hex4def6

As someone who worked on them a decade ago:

To be clear, the displays are not created by Amazon / Lab126. Instead, they're a product of Eink Holdings, Inc.

From what I remember, most of the screen refresh algorithms etc are Eink IP. And by the way, the cost of the display module alone was eye-watering, especially when compared with LCD displays...

With e-ink, you can drive it faster, at the expense of massive power consumption or terrible ghosting / artifacting. You're not going to get the 6 weeks of use out of a battery doing that.

For reading a book, smudges / ghosting sucks, so they optimize for full screen refreshes just often enough to clear that up (that's when the screen goes black then white, followed by the update).

It's kind of a physics based fundamental limitation -- the display is closer to a mechanical display of old than an LCD.

The kindle is a product that does one thing well: display static text in any lighting condition with a similar quality to the printed page.

Jeez. It's one thing to not do the testing, call it N95, and then say "oopsie, we didn't realize". It's another to actually do the testing, discover it doesn't pass, and sell it as N95 anyway.

That is a pretty good "willfully fraudulent" argument rather than "accidently overstating performance".

I remember actually testing that stuff out when it came out. I was working as an intern at Philips Semiconductors in their Wi-Fi chip division. Speaking of time has no meaning... :)

I think there were a couple of consumer products that got released - Linksys and netgear perhaps? They consisted of a USB Hub + Dongle.

They actually worked ok, but the speed would drop off quickly with distance. Across the room, and you'd be at 50% of the rated speed, at best.

The technology was interesting. Basically they were transmitting over a whole slew of spectrum simultaneously (from like 2.5GHz to 5.5GHz), but they kept the transmit power low enough that it didn't exceed some FCC threshold.

This is extremely cool!

I've had an idea percolating in my mind for a while: Would it be possible to have VPN credentials stored in UEFI, and have a system reach out to a server for PXE network boot?

It seems like it would be a neat way of (securely?) allowing a remote system to automatically recover in the event of a nuked install that prevents proper bootup.

But then, also: "And what if the (human) environment is damaged / contaminated less by deep undersea extraction vs land-based mines"? and also: "What if an abundance of these materials enables vastly cheaper energy storage batteries, making solar / wind energy overnight storage practical, reducing our reliance on cheap fossil fuel energy generation"?

To be clear, I'm not sure if either of those hypotheticals are true, but I have a feeling, as with many things in life is "It's complicated".

Being good stewards of our resources with careful management / regulation is the answer, rather than unfettered exploitation or outright bans.

Heard from a greybeard that they had a demo night in university (this was probably early 80s), and one of the demos was was some sort of path-finding rover robot. Of course, it ended up being one of those projects that had show stopping bugs up until a few hours before showtime.

During demo night, it was a big hit, until a stray camera flash got (un)lucky and wiped the microcontroller's EEPROM...

Feels a little apocryphal (I'd assume most flashes have / had UV filters?)

You are understating the level of evidence that points to the NSA being fully aware of what it was doing.

To be clear, the method of attack was something that had been described in a paper years earlier, the NSA literally had a program (BULLRUN) around compromising and attacking encryption, and there were security researchers at NIST and other places that raised concerns even before it was implemented as a standard. Oh, and the NSA paid the RSA $10 million to implement it.

Heck, even the chairman of the RSA implies they got used by the NSA:

In an impassioned speech, Coveillo said RSA, like many in industry, has worked with the NSA on projects. But in the case of the NSA-developed algorithm which he didn’t directly name, Coviello told conference attendees that RSA feels NSA exploited its position of trust. In its job, NSA plays two roles, he pointed out. In the information assurance directorate (IAD) arm of NSA, it decides on security technologies that might find use in the government, especially the military. The other side of the NSA is tasked with vacuuming up data for cyber-espionage purposes and now is prepared to take an offensive role in cyber-attacks and cyberwar.

“We can’t be sure which part of the NSA we’re working with,” said Coviello with a tone of anguish. He implied that if the NSA induced RSA to include a secret backdoor in any RSA product, it happened without RSA’s consent or awareness.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/687628/security-rsa-chi...

You know what, you're right.

Instead of discussing the topic at hand, we should talk about the sins of the messenger. It's far more important to not discuss the actual topic at hand.

I heard the author once said a naughty thing at a dinner party. And more importantly, А у вас негров вешают.

I'm not sure I buy "three years" of concerted, Apple-class effort.

It's probably something that got brought up occasionally, maybe even some exploration was done to see what it would take to port stuff across.

My feeling is that the business case just wasn't there. Their customer base is people that buy into the complete Apple Experience. Not being able to control the OS-level removes a lot of that control, and the inevitable friction issues that result may tarnish the experience.

It's like: Could the French Laundry offer takeout / to-go? Sure. Do they want to? Ehh..

The goal is to welcome people into the Fold, not just sell them a watch. They want them to have an iPhone, so that they then use iCloud and buy apps / videos / subscriptions in the Apple universe.

That's what's interesting to me. Even after a fire, wouldn't someone want to go scrape through the remains to find stuff like that?

To me that seems like that might lean towards a deliberate fire / untimely fate for the inhabitants from an enemy, who might not know where that axe would have been stored.

This seems like a much better fleshed out exploration of this subject: https://monochrome-watches.com/why-do-clocks-and-watches-use...

Kind of a tangent, but websdr.org is one of those sites that you can spend hours searching for interesting radio signals in waterfall plots.

If I were to send an illegal demand to someone (like say a threat of blackmail / extortion), can I simply "withdraw" the demand once it reaches court? Absolutely ridiculous.

The engineers at Boeing are going to be really embarrassed once someone tells them they don't actually need to put wings on their aircraft...

It seems like that could be an option like:

Hard limit: [$1000]/mth or [$500]/24hr period

Notify me if traffic exceeds thresholds: [$800+]/mth or [$400]/24 hr period

Notify me if the traffic forecast for the month looks like it will exceed my hard limit before the end of the month.

Tangentially related, but I was at my local Home Depot, buying a grounding rod. It seemed like an amazing deal -- 5/8", 8 ft for $19.60. Weighing it, it's 6.6 lbs.

Scrap prices according to the web are $3 to $3.30 for that quality of copper. Which means I could potentially be making $2 / rod buying them and selling them to the scrap yard...

It makes me wonder if the Home Depot prices are just lagging the market. Maybe I should stock up.

I was in Google / Nest in ~2018 or so. I knew 20% projects existed, but I'd heard they were considered a good way to not get promoted. I knew a few people that had a 20% project they were working on, but it was the exception, not the norm.

>If you have evidence of Apple or Google cutting a cheque to any lawmaker, personally, I'll commit here and now to paying you six figures for it, because it's worth ten times that much in the open.

https://www.opensecrets.org/search?order=desc&q=apple&sort=A...

$140,000 to a John Harris Whitmire. Apparently he's "an American attorney and politician who is the 63rd mayor of Houston, Texas" according to Wikipedia.

Humorous signs are far more memorable, even if you reach a smaller percentage of the population.

A generic "OBEY POSTED TRAFFIC SIGNS," while readable by 79% of the population, is barely going to mentally register for nearly all of them.

By comparison, a sign that only 40% of drivers understand the pop culture reference to might be more effective overall if they think about it for the next week.

And at least for all the examples in the article, even if you don't get a culture reference, the gist of the message is still understandable. Don't DUI, don't use your cell phone, etc.

A much worse sin for those message boards is when they use multiple pages to convey something. "ROAD CLOSURE FROM SEPT 16 UNTIL" <4 second delay> ... Well, I guess I'll never know.

I'm curious about whether it's even feasible based on dispersion issues. My understanding is that it's hard to beat dispersion over long distances, regardless of your optics on the laser (and we're talking long distances here...)

Any optics experts able to chime in?

I'll throw my hat in the ring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_AD-1

This seems like the right answer. An "expert" should be someone whose field of expertise is in the subject being presented to the court. The opposing counsel can (and should) challenge it when appropriate. A PhD in medicine or PE cert is a pretty good bona-fides to presenting a person as an expert to the court, but it doesn't mean that some amateur naturalist whose spent 20 years studying the population of butterflies in the Sierra foothills couldn't be considered an expert in that specific topic of discussion either. Just that their scope might be more limited than the Phd.

California law doesn't seem to make the sort of distinction either, for example:

720. (a) A person is qualified to testify as an expert if he has special knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education sufficient to qualify him as an expert on the subject to which his testimony relates. Against the objection of a party, such special knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education must be shown before the witness may testify as an expert. (b) A witness' special knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education may be shown by any otherwise admissible evidence, including his own testimony.

721. (a) Subject to subdivision (b), a witness testifying as an expert may be cross-examined to the same extent as any other witness and, in addition, may be fully cross-examined as to (1) his or her qualifications, (2) the subject to which his or her expert testimony relates, and (3) the matter upon which his or her opinion is based and the reasons for his or her opinion.

The map shown here is better in my opinion -- it shows what percentage of the sun will be eclipsed for your location: https://science.nasa.gov/eclipses/future-eclipses/eclipse-20...

At a certain point, isn't it just grilled pineapple with pizza crumbs?

Probably a good reminder archive.org has a fundraiser going on right now. It would a sad day indeed to lose access to that resource.

If you're designing a new power delivery method from scratch, I wonder if 12V is the right voltage.

It seems you could take a page out of the laptop handbook and go to USB-C 20V standard. There must already be a whole ecosystem of 20V capable PMICs / SMPS already, so this doesn't seem like it would be a drastic change.

Heck, it seems like we should just jump to the USB C power delivery standard for desktop PCs. The high end is currently 48V / 240W (which I'm guessing is a limitation of the connector + max safe voltage). Either go with a different design for the connector to get above 240W, or just parallel up 2-4x USB C connectors internally. That would be more than sufficient.

I'm sure you'd be taking advantage of some of the production scale of laptops.

And this would allow easy extension to stuff like power external monitors etc from the desktop PC directly. Being able to charge a laptop and have an external display (or two) all connected to the desktop PC instead of their own dedicated power bricks would be awesome.

But those are pronounced differently. Of course, English has its fair share; Their / They're / There, beach / beech, etc etc.

But I don't think English particularly stands out, and I can think of languages that are much worse than it in that regard (especially for an outsider). Mandarin / Cantonese / Japanese / French / Korean are all pretty notorious examples for homophone collisions.

How so?

That seems incredibly hyperbolic. You might want to consider broadening your news sources or travelling a bit.

For starters, the US as a whole is less than 60% white. And California, while big, only accounts for ~20% of the non-white population of the US. In other words, there's about 120M people that exist outside of your "99%" bubble.

Genius! It does make me think how much you could virtualize the experience while still requiring the same mechanics / ball control. Sort of like those virtual gold driving ranges.

Here's an idea: instead of requiring the whole 60ft lane, just have a lane ~10 ft long with a trap at the end. Based on the measured spin, angle etc, you could project the trajectory down the virtual lane.

Use one of those head-tracking techs (Dimenco screens?)

This would allow you to have like 3x-4x the number of bowling lanes in the same building footprint.