I have a smartphone (recently upgraded from a Pixel to a Pixel 4a). And I have a tablet (currently an Asus Zenpad Z8).

For calling, texting and navigation, the phone gets used. It's narrow enough I can hold it and operate it one-handed.

For reading / composing long emails, reading longer articles and planning trips, the tablet gets used. For messing with docs and spreadsheet on Google Drive, the tablet, MOST DEFINITELY, gets used. I can use a smartphone to look at an existing spreadsheet but composing one with a smartphone is just painful.

These are different tools which are better suited for different jobs. A lot of younger folks don't have tablets (using the smartphone for everything) but older folks, who can't read 4 point type anymore or who actually need to do something other than watch video clips on TikTok or "like" stuff on FeceBook, need more screen real estate.

Samsung, and other fold-able manufacturers, are trying to create one device which will do both jobs. It's compact, so you can put it in your pocket and text with one hand. It also has a larger screen, so you can see and compose more text. One device, multiple tasks. And the competition in the traditional smartphone space is pretty cutthroat, so they're looking for SOME way to create a differentiated product, for which they can get a higher profit margin.

That's what they're TRYING to do.

They are failing at this. They end up with a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, and it's more expensive and fragile to boot. I will need to replace my tablet, at some point in the future, but it won't be with a fold-able device. There's a better than 50:50 chance the replacement will have an e-ink display; some of the newer color e-ink displays are quite good, even if they're not suitable for watching YouTube or playing fast-paced games (I do little of either with my tablet).

A limited number of apps supported Cardboard. Google decided to put all their effort behind Daydream, which would make the device more-or-less VR for all apps. Then they stopped supporting that.

I was looking at that, once upon a time. Like you, once Zuck bought Oculus I lost all interest in them.

Cardboard was just a stereoscopic viewer. There is to more to VR than "just" a stereoscopic viewer.

That said, using a decent stereoscopic viewer as a more-immersive display, while using my phone as the rendering engine and controller, could be useful. I had high hopes for the HTC Vive Flow but HTC seems to be so schizophrenic that they can't seem to get anything working and supplied. They list few use cases for that gizmo (to go with the relatively steep price, for what it is) and it doesn't work with any phone I own, or am likely to own anytime soon.

I don't care about VR gaming. If I could put my desktop up there and use my keeb and touchpad with it, in lieu of the limited display on my laptop, that could be genuinely useful. Cardboard couldn't do that, either.

How many people are working from home, using some laptop, wishing they had the space and $$$ for some big display where they could work? A better keyboard and mouse can be had for a reasonable price but you're still stuck with a limited-area and -resolution display. A wearable headset which filled that niche, and worked well, even if tied to the DP on the laptop, wouldn't be so niche and would likely pry some $$ loose.

LIDAR works great when you're the only person using it.

When multiple vehicles in the vicinity are using LIDAR, you end up with a ton of interference which basically renders all of them useless (or nearly so). You may be sending out narrow beams but the reflections are not narrow beams; the beams are hitting surfaces and scattering, reflecting in all directions, and it's that scattered light that you're looking for. If every LIDAR out there was using a slightly different frequency and you could differentiate your emissions from everyone else's, it might work. But there's little variation in frequencies used and there's precious little filtering to extract ONLY the reflections from your emitters.

Ditto for any kind of RADAR or SONAR. The moment you have more than a handful of sources, things get really messy. If you're overly dependent on same, you will be incapacitated pretty quickly.

I understand Tesla's preference to go entirely passive. Yes, it does make things more difficult. But it's more sustainable in the longer-term.

We are asymptotically approaching FDS Levels 4 and 5. The nature of an asymptote is that it makes excellent progress at the beginning and achieves diminishing returns with time, approaching but never quite reaching a particular value. I think everyone underestimates just how good a system has to be to get there. Getting there in a "laboratory" setting is never enough for "the real world" because there are simply too many corner cases out there. Because Tesla vehicles are actively collecting info on those corner cases and communicating that info back, Tesla has a higher probability of achieving it than anyone else. But I still wouldn't make any bets on getting there in the next decade.

wikipedia article describing it

5" AMOLED screen. If I can't manipulate the entire screen while holding it in one hand, it's a phablet, not a phone. I can barely manage the entire screen on this one.

I don't want a phablet. I want a phone. I have a 7.8" tablet for the stuff which needs a larger screen.

It's getting behind the times, as the original Pixel is no longer supported, and the ever-more-bloated apps are making it difficult to keep all the apps I want in the rather-limited RAM. Upgrade the RAM, keep the size and keep updating the OS and I'd have no reason to replace it.

Consumerism only works if there is an artificially-high amount of purchasing. The easiest way to accomplish that is more consumers. The other way is to put more money in the hands of the existing consumers, so they have more to spend. Too many people are sold on the idea that higher wages = smaller bonuses for management so management will never favor that approach. An ever-expanding population will ensure that there are always plenty of people competing for jobs, helping keep wages as low as possible. So, for our current version of consumerism to continue, there must be population growth.

Consumerism != capitalism. Capitalism can still work with stagnant or reducing populations. But that would entail getting away from consumerism and trying to achieve some degree of sustainabililty. Among certain groups of people, that word is almost as scary as "socialism."

Most modern ways of getting wealthy are dependent on consumerism, particularly while keeping labor costs as low as possible. So the people who are trying to get rich, not just get by, are always going to be in favor of more population. How we're supposed to do that in a finite world ... let's become a multi-planetary species so we can export our problems to an even larger area and keep growing, forever and ever amen.

Kinda depends on the turbine. And the people.

Some of the turbines are as quiet as you mention. Some of them do cause a persistent buzzing sound. Some of them create the buzzing sound at a lower frequency, below the range of human hearing (infrasound).

I used to discount people being disturbed by EM fields. Then I married a woman who can tell, quite clearly, when I turn the wifi off on the router. She doesn't sleep well if there's a wifi source to close to the bedroom (it's at the opposite end of the house). We pointedly did a trip to Green Bank, West Virginia, where such things are not allowed ('cuz big honkin' radio telescope). She could tell, quite clearly, when we entered the federally-mandated radio quiet zone.

I can't perceive any of this. Wifi and other EM noise doesn't bother me at all. But that does NOT mean that it isn't there and it doesn't affect anyone. The fact that she can tell me when I turn the wifi on and off, without her being able to see me doing anything ... that's repeatable and consistent. She can perceive it.

I'm all in favor of more solar and wind power. But I don't live near any major wind turbines, nor am I aware of being near any other sources of infrasound so I have no idea how far it would carry or if it would bother me. Lower frequencies tend to travel longer distances than higher frequencies (anyone who's been in traffic near some fool with a noisy stereo knows this; you hear the bass, if nothing else). Infrasound is much lower than the buzzing of a power transformer (being too close to one of those, long-term, DOES bother me). As a general rule, sound is going to behave like radio waves in terms of propagation; double the distance and the intensity goes down by a factor of 4 (intensity approx = 1 / distance^2).

you already know most of this story. The fact that he re-invested scammed money back into the company drove up the stock price. The company, for which he was un-cooking the books, was doing something similar.

Highly underrated movie.

Start here.

That's about as "hot off the presses" as you can get.

Solar is already the cheapest form of energy in most countries and, within a decade or so, it will be the cheapest in ALL countries.

There are still some areas where wind makes better sense than solar (areas with highly-variable amounts of solar energy, such as far from the equator). Utility-scale wind is already the cheapest source in ALL areas.

Assuming 350 x 240 resolution x 29.97 frames / sec (NTSC specs; the roughly 60 frames / second figure, widely quoted, is interlaced), assuming 1 bit / pixel (just to be safe), that's about 309 KB / sec. A T-120 video tape (7,200 seconds) would hold about 2 GB. You MIGHT be able to get 4 bits / pixel, bumping that up to 8 GB. Maybe.

Extended play would turn a T-120 tape into 6 hours, but at the cost of reduced resolution. Not worth it.

It would take you 2 hours to back up, or restore, that quantity of data. A DVD-R, double-layer, holds more than that and isn't nearly so bulky. Was this "somebody" desperate for a use for a pile of old videotapes? Or just being clueless?

Some years ago, we were driving 600+ miles from our home in a rural area to my Mom's place in a major city.

There's a fairly simple route that we tend to prefer, getting to a major highway and then taking interstates most of the way there. It can be summed up in about a dozen steps (turn right here, merge here, exit here, etc.).

Asking Google Maps for the fastest route had us going over all manner of tiny back roads out in the middle of nowhere before, eventually, getting to the interstate, somewhere around the midpoint of the route. Taking that route knocked about 30 miles off the 600+ mile route. The time savings was maybe a minute or two. There were over 100 steps (turn left on this 2-lane road, turn right on this 2-lane road, turn left on this 2-lane road ...).

No. Just simply no.

Or the time we were driving from Fort Myers, Florida to the southwest side of Lakeland and it offered some 60+ step route which involved multiple dirt roads. The simpler route was 2 miles and 1 minute longer, according to Google Maps' estimate. It was actually faster than that because there's no way you're going to drive 60 mph on a bunch of those dirt roads, which Google seemed to be using for its estimates.

If I'm driving some significant distance I don't want to keep turning left, going a couple miles, turning right, going a couple miles, turning left, etc. Give me the simplest route which isn't significantly out-of-the-way and maintains a good, average speed. Driving from Columbia, Missouri to Minneapolis, Minnesota should take me to Ottumwa, Iowa, then loop me around the town (higher average speed, even if it's a couple miles longer) and put me on the 4-lane to Des Moines, instead of going through 20+ "farm roads" in Missouri and Iowa and eventually approaching Des Moines from the south. For a long route, I want simple, not some very suspiciously-optimized route with a gajillion separate little steps.

Lots of little steps make sense if you're going from one rural area to another with no major thoroughfares nearby, or from one neighborhood to another, within a major metro, with no major thoroughfares nearby, or if there are major thoroughfares but they're clogged with traffic or construction (thinking of the time we were trying to get to the Museum of Science and Industry from southwest Chicago; is there any time of the day when I-55 is NOT a parking lot?). Otherwise, put me on the 4-lane, ASAP, and get it over with.

Sometimes, it seems like Google is going out of their way to AVOID doing this.

So long as it's worth their while to keep pumping, and selling, petrochemicals, they will continue to do so.

Meanwhile, it appears that Norway understands the first rule of dealing drugs: don't get addicted to your product. If the rest of Europe wants to stay addicted to petroleum, Norway will be only too happy to keep supplying them. But they're making sure they won't suffer withdrawal, along with the addicts, when things get too expensive to continue.

Years ago, I was working for a small company with a handful of IT folks. HR asked me to put together a current resume; they were trying to determine what they should be looking for, if they wanted to hire additional folks, and figured my resume (showing what technologies I was claiming to be current in) would be a good starting point.

I used TiddlyWiki to build the resume. Every piece of geek-speak on it was a link to a short article explaining what it was. The upshot was that all of the geek-speak was underlined (they were links) WikiWords so they stood out.

Our HR person (I did mention "small company," yes?) looked it over, clicked through each of the links, read each of the linked explanations and promptly stated that mine was the most useful resume she'd ever seen. Unfortunately, if you printed the main page of it (the actual resume, with all of the linked terminology), the resume scanner app they were using ... didn't like it. The underlining and WikiWords confused it.

Very useful to a person. Not so useful to the automation. Would not have gotten me hired, because the HR person spends a few seconds looking at it (frequently, a printed copy of it), not interacting with it. And they only look at it after the resume scanning app says this resume is a hit for the current search criteria.

They're trying to automate a process which is very human in nature, frequently dealing with terms that they might, kinda sorta, understand, on a very shallow level. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Added that to my list.

Digital Apollo was the last book I read about the that era. That one was good. And you think writing and delivering software today is difficult. Try delivering your object code as small, donut-shaped magnets on a braided set of wires, fabricated by hand by little old ladies according the output of your dev tools. I will never complain about DevOps pipelines, having read about that.

The X-15, originally, had two sets of controls, one for atmospheric and one for exo-atmospheric. They were merged by fly-by-wire hardware and software, back when most pilots weren't willing to trust their lives to FBW systems.

The "rotisserie" program caused the docked CM / LM to roll, slowly, all the way there, so they wouldn't need to put additional heat shielding on one side 'cuz all sides were evenly "cooked." Eliminated a bunch of weight from both vehicles.

Trying to create a FBW software control system for landing the LM. In reduced gravity. Where the pilot's main visual cues were lines painted on the inside and outside of a window. The pilot had to position their head and eyes such that the sets of lines (inside and outside) were aligned and then fly with a joystick.

Crazy times. And some SERIOUSLY innovative folks.

Cringely seems to think they'll be able to provide internet access globally. That is theoretically possible. But, StarLink has to get licenses from the appropriate telecoms agencies in the various countries. I suspect such licenses, in China, would have some "restrictions" on them. Ditto for Russia, or anywhere else the government doesn't want the unwashed masses getting unfettered access. So, no, this will likely not work as a good way to bypass censorship.

Considering the fact that the ground terminals are highly-directional phased-array antennas, you'd need some kind of transmitter, in the sky at high elevations, to block / jam the signals. Yes, you could blanket the airwaves on the frequencies he's using but the directionality of the antennas would go a long way toward raising the signal : noise ratio to usable levels; that's why they're able to use such low power. Since the satellites are moving, as soon as the beam steered away from your jammer ... connection established. Connectivity may be intermittent in the presence of jamming, but not impossible.

What Cringely is missing, though, is that the only way you get high-bandwidth and low-latency is if you're hitting a satellite in LEO which is connected to another ground station, providing the backhaul internet connectivity. If your signal is going up, hitting the satellite, then coming back down to a ground station ... good latency and good bandwidth. If it has to go from your terminal through a couple other satellites to hit a ground station (as with ships at sea) ... that will severely bottleneck the bandwidth and increase the latency. You can still connect, but there will be more limitations.

And that will also, potentially, be what keeps him from being a significant ISP in China, Iran, Russia, etc. If they are unwilling to let him build ground stations within their borders (or outside their borders by nearby, in other countries) ... limited bandwidth and increased latency. At best.

Last, but not least, while StarLink is well-positioned to provide connectivity to people in rural areas, there's a limited total amount of bandwidth available in a satellite's footprint. This works well for low-population-density areas (such as "Hole-in-the-wall," mentioned in TFA) but poorly for high-population-density areas (significant cities). High-population-density areas already have ample numbers of high-bandwidth, wired ISPs. Musk is going for the underserved fraction of the US population, who live in lower-population-density areas.

If you can put in a ground terminal and connect a picocell to it ... you can have cellular services in BFE. I suspect more than a few rural-area services will be happy to use StarLink as their backhaul, where no one other is available (or they're available but unreasonably priced).

This is basically what this book is about.

I tend to think Amazon has something wrong; otherwise it was published before the Declaration of Independence. While I can believe Oxford Press has existing that long, I doubt the author has.

The whole point of the book is about being able to collect large amounts of data and build a digital model of some portion of your world, running on a computer under your control. With that, you can find flaws in existing processes (including government), possibly fix said flaws (including trial-and-error approaches to fixes), optimize, etc.

As others have commented, you don't have to have the Metaverse to do these things. But, if we're going to tap the greater part of human intuition and intelligence, we need a way of intelligently visualizing stuff. No one seems to have figured that part out. When we can get visualization, to tap human ingenuity, and combine that with AI ... that could be a digital "big bang."

Personally, I'd just like a VR headset that worked properly, with Linux, (anyone?) and didn't spy on everything I did (lookin' at you, Facebook / Oculus).