An ongoing issue with operating and maintaining an electrical grid is how to balance electrical generation with electrical consumption. The two vary throughout the day; for example, solar energy adds a surge of power to the grid during sunlight hours, while peak consumer demand for electricity happens around 7-8pm. If you have five minutes, I suggest you watch this video, produced by Vox, discussing it further.
How do electrical companies then compensate for the differences? Or for contingencies, like when an electrical generator needs to be brought offline for emergencies or maintenance? This is where "ancillary services" plays a vital importance. Utilities are desperate to find an efficient way to store surplus power generated when supply is higher than demand, so that it can then be released when demand is higher than supply. Currently, when supply is too high, it is reduced (ex: solar panels and wind turbines turned off), wasting energy. When supply is too low, expensive generators are brought online to meet demand. But if we can make battery technology cost-efficient to store surplus electricity for peak-demand use, it would save vast sums of money, as this article highlights.
My only real concern is how much battery waste this will lead to. Cells need to be replaced every 3-5 years. Until superconductors or high-energy-plasma devices become reality, the only somewhat-environmentally-safe way to store energy long-term is thermal. Hopefully molten-salt storage technology succeeds in this regard.
Back on April 11th, Vice News put up a really interesting documentary titled, "Street Gangs on the Dark Web". In the video, a reporter interviews a former drug dealer who has been using Bitcoin and the Dark Web to buy blank credit cards, reprogram them using stolen credit card data on the Dark Web, use the cards to get cash and goods, then use some of the gains to buy Bitcoin anonymously at these exchanges to continue funding his enterprise. And they also shared that a large majority of these walk-up Bitcoin exchanges are in the state of New York.
I suspect the attorney general watched the documentary as well. Because the video has mysteriously been taken down, with no mention found ask to why, and a Google search for "Vice News Street Gangs on the Dark Web" proves the video at one point did exist, but none of the links contain the video any longer. Mod points to anyone who can find a working copy of the video.
My leaving my front door unlocked does not mean you aren't guilty if breaking and entering if you open the door, walk in, and take something that isn't yours.
Web servers do not work that way. You don't go into the web server and take something. The web server sends it to you. The more apt analogy would be that I asked for something I didn't own and you mail it to me. It can't be stolen since you honored the request to send it to me.
The more apt analogy would be that a public web server is just like a public business. Everything is assumed public unless clearly marked otherwise. Starbucks aside, I can't be arrested for being in a store during normal store hours. However, I can be arrested for breaking & entering if I enter the building outside normal business hours, especially if the front door is locked. I can also be arrested for trespassing if I go through the door clearly labeled, "For Employees Only". I can also get arrested if I am asked to leave an area, but I choose not to. In each case, it's the store's responsibility to instruct me where I am not permitted to go as a patron. And web servers must do the same.
We must accept that 3,000 lb. objects moving at rates of speed over 20 mph will inevitably create a risk of harm for both riders and pedestrians. While we hope that driverless vehicles reduce that risk, there will -never- be a time where anyone is 100% safe. That's what insurance is for.
Require every company that develops driverless vehicles, and every purchaser of driverless vehicles, to pay into an insurance pool. Use a portion of the money for the administration of the pool, including actuaries to calculate the cost of the insurance contributions and adjusters to investigate accidents and a driverless vehicle's responsibility in its outcome. Use the rest to cover costs of accidental harm or death caused by a driverless vehicle.
When I read this, I immediately wondered why it was even possible to build a 1,100 ft tall wooden building, more than eight times taller than the current record for the tallest wooden building. This Guardian article goes into more detail about the engineering of tall wooden buildings, and cites this Canadian Wood Council case study for some of its information. In short, the wood materials to be used are highly specialized fireproofed laminate composites. Calling the finished product wood is like calling Splenda sugar; just because it's a derivative of the original doesn't mean it's the same thing.
From an engineering perspective, a skyscraper undergoes incredible stresses. The building has to be capable of supporting itself and all the weight within it. It has to withstand the tremors of earthquakes, the forces of wind and water, and not lose its strength over time, even as it's exposed for decades to UV rays. The building materials need to have a unique combination of sheer strength, tensile strength, and compressive strength. A combination of steel and concrete give you all three. But natural wood is inconsistent. Flaws like knots and cracks in the grains weaken its sheer strength. Wood has great tensile strength in the direction of the grain, but is very weak against the grain. And it works the opposite way with compression. The only way to overcome these weaknesses is with laminates, which are very expensive (currently, due to the lack of demand) to produce.
Not to mention wood burns much easier.
My personal opinion is that there are some architects trying to get name recognition by coming up with something unique. I hope anyone considering to fund such imaginations take a lesson from the Spruce Goose and use wood when it's advantageous, not avant garde.
Our school hosts a local PA for our community. Most of the equipment was installed in the late 80s. Added onto that were a few DVD players, a Cisco switch, and a few DACs. Still broadcasts in the same 4:3 format it always has. We still get DVDs from all the local churches. I imagine changing it up with all new equivalent HD digital broadcasting equipment would cost around $15,000, give-or-take.
$350 for Apple's version of Google Home? It better be a grand slam.
Which it won't be.
Steve Jobs had the perfect sense of exactly how to package something at exactly the right price point for the consumer. But I think even he would consider $350 to be ridiculous. If he could find a way to create an Apple-esque combination of a portable bluetooth speaker with a wi-fi connected Siri-backed search tool, he'd price it around $200, not too low that it looks cheaper than Apple's "standards", but not too high that it's out of reach of the people that want one.
This is already late to market. It's already $220 more than the competition from Google. Unless it's amazing in every way, it's going to be a fail.
Flat earthers are a different breed altogether. With your typical conspiracy (9-11 inside job, fake the moon landing, vaccines cause autism, etc.), all it takes is a combination of a good story, not understood or misunderstood science, and a belief that you know something special that most people don't. It also becomes more popular as time gets further and further away from the initial event. But a key element is the inability for everyone or the average person to recreate the original variables surrounding the conspiracy. (We cannot recreate 9-11, we cannot recreate a moon landing limiting our technology and knowledge to what we had in 1968, etc.
But with flat earthers? There are literally hundreds of ways today the average human can observe that the Earth is round. There's no depth of science to it. One can ask themselves the question, "Why can't I see the Rocky Mountains from my house?" Or, one can go find a straight road (perhaps on the salt flats or on ND Hwy 46), get a pair of binoculars or a good telescoping lens on a tripod, watch a car drive by, and watch it disappear over the horizon, then ask the question, "Would the car disappear if the Earth was flat?" Or just go onto YouTube and watch all the videos made floating weather balloons up to the stratosphere, where the camera can capture the curvature of the Earth. Or talk to an airplane pilot. Or control tower personnel whose equations they use to calculate distances, vectors, and flight plans would fail miserably if they were to use Euclidian Geometry instead of Spherical Geometry. Or duplicate Eratosthenes' experiment. (Yes, that one's far more complicated than watching video's on YouTube, but if it worked for some dead white Greek dude over two thousand years ago, who didn't have the internet or Google, then it can work for anyone today as well.)
Most conspiracy theories choose to ignore expert opinions because they're incapable of understanding the science themselves. Flat-earthers are fully capable of understanding the science; they just refuse to understand.
I'm confused about AMD's business strategy with this move. They just finally got their foot back in the door with Ryzen being competitive against Intel after a decade of falling behind in performance. Topping this off of Intel not having a competitive solution to AMD's APU with a decent-performing 3D GPU, and AMD finally seemed poised to grow its share in the laptop & desktop market.
But partnering with Intel to create an Intel APU defeats the purpose of buying an AMD APU.
I suspect AMD has accepted that they will never ever come close to the market share they had back in the late 90's and early 2000's, and therefore it's better financially to sell large volume's of AMD-GPU-on-Intel-CPUs chips, than small volumes of AMD APU chips.
The deal marks the first time in modern history that one major film studio has purchased another, eliminating one of the "big six," and essentially giving Disney control of two-thirds of Hollywood. (The other four major movie studios are Universal, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Sony.)
This means that, within the next two years, I guarantee you'll see another merger between the four other players.
No school today...because the vendor pushed out an untested update again.
Let me help you, as it appears you didn't do 30 seconds of Googling to help yourself. Chrome OS is heavily beta tested, and is built upon Chromium OS, which it itself is heavily beta tested. As a Google admin for a public K-12 school (~1200 Chromebooks), I have the option of assigning all my Chrome devices into one of three categories of development. Google "recommends" I activate a policy that will randomly assign 5% of all devices to a beta channel* to assist them with testing and development, though our district chooses to use stable-only software.
Occasionally, a serious bug actually does make it through to a stable, but if it is found, Google has been incredibly quick to prioritize its fix and release an update. It's only when there's a doozie like this where suddenly everyone starts the finger-shaming.
* The first time I turned this on, the very next day, we had about five Chromebooks all come into our office. Every one of them had Chrome crashing randomly, usually within about 30 seconds of it opening up. All had the exact same version of Chrome on it, v.51 I think, when every other one of our Chromebooks had v.50 or below. The only way we were able to fix them was to use a CrOS repair drive utility to reinstall CrOS with a previous version. When I saw that other Chromebooks that had v.50 couldn't be upgraded to v.51, I reasoned that these were the beta tested Chromebooks. I turned that feature back off, but I still saw a few more Chromebooks trickle into my office over the next few days that also "got lucky". After that, never again.
We were so worried about Microsoft back in the '90s, even The Simpsons had to parody it in an episode. The highlights can be watched here and here, on YouTube, no less.
Microsoft is still around, of course. But when they stopped innovating, innovation didn't stop. Others just took over.
In May this year, I made a lifestyle change, and I now exercise 30 minutes every morning M-F 6am. While that was my "positive growth" change I made, I find I do read less now than before.
Not that I was ever an avid reader in the past, but I averaged two books a year. Now it's been two years since I last completed a book.
The last three books I recall reading are:
Freakonomics The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
About 8 years ago, I read a book called "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism", by John Bogle, founder of Vanguard. In one of his chapters, he makes a case for ending executive stock-option compensation. The original intentions of stock-option compensation were to provide executives an incentive to perform well; as Bogle puts it, "align management's interests with those of shareholders".
But Bogle went on to explain a key difference between executives and shareholders. Executive interests are short-term, while shareholders are invested long-term. Most individuals still invest long-term, and a substantial percentage of the stock market is locked away in retirement 401k's / 403b's, or in pension account investments. That money's not going anywhere anytime soon. But executives want their salaries as big as possible, as soon as possible. So, rather than executives making business decisions with long-term interests in mind, they selfishly make business decisions that maximize short-term values with little interest in how those decisions will affect the value of the company beyond the sell date of their stock compensation, 401k's be damned.
And that's why we need to end stock-option compensation.
I wonder if any historians may actually be concerned about this.
Thinking back to my college days, there is much of antiquity that is not well understood due to the inability to understand its written languages. The Rosetta Stone was an as incredible as it was rare. So much history is locked away in written language that will likely never be understood. (See this page for some examples.) A culture's language is its bridge to understanding the culture itself.
If emoticons are linguistically ambiguous, we run a risk that our culture will not be understood in the future, either.
You failed to demonstrate that they don't have a functional cloud based OS, or won't continue to have the same in the future.
Then let me elaborate. It's all about anticipated value.
The key variable here on each device is its web browser. Web browsers are critical for any schools dependent on Google Apps for Education. That Honeycomb tablet can't even run Chrome browser, and Ice Cream Sandwich only supported Chrome up through v.42, which lost its support around the end of 2016. All the websites teachers depend on daily would, bit-by-bit, lose their ability to function in these old browsers. At the time of purchase, did we know the software limitations of these devices? Absolutely not. There was nothing in any documentation telling us how long Android would remain current with these tablets, making it impossible to gauge an anticipated value at purchase.
With Chromebooks, Google clearly communicates to the world that the software on a Chromebook was guaranteed to stay updated for five years. Therefore, our anticipated lifespan of four years was only physically limited by the wear and tear our students would put on it. We could anticipate its value and budget accordingly. But with Android, half the devices we tried had OS's that would not have lasted us four years, without our knowing which of them would. That makes it impossible to plan a device's anticipated value, and our district already experienced devices that fail sooner than they should, and didn't want to go through that again. (That experience involved LearnPads, but that's a whole different story.)
And I didn't praise the Chromebook at all for its performance. That 303c was slow as molasses out of the box, and it only got worse with time. But its browser still works, making it still useful for its intended purpose. If you like using older Android tablets because it still serves its intended purpose for you, then good for you, you're getting good value out of it. I'm praising the Chromebook because it's delivering our district good value.
and if you think the updates on Android phones are bad, let me tell you: The situation with Android tablets is worse.
100% absolutely true.
Four years ago, our school district decided to pilot devices. And when I say device, it seemed like nothing under $400 was off the table. We bought an iPad, an iPad mini, a Chromebook, a Nook, a Kindle Fire, an iPod touch, a Dell Latitude 10 Windows 8 tablet, and four different Android tablets, a Samsung Galaxy 10, an Asus Nexus tablet, and two white-box $100 Android tablets from Amazon. We gave each one to whoever wanted to try it out, we got feedback, and we choose Chromebooks.
Last May, I dug the unused tablets out of the drawer, looking for one that I could use to use as a Wi-Fi analyzer. Updated every tablet to its highest-supported version. One Amazon tablet could only run Android Honeycomb (3.2), the other got to Jelly Bean (4.3), the Samsung Galaxy went up to Lollipop (5.1), and only the Asus Nexus tablet could run Marshmallow (6.0). (That Nexus was great for the job...modern OS, still fast, perfect size & portability...needed a new battery, though.)
Four Android devices, all purchased at the same time, and four different levels of Android. None of us would have had any clue at the time how far each would last in terms of a functional cloud-based OS.
But our Chromebook? Samsung 303c. Still works, still can browse the web with it w/o any issues (except for slowness). Updates guaranteed through next March, which means it will still work through the remainder of our school year. And it cost $239 at the time. I'd call that value.
I've been here since 1999, and never, in all my years reading and posting, have I ever seen this many 3-digit and 4-digit UID's.
It's like someone forgot to close the door to the Alzheimer's wing of the old folks home, and suddenly all of 'em are now wondering aimlessly through the streets.
With a vending machine, I know that the same product is going to be there every single day. Sure, occasionally something gets switched out, but there's enough choices where I usually find something I want.
But this looks far too random. I get the Gatorade and the M&M's. But a Nike sports bag? iPhone case? Cleaning spray? Flour and sugar? These aren't impulse buys. I get the plan is to predict what people will want in the various settings these Bodegas exist, but that's generally not how consumers shop for these items. Impulse items are setup at strategic locations, like Point-of-Sales or business entrances or areas of heavy pedestrian traffic, to encourage people to buy on impulse. But so many of these items are not impulse purchases, they are planned purchases. I go to the grocery store when I have a list of items I want to buy. I'm not going to pay a premium for flour and sugar from a Bodega when I also need to get milk and eggs anyways. And I just started going to the gym three months ago; I found myself a bag and planned out everything I needed well in advance. And with planned items, I know where I need to go in order to buy them. It doesn't look like I can trust a Bodega to always carry what I need, nor always have it be in an accessible location for me to access. (One picture has a Bodega in an apartment building. That limits your customers to only those that live in the apartment. Another has one at the gym, limiting your customers to those gym members.)
For a good visual example, watch the Veritasium video on the Magnus effect. Not only does it explain the effect using a spinning basketball dropped off a dam, but it also has pictures of what these ships will look like with rotor sails.
The lure of someone providing what the school district can't (or won't) is compelling.
Bingo.
Examine this photo, and tell me what you see. I see a classroom that's about half the size of a modern elementary classroom. I see blackboards. I see a radiator. I see a wall-mounted A/C unit. And I see hanging florescent lighting that was not built into the ceiling. With that alone, I'd place the age of the building somewhere between 1920 and 1930. That alone tells me how much a struggle it must be for this teacher to support her program, and how much work she must do to get what she can't from the district.
It just so happens that I grew up in the West Fargo school district, which Mapleton's a part of. Mapleton's a small satellite community; kids living in Mapleton go to Mapleton Elementary through sixth grade, then drive six miles east to West Fargo for middle and high school. The school is small, old, and has never been on the district's growing list of priorities to fund. (As opposed to a new middle school and new high school in order to feed the exponential growth in population.) Also, last I heard, West Fargo still does not have a 1-1 program. (Which is interesting, because they passed a technology levy back in 1995 which paid for truckloads of computers and our district's T1 line back when no other school in the area had internet access.) All which reinforces the point that resourceful teachers will do everything they can to provide what their districts cannot.
Slashdot Mirror
Is in what is called "ancillary services".
An ongoing issue with operating and maintaining an electrical grid is how to balance electrical generation with electrical consumption. The two vary throughout the day; for example, solar energy adds a surge of power to the grid during sunlight hours, while peak consumer demand for electricity happens around 7-8pm. If you have five minutes, I suggest you watch this video, produced by Vox, discussing it further.
How do electrical companies then compensate for the differences? Or for contingencies, like when an electrical generator needs to be brought offline for emergencies or maintenance? This is where "ancillary services" plays a vital importance. Utilities are desperate to find an efficient way to store surplus power generated when supply is higher than demand, so that it can then be released when demand is higher than supply. Currently, when supply is too high, it is reduced (ex: solar panels and wind turbines turned off), wasting energy. When supply is too low, expensive generators are brought online to meet demand. But if we can make battery technology cost-efficient to store surplus electricity for peak-demand use, it would save vast sums of money, as this article highlights.
My only real concern is how much battery waste this will lead to. Cells need to be replaced every 3-5 years. Until superconductors or high-energy-plasma devices become reality, the only somewhat-environmentally-safe way to store energy long-term is thermal. Hopefully molten-salt storage technology succeeds in this regard.
Back on April 11th, Vice News put up a really interesting documentary titled, "Street Gangs on the Dark Web". In the video, a reporter interviews a former drug dealer who has been using Bitcoin and the Dark Web to buy blank credit cards, reprogram them using stolen credit card data on the Dark Web, use the cards to get cash and goods, then use some of the gains to buy Bitcoin anonymously at these exchanges to continue funding his enterprise. And they also shared that a large majority of these walk-up Bitcoin exchanges are in the state of New York.
I suspect the attorney general watched the documentary as well. Because the video has mysteriously been taken down, with no mention found ask to why, and a Google search for "Vice News Street Gangs on the Dark Web" proves the video at one point did exist, but none of the links contain the video any longer. Mod points to anyone who can find a working copy of the video.
My leaving my front door unlocked does not mean you aren't guilty if breaking and entering if you open the door, walk in, and take something that isn't yours.
Web servers do not work that way. You don't go into the web server and take something. The web server sends it to you. The more apt analogy would be that I asked for something I didn't own and you mail it to me. It can't be stolen since you honored the request to send it to me.
The more apt analogy would be that a public web server is just like a public business. Everything is assumed public unless clearly marked otherwise. Starbucks aside, I can't be arrested for being in a store during normal store hours. However, I can be arrested for breaking & entering if I enter the building outside normal business hours, especially if the front door is locked. I can also be arrested for trespassing if I go through the door clearly labeled, "For Employees Only". I can also get arrested if I am asked to leave an area, but I choose not to. In each case, it's the store's responsibility to instruct me where I am not permitted to go as a patron. And web servers must do the same.
The poor drone probably committed suicide. Would you be happy having to deliver packages in Siberia?
It reminds me of that scene from Robocop 2 when they were testing the new Robocop prototypes.
We must accept that 3,000 lb. objects moving at rates of speed over 20 mph will inevitably create a risk of harm for both riders and pedestrians. While we hope that driverless vehicles reduce that risk, there will -never- be a time where anyone is 100% safe. That's what insurance is for.
Require every company that develops driverless vehicles, and every purchaser of driverless vehicles, to pay into an insurance pool. Use a portion of the money for the administration of the pool, including actuaries to calculate the cost of the insurance contributions and adjusters to investigate accidents and a driverless vehicle's responsibility in its outcome. Use the rest to cover costs of accidental harm or death caused by a driverless vehicle.
When I read this, I immediately wondered why it was even possible to build a 1,100 ft tall wooden building, more than eight times taller than the current record for the tallest wooden building. This Guardian article goes into more detail about the engineering of tall wooden buildings, and cites this Canadian Wood Council case study for some of its information. In short, the wood materials to be used are highly specialized fireproofed laminate composites. Calling the finished product wood is like calling Splenda sugar; just because it's a derivative of the original doesn't mean it's the same thing.
From an engineering perspective, a skyscraper undergoes incredible stresses. The building has to be capable of supporting itself and all the weight within it. It has to withstand the tremors of earthquakes, the forces of wind and water, and not lose its strength over time, even as it's exposed for decades to UV rays. The building materials need to have a unique combination of sheer strength, tensile strength, and compressive strength. A combination of steel and concrete give you all three. But natural wood is inconsistent. Flaws like knots and cracks in the grains weaken its sheer strength. Wood has great tensile strength in the direction of the grain, but is very weak against the grain. And it works the opposite way with compression. The only way to overcome these weaknesses is with laminates, which are very expensive (currently, due to the lack of demand) to produce.
Not to mention wood burns much easier.
My personal opinion is that there are some architects trying to get name recognition by coming up with something unique. I hope anyone considering to fund such imaginations take a lesson from the Spruce Goose and use wood when it's advantageous, not avant garde.
Our school hosts a local PA for our community. Most of the equipment was installed in the late 80s. Added onto that were a few DVD players, a Cisco switch, and a few DACs. Still broadcasts in the same 4:3 format it always has. We still get DVDs from all the local churches. I imagine changing it up with all new equivalent HD digital broadcasting equipment would cost around $15,000, give-or-take.
Comcast just doesn't want to shell out that kind of money. And since public-access was started by a mandate by an FCC order back in 1969 ("No CATV system having 3,500 or more subscribers shall carry the signal of any television broadcast station unless the system also operates to a significant extent as a local outlet by cablecasting and has available facilities for local production and presentation of programs other than automated services."), I suppose they're going to stick to their guns until the FCC issues some equivalent modernization order. And I'd bet my giant Reese's coffee mug that that won't happen anytime soon.
$350 for Apple's version of Google Home? It better be a grand slam.
Which it won't be.
Steve Jobs had the perfect sense of exactly how to package something at exactly the right price point for the consumer. But I think even he would consider $350 to be ridiculous. If he could find a way to create an Apple-esque combination of a portable bluetooth speaker with a wi-fi connected Siri-backed search tool, he'd price it around $200, not too low that it looks cheaper than Apple's "standards", but not too high that it's out of reach of the people that want one.
This is already late to market. It's already $220 more than the competition from Google. Unless it's amazing in every way, it's going to be a fail.
Flat earthers are a different breed altogether. With your typical conspiracy (9-11 inside job, fake the moon landing, vaccines cause autism, etc.), all it takes is a combination of a good story, not understood or misunderstood science, and a belief that you know something special that most people don't. It also becomes more popular as time gets further and further away from the initial event. But a key element is the inability for everyone or the average person to recreate the original variables surrounding the conspiracy. (We cannot recreate 9-11, we cannot recreate a moon landing limiting our technology and knowledge to what we had in 1968, etc.
But with flat earthers? There are literally hundreds of ways today the average human can observe that the Earth is round. There's no depth of science to it. One can ask themselves the question, "Why can't I see the Rocky Mountains from my house?" Or, one can go find a straight road (perhaps on the salt flats or on ND Hwy 46), get a pair of binoculars or a good telescoping lens on a tripod, watch a car drive by, and watch it disappear over the horizon, then ask the question, "Would the car disappear if the Earth was flat?" Or just go onto YouTube and watch all the videos made floating weather balloons up to the stratosphere, where the camera can capture the curvature of the Earth. Or talk to an airplane pilot. Or control tower personnel whose equations they use to calculate distances, vectors, and flight plans would fail miserably if they were to use Euclidian Geometry instead of Spherical Geometry. Or duplicate Eratosthenes' experiment. (Yes, that one's far more complicated than watching video's on YouTube, but if it worked for some dead white Greek dude over two thousand years ago, who didn't have the internet or Google, then it can work for anyone today as well.)
Most conspiracy theories choose to ignore expert opinions because they're incapable of understanding the science themselves. Flat-earthers are fully capable of understanding the science; they just refuse to understand.
I'm confused about AMD's business strategy with this move. They just finally got their foot back in the door with Ryzen being competitive against Intel after a decade of falling behind in performance. Topping this off of Intel not having a competitive solution to AMD's APU with a decent-performing 3D GPU, and AMD finally seemed poised to grow its share in the laptop & desktop market.
But partnering with Intel to create an Intel APU defeats the purpose of buying an AMD APU.
I suspect AMD has accepted that they will never ever come close to the market share they had back in the late 90's and early 2000's, and therefore it's better financially to sell large volume's of AMD-GPU-on-Intel-CPUs chips, than small volumes of AMD APU chips.
The deal marks the first time in modern history that one major film studio has purchased another, eliminating one of the "big six," and essentially giving Disney control of two-thirds of Hollywood. (The other four major movie studios are Universal, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Sony.)
This means that, within the next two years, I guarantee you'll see another merger between the four other players.
And all in the name of "competition", of course.
No school today...because the vendor pushed out an untested update again.
Let me help you, as it appears you didn't do 30 seconds of Googling to help yourself. Chrome OS is heavily beta tested, and is built upon Chromium OS, which it itself is heavily beta tested. As a Google admin for a public K-12 school (~1200 Chromebooks), I have the option of assigning all my Chrome devices into one of three categories of development. Google "recommends" I activate a policy that will randomly assign 5% of all devices to a beta channel* to assist them with testing and development, though our district chooses to use stable-only software.
Occasionally, a serious bug actually does make it through to a stable, but if it is found, Google has been incredibly quick to prioritize its fix and release an update. It's only when there's a doozie like this where suddenly everyone starts the finger-shaming.
* The first time I turned this on, the very next day, we had about five Chromebooks all come into our office. Every one of them had Chrome crashing randomly, usually within about 30 seconds of it opening up. All had the exact same version of Chrome on it, v.51 I think, when every other one of our Chromebooks had v.50 or below. The only way we were able to fix them was to use a CrOS repair drive utility to reinstall CrOS with a previous version. When I saw that other Chromebooks that had v.50 couldn't be upgraded to v.51, I reasoned that these were the beta tested Chromebooks. I turned that feature back off, but I still saw a few more Chromebooks trickle into my office over the next few days that also "got lucky". After that, never again.
This Oatmeal Comic might be a good place to start.
My thoughts exactly.
We were so worried about Microsoft back in the '90s, even The Simpsons had to parody it in an episode. The highlights can be watched here and here, on YouTube, no less.
Microsoft is still around, of course. But when they stopped innovating, innovation didn't stop. Others just took over.
In May this year, I made a lifestyle change, and I now exercise 30 minutes every morning M-F 6am. While that was my "positive growth" change I made, I find I do read less now than before.
Not that I was ever an avid reader in the past, but I averaged two books a year. Now it's been two years since I last completed a book.
The last three books I recall reading are:
Freakonomics
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
It needs to stop.
About 8 years ago, I read a book called "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism", by John Bogle, founder of Vanguard. In one of his chapters, he makes a case for ending executive stock-option compensation. The original intentions of stock-option compensation were to provide executives an incentive to perform well; as Bogle puts it, "align management's interests with those of shareholders".
But Bogle went on to explain a key difference between executives and shareholders. Executive interests are short-term, while shareholders are invested long-term. Most individuals still invest long-term, and a substantial percentage of the stock market is locked away in retirement 401k's / 403b's, or in pension account investments. That money's not going anywhere anytime soon. But executives want their salaries as big as possible, as soon as possible. So, rather than executives making business decisions with long-term interests in mind, they selfishly make business decisions that maximize short-term values with little interest in how those decisions will affect the value of the company beyond the sell date of their stock compensation, 401k's be damned.
And that's why we need to end stock-option compensation.
I wonder if any historians may actually be concerned about this.
Thinking back to my college days, there is much of antiquity that is not well understood due to the inability to understand its written languages. The Rosetta Stone was an as incredible as it was rare. So much history is locked away in written language that will likely never be understood. (See this page for some examples.) A culture's language is its bridge to understanding the culture itself.
If emoticons are linguistically ambiguous, we run a risk that our culture will not be understood in the future, either.
The original submission has one caveat. If you keep reloading the page long enough, you'll eventually get a story by Jon Katz.
And just when I thought none of the /. editors had any sense of humor remaining.
Or any historical knowledge of the early days of /. , for that matter.
I've not heard of that bird species before. No worries. Google to the rescue!
Let's see here...
images.google.com
Search for... "Great tit" ...
Well, guess I should have seen that one coming.
You failed to demonstrate that they don't have a functional cloud based OS, or won't continue to have the same in the future.
Then let me elaborate. It's all about anticipated value.
The key variable here on each device is its web browser. Web browsers are critical for any schools dependent on Google Apps for Education. That Honeycomb tablet can't even run Chrome browser, and Ice Cream Sandwich only supported Chrome up through v.42, which lost its support around the end of 2016. All the websites teachers depend on daily would, bit-by-bit, lose their ability to function in these old browsers. At the time of purchase, did we know the software limitations of these devices? Absolutely not. There was nothing in any documentation telling us how long Android would remain current with these tablets, making it impossible to gauge an anticipated value at purchase.
With Chromebooks, Google clearly communicates to the world that the software on a Chromebook was guaranteed to stay updated for five years. Therefore, our anticipated lifespan of four years was only physically limited by the wear and tear our students would put on it. We could anticipate its value and budget accordingly. But with Android, half the devices we tried had OS's that would not have lasted us four years, without our knowing which of them would. That makes it impossible to plan a device's anticipated value, and our district already experienced devices that fail sooner than they should, and didn't want to go through that again. (That experience involved LearnPads, but that's a whole different story.)
And I didn't praise the Chromebook at all for its performance. That 303c was slow as molasses out of the box, and it only got worse with time. But its browser still works, making it still useful for its intended purpose. If you like using older Android tablets because it still serves its intended purpose for you, then good for you, you're getting good value out of it. I'm praising the Chromebook because it's delivering our district good value.
and if you think the updates on Android phones are bad, let me tell you: The situation with Android tablets is worse.
100% absolutely true.
Four years ago, our school district decided to pilot devices. And when I say device, it seemed like nothing under $400 was off the table. We bought an iPad, an iPad mini, a Chromebook, a Nook, a Kindle Fire, an iPod touch, a Dell Latitude 10 Windows 8 tablet, and four different Android tablets, a Samsung Galaxy 10, an Asus Nexus tablet, and two white-box $100 Android tablets from Amazon. We gave each one to whoever wanted to try it out, we got feedback, and we choose Chromebooks.
Last May, I dug the unused tablets out of the drawer, looking for one that I could use to use as a Wi-Fi analyzer. Updated every tablet to its highest-supported version. One Amazon tablet could only run Android Honeycomb (3.2), the other got to Jelly Bean (4.3), the Samsung Galaxy went up to Lollipop (5.1), and only the Asus Nexus tablet could run Marshmallow (6.0). (That Nexus was great for the job...modern OS, still fast, perfect size & portability...needed a new battery, though.)
Four Android devices, all purchased at the same time, and four different levels of Android. None of us would have had any clue at the time how far each would last in terms of a functional cloud-based OS.
But our Chromebook? Samsung 303c. Still works, still can browse the web with it w/o any issues (except for slowness). Updates guaranteed through next March, which means it will still work through the remainder of our school year. And it cost $239 at the time. I'd call that value.
I've been here since 1999, and never, in all my years reading and posting, have I ever seen this many 3-digit and 4-digit UID's.
It's like someone forgot to close the door to the Alzheimer's wing of the old folks home, and suddenly all of 'em are now wondering aimlessly through the streets.
With a vending machine, I know that the same product is going to be there every single day. Sure, occasionally something gets switched out, but there's enough choices where I usually find something I want.
But this looks far too random. I get the Gatorade and the M&M's. But a Nike sports bag? iPhone case? Cleaning spray? Flour and sugar? These aren't impulse buys. I get the plan is to predict what people will want in the various settings these Bodegas exist, but that's generally not how consumers shop for these items. Impulse items are setup at strategic locations, like Point-of-Sales or business entrances or areas of heavy pedestrian traffic, to encourage people to buy on impulse. But so many of these items are not impulse purchases, they are planned purchases. I go to the grocery store when I have a list of items I want to buy. I'm not going to pay a premium for flour and sugar from a Bodega when I also need to get milk and eggs anyways. And I just started going to the gym three months ago; I found myself a bag and planned out everything I needed well in advance. And with planned items, I know where I need to go in order to buy them. It doesn't look like I can trust a Bodega to always carry what I need, nor always have it be in an accessible location for me to access. (One picture has a Bodega in an apartment building. That limits your customers to only those that live in the apartment. Another has one at the gym, limiting your customers to those gym members.)
I just don't see this succeeding.
For a good visual example, watch the Veritasium video on the Magnus effect. Not only does it explain the effect using a spinning basketball dropped off a dam, but it also has pictures of what these ships will look like with rotor sails.
The lure of someone providing what the school district can't (or won't) is compelling.
Bingo.
Examine this photo, and tell me what you see. I see a classroom that's about half the size of a modern elementary classroom. I see blackboards. I see a radiator. I see a wall-mounted A/C unit. And I see hanging florescent lighting that was not built into the ceiling. With that alone, I'd place the age of the building somewhere between 1920 and 1930. That alone tells me how much a struggle it must be for this teacher to support her program, and how much work she must do to get what she can't from the district.
It just so happens that I grew up in the West Fargo school district, which Mapleton's a part of. Mapleton's a small satellite community; kids living in Mapleton go to Mapleton Elementary through sixth grade, then drive six miles east to West Fargo for middle and high school. The school is small, old, and has never been on the district's growing list of priorities to fund. (As opposed to a new middle school and new high school in order to feed the exponential growth in population.) Also, last I heard, West Fargo still does not have a 1-1 program. (Which is interesting, because they passed a technology levy back in 1995 which paid for truckloads of computers and our district's T1 line back when no other school in the area had internet access.) All which reinforces the point that resourceful teachers will do everything they can to provide what their districts cannot.