abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I agree with the article - treating the EU like the USA is the core issue here.

So many people are arguing over and over that the EU solutions won't benefit consumers in any meaningful way. And they're right - because that's not what the EU is trying to do. It obviously is painful for everyone who owns lightning cables to have to buy USB-C cables.

The EU is trying to benefit businesses. That's their job - make sure the EU is a good place to do business (if you play by the rules anyway). This will, in the long term, benefit consumers indirectly since it creates a thriving competitive market where you have to offer good products at fair prices to be successful. Those lightning cables were going to wear out anyway, and USB-C cables are technically better and also cheaper.

The US approach is to try to achieve that long term goal directly, but they rarely actually succeed. The EU's approach is the right one in my opinion. But even if you think the EU is taking the wrong approach that doesn't really matter, like it or not that's the approach they are taking and trying to fight it is a waste of time.

As far as I can tell we've been in a recession for a long time but nobody wants to admit it.

The reserve bank/etc are burying their heads in the sand and hiding behind external factors like the price of resources overseas that artificially inflate official figures... even though they have almost no bearing on the lives of people here in Australia.

I guess those exports are good for our superannuation but that's about it. As a young person with a family I'm not worried about how much money I will have when I retire - I'm worried about how to pay for the roof over my head right now... and unless something changes soon there's a good chance a lot of people will be draining their super to pay for housing. If too many people reach for that bandaid it will cause both short term and long term economic problems.

I'm not sure what needs to be done - but it seems to me like whatever it is, it's not going to happen if we ignore the problem.

If I were to pick an answer though, I'd probably go with some kind of severe tax on anyone who owns a home that they do not live in. Something high enough to force those people to sell and drive housing prices down to something affordable on a typical income. Use the boost in tax revenue to increase welfare funding across the board.

Well in that case - try the Go Button app?

VLC would be better tham the Music app but it's still not really what it's intended for - the last time I saw someone run an event with VLC it was a disaster - poor 14 year old girl's premier performance screwed up in front of a crowd of parents. She'd been working on it for six months.

Don't use the music app.

It has a bunch of frustrating restrictions due to agreements Apple has with major copyright holders in the music industry - copying files onto a device is intentionally difficult in order to fight music piracy.

The industry standard for drama is to run QLab on your MacBook - it's free for basic use, and advanced features (such as surround sound or timing a fireworks display to line up perfectly with the song) can be unlocked for $4 per performance. You will probably be happy with the free version.

It's quite easy to use and has all the features you could possibly need wether you just want to play a few songs one after another, or all the way up to the most complex performances (I know someone who used it to run the opening ceremony of the olympic games...)

With modern sound boards, you can just run a USB cable from the Macbook to the sound board and it will integrate nicely. Or just use a headphone cable if you prefer to keep it simple. You mentioned "splitting the screen" - Qlab can run a single performance on multiple Macs, so you and whoever your working closely with can have your own screen each.

You mentioned using a separate account so kids can't access your stuff, Qlab can "bundle" a project so all the song files and everything are together, then it's easy to put it on a USB drive, Air Drop to another Mac, email it to someone, copy it to another account on the same computer, etc. It also has "Show Mode" where most features in the app are locked down and you can just run the performance without screwing everything up.

Whatever problem you encounter, QLab almost certainly has you covered.

If you really do want to use your iPhone or iPad - then the same company has an app called "Go Button" which is basically a light weight touch screen version of QLab. It's quite new and I've never used it myself, but it looks like it might work well - certainly it would be better than using the Music app.

https://qlab.app/

https://gobutton.app/

One of my mates is a Wog and we refer to him as that (he also refers to himself as a Wog) all the time. As far as we're concerned that's just an alternate word for his nationality and no different from calling an Australian an Aussie.

I'd argue you could totally use "Aussie" as an insult in the right context and it's the same with Wog... at least where I live.

Honestly until I'd read this post, I hadn't even considered that Wog might be insulting. And I don't think I've ever even heard the word "Paki" in my life. No idea what it implies to be honest.

You're barking up the wrong tree by asking how many displays the CPU supports. The CPU is not involved in displays at all.

It's the GPU that matters, and the M3 MacBook Pro is available with GPUs ranging from "barely good enough" to "holy fuck that's a lot of compute for a laptop".

The entry level GPU configuration can drive a single external display. The high end can have four external displays. The mid range can do two.

I agree, it was clearer in the old days when the CPU and GPU were separate line items on the order page... but if you go to the tech specs page and scroll down to "Display Support" for a full page of text explaining in perfectly clear language exactly what each configuration supports.

It's not as simple as just "what GPU" either — it also depends on the specs of your display (for example, is it HDMI or Thunderbolt? Does it run at 60Hz or faster? Is it 4K or higher? Those things matter and Apple doesn't even detail all of it, for example Display Stream Compression can free up a lot of bandwidth. If your display needs 64 Gigabits per second... such as this one then even at the high end you can only have one of them on Apple's most expensive laptop. I have no sympathy - that's a $300,000 display that doesn't even come with an actual display (you need to pay someone to build the wall for you and that might cost even more). Perhaps you should consider a Mac Studio instead? It can drive three of those projectors.

But back to reality, I do feel your pain. I've got two Macs on my desk, with Universal Control to share a single keyboard/mouse between them, because neither of my Macs can drive enough displays for the work I do. I can't wait to upgrade to a better GPU and go back to using a single computer. They are available now - but not as cheap as I'd like.

Are you sure you're measuring that right?

My understanding is with a fixed workload (e.g. compress a specific video file as part of a youtube video upload) then the M3 is faster, draws less battery power, and generates less heat.

But if you play a computer game with M1 running at 30fps but the M3 runs at 60fps... then yeah, the M3 will be hotter and draw more power. But it's also doing twice as much work. Drop the graphics settings down, so that the M1 and M3 are both able to hit 60fps (in a game where you can cap the frame rate), then the M3 will be cooler and use less power.

And the difference could be significant, especially if the M3 is fast enough to shut down the performance cores and do everything on the "efficiency cores". Those cores use a lot less power since they are designed to run on an smartphone sized battery.

Sure but when you can do a thousand disk I/O operations in less time than it takes to draw to an LCD screen... is the user going to notice that not everything is in RAM?

Apple has been progressively moving things out of RAM and onto the SSD for about ten years now. Try running modern MacOS on a spinning rust hard drive and it's completely unusable these days.

I've been using the same 16GB of RAM on my Mac workstations for the last 10 years and I have more memory headroom every year. Right now I've got two Linux Virtual Machines running on my Mac and I still have so much free memory that 6GB are being used as a filesystem cache (so... a lot of those SSD file reads which would be plenty fast enough, aren't even going to hit the SSD).

If all you do is browse the web... 8GB is plenty. And it also improves battery life - Apple doesn't publish stats but it's common for RAM to draw more power than these laptops can afford with only a 50Wh battery. I'd like to see a test, but I bet upgrading from 8GB to 24GB comes with a considerable real world battery life penalty.

It's too early for third party tests on this model, but the old had the same "up to 18 hours" marketing and third party tests found it lasts between 3 hours playing CPU/GPU intensive games and 30 hours if you really stretch the battery and don't do much (e.g. just read an ebook in a dark room with low screen brightness). You're not going to get anywhere near the highest numbers even under light load with fully upgraded RAM, since it draws quite a bit of power even when it's idle.

Developers: I don’t find your rules worth access to your user base

What are you talking about? You really think Spotify is going to cancel their iPhone app? That's never going to happen.

Small developers can be android only (I'd even argue they should, since they don't have the resources to spread their engineering across multiple platforms). But no large established developer will limit their customer base to just Android users.

Still a drop in the bucket for them

It's really not - this is something like two years of revenue for Apple Music in Europe.

Spotify is free to sue Apple in every other jurisdiction around the world. Imagine if Spotify wins the same amount of money in a couple hundred more countries? Anti-competition law is largely the same everywhere in the world and Apple has the same business practices everywhere, so Apple would lose the same lawsuit elsewhere. It could easily end up with hundreds of billions in damages and why wouldn't Spotify sue Apple in every country?

I bet Spotify and Apple are working as we speak to settle this dispute out of court with a settlement that applies globally — this one is only for the EU.

You guys are really bad at understanding basic economy theory.

It works on supply and demand and assumes that everyone works rationally and with full knowledge.

Where that falls to shit is the assumption that "everyone works". Only 132 million people have full time jobs in the United States for example. That's just 40% of the population.

In reality is basic economic theory is only useful if you're explaining economics to a child. And you should only start there - you should try to make sure they have a far more comprehensive understanding of economics before they are old enough to vote.

socialism is a stupid inefficient system, so it’s a non starter.

Socialism is a very broad political movement that works extremely well in some nations.

Sure, there are also nations where it's a total disaster... but the same is true for capitalism. Socialism should be judged by the best implementations, not the shitty ones.

Is money a birthright now?

No but there are a lot of birthrights which are increasingly only available if you have money.

The system used to be to give those things away for free to people who can't afford them - but that's changing. Just giving money to poor people is far easier.

what’s wrong with just texting

If you have friends in another country, it might cost a quarter every time you send a message.

In regions of the world (e.g. Europe, and a lot of Asia) where some countries are the size of a large city (or perhaps the entire country is one city), that's a problem. You'd be sending international texts all day every day.

What are your walls made of? Mine are steel reinforced concrete. Standard building material where I live, since timber is just too expensive here.

Also I have three buildings (house, workshop, garage) on my suburban property and would like access in all three as well as out in the garden, since that's where I spend my weekends.

Also, I've just never seen the overcrowding issues a lot of people complain about. Maybe because we have different building materials here. 2.4Ghz will go through a concrete wall, but it loses a lot of power... and there's at least two of them (plus a good sized air gap) to my direct neighbours.

My access point does both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz at the same time. When I'm in the same room, I get 5Ghz. Walk through a doorway... it seamlessly switches to 2.4Ghz. You don't have to choose one or the other. You can do both and it will (if setup correctly, which mine was by default) pick the one with the strongest signal.

Edit: I am actually really surprised at how unpopular this opinion appears to be.

2.4Ghz WiFi works perfectly for me, possibly because I'm not using an "OEM" access point - but rather went out and spent a couple hundred dollars on a good one myself. Both at home in the suburbs and at our office in the city with several businesses in one building, 2.4Ghz works great.

In my experience 5Ghz only has acceptable performance if you have an access point in every internal room. I have zero interest in setting that up and like the fact that I can have reliable internet on my entire suburban block with a single (good) access point.

"Upgrading" to 5Ghz would mean replacing one access point with eight access points. No thanks.

As for wanting 400mbps... wtf for? I have a 10Gbps connection (wired) at the office and 50Mbps (wifi, 2.4Ghz) at home. Honestly can't tell the difference. Sure, large downloads are faster... but that's not something I do often especially at home. And if I did want that, I wouldn't be using wireless. Latency is far more important than bandwidth and wired has better latency.

There really isn't. For example web browsers can execute assembly now and a good "web developer" (I'd call them a software engineer) will use assembly where appropriate.

Great. Is hydrogen powered construction and mining equipment common? No. So until it is, my statement stands.

It's expected to be the cheapest form of electricity soon. It's in the ballpark of natural gas pricing now and prices are falling fast.. while natural gas prices are rising. The long term future has it cheaper than anything except solar/wind... but those two can't easily be stored to be consumed later which is a big logistical win for hydrogen.

So no, it's not common right now. But that's changing. Hydrogen is arguably the most promising area of our efforts to mitigate climate change.

Convince me otherwise

Hydrogen, released directly into the atmosphere, interacts with methane and increases it's half life. And since Methane is 50x more powerful as a greenhosue gas than CO2... that's bad.

When you "burn" hydrogen, on the other hand, you're converting it into water. Which is obviously harmless.

So, capturing this hydrogen wouldn't just be "carbon free" it would potentially be "carbon negative" at least in terms of it's actual actual impact on climate change which is generally what people mean when they talk about carbon these days.

Hydrogen in out atmosphere is generally not a big problem, so it doesn't get talked about much at all... but if you're going to talk about the greenhouse gasses to install an mining rig... then you are getting into territory where that type of thing is significant.

Trust me, it doesn't take much energy (and therefore not much carbon) to produce a mine to extract more energy. If it did nobody would ever do it.

Also, it's illegal in Australia for a business to make "false or misleading representations" about those rights. Maximum penalty is 10% of annual revenue.

The contract isn't just unenforceable, it's just straight up illegal.