I find it interesting they are going away from diesel engine instead of embracing its performance and durability and building on tech that is already established.
Same here. Whatever engine they put on the truck, you want lowest cost per mile and lowest emissions per mile. Hopefully those are the same.
I remember hearing about this crazy new idea, hybrid cars, what, 15 years ago? The talk at the time was the same idea. The wheels would always be driven by electric motors. The ICE would recharge the battery and might come on to augment the battery in times of high load. Everyone I talked to assumed there'd be no mechanical linkage from the ICE to the wheels. Turns out that's not how they build hybrids today so what do I know?
Anyway, the theory was that since the ICE only needed to generate electricity to recharge the battery, it could run at an optimal load all the time. No need to run at a wide range of RPMs and range of loads.
So I wonder what's the design center of these rigs? Do they need a mechanical transmission, with all the weight, reliability, and cost that entails? Or could it be more like a diesel/electric locomotive, where my understanding is the diesels generate electricity which drives electric motors.
Pry my manual transmission pickup truck from my cold, dead fingers. Never give up, never surrender.
Good for you. I can't wait to not have to drive because I'm a lousy driver and have other things I'd prefer to do than baby sit a machine during my daily commute.
As Cringely points out, we have to share the roads. Hopefully our preferences (and vehicles) don't collide.
Gee, if only there were a field of study which tried to understand how people respond to incentives. If only there were only a way to predict if you make something more difficult, you'll get less of it. And that if you make something harder, organizations will use the easiest possible answer (which might not be the outcome you were hoping for).
6250 using GCR coding for syncronisation, which requires five bits on tape for every four bits of usable storage.
Thanks for the pointer. I found other articles talking about 9-track tapes and assumed the 9 bits (8 data, one parity) were laid out transverse to the tape (i.e. in a single stripe perpendicular to the tape's length). I'll have to look at how GCR works because now I'm curious.
I suspect the manufacturer reported raw storage capacity rather than usable storage capacity in order to make their tape sound more impressive.
It's not just tape vendors. I work in the storage industry and there are all sorts of shenanigans around reporting spinning disk capacity. The first one is the reporting base. Most software people talk about base-2 megabytes (2^20) while all disk vendors report base-10 megabyte (10^6) capacities. I seem to recall there was one weird unit which was a 1,024,000 "megabyte", but hopefully someone took that bastardization out and shot it.
It gets more fun. If you query a 1 TB disk for its capacity, the value isn't exactly 10^12 or 2^40 bytes. Depending on the process, there's a little slop one way or the other. So if you're building a RAID array, you have to make sure your reported capacity is N times the minimum reported capacity of all the member disks. It kind of ruins your day when you run out of sectors in 2 of the 9 disks in your RAID set. And to make it exciting, you need to fix the capacity of the RAID set knowing you might replace a failed disk with another than the reported capacity might go down a hair. So we had a heuristic to decide just how much of the disk to depend on, which we called "rightsizing".
A guy I worked with wrote a 50 page paper explaining why, when you looked at a shelf with 20 1 TB disks in it, your usable capacity report never had the string "20 TB" anywhere to be seen.
I mean that literally. It's impossible to believe there are literally no backups at all, still less that this was all lost as a result of a server migration
I'm puzzled too. First, who performs a server upgrade without a backout plan? And I've got to believe the file storage and the servers accessing the storage were different things. What happened, did they upgrade a server and it executed "rm -rf" followed by writing zeros to all the disks? If nothing else, re-writing all the disks would take time.
My best theory is the pre-2016 files were stored on servers using a really hokey MySpace file system which was banged together over a weekend in 1998, when MySpace was rocketing to prominence. But if that was the case, I'd deploy new servers first, then do a data migration. Anyway, something doesn't sound right.
don't understand why people insist that the way of the future is to fork over a few percent of your income to credit card companies.
Very few vendors seem to charge extra for using plastic. Gas stations seem to be the only ones I bump into. Given I'm paying the same price either way, I'll use more-convenient plastic.
Because we are talking public policy, not what makes individual companies more money or prestige. What is good for the community and what is good for individual businesses are not always the same thing, otherwise we would just go back to 'whites only' signs.
My point is it's not that simple. It's not at all clear which choices are ultimately good for society. And thus we need a way to make those decisions.
In my opinion, making one decision for an entire city is a recipe for suboptimal results. Allowing thousands of vendors to experiment with millions of transactions will allow us to gradually discover and adjust our spectrum of answers is much more likely to find when cash-vs-nocash transactions is a net benefit.
Let me pose a hypothetical so you can see how goofy this gets. I think the surviving Blockbuster store should be required to offer VHS cassettes. There are people who don't have a streaming service or DVD/BluRay player and can't afford to buy one. To ensure those people have access to second-run movies, it's reasonable to require Blockbuster to stock tapes. For that matter, it's unfair that Redbox only offers DVDs. They should add a VHS carousel to their kiosks too. And now that I think on it, Netflix should be required to offer VHS tape rental along with DVDs, BluRay, and streaming. It's only fair.
Other than being obviously silly, how is that argument different in any ethical way than requiring cash transactions?
How often does this kind of robbery take place? Once in a while is a rare occurrence. More likely is after hour break ins where liquor and equipment are stolen. Cashless will not fix this kind of theft.
My bigger point is, how is this any of your or my business? It seems obvious to me that this is a negotiation between the businesses and their customers. There's no justification for you or me to stick our noses into that conversation.
The business owner bears the consequences of either lost business, increased security, increased theft insurance, or stolen cash. Therefore, the business owner should get to decide how often is too often for robbery. Not you. Not me. Not the Philly City Council.
For those who complain about differential loss of access, be serious. There are a zillion decisions a business owner needs to make which affect who can patronize their business: location, hours, prices, choice of products, and a million other things. Why are we treating this one special? And what evidence can you produce which shows there are people who (a) must buy a certain product, and (b) cannot reasonably get some form of debit/credit/pre-paid card, and (c) have literally no way to buy this product short of going to a vendor who doesn't take cash? And for (c), I don't mean "more limited choices than they'd like" I mean "there is no reasonable choice at all."
Here's a further illustration. I have friends who are recovering addicts and don't trust themselves to carry cash. There are vendors who only take cash, or who charge a premium for using a credit card (BTW, a perfectly justifiable thing to do). They're discriminating against my friends! Should the city council require all vendors take no-fee credit cards to ensure access? You'd be laughed out of chambers if you suggested it. At least I hope you would, now I'm not so sure.
Most people don't seem to realize you can swipe/insert the card while the cashier is scanning your purchases. Then when the cashier completes the transaction, the charge is processed almost immediately.
Y'know, this is something I'm pretty happy about these days. It seemed card or chip transactions used to be gawdawful slow. Now they seem pretty quick, especially since many vendors don't even require a PIN for small values. The cafeteria here at work lets me just slide my card, wait about a second, and the cashier tells me I'm good to go. As much as I like technical solutions, they often are slower than older, non-technical answers. In this case, given a few years, people figured it out.
Yet I still encounter plenty of companies that give you a discount for paying cash due to the additional fees credit card companies charge them. I question how much this actually saves them vs simply presenting a more modern image that just happens to keep out the unwashed.
Beats me. But you know what? I bet the business owners have a dang good idea how much business from the unwashed masses they're turning down. And I bet they have a dang good idea how much handling cash costs them. And I'd bet a cup of coffee they know this better than you or I do. So why are we second guessing them?
...and the middle-class keeps shrinking, forcing people who were once middle-class into the ranks of "The Working Poor".
This is a tangent but actually, no. People are leaving the middle class but more of them are becoming "rich" than becoming "poor". It's a surprising and happy development.
While I have some sympathy for Amazon Go trying to do something revolutionary, their stores are effectively closed to people who can't get a credit card. Their model is fundamentally incompatible with paying cash.... That's fine as long as the other option remains.
And IMHO that's a better way to deal with the problem, if it even is a problem. Ensure there are alternative places to shop, perhaps by making easier to open retail outlets. As long as they exist, business owners and customers will sort it out. The boss's are greedy bastards, right? They won't give up on all that lucrative cash business until they have to.
Unless, of course, their clientele doesn't actually buy with cash all that often and they're better off ditching the legacy payment system.
Because business... do whatever they can to benefit themselves.
Inconveniencing your customers is often a bad strategy. Raising prices because you're getting robbed and/or have to pay someone to walk large bags of cash to a bank is also often a bad strategy. Are you sure you know which one is worse?
I suggest you assume for a moment that small business owners are not idiots. I am sure they know how many customers pay with cash versus cards. Further, I'm sure they have a pretty good idea how much business they'll lose if they don't take cash. And yet, they somehow conclude taking cash isn't worth it. Could it be they know something you don't know?
From the beginning they relied on sensationalism, biased reporting, ambush interviews, editing of interviews to swap in different questions that what the interviewee actually answered, and fabricated evidence.
Yeah, I used to like 60 Minutes until they did a hatchet job on the CEO of HP, where I worked at the time. That pretty much reversed my opinion of their coverage overnight.
...that they are directly involved in resolving, they went with this guy. Why can't women speak for themselves about things they have first hand experience of?
Yup, that seems the question. Presumably 60 Minutes thought this guy was a better spokesman than the women were. That seems presumptively incorrect but I'm not a TV producer so what do I know? Has anyone asked 60 Minutes why they made this decision?
The "proper" time standard is thus the one which puts noon as close as possible to when the sun is directly overhead.
I think the "proper" thing to do is have 20 hours a day with the day starting at local sunrise. Daylight gets divided into 10 equal-length hours and darkness gets divided into another 10 equal-length hours. How long an "hour" is varies, of course, but we'll get used to it:).
More seriously, what is the argument for keeping DST? Does anyone seriously believe it saves energy? Or is it all, as the OP states, people just like having their clocks read the same value at sunrise every day?
Trees are very inefficient at converting sunlight to carbon.
Since the tree is using free energy, it's still a mostly free process. I don't think it matters much that in theory, you could have grown 10 trees with that much energy and a more efficient process.
That being said, bright sparks are busy trying to figure out ways to make photosynthesis more efficient. I can't wait to see the GND vs. anti-GMO factions battle that one out.
We don't need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. We just need to stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere.
I'm not sure everyone agrees with this. Some assert we need to bring carbon dioxide levels down to pre-industrial levels and do it quickly. That requires us to actively scrub greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere and oceans.
If we just stop emitting, the planet will do it all by itself, more or less. It just may take a long time and cause lots of human hardship in the interim. The question is whether speeding up the process is worth the (as of yet unknown both ways) costs.
Or a re-growing forest in North America or Farmer Bob (or Farmer Chin or Farmer Raj) growing crops.
So here's my silly idea. There's gotta be something wrong with it, probably the economics. Grow a forest and cut it down. Convert the wood to charcoal, which drives off wood gas (I think that's methane and wood alcohols). Use the wood gas fuel for whatever you want, bury the charcoal. Net-net, you're removing carbon from the atmosphere using sunlight.
Here's my other silly idea. Grow corn, switchgrass, or whatever plant-based ethanol stock you like. Cut down the plants. Skip the alcohol stage and just burn the plants in a retired coal plant. Use the electricity for whatever you like. Make some whiskey from some of the corn to sip so you can still get subsidies under a corn ethanol program.
If you were looking for actual solutions to problems instead of subsidies for your buds, these seem much more straightforward.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it interesting they are going away from diesel engine instead of embracing its performance and durability and building on tech that is already established.
Same here. Whatever engine they put on the truck, you want lowest cost per mile and lowest emissions per mile. Hopefully those are the same.
I remember hearing about this crazy new idea, hybrid cars, what, 15 years ago? The talk at the time was the same idea. The wheels would always be driven by electric motors. The ICE would recharge the battery and might come on to augment the battery in times of high load. Everyone I talked to assumed there'd be no mechanical linkage from the ICE to the wheels. Turns out that's not how they build hybrids today so what do I know?
Anyway, the theory was that since the ICE only needed to generate electricity to recharge the battery, it could run at an optimal load all the time. No need to run at a wide range of RPMs and range of loads.
So I wonder what's the design center of these rigs? Do they need a mechanical transmission, with all the weight, reliability, and cost that entails? Or could it be more like a diesel/electric locomotive, where my understanding is the diesels generate electricity which drives electric motors.
I didn't find any in TFA. I might as well try to read what our two intrepid professors actually wrote.
What am I saying, this is Slashdot...
Pry my manual transmission pickup truck from my cold, dead fingers. Never give up, never surrender.
Good for you. I can't wait to not have to drive because I'm a lousy driver and have other things I'd prefer to do than baby sit a machine during my daily commute.
As Cringely points out, we have to share the roads. Hopefully our preferences (and vehicles) don't collide.
Lectron. I had one of these as a kid. No where near as cool as an I2C setup.
If they need a reliable source of untruths as a dataset, follow @realDonaldTrump.
Huh. I was trying to think of a reliable source of truthful writings. Give me a minute...
Gee, if only there were a field of study which tried to understand how people respond to incentives. If only there were only a way to predict if you make something more difficult, you'll get less of it. And that if you make something harder, organizations will use the easiest possible answer (which might not be the outcome you were hoping for).
Recycling...makes good economic sense.
According to TFA, apparently not. Did you even read the headline?
6250 using GCR coding for syncronisation, which requires five bits on tape for every four bits of usable storage.
Thanks for the pointer. I found other articles talking about 9-track tapes and assumed the 9 bits (8 data, one parity) were laid out transverse to the tape (i.e. in a single stripe perpendicular to the tape's length). I'll have to look at how GCR works because now I'm curious.
I suspect the manufacturer reported raw storage capacity rather than usable storage capacity in order to make their tape sound more impressive.
It's not just tape vendors. I work in the storage industry and there are all sorts of shenanigans around reporting spinning disk capacity. The first one is the reporting base. Most software people talk about base-2 megabytes (2^20) while all disk vendors report base-10 megabyte (10^6) capacities. I seem to recall there was one weird unit which was a 1,024,000 "megabyte", but hopefully someone took that bastardization out and shot it.
It gets more fun. If you query a 1 TB disk for its capacity, the value isn't exactly 10^12 or 2^40 bytes. Depending on the process, there's a little slop one way or the other. So if you're building a RAID array, you have to make sure your reported capacity is N times the minimum reported capacity of all the member disks. It kind of ruins your day when you run out of sectors in 2 of the 9 disks in your RAID set. And to make it exciting, you need to fix the capacity of the RAID set knowing you might replace a failed disk with another than the reported capacity might go down a hair. So we had a heuristic to decide just how much of the disk to depend on, which we called "rightsizing".
A guy I worked with wrote a 50 page paper explaining why, when you looked at a shelf with 20 1 TB disks in it, your usable capacity report never had the string "20 TB" anywhere to be seen.
I mean that literally. It's impossible to believe there are literally no backups at all, still less that this was all lost as a result of a server migration
I'm puzzled too. First, who performs a server upgrade without a backout plan? And I've got to believe the file storage and the servers accessing the storage were different things. What happened, did they upgrade a server and it executed "rm -rf" followed by writing zeros to all the disks? If nothing else, re-writing all the disks would take time.
My best theory is the pre-2016 files were stored on servers using a really hokey MySpace file system which was banged together over a weekend in 1998, when MySpace was rocketing to prominence. But if that was the case, I'd deploy new servers first, then do a data migration. Anyway, something doesn't sound right.
I got 2400 feet of half an inch spool recorded at a breath taking 6250 Bytes per inch by VAX 11-780...Wish I can read that code once again.
Some iron filings and a good magnifying glass ought to just about work.
(I wonder where that number, 6250, came from? I mean, why not an even 6000?)
don't understand why people insist that the way of the future is to fork over a few percent of your income to credit card companies.
Very few vendors seem to charge extra for using plastic. Gas stations seem to be the only ones I bump into. Given I'm paying the same price either way, I'll use more-convenient plastic.
Because we are talking public policy, not what makes individual companies more money or prestige. What is good for the community and what is good for individual businesses are not always the same thing, otherwise we would just go back to 'whites only' signs.
My point is it's not that simple. It's not at all clear which choices are ultimately good for society. And thus we need a way to make those decisions.
In my opinion, making one decision for an entire city is a recipe for suboptimal results. Allowing thousands of vendors to experiment with millions of transactions will allow us to gradually discover and adjust our spectrum of answers is much more likely to find when cash-vs-nocash transactions is a net benefit.
Let me pose a hypothetical so you can see how goofy this gets. I think the surviving Blockbuster store should be required to offer VHS cassettes. There are people who don't have a streaming service or DVD/BluRay player and can't afford to buy one. To ensure those people have access to second-run movies, it's reasonable to require Blockbuster to stock tapes. For that matter, it's unfair that Redbox only offers DVDs. They should add a VHS carousel to their kiosks too. And now that I think on it, Netflix should be required to offer VHS tape rental along with DVDs, BluRay, and streaming. It's only fair.
Other than being obviously silly, how is that argument different in any ethical way than requiring cash transactions?
How often does this kind of robbery take place? Once in a while is a rare occurrence. More likely is after hour break ins where liquor and equipment are stolen. Cashless will not fix this kind of theft.
My bigger point is, how is this any of your or my business? It seems obvious to me that this is a negotiation between the businesses and their customers. There's no justification for you or me to stick our noses into that conversation.
The business owner bears the consequences of either lost business, increased security, increased theft insurance, or stolen cash. Therefore, the business owner should get to decide how often is too often for robbery. Not you. Not me. Not the Philly City Council.
For those who complain about differential loss of access, be serious. There are a zillion decisions a business owner needs to make which affect who can patronize their business: location, hours, prices, choice of products, and a million other things. Why are we treating this one special? And what evidence can you produce which shows there are people who (a) must buy a certain product, and (b) cannot reasonably get some form of debit/credit/pre-paid card, and (c) have literally no way to buy this product short of going to a vendor who doesn't take cash? And for (c), I don't mean "more limited choices than they'd like" I mean "there is no reasonable choice at all."
Here's a further illustration. I have friends who are recovering addicts and don't trust themselves to carry cash. There are vendors who only take cash, or who charge a premium for using a credit card (BTW, a perfectly justifiable thing to do). They're discriminating against my friends! Should the city council require all vendors take no-fee credit cards to ensure access? You'd be laughed out of chambers if you suggested it. At least I hope you would, now I'm not so sure.
Most people don't seem to realize you can swipe/insert the card while the cashier is scanning your purchases. Then when the cashier completes the transaction, the charge is processed almost immediately.
Y'know, this is something I'm pretty happy about these days. It seemed card or chip transactions used to be gawdawful slow. Now they seem pretty quick, especially since many vendors don't even require a PIN for small values. The cafeteria here at work lets me just slide my card, wait about a second, and the cashier tells me I'm good to go. As much as I like technical solutions, they often are slower than older, non-technical answers. In this case, given a few years, people figured it out.
Yet I still encounter plenty of companies that give you a discount for paying cash due to the additional fees credit card companies charge them. I question how much this actually saves them vs simply presenting a more modern image that just happens to keep out the unwashed.
Beats me. But you know what? I bet the business owners have a dang good idea how much business from the unwashed masses they're turning down. And I bet they have a dang good idea how much handling cash costs them. And I'd bet a cup of coffee they know this better than you or I do. So why are we second guessing them?
...and the middle-class keeps shrinking, forcing people who were once middle-class into the ranks of "The Working Poor".
This is a tangent but actually, no. People are leaving the middle class but more of them are becoming "rich" than becoming "poor". It's a surprising and happy development.
While I have some sympathy for Amazon Go trying to do something revolutionary, their stores are effectively closed to people who can't get a credit card. Their model is fundamentally incompatible with paying cash. ... That's fine as long as the other option remains.
And IMHO that's a better way to deal with the problem, if it even is a problem. Ensure there are alternative places to shop, perhaps by making easier to open retail outlets. As long as they exist, business owners and customers will sort it out. The boss's are greedy bastards, right? They won't give up on all that lucrative cash business until they have to.
Unless, of course, their clientele doesn't actually buy with cash all that often and they're better off ditching the legacy payment system.
Because business ... do whatever they can to benefit themselves.
Inconveniencing your customers is often a bad strategy. Raising prices because you're getting robbed and/or have to pay someone to walk large bags of cash to a bank is also often a bad strategy. Are you sure you know which one is worse?
I suggest you assume for a moment that small business owners are not idiots. I am sure they know how many customers pay with cash versus cards. Further, I'm sure they have a pretty good idea how much business they'll lose if they don't take cash. And yet, they somehow conclude taking cash isn't worth it. Could it be they know something you don't know?
Glad to see there's still a little sanity left in the world.
Where? Dang, I missed it!
From the beginning they relied on sensationalism, biased reporting, ambush interviews, editing of interviews to swap in different questions that what the interviewee actually answered, and fabricated evidence.
Yeah, I used to like 60 Minutes until they did a hatchet job on the CEO of HP, where I worked at the time. That pretty much reversed my opinion of their coverage overnight.
...that they are directly involved in resolving, they went with this guy. Why can't women speak for themselves about things they have first hand experience of?
Yup, that seems the question. Presumably 60 Minutes thought this guy was a better spokesman than the women were. That seems presumptively incorrect but I'm not a TV producer so what do I know? Has anyone asked 60 Minutes why they made this decision?
The "proper" time standard is thus the one which puts noon as close as possible to when the sun is directly overhead.
I think the "proper" thing to do is have 20 hours a day with the day starting at local sunrise. Daylight gets divided into 10 equal-length hours and darkness gets divided into another 10 equal-length hours. How long an "hour" is varies, of course, but we'll get used to it :).
More seriously, what is the argument for keeping DST? Does anyone seriously believe it saves energy? Or is it all, as the OP states, people just like having their clocks read the same value at sunrise every day?
Trees are very inefficient at converting sunlight to carbon.
Since the tree is using free energy, it's still a mostly free process. I don't think it matters much that in theory, you could have grown 10 trees with that much energy and a more efficient process.
That being said, bright sparks are busy trying to figure out ways to make photosynthesis more efficient. I can't wait to see the GND vs. anti-GMO factions battle that one out.
We don't need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. We just need to stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere.
I'm not sure everyone agrees with this. Some assert we need to bring carbon dioxide levels down to pre-industrial levels and do it quickly. That requires us to actively scrub greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere and oceans.
If we just stop emitting, the planet will do it all by itself, more or less. It just may take a long time and cause lots of human hardship in the interim. The question is whether speeding up the process is worth the (as of yet unknown both ways) costs.
Perhaps there are places/times ...
Or a re-growing forest in North America or Farmer Bob (or Farmer Chin or Farmer Raj) growing crops.
So here's my silly idea. There's gotta be something wrong with it, probably the economics. Grow a forest and cut it down. Convert the wood to charcoal, which drives off wood gas (I think that's methane and wood alcohols). Use the wood gas fuel for whatever you want, bury the charcoal. Net-net, you're removing carbon from the atmosphere using sunlight.
Here's my other silly idea. Grow corn, switchgrass, or whatever plant-based ethanol stock you like. Cut down the plants. Skip the alcohol stage and just burn the plants in a retired coal plant. Use the electricity for whatever you like. Make some whiskey from some of the corn to sip so you can still get subsidies under a corn ethanol program.
If you were looking for actual solutions to problems instead of subsidies for your buds, these seem much more straightforward.