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Comment Re:What is it for? (Score 1) 120

Apple has a long history of replacing proprietary with open standards, working with the open standards to make them good enough to replace the proprietary tech. Apple likes to have the option of innovating, e.g. ADB was better than the serial ports for keyboards and mice that PCs had, then they worked with Intel to create USB that replaced ADB. Similiarly, Apple had early cheap LANs when ethernet was very expensive and fragile, then when ethernet got cheap and easy Apple moved to ethernet. And they helped create USB-c, and adopted it aggressively, giving it the advantages of Lightning, replacing older tech. The only lightning ports they still had when the EU mandated USB-c were on low end (low power, slow data) phones, keyboards, and mice, where Lightning worked well. Desktops, laptops and iPads were already USB-c. Moving the low-end devices to USB-c wasn't bad, and I don't think Apple fought against that, they just don't like mandated tech, because it prevents them from future innovations. For example, if the EU had mandated USB-a, then that would have blocked USB-c, so the both like open standards and they like the ability to innovate, they balance the two.

Comment Re:What is it for? (Score 1) 120

It would let you see where Apple is heading, giving you hardware and software to develop for, letting you start developing and prototyping to be ahead of the game for the future market, when Apple works down the price into a higher volume AR product. As Tom Cook and others explained in interviews and presentations.

Comment Re:What is it for? (Score 1) 120

Apple has a much higher success rate than most product companies. They're famous for killing off numerous internal products that could have been "fine" because that's not good enough, they want "amazing". They don't always succeed, of course, but many companies would have shipped things Apple refused to.

Yes, Apple's products are for people willing to pay more for better, not for people buying the cheapest possible solution. That's not bad positioning, they dominate the high end phone market, for example, last time I saw the numbers they made 85% of all the profit on selling smartphones globally, Android phone sales are more units, but mainly just breaking even on low-end phones. (Yes, there are some high end android phones...)

Comment Re:What is it for? (Score 1) 120

Apple was pitching a vision of how AR could work, which was fundamentally different from VR gaming, it's about embedding virtual in the real world. Of course, the use case to show that vision are things people do, at work, play, etc. It was very clearly described in numerous interviews as the first generation, for developers and early adopters who were willing to buy in early to be ahead of the curve, priced for that market. it was absolutely not marketed to be bought by normal consumers. Apple sold more of them than they initially targeted. It's similar market segment positioning as the MS Hololens 2, which is also aimed at developers and early adopters, low volume high price market, though of course the product details are different. In both cases the product descriptions are about what the products do, the pricing is what makes the market segment they're selling to obvious. Kids playing VR videogames don't buy either one, they don't buy a $3,500 headset for that!

Comment Completely depends on context (Score 4, Insightful) 68

Survey response rates completely depend on context.

For example, if you're in a paid panel that does high value surveys for real research, response rates are fine.

If you're sending out fake "push polls" or fundraising appeals using a fake poll as a hook, and there are a flood of those, they've trained people that polls aren't real, they're just scams of one sort or another, so people tune them out. I would not be shocked at all that the scammers have driven people away from all polling. Which is why real pollsters have paid panels of people who opted in.

Submission + - Another large Black hole in "our" Galaxy (arxiv.org)

RockDoctor writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy.

Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness.

This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.)

The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone.

This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.")

Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery.

As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.

Submission + - Surado, formerly Slashdot Japan, is closing at the end of the month. (srad.jp) 1

AmiMoJo writes: Slashdot Japan was launched on May 28, 2001. On 2025/03/31, it will finally close. Since starting the site separated from the main Slashdot one, and eventually rebranded as "Surado", which was it's Japanese nickname.

Last year the site stopped posting new stories, and was subsequently unable to find a buyer. In a final story announcing the end, many users expressed their sadness and gratitude for all the years of service.

Comment Change from the inside is hard... (Score 4, Interesting) 197

This is IMO a reminder that changing an industry from the inside is unlikely, because the legacy players have too many internal conflicts. That's why the legacy companies, such as Sears, utterly failed at transitioning to online eCommerce, it took a new player, Amazon, to make it work. So while renewables are booming, led by new companies, not oil companies, oil is roughly flat, which means that they're trapped by their need to maximize short term profits so they're missing the big strategic transition that'll ultimately be very bad for them. BP was a bit smarter than most, covering both renewables and oil, but apparently the investors are demanding that BP destroy their long-term options to maximize short-term profits. Sigh.

Comment Re: iPhone can already do all this stuff but ai = (Score 1) 18

OCR is AI. AI is a much broader field than LLMs or Generative AI, it's teaching computers to do things that "only people could do", such as image recognition, OCR, speech to text, etc. People have been doing AI for many, many decades. GenAI and LLMs are just the latest technique that expands the scope of what can be done by AI and not just people.

Comment Re:The unfortunate problem of big numbers (Score 1) 65

Sure, $100B is a lot, but that also created products that are selling well (Quest is the top VR headset by a huge margin) and selling a lot of software for the Quest. So they didn't just burn $100B they spent $100B and generated about $50B in revenue so far. That's a big investment, but rather obviously they produced real products and a lot of revenue, they didn't just "piss it all away", they're investing big in trying to make a big new market that they dominate.

Comment Re:How about making the VR product suck less? (Score 1) 65

Very true - their model is to the 'console model' of subsidizing the headsets and use revenue from the store to pay that off and eventually grow to make a profit. And to do that, they don't want people side-loading apps outside the store. Though they did open up the 'lab', making it very easy for people to install those apps, which are easy to publish.

That being said, since you can easily stream games to the Quest from a PC, e.g. run Steam VR games, it's pretty easy to run any VR games you like, assuming you have a VR-capable computer, and those games will look a _lot_ better than the native Quest games.

Comment Tesla constantly flashed by other rural drivers (Score 1) 195

Got a Tesla about a year ago, when out in the country I constantly get flashed by other drivers that think I have my high beams on. Like every few minutes of driving time. This looks like a NHTSA fail, most federal agencies have been distracted from core missions in recent years. At least they're finally allowing ADB (Adaptive Driving Beam) headlights which have been standard in the EU...

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