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Comment Re:Honestly Unexpected (Score 1) 81

How would this affect Windows on ARM app development? One problem for Windows the last several years has been x86 hardware not being able to keep up with ARM based chips when it comes to certain aspects like battery life and sometimes single-core performance. Following Apple's lead, Microsoft has made Windows on ARM mostly compatible with Windows on x86 albeit with a performance penalty using a translation layer. The difference between Apple and MS in this regard is the translation layer for Apple is meant to be temporary until Apple developers fully transition to native ARM apps. How long will MS maintain this translation layer? I don't see them being able to abandon x86 like Apple and I don't see them being able to ignore ARM either.

Comment Re:Wozniak - the real reason for Apple (Score 1) 51

Check out Clive Sinclair - he was an engineer and did pretty damn well selling his computers in the UK.

Kinda, I mean he did well, but it went under. Acorn did somewhat better and parts of Acorn are alive and well to this day.

Furber and Wilson lacked that marketing muscle. Were they a unique talent? I mean... no one else did that. Their CPU worked first time, outperformed their contemporaries, ran at a fraction of the power cost a fraction of the amount and went on to become massively popular.

Maybe Woz couldn't have done that, but it doesn't mean Jobs was the one required to help him, any competenant marketing type could have done the same. Vew few people could have designed the hardware and software that Woz did at the time.

I'd argue that Jobs was unusually good at marketing. Maybe as rare as Woz. I mean, look at the cult of personality that's developed around him where people think Apple (or really Jobs himself) invented all sorts of things which were actually popularized by Apple, but invented by someone else.

His schtick works.

Comment Re:Sony makes memory cards? (Score 2) 49

I can't name a single product this company makes besides the PlayStation (that's headed for US $1200.00). They're a dead company walking. China is making more desirable products for less money.

Until recently Sony made TVs which they have sold off to TCL. In terms of consumer facing products, they still sell a small amount or smartphones, cameras, and car stereos. In terms of manufacturing, Sony makes many electronic components like CMOS image sensors which are in iPhones and Androids and storage (subject of this article).

Comment Re:Children shouldn't be on social media (Score 0) 52

What we really need are proper support systems for children in place, but in the real world they often don't exist. Some parents also seem to think they should have full control over their children and know everything they are doing at all times, which makes things like seeking support for being LGBTQ bother difficult for the child and something that the parents demand is not made available.

Maybe we could set up better moderated communities for this kind of thing, but that brings its own problems. As an example, with the current attacks on trans healthcare in the UK, a lot of trans kids are being forced to go the "DIY" route for treatment. It's not illegal as such, but it is something of a grey area. Any kind of official moderation is likely to make such forums useless to a lot of people.

Comment Re:I read the book (Score 1) 65

Are you sure you were paying attention when you read it, because that's not what happens in the book. For example, Rocky needs essentially an environmental suit to survive in an atmosphere suitable for humans, due to his planet having much higher pressure and temperature. Communication is established over some time based on engineering principles, which are universal properties of the universe and a classic sci-fi trope for communicating with very different alien species.

I thought it was a pretty good book overall. Lots of interesting ideas and detail. Strong characters, at least for the protagonist and Rocky.

Comment Re:Wozniak - the real reason for Apple (Score 5, Insightful) 51

Jobs gets all the accolades and fame but he was just a pushy sociopath in a suit,

Suit? The guy who famously wore a black turtleneck all the time?

Anyhoo. I think people outside tech overestimate the importance of CEOs and people in tech underestimate it. Without Jobs, Woz probably would have been a really great engineer in some company and you'd never have heard of him at all. He wasn't a product guy, and you need a product not just raw tech to sell. Selling stuff being somewhat important for a company.

Steve Jobs also had a functioning reality distortion field, something not all that many people have and that's really important for building a company...

Comment Re:Looks like a robotic arm on a rail (Score 1) 54

The Chinese have these kinds of robots deploying much larger installations. They also have drones that fly panels into mountainous areas for installation.

Not that I'm knocking it, it's good that they are copying good ideas. The cheaper solar gets the better, and for political reasons stuff like this has to be home grown.

Comment Re:advice to children (Score 3, Insightful) 192

Slavery was once legal because there were not laws AGAINST it. Laws don't make things legal, they make them illegal.

What utter bullshit.

The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law, -- Lord Chief Justice William Mansfield

And you know that general line of reasoning was why slavery had to be actually recognised in the constitution because if you have a nation of any laws at all you need to pass a law to not have them apply to some people.

Comment Re: Why are lawsuits allowed against end users? (Score 1) 42

Tencent?

They are on the steering committee.

no matter how "open source" they claim the process to be, and subject to American export laws.

What? A process isn't open source, code is. There are open source implementations of AV1 (or 2) and H.265 (and 6). Anything can be subject to American export laws, whether or not it makes sense, but America can't enforce that outside America (or even inside some of the time).

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