3: Thinness of device and bezels. People want the notch and wall to wall screens. Because of this, the thicker phones that allow for easy battery replacement have gone on the wayside.
People, maybe, but not me. I don't. I want a phone that I can hold in my hand without realizing I've forgotten to turn it off, and have it NOT dial Aunt Mabel because my fingers curled ever so slightly over the front face. I want a phone that will recognize touches from the hand that's operating it NOT the hand that's holding it. In other words: I WANT BEZELS.
I'm in a similar boat: when a manufacturer charges too much for a replacement bit for their equipment that was incredibly expensive to begin with, I tell them, as an example, "too bad, you lost the sale by asking for $200 for a spare battery because I'll have my staff make one up from $10 in bits in about 1/2 an hour; had you priced it at a reasonable amount, you'd neither have lost this sale, nor have lost the goodwill of my laboratory; since I work for a Big Name University, people copy my techniques, and your equipment will no longer get my recommendation." And I follow through with the threat. If the company has a booth at the annual conference in my field (which is frelling huge), I go to the staff and complain. When they see Big Name University on my badge, they usually listen. As a result, in one case at least, they have reversed themselves and provided me with the service or pricing they should have in the first place.
I remember an article in Scientific American when I was a kid (decades ago) that described cement research. The one idea that stuck with me is that cement failure is precipitated by mechanical imperfections -- that much isn't so suprising -- which in cement are air bubbles. Remove the air bubbles and cement becomes as strong as aluminum, albeit considerably heavier. They demonstrated this remarkable property by making car springs out of void-free cement!
People confuse Moore's law with performance. Moore observed that the total number of transistors on a chip was doubling every 18 months. For a long time, that meant that the clock frequency was also doubling.
Then, a nasty habit of physics to smack us in the phase --- err, face --- came along in the form of speed of light limitations. Given the size of contemporary chips, it just is not (and is unlikely to ever be, if what we know about fundamental physics is correct) possible to communicate from one side of a 1 cm die to the other much faster than in the range of a handful of gigahertz clock speeds, give-or-take. Even with photons going in straight lines in perfect vacuum (none of which happens on a chip) the best you could hope for would be a 30 GHz clock rate, a paltry ten times faster than today's CPUs.
One obvious solution is to make circuits that are smaller, and thus we started to get more CPUs on a single die. Still, those CPUs need to synchronize with each other, the cache system, etc., so there remain chip-spanning communications constraints.
The limits on the size of transistors, and thus perhaps on the total number on a chip, are looming but haven't arrived yet. The limits of raw clock speed most definitely have. It is safe to say that our chips will continue to get faster for a while, but the heady days of generation-to-generation massive improvements in single-thread CPU performance are over.
I wonder how can be safe to have something like a radio frequency emitter strong enough to induce usable current in a coil (which is the operating principle of a transformer) leaning against a delicate electronic device (the cell phone).
Screw the phone, how safe can it be to have a 20W (ok, 18W in the GP) directional RF transmitter in your house, likely on your bedside stand, likely aimed exactly so it is irradiating you for 8 hours per day as you sleep? Not something I'd want.
The article mentions the Boston subway system frequently, but does not mention that ridership is way, way up since the Great Recession (almost 25% on the heavy rail portion of the subway, source: MBTA "Ridership Trends Final 022717", also see http://www.t4ma.org/boston_is_...). While there are plenty of reasons to dislike the subway system in Boston (including rampant corruption, gross ineptitude, poor management, inadequate maintenance, etc.), it is working at capacity during rush hour, and there are well-publicised plans to expand capacity. It's not clear how much more room there is for expansion, however, as, for example, the Red Line trains run every 3 minutes during rush hour, and need to maintain a minimum separation.
Plants need water, generally speaking. And, generally speaking, there isn't much of that on Mars since, as you point out, it's largely desert-like.
So, some other method is going to be required for Martian use, and we can reasonably expect that it will not be so useful for terrestrial use because the conditions are so different.
the obvious solution to this is to have partitions inside the ship, to limit the amount of shift possible.
As others have pointed out, this idea becomes impractical for various reasons.
A perhaps better solution is to control liquification to a greater degree. One idea that comes to mind is to lower the ratio of solid to water during loading, so as to ease the loading process and better even-out the cargo, and then raise the ratio by pumping out some of the water, locking the load into place. During unloading, the reverse happens.
The extra time required can be mitigated by performing some of the pumping out in the relatively calm waters near the port upon departure, and by pumping in solar-distilled water upon approach to the arrival port.
During a crisis, you respond with whatever is necessary to fight the crisis. Then you present the bill. If you expect repeat business, and run an honest and honorable ship, you make sure the bill represents an accurate and reasonable charge for the services provided. Note that reasonable in this case may be above normal charges due to exigent circumstances, but the charges should not be excessive.
If you instead do what Verizon is reported to have done, and directly impede crisis response, you should expect a lawsuit for the value of the destroyed land and property. What's the legal theory about damages due to inaction called, negligence? In any case, here, that amount of money is going to hurt.
Not per year, but once. The CO2 is sequestered during the making of the mineral, which is MgCO3. The making of this mineral (which the report claims to have accelerated at room temperature, thus with limited requirement of energy input) is a one-time effort. Then, to sequester more CO2, you have to make more mineral.
It's the polystyrene microspheres that are the interesting part, because they can be reused. The article does not say how you go about separating the polystyrene from the magnesite, though, and that process might be energy-intensive.
There is no need for your hot water heater to be online. Nor for your watch. Or your lightbulbs. Or oven, piano, fireplace, thermostat, fire alarm, bed, doorbell, garage door opener, iron, washer, dryer, or any of the IoT things, really. It's all artifical demand, and hopefully like the artificial demand for 3D televisions that self-extinguished in the face of lackluster consumer reception, the IoT will go away once the market doesn't support it.
Your refrigerator needs more insulation, not to run an operating system.
The right answer is: for a low-volume workload like you get in small rural towns, there isn't much of a real need for modern electronics. Really, there isn't. While it might be BORING to fill out 100 trash permits a day in cursive, it really doesn't take that long, especially when you compare it to a hunt-and-peck typist who then has to print out the resulting form (and who is still going to be bored doing their job with a keyboard). Computers are not always the answer.
My hometown, while neither so small nor so rural, does lots of stuff with paper and pen. I'm happy because it means (a) there are fewer computers so the TCO is low compared to a paperless office, (b) our records are less apt to be stolen by some pimple-faced goon because they are not electronic, and (c) lower TCO means lower property taxes. Oh, and it means that when I need to find out where the sewer lines were laid 50+ years ago on my property, the piece of paper is still there, fully legible, and doesn't need special software to be read.
Call me a luddite (wouldn't be the first time), but I believe in using the right tool for the job. Sometimes that means using a computer, sometimes it does not.
While the images they have shown as examples are really pretty impressive, given that they're using a training set of Image A versus Image A Plus Noise, the problem is akin to blind source separation (BSS). There's been quite a lot of work done on BSS, much of which is very impressive (and based on neural nets).
The critical issue is to see what happens when they take a real photograph that has not been adulterated to add noise, and improve that. Will their model of a noiseless source image with additive noise still hold? The article doesn't touch upon that critical test, unfortunately.
The results they show are very, very cool, though. And if they hold up for MRI work, it would be a game-changer in the medical field. The article shows an MRI adulterated with noise, their recovered image, and the noiseless ground truth. A better test would be to take an MRI that was scanned for too short a time (and thus is noisy), and compare their extraction against an MRI with identical scanning parameters, except for normal imaging time. MRI magnet time is expensive; if it can be reduced by 50% and get equivalent image quality, that's a huge advance.
From what I recall reading on Slashdot, this issue is raised nearly every time there's an upgrade to iOS and the reason is that while the basic upgrade happens right away to ensure usability as quickly as possible, there's a ton of stuff that happens in the background for some time to come. It's the background activity that appears to shorten the battery usability. Once the background activity is done, back to normal, more-or-less.
Or so I've read. Personally, I don't own an Apple device of any sort so I can neither confirm nor dispute. Don't blame the messenger.
The revolution came from stable, standardized algorithms that allowed custom hardware to be built. Doing video decoding on general-purpose CPUs is never going to hold a candle to a custom H.264 chip.
I believe in the hair salon case the recording states right at the start,
"Hi, I'm calling to book a women's haircut for a client."
But additional evidence that it is a staged call beyond the salon not stating the business name is that the person at the salon doesn't ask for a contact phone number for the client. That struck me as odd. Maybe that was edited out?
The summary and a nice excerpt from linked articles by Okian Warrior above pretty well says that the rats were so voraciously feeding on the eggs of indigenous birds that they were driving them to the edge of extinction. I sure hope that there are indeed knock on effects, like rebound of the affected species!
No, obviously it isn't. But not paying attention to UI suggests that there might well be an equivalent lack of attention given to inner workings including, the flavor of the month, security and privacy.
It's just like the infamous no-brown-m&m-s clause in Van Halen's contracts. That clause was long held to be the pinnacle of rock-and-roll excess, but in actuality, it wasn't about the preferences of the band members for snack foods. Rather it was an indicator the band used to judge how carefully the venue operator had read the contract and thus had prepared the important items like structural integrity of the stage, appropriate power feeds, evacuation routes, etc.
If someone can't get the obvious, glaring things right, they can't be trusted to get the hidden details right, either.
As a business owner, you would not call up your suppliers and say "We've had a really great year, so go ahead and charge us extra for everything we order!"
As a (small) business owner, that's almost EXACTLY what I do. And when we have a lean year, I have the benefit of flexibility from our suppliers through the good will that being generous during the good times creates. Bear in mind, however, that ours is a small business, and over 90% of our purchases are from small businesses where I know the owner's name and have their personal phone number. And vice-versa, of course.
I wouldn't expect a larger business to act that way, on either the sell side or the buy side. But that's one of the nice things about doing business on the small side.
I think you have the progressive and regressive labels switched.
In particular here...
A progressive believes that, even if what one says is terrible and disgusting, people have the right to express their views.
In my experience, those who label themselves as progressives will shout down differing opinions rather than allow them to be heard. I have many, many Thanksgiving dinners to hold up as proof.
Cut the tress down, outgas them under controlled conditions and reclaim lots of good chemical feedstock, crush the remaining carbon into lumps, and use them to fill up the massive holes from coal mining. Plant a new set of trees, and repeat. It's more-or-less the reverse of what we've been doing.
For extra credit, power the mechanical parts of the process from solar.
Slashdot Mirror
3: Thinness of device and bezels. People want the notch and wall to wall screens. Because of this, the thicker phones that allow for easy battery replacement have gone on the wayside.
People, maybe, but not me. I don't. I want a phone that I can hold in my hand without realizing I've forgotten to turn it off, and have it NOT dial Aunt Mabel because my fingers curled ever so slightly over the front face. I want a phone that will recognize touches from the hand that's operating it NOT the hand that's holding it. In other words: I WANT BEZELS.
I'm in a similar boat: when a manufacturer charges too much for a replacement bit for their equipment that was incredibly expensive to begin with, I tell them, as an example, "too bad, you lost the sale by asking for $200 for a spare battery because I'll have my staff make one up from $10 in bits in about 1/2 an hour; had you priced it at a reasonable amount, you'd neither have lost this sale, nor have lost the goodwill of my laboratory; since I work for a Big Name University, people copy my techniques, and your equipment will no longer get my recommendation." And I follow through with the threat. If the company has a booth at the annual conference in my field (which is frelling huge), I go to the staff and complain. When they see Big Name University on my badge, they usually listen. As a result, in one case at least, they have reversed themselves and provided me with the service or pricing they should have in the first place.
Why not just pay the people for their contributions and buy the damn thing? It's popular. It's apparently well-made. CBS could make money from it!
Seems to work in other fields.
I remember an article in Scientific American when I was a kid (decades ago) that described cement research. The one idea that stuck with me is that cement failure is precipitated by mechanical imperfections -- that much isn't so suprising -- which in cement are air bubbles. Remove the air bubbles and cement becomes as strong as aluminum, albeit considerably heavier. They demonstrated this remarkable property by making car springs out of void-free cement!
People confuse Moore's law with performance. Moore observed that the total number of transistors on a chip was doubling every 18 months. For a long time, that meant that the clock frequency was also doubling.
Then, a nasty habit of physics to smack us in the phase --- err, face --- came along in the form of speed of light limitations. Given the size of contemporary chips, it just is not (and is unlikely to ever be, if what we know about fundamental physics is correct) possible to communicate from one side of a 1 cm die to the other much faster than in the range of a handful of gigahertz clock speeds, give-or-take. Even with photons going in straight lines in perfect vacuum (none of which happens on a chip) the best you could hope for would be a 30 GHz clock rate, a paltry ten times faster than today's CPUs.
One obvious solution is to make circuits that are smaller, and thus we started to get more CPUs on a single die. Still, those CPUs need to synchronize with each other, the cache system, etc., so there remain chip-spanning communications constraints.
The limits on the size of transistors, and thus perhaps on the total number on a chip, are looming but haven't arrived yet. The limits of raw clock speed most definitely have. It is safe to say that our chips will continue to get faster for a while, but the heady days of generation-to-generation massive improvements in single-thread CPU performance are over.
I wonder how can be safe to have something like a radio frequency emitter strong enough to induce usable current in a coil (which is the operating principle of a transformer) leaning against a delicate electronic device (the cell phone).
Screw the phone, how safe can it be to have a 20W (ok, 18W in the GP) directional RF transmitter in your house, likely on your bedside stand, likely aimed exactly so it is irradiating you for 8 hours per day as you sleep? Not something I'd want.
The article mentions the Boston subway system frequently, but does not mention that ridership is way, way up since the Great Recession (almost 25% on the heavy rail portion of the subway, source: MBTA "Ridership Trends Final 022717", also see http://www.t4ma.org/boston_is_...). While there are plenty of reasons to dislike the subway system in Boston (including rampant corruption, gross ineptitude, poor management, inadequate maintenance, etc.), it is working at capacity during rush hour, and there are well-publicised plans to expand capacity. It's not clear how much more room there is for expansion, however, as, for example, the Red Line trains run every 3 minutes during rush hour, and need to maintain a minimum separation.
But declining ridership? Not in Boston.
Plants need water, generally speaking. And, generally speaking, there isn't much of that on Mars since, as you point out, it's largely desert-like.
So, some other method is going to be required for Martian use, and we can reasonably expect that it will not be so useful for terrestrial use because the conditions are so different.
the obvious solution to this is to have partitions inside the ship, to limit the amount of shift possible.
As others have pointed out, this idea becomes impractical for various reasons.
A perhaps better solution is to control liquification to a greater degree. One idea that comes to mind is to lower the ratio of solid to water during loading, so as to ease the loading process and better even-out the cargo, and then raise the ratio by pumping out some of the water, locking the load into place. During unloading, the reverse happens.
The extra time required can be mitigated by performing some of the pumping out in the relatively calm waters near the port upon departure, and by pumping in solar-distilled water upon approach to the arrival port.
3 years go is an older OS?
Three frelling years?
Please. You have a 5-digit ID. Something doesn't add up.
During a crisis, you respond with whatever is necessary to fight the crisis. Then you present the bill. If you expect repeat business, and run an honest and honorable ship, you make sure the bill represents an accurate and reasonable charge for the services provided. Note that reasonable in this case may be above normal charges due to exigent circumstances, but the charges should not be excessive.
If you instead do what Verizon is reported to have done, and directly impede crisis response, you should expect a lawsuit for the value of the destroyed land and property. What's the legal theory about damages due to inaction called, negligence? In any case, here, that amount of money is going to hurt.
Not per year, but once. The CO2 is sequestered during the making of the mineral, which is MgCO3. The making of this mineral (which the report claims to have accelerated at room temperature, thus with limited requirement of energy input) is a one-time effort. Then, to sequester more CO2, you have to make more mineral.
It's the polystyrene microspheres that are the interesting part, because they can be reused. The article does not say how you go about separating the polystyrene from the magnesite, though, and that process might be energy-intensive.
There is no need for your hot water heater to be online. Nor for your watch. Or your lightbulbs. Or oven, piano, fireplace, thermostat, fire alarm, bed, doorbell, garage door opener, iron, washer, dryer, or any of the IoT things, really. It's all artifical demand, and hopefully like the artificial demand for 3D televisions that self-extinguished in the face of lackluster consumer reception, the IoT will go away once the market doesn't support it.
Your refrigerator needs more insulation, not to run an operating system.
That's why my wife has possibly the very rarest of gems: one from a meteorite. She wears a shooting star.
The right answer is: for a low-volume workload like you get in small rural towns, there isn't much of a real need for modern electronics. Really, there isn't. While it might be BORING to fill out 100 trash permits a day in cursive, it really doesn't take that long, especially when you compare it to a hunt-and-peck typist who then has to print out the resulting form (and who is still going to be bored doing their job with a keyboard). Computers are not always the answer.
My hometown, while neither so small nor so rural, does lots of stuff with paper and pen. I'm happy because it means (a) there are fewer computers so the TCO is low compared to a paperless office, (b) our records are less apt to be stolen by some pimple-faced goon because they are not electronic, and (c) lower TCO means lower property taxes. Oh, and it means that when I need to find out where the sewer lines were laid 50+ years ago on my property, the piece of paper is still there, fully legible, and doesn't need special software to be read.
Call me a luddite (wouldn't be the first time), but I believe in using the right tool for the job. Sometimes that means using a computer, sometimes it does not.
Mechanical voting machines. That's the answer. Incredibly difficult to hack on a widespread basis. Essentially impossible to hack remotely.
Can't fix the old ones? Bunk. Re-tooling is not just eminently possible, 3d printing makes it nearly trivial.
While the images they have shown as examples are really pretty impressive, given that they're using a training set of Image A versus Image A Plus Noise, the problem is akin to blind source separation (BSS). There's been quite a lot of work done on BSS, much of which is very impressive (and based on neural nets).
The critical issue is to see what happens when they take a real photograph that has not been adulterated to add noise, and improve that. Will their model of a noiseless source image with additive noise still hold? The article doesn't touch upon that critical test, unfortunately.
The results they show are very, very cool, though. And if they hold up for MRI work, it would be a game-changer in the medical field. The article shows an MRI adulterated with noise, their recovered image, and the noiseless ground truth. A better test would be to take an MRI that was scanned for too short a time (and thus is noisy), and compare their extraction against an MRI with identical scanning parameters, except for normal imaging time. MRI magnet time is expensive; if it can be reduced by 50% and get equivalent image quality, that's a huge advance.
From what I recall reading on Slashdot, this issue is raised nearly every time there's an upgrade to iOS and the reason is that while the basic upgrade happens right away to ensure usability as quickly as possible, there's a ton of stuff that happens in the background for some time to come. It's the background activity that appears to shorten the battery usability. Once the background activity is done, back to normal, more-or-less.
Or so I've read. Personally, I don't own an Apple device of any sort so I can neither confirm nor dispute. Don't blame the messenger.
The revolution came from stable, standardized algorithms that allowed custom hardware to be built. Doing video decoding on general-purpose CPUs is never going to hold a candle to a custom H.264 chip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I believe in the hair salon case the recording states right at the start,
"Hi, I'm calling to book a women's haircut for a client."
But additional evidence that it is a staged call beyond the salon not stating the business name is that the person at the salon doesn't ask for a contact phone number for the client. That struck me as odd. Maybe that was edited out?
The summary and a nice excerpt from linked articles by Okian Warrior above pretty well says that the rats were so voraciously feeding on the eggs of indigenous birds that they were driving them to the edge of extinction. I sure hope that there are indeed knock on effects, like rebound of the affected species!
It's the end of the world!
No, obviously it isn't. But not paying attention to UI suggests that there might well be an equivalent lack of attention given to inner workings including, the flavor of the month, security and privacy.
It's just like the infamous no-brown-m&m-s clause in Van Halen's contracts. That clause was long held to be the pinnacle of rock-and-roll excess, but in actuality, it wasn't about the preferences of the band members for snack foods. Rather it was an indicator the band used to judge how carefully the venue operator had read the contract and thus had prepared the important items like structural integrity of the stage, appropriate power feeds, evacuation routes, etc.
If someone can't get the obvious, glaring things right, they can't be trusted to get the hidden details right, either.
As a business owner, you would not call up your suppliers and say "We've had a really great year, so go ahead and charge us extra for everything we order!"
As a (small) business owner, that's almost EXACTLY what I do. And when we have a lean year, I have the benefit of flexibility from our suppliers through the good will that being generous during the good times creates. Bear in mind, however, that ours is a small business, and over 90% of our purchases are from small businesses where I know the owner's name and have their personal phone number. And vice-versa, of course.
I wouldn't expect a larger business to act that way, on either the sell side or the buy side. But that's one of the nice things about doing business on the small side.
I think you have the progressive and regressive labels switched.
In particular here ...
A progressive believes that, even if what one says is terrible and disgusting, people have the right to express their views.
In my experience, those who label themselves as progressives will shout down differing opinions rather than allow them to be heard. I have many, many Thanksgiving dinners to hold up as proof.
Cut the tress down, outgas them under controlled conditions and reclaim lots of good chemical feedstock, crush the remaining carbon into lumps, and use them to fill up the massive holes from coal mining. Plant a new set of trees, and repeat. It's more-or-less the reverse of what we've been doing.
For extra credit, power the mechanical parts of the process from solar.