Modern tech, retro tech, 80s/90s music & nostalgia. I live in northern England so most things I post about have a UK slant.

Elsewhere on Fedi:

  • 2 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 7th, 2023

help-circle

  • It’s a little more than 100€

    It’s half as much again! If your budget is that flexible you really should have mentioned it in the original post so that people could give you a wider range of options.

    Translate it up by a couple of orders of magnitude and you get “I want to buy a car, I have €10,000 to spend” … “I found one for €15,000, it’s a little bit more but …”





  • Not really a viable solution for many scenarios though. What if your PDF has half a dozen pages, your answer becomes really tedious. And in a lot of cases a PDF with forms is expected to be sent back to the person or company that created it once the fields have been filled in. They’re not likely to want to receive a bunch of JPEG screenshots instead.



  • You don’t need a desktop for CAD anymore.

    Not for the raw processing power, but anyone doing serious CAD work is going to want at least a 21" monitor, relying on just the laptop screen is going to be difficult especially (and I speak as someone aged over 50 myself) as your eyes become less able to focus on fine details as you get older.

    So OP needs to decide if they’re going to want to use the machine for other things as well, in which case a laptop + external monitor might be fine, or if it’s a dedicated work/hobby CAD machine in which case why not get the desktop + monitor.



  • With flying cars we’d have the opportunity to take the human factor out of the equation, which is the cause of the vast majority of car crashes.

    Imagine we had never invented cars and trucks and highways and were just doing it now. Do you think we’d take these two ton death machines and say “let’s put them under control of an individual person, with all the distractions and fallibility and other problems we know we suffer from”? Or would be instead design a system where every single vehicle has a computer that is constantly in communication with all the other vehicles around it, and can react far quicker to any issue than a person could.

    The problem with self-driving cars is that they have to operate in a world where there are also human-driven cars, and cyclists, and pedestrians, etc. If the only things on the road were computer-controlled, it’s a completely different scenario. And that’s what we’d have with flying cars. At least I hope so!




  • How did we let this happen?

    How could we not have done? When electricity was first being proposed of a way of powering homes and industry we couldn’t even agree on a standard for distribution (Tesla vs Edison). The world’s governments didn’t step in because this was a dispute between private companies. Just like governments didn’t decide whether we should use VHS vs Betamax, or drink Coke vs Pepsi.

    And then once a country decided on a standard distribution method they had to pick a voltage, a frequency, and a plug/socket design. Again, there was no real reason for governments to get heavily involved at this point - after all, nobody knew if this new-fangled electricity thing would ever really catch on.

    Can we just start again?

    Sure. But it will cost maybe hundreds of billions. Maybe more than that. It doesn’t matter which plug/socket design you say is the right one for the whole world, most of the world won’t already be using it (just look at the map!). So all those countries are going to have to change not only the plug on every single appliance in existence in their country, but also every single socket on every wall in every building. And what’s the benefit to the countries that have spent al those billions doing that? Absolutely nothing - the advantage and profits will be reaped by product manufacturers who don’t have to produce a variety of connectors.



  • DigitalOcean’s guides in general are pretty good for all sorts of things, whether it’s a generic discussion of a concept like the ones you’ve posted, or a step-by-step guide for installing and configuring specific systems or software. Even if you’re not using DO as a host, much of what they suggest is still very useful.