You missed a key fact: Elop took a good brand that now had only unwanted, aging products that could no longer compete, executed the most expensive failures, and sold the rest before the marketplace killed them completely.
Had he pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Symbian, and tried to make a go of it based on an existing loyal fan base and lots of marketing, he would have ended up EXACTLY like Blackberry -- warehouses filled with unsold phones, flat broke, and completely irrelevant in the marketplace. At least with Microsoft owning them, they're not broke.
I don't know why everyone on slashdot has remained so deluded about Nokia's potential future had Elop not taken those actions. They were not competitive, and their prospects were poor. If Symbian and Meego were as great as everyone here imagines, why weren't they crushing iPhones back in 2010?
I have a couple of heavily used iOS apps that don't have Windows 8 (or web) ports, and i have it on four iDevices, so I'm stuck in that boat with a flimsy paddle. A change would be expensive to me. And today, they get upgraded in pairs, because if I get a new one, the wife gets a new one, too:-/ That also means a different OS has to be part of a wife-acceptable agreement.
And, like you, I mostly like the Apple hardware (the iPhone screen size is optimal, but the battery life is pathetic, and everything is painfully locked down). The current user interface is fine, but Apple is shit-bombing iOS 7 on folks (just like Microsoft and Windows 8), and I don't need that kind of change. Besides, Android and Windows 8 are really not that much different when it comes to walled gardens and no root access to my own computer. The grass currently isn't green anywhere on either side of the fence.
Maybe someday I'll make the leap to a CyanogenMod ecosystem.
Actually, as a tablet device, they aren't awful. When you judge them on an analogy basis, "Surface is to a Windows 7 laptop as an iPad is to a MacBook", they do what they're supposed to do.
One big problem is nobody cares. Anybody with money who wanted a tablet or a smartphone already bought an iPad or an iPhone and got sucked into the Apple ecosystem. They now have built dependencies on Apple apps. Changing over completely is expensive, and gains you not enough extra to make it worthwhile. (For example, until Windows phone 8 came out, many of the Microsofties I know had iPhones and Androids, because not even threats from their boss could get them to use WinCE phones.)
Another problem is that they're trying to be full-purpose computing devices. People accept the limitations of an iPad (compared to the MacBook) because they understand it's a limited system. Microsoft is trying to say "hey, look, it's not just a tablet but a whole computer", but the touch-oriented user interface sucks for non-touch-oriented applications.
Making matters worse was the stupid decision to put Metro on the desktop OS. Now everyone sees how it sucks on a laptop and translates that to their imagined impact on their tablets or phones. I wouldn't buy a Surface if I thought it would suck as much as Windows 8 on a PC.
Are you aware of just how much they increase that risk? In the cases of drunk driving, or texting-while-driving, it's claimed (according to public service advertisements) an increase of four times. While that number sounds scary, when you apply it to the number of accidents per mile driven, it's still a pretty low number. They also don't take into account severity: of those 4x accidents, do injuries also go up by 4x? Or do they go up by only 2x, or perhaps 10x? We know that with speeding, it doesn't appreciably increase the number of accidents per mile driven, but it dramatically increases the severity of the injuries. What I'm saying is it doesn't matter: simply hold people accountable when they actually harm someone.
We naturally react to drunk (or texting) drivers who injure people with revulsion. That's completely understandable - the person was stupid, irresponsible, and harmed someone as a result. I think they need to go to jail for a very long time, and to be punished for their actions.
But we tend to ignore that driving is inherently hazardous, and we downplay the other sources of accidents. And that includes everything. Bad weather? Tired driver? Bald tires? Bad brakes? Slow down, or pull over - any accident is 100% your fault if you keep driving in conditions that aren't suitable for you, your abilities, your vehicle, and the road conditions.
Of course, there are other uncontrollable environmental factors, but they all distill down to the essence of "there would have been no accident if the driver had made a better choice". For example, a deer could jump in front of your vehicle. Were you driving too fast to avoid striking the beast? That's your fault. Did someone get hurt as a result? Your responsibility. Did your vehicle break down and leak oil onto the road, causing a following driver to spin out? Your fault.
What, so now the cop has to see which app on your tiny screen you were using when he saw you? If it's colored a certain way, it's OK, but if it's colored differently it's not OK? And if I am pulled over texting-while-driving, do I just need a double-click-the-button app to pop up the maps quick so I can tell the cop I was just using a map? I don't disagree with the cop tagging someone for using the map app in that way, because it would be impossible to enforce it any other way.
However, I think a lot of driving laws are stupid "pre-crime" kinds of laws that should be revisited. Speeding, drunk driving, texting, etc., none of those actions actually causes harm. They only increase risks, such as the risk of increased injury in an accident due to higher speeds, or the risk of actually getting into an accident because you're distracted or intoxicated. But the only thing that actually causes harm is an actual accident. If you cause an accident that causes minor injury to another, you should get about five years in jail. If your accident seriously injures another person, you should get 10 years. If your accident takes another person's life, you go to jail for life. If those were the laws, and they were enforced, people might actually think before they try something stupid. That way each person would be responsible for their own actions at all times. If you're on an isolated country road, with no cars visible for miles in any direction, why not drive 120 MPH? If you're in a tight city street, with the potential for pedestrians to pop out in front of you from between parked vehicles, you're risking jail if you don't essentially crawl slowly through the neighborhood. You limit your own behavior because you're responsible for the consequences of your actions.
Of course, that would require people to think and to take responsibility for themselves, two things that most people suck at.
If you think of it in terms of crowd == community, it's a group of like minded people who have some common interests. And that makes it elegant.
Can the Rand Paultards "libertarianize" any argument? Sure, and they often do. But they're pretty easily recognizable, and are also easily ignored through the friends and foes mechanism. For those who disagree with them, they can at least be marginalized.
How is moderation by site-users more honest than moderation by site-operators? You get biases either way.
A blessed and approved site admin has ultimate authority to delete viewpoints that disagree with his. It's won't have a community feel - it is simply an opinion portal for the admin. And frankly, most people have so many biases that they're unable to pull it off and keep their site both interesting and relevant. The internet's history is littered with these kinds of failures; see kuro5hin for a dramatic example.
By contrast, on Slashdot each user is given very few mod points, and then only when they participate positively, and is further prevented from moderating in a thread where they've posted. It limits one person's ability to really sway a discussion. Instead, you get a general overall idea of which comments are worth more according to the entire community. (There's also the flag mechanism for notifying an admin of true spam and racist copy pasta trolls, but the admins still have to answer to each other for wielding that weapon.)
Sure, you could probably farm a bunch of sock puppets and mod-bomb people you disagree with, but there's no payoff. You get no personal benefit or gain out of out-trolling someone, certainly not enough to make it worth the effort.
It's an elegant solution to a really, really hard problem.
I sure hope some independent lab tests will be done soon that show no harm from third party controllers
This is where Apple's genius will shine: if you try to reverse engineer the chip in the cable, even to prove or disprove safety claims, they will sue your ass into obscurity (and possibly incarcerate it) for violating the DMCA!
Android may suck, but it couldn't possibly suck this hard, could it?
iPhones come with an expiration built into the upgrades. Did you install iOS 4 on an iPhone 3? "Whoops, why is this thing now a turd? I guess I don't care because it's time to upgrade to the new iPhone anyway." Don't want to upgrade? Too bad, but until you do you can't install Wretched Ravens 2, because it "needs" the latest version of iOS.
But hey, it's YOUR choice, not Apple's. They aren't forcing anyone to upgrade.
(My solution is to avoid iOS upgrading until there's an untethered jailbreak for it. By then, the OS bugs are pretty much worked out, and people have patched around the most heinous inclusions, such as requiring official iCables.)
The problem is that Apple led the way by using switched-mode power supplies, which require careful design and quality parts to ensure safety. The cheap knock-offs have neither, but because they have to fit the Apple look, they haven't the room for a transformer. And sure, Apple is careful, but their designs are still riskier than their old ones.
Old transformer-based designs were much more likely to fail safely, requiring the breakdown of both the primary and secondary coils' insulation before a shock was even possible. SMPSs can have a single part failure lead to a bad outcome.
My guess is the reason those games were so much fun was *you*. You were likely at a carefree age with fewer responsibilities, hanging out with your friends, and all the time in the world. Now you have a job, perhaps a family, and grown-up responsibilities, and don't have the same kinds of leisure time.
Anything you did back then was fun because you were at a point in your life where you could enjoy it the most.
They originally hoped that they'd bring uncensored information to China. When that got silenced, they switched to telling their customers they were being censored, bringing attention to the censorship. When that was silenced, they left.
At the high level, (and from a Western viewpoint*,) those are not evil actions. The rest of their dealings with China and the Chinese market may have been less than angelic, but their overarching framework had noble foundations.
* I qualified that statement because there is a Chinese viewpoint that a harmonious society (even if it is built on polite fictions) is better than individual freedoms that lead to disruptions. We may find that dishonest, repulsive, repressive, and tyrannical, but ours aren't the only ideas on the planet.
I initially assumed that the design would use natural materials - otherwise, what use could it be to anybody?
If it were my team, I'd be looking at ways to build it from natural materials first, found materials second, and using a minimum amount of manufactured materials. Found materials could be anything, from a length of pipe, to corrugated steel, an automobile muffler, a metal grate, or even brass AK-47 shell casings. They'd have to be ubiquitously common, and really cheap or free to obtain. They might even do some field work to learn what kinds of materials fit those qualifications in poor villages around the globe.
But building is separate from design.
I'd want to first design and test it out of materials perfectly suited for the job. Make sure the design actually reduces emissions as required. Then, start substituting the parts for scavenged materials, and learn what impacts those choices have. Does using a rusty exhaust pipe for a smokestack emit lead? Don't use it. Does a flat rock substitute for the heat shield? Great. Does a corrugated sheet metal shroud only have half the thermal efficiency? Ok, but maybe there's a different shape that would make it better if that's the materials you think people will have available to them.
But maybe they find that some key part is critical to reduce emissions, and it has to be manufactured. They then have to find a cheap way of producing them, while keeping them compatible with a wide range of other parts. I wonder if $900,000 will be enough.
Damn! Just when 3D printers started getting reasonably priced, now I have to go out and buy a 4D printer? And to print a 4D universe you're telling me I'll need a 5D printer?
Theoretically, would a 4D printer use "strings" instead of "filament"?
It's only about XP's end of support on April 8, 2014.
FTFY.
There are zero positive valid business benefits to upgrading to Windows 8+, some non-issues that are used for sales pitches by OS vendors, and several negatives.
In the non-issue column, there are:
We have no need for any application changes that take "advantage" of any of the new features of the new OS.
We have no need for any GUI changes that take "advantage" of any of the new features of the new GUI.
In the negative column, we have the following:
Vendor support. End-of-life is used only for extortion by the vendor. We'd be perfectly content if they continued to support XP. It's not as if those bits rotted away through age.
GUI changes that disturb people who have no need to learn a new GUI. In particular, I don't want to pay someone extra to waste their time learning a new GUI.
OS storage requirements that increase the footprint of the OS. I don't want to have to buy new hardware, disks, CPUs, RAM, or motherboards.
Increasingly complex management and distribution requirements. We solved all those problems already. Now I have to re-solve them for the new OS.
Their originally poor security model was made more complex without making it better. Again, my training and costs rise, with no ROI.
Cost. Not only do the new licenses cost, but the ever increasing doom of moving to a Microsoft-based SaaSTCRMFYOAAB (Software as a Service That Collects Rent Money From You On An Annual Basis.) I don't need to pay their cloud fees to do my work.
Microsoft thrives on confusing people into to forgetting that an OS is nothing more than the kernel, and the rest of the crap is GUI and application stuff that should not belong in the hands of the OS vendor. Apple has mastered fostering that misunderstanding as well. It's obviously profitable for them, which means it costs us plenty.
The worst part is that I've had our infrastructure people tell us the cost of deploying Linux is too high, for several of those same negative reasons above. Well, we would have had to do it exactly ONE time, and then we'd have been done. But no, here we are, staring down another Windows end-of-life deadline, getting ready to write them another check. Too bad we can't sue those people for malfeasance.
They should also fit cars with proximity sensors that automatically apply the brakes when you get too close to the car in front.
...
In other words, it's a nice idea, but on crowded roads, even with good drivers, it wouldn't work.
Actually, more than twenty auto makers offer some form of "autonomous cruise control" systems that perform exactly this task. Some are laser based. I have a radar-based system in my Ford that works really well. You set it like a normal cruise control, and it maintains your speed. The radar monitors the front of the car, and if you start gaining on a slower vehicle, it reduces your speed to maintain a constant distance gap. If the vehicle in front of you brakes, it brakes. If the vehicle in front of you then starts accelerating, it accelerates your vehicle back up to your set speed. If the vehicle in front of you slows drastically, stops suddenly, or if it detects a stationary object in your immediate path, it brakes very hard and sounds a warning alarm with a flash of a red stripe displayed on the windscreen.
If it's reduced your speed because you're behind a slower vehicle, and if the road curves, it still keeps the distance constant; but if the slow vehicle ahead of you changes lanes, it recognizes you're no longer behind it and increases your speed again.
It has a selectable gap the driver can set with a switch on the steering wheel: 22 yards, 44 yards, or 66 yards. (Personally, I'd rather have it be time-based, so I could select a 1.5 second gap, a 2.0 second gap, or a 2.5 second gap, but I didn't build the system.) I've found if you set it to the 66 yard gap while you're in traffic, people will cut in front of you, causing your car to brake, causing more people to curse you and cut in front of you. And as your speed is reduced, it still maintains the 66 yard gap, even if that means a four second delay at a slower speed. So that part is somewhat annoying. You can reduce the gap to reduce the number of cars cutting into your space, but you may then be following at about a 1.5 second gap or less, which is uncomfortably close. The system, however, reacts very quickly, and even the shortest gap is not a problem for it. (I keep the car very well maintained, and it always has good tires and very good brakes.)
And believe it or not, the whole system actually functions in heavy highway traffic when you're surrounded on all sides by other vehicles, at least when the traffic is moving. (It disengages at speeds below about 20 MPH, so it doesn't work in true stop-and-go traffic.)
I've had a couple of panic brakes caused by people in front of me who didn't fully pull into their turn lane (I was shifting to avoid them, but the system hit the brakes anyway.) The only real failures I've had have been in heavy rain and heavy snowfall. If there is so much interference that it blinds the sensor, it beeps to announce it's shutting down, and it completely disables cruise control until the interference is corrected. One particularly snowy trip, I had to pull off the road and find a car wash to hose the sticky snow from the front of the vehicle, where the snow had packed itself in and built up in front of the radar antenna.
Ford offers it as a part of an electronic option package on certain models. It costs about $2000 to add the whole package. I have no idea what other car makers charge for their systems.
Slashdot Mirror
"Publish AND perish." What a novel approach!
You missed a key fact: Elop took a good brand that now had only unwanted, aging products that could no longer compete, executed the most expensive failures, and sold the rest before the marketplace killed them completely.
Had he pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Symbian, and tried to make a go of it based on an existing loyal fan base and lots of marketing, he would have ended up EXACTLY like Blackberry -- warehouses filled with unsold phones, flat broke, and completely irrelevant in the marketplace. At least with Microsoft owning them, they're not broke.
I don't know why everyone on slashdot has remained so deluded about Nokia's potential future had Elop not taken those actions. They were not competitive, and their prospects were poor. If Symbian and Meego were as great as everyone here imagines, why weren't they crushing iPhones back in 2010?
I have a couple of heavily used iOS apps that don't have Windows 8 (or web) ports, and i have it on four iDevices, so I'm stuck in that boat with a flimsy paddle. A change would be expensive to me. And today, they get upgraded in pairs, because if I get a new one, the wife gets a new one, too :-/ That also means a different OS has to be part of a wife-acceptable agreement.
And, like you, I mostly like the Apple hardware (the iPhone screen size is optimal, but the battery life is pathetic, and everything is painfully locked down). The current user interface is fine, but Apple is shit-bombing iOS 7 on folks (just like Microsoft and Windows 8), and I don't need that kind of change. Besides, Android and Windows 8 are really not that much different when it comes to walled gardens and no root access to my own computer. The grass currently isn't green anywhere on either side of the fence.
Maybe someday I'll make the leap to a CyanogenMod ecosystem.
Actually, as a tablet device, they aren't awful. When you judge them on an analogy basis, "Surface is to a Windows 7 laptop as an iPad is to a MacBook", they do what they're supposed to do.
One big problem is nobody cares. Anybody with money who wanted a tablet or a smartphone already bought an iPad or an iPhone and got sucked into the Apple ecosystem. They now have built dependencies on Apple apps. Changing over completely is expensive, and gains you not enough extra to make it worthwhile. (For example, until Windows phone 8 came out, many of the Microsofties I know had iPhones and Androids, because not even threats from their boss could get them to use WinCE phones.)
Another problem is that they're trying to be full-purpose computing devices. People accept the limitations of an iPad (compared to the MacBook) because they understand it's a limited system. Microsoft is trying to say "hey, look, it's not just a tablet but a whole computer", but the touch-oriented user interface sucks for non-touch-oriented applications.
Making matters worse was the stupid decision to put Metro on the desktop OS. Now everyone sees how it sucks on a laptop and translates that to their imagined impact on their tablets or phones. I wouldn't buy a Surface if I thought it would suck as much as Windows 8 on a PC.
Are you aware of just how much they increase that risk? In the cases of drunk driving, or texting-while-driving, it's claimed (according to public service advertisements) an increase of four times. While that number sounds scary, when you apply it to the number of accidents per mile driven, it's still a pretty low number. They also don't take into account severity: of those 4x accidents, do injuries also go up by 4x? Or do they go up by only 2x, or perhaps 10x? We know that with speeding, it doesn't appreciably increase the number of accidents per mile driven, but it dramatically increases the severity of the injuries. What I'm saying is it doesn't matter: simply hold people accountable when they actually harm someone.
We naturally react to drunk (or texting) drivers who injure people with revulsion. That's completely understandable - the person was stupid, irresponsible, and harmed someone as a result. I think they need to go to jail for a very long time, and to be punished for their actions.
But we tend to ignore that driving is inherently hazardous, and we downplay the other sources of accidents. And that includes everything. Bad weather? Tired driver? Bald tires? Bad brakes? Slow down, or pull over - any accident is 100% your fault if you keep driving in conditions that aren't suitable for you, your abilities, your vehicle, and the road conditions.
Of course, there are other uncontrollable environmental factors, but they all distill down to the essence of "there would have been no accident if the driver had made a better choice". For example, a deer could jump in front of your vehicle. Were you driving too fast to avoid striking the beast? That's your fault. Did someone get hurt as a result? Your responsibility. Did your vehicle break down and leak oil onto the road, causing a following driver to spin out? Your fault.
My idea of culture hangs on the wall at a museum, not growing in a cup on my table.
What, so now the cop has to see which app on your tiny screen you were using when he saw you? If it's colored a certain way, it's OK, but if it's colored differently it's not OK? And if I am pulled over texting-while-driving, do I just need a double-click-the-button app to pop up the maps quick so I can tell the cop I was just using a map? I don't disagree with the cop tagging someone for using the map app in that way, because it would be impossible to enforce it any other way.
However, I think a lot of driving laws are stupid "pre-crime" kinds of laws that should be revisited. Speeding, drunk driving, texting, etc., none of those actions actually causes harm. They only increase risks, such as the risk of increased injury in an accident due to higher speeds, or the risk of actually getting into an accident because you're distracted or intoxicated. But the only thing that actually causes harm is an actual accident. If you cause an accident that causes minor injury to another, you should get about five years in jail. If your accident seriously injures another person, you should get 10 years. If your accident takes another person's life, you go to jail for life. If those were the laws, and they were enforced, people might actually think before they try something stupid. That way each person would be responsible for their own actions at all times. If you're on an isolated country road, with no cars visible for miles in any direction, why not drive 120 MPH? If you're in a tight city street, with the potential for pedestrians to pop out in front of you from between parked vehicles, you're risking jail if you don't essentially crawl slowly through the neighborhood. You limit your own behavior because you're responsible for the consequences of your actions.
Of course, that would require people to think and to take responsibility for themselves, two things that most people suck at.
If you think of it in terms of crowd == community, it's a group of like minded people who have some common interests. And that makes it elegant.
Can the Rand Paultards "libertarianize" any argument? Sure, and they often do. But they're pretty easily recognizable, and are also easily ignored through the friends and foes mechanism. For those who disagree with them, they can at least be marginalized.
Me too. I like to think of it as a kind of "get-out-of-jury-duty-for-life" benefit!
How is moderation by site-users more honest than moderation by site-operators? You get biases either way.
A blessed and approved site admin has ultimate authority to delete viewpoints that disagree with his. It's won't have a community feel - it is simply an opinion portal for the admin. And frankly, most people have so many biases that they're unable to pull it off and keep their site both interesting and relevant. The internet's history is littered with these kinds of failures; see kuro5hin for a dramatic example.
By contrast, on Slashdot each user is given very few mod points, and then only when they participate positively, and is further prevented from moderating in a thread where they've posted. It limits one person's ability to really sway a discussion. Instead, you get a general overall idea of which comments are worth more according to the entire community. (There's also the flag mechanism for notifying an admin of true spam and racist copy pasta trolls, but the admins still have to answer to each other for wielding that weapon.)
Sure, you could probably farm a bunch of sock puppets and mod-bomb people you disagree with, but there's no payoff. You get no personal benefit or gain out of out-trolling someone, certainly not enough to make it worth the effort.
It's an elegant solution to a really, really hard problem.
If you structured it so "last post" was a thing, people would never stop commenting. At least the race to first post is self limiting.
I like reading about comments on comments about stories about comments about comments.
I like quoting previous comments about commenters commenting about comments in my comments about comments on stories about commenting on comments.
I sure hope some independent lab tests will be done soon that show no harm from third party controllers
This is where Apple's genius will shine: if you try to reverse engineer the chip in the cable, even to prove or disprove safety claims, they will sue your ass into obscurity (and possibly incarcerate it) for violating the DMCA!
Android may suck, but it couldn't possibly suck this hard, could it?
iPhones come with an expiration built into the upgrades. Did you install iOS 4 on an iPhone 3? "Whoops, why is this thing now a turd? I guess I don't care because it's time to upgrade to the new iPhone anyway." Don't want to upgrade? Too bad, but until you do you can't install Wretched Ravens 2, because it "needs" the latest version of iOS.
But hey, it's YOUR choice, not Apple's. They aren't forcing anyone to upgrade.
(My solution is to avoid iOS upgrading until there's an untethered jailbreak for it. By then, the OS bugs are pretty much worked out, and people have patched around the most heinous inclusions, such as requiring official iCables.)
Sadly, there's no (+1, pathetic but true) mod.
The problem is that Apple led the way by using switched-mode power supplies, which require careful design and quality parts to ensure safety. The cheap knock-offs have neither, but because they have to fit the Apple look, they haven't the room for a transformer. And sure, Apple is careful, but their designs are still riskier than their old ones.
Old transformer-based designs were much more likely to fail safely, requiring the breakdown of both the primary and secondary coils' insulation before a shock was even possible. SMPSs can have a single part failure lead to a bad outcome.
My guess is the reason those games were so much fun was *you*. You were likely at a carefree age with fewer responsibilities, hanging out with your friends, and all the time in the world. Now you have a job, perhaps a family, and grown-up responsibilities, and don't have the same kinds of leisure time.
Anything you did back then was fun because you were at a point in your life where you could enjoy it the most.
And nothing of value was corrupted.
They originally hoped that they'd bring uncensored information to China. When that got silenced, they switched to telling their customers they were being censored, bringing attention to the censorship. When that was silenced, they left.
At the high level, (and from a Western viewpoint*,) those are not evil actions. The rest of their dealings with China and the Chinese market may have been less than angelic, but their overarching framework had noble foundations.
* I qualified that statement because there is a Chinese viewpoint that a harmonious society (even if it is built on polite fictions) is better than individual freedoms that lead to disruptions. We may find that dishonest, repulsive, repressive, and tyrannical, but ours aren't the only ideas on the planet.
I initially assumed that the design would use natural materials - otherwise, what use could it be to anybody?
If it were my team, I'd be looking at ways to build it from natural materials first, found materials second, and using a minimum amount of manufactured materials. Found materials could be anything, from a length of pipe, to corrugated steel, an automobile muffler, a metal grate, or even brass AK-47 shell casings. They'd have to be ubiquitously common, and really cheap or free to obtain. They might even do some field work to learn what kinds of materials fit those qualifications in poor villages around the globe.
But building is separate from design.
I'd want to first design and test it out of materials perfectly suited for the job. Make sure the design actually reduces emissions as required. Then, start substituting the parts for scavenged materials, and learn what impacts those choices have. Does using a rusty exhaust pipe for a smokestack emit lead? Don't use it. Does a flat rock substitute for the heat shield? Great. Does a corrugated sheet metal shroud only have half the thermal efficiency? Ok, but maybe there's a different shape that would make it better if that's the materials you think people will have available to them.
But maybe they find that some key part is critical to reduce emissions, and it has to be manufactured. They then have to find a cheap way of producing them, while keeping them compatible with a wide range of other parts. I wonder if $900,000 will be enough.
During entry into a 3D black hole, I bet you get squished pretty much into a speck indistinguishable from a "point".
Damn! Just when 3D printers started getting reasonably priced, now I have to go out and buy a 4D printer? And to print a 4D universe you're telling me I'll need a 5D printer?
Theoretically, would a 4D printer use "strings" instead of "filament"?
It's only about XP's end of support on April 8, 2014.
FTFY.
There are zero positive valid business benefits to upgrading to Windows 8+, some non-issues that are used for sales pitches by OS vendors, and several negatives.
In the non-issue column, there are:
In the negative column, we have the following:
Microsoft thrives on confusing people into to forgetting that an OS is nothing more than the kernel, and the rest of the crap is GUI and application stuff that should not belong in the hands of the OS vendor. Apple has mastered fostering that misunderstanding as well. It's obviously profitable for them, which means it costs us plenty.
The worst part is that I've had our infrastructure people tell us the cost of deploying Linux is too high, for several of those same negative reasons above. Well, we would have had to do it exactly ONE time, and then we'd have been done. But no, here we are, staring down another Windows end-of-life deadline, getting ready to write them another check. Too bad we can't sue those people for malfeasance.
They should also fit cars with proximity sensors that automatically apply the brakes when you get too close to the car in front.
...
In other words, it's a nice idea, but on crowded roads, even with good drivers, it wouldn't work.
Actually, more than twenty auto makers offer some form of "autonomous cruise control" systems that perform exactly this task. Some are laser based. I have a radar-based system in my Ford that works really well. You set it like a normal cruise control, and it maintains your speed. The radar monitors the front of the car, and if you start gaining on a slower vehicle, it reduces your speed to maintain a constant distance gap. If the vehicle in front of you brakes, it brakes. If the vehicle in front of you then starts accelerating, it accelerates your vehicle back up to your set speed. If the vehicle in front of you slows drastically, stops suddenly, or if it detects a stationary object in your immediate path, it brakes very hard and sounds a warning alarm with a flash of a red stripe displayed on the windscreen.
If it's reduced your speed because you're behind a slower vehicle, and if the road curves, it still keeps the distance constant; but if the slow vehicle ahead of you changes lanes, it recognizes you're no longer behind it and increases your speed again.
It has a selectable gap the driver can set with a switch on the steering wheel: 22 yards, 44 yards, or 66 yards. (Personally, I'd rather have it be time-based, so I could select a 1.5 second gap, a 2.0 second gap, or a 2.5 second gap, but I didn't build the system.) I've found if you set it to the 66 yard gap while you're in traffic, people will cut in front of you, causing your car to brake, causing more people to curse you and cut in front of you. And as your speed is reduced, it still maintains the 66 yard gap, even if that means a four second delay at a slower speed. So that part is somewhat annoying. You can reduce the gap to reduce the number of cars cutting into your space, but you may then be following at about a 1.5 second gap or less, which is uncomfortably close. The system, however, reacts very quickly, and even the shortest gap is not a problem for it. (I keep the car very well maintained, and it always has good tires and very good brakes.)
And believe it or not, the whole system actually functions in heavy highway traffic when you're surrounded on all sides by other vehicles, at least when the traffic is moving. (It disengages at speeds below about 20 MPH, so it doesn't work in true stop-and-go traffic.)
I've had a couple of panic brakes caused by people in front of me who didn't fully pull into their turn lane (I was shifting to avoid them, but the system hit the brakes anyway.) The only real failures I've had have been in heavy rain and heavy snowfall. If there is so much interference that it blinds the sensor, it beeps to announce it's shutting down, and it completely disables cruise control until the interference is corrected. One particularly snowy trip, I had to pull off the road and find a car wash to hose the sticky snow from the front of the vehicle, where the snow had packed itself in and built up in front of the radar antenna.
Ford offers it as a part of an electronic option package on certain models. It costs about $2000 to add the whole package. I have no idea what other car makers charge for their systems.
Don't worry, the tinfoil in your hat will short it out.
And yours, too.