Sorry, I meant *intentionally* non-standards-compliant.

Could it just be that they don't support DP Alt mode at all, and that their dock uses DisplayLink instead? Or that they don't implement the split mode where half the bandwidth is for USB and half the bandwidth is for DP, like most docking stations might typically use?

It's way worse than underhanded. It means that your USB-C Switch can't connect via USB-C to any USB-C-equipped television sets, because those by definition won't send Nintendo's nonstandard VDM. If it were even remotely acceptable to play fast and loose with the spec like that, given the history of the MFi program, you can assume that Apple would have done it, yet iPhone hardware supports any generic off-the-shelf USB-C hub, complete with HDMI.

But yeah, since DP is licensed by a different company than USB, the USB branding doesn't cover it. :-( I'm reminded of this XKCD. The most compelling thing someone can say about the Nintendo Switch 2 is that it isn't strictly illegal to do what they did. That's the ultimate concession. One more reason to stay away from Nintendo, as if them pulling the product from Amazon weren't a good enough reason by itself.

That's the thing, Apple has never gone that far. Yeah, the Lightning connector was locked down, but they also made a USB adapter that could adapt it to connect to compatible USB accessories, and that included a wide range of stuff from hubs and SD card adapters to gigabit NICs. And their USB-C port has never been locked down at all.

The closest Apple ever got was not allowing third-party DVD drives to work with some of Apple's software, but that was done for MPEG licensing reasons, not revenue.

If Nintendo is shipping something with a USB-like port that isn't standards-compliant, that's way worse than just about any other company in the entire industry has done.

My guess is that when all is said and done, someone will figure out that they did something stupid in the first revision of the hardware, similar to the way that the first Raspberry Pi 4 hardware couldn't work with some USB-PD hardware because of incorrect resistors, in which case this problem will require a hardware fix. Sucks to be an early adopter.

Guess there's no such thing as a FreeVee.

Basically, AI note takers allow all the folks who aren't really needed at the meeting to just get the email summary. What this means is that A. none of them should have been asked to go to the meeting in the first place, and B. the meeting probably should have been an email.

Meetings tend to be useful for the person calling the meeting. The number of meetings that were genuinely useful for me as an attendee... over the course of my entire career, I can count them on one hand, as long as I use binary. 99% of time spent in meetings is not useful. And even in meetings that are genuinely important and useful, half the time is usually not useful.

More emails, fewer meetings. We had it right during the pandemic. That's why productivity improved so much.

31 TWh per year? That's only 3.5 gigawatts, or roughly one nuclear power plant, or about 0.01% of California's annual power production, unless I'm misreading some numbers or missing a decimal point somewhere.

The only interesting thing about the hardware, IMO, would be details about the internals of the custom silicon used for the image pipeline. And even that probably isn't all that interesting. Beyond that, The hardware is just a glorified iPad and a Quest 3 bolted together, with slightly higher resolution marred by slightly worse optics.

Most of what makes Vision Pro interesting is the software, and that isn't fully baked, making it somewhat less interesting than it otherwise would be.

It's not that Vision Pro is a 100% failure from top to bottom. It just doesn't do anything groundbreaking compared with hardware that costs almost an order of magnitude less, and it is a total marketing flop as a result.

Apple failed to understand the market. They didn't want it to be seen as a device primarily for gaming, so there aren't enough games available. They wanted a closed ecosystem, so they made it support only iOS apps (and only a subset of those), rather than Mac apps as a true spatial computer would. They naïvely assumed that wireless connectivity is good enough, resulting in a device that can't be developed for by users without a paid developer program membership (which means that those of us with corporate tech jobs can't tinker with them for fun) and ensuring that screen sharing with your Mac is flaky as h***. And so on.

And so they built a massively overly powerful device without any clear use case, when what most people would rather have is a larger-display version of Google Glass for consumers — real-time translation, real-time hints about who people are, real-time information about things they see, and being able to watch a movie while they are out for a walk without holding up a device the whole time.

They completely missed the mark, and as a Vision Pro user, I genuinely can't imagine why anybody in their right minds would want to steal their tech, much less the company that makes SnapChat.

It occurs to me that this is a good use of massive solar plants. It wouldn't cost much to idle your oxygen-separation equipment when the sun isn't shining, so you wouldn't need much in the way of battery storage. Grid scale solar without battery backup in a sunny area (like south Texas) can cost as little as $0.03/kWh, which would give you a separation cost of $4.5 to $24 per ton of LOX. Obviously, if you were producing LOX at a scale needed to fuel a fleet of Starships, you'd work to get that towards the bottom of the scale -- so the LOX loadout for a ship could cost on the order of 3500 * 4.5 = $15,750. To launch 150 tons to orbit. Of course you still need methane.

Could you make "green" methane (i.e. without using fossil fuels) with a big solar farm, and what would that cost? You'd do it with the Sabatier reaction to combine CO2 and H2 to get CH4. To make a ton of CH4 you need 2.75 tons of CO2 and 0.5 tons of H2 (stochiometry, dawg). To get a ton of CO2 with direct air capture takes about 2000 kWh of electricity, so 5500 kWh for the CO2. At $0.03/kWh that's $165 for the CO2. However, producing the half-ton of H2 with electrolysis would take 25,000 kWh, so $750. This puts the raw materials cost of green CH4 at around $915. The Sabatier reaction would add a little more, call it $930 in all.

So... Starship could be entirely solar-powered at a cost of around 3500 * 4.5 + 1000 * 930 = ~$946k, assuming $.03/kWh, ignoring equipment and storage overhead. It turns out that the cost is utterly dominated by the cost of methane production; LOX is all but free. But the cost of solar will likely continue to go down so... fuel costs could indeed get really, really low, even with a zero-carbon strategy. Perhaps as low as $2/kg to LEO.

Yeah, but work for somebody else on the projects they want you to do, or work for yourself on the projects you choose?

Oh come on.

We've been saying "Thanks, Biden!" for years as a joke, and you blue haired legbeards always got riled up with your "source????" and "citation needed???" cries.

(FWIW I don't support Trump and have never voted Republican).

My point is that the microSD Pro cards exhibited their first error after half again more cycles, on average, than the "high endurance" cards, suggesting that the high endurance cards might actually have lower endurance than Pro cards, which is... unexpected. The Pro cards, IIRC, do more wear leveling than the standard cards. I have no idea whether high endurance cards do more wear leveling, have a lower number of levels per cell, have more spare cells, or something else entirely.

Looking forward to when the high endurance cards finally reach the 1% failure state so that we can find out whether these things really are better than the standard cards. So far, the first failure of SanDisk High Endurance was *way* earlier than SanDisk Pro, on average, so I won't be surprised if it turns out that the whole high endurance thing is a scam.

Rapid Accelerated Disassembly?

Rapid Anomalous Disassembly?

Or did you mean R.U.D. (Rapid Unscheduled/Unplanned Disassembly)?

Starship burns methane, not RP1.

Between SuperHeavy and Starship, a fully-loaded stack needs 3500 tons of LOX and 1000 tons of CH4. So what do those cost?

Well, oxygen is easy to get from the atmosphere, so the cost of LOX is really just some equipment (which isn't terribly expensive to buy and maintain) plus electricity, and the cost ends up being dominated by the cost of electricity. It takes between 150 kWh and 800 kWh to separate and liquify a ton of oxygen, so if you're paying $0.10 per kWh, LOX costs $15-80 per ton. There are some other costs to handle and store it, so let's say $100/ton.

CH4 can be created many ways. The cheapest is probably to purify natural gas, which costs about $190 per ton (that site shows ~$5 per 1000 ft^3, and a ton is 38k ft^3). Add some costs for purification and cooling, so call it $250/ton.

3500 tons LOX * $100/ton + 1000 tons CH4 * 250/ton = $600k. Musk usually calls it $1M, which seems pretty reasonable, since they're probably not separating/purifiying it themselves and there transportation costs. 150 tons of payload to LEO with $1M worth of fuel means the fuel-only cost is $6.67/kg.

How many years do they have to work there before they get the bonus? Because $10 million is more than enough to retire, even in the Silicon Valley. So they can probably assume that most of these engineers will work there until the bonus pay date, and then retire and do whatever they want to do instead of what someone else tells them to do.

After all, most engineers are driven less by money and more by wanting to do cool stuff. If they have enough money to be able to only do cool stuff and never have to worry about money again, why would they want more money? Why would they choose to do what other people want them to do, when they can do the even cooler stuff that they want to do?

Bonuses that big tend to be counterproductive.

Nonsense. Our only experience with reusable orbital rockets is the space shuttle, which was an unsustainably-expensive and complex beast that was more refurbishable than reusable and had a payload one fifth of what Starship is designed for. It's all of the differences that aim to make Starship both reusable and cheap that make it hard. It's possible that it's just too ambitious, that we don't yet have the technology to make a cheap, fully-reusable (not refurbishable, reusable) orbital rocket with massive capacity. No one else has done it... no one else is even trying, that's how hard it is.

Failure is expected. If they managed to launch and land both Starship and SuperHeavy in less than a dozen test flights, that would be the surprise.