Before mice had lasers this could be done with a piece of clear tape. IT guys got real tired of the number of “broken mouse” calls from our department.

Maybe it helps to know that it can’t perfectly capture your voice. It can get close enough no human can tell the difference, but it’s still not perfect. First of all it has a sampling rate. To make this more understandable let’s think of a sample rate of 1 sample per second. Think of two speakers playing at the same time. One is playing your favorite song, the other is playing the exact note of that some for one second each and only changing notes every second. It’s going to somewhat mimic your song, but it’s going to be terrible. Now imagine that second speaker makes 4 samples every second, now it’s playing your song a quarter of a second at a time. Sounds a lot more like your song, but in the same way stop motion looks a lot like movement but isn’t right. Note up that sample rate to 100s or thousands of samples a second, now you’re getting to the point you can’t tell the difference, but it still can’t be perfect, because it’s still based on a sample rate.

If you can grok pictures from pixels, you can picture the same thing. If you averaged a picture out to one giant pixel, it’s unrecognizable, 4,8,16 pixels, maybe a simple icon starts to approximate into something recognizable. That little icon in your browser tab is usually 32 x 32 pixels. 1024 pixels total, and we barely consider that an image. It’s all about pixel count (sample rate). When you zoom in, you find that it’s not perfect, you always get to the point of individual pixels, unlike optical zoom where you can zoom almost indefinitely as long as you can collect enough light.

It was very experimental, that’s really the reason Sony went with it and it was at the genesis of multi threaded processing, so the jury was still out on which way things would go.

Your description of it is a little wrong though, it wasn’t multiple CPUs, at least not gore would be traditionally thought. It was a single dual core CPU, with 6 “supporting cores” so not full on CPUs. Kind of like an early stab at octocore processors when dual core was becoming popular and quad core was still being developed.

I remember that the ability to boot Linux was a big deal too and a university racked 8 PS3s together into basically a 64 core super computer. I’m actually sad that didn’t go further, the raw computing power was there, we just didn’t really know what to do with it besides experiment.

Honestly I think someone had a major breakthrough in multi-core single-unit processors shortly after the PS3 launch that killed this. Cell was just a more expensive way to get true multi threaded processing and a couple years later it was cheaper to buy a 32 core processor.

Maybe in a different timeline we’re all running Cell processors in our daily lives.

I’m not even that tall and my height causes issues. People love tall until you try to fit in an airline seat, regular sized car, fit on a bicycle, or buy clothes that don’t need to be custom tailored. Not to mention how often I hit my head on things. And finally it kind of sucks that people are almost always initially intimidated by me based on size, hard to get part that first impression.

Further, if you drop something small, like a screw, set the flashlight on the floor. This will make all the small things cast long shadows and stand out way more.

Visa and Mastercard, yes. Amex and Discover are both network and bank.

I firmly believe some people emit some sort of electromagnetic interference that we don’t have a reliable way to measure yet that makes technology buggy in their hands. My spouse is one such person. I’ve watched them from across the room do exactly the right steps and not have it work. Then hand it to me and it works instantly. There’s no logical reason for this. Their mere presence near by can make some things error it seems. It’s given me a lot more patience when people describe problems that should be impossible.

Grandma’s empty threat punishment to all my cousins: “I’m gonna jerk a knot in your tail”

When something would strike you with immediate worry, like almost falling off a cliff, real ass-clenching moments, she would say: “That really pulled your pucker string”

Love and miss that woman.

Unless we’re related, this one isn’t just your family.

Number 1) find the fuse that controls the modem and pull it. Without this your car can only report when the service techs hook it up to their diagnostics, and what is reported there versus what reports on the regular from the modem is a huge difference. You lose a lot of convenience this way, but that’s to be expected. CarPlay and auto give you a lot of that convenience back, but now you’re giving a lot of that same data to Apple and Google, even if all you think you’re doing is projecting maps from your phone to your infotainment. Do you trust them? You can use Bluetooth audio in most cars without using CarPlay or auto, that should be safe. Stick to maps on your phone if you don’t want Google or Apple getting your driving data.

My first flip phone was free when I signed up for service. Next one I got because it had that push to talk feature a bunch of my friends and coworkers had. Last one was just to upgrade the second one. Added a camera, an external display with caller ID and track info when playing MP3s. Then I got into the early smartphones. Pre iPhone, Windows CE stuff.

If I were looking today it would need to be rugged as hell since I drop shit all the time, and I bet there won’t be a lot of cases for it. Capable of hotspot. Still want a camera (the best camera is the one you have with you). And a decent button feel since texting is going to be a way bigger PITA

Nah, if you can drop the weird Al lyrics without them being on the screen, the crowd will love it.

Years ago I had an E85 compatible vehicle when that was how we were going to save the planet before hybrids came along. E85 was cheaper than unleaded, but after crunching the numbers it was always the exact same cost per mile. Considering there were almost no stations with E85 fuel available, it just never made sense to go far out of my way to pay the same.

Yes, it was fool proof, until the world gave me a bigger fool.

I work with programmers and devops people who think BitWarden is too complicated. I get it when it comes to the product team and BAs, but even then.

Stealing my time for nothing in return. Watching an ad to get content is a transaction. The door to door guy, or the guy who interrupts my shopping with “I’m not selling anything just asking you some questions” is annoying and I’m never going to use their product. The ones that persist after being told “not interested” can jump off a cliff.

0-40 km/h (25 mi/h) in 42 seconds…. That’s 42, not 4.2 in case someone thought I missed the decimal. How did this sell almost 92k units per year up through the 80s?

When everything works: “What do we even pay IT for?”

When everything’s broke: “What do we even pay IT for?”

“When you do your job right it’s as if you didn’t do anything at all”

• God to bender in Futurama

When they start looking for a scapegoat, I hope you find yourself far away from the eye of Sauron there.

Petroleum may be both an accelerator and a filter. Filter in the form of plastic, like you’re saying, but maybe it’s weird that crude oil even exists in the first place. An era where plants die, but don’t decompose may be a rarity in itself. Then the geologic activity that buried that dead plant matter, but not too deeply for us to get to, seems like it could also be a rarity. So then we get this energy source that’s pretty energy dense and allows massive technical acceleration, but then poisons us and salts the earth behind us. Look how shortly we went from the first fixed wing flight to rocketing to the moon, amazing how short that time was. Hydrocarbons, allowing us to touch the greatness we could achieve, before smacking us back down.

If we can recycle single use plastic into this, then great. Somehow I doubt that’s how it would be made.