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Comment Re:Goodbye Battery (Score 1) 41

by aRTeeNLCH (#64396522) Attached to: Google Finally Launches Android's 'Find My Device' Network
There's not going to be any difference, because, surprise surprise, turning off Bluetooth on Android actually doesn't turn it off, it just disables any communication over Bluetooth to any app. If you don't believe me, I use MyPhoneExplorer to synch my phone with my Windows work PC outlook, and if I trigger the sync whilst forgetting to turn on Bluetooth on my phone, the display off my phone wakes up anyway. Go ahead and find out for yourself. Yes, Android Bluetooth toggle will not actually turn off the Bluetooth radio, perhaps transmit (I don't have the means to really test that), but certainly not receive.

Comment Re:In my experience 3rd party ink clogs print head (Score 1) 116

by aRTeeNLCH (#64389602) Attached to: We Never Agreed To Only Buy HP Ink, Say Printer Owners
Good point, I actually got my Epson 8550 ET when after 4 years my previous Epson had the heads clog up badly. It hadn't been used for some time, which mentioned when returning under extended warranty (5 years total instead of the regular 2 10 % of the printer purchasing price, about 30 bucks), but they gave me the full value as a credit. Which I then used to get the 8550. As for getting the value out, where I live, A3 photo prints are easily 15 bucks, whereas it costs me about 2, on Epson archival paper.

Comment Epson ink tank for ink jet (Score 2) 116

by aRTeeNLCH (#64389470) Attached to: We Never Agreed To Only Buy HP Ink, Say Printer Owners
Sure, brother and laser as many here say whenever HP printers come up, but if you want to print your own photos, I find Epson ink tank printers great. I've got the 8550 A3+ that prints photos for cents on A4 in great quality with lasting colours. Note that Epson have always had great Linux compatibility (no support, but it all works and they provide drivers for the scanners printers and such, some things don't need drivers, but they provide them, including their own Linux scanning app), a domain where canon is hit and miss.

Comment Re:Every time they release a new version of androi (Score 1) 22

by aRTeeNLCH (#64388430) Attached to: Android 15's First Beta Release is Out
Samsung expanded updates of their Galaxy A line alongside the flagship S line 2 years ago, the A33 got 4 years of system upgrades (= 4 major android versions) plus one additional year of security updates. At just around 250 bucks, it's far from a flagship price. And sure, it's not 7 years like your iPhone but one should know forget that iPhones are sold over 4 years, since older flagship become mid end phones. Samsung models from last year are scarce and of two years ago aren't available anywhere I look. So from last sale, I don't think iPhones actually have longer support, the A 3n series is a better bet if you don't want to break your bank.

Comment Re:Stoned people & tripped out definitions (Score 1) 291

by aRTeeNLCH (#64380744) Attached to: Musk Predicts AI Will Overtake Human Intelligence Next Year
Please don't abuse the word analog (analogue) to mean something opposed to digital, when it refers to something that exists in the real world and is not an analogy for a measurement result, or similar state. An analogue indicator is, for example, the mechanically collected fuel level indicator on the dashboard of a car. All too often, the word analogue is seen as a counterpart to digital as in with a computer, so then the meaning gets twisted into something in real life. Which is, obviously, just something in real life and not analogue. Brain cells operate with continuous levels in continuous time. They are not digital. They are also not analogue.

Submission + - How a Micro-Budget Student Film Changed Sci-Fi Forever (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the early 70s, young filmmakers John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon created a spaceship tale for a graduation project – little knowing it would influence Alien and many other works. Made for $60,000 by film school students, horror maestro John Carpenter's directorial debut Dark Star is now regarded as a sci-fi cult classic. Having just turned 50 years old, it's a world away from much of the sci-fi that came before it and would come after, neither space odyssey nor space opera, rather a bleak, downbeat and often absurd portrait of a group of people cooped together in a malfunctioning interstellar tin can. Arguably its most famous scene consists of an existential debate between an astronaut and a sentient bomb. Dark Star was a collaboration between Carpenter, who directed and scored the film, and Dan O'Bannon, who in addition to co-writing the script, acted as editor, production designer, and visual effects supervisor, as well as playing the volatile, paranoid Sergeant Pinback. They met as budding filmmakers at the University of Southern California. "While [Carpenter and O'Bannon] couldn't be more dissimilar in personality, they were both very energetic and focused," says Daniel Griffiths, director of Let There Be Light: The Odyssey of Dark Star (2010), the definitive documentary about the making of the film.

The sci-fi films of this period tended to be bleak and dystopian, explains John Kenneth Muir, author of The Films of John Carpenter – films like Silent Running (1972), in which all plant life on Earth is extinct, or George Lucas's 1971 debut THX-1138, in which human emotion is suppressed. "Dark Star arrived in this world of dark, hopeless imaginings, but took the darkness one step further into absurd nihilism." Carpenter and O'Bannon set out to make the "ultimate riff on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey," says Griffiths. While Kubrick's 1968 film, explains Muir, was one "in which viewers sought meaning in the stars about the nature of humanity, there is no meaning to life in Dark Star". Rather, says Muir, it parodies 2001 "with its own sense of man's irrelevance in the scheme of things". Where Kubrick scored his film with classical music, Dark Star opens with a country song, Benson, Arizona. (A road in the real-life Benson is named in honour of the film). The film was even released with the tagline "the spaced-out odyssey." Dark Star captured the mood of the time in which it was made, says Muir, the atmosphere of Nixon's America. "The 1960s was all about utopian dreaming and bringing change to America in the counterculture. The 1970s represent what writer Johnny Byrne called 'The wake-up from the hippie dream', a reckoning with the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same." [...]

When Dark Star premiered at the FILMEX expo in 1974, the audience response was largely positive. "They recognised the film's absurdist humour and celebrated its student film roots," says Griffiths. It had a limited theatrical release in 1975, but it was not a commercial success. "The film met with negative reviews from critics, and general disinterest from audiences," says Muir. "Both Carpenter and O'Bannon realised that all the struggles they endured to make the film did not matter to audiences, they only cared about the finished product. I think they were discouraged," says Griffiths. The growth of the VHS market, however, helped it find its audience and propelled it towards cult status. Its influence can still be felt, perhaps most directly in Ridley Scott's Alien, for which O'Bannon, who died in 2009, wrote the screenplay. The two films share DNA. Alien is also set on a grotty working vessel with a bickering crew, only this time the alien wasn't played for laughs.

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