The company I work for is all in on Google apps. The standard for email is GMail, we use Google Calendar, we use Google Drive to share files, we use Google apps for collaborating on spreadsheets or word processor documents, and most people use Google Slides for presenting. For remote meetings we use Google Hangouts. We also use web-based software such as Slack and an issue tracker.
Because of all this, a Chromebook is an excellent solution for many people in our company.
The best thing about a Chromebook is that it Just Works. It's locked-down nature means you really don't need to worry about malware, and it automatically downloads security updates. (Unlike Windows 10, ChromeOS never forces you to take an update while you are in the middle of a meeting or presentation.)
Also, if you are using "cloud" storage apps like the Google apps, then if anything happens to the Chromebook, the data will all be backed up. Your employee would be able to just get a new Chromebook and could get sorted out and back to work very quickly.
Because your business is too small to have a dedicated IT department, using all Google apps would have significant advantages. And those apps are IMHO about as easy to use as Microsoft apps or MacOS apps.
As a bonus, if you standardize on Google apps, then your employee has the option of installing some of the apps on her phone (maybe just GMail). I have everything installed on my phone, including Google Hangouts, and I can deal with a lot of possible emergencies with just my phone. I like that.
The one question mark I have is whether bibliography software is available for a Chromebook. A Chromebook does have Linux app support now, plus Android app support, and there are web-based bibliography systems, so... maybe?
Also, some people strongly disapprove of Google, feeling that Google track too much about what you do with their software. If you have a philosophical objection to Google you may not want a Chromebook solution.
I agree with all the people saying not to skimp but to get something nice. If you do this, I'd recommend one of Google's own branded products... the top of the line would be a Google Pixelbook which gets veryfavorablereviews.
P.S. I personally own a Samsung Chromebook Plus with a non-Intel CPU (a hexa-core OP1 running ARM instructions). I've been happy with it... IMHO it looks a lot like an Apple product but it has a much better keyboard. It's half the cost of a Pixelbook but not as fancy. Like the Pixelbook it's just a touch over 1 kg and has long battery life. It does come with a stylus and it has a storage silo for the stylus.
"The reason you think the older records are better is more likely to do with the quality of production, before the audio was stamped onto either media, in the 1970s, than it does the medium. " No, the reason it sounds better is because the music was better!
There are cases where an album from the 1970's sounds great on vinyl and terrible on CD. The CD should sound better, and would sound better if correctly mastered, but many CDs are being mastered poorly.
It is not possible to master vinyl that poorly. Vinyl can't do as much as a CD can, which turns out to be good when people are doing dumb things and the vinyl just doesn't allow the dumb things.
To be specific we are talking about mastering CDs with the gain set way too high, on the incredibly dumb theory that "louder" CDs sell better. Overgained CDs have measurable defects and a human listener can hear the difference.
I used to work at an audio company, and my boss analyzed a few very popular songs. In one of them he found that 50% of all samples in the song were the most extreme sample value possible. (Since CDs are 16-bit, what he found was that 50% of all samples had the value +32767 or the value -32768.) I used Audacity to look at one popular song and was depressed to find 15 samples in a row that were +32767. Audio is supposed to be a waveform, but that was clearly an example of a waveform so overgained that the top of the wave had to be sliced off. It's bad enough when it happens at all, but 15 samples in a row? That's just awful.
I have some Genesis CDs that I bought as soon as they were available. I've been told that more recent releases of the same albums on CD are overgained and sound worse than the old ones I have.
So it's not simply that the older music was better; the "loudness war" can ruin old music and new music alike.
I see steveha, that you did not attempt to address your pathetic attempt at deception
Nope, no deception. What motive would I even have? Nobody cares what I say. I try to win people over with facts, but asserting my opinions is pointless because nobody cares.
As for the rest, congratulations, you successfully demonstrated that sometimes I get up early and sometimes I stay up late. Well done!
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and have a nice life.
According to Sandy Munro, the Model 3 has quality flaws he's not seen since Kia's of the 90's. Sandy Munro also slammed the Model 3 chassis as being "it's too heavy and it costs too much money", while praising the Chevy Bolt chassis as "a good example of a well done body". Suggesting insufficient Tesla hires with experience in finite element analysis.
Sandy Munro later said he "had to eat crow" and called the Model 3 "a symphony of engineering".
He said the Model 3 body is too heavy and too complicated. Elon Musk replied, on Twitter, that it definitely could be simpler but the extra weight was in service of safety. (The Model 3 is the safest car ever tested by the US government.)
Model 3 cost cutting centerline "ipad" dashboard is universally reviled.
Maybe everyone you know hates it, but I've read a bunch of reviews that say "after driving a Model 3, other cars start to feel overly cluttered."
Model 3 gets fake leather, unlike the real deal in a Chevy Bolt.
So buy a Bolt! No back orders on those, you can just walk in and find them sitting around at Chevy dealers. Just waiting for someone to buy them.
Tesla has used real leather for their cars in the past, vegetarians and vegans would rather have the fake leather, and the fake leather seems to be fine. I saw a video where someone showed how he cleans his Model 3 white seats. When he was done cleaning they looked like new. (He just used unscented baby wipes and simply wiped down the seats. He put a strip of clear tape and when he was done you could see how much whiter and cleaner the rest of the seat was compared to the taped section.)
Except CATL is actually the largest manufacturer of Lithium ion cells...not Panasonic. But you have other large players in the marketplace like BYD, LG...
Not sure what your point is here. Tesla gets the entire output of Gigafactory 1, and they keep adding production lines to it. And they are now building additional Gigafactories. It will be difficult indeed for other car makers to buy batteries in the same quantities as Tesla gets them already, and Tesla is going to ramp up their production.
BTW Steve, a self proclaimed Washington state resident, why are you posting at 0228 in the morning?
It's touching that you are so worried about my health. I'm a "night owl" and I often stay up later than I should.
If that was a veiled implication that I'm lying about where I live, I cordially invite you to get stuffed.
Musk failed so miserably with Tesla. I mean Tesla loses even against "domestic" competition like the Chevrolet Bolt which beat the snot out of Tesla Model 3 by 20% price-wise.
LOL. The Chevy Bolt sold 3,949 cars in the third quarter of 2018; at the same time, Tesla was making and selling more Model 3 cars per week than that. For the whole quarter Tesla sold 55,840 Model 3 cars. That's over 14 times the sales.
The Model 3 costs more, but it's also a better car than the Bolt, and it appears that customers are willing to pay the premium.
In November 2018, the Tesla Model 3 was the 6th highest selling car on the market, period. The Model 3 outsold the Ford Fusion and the Nissan Sentra. It sold about double compared to Volkswagen Jetta and about triple compared to the Toyota Prius.
In fairness, the above is with a $7,500 tax credit. That credit will be reducing soon and then will go away. But by then, Tesla should have their $35,000 model available to sell.
Elon Musk had hoped to have the $35K car available by the end of 2018. That's not happening but it looks like it will happen in the first half of 2019.
I don't think the word "failure" is the right word to describe Tesla or the Model 3. I expected it to beat the stuffing out of the BMW 3-series and other luxury cars; I didn't expect it to be competitive with the Honda Civic or the Nissan Sentra.
Also, for your prediction about Japanese car makers beating Tesla to come true, the Japanese car makers are going to need a guaranteed source of batteries. Tesla spent the big money to build their own battery factory, which at the same time gives them the lowest cost on batteries and a guaranteed supply of batteries. There will be millions of Tesla cars on the road before any other company can even begin to compete with them.
I like headphone jacks and every phone I have ever owned has had one. But there is a modern trend to getting rid of them, and also a modern trend to making phones waterproof. I don't think it's unrelated.
It is possible to make a waterproof phone with a headphone jack. But to my knowledge all such phones were top of the line, expensive phones.
All else being equal, I'd prefer a headphone jack. But I want my next phone to be waterproof, and my guess is that to get that I will need to accept the loss of the headphone jack.
P.S. My wife's phone has no headphone jack, but there's a little cable that plugs into the USB C port and then gives an analog headphone jack. Spare cables are something like $9. I would have no problem buying one of those cables for each of my telephone-capable headphones or ear buds.
Yes, this means I won't be able to charge the phone while listening to music on headphones. I'll survive somehow.
350 lbs requires power assistance huh? I guess UPS has never seen a guy on a bike in India deliver a package the size of a school bus on his own power.
Hi, I live in the Seattle area and I spend a lot of time riding bikes.
Seattle is hilly. The downtown core where the packages most likely need delivery is... also hilly.
If any packages need delivery to Queen Anne Hill, that's so steep I wouldn't want to ride that even with 10 pounds of packages. If any packages need delivery to the hospitals, we literally call that area "Pill Hill", as in there is a big hill with the hospitals on it.
The hills are sufficiently bad that there is an official city program of rights-of-way that go through skyscrapers downtown. Instead of walking up a hill you cut through a skyscraper and use their escalators. I say again this is an official thing... I spent some time working in one of the skyscrapers on one of the routes. (I haven't found anything about this online with Google searches, but I remember reading a plaque in the skyscraper where I worked listing the guaranteed hours that the escalators were open to the public as part of this program.) Of course, UPS tricycles can't use escalators and wouldn't be allowed to even if it were possible.
It is entirely appropriate to have a motor assist if we are talking about 350 pounds of packages.
Actually it wouldn't surprise me if UPS wanted to have a motor assist even in flat places (Kansas maybe?), because it won't add that much to the expense of a special delivery tricycle and the motor will provide more speed. More speed is more packages delivered and thus more money.
Do you have some reason to think that a land-based installation will lose capacity much faster? Seems like land-based should be better than car-based as you don't need to worry about weight.
P.S. When the Prius first came out, I heard this claim that the car would be insanely expensive because the battery pack would wear out and need to be replaced at huge cost. I sure see a lot of taxi services using Prius cars, so I'm assuming that in actual use a Prius is not insanely expensive. Taxi services won't use a car that costs too much.
According to this, a Prius battery pack will last at least 10 years and isn't expensive to replace:
Oooo, they are now? [...] Oh, no, seems like they are trying to provide a LOCK-IN repair experience.
Wow, such drama.
You're right of course that if you want to fix your own car, Tesla is the wrong brand to buy.
Tesla promised they were "working on" opening up repairs. They said this 22 months ago and there has been no news about it since then as far as I know.
Elon Musk has said that they will open up repairs eventually but hasn't promised a specific time. He has also said that Tesla will only try to break-even on repairs, never treat them as a profit center. Musk is a believer in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming and wants to get everyone switched over to electric cars, so I don't think he's lying about the repairs, but I must admit that there's no end in sight to Tesla being uncooperative about owner and third-party repairs.
So apparently now cars are going to be like smartphones or other electronic gadgets -- everything is too-cleverly designed such that you can't repair individual components
There's something to what you say. But on the other hand, Tesla designed the Model 3 to have a greatly reduced parts count and simplified design.
Sandy Munro and his team famously tore down and analyzed a Tesla Model 3, and he was quite impressed by the design. Initially he made some negative comments but lately he said he "had to eat crow" and that the car is a "symphony of engineering". His only real complaint is that the car body is too complex and heavy; Elon Musk replied on Twitter saying the car body definitely could be simpler but the weight was due to the car being designed to be so safe.
Tesla cars have computer-controlled everything. I can't find the link where I read this, but I read that they use a star-topology wiring data network for control, plus a power bus. For the Model Y, they are rumored to be going to a single cable per gadget, implying power and data together in a star topology. A conventional car has around 5000 feet of wiring (1500 metres) but this story claims that Model Y will need only 328 feet of wire. 328 feet converts almost exactly to 100 metres so I wonder if someone gave a ballpark estimate of 100 metres (nice round number) and some reporter uncritically converted that to an exact number of feet.
Tesla's modular design is really impressive in the battery and drive train. A Model 3 "drive unit" is a motor plus gearbox plus axles and suspension. To remove it is incredibly simple: four bolts, two cables (data and power), two glycol coolant hoses, and two brake hoses. A motor swap for a Model 3 will take much less labor than most engine or transmission repairs on a conventional car.
And Tesla is trying to provide a good repair experience. They have a program where they set up Tesla body shops and keep those stocked with parts. For people lucky enough to be near one of these Tesla body shops, a Tesla repair can be amazingly fast.
Early adopters have it worst, and it can cost something like $900 to repair a door handle on a Model S. But Tesla is doing an amazing job of ramping their operations and making their cars as simple as possible to build and to repair.
staging an event in front of a room full of people, including people who were trained as observers. Then, quizzing them on the details.
Everyone performed badly, including the trained observers.
I once participated in an exercise along those lines. Our group was shown a video in which a man with a revolver robbed a bank or something and fired the revolver. The group was asked how many shots the man fired.
Some of the group thought he fired 7 times. From his revolver.[1]
I actually got the count perfect, but that's because he fired a few shots, then there was a beat, then he fired more shots; I remembered the cadence of the shooting, like a little song played on a musical instrument that only goes "BANG", and I played the little song back in my head and counted the shots. I knew that in a more chaotic scene there was no way I would have kept track of how many shots were being fired.
The point of the exercise was to emphasize how unreliable eyewitness testimony can be.
But a Fair Witness is better than a possibly doctored video. Ideally, you should have a Fair Witness saying the same thing that the video shows, and then you can have more confidence in the video.
[1] Actually, I've seen a 9 shot.22 revolver, but the video showed a revolver that obviously was bigger than.22. In recent years a couple of 7-shot revolvers have been made, but back when this exercise was done it was seriously unlikely a bank robber would have had anything beyond a 6-shooter.
Robert A. Heinlein imagined this problem, and in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land he described a new profession: "Fair Witness"
A Fair Witness is a person who is trained to observe and remember without jumping to any conclusions. A Fair Witness should be able to describe in court what he/she saw, and only that. As an example, a Fair Witness would say something like "I observed a house, and the side I saw appeared white" rather than "I observed a white house." It's possible that other sides of the house, not seen by the Fair Witness, could be a different color; and it's possible the house was repainted after the Fair Witness saw it... the Fair Witness keeps such things in mind.
Surprisingly, Wikipedia doesn't seem to think that the idea of "Fair Witness" is notable. I Google searched for a reference, and I found a reference that claims to be quoting Wikipedia, but I can't find it on Wikipedia now.
I found the "Fair Witness" idea to be one of the most interesting things in the book, and I have long wondered if we would one day see that profession in real life.
You need to reflect on the economics of the situation. It was paid for. Certainly Tesla has charged sufficient to pay for all materials and make money by selling at the lower price point. It's *all* paid for.
Tesla offered a deal to these customers and the customers took the deal. If Tesla offered to sell the car for less money with a software-limited battery, and if the customer agreed to the deal, then it's a done deal and there is no point in you complaining about it.
I don't love artificial market segmentation like this, but I understand it. Tesla had a higher cost of materials when they sold a 75 kWh battery pack as a 60 kWh pack; but they saved on not having to manufacture two different sizes of pack, and it allowed them to offer a lower price to some customers. And they knew that some nonzero number of customers will pay later to have the extra capacity unlocked.
It's no different from Microsoft selling Windows at different price levels, even though all the R&D work was already all done. Microsoft's cost of goods is the same for different levels of Windows Server, and the different versions are literally some registry settings apart.
It's no different from Intel selling two different CPUs for two different prices, and under the hood they are the same CPU design with a fuse blown to disable features.
Actually, the software locked battery is different from the above scenarios in two ways: 0) the customer can pay Tesla an upgrade fee and get the battery unlocked, and 1) A software-locked "60 kWh" battery that's really a 75 kWh battery can be charged to 100% every day without harm. (Tesla recommends charging to no more than 90% level on a daily basis, so an actual 60 kWh battery pack is treated as a 54 kWh pack most of the time.)
This is simply Tesla puffing smoke and twisting mirrors to pretend that these are different products when they just are not. I'm simply not believing that there's any real R&D in the charging software to justify a price difference based on the software load. It's simply an *artificial* limitation.
I've never seen Tesla make any claims that R&D costs or any other costs justify this. They offered a lower price if some of the battery was disabled, full stop. (By the way: they don't do it anymore. They only offer two battery pack sizes now, and both are sold only at their actual capacity.)
If one came featureless and the other with navigation software and maps - that's also materially different and worthy of a price option.
But if both cars had the hardware to run the navigation software, then by your own logic Tesla should throw in the software for free, since the car owners already paid for the hardware and Tesla's R&D on the software is complete. It's the exact same argument. How dare Tesla choose to sell a car without the nav software and maps installed, when it wouldn't cost them any extra to just throw those in! Well, I consider it reasonable that Tesla want to get paid for the software, to help cover the costs of the R&D at Tesla (for the software and/or anything else). Similarly, I consider it reasonable that Tesla tried to get as much money as a customer is willing/able to pay by offering different levels of battery pack size, even if the lowest level was software locked.
Are you upset that every Tesla doesn't come with "Autopilot" enabled? Every new Tesla (all the latest Model S and X and every single Model 3) comes with the hardware for "Autopilot" but Tesla charges thousands of dollars to enable it. Do you think that Tesla should throw in the "Autopilot" software for free since the hardware was already paid for?
I'm not sure what the margin is, but I found a recent article on how much it costs Tesla: about $100 per kWh for cells, and "within two years" they hope to be under $100 per kWh for finished battery packs.
I also found a 2017 article where Audi claims to be paying around 100 Euros (about $114) for one kWh of battery cells. This is a much lower price than I expected. And, a year ago? How is Audi doing that?
Yeah, but the majors may find that there isn't enough capacity on the market to make mass quantities of battery cells. Tesla's GigaFactory now makes over half of all EV battery cells, and only Tesla gets those.
I think Audi is planning to sell in Model S quantities, not Model 3 quantities.
Long term, Tesla will face a serious issue with their build costs. That's where the majors will clean their clocks. They know how to run the supply chain, drive costs down on volume and build cars accurately and quickly. Tesla will struggle there too. Their margin for error is very small.
On the other hand, Tesla built their own battery factory, and they get all the batteries they need at the lowest possible cost. Battery cost is a huge chunk of the cost of an EV.
The Chevy Bolt is believed to sell at a $9000 loss per car; EV credits make up the difference. Chevy doesn't have a battery factory.
So will the new Mercedes EV be a low-volume car like the Bolt, profitable mainly due to EV credits? For it to really hurt Tesla, Mercedes would have to be able to undercut Tesla on cost while still being profitable. This seems unlikely to me.
Also, it appears that Tesla has smoothed out the problems with the Model 3 factory. I expect them now to build one, or even two, additional factories (first one in China, second one in Europe) to make batteries and cars. If Tesla gets three factories going, building 5000 cars per week at each factory, and making USD$10000 per car... that would be quite a revenue stream. And Tesla can get there faster than Mercedes or any other legacy car maker can.
Tesla could have been strangled in its crib when it was a baby. I think it's too late now and Tesla is going to be huge.
Nobody is making more old clunkers and most of the guys refurbishing them now are putting injection on them one way or another.
Basically what I would like to see is for the worst-polluting cars to be punished with taxes or fines or something. If someone can fix the car to make it stop polluting so badly, they can keep driving the car. it's not that I hate old cars, I just hate pollution.
Right now it's very economical to drive a clunker: if you fail the smog test, you only have to spend something like $50 to fix the failure. (At least that's how it works where I live.) I get that this is a kindness to people who don't have much money, but it also means there is little incentive to fix a car that pollutes a whole lot. I just want the financial incentives to force horrible cars to be fixed or scrapped.
And remember the conservative freak-out over the Obama-era "Cash for Clunkers" program, because of the idea that undeserving people (a.k.a. melanin-enhanced minorities) might be getting a benefits from a government program?
Actually, I don't remember that. I do remember people freaking out over how stupidly the Cash for Clunkers program was designed, where it didn't just take actual clunkers off the road but also newer cars that weren't so bad, and the program funding that was supposed to last a year only lasted about a month (lots of "duh, what did you expect" comments from non-Democrats).
I'm sure there must have been some racists somewhere who thought what you said, but I never saw or heard or read anything about it at the time, so I doubt it was widespread at all. If you have some YouTube videos or web page essays or something that document this alleged widespread racist conservative backlash against Cash for Clunkers, please share the URLs.
Just like CD prices came down after all the music companies recouped the cost of switching from making cassettes?
Why CDs are expensive Hint: the cost of the actual CD technology always was a small fraction of the record company costs.
Also, cars are not the same as CDs. Honda, Nissan, and Ford might all be selling a similar car at a similar price; but if you want the latest music by $ARTIST you don't have a choice of multiple companies selling that music. Only if music consumers said "I'm not loyal to $ARTIST but rather to $GENRE" and shopped on price would the two be comparable. I don't even pay attention to what company makes the CDs of my favorite artists; I buy the specific music I like.
There are some people who are very brand loyal and will buy a particular car brand no matter what, but those are IMHO few when we are talking about the low end of the car market. (It's different with prestige brands like BMW, Mercedes, etc.)
The cost of computers has come down over the years, and cars are more like computers than they are like CDs in terms of competition based on price.
...a 0.1% reduction in car emissions is much better for the total environment then if all emissions were eliminated from leaf blowers, lawn mowers, construction vehicles, etc.
A slight bit of critical thinking would do you a world of good.
A slight bit of researching the issue is also a great idea.
Motor scooters with 2-stroke engines pollute about three orders of magnitude more than a modern gasoline car. There are enough of these scooters that in many cities they are now a worse problem than gasoline cars yet they remain barely regulated.
If the scooters by themselves are enough to be a problem, it can only be worse if we add up all the 2-stroke engines of all sorts.
I pretty much hate 2-stroke engines. I am in favor of allowing them where nothing else will do, like professional chain saws. But modern battery tech has gotten to a place where an electric scooter ought to be a practical replacement for a 2-stroke scooter and I'd like to see the 2-stroke scooters aggressively taxed or outright banned.
Also, I am now very dubious about the value of additional restrictions on cars. If the goal is to maximize the net benefits to society, then it's better to take old clunkers off the road than to have the new cars pollute 0.1% less.
It's literally true that one old clunker pollutes more than dozens of new cars. (A study found that the worst 25% of cars produce over 90% of pollution!) If you can get clunkers off the road, and their owners start driving anything even remotely modern, it's a huge win for air quality. Making new cars more expensive will only encourage people to keep their clunkers running as long as possible, so I am dubious about anything that makes new cars more expensive. Is it better for new cars to cost $3000 more each but pollute 0.1% less? Or is it better to leave the standards alone, let the car makers get their factories well set up to make cars to that standard, and let the costs of new cars gradually fall over time? My gut instinct says the latter is preferable.
On the other hand, if the government forces insane emissions standards, the only way to meet them will be electric cars. So companies like GM that make the minimum number of electric cars they can get away with will be forced to make more electric cars. So maybe it's better in the really long run?
Just as I'd like to ban 2-stroke scooters I would like to see aggressive taxes on old clunkers that make them no-longer-affordable to run. However, I am well aware that the burden of those taxes would fall on the poorest people in our society. That's a problem. But it's also a problem that old horribly-polluting clunkers are exempted from emissions standards.
P.S. I don't actually care if the Trump Administration wants to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. If it's the right thing I want to stand back and let it happen. IMHO, leaving standards where they are is the right thing.
If I'm understanding the abstract correctly, this study showed that three seconds of hot steam was 99.95% effective at killing biofilm. "Compared with chemical disinfection, steam treatment for <1 second a similar level of biofilm disinfection as provided by incubation with 10-ppm sodium hypochlorite (bleach) for 10-20 minutes of contact time."
The above study tested a particular brand of commercial steam vapor cleaner ("Ladybug") with a feature called "TANCS". I'd be interested to know how well other brands of steam cleaners would work. Is "TANCS" key to this or was it simply the high-temperature steam?
From the Ladybug web site here's an article that discusses the results of another study, also showing that the Ladybug is effective:
You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. 30 minutes at 375 (celcius) is required to confidently kill MRSA
I always welcome corrections; I'd rather learn the truth than continue to believe something mistaken. However, I just did a Google search and I have not found a reference to support the above numbers.
Could you please provide a link documenting your numbers?
Here's an article about a test using a commercial steam vapor cleaner. I'm having trouble understanding it... the conclusion is that a steam vapor cleaner is a practical way to kill MRSA and other bacteria, but reading the text it seems to suggest that it took over 7 minutes, and I don't think anyone applies a steam cleaner to the same spot for over 7 minutes. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4600216/
This BBC article says that 150 to 180 degree C steam vapor can kill MRSA in two seconds. I think that is practical with a real steam vapor cleaning machine. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6919473.stm
And here are some claims from companies that want to sell you steam vapor cleaners.
Quote: "...even strong chemical disinfectants such as bleach when allowed 20 minutes of dwell time did not achieve the same degree of kill that the TANCS(R)-equipped unit accomplished in 3 seconds."
This doesn't solve the hand wash problem, but I think hospitals should try cleaning with a steam vapor cleaner. An industrial-quality steam cleaner is not that expensive, and it just takes water and electricity to run. And I don't think there are many germs that can survive temperatures higher than the boiling point of water.
Industrial steam cleaners can reach temperatures of over 340 degrees F (171 degrees C) inside their boilers, but what matters is the temperature of the steam when it exits the cleaning wand, and that can easily be 215 to 230 degrees F (101 to 110 degrees C).
I personally bought a consumer-grade steam cleaner (a Vapamore MR-100) and I have been happy with it. I bought it to kill some mold without using chemicals and it worked perfectly.
Fair enough. It's much slower than even Java, let alone languages like C. (But it can use libraries written in compiled languages like C and Fortran so it can be extremely fast in specific domains.)
that the project governance has declined to address
You say that as if the Python devs are refusing to do something that would be easy. The latest versions of Python are faster and more memory-efficient than earlier versions of Python. The design of the language makes it hard to really optimize so there aren't easy performance gains just waiting for someone to make them.
The fastest Python is PyPy, and that's fast because it has a JIT that compiles your code's hot spots into native code. It isn't that fast until the JIT kicks in.
And the mandatory whitespace is just idiotic, sorry but it is.
You're entitled to your opinion, but please don't give your opinion as if it were a fact. Some people, such as me, like the fact that if code looks like it's part of a block, it actually is part of a block. I don't think that's "just idiotic". You're free to hate it and I won't try to convince you.
Plus scoping is crappy
I have no idea what you are complaining about here.
if you want to do static typing, sorry you just can't.
Actually, you can. Python 3.x supports "type annotations" which let you document the types that various values should be, and there are static checkers that make sure your programs conform to the annotations.
The static checking is not built-in to Python itself, so you could say that Python "enables" static type checking without "providing" it. But to say that "you just can't" do it is a mistake.
By the way, the history of type annotations is IMHO interesting. Guido van Rossum found out that multiple large organizations (Google, Microsoft, etc.) were making their own ad-hoc static type annotations, requiring standardized comments that documented the types. He applied the principle that "there should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do it" and added type annotations to the language spec.
The static type checker still works in Python 2.x if you use appropriate comments.
Python improved on the existing scripting languages, but it fucked up the v2 to v3 transition and lost some momentum in the process.
It's true that the 2 to 3 transition didn't go as smoothly as hoped. I'm not sure I agree that the Python devs messed up the transition. Maybe nobody could have done a better job, and I do think the changes were worth doing.
Python 3.x was an opportunity to make "breaking" changes to Python: to make changes that would break old Python 2.x programs. Using this opportunity, the Python devs cleaned up the language.
Some method functions returned lists, others returned iterators... now in Python 3.x everything returns iterators, because it's trivial to turn an iterator into a list. So your programs are "lazy" by default, and there's less cognitive overhead. Win/win.
I'm fond of the change where 1 / 2 returns 0.5 instead of returning 0. It's a bit surprising that integer division can return a float result, but it's even more surprising to most people for nonzero numbers to produce a zero result.
I'm also fond of the way Python 3.x forces I/O to handle Unicode conversion, so a 3.x program either fails instantly the first time you test it or else runs reliably. The Python 2.x "feature" of letting you ignore Unicode, then randomly blowing up later, was enough to make me eager to make the switch.
So IMHO the changes were well thought-out and I approve of them. But they were changes. The real problem is that Python 2.x is a pretty sweet language, so staying with it was pretty attractive. There would be nonzero pain to migrate to Python 3.x, so doing nothing was an attractive choice.
But over time the various popular libraries were converted to be Python 3 compatible, and the Python devs kept adding improvements, and now basically everyone agrees that Python 3.6 and newer are the best Python versions ever.
It's free software and someone could have forked the sources for Python 2.7 and backported features from Python 3.x; but nobody loved Python 2.x that much. Grumbling and inertia yes, actual work to keep Python 2.x viable no.
Pascal simply lost to C, they competed in a single niche and winner takes all.
I agree 100%. There was nothing Pascal did that C couldn't do, and do better. In the early days C was much less type-safe but that was fixable and has been fixed.
C is the king of the third-generation languages and is unlikely to be displaced in the foreseeable future.
Slashdot Mirror
The company I work for is all in on Google apps. The standard for email is GMail, we use Google Calendar, we use Google Drive to share files, we use Google apps for collaborating on spreadsheets or word processor documents, and most people use Google Slides for presenting. For remote meetings we use Google Hangouts. We also use web-based software such as Slack and an issue tracker.
Because of all this, a Chromebook is an excellent solution for many people in our company.
The best thing about a Chromebook is that it Just Works. It's locked-down nature means you really don't need to worry about malware, and it automatically downloads security updates. (Unlike Windows 10, ChromeOS never forces you to take an update while you are in the middle of a meeting or presentation.)
Also, if you are using "cloud" storage apps like the Google apps, then if anything happens to the Chromebook, the data will all be backed up. Your employee would be able to just get a new Chromebook and could get sorted out and back to work very quickly.
Because your business is too small to have a dedicated IT department, using all Google apps would have significant advantages. And those apps are IMHO about as easy to use as Microsoft apps or MacOS apps.
As a bonus, if you standardize on Google apps, then your employee has the option of installing some of the apps on her phone (maybe just GMail). I have everything installed on my phone, including Google Hangouts, and I can deal with a lot of possible emergencies with just my phone. I like that.
The one question mark I have is whether bibliography software is available for a Chromebook. A Chromebook does have Linux app support now, plus Android app support, and there are web-based bibliography systems, so... maybe?
Also, some people strongly disapprove of Google, feeling that Google track too much about what you do with their software. If you have a philosophical objection to Google you may not want a Chromebook solution.
I agree with all the people saying not to skimp but to get something nice. If you do this, I'd recommend one of Google's own branded products... the top of the line would be a Google Pixelbook which gets very favorable reviews.
P.S. I personally own a Samsung Chromebook Plus with a non-Intel CPU (a hexa-core OP1 running ARM instructions). I've been happy with it... IMHO it looks a lot like an Apple product but it has a much better keyboard. It's half the cost of a Pixelbook but not as fancy. Like the Pixelbook it's just a touch over 1 kg and has long battery life. It does come with a stylus and it has a storage silo for the stylus.
"The reason you think the older records are better is more likely to do with the quality of production, before the audio was stamped onto either media, in the 1970s, than it does the medium. "
No, the reason it sounds better is because the music was better!
There are cases where an album from the 1970's sounds great on vinyl and terrible on CD. The CD should sound better, and would sound better if correctly mastered, but many CDs are being mastered poorly.
It is not possible to master vinyl that poorly. Vinyl can't do as much as a CD can, which turns out to be good when people are doing dumb things and the vinyl just doesn't allow the dumb things.
To be specific we are talking about mastering CDs with the gain set way too high, on the incredibly dumb theory that "louder" CDs sell better. Overgained CDs have measurable defects and a human listener can hear the difference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
I used to work at an audio company, and my boss analyzed a few very popular songs. In one of them he found that 50% of all samples in the song were the most extreme sample value possible. (Since CDs are 16-bit, what he found was that 50% of all samples had the value +32767 or the value -32768.) I used Audacity to look at one popular song and was depressed to find 15 samples in a row that were +32767. Audio is supposed to be a waveform, but that was clearly an example of a waveform so overgained that the top of the wave had to be sliced off. It's bad enough when it happens at all, but 15 samples in a row? That's just awful.
I have some Genesis CDs that I bought as soon as they were available. I've been told that more recent releases of the same albums on CD are overgained and sound worse than the old ones I have.
So it's not simply that the older music was better; the "loudness war" can ruin old music and new music alike.
I see steveha, that you did not attempt to address your pathetic attempt at deception
Nope, no deception. What motive would I even have? Nobody cares what I say. I try to win people over with facts, but asserting my opinions is pointless because nobody cares.
As for the rest, congratulations, you successfully demonstrated that sometimes I get up early and sometimes I stay up late. Well done!
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and have a nice life.
According to Sandy Munro, the Model 3 has quality flaws he's not seen since Kia's of the 90's.
Sandy Munro also slammed the Model 3 chassis as being "it's too heavy and it costs too much money", while praising the Chevy Bolt chassis as "a good example of a well done body".
Suggesting insufficient Tesla hires with experience in finite element analysis.
Sandy Munro later said he "had to eat crow" and called the Model 3 "a symphony of engineering".
He said the Model 3 body is too heavy and too complicated. Elon Musk replied, on Twitter, that it definitely could be simpler but the extra weight was in service of safety. (The Model 3 is the safest car ever tested by the US government.)
Model 3 cost cutting centerline "ipad" dashboard is universally reviled.
Maybe everyone you know hates it, but I've read a bunch of reviews that say "after driving a Model 3, other cars start to feel overly cluttered."
Model 3 gets fake leather, unlike the real deal in a Chevy Bolt.
So buy a Bolt! No back orders on those, you can just walk in and find them sitting around at Chevy dealers. Just waiting for someone to buy them.
Tesla has used real leather for their cars in the past, vegetarians and vegans would rather have the fake leather, and the fake leather seems to be fine. I saw a video where someone showed how he cleans his Model 3 white seats. When he was done cleaning they looked like new. (He just used unscented baby wipes and simply wiped down the seats. He put a strip of clear tape and when he was done you could see how much whiter and cleaner the rest of the seat was compared to the taped section.)
Except CATL is actually the largest manufacturer of Lithium ion cells...not Panasonic.
But you have other large players in the marketplace like BYD, LG...
Not sure what your point is here. Tesla gets the entire output of Gigafactory 1, and they keep adding production lines to it. And they are now building additional Gigafactories. It will be difficult indeed for other car makers to buy batteries in the same quantities as Tesla gets them already, and Tesla is going to ramp up their production.
BTW Steve, a self proclaimed Washington state resident, why are you posting at 0228 in the morning?
It's touching that you are so worried about my health. I'm a "night owl" and I often stay up later than I should.
If that was a veiled implication that I'm lying about where I live, I cordially invite you to get stuffed.
Musk failed so miserably with Tesla.
I mean Tesla loses even against "domestic" competition like the Chevrolet Bolt which beat the snot out of Tesla Model 3 by 20% price-wise.
LOL. The Chevy Bolt sold 3,949 cars in the third quarter of 2018; at the same time, Tesla was making and selling more Model 3 cars per week than that. For the whole quarter Tesla sold 55,840 Model 3 cars. That's over 14 times the sales.
The Model 3 costs more, but it's also a better car than the Bolt, and it appears that customers are willing to pay the premium.
https://electrek.co/2018/10/03/chevy-bolt-ev-sales-slumping-us/
In November 2018, the Tesla Model 3 was the 6th highest selling car on the market, period. The Model 3 outsold the Ford Fusion and the Nissan Sentra. It sold about double compared to Volkswagen Jetta and about triple compared to the Toyota Prius.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/12/08/tesla-model-3-completely-crushing-us-luxury-car-competition-10-cleantechnica-charts/
In fairness, the above is with a $7,500 tax credit. That credit will be reducing soon and then will go away. But by then, Tesla should have their $35,000 model available to sell.
Elon Musk had hoped to have the $35K car available by the end of 2018. That's not happening but it looks like it will happen in the first half of 2019.
https://insideevs.com/base-35000-tesla-model-3-production-8-months/
Another fun fact: the Honda Civic and the Honda Accord are two of the top five trade-ins of Model 3 customers.
https://electrek.co/2018/08/01/tesla-model-3-top-5-trade-in-cars/
I don't think the word "failure" is the right word to describe Tesla or the Model 3. I expected it to beat the stuffing out of the BMW 3-series and other luxury cars; I didn't expect it to be competitive with the Honda Civic or the Nissan Sentra.
Also, for your prediction about Japanese car makers beating Tesla to come true, the Japanese car makers are going to need a guaranteed source of batteries. Tesla spent the big money to build their own battery factory, which at the same time gives them the lowest cost on batteries and a guaranteed supply of batteries. There will be millions of Tesla cars on the road before any other company can even begin to compete with them.
I like headphone jacks and every phone I have ever owned has had one. But there is a modern trend to getting rid of them, and also a modern trend to making phones waterproof. I don't think it's unrelated.
It is possible to make a waterproof phone with a headphone jack. But to my knowledge all such phones were top of the line, expensive phones.
All else being equal, I'd prefer a headphone jack. But I want my next phone to be waterproof, and my guess is that to get that I will need to accept the loss of the headphone jack.
P.S. My wife's phone has no headphone jack, but there's a little cable that plugs into the USB C port and then gives an analog headphone jack. Spare cables are something like $9. I would have no problem buying one of those cables for each of my telephone-capable headphones or ear buds.
Yes, this means I won't be able to charge the phone while listening to music on headphones. I'll survive somehow.
350 lbs requires power assistance huh? I guess UPS has never seen a guy on a bike in India deliver a package the size of a school bus on his own power.
Hi, I live in the Seattle area and I spend a lot of time riding bikes.
Seattle is hilly. The downtown core where the packages most likely need delivery is... also hilly.
If any packages need delivery to Queen Anne Hill, that's so steep I wouldn't want to ride that even with 10 pounds of packages. If any packages need delivery to the hospitals, we literally call that area "Pill Hill", as in there is a big hill with the hospitals on it.
Wikipedia has a list of hills in Seattle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_hills_of_Seattle
And here's an article about how the hilly streets are challenging to folks with mobility issues: https://crosscut.com/2017/02/seattles-hills-are-the-worst-heres-a-way-to-cope
The hills are sufficiently bad that there is an official city program of rights-of-way that go through skyscrapers downtown. Instead of walking up a hill you cut through a skyscraper and use their escalators. I say again this is an official thing... I spent some time working in one of the skyscrapers on one of the routes. (I haven't found anything about this online with Google searches, but I remember reading a plaque in the skyscraper where I worked listing the guaranteed hours that the escalators were open to the public as part of this program.) Of course, UPS tricycles can't use escalators and wouldn't be allowed to even if it were possible.
It is entirely appropriate to have a motor assist if we are talking about 350 pounds of packages.
Actually it wouldn't surprise me if UPS wanted to have a motor assist even in flat places (Kansas maybe?), because it won't add that much to the expense of a special delivery tricycle and the motor will provide more speed. More speed is more packages delivered and thus more money.
So your comment is +1 snarky but -2 clueless.
after, say, five years, by which time all the cells will have had to be replaced at least once.
Citation needed.
Actual data collected from Tesla car owners shows that the battery packs still have over 90% capacity after 220000 km (160000 miles).
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1110149_tesla-model-s-battery-life-what-the-data-show-so-far
Do you have some reason to think that a land-based installation will lose capacity much faster? Seems like land-based should be better than car-based as you don't need to worry about weight.
P.S. When the Prius first came out, I heard this claim that the car would be insanely expensive because the battery pack would wear out and need to be replaced at huge cost. I sure see a lot of taxi services using Prius cars, so I'm assuming that in actual use a Prius is not insanely expensive. Taxi services won't use a car that costs too much.
According to this, a Prius battery pack will last at least 10 years and isn't expensive to replace:
https://www.torquenews.com/1083/can-toyota-prius-battery-last-250000-miles
Oooo, they are now?
[...]
Oh, no, seems like they are trying to provide a LOCK-IN repair experience.
Wow, such drama.
You're right of course that if you want to fix your own car, Tesla is the wrong brand to buy.
Tesla promised they were "working on" opening up repairs. They said this 22 months ago and there has been no news about it since then as far as I know.
https://electrek.co/2017/01/30/tesla-opening-up-service-replacement-parts/
The good news is that Teslas are quite easy to repair, assuming you can get the parts.
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/national-international/Tesla-Owner-Frustrated-Fixes-Model-S-491889781.html
Elon Musk has said that they will open up repairs eventually but hasn't promised a specific time. He has also said that Tesla will only try to break-even on repairs, never treat them as a profit center. Musk is a believer in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming and wants to get everyone switched over to electric cars, so I don't think he's lying about the repairs, but I must admit that there's no end in sight to Tesla being uncooperative about owner and third-party repairs.
So apparently now cars are going to be like smartphones or other electronic gadgets -- everything is too-cleverly designed such that you can't repair individual components
There's something to what you say. But on the other hand, Tesla designed the Model 3 to have a greatly reduced parts count and simplified design.
Sandy Munro and his team famously tore down and analyzed a Tesla Model 3, and he was quite impressed by the design. Initially he made some negative comments but lately he said he "had to eat crow" and that the car is a "symphony of engineering". His only real complaint is that the car body is too complex and heavy; Elon Musk replied on Twitter saying the car body definitely could be simpler but the weight was due to the car being designed to be so safe.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/10/23/second-tesla-model-3-teardown-highlights-strengths-opportunities-for-tesla/
Tesla cars have computer-controlled everything. I can't find the link where I read this, but I read that they use a star-topology wiring data network for control, plus a power bus. For the Model Y, they are rumored to be going to a single cable per gadget, implying power and data together in a star topology. A conventional car has around 5000 feet of wiring (1500 metres) but this story claims that Model Y will need only 328 feet of wire. 328 feet converts almost exactly to 100 metres so I wonder if someone gave a ballpark estimate of 100 metres (nice round number) and some reporter uncritically converted that to an exact number of feet.
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/elon-musk-tesla-model-y-will-require-only-328-feet-of-wiring-119717.html
Tesla's modular design is really impressive in the battery and drive train. A Model 3 "drive unit" is a motor plus gearbox plus axles and suspension. To remove it is incredibly simple: four bolts, two cables (data and power), two glycol coolant hoses, and two brake hoses. A motor swap for a Model 3 will take much less labor than most engine or transmission repairs on a conventional car.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-drivetrain-design-elon-musk-master-plan/
And Tesla is trying to provide a good repair experience. They have a program where they set up Tesla body shops and keep those stocked with parts. For people lucky enough to be near one of these Tesla body shops, a Tesla repair can be amazingly fast.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-in-house-body-repair-shop-model-3-damage-25-hours/
Early adopters have it worst, and it can cost something like $900 to repair a door handle on a Model S. But Tesla is doing an amazing job of ramping their operations and making their cars as simple as possible to build and to repair.
staging an event in front of a room full of people, including people who were trained as observers. Then, quizzing them on the details.
Everyone performed badly, including the trained observers.
I once participated in an exercise along those lines. Our group was shown a video in which a man with a revolver robbed a bank or something and fired the revolver. The group was asked how many shots the man fired.
Some of the group thought he fired 7 times. From his revolver.[1]
I actually got the count perfect, but that's because he fired a few shots, then there was a beat, then he fired more shots; I remembered the cadence of the shooting, like a little song played on a musical instrument that only goes "BANG", and I played the little song back in my head and counted the shots. I knew that in a more chaotic scene there was no way I would have kept track of how many shots were being fired.
The point of the exercise was to emphasize how unreliable eyewitness testimony can be.
But a Fair Witness is better than a possibly doctored video. Ideally, you should have a Fair Witness saying the same thing that the video shows, and then you can have more confidence in the video.
[1] Actually, I've seen a 9 shot .22 revolver, but the video showed a revolver that obviously was bigger than .22. In recent years a couple of 7-shot revolvers have been made, but back when this exercise was done it was seriously unlikely a bank robber would have had anything beyond a 6-shooter.
Robert A. Heinlein imagined this problem, and in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land he described a new profession: "Fair Witness"
A Fair Witness is a person who is trained to observe and remember without jumping to any conclusions. A Fair Witness should be able to describe in court what he/she saw, and only that. As an example, a Fair Witness would say something like "I observed a house, and the side I saw appeared white" rather than "I observed a white house." It's possible that other sides of the house, not seen by the Fair Witness, could be a different color; and it's possible the house was repainted after the Fair Witness saw it... the Fair Witness keeps such things in mind.
Surprisingly, Wikipedia doesn't seem to think that the idea of "Fair Witness" is notable. I Google searched for a reference, and I found a reference that claims to be quoting Wikipedia, but I can't find it on Wikipedia now.
http://dlkphotography.com/fair-witness/stranger-in-a-strange-land
I found the "Fair Witness" idea to be one of the most interesting things in the book, and I have long wondered if we would one day see that profession in real life.
You need to reflect on the economics of the situation. It was paid for. Certainly Tesla has charged sufficient to pay for all materials and make money by selling at the lower price point. It's *all* paid for.
Tesla offered a deal to these customers and the customers took the deal. If Tesla offered to sell the car for less money with a software-limited battery, and if the customer agreed to the deal, then it's a done deal and there is no point in you complaining about it.
I don't love artificial market segmentation like this, but I understand it. Tesla had a higher cost of materials when they sold a 75 kWh battery pack as a 60 kWh pack; but they saved on not having to manufacture two different sizes of pack, and it allowed them to offer a lower price to some customers. And they knew that some nonzero number of customers will pay later to have the extra capacity unlocked.
It's no different from Microsoft selling Windows at different price levels, even though all the R&D work was already all done. Microsoft's cost of goods is the same for different levels of Windows Server, and the different versions are literally some registry settings apart.
It's no different from Intel selling two different CPUs for two different prices, and under the hood they are the same CPU design with a fuse blown to disable features.
Actually, the software locked battery is different from the above scenarios in two ways: 0) the customer can pay Tesla an upgrade fee and get the battery unlocked, and 1) A software-locked "60 kWh" battery that's really a 75 kWh battery can be charged to 100% every day without harm. (Tesla recommends charging to no more than 90% level on a daily basis, so an actual 60 kWh battery pack is treated as a 54 kWh pack most of the time.)
This is simply Tesla puffing smoke and twisting mirrors to pretend that these are different products when they just are not. I'm simply not believing that there's any real R&D in the charging software to justify a price difference based on the software load. It's simply an *artificial* limitation.
I've never seen Tesla make any claims that R&D costs or any other costs justify this. They offered a lower price if some of the battery was disabled, full stop. (By the way: they don't do it anymore. They only offer two battery pack sizes now, and both are sold only at their actual capacity.)
If one came featureless and the other with navigation software and maps - that's also materially different and worthy of a price option.
But if both cars had the hardware to run the navigation software, then by your own logic Tesla should throw in the software for free, since the car owners already paid for the hardware and Tesla's R&D on the software is complete. It's the exact same argument. How dare Tesla choose to sell a car without the nav software and maps installed, when it wouldn't cost them any extra to just throw those in! Well, I consider it reasonable that Tesla want to get paid for the software, to help cover the costs of the R&D at Tesla (for the software and/or anything else). Similarly, I consider it reasonable that Tesla tried to get as much money as a customer is willing/able to pay by offering different levels of battery pack size, even if the lowest level was software locked.
Are you upset that every Tesla doesn't come with "Autopilot" enabled? Every new Tesla (all the latest Model S and X and every single Model 3) comes with the hardware for "Autopilot" but Tesla charges thousands of dollars to enable it. Do you think that Tesla should throw in the "Autopilot" software for free since the hardware was already paid for?
I'm not sure what the margin is, but I found a recent article on how much it costs Tesla: about $100 per kWh for cells, and "within two years" they hope to be under $100 per kWh for finished battery packs.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/09/100-kwh-tesla-battery-cells-this-year-100-kwh-tesla-battery-packs-in-2020/
I also found a 2017 article where Audi claims to be paying around 100 Euros (about $114) for one kWh of battery cells. This is a much lower price than I expected. And, a year ago? How is Audi doing that?
https://electrek.co/2017/06/28/audi-electric-car-battery-cost/
The majors have a lot of revenue to throw at it
Yeah, but the majors may find that there isn't enough capacity on the market to make mass quantities of battery cells. Tesla's GigaFactory now makes over half of all EV battery cells, and only Tesla gets those.
I think Audi is planning to sell in Model S quantities, not Model 3 quantities.
Long term, Tesla will face a serious issue with their build costs. That's where the majors will clean their clocks. They know how to run the supply chain, drive costs down on volume and build cars accurately and quickly. Tesla will struggle there too. Their margin for error is very small.
On the other hand, Tesla built their own battery factory, and they get all the batteries they need at the lowest possible cost. Battery cost is a huge chunk of the cost of an EV.
The Chevy Bolt is believed to sell at a $9000 loss per car; EV credits make up the difference. Chevy doesn't have a battery factory.
So will the new Mercedes EV be a low-volume car like the Bolt, profitable mainly due to EV credits? For it to really hurt Tesla, Mercedes would have to be able to undercut Tesla on cost while still being profitable. This seems unlikely to me.
Also, it appears that Tesla has smoothed out the problems with the Model 3 factory. I expect them now to build one, or even two, additional factories (first one in China, second one in Europe) to make batteries and cars. If Tesla gets three factories going, building 5000 cars per week at each factory, and making USD$10000 per car... that would be quite a revenue stream. And Tesla can get there faster than Mercedes or any other legacy car maker can.
Tesla could have been strangled in its crib when it was a baby. I think it's too late now and Tesla is going to be huge.
Nobody is making more old clunkers and most of the guys refurbishing them now are putting injection on them one way or another.
Basically what I would like to see is for the worst-polluting cars to be punished with taxes or fines or something. If someone can fix the car to make it stop polluting so badly, they can keep driving the car. it's not that I hate old cars, I just hate pollution.
Right now it's very economical to drive a clunker: if you fail the smog test, you only have to spend something like $50 to fix the failure. (At least that's how it works where I live.) I get that this is a kindness to people who don't have much money, but it also means there is little incentive to fix a car that pollutes a whole lot. I just want the financial incentives to force horrible cars to be fixed or scrapped.
And remember the conservative freak-out over the Obama-era "Cash for Clunkers" program, because of the idea that undeserving people (a.k.a. melanin-enhanced minorities) might be getting a benefits from a government program?
Actually, I don't remember that. I do remember people freaking out over how stupidly the Cash for Clunkers program was designed, where it didn't just take actual clunkers off the road but also newer cars that weren't so bad, and the program funding that was supposed to last a year only lasted about a month (lots of "duh, what did you expect" comments from non-Democrats).
I'm sure there must have been some racists somewhere who thought what you said, but I never saw or heard or read anything about it at the time, so I doubt it was widespread at all. If you have some YouTube videos or web page essays or something that document this alleged widespread racist conservative backlash against Cash for Clunkers, please share the URLs.
http://www.thedrive.com/new-cars/9578/why-are-cars-so-expensive
HTH, HAND.
Just like CD prices came down after all the music companies recouped the cost of switching from making cassettes?
Why CDs are expensive Hint: the cost of the actual CD technology always was a small fraction of the record company costs.
Also, cars are not the same as CDs. Honda, Nissan, and Ford might all be selling a similar car at a similar price; but if you want the latest music by $ARTIST you don't have a choice of multiple companies selling that music. Only if music consumers said "I'm not loyal to $ARTIST but rather to $GENRE" and shopped on price would the two be comparable. I don't even pay attention to what company makes the CDs of my favorite artists; I buy the specific music I like.
There are some people who are very brand loyal and will buy a particular car brand no matter what, but those are IMHO few when we are talking about the low end of the car market. (It's different with prestige brands like BMW, Mercedes, etc.)
The cost of computers has come down over the years, and cars are more like computers than they are like CDs in terms of competition based on price.
...a 0.1% reduction in car emissions is much better for the total environment then if all emissions were eliminated from leaf blowers, lawn mowers, construction vehicles, etc.
A slight bit of critical thinking would do you a world of good.
A slight bit of researching the issue is also a great idea.
Motor scooters with 2-stroke engines pollute about three orders of magnitude more than a modern gasoline car. There are enough of these scooters that in many cities they are now a worse problem than gasoline cars yet they remain barely regulated.
Two-stroke scooters are a dominant source of air pollution in many cities
Scooters: Europe's Pollution Machines
If the scooters by themselves are enough to be a problem, it can only be worse if we add up all the 2-stroke engines of all sorts.
I pretty much hate 2-stroke engines. I am in favor of allowing them where nothing else will do, like professional chain saws. But modern battery tech has gotten to a place where an electric scooter ought to be a practical replacement for a 2-stroke scooter and I'd like to see the 2-stroke scooters aggressively taxed or outright banned.
Also, I am now very dubious about the value of additional restrictions on cars. If the goal is to maximize the net benefits to society, then it's better to take old clunkers off the road than to have the new cars pollute 0.1% less.
It's literally true that one old clunker pollutes more than dozens of new cars. (A study found that the worst 25% of cars produce over 90% of pollution!) If you can get clunkers off the road, and their owners start driving anything even remotely modern, it's a huge win for air quality. Making new cars more expensive will only encourage people to keep their clunkers running as long as possible, so I am dubious about anything that makes new cars more expensive. Is it better for new cars to cost $3000 more each but pollute 0.1% less? Or is it better to leave the standards alone, let the car makers get their factories well set up to make cars to that standard, and let the costs of new cars gradually fall over time? My gut instinct says the latter is preferable.
I first started thinking along these lines when I read this essay in 2009: https://keithhennessey.com/2009/05/19/understanding-the-presidents-cafe-announcement/
On the other hand, if the government forces insane emissions standards, the only way to meet them will be electric cars. So companies like GM that make the minimum number of electric cars they can get away with will be forced to make more electric cars. So maybe it's better in the really long run?
Just as I'd like to ban 2-stroke scooters I would like to see aggressive taxes on old clunkers that make them no-longer-affordable to run. However, I am well aware that the burden of those taxes would fall on the poorest people in our society. That's a problem. But it's also a problem that old horribly-polluting clunkers are exempted from emissions standards.
P.S. I don't actually care if the Trump Administration wants to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. If it's the right thing I want to stand back and let it happen. IMHO, leaving standards where they are is the right thing.
If I'm understanding the abstract correctly, this study showed that three seconds of hot steam was 99.95% effective at killing biofilm. "Compared with chemical disinfection, steam treatment for <1 second a similar level of biofilm disinfection as provided by incubation with 10-ppm sodium hypochlorite (bleach) for 10-20 minutes of contact time."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22418602/
The above study tested a particular brand of commercial steam vapor cleaner ("Ladybug") with a feature called "TANCS". I'd be interested to know how well other brands of steam cleaners would work. Is "TANCS" key to this or was it simply the high-temperature steam?
From the Ladybug web site here's an article that discusses the results of another study, also showing that the Ladybug is effective:
https://www.ladybugsteamvapor.com/study-validates-ladybug-dry-steam-vapor/
You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. 30 minutes at 375 (celcius) is required to confidently kill MRSA
I always welcome corrections; I'd rather learn the truth than continue to believe something mistaken. However, I just did a Google search and I have not found a reference to support the above numbers.
Could you please provide a link documenting your numbers?
Here's an article about a test using a commercial steam vapor cleaner. I'm having trouble understanding it... the conclusion is that a steam vapor cleaner is a practical way to kill MRSA and other bacteria, but reading the text it seems to suggest that it took over 7 minutes, and I don't think anyone applies a steam cleaner to the same spot for over 7 minutes.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4600216/
This BBC article says that 150 to 180 degree C steam vapor can kill MRSA in two seconds. I think that is practical with a real steam vapor cleaning machine.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6919473.stm
And here are some claims from companies that want to sell you steam vapor cleaners.
Ladybug company cites a study
Vapamore company cites a study
An article that reads like an advertisement for Ladybug brand cleaners with "TANCS".
Quote: "...even strong chemical disinfectants such as bleach when allowed 20 minutes of dwell time did not achieve the same degree of kill that the TANCS(R)-equipped unit accomplished in 3 seconds."
This company claims two of their machines are "certified" to kill MRSA (no reference to support the claim).
This doesn't solve the hand wash problem, but I think hospitals should try cleaning with a steam vapor cleaner. An industrial-quality steam cleaner is not that expensive, and it just takes water and electricity to run. And I don't think there are many germs that can survive temperatures higher than the boiling point of water.
Industrial steam cleaners can reach temperatures of over 340 degrees F (171 degrees C) inside their boilers, but what matters is the temperature of the steam when it exits the cleaning wand, and that can easily be 215 to 230 degrees F (101 to 110 degrees C).
Here's an article about a test at University of Washington: https://www.asumag.com/maintenance/steaming-clean
I personally bought a consumer-grade steam cleaner (a Vapamore MR-100) and I have been happy with it. I bought it to kill some mold without using chemicals and it worked perfectly.
Python has longstanding performance issues
Fair enough. It's much slower than even Java, let alone languages like C. (But it can use libraries written in compiled languages like C and Fortran so it can be extremely fast in specific domains.)
that the project governance has declined to address
You say that as if the Python devs are refusing to do something that would be easy. The latest versions of Python are faster and more memory-efficient than earlier versions of Python. The design of the language makes it hard to really optimize so there aren't easy performance gains just waiting for someone to make them.
The fastest Python is PyPy, and that's fast because it has a JIT that compiles your code's hot spots into native code. It isn't that fast until the JIT kicks in.
And the mandatory whitespace is just idiotic, sorry but it is.
You're entitled to your opinion, but please don't give your opinion as if it were a fact. Some people, such as me, like the fact that if code looks like it's part of a block, it actually is part of a block. I don't think that's "just idiotic". You're free to hate it and I won't try to convince you.
Plus scoping is crappy
I have no idea what you are complaining about here.
if you want to do static typing, sorry you just can't.
Actually, you can. Python 3.x supports "type annotations" which let you document the types that various values should be, and there are static checkers that make sure your programs conform to the annotations.
The static checking is not built-in to Python itself, so you could say that Python "enables" static type checking without "providing" it. But to say that "you just can't" do it is a mistake.
By the way, the history of type annotations is IMHO interesting. Guido van Rossum found out that multiple large organizations (Google, Microsoft, etc.) were making their own ad-hoc static type annotations, requiring standardized comments that documented the types. He applied the principle that "there should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do it" and added type annotations to the language spec.
The static type checker still works in Python 2.x if you use appropriate comments.
http://mypy-lang.org/
Python improved on the existing scripting languages, but it fucked up the v2 to v3 transition and lost some momentum in the process.
It's true that the 2 to 3 transition didn't go as smoothly as hoped. I'm not sure I agree that the Python devs messed up the transition. Maybe nobody could have done a better job, and I do think the changes were worth doing.
Python 3.x was an opportunity to make "breaking" changes to Python: to make changes that would break old Python 2.x programs. Using this opportunity, the Python devs cleaned up the language.
Some method functions returned lists, others returned iterators... now in Python 3.x everything returns iterators, because it's trivial to turn an iterator into a list. So your programs are "lazy" by default, and there's less cognitive overhead. Win/win.
I'm fond of the change where 1 / 2 returns 0.5 instead of returning 0. It's a bit surprising that integer division can return a float result, but it's even more surprising to most people for nonzero numbers to produce a zero result.
I'm also fond of the way Python 3.x forces I/O to handle Unicode conversion, so a 3.x program either fails instantly the first time you test it or else runs reliably. The Python 2.x "feature" of letting you ignore Unicode, then randomly blowing up later, was enough to make me eager to make the switch.
So IMHO the changes were well thought-out and I approve of them. But they were changes. The real problem is that Python 2.x is a pretty sweet language, so staying with it was pretty attractive. There would be nonzero pain to migrate to Python 3.x, so doing nothing was an attractive choice.
But over time the various popular libraries were converted to be Python 3 compatible, and the Python devs kept adding improvements, and now basically everyone agrees that Python 3.6 and newer are the best Python versions ever.
It's free software and someone could have forked the sources for Python 2.7 and backported features from Python 3.x; but nobody loved Python 2.x that much. Grumbling and inertia yes, actual work to keep Python 2.x viable no.
Pascal simply lost to C, they competed in a single niche and winner takes all.
I agree 100%. There was nothing Pascal did that C couldn't do, and do better. In the early days C was much less type-safe but that was fixable and has been fixed.
C is the king of the third-generation languages and is unlikely to be displaced in the foreseeable future.