problem with the same assumption when voting is involved...
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I just got a IoT* wall plug just so I can control it whenever I like without having to dig for its inline cord-switch (it's in a quite visible but hard-to-reach spot)...
* Now, now, we're all adults here, no need for that pitchfork - it just functions like a wireless switch within a larger existing system, there's no remote access at all to any of it...
A cynically pragmatic one, and not incorrect IMHO. Along the lines of "don't try to criticise or attempt to change the system unless you're willing to accept that nothing will change in a significant enough way to affect favourably anyone you know except perhaps your grandchildren - if you're stupidly lucky, otherwise it will just be even worse for them. So if that sounds like fun go right ahead but please don't delude yourself into thinking anything you could possibly do could be of any assistance to you in any immediate practical matter regardless of how long you're willing to wait. If that's what you're after, your only remedy is to try staying out of of the system completely".
Well, he might be meaning something completely different but that's how I read it...
"Of course, there's no way to know where a package actually went - only what the courier admits to."
...unless the package happens to contain... a phone. Which could power up each hour or so, attempt to get a GPS fix, log it, and power back down for another hour (with the right app). Might still miss all the clear(ish)-sky fix opportunities though...
And that's why I don't like to stay beholden to free crumbs form the tables of the mighty. While not quite meant for specifically this, "Sweet Home 3D" may or may not do what you want for _proper_ free - although don't expect to rebuild La Sagrada Familia with it. Of course, if do you need to stay compatible with someone else's sketchup plans, it's all a bit moot...
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