dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

I do too, but I’d highly doubt it will. It’s well known that Meta sells every headset at a loss and funds the expenditure via revenue from their gargantuan advertising and spy network, specifically to squeeze out competitors and make it harder to enter the VR market as a newcomer. Zuck Zuck still thinks all the prime real estate in the metaverse is going to be his, because he only read the first half of Snow Crash.

Gabe is a rich man and I assume he and his company could take this approach as well if they wanted to, at least temporarily. But based on their pricing for their past hardware (particularly the Steam Deck), I predict they won’t.

Insufficient pedantry detected.

The PC platform is an extension of IBM’s Personal Computer architecture, which was not a description of what it was so much as it was literally the brand name. It’s long since been forgotten that this is now a shorthand, and the full name of the platform arguably ought to be PC Compatible. Unless you bought your machine from IBM, anyway, which these days would be quite the trick.

Being PC compatible was a big deal back when the original PC was also a big deal. Probably slightly less so now, since it’s the assumed default.

It should go without saying that the original IBM PC, model 5150, did not run Windows… Because Windows did not yet exist. It didn’t even necessarily run the then-nascent PC-DOS provided by Microsoft, because IBM also supported running CP/M and and UCSD Pascal on it.

The whole Windows-as-default thing didn’t happen until well after the appeal of the PC specification had escaped containment at IBM and x86 had handily taken over the desktop computing world.

A personal computer is basically anything you can stick on your desk (or lap) and doesn’t require hooking up to a mainframe to run. But a Personal Computer, capital P and C, implies an x86 compatible platform with architecture designed such that it is technically still capable of running all those decades old 8086 programs and operating systems. (Just, several orders of magnitude faster than their designers ever envisioned, and probably only by sticking your UEFI BIOS in legacy mode first.)

FYI, technically Meta/Facebook had already owned Oculus for something like five years before the original Quest came out. They just started getting really blatant about the branding shortly after that time, probably to acquiesce to Zuck Zuck and his huffing of his “metaverse” crack pipe increasingly frequently.

It’s from the Watchmen comic:

In that case who knows what it was. This is one of those rare instances where it’d be awesome to have a flame spectrometer.

That was never actually an official statement. It was an offhand comment by some staffer that didn’t carry any legal weight nor accurately describe the internal trajectory for Windows in any way. As much as we like to poke fun at it regardless.

As opposed to what, buying a viable phone from those other guys?

What other guys?

At minimum a stampede of people moving to iPhones should theoretically cause Google to shit enough of a brick (providing capitalism actually works as advertised, and for the record I am trying like hell to keep a straight face as I type this) to correct their behavior in an attempt to win some of those users back.

Because at the end of the day most consumers are consumers, not nerds, and if neither platform is going to allow you control over your device and they’re both privacy nightmares you’re not much worse off with an iDevice if you plan on owning a smartphone in the first place.

What we really need is a viable third option. Hopefully an inherently non-shitty one. The barrier to market entry seems pretty high, though.

If you still have the length of filament you cut off, you can verify your temperature theory pretty easily by loading it up temporarily and trying increasing nozzle temperatures until you get it to extrude. That spool of filament may have been contaminated by having a couple of pellets of the wrong stuff in it. Plain PET (rather than PETG) is most likely, I think, and that stuff won’t extrude until you wind your nozzle up to probably about 240° C.

It might have been a diameter issue as well, but I’d doubt it. My printer’s drive gears can still grab objects that are quite a bit smaller than the prescribed 1.75mm filament diameter, and if the stuff were so thin or thick it wouldn’t feed I think it’d be quite obvious to the naked eye. I imagine this is the case with pretty much any modern printer.

0 to 1023 is 1024 possible values, but the highest value you can display is still 1023.

When you count on your fingers in base 10, do you tell people you can “actually” count to 11? Of course not. Only if you, in fact, killed Inigo Montoya’s father.

1023. Otherwise you’d have to stick out your tongue or something for the 1024ths place bit.

Via.

That’s the main hurdle.

Re-finding this was a pain in the ass because I didn’t save it. https://lemmy.world/post/19485246/12219336

Editing to add some more meandering. Now this is even longer than the first one.

In addition to surface area limitations, there’s also a pretty obvious line of sight problem in that if your satellite is positioned such that its shiny side is facing the sun, by definition it must be facing the same direction as the Earth’s currently lighted side. The further past the dusk line onto the dark side of the Earth you’re trying to hit the further you have to rotate your mirror until ultimately the surface of it is perpendicular to the incoming sunlight. This is the angle of incidence, in optical terms, and it reduces the effective reflection not only off of the mirror proportionally to the increase in angle (in a roughly geometric manner, I believe) but also where that reflected beam of light hits the ground at its oblique angle. In real terms, it will be impossible to hit any target more than a few degrees past the dusk line with any meaningful amount of energy. Insofar as this harebrained scheme could possibly hit the ground with any amount of energy at all.

The diagram (which is surely not to scale) on these idiots’ website seems to depict a mirror in orbit around the Earth that’s about the size of Massachusetts, which is orbiting at a height that’d put it somewhere in the vicinity of the Van Allen belt, which is also a bad idea (no radio communication for you!) and would result in an orbital period of around 2.5 hours. If so, that means your mirror is whizzing over the surface at something like 14,000 MPH, and you would have some kind of line of sight to it from the ground for maybe 25% of its orbit. So even with the best will in the world and absolutely mathematically perfect rotation control it’ll only be able to remain on a surface target for about 37 minutes at most, most of which would be while it’s uselessly passing through the Earth’s shadow and is reflecting no sunlight at all, and for the remaining handful of minutes with its effective output tapering off to uselessness as it sets over the opposite horizon.

“I’ll just position my mirrors in a geostationary orbit,” says Mr. Clever. “Then I’ll have line of sight to a big chunk of the surface and my satellite won’t move relative to it.”

Well, the further you park your mirrors from the surface, the harder they are to aim. You can’t have it both ways. A geostationary orbit is about 22,000 miles from the surface, a distance from which even the tiniest error in alignment will result in you hitting the wrong target. You can use some middle school trig to calculate this for yourself: At a distance of 22,000 miles, an alignment error of just 0.01 degrees will result in the centerline of your beam missing the target by four miles, which in terrestrial terms is what we refer to as kind of a lot. Maintaining an alignment precision that high especially taking into account gravitational perturbation by the moon, etc., is a rather tall order. To maintain targeting precision within 223 feet, which is probably already unacceptable, you need a constant alignment precision of 0.0001 degrees, and you need to hold it there 100% of the time.

I don’t care how big your rocket is, that’s not happening.

All of this also assumes perfectly flat and 100% reflective surfaces on the mirrors, which never degrades or gets scuffed up or punctured by space debris. Which is also impossible.

To recap:

• You can’t reflect any more energy than strikes the surface area of your mirrors, end of story. The mirrors will be tiny, relative to the size of the Earth, and the Earth is huge, relative to the size of any mirror we can launch.
• The efficacy of your mirrors diminishes geometrically with how far you must angle them relative to the direction of incoming sunlight.
• Most of the time your mirrors will either be in the Earth’s shadow, where they are useless, or over the already illuminated side of the Earth, where they’re pointless. In easily achievable low Earth orbits, their time on target will be very short.
• Positioning the orbits high enough to mitigate either problem will make aiming mathematically impossible, and also magnify any imperfections in focus, which are certain to be vast. That won’t work either.

TL;DR: The whole thing won’t work.

In addition to being a moronic idea, this is also physically infeasible as I outlined in excruciating detail in my comment the last time this came up. The takeaway is that this is an investor scam for sure, and the side effects outlined in this article are just a fun (!) and exciting (!) sideshow if these bozos actually do mange to get a single mirror off the ground and deployed. Which they probably won’t.

Exciting enough for me to use on a daily basis, and I’m actively following their development progress. Not contributing, mind you. Nobody wants me of all people touching their codebase.

FreeCAD - The open source alternative to various proprietary parametric CAD and solid modelling software such as Solidworks, Fusion360, OnShape, etc. This recently passed its milestone 1.0 release at which point it could finally be considered actually broadly functional for actual real world use. Among various other widgets, I prominently used it to make this and this. Yeah, you guys know how it is.

I consider FreeCAD pretty important coming from the 3D printing hobbyist’s perspective because its the lone bulwark (well, okay, maybe also along with Blender and OpenSCAD) standing firm against the tidal wave of predatory bullshit being peddled by the commercial modelling software options, all of which at this point are genuine full-blown instruments of evil desperately trying to strangle, gatekeep, and paywall humankind’s ability to just make some goddamned shapes to 3D print.

In other news, I complied UZDoom from source the other night because somehow I missed that zdoom.org has precompiled binaries on their site, which I haven’t had to visit in years, but the UZDoom Github page doesn’t. We live and learn. UZDoom is pretty exciting because it’s a continuation of GZDoom with the added feature of kicking its insane former lead developer off of the project, or rather forking it out from under him. And everybody loves to play Doom.

Just for anyone wondering, because I was sure wondering, existing continuous fiber filaments from other brands run upwards of $450 per spool at the moment. Jesus.

Not to be a stereotypically insufferable Stallman style neckbeard about it, but the only two objectively correct answers to this question are FreeCAD for mechanical parametric things, and Blender for organic shapes or decorative models. (You can also bully Blender into doing parametric CAD work with plugins. And I guess OpenSCAD also counts, if you would rather program your models rather than model your models.)

All of the other available commercial options are some combination of:

• Proprietary vendor lock-in bullshit
• Subscription model “software as a service” perpetual money sinks
• Always online cloud services that either steal your models/make them available to anyone/probably also report you to the Feds
• Loaded with quasi-legal licensing restrictions that prevent you from distributing or selling your own creations made with it

Or for extra bonus points, all of the above!

FreeCAD isn’t exactly slick and it has a rather precipitous learning curve, but it’s also basically the only viable truly free option that won’t spy on you, steal your stuff, or turn you upside down and shake you for money on a monthly basis.