Overzeetop @ overzeetop @lemmy.world

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11

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375

Joined

2 yr. ago

Mostly. If your locality is served by Amtrak - and only a few dozen cities are out of the 3 million square miles of ConUS - then it can be somewhat convenient and cost effective if you plan your travel more than 2-3 months in advance. It’s about 2/3 the speed of car travel, but more comfortable, generally. If you buy tickets less than 3 weeks ahead the prices are about 4x what they are for booking at 3-6 months out. Also, unless you live in one of the 2-3 hub areas, trains run only once or twice a day. For comparison, Last time I checked it’s like £70 to go from London to Aberdeen and takes 7 hours and trains leave every hour or two. From Roanoke to New York - 80 miles closer than the UK route I know of - it’s $200, 9 hours, and only two trains run per day - the first departs at 6:20am, the second at 4:15p (and gets in around 2am). It’s only a 7.5 hour drive and $40-50 in gas to go from Roanoke to NYC, and it’s pretty easy to park outside the city and take a commuter train in.

Oh, and there’s no workable hub and spoke system due to the few trains and long travel times. My daughter is just 300 miles away at school and the city has a train stop. It’s a 5 hour drive one way. It takes two days and 3 train changes to get from her city to the closest station to me, about a 45 minute drive away. It’s ridiculous.

Man, my first homebuild out of college was an absolute monster with 8MB of RAM so I could run NT at home. $640 just for the memory. I did cheap out on the CPU and only got the 75MHz Pentium, though we ran 90s at work. Wing Commander III was awesome on that thing.

Yeah, US is a real backwater when it comes to data - availability, privacy, you name it. Heck, my ISP will let me install for free, but I either have to buy my own modem or pay them $15/mo to rent one of theirs. I technically get wifi roaming with the company I use, but it's rarely useful. I won't torrent without a VPN; my ISP is a hardass for torrenting.

There are decent plans in some areas in the big cities in the US, but outside of that it's pretty bleak...and there's a lot of "outside of the cities" in the US.

Knowing who your provider is would (might) help. Xfinity has a 1TB or 1.2TB soft cap, which you can exceed once or twice a year without concern. Beyond that you fall into their top (I think it's) 1% of users and may be asked to scale back or to pay an excess usage fee (which was non-trivial the last time I looked - something like $10/50GB).

Q: why WotC are so committed to making plans that are so anti-consumer

A: fuck you, give us more money

I think you nailed it.

Wait, really? I'm going to have to go check next time I log into my torrenting box.

It appears to be built specifically for designing electronics enclosures with 3D printing in mind. I'm sure it's a great utility, and I don't mean to argue to no end, but to me a tool built specifically for 3D printed design would have core functionality which offers layer line alignment and orientation, custom and customizable internal structure (what we call "fill"), and a parametric engine to adjust the design and internal structure based on layer and nozzle thickness. While these are all currently slicer-like functions, slicers are absolute trash at being able to customize a part for strength, stiffness, and failure mode selection. (Yes, I'm a structural engineer - I actually do know about these things and design for them - usually being at odds with the slicer over just such effects)

Anyway - I'm sure Dune3D comes in handy for its designer's purpose, and I'll probably file this for the next time I think about fighting a Pi case in CAD.

No, no - they're not raising the price; they're rebalancing it to reflect the value it delivers!!1!

And since they've reduced the free version functionality significantly, I believe I'm due a substantial rebate.

I mean you could always switch to Bentley. AFAICT, they’re actually more Byzantine in their licensing structure, though. They bought a small analysis program company I used and their support was so terrible I gave up and learned a whole new FEM program rather than continue.

I’ve been through the donut tutorial. Is there a CAD sketching / exact dimension /parametric modeling interface buried somewhere in Blender?

I agree it's a silly breakpoint, but they have to draw the line somewhere, and I'm sure they feel that a 70/30 split is completely reasonable. Besides, a Fusion license is practically coins-in-the-couch compared to their architectural licensing fees. I'm sure they feel like they're doing us a favor by pricing Fusion so low.

I don't; at least no in our lifetimes (I'll call that 50 years). I've been an engineer in the building industry for 25 of my 35 professional years, and I've watched multiple "disruptive" technologies progress and mature. 3D printing may very well become a useful tool for complex building geometry in certain niche markets but it will not take over any substantial part of the building industry during the life of any adult today. And I say that as someone who has helped new technologies to market, done design for nearly every (non-3d printed) material around (cordwood, straw, timbercrete - hell, I had a guy call me who wanted to build a garage out of 400 surplus 19" aluminum server racks he got at an auction).

3D printed walls will go right up there with geodesic domes, hyperbolic parabaloid concrete, and (as much as I hate to say it) structural insulated panels. It's not that there is anything wrong with it, or the other methods I mention, it will simply not achieve mass adoption due to a combination of appearance and cost competitiveness of the finished product.

If all of your relationships end because of animosity between you and your partner, it may not be that your partners are the difficult ones.

Hold the IP, harvest cash - by license or court, eliminate running costs. Presuming Weta has not open sourced all of their processes, they're basically now a patent troll for anything previously developed.

And the revived’s first words are “Dry land is real!”

I guess printing a correct headline of “sued for copyright infringement “ isn’t click baity enough. Because that’s all it is. Dbrand is lucky they haven’t been sued by the board manufacturers for creating an unlicensed derivative work (which is what the case art is, just as the photo of a sculpture, even stylized, has been deemed derivative - especially when the reproduction is intended to represent the original).

That's quite the myopic view of US national politics. Biden can't stop Netanyaho from performing escalatio on Gaza than he can force Macron to limit France's trade coziness with China, affect the interaction between Pedro Sanchez and Catalan separatists, or require Erdogan to admit Sweden into NATO. He has influence, but he doesn't hold veto power over a foreign leader.

Mmmm, no. I heard that Biden and his ultra-centrist party have done nothing to stop deforestation in the Messia region of Mozambique. I'd rather have Trump and vote my conscience than allow globalists like Biden to ruin the Earth.

(just in case... /s)

Samsung QN TVs do VRR up to 144Hz (with a 4k input signal) and up to 60Hz with an 8K signal.

I intend to partition the screen into three zones - a status monitor in the bottom 400-500 pixels (newsfeed, media player, fancy clock), a 2100-2400 pixel high working space in the middle, and a planning and notification band at the top 1000 pixels for calendar, email, phone, tasks. Gaining a 7600 pixel wide workspace without a middle (or 1/3) bezels will be explicitly valuable for my workflow, especially since I'm working with large-format (A1) PDFs on a regular basis.

WRT refresh rate, high refresh in office work is highly overrated. For or 3-4 years I ran dual 4k/30Hz for office work off of a Surface Pro tablet and - for office and CAD tasks at a viewing distance of 36" - the experience was indistinguishable from running at 60Hz. 100ppi at 36" viewing distance (my desk) is about the limit of my usable acuity* and a good target for me. I can see jaggies in single pixel lines of moderate intensity (grays) on black backgrounds (most of my CAD work). They mostly disappear with bright lines (bleed) and are invisible in black on white (word processing and PDF documents) and full color (photos).

not too surprising , really, since 100ppi @ 36" is 1 arcminute resolution, or close to 20/20 vision.

Thanks. I remember wondering about that on my last major upgrade over a decade ago. I’ve currently got a 3070, which isn’t going to be doing any 8k native gaming for sure, but will run my office apps at 8k/60.

I admit the resolution seems a wee bit ridiculous for most things, but I work in architecture and regularly need to cross reference 2 or 3 D size/A1 prints simultaneously. 8k wide lets me (just barely) read fine print on two sets without zooming in, but even 30 Hz is perfectly acceptable. First world problems…