Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment oh goodie another WEBP (Score 3, Insightful) 81

webp has been a headache for me and a lot of other people. While I can agree that it tends to be about half the file size, these are already usually small-ish files, and I don't really need the savings. All it does for me is cause my older apps to go "what is this?" and refuse to display them as inline images or have other compatibility problems. There was a big push for webp but it seems to have gotten enough pushback to have caused a lot of places to back off and return to the old reining king JPEG.

I don't see anything different happening with JPEGLI. A momentary annoyance for a lot of people with very little functional benefit.

Comment Re:$1 fee (more like $3-$5 to cover CC fees) (Score 1) 159

if you want ME to "take care of your kids", then yes, you ought to pay me to do it.

Otherwise, step up and be a responsible parent. It's not the world's job to raise your child and instill the values you want them to have. I believe legisnation like this is mostly the result of lazy parents that expect (and want to FORCE) the world to do the parenting they can't be bothered to do themselves.

Comment Re:What crime (Score 1) 151

What do you think extraditions are for?
If you break a law in one country but reside in another, if the two countries like each other, they'll arrange a little trip for you.
This usually only happens if what you did is also a crime in the country you're in.

Taking it to the extreme, if you shoot and kill someone across the border of a country, you didn't kill anyone in the country you were standing in. Who's law did you break?

Comment Re:Wait, Airpods have cell service? (Score 2) 164

They typically will make a temporary connection with a nearby device (usually Apple or Android) and let them know they are nearby. Their identification is anonymous though. The device they connected to can then connect to Apple's servers and provide the identification along with the geo location of the device performing the upload. If the device has a GPS with a position, that's what will be sent.

But if the device was just turned on or is in a location with poor GPS signal, the accuracy of the location can be poor. Due to the nature of GPS, the precision can be much higher in one direction and lower in another, so it may be +/- 20 feet north/south, and +/- 100 feet east/west. If GPS is unavailable but the device has a cellular signal, it may instead try to estimate the location using nearby tower strength. (the phone knows the GPS coordinates of the towers) This can also be low precision if cellular reception is poor or there are few towers nearby with a decent signal. The same +/- variations that happen with poor GPS can happen with poor cellular.

GPS DOP (degree of precision) is available to your GPS and some will display the uncertainty, but most cell phones don't display their DOP, for their GPS or for their cellular. Unfortunately, they're happy to provide an exact GPS coordinate and say "this is where I am", without any warning of just how good or bad the precision actually is. (my GPS will give me a rough indication of its current precision, sometimes while showing me driving down the road that's one block to my left or right...) DOP can be included with the report, but again whatever is interpreting it needs to inform the user of the uncertainty. I don't think "find my device" displays the DOP of the last position.

If it puts a thumbtack on a house, but tells you the average DOP is 300 feet, you can't just go busting down that door. It sounds like that's what happened though, and for that they ought to get held accountable.

And making matters worse, this is all reporting the position of the device, not the AirPod, so you have to figure in how far away the AirPod is from the device, and further ADD to the DOP, which is just going to make the reading even less accurate. Even if the phone had excellent DOP of say +/- 3 feet, if they're driving down the street and pass by the house, there's NO way to tell even which side of the street it's on, since the DOP from the AirPod to the phone is going to be something like +/- 40 feet to reach to the AirPod in the house. (so the final DOP is +/- 43 feet) And so realistically, that position is going to cover at least half a dozen houses.

But from what I recall of Find My Device, I think a lot of the blame here is on Apple, for not being clear about the accuracy of the indicator. The last time I used it, it pulled up a map and put a red pin where it thought my laptop was, and gave NO indication of the blob-shaped area my phone was LIKELY to be in. It just put a pin on the map and said "here it is!" But it was in my house, I had a good signal on my phone, and the computer was in the same room, so both the phone and the computer had good DOP. And this is probably the same scenario that people were in when they turned it on and played with it for the first time. "The pin is on my house and that's where my computer is, this seems to work really well!" This leads to an unreasonably high confidence in the precision of the report.

It's also important to remember that this is the LAST REPORTED position. If that AirPod was in a car that was following another car, whose driver's phone reported it, and it hasn't checked in with any other device since then, it could easily be MILES away from that reported position now. You've got to pay attention to the exact timestamp of the report, and again that may be something the swat team didn't do.

Comment you can "only"? (Score 1) 74

"If you're playing games in the same room with someone, it's a different experience than doing it online. You can only be so much of a jackass to somebody who was sitting three feet away from you..."

Oh but it was SO much better. Taunts are so much more effective when they're live and in person. And we used to trash talk the piss out of each other as we played - this house was fully networked and we had a good ten machines running at a time. And you had the added bonus of being able to hear other people's computers, which could give you an edge from time to time. "OK I just heard a redeemer launch from the living room, time to find somewhere to hide!"

Also, everyone has sub-10ms pings, which is nice.

UT2004 with the bots set to Godlike. Us vs them. (and those bots would cheat like you would not believe - think playing against an entire team of wall hack, radar, headshot hacks) We had single CTF matches that lasted nearly an hour. Coordinating over voice chat just doesn't work the same as yelling down the hallway. (also, several people can be screaming at once without someone getting muted)

I DO miss that.

Comment I thought this was fly-by-wire? (Score 2) 166

I find it odd that the flight computer will reject commands that will do things like over-stress the airframe, while at the same time allowing a maneuver that's this dangerous for the crew and passengers?

I suppose it's allowed due to the pilot maybe having the need to do something like that in an emergency, but they should have to manually disengage the autopilot or something for that. I assume the autopilot was on at this stage, and that the sudden stick movement automatically disengaged the autopilot and kicked them into the nose-dive.

It also wouldn't surprise me if that server standing in the cockpit didn't get flung into the chair and possibly pilot, just making the problem worse.

Comment that's complete BS (Score 1) 64

United said the missing panel did not affect the flying characteristics of the airplane...

Using non-flush rivets affects flight characteristics significantly. (top speed, fuel economy, well known since ww2) Saying an entire panel missing "doesn't affect flying characteristics" is just a bald-faced lie.

If they simply said "the change in flight characterists caused by the loss of the panel is still well within safe flying parameters" I might be more convinced they weren't justt trying to hand-waive all of my concerns away.

Slashdot Top Deals

Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.

Working...