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Comment Re:Robot vacuum cleaners - meh (Score 1) 93

A real vacuum cleaner just about maxes out a standard residential 120v 15a circuit, as anyone who remembers the incandescent bulb era can attest to. A circuit with a few lamps shared with a vacuum cleaner could easily end with you flipping a breaker or replacing a blown fuse.

When you look at the absolutely tiny lithium ion pack these robo-vacs come with, ...

Sitting on my kitchen table right now is a drone pack. It's 57,5Wh, smaller the batteries of most modern Roombas. It's 50C - thus it can output up to 2,9kW. And there's even higher packs available than that. Lithium ion cells can handle some truly high power outputs. It's *energy*, not *power*, that is their limitation. Run a pack at 50C and it'll be empty in a bit over a minute. That said, on hard floor surfaces there is absolutely no reason why you should be drawing more than 300-400W or so, and you can get by with well less than that. High powers are for like shag carpeting and the like. Also, the head matters more than the power (though of course contribute) - for a hard floor, for example, a fluffy roller head is ideal.

Comment Re:Rejected the AMZN Aquisition? (Score 3, Insightful) 93

Facts. I used to have a Roomba for years, but as I live in Europe, it was getting increasingly hard to deal with modern features (like the self-emptying base which needs 120V power). I reluctantly switched to a Roborock when my power converter died, and just, wow, they're light years ahead of iRobot. I think iRobot has been coasting on its name for a while now.

Comment Re:Rejected the AMZN Aquisition? (Score 4, Informative) 93

iRobot and Amazon say EU approval was the problem. Not sure if they had a specific reason to be selectively truthful and focus on only one of multiple regulatory hurdles; but they don't mention the US.

It also looks like the sale is basically formalizing their plan to gut themselves. Shockingly enough; firing everyone you can and switching to rebadging stuff from an ODM because that's cheaper puts you in "what would you say you do here?" territory pretty quickly.

Comment Write once, run anywhere - NOT (Score 1) 59

It's been a sh*show beyond belief with the applets, JNLP, stuff requiring older Java, browsers disabling support and all kinds of ancillary nonsense. Office for NT 4.2 (the first 32 bit one) runs on modern Windows with no shenanigans and it comes from more than 30 years ago. But nope, some older java is blocked beyond belief. They pulled even the Internet Exploder from Windows 10 with some update (WTF?).

Eventually the most straightforward way to run some Java code needed to manipulate some hardware ended up being a Windows 7 machine. Which then I replaced with a Windows 98 one which is spooky how quick and light it is, and bonus it doesn't have any security prompts you can't disable (no, I don't need to be told 1000 times that if some code comes over http it's unsafe, it was unsafe too the first time I clicked yes).

Comment Re:For Firefox, community has always been at the h (Score 3, Insightful) 33

The prior non-core items were optional and relatively clearly marked; but when they decided to go 'AI' that went out the window. Being able to grub around in about:config for anything that has 'ml' in it does, depressingly, put them ahead of the options of some of the competition; but it shipped on by default and without controls in the normal-user UI. Seems like 'AI' really does something to the decision making even of people who should know better.

Comment Re:So, like Seiko, Kodak devised their own demise (Score 1) 28

Kodak's demise is a little overstated just because they have been reorganized several times; and 'Kodak' is sort of the dump entity. There are still a variety of applications for being competent at thin film chemistry, including semiconductor fabrication, just not so much making 35mm film. So Eastman Chemical got most of that. And some of their medical and otherwise higher-end optics and imaging stuff also got spun off, with the business of not terribly optically interesting cameras under heavy threat from apathy and cellphones left at Kodak proper.

They certainly didn't do desperately well; or they'd probably be somewhere more along the lines of Sony in terms of 'who builds CCDs worth disclosing the provider of?'; but the reorgs appear to have been aimed at separating the more viable business units from the liabilities. Probably so the latter could be tied to the pension plan.

Comment Re:Dumbing down (Score 2) 117

PBS is primarily (85%) privately funded. It will continue to produce shows like Masterpiece, Nova, Frontline, and Sesame Street and people in places like Boston or Philadelphia will continue to benefit from them.

What public funding does is give viewers in poorer, more rural areas access to the same information that wealthy cities enjoy. It pays for access for people who don't have it.

By opting out, Arkansas public broadcasting saves 2.5 million dollars in dues, sure. But it loses access to about $300 million dollars in privately funded programming annually.

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