Technology that works or doesn't

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

4 hours ago, mlooney said:

Just out of curiosity, is it still in warranty?

Oh hell no. I bought the thing back on June 1st of 2021. I think the warranty ran out either 90 days or 1 year after I received it.

BTW, it cost me $2,844.00 back then. I've since upgraded the SDDs and the RAM to where it's worth over $3,100.00 now. It's going to be a bitch to insure for shipping. Mrs. Prof is going to shit bricks.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

4 hours ago, mlooney said:

J

[duplicate post deleted]

[mlooney 3,733]

That's more than all the functional computer and computer like devises I have, combined.  Actually even if I add in the pile of broken screen tables and Chromebooks that have weird failure modes, it's still more.

[Darth Fluffy 364]

6 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Mrs. Prof is going to shit bricks.

That is a handy skill, assuming they are a consistent size. You planning to build something?

[mlooney 3,733]

   

7 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Mrs. Prof is going to shit bricks.

Didn't know that Mrs. Prof was a wombat.

54 minutes ago, Darth Fluffy said:

That is a handy skill, assuming they are a consistent size. You planning to build something?

Just remember, Adobe means dried mud.  Which some time might include dung, granted not human.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

On 9/28/2024 at 3:27 AM, mlooney said:

That's more than all the functional computer and computer like devises I have, combined.  Actually even if I add in the pile of broken screen tables and Chromebooks that have weird failure modes, it's still more.

Consider what it has in it for a 2021 purchase. It's got an Intel i9 CPU, 32GB RAM, a 512MB NVMe SDD (upgraded to 4TB), and an NVIDIA 3500GTX (I think) GPU. That's still expensive in today's money, and it's needed for my music writing/mastering chores.

On 9/28/2024 at 8:42 AM, mlooney said:

Which some time might include dung

What's brown and sounds like a bell? Didn't get the wombat reference, though...

[ChronosCat 158]

1 hour ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Didn't get the wombat reference, though...

 

[Don Edwards 572]

3 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Consider what it has in it for a 2021 purchase. It's got an Intel i9 CPU, 32GB RAM, a 512MB NVMe SDD (upgraded to 4TB), and an NVIDIA 3500GTX (I think) GPU. That's still expensive in today's money, and it's needed for my music writing/mastering chores.

...yeah. I've done both image editing and audio editing on a slow computer with not enough memory. It sucks. When your compressed image file is four times the size of your RAM...

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

The laptop hasn't left the house yet. Mrs. Prof keeps on promising to get bubble wrap to wrap it per the recommendations of the manufacturer, but she never leaves the house. I'm about to start a major "bitch at the wife" campaign to get her off her ass.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

BTW, the laptop got shipped on October 1st. It'll arrive on the 7th. It had to go UPS Ground, since we had to ship it with its lithium ion batteries still inside. Those aren't allowed to travel via air freight at UPS. 'Twas an expensive package to ship - something like $50, mainly due to the insurance on the $3k replacement value of the thing.

One thing this event has helped motivate me to do is to get my installations of certain software on the Music Computer up to date. I'm currently updating - and moving -  my copy of Native Instruments KOMPLETE 14. That one piece of software took up so much space on the system's C: drive that I nearly ran out of disk space, quite literally. That's one reason why I installed a new 2TB NVMe drive some while back as a D: drive. (Not to be confused with the new 4TB D: drive I just put into the laptop a few months back.) I'm now in the process of moving every single one of KOMPLETE's libraries from the C: drive to the D: drive. All 254,750 files, taking up 605,146.2 Megs of space. This has taken the better part of 24 hours so far (including verification after copy by Total Commander's copy process), and there's still an estimated 1 1/2 hours left to go. I'll still have some manual follow-up work to do after that, but it won't take nearly as long. Suffice it to say that my system should operate a lot more smoothly afterwards. I am wondering if I should find a standalone TRIM utility to release all of the sectors that were used by the moved data when I'm done, though...

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

The chore is done. It took almost 26 hours to transfer and bit-verify everything from drives C: and H: to drive D:, then another hour-plus to make Native Instruments KOMPLETE recognize the new locations of all of the libraries, one at a time. We're talking almost 950 Gigabytes of data moved, verified, and address checked. Whew! And it all works, too.

I hope I never have to do that again.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

Here's an interesting video explaining the new Porsche patent on a 6-stroke internal combustion engine that came out recently:

 

[mlooney 3,733]

The radar tech in me is almost calling BS on this.

 

[ijuin 603]

While a WiFi router can provide the microwave signal for a separate camera to form an image, routers do not possess the angular resolution to form images on their own—it can only determine the general direction of an object. While this might be enough to get general location and numbers of users/devices (thus fulfilling the literal meaning of RAdio Detection And Ranging, showing devices as blips), it can not form a picture of people’s body shape and poses.

[mlooney 3,733]

My point.  Even "high resolution" radar doesn't give that sort of pictures.  And 5.4mhz isn't high res.  And the receiver is damn sure not high res.

[Darth Fluffy 364]

2 hours ago, ijuin said:

While a WiFi router can provide the microwave signal for a separate camera to form an image, routers do not possess the angular resolution to form images on their own—it can only determine the general direction of an object. While this might be enough to get general location and numbers of users/devices (thus fulfilling the literal meaning of RAdio Detection And Ranging, showing devices as blips), it can not form a picture of people’s body shape and poses.

 

1 hour ago, mlooney said:

My point.  Even "high resolution" radar doesn't give that sort of pictures.  And 5.4mhz isn't high res.  And the receiver is damn sure not high res.

 

Radar images are a real thing. The resolution is not optical quality; resolution depends in part on wavelength, and 'radio' is much longer (in this case 'wider', less resolved) than optical. But 'radio' covers a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum, ill-defined at the upper end (frequency) where variant terms are often used; these can have pretty good resolution; not optical, but close enough to mimic the eyeball at a distance.

The second factor in resolution is aperture, bigger sees smaller details better, and while a ranging radar may have a large dish, that does not generally help imaging. You also need a scheme for an image receptor. The way this is handled for snooping planes and satellites is 'synthetic aperture', where the motion of the radar imaging device constitutes a large aperture over time.

A key problem with any radar based technique is that the Earth's atmosphere is not transparent to all frequencies, indeed visible light is in one of the few generally transparent wavelength bands. The rest of the spectrum is in some degree of fog all the time, at some points opaque.

5.4mhz is not high res. Imaging radar are going to be millimeter waves or smaller.

[ijuin 603]

1 hour ago, mlooney said:

My point.  Even "high resolution" radar doesn't give that sort of pictures.  And 5.4mhz isn't high res.  And the receiver is damn sure not high res.

5.4 megahertz? I thought it was 5.4 gigahertz? That would make for a wavelength of about 5 centimeters.

[Darth Fluffy 364]

8 minutes ago, ijuin said:

5.4 megahertz? I thought it was 5.4 gigahertz? That would make for a wavelength of about 5 centimeters.

I don't see how that leads to 'WiFi imaging. The image would be crude, might get you general locations of people, but there is no imaging receptor involved, so, I don't think so.

[mlooney 3,733]

26 minutes ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Radar images are a real thing.

I did spend the 1st 10 years of my adult life as a radar tech.  I may or may not have mentioned that.

[mlooney 3,733]

My Chromebox just let me install, and run Firefox.  Granted it's Firefox for Android, but still.

[Darth Fluffy 364]

6 hours ago, mlooney said:

I did spend the 1st 10 years of my adult life as a radar tech.  I may or may not have mentioned that.

Sweet. You were in the Army, right? Not a lot of radar imaging going on, I think. Synthetic aperture works better if you are moving fast, aircraft or satellite.

[mlooney 3,733]

10 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

You were in the Army, right?

Yes, Air Defense.

[Darth Fluffy 364]

17 minutes ago, mlooney said:

Yes, Air Defense.

Air aggression is more fun, because as they say, "The grass is always greener on the other side of defense."

[mlooney 3,733]

36 minutes ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Air aggression is more fun,

No, that's the USAF that gets to do that.

[Darth Fluffy 364]

19 minutes ago, mlooney said:

No, that's the USAF that gets to do that.

That's what I was in. (Everyone else is 'targets')

Odd factoid: One of the rarest US military uniform insignia is the Army astronaut badge.

In a related bit of irony, it appears that currently the US Space Force does not have an astronaut badge. They appear to be taking over the title of being the reigning Chair Force.