Major drawback of Apple Hi Res is that Apple headphones dont support it (bluetooth is lossy), and even their recommended 3.5mm adapter converts it down to 48kHz (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212183)
That sounds like a bad joke. "Everyone can use Facetime, except if you're on a certain platform you have to ask someone on the 'real' platform to initiate the call." That's... not a viable communication method.
Almost all links I get via SMS are phishing. The rest is OTP, there is sometimes a link in the same SMS but I _never_ clicked a link in an SMS...
My point is, the inhibition to click a link inside an SMS is very high with lots of users, hence I can't imagine this working well.
Also, it's purely inconvenient. You're not having a conf call at a previously agreed time, you want to call someone, this means it's spontaneous or somewhat urgent...
Most people lead up to an invitation to a video call with text messages (e.g. "When are you free for a video call?") unless they're very familiar with the other party.
Until recently, Formula One teams used Helium in their wheel guns as it spins them faster. In their push to be more environmentally friendly the sanctioning bodies realized that banning the use of pneumatic helium was an easy win.
My favourite F1 tire gas story is when Ferrari used a refrigerant gas (HFC 404a) to inflate the tyres instead of the usual nitrogen.
The gas has mutch better heat transfer properties and helped with cooling, which gave them a slight advantage.
Not sure if they utilised a full-on refrigerant cycle within the tyre (liquid being thrown against the inside and evaporating) or similar a higher density and heat capacity, giving improved connections heat transfer, but pretty interesting nonetheless. Was banned soon after, of course.
This was probably in the old days of F1 when teams could do whatever they wanted. Nowadays Pirelli is responsible for mounting the tires on the wheels and inflating them to spec.
> "Balloon Grade" Helium represents a slightly impure Helium. While there is no scientific definition of this quality, it is often accepted that the purity of "Balloon Grade" Helium is around 99%
Sounds high, but not pure enough for MRI applications, and it isn't currently economical to reliquefy without shipping it to a processor.
> Manufacturers have stated that this wasted helium is considered a ‘recycled product’ as it would have been lost to the environment had it not been captured and re-purposed. If the balloon market demand declined, manufacturers would have to re-evaluate other markets and consider the possibilities of re-liquefying it. Re-liquefying is currently considered uneconomical from the locations of where the filling application take place.
As an American, the part of the story that is very interesting to me is that Canadian coins have enough ferrous content to be picked up by a magnet. Wouldn’t the ability for coins to become magnetized cause all sorts of issues for the internal workings of vending machines and other coin slot using mechanisms?
IIRC many vending machines operate or operated on the magnetic properties of coins even. At least in my country before the Euro some did.
There are only several properties that can be easily distinguised from coins without complex digital processing: weight (and its distribution), sizes, conduction and ferromagnetism.
It sounds like you're thinking of separating coins using eddy current braking [1]. This works even for non-magnetic coins because the effect is a function of the metal's electrical conductivity.
If you have a silver coin or a small piece of copper pipe and a large, strong neodymium magnet, then you can easily observe this effect at home by putting the metal sample on a table and quickly waving the magnet past it as close as you can without touching it. The metal will slide across the table following the magnet, despite the metal itself not being magnetic, because the moving magnet induces eddy currents which temporarily create a magnetic field like an electromagnet. Other metals besides silver and copper exhibit weaker responses due to higher electrical resistivity.
Thanks for explaining. Wondered how non-ferro coins were handled.
TD Bank in Canada had coin counting machines for customers for a while. I dumped a few hundred $ in and was very happy when it kicked back some silver coins to me.
Canadian vending machines are happy to accept US quarters at par. Why pay for a more sensitive mechanism to prevent someone from giving you a more valuable coin. Although, probably not more valuable enough that it's worth filtering out from change boxes to deposit with a US based bank instead.
Otoh, there are coin mechanisms that can check for and reject quarter sized objects that are attracted to magnets; they might not be installed everywhere that takes US quarters, but if an operator starts getting a nuisance amount of CA quarters, they will be. See this doc [1] for a description of a pretty discerning mechanism (although it accepts both US and CA quarters, a slightly different design could reject CA quarters)
As an American, the part of the story where a single coin is valuable enough to bother with is very interesting to me. Our failure over years to introduce a working dollar coin (much less a toonie) is frustrating.
This was 40 years ago and he was stealing hundreds of coins a day.
Also, I'm sure you realize, but the US has had dollar coins since at least 1971. The public never really had much interest in using them and with cash use declining, I wouldnt expect that to change.
I didn't read the "failure to introduce" as meaning no coin was created, but more as "failure to launch" in that it was just never picked up by the population. My largest concern with the dollar coins where they were too similar to quarters in size and were often used in error as a quarter. it is the primary reason I've heard to explain the lack of acceptance.
The problem is actually pennies. There aren't enough coin slots in cash register draws so there is no where to put dollar coins. If we got rid of pennies we would have a place to put them.
If they were fishing quarters, they'd have a $44k in "side income". The coin's value ultimate doesn't matter if you're willing to steal 500 of them every single day.
The US and Canada discontinued silver coins at about the same time (mid-1960s). The US went for a copper-nickel alloy sandwich and Canada went for pure nickel (which I believe is now nickel-plated steel).
Apple started replacing their own file system (and networking) kexts with user-mode file systems in macOS 13. Right now its locked up behind some private entitlements though. Hopefully they open it up more in the future.
It’s certainly been interesting watching the multi-decade arc play out. With Mach as the origins, everything other than tasks (processes) schedule and virtual mem was out of kernel and done over Mach port comms. Then xnu via next step and later OS X linked much more in kernel and exposed specific data types using com+ in iokit. And now more and more is moving back out of the kernel.
io_urging networking on Linux is another similar move out to use space
The linked msdos source code on GitHub has since been rewritten by Apple /again/ [1], so the article is a bit out of date. This happened 3 months ago, and it now plugs into a private framework named FSKit.
I did not immediately see any private entitlements that restrict access to this API, nor is msdos.fs signed with special entitlements on my machine. Chances are this API works for any filesystem by dropping an appex into /Library/Filesystems. Looking forward to this being documented and made public eventually.
Thanks. I was aware of FAT being the first filesystem in userspace (maybe for iOS devices to mount SD cards?) but did not know it was open source or that FSKit existed. Maybe an enterprising hacker could dump the Obj-C header from that framework and start writing a FUSE translation layer.
Generally refactoring is where I find tests to be super valuable. If it’s a pure refactor then the existing tests shouldn’t break. If they start failing, then you have done something that has changed the expected behavior.
For business logic I would change the tests first so that it represents the new expected result. Then you refactor the code until the tests pass.
I work with people half my age now. Some of them have bigger titles than me. And they couldn't tell you what an AT command or a segmented memory address is. I am practically the crypt keeper.
It’s all just phishing to me, I don’t get the need for all the other terms.