iClaudiusX

I only use Amazon to browse selections, and then buy direct from the brand's site. Buying only from Amazon made sense in the bad old days when most sites didn't have their act together with payment processing and shipping. Thankfully, those days are long gone.

It's basically the reverse of the "browse in store, buy on Amazon for cheaper" experience.

It used to be that a release was tried and tested. Now everyone's an unpaid QA tester months after the official beta period is over. And the folk wisdom of "wait until x.1" keeps getting pushed further and further back to the point of futility.

That's interesting because otherwise tedious chores like washing dishes or cleaning can feel meditative and therapeutic after I've had my coffee.

I came to a similar crossroads when I realized I did not want to switch from windows7 to 10 once security patches end in 2020.

I've been using Kubuntu 18.10 since January and have found it so much easier to get things done. I don't have to constantly reset privacy and telemetry settings to keep the OS's nose out of my life. It has a real shell, ssh, and terminal so I no longer have to muck about with cygwin, putty, and winscp. I can customize the UI to my liking, e.g. dark mode that's consistent across applications.

About the only thing that doesn't work is about 1/3rd of my Steam game library but it's a tiny sacrifice for the efficiency gained with a proper OS that respects your time and privacy.

The opt-out for rerouting is a truly awful design choice.

One time I was driving up through NYC during a heavy downpour where visibility was only a few car-lengths ahead. Traffic had slowed to about 30 mph on the NJTP and most people thankfully had their hazard flashers on. Then Google Maps decides to distract me and pile on the anxiety with multiple "press no in the next 10 seconds or else!" re-routing prompts to save at most 5 minutes.

Just yesterday I got a pop-under to "confirm" that a speed trap was still in effect, which of course obscured some vital information on screen for a few minutes until it finally gave up.

Demanding that your user take their attention off the road to fumble with a touch screen just to stay on the route they're comfortable with is dangerous, and if I opt out once it should at the very least snooze those alerts.

The increasing sprawl of non-search widgets invading the search result page reminds me of the AOL years where "the web" was funneled through a narrow portal controlled by one entity.

Having to scroll down past ads, unrelated news, unrelated youtube videos, and ever more of these info boxes has pushed the actual content I'm looking for out to the second page. It's made it much easier to use ddg as default and use the !g flag only when absolutely necessary.

Fully informed consent should be a bare minimum for this kind of work.

Tech should take a cue from the biomedical research community and adopt an institutional review board that can independently assess the ethical and privacy implications of the data they're collecting.

Apple could be a leader here and drag the rest of the industry forward.

The "hole" is a part of the ventricular system that produces cerebro-spinal fluid that circulates within the brain and spinal cord.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventricular_system

Most of it is useless (I also prefer minimalist hardware). However the new x570 chipset for AMD motherboards requires active cooling as the TDP has increased from 5-7W to 11W in order to support PCIe 4.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14161/the-amd-x570-motherboar...

The root problem is the culture at Boeing and the FAA has shifted from safety first to profit first.

The investigative reporting from The Seattle Times[0] indicates that safety engineers were pressured to avoid delays to rush out a competitor to the A320. Furthermore, their safety analysis was based on flawed assumptions to meet an artificial constraint of not requiring pilot simulator training in order to appease the airlines they were selling to. Finally, the FAA is allowing industry to self-certify critical systems with lax oversight.

It is easy to get lost in the technical details of why a particular catastrophe happens. The common throughline is a broken culture where deviance is normalized and those who speak out are ignored. It's the same story with Chernobyl, Fukushima, the El Faro, the USS Fitzgerald and USS John S. McCain, Air France 447, and now the 737 Max.

[0] - https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/the...

I'm most excited about the modern A72 cores, upgraded hardware decode, and up to 4 GB RAM. They really listened and delivered what most people wanted in a next gen RPi.

Technically, the Zune bug didn't kill the device. The bug sent it into an infinite boot loop until the following day when the leap year calculation could return.

But yes, the difficulty in verifying a correct implementation of date and time calculation calls out for a standard test apparatus to "prove" correct results for a defined scope.

I would trace it to a few factors; most important is the rise of the influencer advertising strategy.

It is vastly cheaper to simply pay streamers to hype up your game on Twitch or youtube than it is to give an honest, sober demo live on an E3 stage. The audience at these press events has shifted from enthusiast reporters/critics to hyperventilating influencer personalities. It was so bad this year that they were obnoxiously screaming and interrupting the presenters every few seconds to the point where the people on stage were losing their train of thought.

The other aspect is that putting together a demo takes time out of development. Almost every game shown this year had a release date of either Fall 2019 or Spring 2020. That means they're either on crunch or ramping up for it and can't afford to set aside a few months to make a vertical slice for E3. This is partly due to the end of this console generation with new hardware coming next holiday season.

The longer term trend is that marketing has caught on to the irrelevance of E3. They can run their own Nintendo Direct style live stream whenever they want to speak to their audience and the press will disseminate that info to the wider community.

You're even seeing companies like EA experiment with dropping a new title with zero advance notice as they did with Apex Legends (their take on battle royale, from the Titanfall developers). They just had an influencer preview event the week before and dumped it to the public with pretty wild success.

Indeed, design choices accounted for the biggest difference by far.

I like that the title frames it as a language shootout to pull people in to see if their favorite language wins (and I'm partial to Python having rewritten tens of thousands of lines of Java into numpy). Still, it would be foolish for people to come away from this brilliant analysis by ignoring the more important conclusion.

Even a brand new, unlocked, $1000 Samsung Galaxy S10 comes riddled with adware and spyware, some of it unremovable:

"There are apps from Flipboard and Spotify as well as a unremovable version of Facebook. McAfee Anti-virus is baked into the operating system as "security," and the Samsung Gallery app wants to share my location with Foursquare. The storage management settings, which is just a simple file-cleanup app, is "Powered by Qihoo 360," a Chinese security company. A caller-ID feature built into the phone app is provided by a company called "Hiya."

Once you run through setup and connect to Wi-Fi, the phone spawns an undismissable "Secure Wi-Fi" notification, which, it turns out, is an ad for McAfee VPN subscription service. I tried blocking the notification—it's not blockable—but it turns out you can open the advertisement, carefully consider subscribing to McAfee VPN, say "No," and then it will go away. Cool."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/galaxy-s10-review-fo...

The use of such a vague and overloaded term as "anomaly" is deceptive.

The purpose of communication is to inform the audience, and rather than clarify what happened, this statement obscures the truth to the public.

The test capsule exploded. It means both SpaceX and Boeing have had test failures in the launch abort system for their respective human launch capsules. It will set back the timeline for the US to regain the ability to launch humans into space without paying for seats on the Soyuz.

Instead of discussing the event and its implications, the longest thread is now dedicated to excessive pedantry and incorrecting each other over textbook definitions of the word "anomaly".

I also had the overheating RROD. The problem with the 360 was the CPU heatsink mounting hardware was insufficient to maintain contact and the board would warp. It was easy enough to fix with a set of screws from the hardware store to replace the crappy 'X' clip, plus some PC thermal grease like Arctic Silver.

Relatively speaking, the CPU heatsink was massive compared to the GPU. I would assume the engineers designing it knew that the CPU was going to run very hot, especially when it launched on a 90nm architecture.

I found this to be the case for mid-level espresso machines as well. Luckily it is fairly simple to add a PID controller and a more accurate platinum temperature sensor to hold the brew temp to within a few degrees Celsius for a much more consistent extraction.

Here is 500 fps film of the Saturn V launch for Apollo 11, narrated by Mark Gray. It explains the sequence of events over the course of 8+ minutes (30 seconds real time).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKtVpvzUF1Y

Using the search/filter options on the site is useless now.

Most recently I was looking for a countertop hot plate/burner to replace one that finally broke (filament burned out after 15 years). Searching within the Appliances / Cooktops category, it is filled with random apparel like t-shirts and dresses for < $1. Try filtering by price to any interval and it's random kids' toys, arts and crafts supplies, tools, and sex toys. You're lucky to see one or two actual cooktops per page. Filter by 'Fuel Type: Electric' and there are only 5 actual results plus an impact socket even though there are hundreds of actual electric cooktops if you filter by brand name or surface material. It's insane.

Most of the sellers and brands have names that look like someone mashed their keyboard. At this point the only way to use the site is to already know the exact brand and model you want and search from google.

Sony tried to do the same in 2005 when Microsoft released the XBox 360, only they kept pushing back the release date. Thankfully their E3 2006 press conference was such a flop that in a bit of karmic justice it forced them to stop resting on their laurels and compete for marketshare again.

All the major SSD NAND flash producers finally hit volume production of 3D TLC NAND at roughly the same time last year which sent prices falling precipitously.

I'm not aware of a similar pattern in DRAM, which if anything has been suspiciously high for a while to the point that many assume price fixing was to blame as has happened in the past.

| social on their own terms

I think that is the key insight. Phone calls and instant messaging before smartphones meant that you had to make a deliberate choice to be available at a given time, and to give that communication most of your attention. When you wanted to stop, you simply logged off.

Now there is the expectation that you're always online so nobody wants to be the one to "bother" everyone and interrupt what they're doing. And you're constantly reminded of what you missed out on with the endless feed of everyone else's messages to each other.

That was the first time I had heard the name Nixon and prompted me to learn about Watergate from the dead-tree encyclopedia in first grade.

I've always pondered whether this could be an effective way of tricking children into learning bits of history like trying to understand jokes from The Simpsons or the little bits of trivia that used to pop up on the loading screens in Call of Duty single player modes.

It's curious that they pitched this curated experience by openly admiting their app store experience is terrible and full of scammy games that are "free" w/ ads and egregious microtransactions. Of course they could fix the app store they control rather than silo-ing off the good games into a separate subscription.

See also the multiple eyewitness accounts of what brought down TWA-800, many involving a surface-to-air missile. The most likely explanation supported by evidence turned out to be faulty wiring igniting fuel vapor in the center tank. However, it took years of investigation and evidence gathering to finally put that initial speculation to rest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800

The motivation is the same for re-branding 4G-LTE as 5G (or 6G). Sell the same thing with a new name so customers are tricked into thinking you're selling something newer and better based on the spec sheet without context.

I was just thinking about this while reading about a (the?) company that produces extreme ultraviolet lithography scanners. Intel, Samsung, and TSMC all buy EUL scanners from this one company, ASML, to make their ~7nm chips. Only 31 of these machines exist in the world, with another 30 orders projected for this year.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13904/asml-to-ship-30-euv-sca...

A few things I would add:

brace expansions

  combine for combinations

    {a..c}{1..3}  # a1 a2 a3 b1 b2 b3 c1 c2 c3

  step size

    {0..10..2}  # 0 2 4 6 8 10

mapfile to read lines from file to array

  mapfile -t arrayname < filename

    -t     # remove trailing newline for each element

    -u FD  # read from file descriptor FD

    -s N   # skip first N lines

    -n N   # read at most N lines

    -O N   # start populating array at index N

array quoting

  "${array[@]}"  # expand all elements, individually quoted

  "${array[*]}"  # expand all elements, group quoted

translate number from base to decimal for base in (2,64)

  $(( base#num ))

That is insane, like the worst of the Pentium4 NetBurst era when AMD was competitive at the high end and Intel decided to try to clock their way out of the problem. Granted this is a one-off chip to grab headlines and not a long term micro-architecture commitment.

But between this and the fiasco when Intel announced a 28-core 5 GHz chip[0] (without mentioning the 1800 W industrial water chiller needed to cool it), it's starting to sound desperate in its attempts to deflect attention from AMD's EPYC and Threadripper high-core-count chips.

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12907/we-got-a-sneak-peak-on-...