It used-to be just in the comment section that idiots would spout-off idiotic nonsense like this. Now Bizx is publishing any worthless crap some moron submits...
it'll be impossible to cram enough solar panels onto a 747's wings
It'll be impossible for a horse to haul the extra weight of a fuel tank, wheels, and an internal combustion engine...
A gallon of jet fuel packs about 15 to 30 times as much energy as a lithium-ion battery of similar weight.
Massively, idiotically, wrong. Liquid fuels are subject to horrendous conversion inefficiency, while batteries are not. See: Carnot's Theorem. This is the same drooling moron nonsense we heard about electric cars... And guess what; existing electric cars aren't any heavier than their conventional brethren, while having similar range between refueling. They're not quite comparable, yet, but they're damn well not 15-30 times heavier, are they?
If you want to go full-retard, why don't we talk about the amount of energy we can get from nuclear reactions of Lithium atoms versus carbon atoms? It's just as relevant as this spewing crap.
Here's what I said here last month, on exactly the same damn subject:
"Compared to advanced piston engine airliners of the 1950s, current jet airliners are only marginally more efficient per passenger-mile."
Fuel cells are more thermodynamically efficient than even the best turbines at converting hydrocarbons into work, and they conveniently happen to output electricity, directly.
Fuel cells are being developed that can run directly on common liquid hydrocarbon fuels, not just hydrogen.
At lower-speeds, props are much more efficient than turbofans, and props can of course be easily driven by electric motors.
The lower speeds of prop-driven planes gives additional added efficiency in lower aerodynamic drag, as well.
Instead of retrofitting such a system onto current jets, combine electric propulsion with "blended wing" aircraft, and the future of passenger air travel could be vastly quieter and more fuel efficient, albeit slower.
And electrically-driven aircraft is incredibly simplified, to the point that airlines would want them for their lower maintenance costs and less downtime, even if the efficiency wasn't substantially better... See my quote above, as airlines previously embraced inefficient turbines for just this reason.
your complete disregard for double-blind testing betrays your complete lack of knowledge and experience in this field.
Haha! I'm well aware of the different listening tests, and I am an expert. They are all subjective tests... they are by definition and in common industry terminology, and you're just making a fool of yourself.
You won't find one expert who calls listening tests objective. All academic or industry papers involving listening test will have "subjective" in there. eg. http://www.aes.org/e-lib/brows...
If everybody's watching a different movie, or they didn't start at the same time or pause differently, then multicast doesn't work
That's not entirely true. You can have people join-in late on a multicast transmission, and they will only have to unicast the bits they missed, assuming enough buffer space. Or you can do a nice rotation where the same movie gets transmitted via multicast every half hour (if there are any interested receivers), and you can join the one that is nearest to the starting when you did.
Multicast does have more intelligence than broadcast. The sender can pause the stream when the last receiver disconnects, and start in the same or a different position when one rejoins, as needed. Of course there's complexity involved, and bandwidth is cheap.
Show me a couple experts who won't be surprised... You know, as opposed to the thousands who say you're utterly wrong. There's gotta be a few who have the same magical insight as you've got.
foretell on the basis of observation, experience, or scientific reason
Wild-assed guesses and bald-faced assertions like you're coming up with, are NOT predictions. Those who have the knowledge, experience, etc., to make valid predictions, massively disagree with the numbers you pulled from your backside. There's no need to wait, as there's no question at all that your random guess will prove to be massively faulty.
I am actually completely disregarding your unproven subjective assertions,
Human listening tests are subjective, by definition. More precise and repeatable methods are objective. This is basic terminology, continually used in the field, and of course fits nicely with the standard definition. Neither of which you apparently grasp.
which seem to be based only in reading a list of technical limitations in the MP3 format,
No, actually it's based upon expert knowledge from many years working in the field.
I'm done having a laugh at your childish crying. You may now return to shouting your profuse ignorance at the top of your lungs.
Do you do realise appeal to authority is a fallacious argument.
It's only a fallacy when relevant evidence is being ignored in the process. You haven't provided ANY evidence for your claims at all. Saying "No experts believe the world is flat" is NOT a logical fallacy. In this case, you're the flat-earther in question...
And pointing to another person's prediction being wrong is irrelevant to whether mine is good.
Pointing to nearly all manufacturer's estimates being high is quite relevant. They've got the best data of anyone, and they still over-estimate. And their over-estimates are only a TINY fraction as high as your imaginary numbers, pulled out of thin air.
You're making sweeping conclusions in contradiction to facts, all because you don't happen to have seen a subjective anecdote that contradicts your bias.
I've made supported and verifiable statements, and provided a link to plenty of citations. You choose to ignore the actual evidence, and instead insist on subjective anecdotes.
The fact that YOU couldn't detect any difference only says your ears aren't that great. There's really no need for ABX testing, because the unavoidable artifacts with frequency-domain codecs such as MP3 are well known, and they certainly aren't just non-music. Percussion and other transient instrument sounds are decidedly involved in music.
Pretty sad you'd recommend a completely uncited Wiki on Hydrogen audio, as superior to an extensively cited Wiki on another cite. Clearly your own bias needs some work. But I'm not surprised./.ers have always been vastly overconfident in their knowledge of lossy codec, resulting in actual good information from experts getting buried.
the trope isn't gasoline, it's diesel that you're dropping the match into.
No. I've done it with gasoline. You're right that there are MANY ways you can be unlucky and it can go wrong, but gasoline is more stable than people assume.
192kbit VBR MP3 (aka LAME v2) is a perfectly acceptable encode there because it provides audible transparency.
MP3 can't produce transparent audio at ANY bit-rate. It has many design compromises like the anti-aliasing which produces audible distortions, and besides that, it's a frequency domain codec, like AAC and most others, which makes them all incapable of true transparency:
For lossy transparent audio, you MUST use a temporal domain audio codec, which only includes a few formats like MPEG Layer-II (MP3's older brother), Musepack, DTS, and the rare SDDS. As well as rip-offs of LayerII like ATRAC, PASC.
Dolby Digital/AC-3/A52 has both frequency and temporal domain modes, so it could potentially perform transparently as well, but the complicated design raises the potential for problems, and I certainly haven't tested any encoder implementations to see exactly how well they actually perform.
It's got to be the stupidest time to set up a gas delivery business. Just as gas powered cars are going to be obsoleted. OK, they're not obsolete yet - but it's hardly a new business model that has a future.
Funny you'd say that, as ice delivery really scaled-up and hit its stride just as mechanical refrigeration came on the scene. I'm betting you don't have an ice delivery man in your neighborhood, or a soda jerk for that matter, but those business were still quite profitable at the time, and many people made their money doing those jobs their entire working life.
Gasoline vehicles will be with us in a big way for many decades to come. Electric cars are great, but won't be able to match the pricing of entry-level conventional cars (or pickups) with the same range and fast fill-ups, for quite a while into the future. And even when that happens, inertia will keep the old vehicles on the road in numerous niches that can't be directly, exactly replaced by EVs for a while.
Another example comes to mind... Steam locomotives still dominated the rails for decades after diesel engines appeared. It just took so much time until they were as reliable and finally scaled-up to those monstrous sizes.
Cigarettes make absolutely lousy ignition sources. You can flick lit cigarettes into a bucket of gasoline all day without ever getting a flame.
You can do the same with matches, but they're certainly not lousy ignition sources... It's just that gasoline needs to vaporize to be flammable. So while dropping an open flame into pool of liquid gas isn't going to start a fire, holding the flame NEAR the liquid, or flicking a cigarette onto a bare spot on the side of your car where you happened to drip a little gasoline, WILL cause a gasoline fire, and possibly an explosion, if the air and gasoline vapor are at just the right concentration.
If we're talking about pickup truck beds full of (large containers of) gasoline I would expect they are still filling them at gas stations. They are then just up-charging the people who are paying for it for their own cars. The gas stations are still selling just as much gas, and in fact might do better as this process could involve more consumption.
Except it's only the cheapest gas stations which will see additional business, while the up-scale stations are likely to see their customer base decline. And with less cars in the station, it's likely fewer stations will be needed. And that's only to start... Once their business gets big enough, they'll be placing orders for fuel wholesale, maybe having a private gas stations like larger fleets, and could potentially have pricing at or below that of the cheapest local gas stations, as they don't need as much real-estate, and only a couple employees to manage huge amounts of fuel going out.
It is also obviously legal to fill a car with gasoline at places other than gas stations - people that run out of gas do this all the time using a one gallon container. There would have to be a specific law prohibiting this particular job.
I have no doubt there are such laws. There are hundreds of state and federal lawmakers who have nothing better to do with their days than make and remake laws. There are laws for EVERYTHING. Every little minor detail you couldn't imagine being regulated, is.
You know those free tire pick-up days? Well they limit you to 9 tires, because transporting more than 9 car tires requires a commercial license. I'm absolutely certain there is a hard limit on how much gasoline a private citizen can haul (without a commercial license, special certifications for hazardous fuels, and special equipment for it), and even more regulations around adding fuel to someone's car, on a for-profit basis, which will stop this in its tracks as well.
The lesson of Uber and AirBnB is that if you need to break the law, be sure you earn lots of money early in the process, so that you can pay the fines and still afford to bribe politicians to give you your own special loophole which allows your service, but will be a barrier to anyone else trying to copy your business model after you.
Charter hasn't been all that bad, at least by comparison to other cable companies. Hope TWC doesn't rub off on them.
I believe Charter is the ONLY cable company that doesn't have a subsidized service for low-income families. They dropped their lower-cost packages years ago, and now their service STARTS at $40/mo.
Meanwhile, Time Warner still has a $15/mo plan, which is only 3/1Mbps, but you don't even need evidence of income. Time Warner is also one of the only cable companies that allows other service providers... If TW isn't doing a good job, you can switch to Earthlink service over the same coax.
I expect the merger with Charter is only going to ruin these TW benefits which aren't as profitable for the company as not offering them would be. The terms allowing the merger should really have forced these programs across Charter's network. Instead, soon it's going to be cheaper for light internet users to switch to cellular entirely.
the infrastructure isn't free and the more people want to use, the more of it you need.
The end-user connection equipment has some costs, but that's up-front, and doesn't change with maximum or minimum usage.
Goes double when you are talking something like cable since you share the network with neighbours, and you share the spectrum of the wire with video.
Absolutely not. A coax cable has over 1GHz of bandwidth, and that's only shared within a neighborhood these days, as nearly all have fiber-optic distribution. It's an absolutely absurd amount of available throughput.
You can max-out most of the connections almost all the time, without problems. The only limitation is peak usage periods, and that just means some minimal throttling during a few hours of the day.
In any case, you're still splitting hairs. There are innumerable cases where major service providers have admitted (usually to their shareholders) that additional usage adds no additional operating cost to their company, and cap/overage fees are just free money for them.
the water analogy isn't a good one because that is, in fact, how it works. With utilities you pay more for a bigger hookup AND you pay for usage.
"Bigger hookup" has only very little to do with PSI, or the networking equivalent of speeds. It's just a secondary limitation to your usage/throughput.
Of course with utilities paying for usage makes sense since it is a resource you are using. Just not a good analogy for Internet.
It is a good analogy, because ISPs are TRYING to charge people exactly how I stated, on two independent metrics, neither of which actually adds much additional cost to providing the service.
they want to set the cop too low on purpose, so people overrun it and have to pay more.
My pet peeve is services that have the same cap across all their different service levels... 5Mbps or 500Mbps having the same cap is absurd, and eliminates any real benefit to the higher-priced plan.
The big problem is landline internet service providers want it both ways... They want to sell you SPEED, and then sell you QUANTITY. Can you imagine your water utility charging you more money for 40PSI service instead of their less-expensive 5PSI service, and then you pay for volume of water consumed as well?
At least cellular services stick to just quantity... 1GB, 5GB... Pay more if you use more. it'll all be at maximum speed, either way. I'd be happy to buy my landline internet service that way, so long as the lowest data-usage tier is no more than maybe $5/mo. Of course they don't want that, because most people have an internet connection they barely use. And the truth is, bandwidth is a trivial cost to your service provider, as many have admitted.
I would have thought that mobile data is more expensive than wired?
Theoretically... per gigabyte, cellular data is certainly much more expensive.
But in practice, you can get a lower per-month fee, if your usage is limited, with cellular plans. Services like FreedomPop even give you a small but completely free monthly allowance of data, if you are careful to avoid their hidden fees. Obviously no wired internet services are similarly FREE.
For some context, US cellular carriers are in a nasty fight right now... Penetration is so high that for growth they can only hope to steal customers from other carriers. None of the carriers wants to be seen losing customers and shrinking, lest investors notice and stop buying stock, so they quickly match other's price-cuts and incentives.
Data allowances are fairly quickly going up, even as prices drop. Interesting models like FreedomPop's modest free service, and T-Mobile's completely unlimited streaming audio/video from numerous participating services, make for an interesting future trajectory, where the barriers to depending on cellular data seem to be shrinking.
Slashdot Mirror
It used-to be just in the comment section that idiots would spout-off idiotic nonsense like this. Now Bizx is publishing any worthless crap some moron submits...
It'll be impossible for a horse to haul the extra weight of a fuel tank, wheels, and an internal combustion engine...
Massively, idiotically, wrong. Liquid fuels are subject to horrendous conversion inefficiency, while batteries are not. See: Carnot's Theorem. This is the same drooling moron nonsense we heard about electric cars... And guess what; existing electric cars aren't any heavier than their conventional brethren, while having similar range between refueling. They're not quite comparable, yet, but they're damn well not 15-30 times heavier, are they?
If you want to go full-retard, why don't we talk about the amount of energy we can get from nuclear reactions of Lithium atoms versus carbon atoms? It's just as relevant as this spewing crap.
Here's what I said here last month, on exactly the same damn subject:
"Compared to advanced piston engine airliners of the 1950s, current jet airliners are only marginally more efficient per passenger-mile."
Fuel cells are more thermodynamically efficient than even the best turbines at converting hydrocarbons into work, and they conveniently happen to output electricity, directly.
Fuel cells are being developed that can run directly on common liquid hydrocarbon fuels, not just hydrogen.
At lower-speeds, props are much more efficient than turbofans, and props can of course be easily driven by electric motors.
The lower speeds of prop-driven planes gives additional added efficiency in lower aerodynamic drag, as well.
Instead of retrofitting such a system onto current jets, combine electric propulsion with "blended wing" aircraft, and the future of passenger air travel could be vastly quieter and more fuel efficient, albeit slower.
And electrically-driven aircraft is incredibly simplified, to the point that airlines would want them for their lower maintenance costs and less downtime, even if the efficiency wasn't substantially better... See my quote above, as airlines previously embraced inefficient turbines for just this reason.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Haha! I'm well aware of the different listening tests, and I am an expert. They are all subjective tests... they are by definition and in common industry terminology, and you're just making a fool of yourself.
You won't find one expert who calls listening tests objective. All academic or industry papers involving listening test will have "subjective" in there. eg. http://www.aes.org/e-lib/brows...
That's not entirely true. You can have people join-in late on a multicast transmission, and they will only have to unicast the bits they missed, assuming enough buffer space. Or you can do a nice rotation where the same movie gets transmitted via multicast every half hour (if there are any interested receivers), and you can join the one that is nearest to the starting when you did.
Multicast does have more intelligence than broadcast. The sender can pause the stream when the last receiver disconnects, and start in the same or a different position when one rejoins, as needed. Of course there's complexity involved, and bandwidth is cheap.
Show me a couple experts who won't be surprised... You know, as opposed to the thousands who say you're utterly wrong. There's gotta be a few who have the same magical insight as you've got.
Wild-assed guesses and bald-faced assertions like you're coming up with, are NOT predictions. Those who have the knowledge, experience, etc., to make valid predictions, massively disagree with the numbers you pulled from your backside. There's no need to wait, as there's no question at all that your random guess will prove to be massively faulty.
Human listening tests are subjective, by definition. More precise and repeatable methods are objective. This is basic terminology, continually used in the field, and of course fits nicely with the standard definition. Neither of which you apparently grasp.
No, actually it's based upon expert knowledge from many years working in the field.
I'm done having a laugh at your childish crying. You may now return to shouting your profuse ignorance at the top of your lungs.
It's only a fallacy when relevant evidence is being ignored in the process. You haven't provided ANY evidence for your claims at all. Saying "No experts believe the world is flat" is NOT a logical fallacy. In this case, you're the flat-earther in question...
Pointing to nearly all manufacturer's estimates being high is quite relevant. They've got the best data of anyone, and they still over-estimate. And their over-estimates are only a TINY fraction as high as your imaginary numbers, pulled out of thin air.
You're making sweeping conclusions in contradiction to facts, all because you don't happen to have seen a subjective anecdote that contradicts your bias.
I've made supported and verifiable statements, and provided a link to plenty of citations. You choose to ignore the actual evidence, and instead insist on subjective anecdotes.
Your predictions are absolute fantasy. You won't find any authority who predicts EV uptake at a fraction of your numbers.
EV sales have significantly underperformed predictions in the past:
http://insideevs.com/op-ed-201...
The fact that YOU couldn't detect any difference only says your ears aren't that great. There's really no need for ABX testing, because the unavoidable artifacts with frequency-domain codecs such as MP3 are well known, and they certainly aren't just non-music. Percussion and other transient instrument sounds are decidedly involved in music.
Pretty sad you'd recommend a completely uncited Wiki on Hydrogen audio, as superior to an extensively cited Wiki on another cite. Clearly your own bias needs some work. But I'm not surprised. /.ers have always been vastly overconfident in their knowledge of lossy codec, resulting in actual good information from experts getting buried.
No. I've done it with gasoline. You're right that there are MANY ways you can be unlucky and it can go wrong, but gasoline is more stable than people assume.
MP3 can't produce transparent audio at ANY bit-rate. It has many design compromises like the anti-aliasing which produces audible distortions, and besides that, it's a frequency domain codec, like AAC and most others, which makes them all incapable of true transparency:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For lossy transparent audio, you MUST use a temporal domain audio codec, which only includes a few formats like MPEG Layer-II (MP3's older brother), Musepack, DTS, and the rare SDDS. As well as rip-offs of LayerII like ATRAC, PASC.
Dolby Digital/AC-3/A52 has both frequency and temporal domain modes, so it could potentially perform transparently as well, but the complicated design raises the potential for problems, and I certainly haven't tested any encoder implementations to see exactly how well they actually perform.
Funny you'd say that, as ice delivery really scaled-up and hit its stride just as mechanical refrigeration came on the scene. I'm betting you don't have an ice delivery man in your neighborhood, or a soda jerk for that matter, but those business were still quite profitable at the time, and many people made their money doing those jobs their entire working life.
Gasoline vehicles will be with us in a big way for many decades to come. Electric cars are great, but won't be able to match the pricing of entry-level conventional cars (or pickups) with the same range and fast fill-ups, for quite a while into the future. And even when that happens, inertia will keep the old vehicles on the road in numerous niches that can't be directly, exactly replaced by EVs for a while.
Another example comes to mind... Steam locomotives still dominated the rails for decades after diesel engines appeared. It just took so much time until they were as reliable and finally scaled-up to those monstrous sizes.
You can do the same with matches, but they're certainly not lousy ignition sources... It's just that gasoline needs to vaporize to be flammable. So while dropping an open flame into pool of liquid gas isn't going to start a fire, holding the flame NEAR the liquid, or flicking a cigarette onto a bare spot on the side of your car where you happened to drip a little gasoline, WILL cause a gasoline fire, and possibly an explosion, if the air and gasoline vapor are at just the right concentration.
Except it's only the cheapest gas stations which will see additional business, while the up-scale stations are likely to see their customer base decline. And with less cars in the station, it's likely fewer stations will be needed. And that's only to start... Once their business gets big enough, they'll be placing orders for fuel wholesale, maybe having a private gas stations like larger fleets, and could potentially have pricing at or below that of the cheapest local gas stations, as they don't need as much real-estate, and only a couple employees to manage huge amounts of fuel going out.
I have no doubt there are such laws. There are hundreds of state and federal lawmakers who have nothing better to do with their days than make and remake laws. There are laws for EVERYTHING. Every little minor detail you couldn't imagine being regulated, is.
You know those free tire pick-up days? Well they limit you to 9 tires, because transporting more than 9 car tires requires a commercial license. I'm absolutely certain there is a hard limit on how much gasoline a private citizen can haul (without a commercial license, special certifications for hazardous fuels, and special equipment for it), and even more regulations around adding fuel to someone's car, on a for-profit basis, which will stop this in its tracks as well.
The lesson of Uber and AirBnB is that if you need to break the law, be sure you earn lots of money early in the process, so that you can pay the fines and still afford to bribe politicians to give you your own special loophole which allows your service, but will be a barrier to anyone else trying to copy your business model after you.
Extremely unlikely... My 486/33 laptop came with an 80GB HDD and maxed-out at 40MB of RAM if you had the money.
More likely somebody dropped a zero on the storage, and the included HDD was 160MB.
A quick search finds that refurb units came with 1.2GB HDDs:
http://www.overstock.com/Elect...
First hit on eBay says the original HDD was 1.35GB. Others say different, so storage was likely upgraded over the years that model was sold.
This link will work fine even with ad blockers:
http://webcache.googleusercont...
You can also change your user agent to Googlebot to workaround such shenanigans.
I believe Charter is the ONLY cable company that doesn't have a subsidized service for low-income families. They dropped their lower-cost packages years ago, and now their service STARTS at $40/mo.
Meanwhile, Time Warner still has a $15/mo plan, which is only 3/1Mbps, but you don't even need evidence of income. Time Warner is also one of the only cable companies that allows other service providers... If TW isn't doing a good job, you can switch to Earthlink service over the same coax.
I expect the merger with Charter is only going to ruin these TW benefits which aren't as profitable for the company as not offering them would be. The terms allowing the merger should really have forced these programs across Charter's network. Instead, soon it's going to be cheaper for light internet users to switch to cellular entirely.
The end-user connection equipment has some costs, but that's up-front, and doesn't change with maximum or minimum usage.
Absolutely not. A coax cable has over 1GHz of bandwidth, and that's only shared within a neighborhood these days, as nearly all have fiber-optic distribution. It's an absolutely absurd amount of available throughput.
You can max-out most of the connections almost all the time, without problems. The only limitation is peak usage periods, and that just means some minimal throttling during a few hours of the day.
In any case, you're still splitting hairs. There are innumerable cases where major service providers have admitted (usually to their shareholders) that additional usage adds no additional operating cost to their company, and cap/overage fees are just free money for them.
"Bigger hookup" has only very little to do with PSI, or the networking equivalent of speeds. It's just a secondary limitation to your usage/throughput.
It is a good analogy, because ISPs are TRYING to charge people exactly how I stated, on two independent metrics, neither of which actually adds much additional cost to providing the service.
I notice the increase in suicides closely corresponds with Dice buying /.
With what I've seen of how "SlashdotMedia" is horribly managing things, I expect that number is currently climbing even more.
My pet peeve is services that have the same cap across all their different service levels... 5Mbps or 500Mbps having the same cap is absurd, and eliminates any real benefit to the higher-priced plan.
The big problem is landline internet service providers want it both ways... They want to sell you SPEED, and then sell you QUANTITY. Can you imagine your water utility charging you more money for 40PSI service instead of their less-expensive 5PSI service, and then you pay for volume of water consumed as well?
At least cellular services stick to just quantity... 1GB, 5GB... Pay more if you use more. it'll all be at maximum speed, either way. I'd be happy to buy my landline internet service that way, so long as the lowest data-usage tier is no more than maybe $5/mo. Of course they don't want that, because most people have an internet connection they barely use. And the truth is, bandwidth is a trivial cost to your service provider, as many have admitted.
Theoretically... per gigabyte, cellular data is certainly much more expensive.
But in practice, you can get a lower per-month fee, if your usage is limited, with cellular plans. Services like FreedomPop even give you a small but completely free monthly allowance of data, if you are careful to avoid their hidden fees. Obviously no wired internet services are similarly FREE.
For some context, US cellular carriers are in a nasty fight right now... Penetration is so high that for growth they can only hope to steal customers from other carriers. None of the carriers wants to be seen losing customers and shrinking, lest investors notice and stop buying stock, so they quickly match other's price-cuts and incentives.
Data allowances are fairly quickly going up, even as prices drop. Interesting models like FreedomPop's modest free service, and T-Mobile's completely unlimited streaming audio/video from numerous participating services, make for an interesting future trajectory, where the barriers to depending on cellular data seem to be shrinking.
Interesting plan. Be a good parent by... working your ass off and never seeing your kids.