I've always wondered how many people would be driving electric cars if it wasn't for the state/Fed subsidies (rebates)
Our tax policy includes rebates and incentives to encourage people to do things. For example, giving to charity.
Policy makers were hoping people would do things like switch to driving electric cars. They set up the tax rebates accordingly.
Tesla customers getting a tax rebate on Tesla electric cars? That's the system working as intended. The government wanted to encourage the switch to electric cars, and it's working.
Note that the incentives are really just accelerating a process that would have happened on its own. If BEVs were significantly less expensive than ICE vehicles, people would choose to buy them even without tax incentives. The tax incentives are intended to jump-start this, and help BEVs get over the initial hump.
Selling lots of cars helps enable economies of scale; economies of scale help cars cost less; cars costing less helps sell more cars. It's hard to get the cycle going when your initial low-quantity sales are expensive cars.
Also note that when government picks winners and losers, government tends to do a stupid job. Consider the Obama administration loans to Solyndra... a total debacle. But if government is going to interfere with the free market, IMHO the BEV tax credit is one of the best things they could do. Customers are still spending their own money, so they won't be buying lousy cars even with the BEV tax credit; it should help good products get established with little risk of Solyndra-style debacles. And in the specific case of Tesla I think it's clear that it worked out well.
or other benefits like Leaf's free charging.
Nissan provided that to encourage customers to buy their brand of BEV. Nothing wrong with that.
I see people driving $100k Teslas, and they're not doing it to be green. It's the new status symbol of wealth (used to be BMW/Benz).
It's true that Tesla has grabbed most of the "large luxury car" sales in markets where they are competing. However I don't think that it is just, or mostly, that rich people want to show off their wealth. Tesla makes cars that are safe, reliable, and fun to drive; and for rich people the cost doesn't seem too high, so why not buy one?
Plus I've read a lot of discussion of Teslas online, and I've repeatedly seen comments like "Well, I think the Tesla interiors are cheap. My BMWs and Mercedes are much nicer, let alone my Bentley. I sold the Tesla and bought a Jaguar." (I just made that up but it's similar to real things I have read.) It sure doesn't seem to me like really rich people think a Tesla is a mark of status.
it kind of defeats the purpose of security if a simple device such as a ring can disable it.
I know! I just found out that the lock on my house can be defeated by a simple device... a piece of metal with some notches carved into it! How did they overlook this?!?
You do realize the the rear motor in a "D" model is the exact same rear motor as comes in the non-"D" version....ya, didn't think you did.
Please provide a reference link so I can read about this. I have read that on a "D" model Tesla, the two motors are each individually smaller than the rear-only model.
Here's how Wikipedia describes the 85D:
the rear drive unit is replaced by a smaller one to save cost and weight, while the second motor of similar size is added to the front wheels.
However, this discussion suggests that the "P100D" model cars ("P" for "performance") use the full-size rear motor. If that is correct, then I was mistaken about Tesla being able to stop making the larger rear-drive motors, because of course Tesla still makes the "P" cars.
I just checked, and the remaining options are the 75D, the 100D, and the P100D. The "D" means "dual-motor"... these are the all-wheel-drive versions.
This change means Tesla can more or less stop making rear-drive-only motors (just make a few as needed for repairing already-sold rear drive cars).
I looked at the Model S ordering page, and noticed that a lot of stuff that used to be optional is now standard on the Model S. The "smart air suspension" is now standard. The upgraded stereo is no longer a standalone option, but part of a "premium upgrades package" that includes the improved cabin air filter, the better stereo, and the cold-weather package (which also used to be a stand-alone option).
Now your only options are: "premium upgrades package", "enhanced autopilot", "full self-driving", and the rear-facing child seats for the rear cargo area. And probably most people will get the "premium upgrades package", looks worth it to me... and "enhanced autopilot" and "full self-driving" are both pure software upgrades. So really there are only two options now, and one of those is the child seats.
It's just like Apple: they have streamlined their offerings, they will have less to keep track of.
And as noted in the article, this also segments the Model S a bit above the Model 3.
P.S. IMHO Tesla's "most affordable Model S" would be a CPO (a Certified Pre-Owned car, i.e. a used car bought directly through Tesla). Tesla still sells those; you can still get one with the 60 battery if you like. I just checked and the least expensive CPO car it offered me was $40,800 (a 60 battery rear-drive car).
using the backslash for directory paths when every other OS used normal slashes
You overlooked one other OS that matters here: CP/M.
When MS-DOS was first developed, it was not the first DOS on the market; the majority of the business market was using Z-80 processor computers running CP/M. (Home users were on Apple II computers, mostly. Some business users used an Apple II with a CP/M card!) Anyway, MS-DOS looked and worked almost exactly like CP/M. MS-DOS programs were not that different from CP/M, I think deliberately to make it easier to port. The similarities were enough that the company that made CP/M threatened legal action over them. (Bob Zeidman checked the source code and he says no stolen code was present.)
Anyway, the important thing is: CP/M used forward slash as the punctuation for command-line program arguments. Thus, so did MS-DOS.
And nobody was really thinking too much about directory separators because CP/M, and MS-DOS 1.x, did not have directories. They used floppy disks, and those disks just had one directory. Just a flat list of files.
When MS-DOS 2.0 came out, someone was thinking of the slash for directories, because there was an actual command that you could put into your config.sys file that let you switch the character used for command-line switches. This was SWITCHAR and if you set it to - you also set the directory separator to forward slash. It was undocumented! It was never officially supported! And I think MS-DOS 3.0 dropped it and it never returned. (But in Windows, even today, you can just use forward slash as a directory delimiter and it works.)
I think that Microsoft had the opportunity to push on this. Just say "old MS-DOS apps that are using the old APIs can continue to use forward slash for command-line switches, but any program that works with directories should use the dash. It's The New Standard." I think they could have pulled it off, with some grumbling but nothing serious. But either someone at Microsoft was timid, or else they had an argument about this with IBM and lost, I don't know.
But way back in the dawn of time, compatibility with CP/M was the reason why forward slash was reserved as the command-line switch marker.
P.S. I think the registry was a good idea. Having a little database to store options, and have some kind of daemon that owns it, avoids race conditions and is just good sense. However, using an opaque and fragile binary database format was insanity. They could have used a simple text-based format (like.ini files... or, heck, S-expressions!) and saved the world a lot of pain. Or, at least made their binary database less fragile and documented it completely so that third parties could write registry checker tools that could fix corrupted registries or whatever.
Ideally they should have used JSON for the registry, but I'm pretty sure the registry pre-dates Javascript, let alone JSON as an interchange format.
A VR headset would be great if the periscope is actually a ball of cameras pointing in all directions at once, with computers stitching the images together. Then you could just move your head around to look at different stuff.
My guess is that the camera on the periscope looks at one thing at a time, and motors swing it in various directions. So what you need is a control that lets you drive the motors to point the camera. An ideal control would allow for slower and faster running of the motors, perhaps by pushing something a little bit or a lot in the desired direction. Some kind of joystick perhaps.
And if you want a joystick you can do worse than a commercial off-the-shelf product that was made for people to play games vigorously for hours without breaking, and for which you can trivially pack several spares.
Probably someday the periscope really will be a ball of cameras and the VR solution will be the right one.
Note that the F-35 uses a custom VR system so that the pilot can look in any direction and see what's there even if the plane is in the way. (It's stupendously more expensive than an Xbox controller.) I doubt the Navy would shy away from a VR solution if it really was the right solution for the problem.
Put simply if the business isn't relying on seed or other capital investment for operations and expansion then you can't call it a "startup".
Really. So the company I work for, which was profitable from its first week of existence and bootstrapped itself up, was not a startup? Even when it was four guys working out of one of the guy's house?
Four years later, the company took some VC cash to fund some more expansion. Did it then magically become a startup after not having been one before?
I don't like your definition of a "startup". I'll stick with the CFO's definition.
I work for a company that is making a ton of money and serving a lot of customers and has been around for years, but it still considers itself a startup. I wondered about this.
The CFO explained it in an internal meeting: his definition is that a startup is a company that is still focused on growth above all else. And it's true, the company I work for is plowing a lot of revenue into expansion opportunities, going for growth rather than profits.
When a company has a stable position in its market and starts focusing on making lots of money and/or paying out good dividends on its stock, at that point it is definitely no longer a startup.
I don't know how universal this definition of "startup" is but it makes sense to me, and it nicely handles some of the corner cases discussed in the previous threads here today.
If Tesla can sell the same hardware at different price points and still make a profit then the higher price point is simply profiteering. I would rather they sell it at a fair price.
"profiteering" is one way to describe it. "Selling different products that have different profit margins" is another, and IMHO better, way to describe it.
I get it, you have a visceral reaction that this is bad. I feel the same way about how Intel sells deliberately-crippled parts to maximize profits at all levels in the market they serve.
But prices are between a company and their customers. If you don't like how they do things, you don't have to buy the product, that that also doesn't make it immoral (as you implied in your +5 moderated post).
Tesla was trying something new: selling the first battery electric vehicle that doesn't suck. Safe, reliable, fun to drive, and usable for long trips. Nobody had made a car like that before. They weren't sure they would be able to sell enough cars with the bigger battery size, so they offered the 60 with the software limit on size, and tried selling that for a while. It let them set the starting price lower.
Tesla had (and still has) lots of expenses. They had to build their own network of Superchargers. They had to build out their factory. They built their own battery "Gigafactory". All of these investments will make it possible for people to buy the Model 3 at a less-crazy price than the Model S or X. And just maybe someday Tesla will be able to sell a car for the same cost as a Honda Civic, and BEVs will become truly mainstream.
So I am personally happy and grateful that a bunch of rich people spent a bunch of money buying Tesla cars, helping Tesla get to where it could start making the Model 3. And if that means Tesla made a higher profit margin on the fancier cars, I'm personally okay with that.
And by the way, Tesla's battery management software strongly encourages users to avoid charging their cars to 100%. Tesla owners routinely charge to 90% or less to preserver battery life. But since the Tesla 60 battery is actually a larger battery, owners of those cars simply charge them to 100% every day. Also, even a Tesla 60 has dramatically better range than the Nissan Leaf or the Volkswagen eGolf or various other options, yet people buy those. For many users who just want to drive around town, the 60 has plenty of range just the way it is, and they would rather have the car at the lower cost.
Finally, on the gripping hand, Tesla doesn't do this anymore. They now just sell 70 and 90 cars, neither one software-limited. But there are a fair number of 60 cars out there still.
Every new Tesla car (including Model 3) has the full "Hardware 2" platform for self-driving, and even when it's not being used for self-driving it's on and watching the world. Tesla has said that it is already using "fleet learning" to map out roads. This blog post is talking about how radar has problems but is still useful for self-driving, and they are working around the problems:
When the car is approaching an overhead highway road sign positioned on a rise in the road or a bridge where the road dips underneath, this often looks like a collision course. The navigation data and height accuracy of the GPS are not enough to know whether the car will pass under the object or not. By the time the car is close and the road pitch changes, it is too late to brake.
This is where fleet learning comes in handy. Initially, the vehicle fleet will take no action except to note the position of road signs, bridges and other stationary objects, mapping the world according to radar. The car computer will then silently compare when it would have braked to the driver action and upload that to the Tesla database. If several cars drive safely past a given radar object, whether Autopilot is turned on or off, then that object is added to the geocoded whitelist.
In a world with fleet learning this hack will be of very limited effectiveness. The first cars to reach the hacked signs will learn about them and then other cars will know. In the early days of self-driving cars the car can make the human take over and the fleet can learn what the human did.
Sooner or later I imagine there will be an interoperative standard for fleet learning, where all the cars will cooperate instead of only Tesla cars learning from other Tesla cars and so on. All cars would share learning over the Internet. This then suggests an attack where false learning data is injected into the system!
Once the world has "Level 5 self-driving" cars built with no steering wheel or other human controls, this sort of attack could be a bit of a problem and will need to be solved. One idea: if there is an interoperative standard then the Department of Transportation would publish learning data about temporary stop signs or whatever. A new stop sign appearing right where the learning data said it would would be trusted a lot.
I don't think this will be a huge issue though. Self-driving cars will already have to deal with the unexpected, such as a pedestrian jumping out into the road. If you want to get a self-driving car to stop suddenly, just throw a realistic dummy out into the road when it's coming.
I fear that in the real world, the protections around age and any other special category tend to make it more difficult for the "protected" people to get a job in the first place.
If 20 people apply and only one gets hired, it's hard for a person to make a lawsuit claiming he/she was rejected just for being in a category, so there's little down-side for not hiring the protected category person. But if the person is hired and doesn't work out for any reason, the company has to worry about a lawsuit for laying the person off. So there's no down-side for not-hiring and a possible bad down-side for hiring.
Thus my fear that these protections will tend to hurt the very people they were intended to help.
I don't think perfection is attainable. But IMHO the best possible situation would be if everyone had a level playing field (no protections for me because of my age, no protections for you because you are a minority or whatever, etc.) and just hire based on fit.
The history of Silicon Valley includes people with no obvious qualifications getting hired (back in the wilder early days) and going on to do fantastic work. The qualifications are not what makes a good worker, the person is. But the more red tape and danger surrounds firing someone, the more qualifications-oriented the hiring process becomes, as the companies strive to never hire someone who won't work out.
Companies like Google reject lots of excellent people, quite late in the hiring process. It's far better for them to reject lots of good people than to let even one bad person in. Again, I don't think perfection is possible, but I think giving more people a chance to prove themselves in the actual work would do a better job of finding the best people.
There's something to what you say. But AMD's current lineup looks very strong, and AMD should be able to carve out a niche as the price/performance brand.
It was very tough for AMD to compete when they were two generations behind. Now they should do very well for a while. And even if Intel goes to 10 nm, AMD should do okay with 14 nm parts... 14 vs. 10 is an easier battle than 32 vs. 14!
The reason Intel was eating AMD's lunch for over half a decade was that Intel was two generations ahead on processor fab technology, and as a result Intel had an absolutely huge advantage in power efficiency.
AMD made the difficult decision to skip one generation completely and they are now fabbing 14 nm chips; they have caught up to Intel. (Someday Intel will move to 10 nm and the race will continue.)
According to a table released by Intel the top i9 chips will be rated for 165 Watts TDP. AMD's chips are rated for 180 Watts TDP. A 15 Watt difference is not a big deal, and AMD chips are so much less expensive that you will save money even if electricity is expensive where you live.
The most wasteful AMD chips would be the 220 Watt Vishera-core chips... fabbed on 32 nm, ouch. Newegg still sells them but I'd sooner buy a Threadripper.
Could you please provide a list of the "special tax and other benefits" given to oil companies every single year? Since you are saying that there are billions of dollars worth per year, it should be pretty easy to find an example or two.
I keep reading web pages debunking the idea that oil companies get special subsidies, and I haven't ever seen an actual list of the special subsidies, so I'm curious what they are.
gedit is written in C. There is a little bit of Objective-C for Mac OS X support. Then plugins are written in Vala or Python.
Why is this rant-worthy? IMHO Python is a great choice for writing plugins. And for a while GNOME was pushing Vala so that is not a shock.
Seems like Sebastien Wilmet is nakedly trying to encourage people to want gedit to die. After the language rant he says that helping gedit also helps some guy who sells gedit on the Mac. He also rants that gedit ought to be a super-thin shell around his new project Tepl, libraries for text editor features. This is a weird and barely-concealed agenda.
I am not going to volunteer for this, but it's because I am busy, not because I am scared of a project with 4 languages.
Wow. I'm using a browser plugin that blocks JavaScript by default, and so the caption didn't appear for me. When I enable scripts the caption appears, exactly as you described it, and of course it appears in the page source.
So, I thank you for the correction. I don't know what Ubuntu 17.10 will look like in the end.
Also, re-reading that web page he does say that "global menu" is one of the things that won't be present; I didn't recognize the term "global menu" but that is what Ubuntu calls the menu at the top of the screen. So I guess this is actually confirmation that the menus will be per-window like GNOME Shell, and I had it exactly wrong. Sorry, everyone.
The buttons were moved from the right side of the window to the left side because Ubuntu was planning an amazing new feature called "windicators" ("window indicators") which were going to go on the right side of the window bar. These would show, for example, a progress bar for a background task in an app, online/offline indicator for server connection status, etc. My favorite idea: they were supposed to also provide convenient per-app volume control or mute. (PulseAudio does allow per-app volume controls but there isn't any window chrome for it; you have to go to the audio control panel, find the list of running audio apps, and control from there.)
This announcement, that the window buttons are going back to the right side, indicates to me that Ubuntu has officially given up on ever implementing "windicators".
I had thought that Ubuntu was planning to just adopt the GNOME Shell, but that's not their plan. Reading TFS I found out: their plan is to use extensions to change the GNOME Shell experience so that the desktop works more similarly to Unity.
Famously, the GNOME Shell got rid of minimize and maximize buttons completely, opting to keep only the close button.[1] To maximize you snap a window to the top of the screen. There is no minimize, but you can make any number of virtual workspaces and the equivalent of minimize is to send a window to a workspace that is not currently displayed. It's not necessarily a bad way to go, but it's really different from any other desktop environment ever.
The new Ubuntu is going to have a dock, and minimize will make the window disappear the way it does now in Unity, and you will use the dock to re-open the window just as now in Unity.
What about menus... will they be per-window or Mac OS X style? One screenshot (see it here) shows them at the top of the window. Just like Unity.
So the Ubuntu team is going to avoid the needless duplication of effort of making a complete desktop environment, but they will be customizing their GNOME Shell to work pretty much like Ubuntu works today.
I guess I should have expected it but this was surprising news for me. Personally I am still using MATE on my own computers, but I'd rather use a Unity clone than native GNOME Shell.
[1] Note that back in the GNOME 2.x days at Sun Microsystems, Sun paid for usability studies. For GNOME 3.x, a developer made the giant change of removing the minimize button by... thinking about it and talking to two other people on the GNOME 3.x development team. Who needs usability studies? Not the GNOME devs, apparently.
Actual quote: "In the end, I think with GNOME 3 we need to emphasize design coherency and slickness - what is different and better, and that actually is more important than being 100% sure we perfectly meet everybody's workflow." Personally I think the emphasis on "coherency and slickness" vs. "workflow" was a mistake, which is why I'm still using MATE. I just want to get my work done with minimal distractions.
there are countless Fonts on 'free' websites that aren't really free, but merely have the copyright info stripped from the headers and been republished countless of times on 'free font' cd collections over the past 25 years, shrouding their true origins
That's extremely interesting and a problem. Now it make more sense to me why someone would license a commercial font.
It seems that someone should make a project similar to Project Gutenberg but for fonts: provide a central clearing-house of free fonts, but have staff that actually traces the origins of the fonts to establish the actual free status of the fonts.
A company could also charge for a collection of vetted fonts that are free for all uses, but it might be hard to charge money in a cluttered field with so many free font sources (of dubious provenance, but how many font users are careful about that?), so it would likely be better to have a Project Gutenberg sort of thing that just runs on contributions.
This seems to me like a compelling argument for never licensing a commercial font, and just using the large and growing pool of free fonts.
Much as my personal policy for software is that if there is FOSS that can solve my problem, I try to use that even if there is something better that costs money. I don't even want to have to keep track of how many copies I have installed, how many backups I have made, etc.
That "Vamps" logo is pretty straightforward, and I'll bet it wouldn't be that hard to find some free font that would look about as nice.
Another good option: pay a free-lance artist (or even an art-college student) to design the logo, with a clear contract saying there will be no royalties.
As others have noted, the music labels are in the business of charging royalties and it's stupid for one to step on a licensing landmine like this.
Even the Python folks tell you to write your high performance code in C or C++.
True, but one of the smartest things Guido van Rossum did early on was to make it easy to interface C and C++ code to Python. It's why SciPy is winning so big in the sciences; it's the convenience of Python with the performance of Fortran. The libraries that do the work for SciPy are old numerical libraries that are very well optimized, very well debugged, very well understood, and very very useful. So, you can work in Fortran... or you can work in Python, enjoying the much friendlier interpreted language, and barely give up any performance vs. the pure Fortran. The hard work is done in Fortran, and the overhead of using Python to set up your calculations is trivial compared to the work of the calculations themselves.
And pretty much every library you might want to use has already been glued into Python by someone. Computer vision? Running code on a GPU? Signal processing? Solving equations? Whatever you need to do, you can do it conveniently in Python and it will be fast.
So yeah, if you write your own matrix multiply in pure Python it will be roughly 50x slower than compiled C. But nobody does that, and in the real world Python is fast enough to do real work.
Briefly: this fiasco went on for weeks without anyone mentioning any concern about the female autistic housemate, so Larry Garfield doesn't believe this current statement. He believes that the actual reason at the core of this is intolerance for his "alternative" lifestyle. And he is severing all ties with Drupal:
At this point, I cannot in good conscience continue to be an advocate for Drupal in the broader tech community. Though it pains me to say it after 12 years with this project, to be stabbed in the back by so many, even if they're a minority, is unbearable. Doubly so when it's by the project lead, a man whom I had considered a friend.
It's difficult for me, as a total outsider, to decide whom to believe in this he said/they said situation. But I'm inclined to believe Garfield because of this part of his blog posting:
...I don't know what "authorities" Megan refers to, but two autism specialists, a social worker, and three police officers all agreed that nothing illicit, immoral, or illegal was happening, and everything was entirely fine and consensual. I would consider them reasonable "authorities".
Note that therapists and social workers are "mandatory reporters", and would have been legally required to report to the police if they felt the situation was abusive.
Given that the police and social workers had already focused their attention on Larry Garfield's personal life and his situation with the autistic female housemate, and nobody threw any red flags that the situation was abusive, it's difficult to believe that the Drupal project's lawyers ordered the Drupal leadership to eject Garfield over suspicions of abuse. It's easier to believe that this is cover for a decision already made for other reasons.
Responding to cyberstalking, prejudice, and blackmail with... cyberstalking, threats, and blackmail? No. NO! Even if you're trying to support me, NO! I do not want any such support.
I'm not a CPU expert but it seems clear that L1 and L2 cache is per-core (makes sense) but L3 cache is shared... I'm going to guess that a group of 4 cores shares one 32 MB cache, since 4 * 4 is 16.
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I've always wondered how many people would be driving electric cars if it wasn't for the state/Fed subsidies (rebates)
Our tax policy includes rebates and incentives to encourage people to do things. For example, giving to charity.
Policy makers were hoping people would do things like switch to driving electric cars. They set up the tax rebates accordingly.
Tesla customers getting a tax rebate on Tesla electric cars? That's the system working as intended. The government wanted to encourage the switch to electric cars, and it's working.
Note that the incentives are really just accelerating a process that would have happened on its own. If BEVs were significantly less expensive than ICE vehicles, people would choose to buy them even without tax incentives. The tax incentives are intended to jump-start this, and help BEVs get over the initial hump.
Selling lots of cars helps enable economies of scale; economies of scale help cars cost less; cars costing less helps sell more cars. It's hard to get the cycle going when your initial low-quantity sales are expensive cars.
Also note that when government picks winners and losers, government tends to do a stupid job. Consider the Obama administration loans to Solyndra... a total debacle. But if government is going to interfere with the free market, IMHO the BEV tax credit is one of the best things they could do. Customers are still spending their own money, so they won't be buying lousy cars even with the BEV tax credit; it should help good products get established with little risk of Solyndra-style debacles. And in the specific case of Tesla I think it's clear that it worked out well.
or other benefits like Leaf's free charging.
Nissan provided that to encourage customers to buy their brand of BEV. Nothing wrong with that.
I see people driving $100k Teslas, and they're not doing it to be green. It's the new status symbol of wealth (used to be BMW/Benz).
It's true that Tesla has grabbed most of the "large luxury car" sales in markets where they are competing. However I don't think that it is just, or mostly, that rich people want to show off their wealth. Tesla makes cars that are safe, reliable, and fun to drive; and for rich people the cost doesn't seem too high, so why not buy one?
Plus I've read a lot of discussion of Teslas online, and I've repeatedly seen comments like "Well, I think the Tesla interiors are cheap. My BMWs and Mercedes are much nicer, let alone my Bentley. I sold the Tesla and bought a Jaguar." (I just made that up but it's similar to real things I have read.) It sure doesn't seem to me like really rich people think a Tesla is a mark of status.
it kind of defeats the purpose of security if a simple device such as a ring can disable it.
I know! I just found out that the lock on my house can be defeated by a simple device... a piece of metal with some notches carved into it! How did they overlook this?!?
You do realize the the rear motor in a "D" model is the exact same rear motor as comes in the non-"D" version....ya, didn't think you did.
Please provide a reference link so I can read about this. I have read that on a "D" model Tesla, the two motors are each individually smaller than the rear-only model.
Here's how Wikipedia describes the 85D:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S#Dual-motor_all-wheel-drive_versions
However, this discussion suggests that the "P100D" model cars ("P" for "performance") use the full-size rear motor. If that is correct, then I was mistaken about Tesla being able to stop making the larger rear-drive motors, because of course Tesla still makes the "P" cars.
https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/why-does-dual-motor-get-better-mileage
I just checked, and the remaining options are the 75D, the 100D, and the P100D. The "D" means "dual-motor"... these are the all-wheel-drive versions.
This change means Tesla can more or less stop making rear-drive-only motors (just make a few as needed for repairing already-sold rear drive cars).
I looked at the Model S ordering page, and noticed that a lot of stuff that used to be optional is now standard on the Model S. The "smart air suspension" is now standard. The upgraded stereo is no longer a standalone option, but part of a "premium upgrades package" that includes the improved cabin air filter, the better stereo, and the cold-weather package (which also used to be a stand-alone option).
Now your only options are: "premium upgrades package", "enhanced autopilot", "full self-driving", and the rear-facing child seats for the rear cargo area. And probably most people will get the "premium upgrades package", looks worth it to me... and "enhanced autopilot" and "full self-driving" are both pure software upgrades. So really there are only two options now, and one of those is the child seats.
It's just like Apple: they have streamlined their offerings, they will have less to keep track of.
And as noted in the article, this also segments the Model S a bit above the Model 3.
P.S. IMHO Tesla's "most affordable Model S" would be a CPO (a Certified Pre-Owned car, i.e. a used car bought directly through Tesla). Tesla still sells those; you can still get one with the 60 battery if you like. I just checked and the least expensive CPO car it offered me was $40,800 (a 60 battery rear-drive car).
using the backslash for directory paths when every other OS used normal slashes
You overlooked one other OS that matters here: CP/M.
When MS-DOS was first developed, it was not the first DOS on the market; the majority of the business market was using Z-80 processor computers running CP/M. (Home users were on Apple II computers, mostly. Some business users used an Apple II with a CP/M card!) Anyway, MS-DOS looked and worked almost exactly like CP/M. MS-DOS programs were not that different from CP/M, I think deliberately to make it easier to port. The similarities were enough that the company that made CP/M threatened legal action over them. (Bob Zeidman checked the source code and he says no stolen code was present.)
Anyway, the important thing is: CP/M used forward slash as the punctuation for command-line program arguments. Thus, so did MS-DOS.
And nobody was really thinking too much about directory separators because CP/M, and MS-DOS 1.x, did not have directories. They used floppy disks, and those disks just had one directory. Just a flat list of files.
When MS-DOS 2.0 came out, someone was thinking of the slash for directories, because there was an actual command that you could put into your config.sys file that let you switch the character used for command-line switches. This was SWITCHAR and if you set it to - you also set the directory separator to forward slash. It was undocumented! It was never officially supported! And I think MS-DOS 3.0 dropped it and it never returned. (But in Windows, even today, you can just use forward slash as a directory delimiter and it works.)
I think that Microsoft had the opportunity to push on this. Just say "old MS-DOS apps that are using the old APIs can continue to use forward slash for command-line switches, but any program that works with directories should use the dash. It's The New Standard." I think they could have pulled it off, with some grumbling but nothing serious. But either someone at Microsoft was timid, or else they had an argument about this with IBM and lost, I don't know.
But way back in the dawn of time, compatibility with CP/M was the reason why forward slash was reserved as the command-line switch marker.
P.S. I think the registry was a good idea. Having a little database to store options, and have some kind of daemon that owns it, avoids race conditions and is just good sense. However, using an opaque and fragile binary database format was insanity. They could have used a simple text-based format (like .ini files... or, heck, S-expressions!) and saved the world a lot of pain. Or, at least made their binary database less fragile and documented it completely so that third parties could write registry checker tools that could fix corrupted registries or whatever.
Ideally they should have used JSON for the registry, but I'm pretty sure the registry pre-dates Javascript, let alone JSON as an interchange format.
A VR headset would be great if the periscope is actually a ball of cameras pointing in all directions at once, with computers stitching the images together. Then you could just move your head around to look at different stuff.
My guess is that the camera on the periscope looks at one thing at a time, and motors swing it in various directions. So what you need is a control that lets you drive the motors to point the camera. An ideal control would allow for slower and faster running of the motors, perhaps by pushing something a little bit or a lot in the desired direction. Some kind of joystick perhaps.
And if you want a joystick you can do worse than a commercial off-the-shelf product that was made for people to play games vigorously for hours without breaking, and for which you can trivially pack several spares.
Probably someday the periscope really will be a ball of cameras and the VR solution will be the right one.
Note that the F-35 uses a custom VR system so that the pilot can look in any direction and see what's there even if the plane is in the way. (It's stupendously more expensive than an Xbox controller.) I doubt the Navy would shy away from a VR solution if it really was the right solution for the problem.
https://www.f35.com/about/capabilities/helmet
Put simply if the business isn't relying on seed or other capital investment for operations and expansion then you can't call it a "startup".
Really. So the company I work for, which was profitable from its first week of existence and bootstrapped itself up, was not a startup? Even when it was four guys working out of one of the guy's house?
Four years later, the company took some VC cash to fund some more expansion. Did it then magically become a startup after not having been one before?
I don't like your definition of a "startup". I'll stick with the CFO's definition.
P.S. One thing we can all agree on: the key attribute of a startup is its ability to grow. As Graham explains, a startup is a company designed to scale very quickly.
I work for a company that is making a ton of money and serving a lot of customers and has been around for years, but it still considers itself a startup. I wondered about this.
The CFO explained it in an internal meeting: his definition is that a startup is a company that is still focused on growth above all else. And it's true, the company I work for is plowing a lot of revenue into expansion opportunities, going for growth rather than profits.
When a company has a stable position in its market and starts focusing on making lots of money and/or paying out good dividends on its stock, at that point it is definitely no longer a startup.
I don't know how universal this definition of "startup" is but it makes sense to me, and it nicely handles some of the corner cases discussed in the previous threads here today.
If Tesla can sell the same hardware at different price points and still make a profit then the higher price point is simply profiteering. I would rather they sell it at a fair price.
"profiteering" is one way to describe it. "Selling different products that have different profit margins" is another, and IMHO better, way to describe it.
I get it, you have a visceral reaction that this is bad. I feel the same way about how Intel sells deliberately-crippled parts to maximize profits at all levels in the market they serve.
But prices are between a company and their customers. If you don't like how they do things, you don't have to buy the product, that that also doesn't make it immoral (as you implied in your +5 moderated post).
Tesla was trying something new: selling the first battery electric vehicle that doesn't suck. Safe, reliable, fun to drive, and usable for long trips. Nobody had made a car like that before. They weren't sure they would be able to sell enough cars with the bigger battery size, so they offered the 60 with the software limit on size, and tried selling that for a while. It let them set the starting price lower.
Tesla had (and still has) lots of expenses. They had to build their own network of Superchargers. They had to build out their factory. They built their own battery "Gigafactory". All of these investments will make it possible for people to buy the Model 3 at a less-crazy price than the Model S or X. And just maybe someday Tesla will be able to sell a car for the same cost as a Honda Civic, and BEVs will become truly mainstream.
So I am personally happy and grateful that a bunch of rich people spent a bunch of money buying Tesla cars, helping Tesla get to where it could start making the Model 3. And if that means Tesla made a higher profit margin on the fancier cars, I'm personally okay with that.
And by the way, Tesla's battery management software strongly encourages users to avoid charging their cars to 100%. Tesla owners routinely charge to 90% or less to preserver battery life. But since the Tesla 60 battery is actually a larger battery, owners of those cars simply charge them to 100% every day. Also, even a Tesla 60 has dramatically better range than the Nissan Leaf or the Volkswagen eGolf or various other options, yet people buy those. For many users who just want to drive around town, the 60 has plenty of range just the way it is, and they would rather have the car at the lower cost.
Finally, on the gripping hand, Tesla doesn't do this anymore. They now just sell 70 and 90 cars, neither one software-limited. But there are a fair number of 60 cars out there still.
Every new Tesla car (including Model 3) has the full "Hardware 2" platform for self-driving, and even when it's not being used for self-driving it's on and watching the world. Tesla has said that it is already using "fleet learning" to map out roads. This blog post is talking about how radar has problems but is still useful for self-driving, and they are working around the problems:
https://www.tesla.com/blog/upgrading-autopilot-seeing-world-radar
In a world with fleet learning this hack will be of very limited effectiveness. The first cars to reach the hacked signs will learn about them and then other cars will know. In the early days of self-driving cars the car can make the human take over and the fleet can learn what the human did.
Sooner or later I imagine there will be an interoperative standard for fleet learning, where all the cars will cooperate instead of only Tesla cars learning from other Tesla cars and so on. All cars would share learning over the Internet. This then suggests an attack where false learning data is injected into the system!
Once the world has "Level 5 self-driving" cars built with no steering wheel or other human controls, this sort of attack could be a bit of a problem and will need to be solved. One idea: if there is an interoperative standard then the Department of Transportation would publish learning data about temporary stop signs or whatever. A new stop sign appearing right where the learning data said it would would be trusted a lot.
I don't think this will be a huge issue though. Self-driving cars will already have to deal with the unexpected, such as a pedestrian jumping out into the road. If you want to get a self-driving car to stop suddenly, just throw a realistic dummy out into the road when it's coming.
I fear that in the real world, the protections around age and any other special category tend to make it more difficult for the "protected" people to get a job in the first place.
If 20 people apply and only one gets hired, it's hard for a person to make a lawsuit claiming he/she was rejected just for being in a category, so there's little down-side for not hiring the protected category person. But if the person is hired and doesn't work out for any reason, the company has to worry about a lawsuit for laying the person off. So there's no down-side for not-hiring and a possible bad down-side for hiring.
Thus my fear that these protections will tend to hurt the very people they were intended to help.
I don't think perfection is attainable. But IMHO the best possible situation would be if everyone had a level playing field (no protections for me because of my age, no protections for you because you are a minority or whatever, etc.) and just hire based on fit.
The history of Silicon Valley includes people with no obvious qualifications getting hired (back in the wilder early days) and going on to do fantastic work. The qualifications are not what makes a good worker, the person is. But the more red tape and danger surrounds firing someone, the more qualifications-oriented the hiring process becomes, as the companies strive to never hire someone who won't work out.
Companies like Google reject lots of excellent people, quite late in the hiring process. It's far better for them to reject lots of good people than to let even one bad person in. Again, I don't think perfection is possible, but I think giving more people a chance to prove themselves in the actual work would do a better job of finding the best people.
Then Intel screw up again and the cycle repeats.
There's something to what you say. But AMD's current lineup looks very strong, and AMD should be able to carve out a niche as the price/performance brand.
It was very tough for AMD to compete when they were two generations behind. Now they should do very well for a while. And even if Intel goes to 10 nm, AMD should do okay with 14 nm parts... 14 vs. 10 is an easier battle than 32 vs. 14!
The reason Intel was eating AMD's lunch for over half a decade was that Intel was two generations ahead on processor fab technology, and as a result Intel had an absolutely huge advantage in power efficiency.
AMD made the difficult decision to skip one generation completely and they are now fabbing 14 nm chips; they have caught up to Intel. (Someday Intel will move to 10 nm and the race will continue.)
According to a table released by Intel the top i9 chips will be rated for 165 Watts TDP. AMD's chips are rated for 180 Watts TDP. A 15 Watt difference is not a big deal, and AMD chips are so much less expensive that you will save money even if electricity is expensive where you live.
The most wasteful AMD chips would be the 220 Watt Vishera-core chips... fabbed on 32 nm, ouch. Newegg still sells them but I'd sooner buy a Threadripper.
Sorry for the bad link. I copied it right out of my browser; I blame the Forbes site.
This is a good URL, I tested it:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/drillinginfo/2016/02/22/debunking-myths-about-federal-oil-gas-subsidies/
P.S. If this link somehow fails, search for "Debunking Myths About Federal Oil & Gas Subsidies by Len Tesoro"
Could you please provide a list of the "special tax and other benefits" given to oil companies every single year? Since you are saying that there are billions of dollars worth per year, it should be pretty easy to find an example or two.
I keep reading web pages debunking the idea that oil companies get special subsidies, and I haven't ever seen an actual list of the special subsidies, so I'm curious what they are.
gedit is written in C. There is a little bit of Objective-C for Mac OS X support. Then plugins are written in Vala or Python.
Why is this rant-worthy? IMHO Python is a great choice for writing plugins. And for a while GNOME was pushing Vala so that is not a shock.
Seems like Sebastien Wilmet is nakedly trying to encourage people to want gedit to die. After the language rant he says that helping gedit also helps some guy who sells gedit on the Mac. He also rants that gedit ought to be a super-thin shell around his new project Tepl, libraries for text editor features. This is a weird and barely-concealed agenda.
I am not going to volunteer for this, but it's because I am busy, not because I am scared of a project with 4 languages.
Wow. I'm using a browser plugin that blocks JavaScript by default, and so the caption didn't appear for me. When I enable scripts the caption appears, exactly as you described it, and of course it appears in the page source.
So, I thank you for the correction. I don't know what Ubuntu 17.10 will look like in the end.
Also, re-reading that web page he does say that "global menu" is one of the things that won't be present; I didn't recognize the term "global menu" but that is what Ubuntu calls the menu at the top of the screen. So I guess this is actually confirmation that the menus will be per-window like GNOME Shell, and I had it exactly wrong. Sorry, everyone.
The buttons were moved from the right side of the window to the left side because Ubuntu was planning an amazing new feature called "windicators" ("window indicators") which were going to go on the right side of the window bar. These would show, for example, a progress bar for a background task in an app, online/offline indicator for server connection status, etc. My favorite idea: they were supposed to also provide convenient per-app volume control or mute. (PulseAudio does allow per-app volume controls but there isn't any window chrome for it; you have to go to the audio control panel, find the list of running audio apps, and control from there.)
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/333
Windicators... never happened.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/58466/what-is-the-current-status-of-windicators
This announcement, that the window buttons are going back to the right side, indicates to me that Ubuntu has officially given up on ever implementing "windicators".
I had thought that Ubuntu was planning to just adopt the GNOME Shell, but that's not their plan. Reading TFS I found out: their plan is to use extensions to change the GNOME Shell experience so that the desktop works more similarly to Unity.
Famously, the GNOME Shell got rid of minimize and maximize buttons completely, opting to keep only the close button.[1] To maximize you snap a window to the top of the screen. There is no minimize, but you can make any number of virtual workspaces and the equivalent of minimize is to send a window to a workspace that is not currently displayed. It's not necessarily a bad way to go, but it's really different from any other desktop environment ever.
The new Ubuntu is going to have a dock, and minimize will make the window disappear the way it does now in Unity, and you will use the dock to re-open the window just as now in Unity.
What about menus... will they be per-window or Mac OS X style? One screenshot (see it here) shows them at the top of the window. Just like Unity.
So the Ubuntu team is going to avoid the needless duplication of effort of making a complete desktop environment, but they will be customizing their GNOME Shell to work pretty much like Ubuntu works today.
I guess I should have expected it but this was surprising news for me. Personally I am still using MATE on my own computers, but I'd rather use a Unity clone than native GNOME Shell.
[1] Note that back in the GNOME 2.x days at Sun Microsystems, Sun paid for usability studies. For GNOME 3.x, a developer made the giant change of removing the minimize button by... thinking about it and talking to two other people on the GNOME 3.x development team. Who needs usability studies? Not the GNOME devs, apparently.
Actual quote: "In the end, I think with GNOME 3 we need to emphasize design coherency and slickness - what is different and better, and that actually is more important than being 100% sure we perfectly meet everybody's workflow." Personally I think the emphasis on "coherency and slickness" vs. "workflow" was a mistake, which is why I'm still using MATE. I just want to get my work done with minimal distractions.
there are countless Fonts on 'free' websites that aren't really free, but merely have the copyright info stripped from the headers and been republished countless of times on 'free font' cd collections over the past 25 years, shrouding their true origins
That's extremely interesting and a problem. Now it make more sense to me why someone would license a commercial font.
It seems that someone should make a project similar to Project Gutenberg but for fonts: provide a central clearing-house of free fonts, but have staff that actually traces the origins of the fonts to establish the actual free status of the fonts.
A company could also charge for a collection of vetted fonts that are free for all uses, but it might be hard to charge money in a cluttered field with so many free font sources (of dubious provenance, but how many font users are careful about that?), so it would likely be better to have a Project Gutenberg sort of thing that just runs on contributions.
This seems to me like a compelling argument for never licensing a commercial font, and just using the large and growing pool of free fonts.
Much as my personal policy for software is that if there is FOSS that can solve my problem, I try to use that even if there is something better that costs money. I don't even want to have to keep track of how many copies I have installed, how many backups I have made, etc.
That "Vamps" logo is pretty straightforward, and I'll bet it wouldn't be that hard to find some free font that would look about as nice.
Another good option: pay a free-lance artist (or even an art-college student) to design the logo, with a clear contract saying there will be no royalties.
As others have noted, the music labels are in the business of charging royalties and it's stupid for one to step on a licensing landmine like this.
Even the Python folks tell you to write your high performance code in C or C++.
True, but one of the smartest things Guido van Rossum did early on was to make it easy to interface C and C++ code to Python. It's why SciPy is winning so big in the sciences; it's the convenience of Python with the performance of Fortran. The libraries that do the work for SciPy are old numerical libraries that are very well optimized, very well debugged, very well understood, and very very useful. So, you can work in Fortran... or you can work in Python, enjoying the much friendlier interpreted language, and barely give up any performance vs. the pure Fortran. The hard work is done in Fortran, and the overhead of using Python to set up your calculations is trivial compared to the work of the calculations themselves.
https://www.scipy.org/
Python also provides a "lab notebook" environment through the Jupyter project. Nobody is going to try to use Fortran or C directly in the notebook.
http://jupyter.org/
https://www.datacamp.com/community/tutorials/tutorial-jupyter-notebook
And pretty much every library you might want to use has already been glued into Python by someone. Computer vision? Running code on a GPU? Signal processing? Solving equations? Whatever you need to do, you can do it conveniently in Python and it will be fast.
So yeah, if you write your own matrix multiply in pure Python it will be roughly 50x slower than compiled C. But nobody does that, and in the real world Python is fast enough to do real work.
There are no Python to machine code compilers out there.
Interestingly, you are incorrect. There is one: PyPy. It's Python written in Python. And it's fast!
http://pypy.org/
https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-part-5
Briefly: this fiasco went on for weeks without anyone mentioning any concern about the female autistic housemate, so Larry Garfield doesn't believe this current statement. He believes that the actual reason at the core of this is intolerance for his "alternative" lifestyle. And he is severing all ties with Drupal:
It's difficult for me, as a total outsider, to decide whom to believe in this he said/they said situation. But I'm inclined to believe Garfield because of this part of his blog posting:
Given that the police and social workers had already focused their attention on Larry Garfield's personal life and his situation with the autistic female housemate, and nobody threw any red flags that the situation was abusive, it's difficult to believe that the Drupal project's lawyers ordered the Drupal leadership to eject Garfield over suspicions of abuse. It's easier to believe that this is cover for a decision already made for other reasons.
P.S. Garfield racked up some points with me for this blog post: https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-dont-go-low
(bolding and italics in the original)
And naturally, right after I posted the parent, I found the cache sizes.
These are for a 16-core Threadripper 1950X:
L1 instruction cache: 32 KB x 16
L1 data cache: 64 KB x 16
L2 cache: 512 KB x 16
L3: 32 MB x 4
http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-threadripper-1950x-cpu-performance-benchmarks-leak/
https://browser.primatelabs.com/v4/cpu/3324737
I'm not a CPU expert but it seems clear that L1 and L2 cache is per-core (makes sense) but L3 cache is shared... I'm going to guess that a group of 4 cores shares one 32 MB cache, since 4 * 4 is 16.