I imagine I’d make a not totally incompetent blacksmith, or some other equivalent allied trade. In fact, I’d probably have a better chance at that 300 or so years ago than now.

Yes, I do already have my own anvil. Jury’s out on whether or not I feel like lugging it with me, though. The fucker is heavy.

And he’ll get it there, too.

The US Postal Service is basically the only part of the federal government that actually works. And still works, amazingly, despite all the politicking and bullshit that’s been thrown at it. My uncle once mailed me a letter but didn’t remember the address of the place I’d recently moved to. He addressed it to, “White house near the corner of [street] and [street] in [town],” with no ZIP code, and it still made it to me. I saved the envelope. I’ve still got it somewhere.

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.

Nobody is ever actually shot while “cleaning” their gun. Unloading it is step 1 in this procedure for basically every firearm ever made, and that assessment stretches back several hundred years by now.

This is just a culturally ingrained lame excuse people pathologically fall back on thinking they’re going to save face over capping their own damn selves with an easily avoidable negligent discharge. And everyone who tries it inevitably thinks they’re the first person to think of it, because they’re stupid.

Hey! I will have you know, mine also involves copious amounts of knives, duct tape, and drywall joint compound.

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.

You’re not truly alive until you’re cooking your extruder assembly with a heat gun to get enough solidified plastic off of it just to take it apart.

It’s the same line of logic as when you see people post on a forum something like [img]c:\Users\Bob\Documents\My_Image.bmp[/img] and then wonder why it doesn’t work.

“But I can see it on my computer!”

Over the internet, the origin of all data is on someone else’s computer. All means all. And all of it needs to come down the wire to you at some point.

You’re on the right track in one regard, though, in a roundabout way with caching: Browsers will keep local copies of media or even the entire content of webpages on disk for some period of time, and refer to those files when the page is visited again without redownloading the data. This is especially useful for images that appear in multiple places on a website, like header and logo graphics, etc.

This can actually become a problem if an image is updated on the server’s side, but your browser is not smart enough to figure this out. It will blithely show the old image it has in its cache, which is now outdated. (If you force refresh a webpage by holding shift when you refresh or press F5 in all of the current modern browsers, you’ll get a reload while explicitly ignoring any files already in the cache and all the images and content will be fully redownloaded, and that’s how you get around this if it happens to you.)

That’s how it works.

You may be thinking of “lazy loading,” where some scriptwork is used to delay downloading images until some time after the initial page load completes. This still requires all the data to be sent to the user — all of the data always has to be sent to the user eventually — but just not right away. This can have perceptible load time benefits, especially if whatever content you’re loading won’t be visible in the viewport initially anyway.

Oh, yeah. Or, if you’re very close to the horizon and reflecting light that’s already plowed through most of the atmosphere at a very shallow angle before it can hit the mirror satellite, how much attenuation you get from that. Tons, I’m sure.

The same a what the sun already has to deal with, really. If your reflection and focus were somehow 100% perfect (impossible, but maybe you could get close) then attenuation from the atmosphere would be the same as what happens to ordinary sunlight over the same surface area, since that also has to pass through the same amount of atmosphere.

The Hubble is also in a rather low Earth orbit (340-ish miles), which enables it to use magnetic brakes which allow it to ditch the excess energy from its reaction wheels into the Earth’s magnetic field so it can stop pivoting when it aims. The further away you get from the planet the less effective that becomes. The bigger your object is, the bigger your reaction mass needs to be.

And the Hubble doesn’t inherently roast or blind innocent bystanders as it swings its point of aim across all of the intervening space between its targets. Maintaining a steady shine on one particular point on the surface is one thing, but these idiots seem to be implying that they will sell sunlight-as-a-service via some kind of subscription model to multiple customers, so they would presumably be changing targets all the time.

The Hubble can only rotate very slowly. Per the article, 90 degrees in about fifteen minutes. Its advantage is that it only looks at targets that are very far away and hold still relative to the Earth, so there is very little parallax to worry about. If you wanted to go faster you probably can’t use the reaction wheel method that it does; you’d have to use thrusters which would consume finite fuel that’d eventually (or quickly) run out, and at that rate there’s no way you could do it as accurately. For the Hubble specifically, the amount of time it takes to get on a target is broadly irrelevant, only that it can keep itself there once it eventually achieves targeting. This would not be so with the hypothetical solar reflectors, regardless of what altitude they were flown at. And low altitude orbits would be the worst, because they’d be flying over the target’s head at tens of thousands of miles per hour in terms of ground speed and would have to rotate very quickly in order to remain even vaguely pointed in the right direction.