TomVDB

> Tap to click should _always_ be turned off; it's bad and it should feel bad

I love tap to click and it works great on my 2012 MacBook Pro trackpad.

However, on my brand new, expensive Dell Precision laptop from work, it's crap.

14 years after the introduction of the glass trackpads on the first unibody MacBook, I still haven't experienced a Windows or Linux laptop that comes close. Is it all due to patents?

One of the reason I choose a Tesla was because of the superchargers that are everywhere in California, and because of their long range: I only need a 30min intermediate recharge to get from the Bay Area to Lake Tahoe.

When I google for superchargers for other brands, I get very ambiguous results. There has been chatter about Tesla opening up its supercharges in the future (the selfish part of me would rather not see that happen, its I-80 charging lots before climbing to Tahoe are already pretty busy), but I've never seen another brand, so I guess it's not a thing yet.

So what's the situation then? If you're a non-Tesla EV owner in the Bay Area, how do you make it to Lake Tahoe in a reasonable amount of time?

Contrary to my MacBook, I don’t tend to leave my monitor laying around the house with the charger plugged in.

I’m clumsy, I tend to accidentally stumble of cables that are plugged in. (It doesn’t happen that often, of course, but once every few months is sufficient to kill my laptop.)

MagSafe is wonderful. The fact that it’s a proprietary connector is far less important than the fact that it protects me from my clumsiness.

I blame the designers of USB-C for not coming up with something that can offer the benefits of MagSafe.

(Of course, the battery life of the new laptops makes it less necessary to plug in while you’re sitting on the sofa…)

How strange. I routinely drive uninterrupted stretches of 160 miles in my Model Y without emptying the battery. Are you sure they weren't pressing the acceleration and break pedals at the same time?

Nothing at all.

I've driven a Tesla for over a year now, and this is the first time I've even heard about it, let alone experienced it.

Yes, but people aren't impressed by the M1 chips because of 5% KPI differences.

> Does anyone expect x86 to close a factor-of-6 perf/watt difference?

The one number that surprised me in this review was that the perf/W of Threadripper for the rendering phase: it is very close to the M1 Max. I understand that the numbers are not apples to apples because of the total laptop vs CPU-only comparison, but the power consumption of the Threadripper CPU itself is very high and probably takes the lion's share of the overall power consumption. And that's for a previous generation Threadripper.

I wasn’t a Mac user back then, but when the original iPod was revealed, I was blown away by its looks, and it was something we talked about at the office.

I don’t know what was so special about the 4th generation clock wheel though…

Did he say anything controversial?

When 1999 rolls over into 2000, you’re going to be telling everyone that we should be celebrating 2000 rolling into 2001 instead, right?

40 years ago, The US Coast Guard used to have a pigeon powered sensor to detect sailors lost at sea.

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/that-time-the-u-s-coast-gua...

I once attended a press briefing, as a supporting demo engineer, that started with a very stern “Under NDA” warning, followed by some pretty mundane technical disclosures.

Not 10 minutes later, one of the attending journalists was blabbing about it on Reddit under a user name that was linked to his publication.

Another 10 minutes later, said journalist was walked out of the room, well before the really interesting stuff was talked about.

I wonder how he explained that to his editor. What an idiot…

Try committing suicide while surrounded by family without risking those present to be charged with murder.

Does that motorcycle pass modern emission requirements?

The engine controle unit plays a major role in emission control and fuel economy.

Dude, this is not complicated.

All wireless carriers offer huge incentives to come to their network. Because there’s a lot of friction for people to change.

Offering generous trade-in programs is just part of the same tactics. They’ll make just a tiny bit less profit, but it’s way better than seeing a customer go to somebody else. The cost of a cell phone network is dominated by capital investments.

I can do math. It looks like you can’t? Because it’s really not hard to take the regular price of a phone vs what you get after incentives and compare which one is cheapest. And then do the same with plans and compare those with prepaid.

I see prepaid plans for $40+taxes and fees for prepaid and they don’t offer what I want, for which I pay $55 after all taxes and fees.

So for around $10 or $240 more over 2 years minus $350 in trade-in, I get the plan features that I want and the phone that I want. IOW: I get a better deal all around than what I’d get with prepaid. Financially and feature-wise.

Would you please care to explain me how I’m the dumb one here, because I clearly don’t get it.

As for that tacked on charge: the guy in the store obviously added it without my permission to pad his commission. I hate it too. It took me 5min on the phone to get it reversed. I already wrote that it was orthogonal to the concept of getting a better deal vs buying straight from Apple, but somehow you didn’t get that.

Your premise that you don’t save money by buying your phone through the carrier is incorrect.

AT&T has had generous trade-in options to upgrade an existing iPhone to a new one since forever. I’m typing this on an iPhone 12 that was bought for list price, but AT&T offered somewhere around $350 for an old iPhone 7Plus that was half broken. There’s absolutely no way I would have been able to resell that old phone for so much in the open market or through Apple’s trade-in program.

If you paid attention, these kind of trade-ins have been possible ever since the second iPhone appeared on the market.

It’s true that the trade-in locks me into a 2 year contract, but I can live with that: the plan matches my needs very well, so I don’t care, and I don’t upgrade phones every year either.

That doesn’t mean that I like AT&T’s customer experience: they signed me up for a warranty plan behind my back that I had to cancel after seeing my first bill. But that’s orthogonal to the earlier point.

How do you want a savings bank to invest?

Government bonds? Corporate bonds? Stocks? Crypto?

Are you willing to cover their potential losses with government guarantees?

Savings accounts are supposed to be a safe storage of money. They have certain insurance guarantees because of that. Encouraging banks to use that money to speculate is exactly what you don’t want them to do. Savings banks are not known to employ the most brilliant investment minds.

Banality of evil is about ordinary people performing profoundly evil acts, like participating in mass genocide. It has nothing to do with the banality of legally optimizing your interest rate by opening a few bank accounts.

If there is only one investment vehicle (other than the stock market) that offers considerably higher returns than everything else, then that vehicle carries pretty by definition a much higher risk than you seem think it does.

Other than that, how was the play, Mrs Lincoln?

What did you pay for it?

I don’t see any prices on their website…

That astute guess is so out of left field that it needs at least a bit of justification.

To my limited ASML knowledge, ASML is a fab equipment maker, not a silicon IP procider.

It’s already like that. Most houses in the Tahoe area that are surrounded by a certain amount of trees are insurable only via the California FAIR plan.

2012 MacBook Pro with retina screen here too. I've replaced the battery twice, and I've had 2 SSDs going dead, but other than that it's still going strong. I love the screen, I love the keyboard, I just wish I didn't cheap out on 8MB of RAM when I bought it.

I’ve noticed in various places in the Bay Area that new and improved bike lanes are being added.

A good example is a Bubb Rd, the part north of McClellan, in Cupertino (which has a bunch of Apple offices): much improved signalization and there’s now a bumper divider between the car and bike lane, making it very safe.

They also added much improved commuter bus access islands.

This is just one example. There are others. I don’t know if it’s because of COVID or because these things were already planned, but the lack of usual commuter and school traffic definitely made it easier to do the work.

Spend a bit of time on the /r/nursing subreddit and weep.

ICU nurses have been worked to the bone for 18 months now, and often already at higher patient/nurse ratios that customary.

The coming problem won’t be one one of insufficient beds but insufficient people to care for them.

They don’t.

They want to link a new GV account to a real phone number that is not theirs, so that they can use the GV number for other scams.

It only works when your phone number doesn’t already have a GV linked to it.

This is very common scam. AFAIK it’s a way to create a new Google Voice account (linked to your phone number) with the goal of using that account for other scams so that they can’t be tracked.

I fell for it, but since I already had a Google Voice account linked to that phone number, it didn’t work for the scammer. But he didn’t realize what it didn’t work.

I quickly realized that something wasn’t right (and Googled the mechanics of the scam) and then was able to waste his time for another 30min.

The reason I fell for it was because they use a text message from Google in some African language, so I didn’t immediately realize what was going on. Still dumb to not pay more attention…

But it taught me to not list my phone number in the open on Craigslist.

I don’t think the magic cookie was anything deliberately complex, but you’re right that guessing wouldn’t have been very practical.

Reminds me of a friend of mine who wanted the ability to have Unix shell access on his work machine from home. (This was early nineties, when Internet log in to work was not a thing.)

He ran a service that piped all income emails to a script. If the email contained a magic cookie, the subsequent commands were executed on a shell, and the results emailed back to sender. There were no checks on who the sender was. :-)

I don’t think the IT people at his very big telecom equipment company would have approved. They never found out about this stunt, but he was later fired for running a password cracker on the company server farm.