I can just see the senior engineers watching the junior engineers waving their hands in the air with VR goggles on and thinking that it isn't "Real work"
Just as long as you aren't one of those people going through discussions and demanding citations. Maybe if I said that 80% of NASA launches result in a fatality, some kind of proof might be called for. But if I said that most programmers I know don't do TDD, calling for a citation is just asinine. There is a fine line and that line is much closer to my NASA claim.
Complaining about typos in non-published stuff? What do they think, we all have a professional editor who vets our stuff before hitting submit? Not to mention not everyone in places like/. are typing in their native language.
Obviously a certain line can be crossed where our opinion of the commenter becomes so low as to dilute whatever point they are making, but anyone who comes onto a tech board to complain about someone's typing mistakes has some pretty serious priory issues.
To me this comes under the same category about all arts majors complaining that tech people don't take enough arts courses and thus aren't "Well rounded"
The sad part is that not only will the MBAs who reached into their pants and declared themselves bigger than everyone else keep their massive paycheques and massive bonuses, but the worst culprits will chest bump with the MBAs who run the bankruptcy accounting company who will then pay them massive "retention bonuses".
The actual engineering types who tried to make this all function will be soon informed that severances and whatnot won't be paid to the levels in their contracts.
Then the super ringleaders will finish rolling around in their piles of cash only to find themselves being "recruited' to boards of directors and eventually executive positions again.
I wish I were exaggerating but I suspect that I am actually understating the depravity of what has and will happen.
They still make a pile of exceptions to the do not call list. Surveys can call, politicians can call, charities can call. Yet most Canadians who put themselves on the DNC list don't want any calls with surveys probably being some of the worst offenders.
When I say I don't want calls I really really don't want calls.
So here is how I would like it to work. I would like to sign up for two DNC call lists. One would be the usual list, but the other would be part of a service. If someone calls me and I don't like it for any reason and it doesn't matter why, then I would mark the call as annoying, spam, scam, crank, sales, etc. When enough people (not that many, maybe 5-10, note number as bad then anyone who subscribed to that service would then never get a call from that number. But if the banned numbers had some kind of consistency such as originating from a single call company, or even a country, then the system would start imposing more and more bans such as entire country bans. For instance, I don't think that Canada would get that many legitimate calls from Bangladesh as compared to Britain. Thus it wouldn't take that many bad calls originating in Bangladesh to have all subscribers suddenly have all calls from Bangladesh cut off. The same with things like some of the voice services that seem to allow the scammers to use them. Boom cut off.
I suspect that once any mostly legitimate telco or voice service was cut off that they would up their screening and cut off the worst offenders.
This way the offenders don't need to be tracked down in long complicated enforcement actions, just a few people being annoyed would end their calls.
The beauty of the service that I am describing is that it doesn't really matter why people are calling. They would get feedback as to their being annoying when they find themselves with a ban, maybe temporary at first, of many of the people who have subscribed. This would of course mostly be aimed at scammers and whatnot, but even the car dealership that tried cold calling everyone who entered a contest to win a car would suddenly find that they had just cut themselves off for a few months. Or bill collectors, or schools with automated messaging systems for parents, or anyone else who wrongly thought that their calls would be welcomed.
Do you know for a fact that my suspicion is wrong. Or is that something that you suspect?
I will give you a fact to research and then digest. Check out the management companies behind the "Indie" bands the CBC plays the most and give extended interviews of. How is it that so many varied and diverse bands representing Canadian culture are represented by management companies that I can count on one hand. Management companies in Toronto? Management companies with former CBC execs on the payroll?
I don't know how the Canadians reads books are selected but why do I have a feeling that there will be a tiny overlapping publishing footprint? This last one is again only a sneaking suspicion.
When you start seeing things like an NPR station doing a buyout you know that they have been taken over by MBAs who have lost the plot.
I suspect that there are lots of strategy meetings where they talk about efficiency, metrics, verticals, and whatever buzzwords they read recently in Success magazine.
I keep my finger hovering above the skip forward button when I start listening to CBC(Canada's sort of NPR) podcasts. They pretty much inevitably promote insider (politically powerful) shows on shows that appeal to a specific and different audience. The promotions are for podcasts that are highly irrelevant to the podcast in question. A science show will promote an arts show, a business show will promote an arts show, a news show will promote an arts show, etc.
To make it worse, the shows they are promoting are often long out of date when the podcast in question is something that is ageless and thus will be listened to potentially for a decade or more.
I have a strong feeling that the CBC is deeply unhappy with podcasts because with listeners choosing what they want to listen to it is in complete opposition with how budgets are being distributed and how by putting certain shows in prime slots it then confirms that those shows are "popular".
I would love to see the stats on podcast listening compared to what the CBC claims is the number of listeners to the live show.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if the CBC was 100% driven by its listeners that the lineups, budgets, and shows would be wildly re-prioritized.
Instead the CBC is driven by some mental image of what they should be doing.
"The BEA’s critics say that once the tyre burst, the load on the three remaining tyres became uneven, and even if the wheels had been more or less straight before, they now twisted disastrously to the side. The smoking gun is a remarkable series of photographs in the BEA’s own preliminary report. They show unmistakably the skid marks of four tyres, heading off the runway on to its concrete shoulder, almost reaching the rough grass beyond."
When a burst tire is a huge problem in an airplane, then it is too close to the limits of engineering.
I typically check into a hotel and just hang the Do Not Disturb sign out for the entire duration of the stay. If I run out of something, I will intercept a maid in the hallway.
HaaS. That is great.
As a business traveller, I would love a hotel that is near my clients. I also rarely have ever used anything in a hotel beyond the room. Concierge, nope, I will call my own cab, etc. I also have a long standing policy of never eating in a hotel restaurant; most of the time they are disappointing. A hotel pool is nice, but not for a zillion dollars more.
Economics as much Ecology is what is driving this. China has fully grasped that shipping money out for oil is just a huge parasitical drain on their economy going to countries that don't exactly promote world stability. Every watt of energy that is generated through solar is potentially a watt not bought from sponsors of terrorism as well as a watt not resulting in that money being shipped outside the economy.
Thus by looking at the big picture it is sensible for a country to spend quite a bit more on a per watt basis for homegrown energy than imported energy as that money continues to then circulate around your own economy. This is doubly important when the currency being used is not your own as oil is mostly purchased using USD.
Another benefit that is big picture is that by mastering the mass production and understanding of solar technology and its related technologies China will pull further ahead in its ability to become a world leader.
Then, as an added bonus, there are the eco benefits. Another benefit for a country that has still not yet built a comprehensive power grid is that solar generation is somewhat distributed. This fits perfectly with filling in gaps where not enough power can easily be supplied to some areas, combined with the fact that much of the Chinese powergrid is of an older design and in desperate need of replacement. This then allows for a modern power grid much more capable of working with a distributed and ever varying power source such as solar. Many western countries have older but comprehensive power grids that really aren't distributed generation friendly, nor do they want to be as the power companies aren't so big picture oriented.
I travel for business and I travel alone. I don't need a room bigger than you would find in a sleeper car in a train. But the shared bathroom? That sounds like the MBA technique where they deliberately make you miserable in some unnecessary way so that you will upgrade. Airlines have mastered this. They could make the seats with a tiny bit of extra leg room for just a few dollars more per flight. But they won't because they want you to upgrade for a zillion dollars more. The same with the executive lounges, etc. They make the normal waiting areas cold, noisy and uncomfortable so that you will want to go into the executive areas.
But here is my ideal hotel experience. I book my room on a phone. Then when I get to the hotel I use my phone or CC to get into the tiny tiny room that it says is mine. No humans, no wasted extras such as desks, ironing boards, etc.
If there are any features that I would like it would be stunning noise proofing.
One thing that I have long thought would be possible would be that instead of hotels that were huge buildings full of hotel rooms, there would be these little rooms tucked into nooks and crannies throughout the city. Then the management company would send maids out to clean the rooms scattered around. A restaurant would have a few in an old storage room. An office building would have a few dozen on a floor that wasn't used anymore, etc. For me there is little advantage to having a room that is surrounded by 400 other rooms. Being in the office building that I am doing a contract in would be far better.
No, it lost power to an engine resulting in insufficient power to continue to fly. The rotation was because of asymmetrical thrust, not a 747 problem. The great lumbering beast was completely unable to make any semblance of an emergency landing. Also it had tonnes of runway left for any normal airplane to stop but not the Concorde.
The same damage to most other airplanes would have been far less catastrophic, but each of the systems were engineered at their limits. For instance the impact of the blown tire didn't go through the tank but the impact blew a seal which dumped fuel onto a handy extra hot surface, another stupidity not found in a 747.
The key being that a zillion compromises had to be made that other airplanes refuse to make. For instance the 747 is fading because 4 engines are no longer required for the required reliability, as two will now do. The limits of engineering when the 747 was built required 4 for near absolute reliability and due to low power to weight ratios. Most modern 2 engined airplanes are far less likely to have a single engine failure and the single remaining engine can somewhat maintain flight. Maybe at some point there will even be single engined passenger jet when reliability reaches some crazy high.
A great example of this would be the semi automatic pistol and the revolver. The metallurgy and machining in the 1800s was good enough to produce semi automatic weapons. But the reliability of bullets was too low. Thus the revolver was a great solution. If one bullet doesn't fire, you just fire the next one. In a semi-automatic that would be a jam and very bad. Also in a revolver the fundamental design can take a slight overload better than a semi-automatic design. Once the bullets crossed a certain threshold of reliability the semi-auto really took off. The same with the lever action rifle, which is also all about overcoming unreliable ammunition. An added plus of the revolver and lever action is that they do function if the machining is a bit poor.
So the supersonic transport can be built and like a semi-automatic in 1850 might even work some of the time.
I completely discounted Chinese anything. I find any product made by the Chinese have a habit of only looking like the thing they are supposed to be. I was referring more to products where the company made more than a half assed attempt to produce a quality product. The key being that you aren't operating your hammers right at the edge of their engineering; A few extra newtons of force and boom it explodes.
One of the rules in engineering is that you really shouldn't engineer near the limits of your materials. For instance a modern day hammer is so well below what can easily be made with steel and wood that we don't worry about its reliability; even a 50% reduction in strength because of a flaw would still give you a pretty useful hammer, or if the person wielding the hammer is unusually strong, still not a problem . At the opposite end of the spectrum are the materials that go into supersonic or hypersonic transport. If the slightest thing goes wrong the whole thing will just turn to crap. There are all kinds of pictures of airplanes that had fairly catastrophic failures (Aloha Airlines Flight 243 where it went convertible) and the plane landed fairly well. In hypersonic flight a tiny failure would typically result in the thing turning into a meteor.
So the question is not if a hypersonic transport can be built, but if a rough and ready hypersonic transport can be built. The answer at this point is NO.
As was discovered with Concorde. The plane could fly under ideal circumstances but the Concorde that crashed wasn't that badly damaged as far as a 747 would have been concerned. This is why there are a zillion 747s and no more Concordes.
So the only way for these sorts of planes to ever make it to civilian use will be that ever greater testbeds are produced that prove the foolproof nature of the state of the art. A military transport would be a good start. Then when we see pictures of large hypersonic planes where huge bits are torn open and the plane successfully made it to the ground we will not only feel safe to fly in them, but the insurance companies will green light their future.
Another great example of this sort of engineering being at the very edge would be the damage done to the last shuttle where it was hit by foam. Then the minor damage from the foam basically burned the wing off on reentry. Again the same damage to a 747 might not have been noticed by the flight crew and only picked up when someone was looking at the parked airplane on the ground.
My horrible suggestion is that some networking company just invent a new standard after a few quiet consultations with industry engineers. Then just impose their standard.
While this is often the route to making people deeply unhappy, it would have the ever so slightly notable side effect of a vaguely useful standard getting implemented. But the key to success is that they make it a patent free, and open standard.
Otherwise, if we rely on broad consensus, we are looking at the next IPv6. A laudable standard that just never seems to get any traction even with pundits saying that the world will come to a screeching halt without it. Also a broadbased consensus would have a probably aim of solving problems only at the extreme expert problem domain.
I can make two suggestions for such a standard to make it work. First is that it needs to be easily backwards compatible. With a minor adaptor, I can just plug it into a traditional Ethernet plug. The other is that it needs to do something completely kick ass for the end user, as opposed to only something kickass in a data center.
For instance it would need a feature such as being shockingly cheap per foot, or transmit 8 zillion wonka bits per second. Or the connector would need to be somehow indestructible. Or something.
Just making it smaller isn't that big a deal on its own. It would need to be paired with some other kickass feature. The simple reality is that an old connector is usually hooked up once to my desktop and sits there for years at a time without fiddling. They could make it bigger and I probably wouldn't care that much.
I hope they have some good anti fouling crap smeared all over it. In real life anything sitting in the sea for months becomes a Barnacle magnet. Basiclly it would look like one of the creatures in a recent Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
I believe that I have seen animations for driverless cars careening through intersections for years, as in going back to the 70s.
What I find much more fascinating is the economic impact of this sort of thing. How much economic activity is generated by traffic lights. Obviously there are the companies making them, maintaining them, their electrical usage, the cost in having people idle at them, and the ticket taxes generated by having police ticket people for not obeying the tax laws.
I would not be surprised that the savings to the taxpayer and the public by removing a single unimportant traffic light could be well in excess of $100,000 per year. For instance there was one major downtown street near my old house where they had the lights perfectly timed so that you pretty much missed all of them. Thus the average speed on that street in low traffic was maybe 15mph tops. With about 8 lights and the street being 1.5 miles the savings in time alone to get that up to 25mph would be astounding, let alone in gas.
Also many busy intersections are pretty much car accident factories. So to remove those would be just another layer of costs removed.
But what is interesting about all the above costs is that they are all very parasitical. Most of the costs in having a traffic light don't really "benefit" society. Obviously a typical traffic light today massively reduces accidents and other problems but when we have 100% SDCs their removal will only be a net benefit to all.
Where this is also going to get interesting is that some traffic lights are political. For instance there is a neighbourhood in my old city where a 3 way stop was replaced with a traffic light. This then encouraged people to take a short cut through a rich influential neighbourhood so within about 10 days the light was removed and went back to a 3 way stop. I can see attempts to prevent self driving cars from "navigating" through rich neighbourhoods but that is going to impinge upon fundamental freedoms and those laws are going to be hard to sustain. But with enough political influence there will be a way to keep the plebs away from the rich. Which will simply be part and parcel of the many many stupid laws that I see coming when politicians don't realize that every stupid traffic law they implement will be diligently followed by computerized cars. I can see every squeaky wheel along rural highways calling for the speed limit to be dropped in front of their house because of "the children" thus the speed limit will be very much an indication of how influential any given household is in rural communities.
I refuse to update. I just turned off my wifi and will use my reader on downloaded books. Why the hell are they so in my face about this. With the way they treat their employees I have not only zero trust of Amazon, but actually have negative trust. I fully believe that if I order X and it will be here by Y that I will get X on or before Y and that my CC is safe. What I don't trust them to do is to not upgrade my kindle to watch my network or some such. After an upgrade that is this hysterical I don't even trust them to keep my wifi off when I have turned it off.
To add some paranoid salt to this, I almost wonder if they are working with the government to have all the kindles look for someone. While Apple is doing its damnedest to keep me safe, I can see Amazon simply helping the government as part of a routine contract.
OK, I am an American admin heading over to Germany for a security audit, code update, bug tracking, etc. (at the airport 8 thugs in cheap suits hand me a security letter from the DOJ saying that if I don't comply I go to jail. If I tell anyone about the security letter, I go to jail. If I call a lawyer they haven't approved, I go to jail. But at the same time they tell me that they are trying to stop very very bad people and that it would improve my job prospects with future applications to various security companies if I do help out.)
So I go to Germany and do what? Nothing. Yeah some wishful thinking there.
I wonder how many already stumbled upon this and just assumed that it must be already mentioned somewhere.
For instance if I noticed that the probability of a prime ending in a 9 went up and down in a sign wave over the first billion primes, I would again just assume that this was a well known fact and move on.
So I wonder how many of these previously ignored discoveries are going to be dusted off now that people have been reminded that there are fundamental discoveries still unclaimed with primes. Also I wonder how many people are going to take a quick look at the simpler end of primes for more of these unclaimed discoveries.
I find that so many other "competing" boards somehow miss the point. Keeping the Pi at or below $35 keeps it in the realm of disposable. 35 bucks can be put into a robot. $35 can be put into some dumb home automation system. 35 bucks can be sent to school with the kid's project. $35 can be risked in some project that might not survive.
But much more than that means that people start to ration. They don't buy multiples, they don't put it into risky situations, and they don't leave them behind as the brains of some project. To a large extent that makes any competitor that doesn't do the above a cheap crappy desktop. In that case I will just use my laptop/desktop.
The other factor is that there is generally a gradient of embedded systems. Most people are throwing Arduinos into things willy-nilly. This is because they are easy, very cheap, very low power, and really simple. There are a few more capable Arduino like boards which can do more but at a certain point people need something more capable. The raspberry pi is quite ready to step into that breach. It can run basic OpenCV, it can power things like touch screens, it can convert text to speech or the other way around. There are lots of things it can do. And it can do all of these while not rapidly draining a battery and it is fairly small.
But for most projects if the horsepower of a Pi is not enough, it is not probable that a small increase in horsepower is enough. Double or triple is not that big of a leap if you are talking about some Genetic Algorithm that needs to run in real time or some crazy complex image recognition or whatever. Thus a board that is a bit better is not really filling the gap for most people unless you buy something very expensive such as the new nVidia board but that is so far beyond the price range of the Pi as to not really be comparable.
What most people do when their Pi runs out of power is to offload the task to a desktop or laptop over some sort of data connection. Transmitting video in near real time or sensor data is not that huge a task and then you have a pile of power and might even be able to drop back to the Arduino under remote control.
Then there is the whole thing around the Pi becoming a bit of a standard. There are wonderful Python libraries well tuned for the Pi GPIO and whatnot. How well do they work with the Better-than-a-pi-board-2000? I don't know and I don't want to screw around with them for a day. Basically the Pi is pretty much going to be first in line for any ports such as ROS.
So if someone wants to compete with the Pi they need to understand that this is not a desktop war where some extra memory or a few more Hz is going to win my heart. A great example of a competitor that caught my attention is the C.H.I.P. for $9. It pretty much meets all the above requirements in spades. Now the completeness of the Pi with BLE and whatnot is pretty attractive but in many cases I could use the horsepower of the CHIP and the rest would be wasted. Thus I can see a future where I have 5-10 CHIPS in my toolbox, and 3-4 Pis. I don't see a future for a $60+ board in my toolkit. Literally the next step beyond a pi will be something that is effectively a small desktop, even if it needs to be an embedded system.
One could argue that using any public service or utility could give consent to some authoritarian add-on. Instead of letting the police continuously nibble at our rights, we need some solid laws that block any further attempts. If they gather data without a warrant then they have broken laws with mandatory minimum sentencing.
The only thing that would have come about from this going well would have been a slowdown of the death of the cable TV industry. But by overreaching with their greed, the customer bleed should continue apace.
Slashdot Mirror
I can just see the senior engineers watching the junior engineers waving their hands in the air with VR goggles on and thinking that it isn't "Real work"
Just as long as you aren't one of those people going through discussions and demanding citations. Maybe if I said that 80% of NASA launches result in a fatality, some kind of proof might be called for. But if I said that most programmers I know don't do TDD, calling for a citation is just asinine. There is a fine line and that line is much closer to my NASA claim.
Complaining about typos in non-published stuff? What do they think, we all have a professional editor who vets our stuff before hitting submit? Not to mention not everyone in places like /. are typing in their native language.
Obviously a certain line can be crossed where our opinion of the commenter becomes so low as to dilute whatever point they are making, but anyone who comes onto a tech board to complain about someone's typing mistakes has some pretty serious priory issues.
To me this comes under the same category about all arts majors complaining that tech people don't take enough arts courses and thus aren't "Well rounded"
The sad part is that not only will the MBAs who reached into their pants and declared themselves bigger than everyone else keep their massive paycheques and massive bonuses, but the worst culprits will chest bump with the MBAs who run the bankruptcy accounting company who will then pay them massive "retention bonuses".
The actual engineering types who tried to make this all function will be soon informed that severances and whatnot won't be paid to the levels in their contracts.
Then the super ringleaders will finish rolling around in their piles of cash only to find themselves being "recruited' to boards of directors and eventually executive positions again.
I wish I were exaggerating but I suspect that I am actually understating the depravity of what has and will happen.
They still make a pile of exceptions to the do not call list. Surveys can call, politicians can call, charities can call. Yet most Canadians who put themselves on the DNC list don't want any calls with surveys probably being some of the worst offenders.
When I say I don't want calls I really really don't want calls.
So here is how I would like it to work. I would like to sign up for two DNC call lists. One would be the usual list, but the other would be part of a service. If someone calls me and I don't like it for any reason and it doesn't matter why, then I would mark the call as annoying, spam, scam, crank, sales, etc. When enough people (not that many, maybe 5-10, note number as bad then anyone who subscribed to that service would then never get a call from that number. But if the banned numbers had some kind of consistency such as originating from a single call company, or even a country, then the system would start imposing more and more bans such as entire country bans. For instance, I don't think that Canada would get that many legitimate calls from Bangladesh as compared to Britain. Thus it wouldn't take that many bad calls originating in Bangladesh to have all subscribers suddenly have all calls from Bangladesh cut off. The same with things like some of the voice services that seem to allow the scammers to use them. Boom cut off.
I suspect that once any mostly legitimate telco or voice service was cut off that they would up their screening and cut off the worst offenders.
This way the offenders don't need to be tracked down in long complicated enforcement actions, just a few people being annoyed would end their calls.
The beauty of the service that I am describing is that it doesn't really matter why people are calling. They would get feedback as to their being annoying when they find themselves with a ban, maybe temporary at first, of many of the people who have subscribed. This would of course mostly be aimed at scammers and whatnot, but even the car dealership that tried cold calling everyone who entered a contest to win a car would suddenly find that they had just cut themselves off for a few months. Or bill collectors, or schools with automated messaging systems for parents, or anyone else who wrongly thought that their calls would be welcomed.
Do you know for a fact that my suspicion is wrong. Or is that something that you suspect?
I will give you a fact to research and then digest. Check out the management companies behind the "Indie" bands the CBC plays the most and give extended interviews of. How is it that so many varied and diverse bands representing Canadian culture are represented by management companies that I can count on one hand. Management companies in Toronto? Management companies with former CBC execs on the payroll?
I don't know how the Canadians reads books are selected but why do I have a feeling that there will be a tiny overlapping publishing footprint? This last one is again only a sneaking suspicion.
When you start seeing things like an NPR station doing a buyout you know that they have been taken over by MBAs who have lost the plot.
I suspect that there are lots of strategy meetings where they talk about efficiency, metrics, verticals, and whatever buzzwords they read recently in Success magazine.
I keep my finger hovering above the skip forward button when I start listening to CBC(Canada's sort of NPR) podcasts. They pretty much inevitably promote insider (politically powerful) shows on shows that appeal to a specific and different audience. The promotions are for podcasts that are highly irrelevant to the podcast in question. A science show will promote an arts show, a business show will promote an arts show, a news show will promote an arts show, etc.
To make it worse, the shows they are promoting are often long out of date when the podcast in question is something that is ageless and thus will be listened to potentially for a decade or more.
I have a strong feeling that the CBC is deeply unhappy with podcasts because with listeners choosing what they want to listen to it is in complete opposition with how budgets are being distributed and how by putting certain shows in prime slots it then confirms that those shows are "popular".
I would love to see the stats on podcast listening compared to what the CBC claims is the number of listeners to the live show.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if the CBC was 100% driven by its listeners that the lineups, budgets, and shows would be wildly re-prioritized.
Instead the CBC is driven by some mental image of what they should be doing.
"The BEA’s critics say that once the tyre burst, the load on the three remaining tyres became uneven, and even if the wheels had been more or less straight before, they now twisted disastrously to the side. The smoking gun is a remarkable series of photographs in the BEA’s own preliminary report. They show unmistakably the skid marks of four tyres, heading off the runway on to its concrete shoulder, almost reaching the rough grass beyond."
When a burst tire is a huge problem in an airplane, then it is too close to the limits of engineering.
I typically check into a hotel and just hang the Do Not Disturb sign out for the entire duration of the stay. If I run out of something, I will intercept a maid in the hallway.
HaaS. That is great.
As a business traveller, I would love a hotel that is near my clients. I also rarely have ever used anything in a hotel beyond the room. Concierge, nope, I will call my own cab, etc. I also have a long standing policy of never eating in a hotel restaurant; most of the time they are disappointing. A hotel pool is nice, but not for a zillion dollars more.
Economics as much Ecology is what is driving this. China has fully grasped that shipping money out for oil is just a huge parasitical drain on their economy going to countries that don't exactly promote world stability. Every watt of energy that is generated through solar is potentially a watt not bought from sponsors of terrorism as well as a watt not resulting in that money being shipped outside the economy.
Thus by looking at the big picture it is sensible for a country to spend quite a bit more on a per watt basis for homegrown energy than imported energy as that money continues to then circulate around your own economy. This is doubly important when the currency being used is not your own as oil is mostly purchased using USD.
Another benefit that is big picture is that by mastering the mass production and understanding of solar technology and its related technologies China will pull further ahead in its ability to become a world leader.
Then, as an added bonus, there are the eco benefits. Another benefit for a country that has still not yet built a comprehensive power grid is that solar generation is somewhat distributed. This fits perfectly with filling in gaps where not enough power can easily be supplied to some areas, combined with the fact that much of the Chinese powergrid is of an older design and in desperate need of replacement. This then allows for a modern power grid much more capable of working with a distributed and ever varying power source such as solar. Many western countries have older but comprehensive power grids that really aren't distributed generation friendly, nor do they want to be as the power companies aren't so big picture oriented.
I travel for business and I travel alone. I don't need a room bigger than you would find in a sleeper car in a train. But the shared bathroom? That sounds like the MBA technique where they deliberately make you miserable in some unnecessary way so that you will upgrade. Airlines have mastered this. They could make the seats with a tiny bit of extra leg room for just a few dollars more per flight. But they won't because they want you to upgrade for a zillion dollars more. The same with the executive lounges, etc. They make the normal waiting areas cold, noisy and uncomfortable so that you will want to go into the executive areas.
But here is my ideal hotel experience. I book my room on a phone. Then when I get to the hotel I use my phone or CC to get into the tiny tiny room that it says is mine. No humans, no wasted extras such as desks, ironing boards, etc.
If there are any features that I would like it would be stunning noise proofing.
One thing that I have long thought would be possible would be that instead of hotels that were huge buildings full of hotel rooms, there would be these little rooms tucked into nooks and crannies throughout the city. Then the management company would send maids out to clean the rooms scattered around. A restaurant would have a few in an old storage room. An office building would have a few dozen on a floor that wasn't used anymore, etc. For me there is little advantage to having a room that is surrounded by 400 other rooms. Being in the office building that I am doing a contract in would be far better.
No, it lost power to an engine resulting in insufficient power to continue to fly. The rotation was because of asymmetrical thrust, not a 747 problem. The great lumbering beast was completely unable to make any semblance of an emergency landing. Also it had tonnes of runway left for any normal airplane to stop but not the Concorde.
The same damage to most other airplanes would have been far less catastrophic, but each of the systems were engineered at their limits. For instance the impact of the blown tire didn't go through the tank but the impact blew a seal which dumped fuel onto a handy extra hot surface, another stupidity not found in a 747.
The key being that a zillion compromises had to be made that other airplanes refuse to make. For instance the 747 is fading because 4 engines are no longer required for the required reliability, as two will now do. The limits of engineering when the 747 was built required 4 for near absolute reliability and due to low power to weight ratios. Most modern 2 engined airplanes are far less likely to have a single engine failure and the single remaining engine can somewhat maintain flight. Maybe at some point there will even be single engined passenger jet when reliability reaches some crazy high.
A great example of this would be the semi automatic pistol and the revolver. The metallurgy and machining in the 1800s was good enough to produce semi automatic weapons. But the reliability of bullets was too low. Thus the revolver was a great solution. If one bullet doesn't fire, you just fire the next one. In a semi-automatic that would be a jam and very bad. Also in a revolver the fundamental design can take a slight overload better than a semi-automatic design. Once the bullets crossed a certain threshold of reliability the semi-auto really took off. The same with the lever action rifle, which is also all about overcoming unreliable ammunition. An added plus of the revolver and lever action is that they do function if the machining is a bit poor.
So the supersonic transport can be built and like a semi-automatic in 1850 might even work some of the time.
I completely discounted Chinese anything. I find any product made by the Chinese have a habit of only looking like the thing they are supposed to be. I was referring more to products where the company made more than a half assed attempt to produce a quality product. The key being that you aren't operating your hammers right at the edge of their engineering; A few extra newtons of force and boom it explodes.
On a different note: Blacksmith; cool!
One of the rules in engineering is that you really shouldn't engineer near the limits of your materials. For instance a modern day hammer is so well below what can easily be made with steel and wood that we don't worry about its reliability; even a 50% reduction in strength because of a flaw would still give you a pretty useful hammer, or if the person wielding the hammer is unusually strong, still not a problem . At the opposite end of the spectrum are the materials that go into supersonic or hypersonic transport. If the slightest thing goes wrong the whole thing will just turn to crap. There are all kinds of pictures of airplanes that had fairly catastrophic failures (Aloha Airlines Flight 243 where it went convertible) and the plane landed fairly well. In hypersonic flight a tiny failure would typically result in the thing turning into a meteor.
So the question is not if a hypersonic transport can be built, but if a rough and ready hypersonic transport can be built. The answer at this point is NO.
As was discovered with Concorde. The plane could fly under ideal circumstances but the Concorde that crashed wasn't that badly damaged as far as a 747 would have been concerned. This is why there are a zillion 747s and no more Concordes.
So the only way for these sorts of planes to ever make it to civilian use will be that ever greater testbeds are produced that prove the foolproof nature of the state of the art. A military transport would be a good start. Then when we see pictures of large hypersonic planes where huge bits are torn open and the plane successfully made it to the ground we will not only feel safe to fly in them, but the insurance companies will green light their future.
Another great example of this sort of engineering being at the very edge would be the damage done to the last shuttle where it was hit by foam. Then the minor damage from the foam basically burned the wing off on reentry. Again the same damage to a 747 might not have been noticed by the flight crew and only picked up when someone was looking at the parked airplane on the ground.
My horrible suggestion is that some networking company just invent a new standard after a few quiet consultations with industry engineers. Then just impose their standard.
While this is often the route to making people deeply unhappy, it would have the ever so slightly notable side effect of a vaguely useful standard getting implemented. But the key to success is that they make it a patent free, and open standard.
Otherwise, if we rely on broad consensus, we are looking at the next IPv6. A laudable standard that just never seems to get any traction even with pundits saying that the world will come to a screeching halt without it. Also a broadbased consensus would have a probably aim of solving problems only at the extreme expert problem domain.
I can make two suggestions for such a standard to make it work. First is that it needs to be easily backwards compatible. With a minor adaptor, I can just plug it into a traditional Ethernet plug. The other is that it needs to do something completely kick ass for the end user, as opposed to only something kickass in a data center.
For instance it would need a feature such as being shockingly cheap per foot, or transmit 8 zillion wonka bits per second. Or the connector would need to be somehow indestructible. Or something.
Just making it smaller isn't that big a deal on its own. It would need to be paired with some other kickass feature. The simple reality is that an old connector is usually hooked up once to my desktop and sits there for years at a time without fiddling. They could make it bigger and I probably wouldn't care that much.
I hope they have some good anti fouling crap smeared all over it. In real life anything sitting in the sea for months becomes a Barnacle magnet. Basiclly it would look like one of the creatures in a recent Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
I believe that I have seen animations for driverless cars careening through intersections for years, as in going back to the 70s.
What I find much more fascinating is the economic impact of this sort of thing. How much economic activity is generated by traffic lights. Obviously there are the companies making them, maintaining them, their electrical usage, the cost in having people idle at them, and the ticket taxes generated by having police ticket people for not obeying the tax laws.
I would not be surprised that the savings to the taxpayer and the public by removing a single unimportant traffic light could be well in excess of $100,000 per year. For instance there was one major downtown street near my old house where they had the lights perfectly timed so that you pretty much missed all of them. Thus the average speed on that street in low traffic was maybe 15mph tops. With about 8 lights and the street being 1.5 miles the savings in time alone to get that up to 25mph would be astounding, let alone in gas.
Also many busy intersections are pretty much car accident factories. So to remove those would be just another layer of costs removed.
But what is interesting about all the above costs is that they are all very parasitical. Most of the costs in having a traffic light don't really "benefit" society. Obviously a typical traffic light today massively reduces accidents and other problems but when we have 100% SDCs their removal will only be a net benefit to all.
Where this is also going to get interesting is that some traffic lights are political. For instance there is a neighbourhood in my old city where a 3 way stop was replaced with a traffic light. This then encouraged people to take a short cut through a rich influential neighbourhood so within about 10 days the light was removed and went back to a 3 way stop. I can see attempts to prevent self driving cars from "navigating" through rich neighbourhoods but that is going to impinge upon fundamental freedoms and those laws are going to be hard to sustain. But with enough political influence there will be a way to keep the plebs away from the rich. Which will simply be part and parcel of the many many stupid laws that I see coming when politicians don't realize that every stupid traffic law they implement will be diligently followed by computerized cars. I can see every squeaky wheel along rural highways calling for the speed limit to be dropped in front of their house because of "the children" thus the speed limit will be very much an indication of how influential any given household is in rural communities.
I refuse to update. I just turned off my wifi and will use my reader on downloaded books. Why the hell are they so in my face about this. With the way they treat their employees I have not only zero trust of Amazon, but actually have negative trust. I fully believe that if I order X and it will be here by Y that I will get X on or before Y and that my CC is safe. What I don't trust them to do is to not upgrade my kindle to watch my network or some such. After an upgrade that is this hysterical I don't even trust them to keep my wifi off when I have turned it off.
To add some paranoid salt to this, I almost wonder if they are working with the government to have all the kindles look for someone. While Apple is doing its damnedest to keep me safe, I can see Amazon simply helping the government as part of a routine contract.
OK, I am an American admin heading over to Germany for a security audit, code update, bug tracking, etc. (at the airport 8 thugs in cheap suits hand me a security letter from the DOJ saying that if I don't comply I go to jail. If I tell anyone about the security letter, I go to jail. If I call a lawyer they haven't approved, I go to jail. But at the same time they tell me that they are trying to stop very very bad people and that it would improve my job prospects with future applications to various security companies if I do help out.)
So I go to Germany and do what? Nothing. Yeah some wishful thinking there.
I wonder how many already stumbled upon this and just assumed that it must be already mentioned somewhere.
For instance if I noticed that the probability of a prime ending in a 9 went up and down in a sign wave over the first billion primes, I would again just assume that this was a well known fact and move on.
So I wonder how many of these previously ignored discoveries are going to be dusted off now that people have been reminded that there are fundamental discoveries still unclaimed with primes. Also I wonder how many people are going to take a quick look at the simpler end of primes for more of these unclaimed discoveries.
That is an interestingly unsupported and grand statement.
I find that so many other "competing" boards somehow miss the point. Keeping the Pi at or below $35 keeps it in the realm of disposable. 35 bucks can be put into a robot. $35 can be put into some dumb home automation system. 35 bucks can be sent to school with the kid's project. $35 can be risked in some project that might not survive.
But much more than that means that people start to ration. They don't buy multiples, they don't put it into risky situations, and they don't leave them behind as the brains of some project. To a large extent that makes any competitor that doesn't do the above a cheap crappy desktop. In that case I will just use my laptop/desktop.
The other factor is that there is generally a gradient of embedded systems. Most people are throwing Arduinos into things willy-nilly. This is because they are easy, very cheap, very low power, and really simple. There are a few more capable Arduino like boards which can do more but at a certain point people need something more capable. The raspberry pi is quite ready to step into that breach. It can run basic OpenCV, it can power things like touch screens, it can convert text to speech or the other way around. There are lots of things it can do. And it can do all of these while not rapidly draining a battery and it is fairly small.
But for most projects if the horsepower of a Pi is not enough, it is not probable that a small increase in horsepower is enough. Double or triple is not that big of a leap if you are talking about some Genetic Algorithm that needs to run in real time or some crazy complex image recognition or whatever. Thus a board that is a bit better is not really filling the gap for most people unless you buy something very expensive such as the new nVidia board but that is so far beyond the price range of the Pi as to not really be comparable.
What most people do when their Pi runs out of power is to offload the task to a desktop or laptop over some sort of data connection. Transmitting video in near real time or sensor data is not that huge a task and then you have a pile of power and might even be able to drop back to the Arduino under remote control.
Then there is the whole thing around the Pi becoming a bit of a standard. There are wonderful Python libraries well tuned for the Pi GPIO and whatnot. How well do they work with the Better-than-a-pi-board-2000? I don't know and I don't want to screw around with them for a day. Basically the Pi is pretty much going to be first in line for any ports such as ROS.
So if someone wants to compete with the Pi they need to understand that this is not a desktop war where some extra memory or a few more Hz is going to win my heart. A great example of a competitor that caught my attention is the C.H.I.P. for $9. It pretty much meets all the above requirements in spades. Now the completeness of the Pi with BLE and whatnot is pretty attractive but in many cases I could use the horsepower of the CHIP and the rest would be wasted. Thus I can see a future where I have 5-10 CHIPS in my toolbox, and 3-4 Pis. I don't see a future for a $60+ board in my toolkit. Literally the next step beyond a pi will be something that is effectively a small desktop, even if it needs to be an embedded system.
One could argue that using any public service or utility could give consent to some authoritarian add-on. Instead of letting the police continuously nibble at our rights, we need some solid laws that block any further attempts. If they gather data without a warrant then they have broken laws with mandatory minimum sentencing.
The only thing that would have come about from this going well would have been a slowdown of the death of the cable TV industry. But by overreaching with their greed, the customer bleed should continue apace.