So IE is old and badly maintained, so just "trust us" that our new Edge browser will get better maintenance and support after it replaces IE. Never mind that it will be the same pile of schlubs maintaining the thing as were maintaining IE. It will be different this time, just "trust us".
If MS ever officially apologizes for the Ribbon interface and throws it into the same burn pile as Clippy, then I might start trusting them a little more. So far they have a nasty habit of shoving garbage down their customers throat, being horrified by the public outcry, temporarily mending their ways, then reverting to old behaviors on the following product cycle. But "trust us", this time is different, we promise to force updates that won't wreck your machine...
I'm fine raising the price of gas to a natural level (no subsidies). Oil companies don't need the welfare anymore. Subsidies in general bug me. Once they are in place they never go away. Modest tariffs to add a little friction at the borders is also a good thing if you ask me, it make it harder for big companies to arbitrage the labor supply.
I'd rather see funding in general come from taxing the top 5-10% more, especially the top 0.1%. Even independent of adding solar panels I would like to see the top income brackets taxed much more, with the funding going to infrastructure and education. I'd also like to see military funding rolled back, which is more practical if we manage to become less dependent on unstable countries for our energy needs.
Wrong. Most people forget that there is a time dependence on the supply demand curve, and often an NRE portion. Supply/demand works as you state as a way to describe what will happen in the short term.
If you sell 1,000 cars you have to charge more than if you know you are selling a million of them. The miracle of mass production shows up when you can ammortize the development costs over many units. The more you sell, the more you can spread that cost around and more reasonable spend extra development money to lower the production costs (make a custom battery plant, buy robots to replace workers, etc).
So over time you can get 1990's Ferrari performance for Chevy prices. Many of the major safety and convenience features in a Chevy started out in luxury cars and trickled down as the volumes went up and the prices came down. As volumes go up you find that there si higher integration and a drop in the per unit price, which a textbook beginner supply/demand curve is inadequate to describe.
Who pays for your current power plant when it needs maintenance, repair, or replacement? We have these things called "utility companies" that have the charter to keep the lights on (some do a better job than others). Similarly if utility companies are driven to put in energy storage by laws or incentives, they would pool user fees (you do have an electric bill, right?) and pay for ongoing maintenance and repair of panels and storage systems.
Today we have subsidies, the argument being made is to adjust those to favor solar instead of coal, oil, and natural gas. Utility companies are largely driven by rules to best serve their customers. If subsidies make solar the cheapest option, the change will happen as old power plants wear out and get replaced.
But surely you are not as dumb as your comments appear to be?
So a 14x14 mile square? Put a few of those in the Mojave desert. Put many more out in Eastern Oregon, Texas, New Mexico, etc. We have many large and mostly empty places in the USA.
Let's get that started, and also start funding/subsidizing the heck out of energy storage projects to help get solar to fill in more than just daylight hours.
That has been proposed for a while. However, it takes huge amounts of energy to get that many panels into orbit, and space is still a very harsh place do construction work.
Geosynchronous would allow satellites to hover over their receiving stations, but the distances are quite large, making it very hard to make a narrow enough beam to power a city a couple hundred miles away without also cooking it.
Low earth orbit is better, but now your giant death ray is moving, and must track one of many receiving stations as it orbits. No easy task either.
Ground based solar is vastly more serviceable, but needs an upgraded power grid to push around power from where we have it to where we need it. Storage is still needed if we want to go beyond the ~20% point, but generally solar can fill in the peak usages caused by summertime AC use. There still is a lot of low hanging fruit for solar to help with, and the limitations of storage shouldn't be used to distract from us from using solar up to that point.
As long as their panels aren't crap and can be bought at a competitive price, I see no issue.
BMW used to make engines for Nazi planes (Godwin!), but that should have no bearing on your decision when buying a car that fits your criteria. Companies in reviled industries who branch out should be applauded, not blackballed.
The point is that half the die area (plus the extra DRAM module) cost you major $$$ even if all you wanted was a top end 4 core processor. For quite a while now Intel has been working on the graphics and power consumption, which is great for mobile and low-end, but the higher end desktop folks are getting frustrated that performance is dead flat, if not dropping.
Anyone paying $300-540 for a processor is not likely to cheap out and ONLY use the integrated graphics. These i5 and i7 processors are turning into a pretty big disappointment. You can get far better graphics with just about the lowliest available sub $100 graphics card, but the options ditch the graphics and get a couple more cores explode in price.
And Agilent has since split into two with Life Sciences taking the name, and the test and measurement relic being named Keysight (sounds like a rental company...).
Bill and Dave would be ashamed of where their creation has gone.
Thin hair and light skin. My head burns easily and I just wear mine out of habit a lot so that I am rarely without it. I often take it off indoors, but I always show up to work with one, and have an additional sun hat for when I go outside at lunch for a walk. Hats are useful as more than a fashion statement.
Hipsters wearing knit winter hats in the middle of the blazing summer are just dumb however.
At least partially silly but I do understand some of the banned items like baseball caps (or any other head wear like hoodies) as they are totally impolite to be worn indoors.
I often do a lot of CAD work, usually a bunch of squiggly crap on a black background. Overhead fluorescent lights in my field of view really bug me when I am in in the midst of that type of work. I often wear a baseball cap to block the light that is right above the corner of my cube. I also often come in on weekends where I can turn off the overhead lights in my area and also have very few distractions when I really need to be immersed.
I expect someday we may have truly autonomous cars, but everyone is acting like it will be in the next 5 years. Maybe 30-50 years out I will believe it, but a lot of the wild claims of "sooner than you think" are a bunch of hot air.
So one car racking up double the total miles you would have put on two cars? So double the gas usage and tire wear to boot. And you get to replace that one car twice as often.
Why will insurance become too expensive? If mixing in autonomous cars doesn't make the road more dangerous rates should stay the same or even drop for non-autonomous cars, not go up. Insurance is about aggregating average risk and taking a bit of profit, not some grand morality play.
And when you are late for work, they will happily chug along at the speed limit no matter how much you yell at them. Fleet operators might also decide to tweak maximum speeds to save gas money when prices rise (like airlines did for awhile), maybe even giving you the ability to select to go at the full speed limit for an extra fee. I think of the airlines as to how very cool technology can be completely made miserable once in the grasp of the invisible hand.
I know a lot of people who really dislike being passengers, and that won't change when we are all asked to become passengers.
There is also a false statistic in the summary implying that since cars sit idle 90% of the time that we will only need 1/10 the number of cars. Even if all these wild assumptions come true about having a fleet of fully autonomous Johny Cabs, the morning and evening rush hours will dictate that peak utilization is a far better metric than average. All the miles a Johny Cab would have to drive in between destinations would also come right off the bottom line. A car sitting in a parking space depreciates, but does not gain wear and tear from driving. A Johny Cab is going to last a lot fewer years, though probably somewhat more miles, than a personal car.
Similarly most folks don't buy the minimum car for their needs today, but often end up with a Lexus or some SUV to feel safe, or show off status. Most folks could readily buy a lot less car than they do and be just fine, but they choose not to. So the basic premise is already flawed. By the logic stated you might as well predict the doom of all luxury cars simply because their cost per mile is higher than the cost per Chevy mile.
Owning your own car lets you have your seat already in the right spot, your preferred music stations already programmed in, you stash of coins for tolls, books for your kid, as well as your stash of "just in case" gear. In winter I keep an umbrella and a spare rain jacket, as well as gum, flashlight, etc in the car. Calling a Johny Cab means that I have to skip that stuff or lug it with me. A fleet of autonomous cars will have to make a profit, meaning they will be driven hard and you may find that the previous occupants was a slob who ate their lunch in the car, some sweaty person returning from a workout, or a couple who took advantage of there being no driver watching them (or would you prefer to have every commute recorded?).
After all, why don't we just all live in hotels? We can easily add a spare room with just a call to the front desk, no pesky on-going mortgage payments, etc. Pure bliss according to experts in the new sharing economy...
I expect that cabbies and long haul truck drivers to be threatened, but the personal automobile is not likely to go away any time soon
I see folks in meetings (and my wife under many different circumstances) time and again get all jittery and distracted after getting a text. Usually it is less than 2-3 minute before they just HAVE to check before they can calm down and resume focus. Counting down till the phone slides out under the table is almost as much fun as playing Buzzword Bingo in a meeting.
I know I am just as bad, so I tend to keep my phone on truly silent, and often don't take it with me to meetings unless I am expecting something important.
Similar to how you don't pay to receive a call on your land line, the laws around cell billing need to be changed so that advertisers must pay for their bandwidth usage rather than the user. If I don't ask for it, I should not have to pay for it (radical concept...).
Wasting cell data is not a bother to your provider, rather it just lines their pockets. More transparency on the real cost of data might show how big their incentives to let this crap go on are.
Yep. Once you have thousands of parts all designed to trade off as much strength for weight reduction as possible it doesn't take much of a manufacturing hiccup to cause an expensive "excursion". Vendors end up having to rigorously test every widget, and custom design it just for you.
Before long $10k each for a batch of a half dozen toilets seat that are space rated to not outgas funny chemicals that foul optics, handles 10g's, has 6 sigma of de-rating for the bolt hole strength, weighs under 500g, and is non-flammable starts sounding like a deal.
Many families have multiple cars. Ours has 3, all different manufacturers, and I frequently drive all three in any given month. It is fairly maddening to go between cars and to deal with different controls that require additional attention just to remember where the turn signals are without ending up with the wipers flapping.
Our Ford and Toyota put almost everything from the column on opposite sides. Even adjusting the air conditioner settings requires a conscious mental shift to get remember how to get the desired result.
Equivalent Xeon's get roughly a 2x multiplier for cost, as do the motherboards for them. My work machine is a 6 core Xeon (E5-1650 v2) that can be bought for about $650 compared to about $330 for an i7-4790k, which is also what is roughly expected for the i7-6700k when it arrives with its piddly little 4 cores sitting next to a vast wasteland of third rate GPU.
So either I would like a cheaper i7 without an on-die GPU, or more cores and cache in an i7 in place of the GPU.
With AMD continuing to gasp for life, I think it is fair to ask questions about what the hell the dominant monopoly in town is doing and why they seem to be stalled out. I am not in favor of breaking them up, but it is appropriate to scrutinize and control the pricing and behavior of companies that are in a monopoly position.
Performance per watt is wonderful and all, but we have had a lot of years where only the denominator has made significant improvements while clock speed and throughput per cycle are excruciatingly stagnant. I am complaining because I want a faster fricking machine, and it appears that Intel has either by willfulness or ineptitude has failed to deliver better speed in a any meaningful way in the last several years.
Wait till we have 10 year old first generation autonomous cars on the road from now defunct manufacturers. Or just as likely, 10 year old autonomous cars where you are told you are out of warranty and have to pay for ongoing security and compliance updates at dealer prices or they will remotely disable HAL. If updating my maps is $300, I am fearful as to how much I might have to pay to keep my autonomous software up to snuff.
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So IE is old and badly maintained, so just "trust us" that our new Edge browser will get better maintenance and support after it replaces IE. Never mind that it will be the same pile of schlubs maintaining the thing as were maintaining IE. It will be different this time, just "trust us".
If MS ever officially apologizes for the Ribbon interface and throws it into the same burn pile as Clippy, then I might start trusting them a little more. So far they have a nasty habit of shoving garbage down their customers throat, being horrified by the public outcry, temporarily mending their ways, then reverting to old behaviors on the following product cycle. But "trust us", this time is different, we promise to force updates that won't wreck your machine...
Was the drone black?
I'm fine raising the price of gas to a natural level (no subsidies). Oil companies don't need the welfare anymore. Subsidies in general bug me. Once they are in place they never go away. Modest tariffs to add a little friction at the borders is also a good thing if you ask me, it make it harder for big companies to arbitrage the labor supply.
I'd rather see funding in general come from taxing the top 5-10% more, especially the top 0.1%. Even independent of adding solar panels I would like to see the top income brackets taxed much more, with the funding going to infrastructure and education. I'd also like to see military funding rolled back, which is more practical if we manage to become less dependent on unstable countries for our energy needs.
What was your point again?
So if we had 100,000 workers installing panels, they would only have 7 hours per panel to install it?
Horrors. We might need to get unions involved to keep people from exceeding that rate and put hard working solar installers out of work.
Wrong. Most people forget that there is a time dependence on the supply demand curve, and often an NRE portion. Supply/demand works as you state as a way to describe what will happen in the short term.
If you sell 1,000 cars you have to charge more than if you know you are selling a million of them. The miracle of mass production shows up when you can ammortize the development costs over many units. The more you sell, the more you can spread that cost around and more reasonable spend extra development money to lower the production costs (make a custom battery plant, buy robots to replace workers, etc).
So over time you can get 1990's Ferrari performance for Chevy prices. Many of the major safety and convenience features in a Chevy started out in luxury cars and trickled down as the volumes went up and the prices came down. As volumes go up you find that there si higher integration and a drop in the per unit price, which a textbook beginner supply/demand curve is inadequate to describe.
Who pays for your current power plant when it needs maintenance, repair, or replacement? We have these things called "utility companies" that have the charter to keep the lights on (some do a better job than others). Similarly if utility companies are driven to put in energy storage by laws or incentives, they would pool user fees (you do have an electric bill, right?) and pay for ongoing maintenance and repair of panels and storage systems.
Today we have subsidies, the argument being made is to adjust those to favor solar instead of coal, oil, and natural gas. Utility companies are largely driven by rules to best serve their customers. If subsidies make solar the cheapest option, the change will happen as old power plants wear out and get replaced.
But surely you are not as dumb as your comments appear to be?
So a 14x14 mile square? Put a few of those in the Mojave desert. Put many more out in Eastern Oregon, Texas, New Mexico, etc. We have many large and mostly empty places in the USA.
Let's get that started, and also start funding/subsidizing the heck out of energy storage projects to help get solar to fill in more than just daylight hours.
That has been proposed for a while. However, it takes huge amounts of energy to get that many panels into orbit, and space is still a very harsh place do construction work.
Geosynchronous would allow satellites to hover over their receiving stations, but the distances are quite large, making it very hard to make a narrow enough beam to power a city a couple hundred miles away without also cooking it.
Low earth orbit is better, but now your giant death ray is moving, and must track one of many receiving stations as it orbits. No easy task either.
Ground based solar is vastly more serviceable, but needs an upgraded power grid to push around power from where we have it to where we need it. Storage is still needed if we want to go beyond the ~20% point, but generally solar can fill in the peak usages caused by summertime AC use. There still is a lot of low hanging fruit for solar to help with, and the limitations of storage shouldn't be used to distract from us from using solar up to that point.
He's a loonie, and so far the only candidate I actually want to vote for.
I don't think that is a statement on how good of a candidate he is, but rather just how awful the other choices are.
As long as their panels aren't crap and can be bought at a competitive price, I see no issue.
BMW used to make engines for Nazi planes (Godwin!), but that should have no bearing on your decision when buying a car that fits your criteria. Companies in reviled industries who branch out should be applauded, not blackballed.
The point is that half the die area (plus the extra DRAM module) cost you major $$$ even if all you wanted was a top end 4 core processor. For quite a while now Intel has been working on the graphics and power consumption, which is great for mobile and low-end, but the higher end desktop folks are getting frustrated that performance is dead flat, if not dropping.
Anyone paying $300-540 for a processor is not likely to cheap out and ONLY use the integrated graphics. These i5 and i7 processors are turning into a pretty big disappointment. You can get far better graphics with just about the lowliest available sub $100 graphics card, but the options ditch the graphics and get a couple more cores explode in price.
And Agilent has since split into two with Life Sciences taking the name, and the test and measurement relic being named Keysight (sounds like a rental company...).
Bill and Dave would be ashamed of where their creation has gone.
Thin hair and light skin. My head burns easily and I just wear mine out of habit a lot so that I am rarely without it. I often take it off indoors, but I always show up to work with one, and have an additional sun hat for when I go outside at lunch for a walk. Hats are useful as more than a fashion statement.
Hipsters wearing knit winter hats in the middle of the blazing summer are just dumb however.
At least partially silly but I do understand some of the banned items like baseball caps (or any other head wear like hoodies) as they are totally impolite to be worn indoors.
I often do a lot of CAD work, usually a bunch of squiggly crap on a black background. Overhead fluorescent lights in my field of view really bug me when I am in in the midst of that type of work. I often wear a baseball cap to block the light that is right above the corner of my cube. I also often come in on weekends where I can turn off the overhead lights in my area and also have very few distractions when I really need to be immersed.
I expect someday we may have truly autonomous cars, but everyone is acting like it will be in the next 5 years. Maybe 30-50 years out I will believe it, but a lot of the wild claims of "sooner than you think" are a bunch of hot air.
So one car racking up double the total miles you would have put on two cars? So double the gas usage and tire wear to boot. And you get to replace that one car twice as often.
Why will insurance become too expensive? If mixing in autonomous cars doesn't make the road more dangerous rates should stay the same or even drop for non-autonomous cars, not go up. Insurance is about aggregating average risk and taking a bit of profit, not some grand morality play.
And when you are late for work, they will happily chug along at the speed limit no matter how much you yell at them. Fleet operators might also decide to tweak maximum speeds to save gas money when prices rise (like airlines did for awhile), maybe even giving you the ability to select to go at the full speed limit for an extra fee. I think of the airlines as to how very cool technology can be completely made miserable once in the grasp of the invisible hand.
I know a lot of people who really dislike being passengers, and that won't change when we are all asked to become passengers.
I fully agree.
There is also a false statistic in the summary implying that since cars sit idle 90% of the time that we will only need 1/10 the number of cars. Even if all these wild assumptions come true about having a fleet of fully autonomous Johny Cabs, the morning and evening rush hours will dictate that peak utilization is a far better metric than average. All the miles a Johny Cab would have to drive in between destinations would also come right off the bottom line. A car sitting in a parking space depreciates, but does not gain wear and tear from driving. A Johny Cab is going to last a lot fewer years, though probably somewhat more miles, than a personal car.
Similarly most folks don't buy the minimum car for their needs today, but often end up with a Lexus or some SUV to feel safe, or show off status. Most folks could readily buy a lot less car than they do and be just fine, but they choose not to. So the basic premise is already flawed. By the logic stated you might as well predict the doom of all luxury cars simply because their cost per mile is higher than the cost per Chevy mile.
Owning your own car lets you have your seat already in the right spot, your preferred music stations already programmed in, you stash of coins for tolls, books for your kid, as well as your stash of "just in case" gear. In winter I keep an umbrella and a spare rain jacket, as well as gum, flashlight, etc in the car. Calling a Johny Cab means that I have to skip that stuff or lug it with me. A fleet of autonomous cars will have to make a profit, meaning they will be driven hard and you may find that the previous occupants was a slob who ate their lunch in the car, some sweaty person returning from a workout, or a couple who took advantage of there being no driver watching them (or would you prefer to have every commute recorded?).
After all, why don't we just all live in hotels? We can easily add a spare room with just a call to the front desk, no pesky on-going mortgage payments, etc. Pure bliss according to experts in the new sharing economy...
I expect that cabbies and long haul truck drivers to be threatened, but the personal automobile is not likely to go away any time soon
You sir, are the exception.
I see folks in meetings (and my wife under many different circumstances) time and again get all jittery and distracted after getting a text. Usually it is less than 2-3 minute before they just HAVE to check before they can calm down and resume focus. Counting down till the phone slides out under the table is almost as much fun as playing Buzzword Bingo in a meeting.
I know I am just as bad, so I tend to keep my phone on truly silent, and often don't take it with me to meetings unless I am expecting something important.
Similar to how you don't pay to receive a call on your land line, the laws around cell billing need to be changed so that advertisers must pay for their bandwidth usage rather than the user. If I don't ask for it, I should not have to pay for it (radical concept...).
Wasting cell data is not a bother to your provider, rather it just lines their pockets. More transparency on the real cost of data might show how big their incentives to let this crap go on are.
Yep. Once you have thousands of parts all designed to trade off as much strength for weight reduction as possible it doesn't take much of a manufacturing hiccup to cause an expensive "excursion". Vendors end up having to rigorously test every widget, and custom design it just for you.
Before long $10k each for a batch of a half dozen toilets seat that are space rated to not outgas funny chemicals that foul optics, handles 10g's, has 6 sigma of de-rating for the bolt hole strength, weighs under 500g, and is non-flammable starts sounding like a deal.
Many families have multiple cars. Ours has 3, all different manufacturers, and I frequently drive all three in any given month. It is fairly maddening to go between cars and to deal with different controls that require additional attention just to remember where the turn signals are without ending up with the wipers flapping.
Our Ford and Toyota put almost everything from the column on opposite sides. Even adjusting the air conditioner settings requires a conscious mental shift to get remember how to get the desired result.
It creates a lot of needless distraction.
Equivalent Xeon's get roughly a 2x multiplier for cost, as do the motherboards for them. My work machine is a 6 core Xeon (E5-1650 v2) that can be bought for about $650 compared to about $330 for an i7-4790k, which is also what is roughly expected for the i7-6700k when it arrives with its piddly little 4 cores sitting next to a vast wasteland of third rate GPU.
So either I would like a cheaper i7 without an on-die GPU, or more cores and cache in an i7 in place of the GPU.
With AMD continuing to gasp for life, I think it is fair to ask questions about what the hell the dominant monopoly in town is doing and why they seem to be stalled out. I am not in favor of breaking them up, but it is appropriate to scrutinize and control the pricing and behavior of companies that are in a monopoly position.
Performance per watt is wonderful and all, but we have had a lot of years where only the denominator has made significant improvements while clock speed and throughput per cycle are excruciatingly stagnant. I am complaining because I want a faster fricking machine, and it appears that Intel has either by willfulness or ineptitude has failed to deliver better speed in a any meaningful way in the last several years.
Wait till we have 10 year old first generation autonomous cars on the road from now defunct manufacturers. Or just as likely, 10 year old autonomous cars where you are told you are out of warranty and have to pay for ongoing security and compliance updates at dealer prices or they will remotely disable HAL. If updating my maps is $300, I am fearful as to how much I might have to pay to keep my autonomous software up to snuff.