More and more traditional application functionality is being offered by online services, meaning less and less of it is distributed and users can't change how they work. Companies can build proprietary services and create their own private forks and fixes without contributing back to the general community. Some open source licenses encourage this, others like the GPL discourages this. The Linux kernel and a great many other parts of Red Hat Linux is built on that user freedom and enforced sharing of code.
We see Google has great success with Android under the Apache license, except for the kernel. Apple built OS X based on a BSD kernel. While open source probably has a bright future at the bottom of the stack, will it mainly become the "plumbing" of proprietary systems using non-copyleft licenses? Will copyleft applications adapt to this new hosted, service-oriented world? Be an alternative to it? More or less fade out as users move to the cloud? Obviously this won't have a definitive answer, but I'd like your thoughts on what direction we're headed.
That means sensors that Google purchased for $75,000 back in 2009 now only cost $7,500 for Waymo to build itself.
I'm guessing cost was waaaaaay down on Google's list of priorities when they picked experimental sensors for their highly experimental cars. I doubt anyone thought it had to be these exact sensors that go on production models. Also this has very little to do with in-house, since 2009 there are tons of new, much cheaper LIDAR sensors. Minus the PR blurb it's basically "Waymo follows industry, pretends it's a miracle".
Sounds like the courts like to drum up business, how American. Here in Norway the general rule is that the winners are awarded reasonable court costs if their claim is mostly or entirely won, rule of thumb is around 80% for economic damage. That is to say, if I claim $3000 in compensation for lost income and the court awards me $2500+ I'll get court costs covered on top. If I make a bullshit $10000 claim for emotional distress and is awarded $3000 then I have to pay my own costs. The reasoning is that you so massively exaggerated your claim your opponent had $7000 worth of valid reason to bring this case to court even if he'd still lose. I think that's a good system, it rewards reasonable demands and punishes defendants for bringing cases they should have settled to trial. For partial wins with many claims the court can choose to award partial costs to the same effect.
There are a few exceptions to this, if there was a material dispute of facts resolved at trial, if the winning party has refused attempts to negotiate a settlement or if it is for welfare reasons or in case of great resource inequality. That means the principle generally doesn't apply in custody cases, whether they can pull the plug, putting mentally challenged people under legal guardianship and such. It also means individuals usually aren't forced to pay court costs against big companies like banks and insurance companies unless they're frivolous. In fact there's a few exceptions that can be used regardless of outcome, like incurring needless cost. If the first thing I do is sue someone and the first thing they do is admit fault and pay up I could end up paying the court fees, because I didn't even bother to try to resolve it some other way. Those are very narrow exceptions though.
It seems Leah created a project, joined with GNU, then decided to separate from the GNU, and Stallman is talking as if Leah can't go back to her original project. Is that normal? It seems borderline abusive to me. "Oh, you want to leave? Well, I'm going to make sure I tell everyone publicly that you have my permission, because I am the one in power, and you are lucky that I am letting you go."
Seems completely normal to me. If Oracle unilaterally sent out a press release that OpenOffice has left Apache and is back to being a Oracle project and Apache objected saying you can't just decide that we'd be ready to burn Larry Ellison at the stake. I don't know the truth of the allegations, but whether they're true or false she's clearly a major drama queen taking every opportunity to be butthurt. That leads me to question how much the person fired was fired for bring a trans person and how much she's just projecting that it must really be because that person is transsexual.
Apple has suffered from a lack of progress ever since Jobs died. They are treading water... it took them 5 years to update the MacBook, and what we got was lackluster. 'Predicting' that they will succeed and Microsoft will falter is dubious.
On the other hand they got a friend of mine who hasn't worn a watch since 1998 to buy an Apple Watch. Actually two, first he bought one for his significant other and then he got jealous and bought one for himself. I know anecdotes aren't data, but Apple doesn't have to defend every market they're in as long as they grow new ones. I could see Apple launching a 2-in-1 convertible like the Surface Pro and decide between that and iCloud they don't care much about having any other kind of Mac. It would be enough for a vast majority of the PC users and the rest would simply be a market Apple won't serve.
I think in essence this boils down to a "fight or flee" response. Either you stand your ground and fight for a better work environment and possibly lose badly or you dodge the problematic employee/employees/boss and find a better work environment somewhere else. And the premise here is that fight is impossible, then you're not left with a whole lot of choices.
These types of lists are always biased in a "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" kind of way. I've been using linux for 20 years now and don't really agree with most of their choices. These lists might get someone new started with Linux, but people eventually gravitate towards what works for them once they get their sea legs.
Most people gravitate towards what they already know, whether or not it is longer the best choice. I've used outdated or sub-optimal tools many times because I know exactly what the workflow, limitations and quirks are and if you avoid the pitfalls it works, even though I know newer versions or other software does it better. You can waste a lot of time chasing a better solution, switching distros fixes one problem and gives you two new ones. To be honest I don't like that being used as a suggestion very often, pick one roughly right for you and unless it turns consistantly sour or is a real deal breaker for you most of the time you're better off trying to fix it or live with it than jumping ship.
Given Nintendo's historical opposition to basically anything they don't explicitly allow happening on their consoles, it seems like a real surprise that this one cheerfully accepts being reflashed with a modified system image. Does Nintendo just not care in this case? Are they doing console lockdown almost as retro as the games being emulated?
Nintendo wants to sell consoles. Usually you do that by offering a locked down platform with anti-piracy features developers want to develop for, so they make games and users buy it for the games. In this case the games are already written. Who is going to start writing new games for the Nintendo Classic? Nobody. So why should Nintendo try to get between you and your favorite non-included classic? I'm pretty sure this means you'll quickly see "every game under the sun" classic boxes for sale on eBay. Which means Nintendo will sell lots of boxes. Companies are very good at not looking too hard into why they make money when it's in their best interest not to.
I fear that their top end chip is still getting stomped by the Core i5 in most benchmarks, so they are still making last minute tweaks to improve performance. They can only do so much at this point, though. I'd like to be wrong about that, but until we start seeing reviews I'm going to be a skeptic.
What AMD will do that Intel won't do is release a mainstream chip with no graphics. If you look at the Skylake quadcore die you'll see something like 40% of it is graphics, 40% CPU cores and 20% miscellaneous. You could put four more CPU cores in the same space. Obviously you won't have built in graphics but for gamers you'll have a dGPU anyway, so nothing much of value was lost. Intel has force bundled this so they can kill the low end graphics market, but as a dGPU gamer you're paying an "GPU tax" for something you don't use. Of course you could move to the X99 platform and "enthusiast" CPUs, but then you're paying an even bigger premium for that. I don't know if they'll match an i5 single threaded, but it's a long time since games started to have to work with dual and quad cores. If games scale well to eight cores I'm sure a Zen octo-core will beat an i5 quad-core by a considerable margin. Of course Intel could just "mainstream" their enthusiast platform to compete, but that would mean lowering prices a lot. Either way it's a pretty big win for the consumer.
Work hard. Save money. Pay for the things that you want to pay for. Don't force someone else to pay for your stuff-- and that includes your medical treatment.
Grow wings. Learn to fly. That's roughly how likely 99.9% of the population are to ever pay for a major stay at the ICU out of pocket. So unless you want to make due totally without you need to get insurance. I like insurance when it's reasonably clear what the terms and conditions are like theft or fire. Health insurance is a horror show, it's paying money into a black hole hoping that some day you get the help you need if shit hits the fan.
But if you show any signs of actually needing that help, they'll do their best to get rid of you. The hospital wants to over-treat you to bill more, the insurance company wants to under-treat you to pay less and if you end up in any conflict about the degree or quality of care you'll be fighting in court instead of getting well. It's the freedom to starve or eat what turd you will. Or you could have a sandwich, whether or not you want it or not because they already taxed you for it.
I don't like many aspects of the nanny state, but I think it has to be somewhat balanced up against the realistic choices people have. Otherwise you might argue you should be able to make slave contracts, if only you find people far enough backed into a corner they'll do it "willingly". Or if your parents are bums who won't pay your schooling then you shouldn't get any K-12 education, what real choice does a six year old have? There's such a thing as too much freedom...
Ah, "social democracy". Where they do what's "best for you", not what you want.
Because in the US the politicians never do what people are against. You're like a guy in a wheelchair making fun of another man's limp. We voted for these clowns. We continue voting for these clowns. And if the latest polls are any indication we're moving to a more socialist government in this year's election. Democracy is working fine. The voters, eh.... but at least we haven't stooped to electing reality show celebrity billionaires.
And compared to FM, DAB is mostly nothing. At a fraction of the range where you'd still be pulling in very usable FM audio. DAB is gone entirely, or slamming open and closed like a berserk doorman on meth.
This is where commercial interests have won. DAB+ is actually quite nice in populated areas, more channels and better sound. We're building tunnel coverage and such so along the main roads it'll be okay. But when you start to consider the streaming capabilities of cell phones and particularly compared to the antenna and battery = power of a car we should have dropped radio altogether and just built out data transfer for streaming.
Because the places you don't have good cell phone coverage DAB+ isn't very good either. Remote cabins, deep in the mountains, far out at sea out of cell phone coverage where you don't care about DAB+ and 20 channels of music. You want to hear the weather forecast and know if there's a storm coming. I'm sure we could find some other alternative for that.
DAB here in the UK is a failure because we adopted it too early, and we are stuck with first generation DAB rather than DAB+. I hope Norway is a bit more advanced.
We were just as early adopters, but in an effort to give as many as possible the finger it will be exclusively DAB+. So if you bought a DAB radio it has both been born and died in less time than most FM radios have lived. If you live in a sane country and need FM radios you can probably get them for a few bucks + shipping, there will be literally millions of them thrown away. To my knowledge there will be zero effort made to recycle them other than as electronic trash, when you could have just put them in a container and shipped them to... anywhere but here, really and sold them cheap or given them to a third world country. We spend billions in tax relief for EVs... but trash millions of working radios, that's good environmentalism./facepalm
The "news for cynics" version of this story's headline is "AMD unveils yet another set of powerpoints". Where is (Ry)Zen? Where is Vega? Every month is another month Intel and nVidia rule unchallenged on the high end. We need actual product on the shelf, not more tech demos. And I bet so does AMDs financials, you have to actually hard launch it before you get any revenue. I'm a bit hyped out, now it's more like hoping for a miracle.
Further, the passengers are not the driver's clients, they are Uber's
The moment you start down that road Uber is a taxi service, which they very strongly insist that they are not. They're just a matchmaking service, like eBay for car rides. The "ride sharing" are private agreements between drivers and passengers, Uber just takes a commission like on eBay. At least that's their narrative on the customer side. Their problem is that they're not really much like eBay at all, when you start regulating in detail what you can sell, how you can sell it and to what price sooner or later you'll cross the line where you're not an independent seller but a store employee.
It's like trying to claim the fry cook at McDonald's is an independent contractor delivering burgers and the company just takes a commission for matching him with hungry customers, even though they decide the menu, branding, price, commission rate, opening hours and everything else. You could simply stop driving for Uber any time, but in an at-will state you could walk out at any time. That alone doesn't make you a contractor.
It's not a usable currency because one of the points of currency is a value store - a way of 'keeping score'.
Except money pretty much universally sucks as a value store. If you don't want to lose money because of inflation you have to invest them. Even putting them in the bank is investing them so the bank can lend it out to others, the risk has just been insured out of it. We keep money because of the overhead, risk and capital binding of doing anything else. If you want a savings account somebody should probably set up a BTC to index fund bridge or to gold or some other easily traded valuable. If you have money to spare, you buy shares and if you need money you sell shares and in your BTC wallet is just your spending cash. Then it doesn't matter so much if it's just your spending cash fluctuating wildly and effectively you're not dealing with any other currency. For really big trades like buying a house you could first do a swap for shares or gold then sell those off slowly so you don't get hit with a huge one day swing.
I think it's important to realize that most currencies that have gone to hell have done so because the government was printing tons of money causing hyperinflation. Bitcoin is all over the place, it'll soar and crash and soar and crash and if it'll do more or less of one or the other is anyone's guess. But just volatility is fairly easily beaten by statistics, maybe it's unusual that sometimes you end up paying $90 or $110 instead of $100 but if they both happen then 10 times down the road you've probably paid $1000 +/- $30. It's worse for stability if you lose every time like with hyperinflation, then everybody wants to spend their cash as soon as humanly possible. If you're holding Bitcoins you're a speculator, if you hold cash during hyperinflation you're an idiot.
Tesla will be transitioning the Model S and Model X to redesigned packs with the new form factor (whether or not they announced itâ"it's just how they roll).
Well they also plan to produce 100k Model 3s this year, so I guess that depends on whether the Gigafactory can ramp up quick enough. Eventually it will certainly happen but if the 3s eat all the new capacity there's no urgent need to switch.
The claim is "they can express all colors at any level of brightness".
It doesn't mean what you think it means, if you have say a red, green and blue bulb then you can only do red at 1/3 intensity of white (R+G+B). Apparently this technology lets them shade all the lamps dynamically so you can have any displayable color at max intensity. It makes a huge difference for colors that are both strong and bright.
Moreover, even the gamut of Rec. 2020 is not "all colors."
It doesn't do all colors but it does do 99,8% of the colors you'll see reflecting off real world objects (Pointer's gamut). The only colors that are missing are those you'd only see by watching a laser show, because nothing but a 450nm laser looks exactly like a 450nm laser.
No system can display "all colors" additively, unless you use a system with color primaries based on all of the monochromatic colors (i.e. much more than three primaries - thousands). Four or five color primaries added together can get close.
My impression is that by using quantum dots you effectively have more, not infinitely many but as many as you have different sizes of QDs.
I was at Best Buy last week; all of the TVs there looked awesome. I'm sure some of them looked slightly better than others, but really, who cares? At this point the quality of your viewing experience will be determined almost exclusively by the creative content of the programming you chose to watch, not by any limitations of the display technology. Adam Sandler movies will continue to suck no matter how large the contrast ratio gets.
And how your commute is will be more determined by where you live and where you work, but that's no reason to stop refining cars. A car from the 80s got you from A to B too, but we keep tweaking them and making them better. I want to look at a TV and wonder if I'm looking out a window. I want the blacks to be black. I want the bright whites to be bright white. I want all the colors to be there and to be just as clean and vibrant. The real world doesn't have color banding. The real world isn't fuzzy and doesn't have film grain. The real world isn't interlaced or run at 24 fps. If you want it for a "filmic" look that's fine. If you can achieve overkill, you can always back down later that we don't need 8K 120Hz with 100% Rec.2020 colors at 12 bits and HDR bright enough to stare into a virtual sun. Don't get me wrong my TV looks okay too, but it clearly has a few shortfalls as a "reality reproduction device", even if works as an entertainment device. Well, except when Adam Sandler is playing then it's a torture device.
I'm sure there's a reason why someone might want 8K, but I've not even been convinced of the benefit of 4K yet.
Well on my UHD monitor I can see the difference between a 3840x2160 crop of a photo and the same photo resized to 1920x1080 and back, though it's not huge. If I use a really stupid upscaler to simulate a 1920x1080 screen it's even more obvious. But if I need it to watch TV... not so sure. But there's UHD the resolution and there's UHD the format with HDR, Rec.2020, 10 bit color etc. which all together is a pretty big improvement over BluRay. Going to 8K is probably going to be like 96KHz/24 bit audio, it might be nice if you're editing it and mixing it but for final presentation you don't need it.
I think you have to understand that Apple has morphed into a tech-bling company. The iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air, Apple Watch and AirPods are all high visibility items. The Mac Mini, Mac Pro and to some degree even the MacBook Pro? Mostly stuck on someone's desk or shelf and not for showing off. Well not just showing off but like a premium car, I could get here just as fast in a clunker but I'm doing it in style. They've realized that if the only thing they're fighting on is tech specs it's not really a business they want to be in. So if it comes down to whether there is a Haswell or Roswell in the Mac Mini you're not in their target market anymore.
Is that bad for Apple? Well if what they do go out of fashion, I suppose. If on the other hand it's like wearing Ray-Bans they can keep selling things for way above cost for decades because it's the premium brand people want and buy when they can afford it. Here in Norway I see iPhones have >50% of the web surfing market, it's not because Android is bad but because it's not an iPhone. They don't want to be in the value market and if they tried they might not be very good at it. You really don't want a Michelin star chef to try running a McDonald's any more than the other way around.
I am not a hater of EV technology but if your going to really make a dent you can't cater to the 1%. The people who could really benefit from EV technology are not the 1% it's the rest of us. Is Tesla trying to serve everyone? Or just a few? When Henry Ford made history he was making a vehicle for the masses.
The Ford Motor Company was founded in 1903. The first mass market car was the Model T in 1908. Before T there was A, S and K that was their "Roadster", "Model S" and "Model X". It's just that hardly anyone remembers, because T became the famous one. If the giga-factory and "Model 3" pays off and sells millions, it'll be straight out of the same playbook.
Hardware x264 and x265 video decoding and x264 video encoding has been standard in ARM chips for years. Intel just got x264 decoding. They don't have 265 decoding and they don't have any hardware video encoding. I could go on but my point is that Intel has fallen way behind because they figured they didn't have competition.
Not sure what you're smoking, H264 encode and decode support has been there since Sandy Bridge 6 years ago and Kaby Lake does H265 Main10 decoding in UHD resolution as well as 8 bit encoding. Maybe you've used a poor media player?
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More and more traditional application functionality is being offered by online services, meaning less and less of it is distributed and users can't change how they work. Companies can build proprietary services and create their own private forks and fixes without contributing back to the general community. Some open source licenses encourage this, others like the GPL discourages this. The Linux kernel and a great many other parts of Red Hat Linux is built on that user freedom and enforced sharing of code.
We see Google has great success with Android under the Apache license, except for the kernel. Apple built OS X based on a BSD kernel. While open source probably has a bright future at the bottom of the stack, will it mainly become the "plumbing" of proprietary systems using non-copyleft licenses? Will copyleft applications adapt to this new hosted, service-oriented world? Be an alternative to it? More or less fade out as users move to the cloud? Obviously this won't have a definitive answer, but I'd like your thoughts on what direction we're headed.
That means sensors that Google purchased for $75,000 back in 2009 now only cost $7,500 for Waymo to build itself.
I'm guessing cost was waaaaaay down on Google's list of priorities when they picked experimental sensors for their highly experimental cars. I doubt anyone thought it had to be these exact sensors that go on production models. Also this has very little to do with in-house, since 2009 there are tons of new, much cheaper LIDAR sensors. Minus the PR blurb it's basically "Waymo follows industry, pretends it's a miracle".
Sounds like the courts like to drum up business, how American. Here in Norway the general rule is that the winners are awarded reasonable court costs if their claim is mostly or entirely won, rule of thumb is around 80% for economic damage. That is to say, if I claim $3000 in compensation for lost income and the court awards me $2500+ I'll get court costs covered on top. If I make a bullshit $10000 claim for emotional distress and is awarded $3000 then I have to pay my own costs. The reasoning is that you so massively exaggerated your claim your opponent had $7000 worth of valid reason to bring this case to court even if he'd still lose. I think that's a good system, it rewards reasonable demands and punishes defendants for bringing cases they should have settled to trial. For partial wins with many claims the court can choose to award partial costs to the same effect.
There are a few exceptions to this, if there was a material dispute of facts resolved at trial, if the winning party has refused attempts to negotiate a settlement or if it is for welfare reasons or in case of great resource inequality. That means the principle generally doesn't apply in custody cases, whether they can pull the plug, putting mentally challenged people under legal guardianship and such. It also means individuals usually aren't forced to pay court costs against big companies like banks and insurance companies unless they're frivolous. In fact there's a few exceptions that can be used regardless of outcome, like incurring needless cost. If the first thing I do is sue someone and the first thing they do is admit fault and pay up I could end up paying the court fees, because I didn't even bother to try to resolve it some other way. Those are very narrow exceptions though.
It seems Leah created a project, joined with GNU, then decided to separate from the GNU, and Stallman is talking as if Leah can't go back to her original project. Is that normal? It seems borderline abusive to me. "Oh, you want to leave? Well, I'm going to make sure I tell everyone publicly that you have my permission, because I am the one in power, and you are lucky that I am letting you go."
Seems completely normal to me. If Oracle unilaterally sent out a press release that OpenOffice has left Apache and is back to being a Oracle project and Apache objected saying you can't just decide that we'd be ready to burn Larry Ellison at the stake. I don't know the truth of the allegations, but whether they're true or false she's clearly a major drama queen taking every opportunity to be butthurt. That leads me to question how much the person fired was fired for bring a trans person and how much she's just projecting that it must really be because that person is transsexual.
Apple has suffered from a lack of progress ever since Jobs died. They are treading water... it took them 5 years to update the MacBook, and what we got was lackluster. 'Predicting' that they will succeed and Microsoft will falter is dubious.
On the other hand they got a friend of mine who hasn't worn a watch since 1998 to buy an Apple Watch. Actually two, first he bought one for his significant other and then he got jealous and bought one for himself. I know anecdotes aren't data, but Apple doesn't have to defend every market they're in as long as they grow new ones. I could see Apple launching a 2-in-1 convertible like the Surface Pro and decide between that and iCloud they don't care much about having any other kind of Mac. It would be enough for a vast majority of the PC users and the rest would simply be a market Apple won't serve.
I think in essence this boils down to a "fight or flee" response. Either you stand your ground and fight for a better work environment and possibly lose badly or you dodge the problematic employee/employees/boss and find a better work environment somewhere else. And the premise here is that fight is impossible, then you're not left with a whole lot of choices.
These types of lists are always biased in a "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" kind of way. I've been using linux for 20 years now and don't really agree with most of their choices. These lists might get someone new started with Linux, but people eventually gravitate towards what works for them once they get their sea legs.
Most people gravitate towards what they already know, whether or not it is longer the best choice. I've used outdated or sub-optimal tools many times because I know exactly what the workflow, limitations and quirks are and if you avoid the pitfalls it works, even though I know newer versions or other software does it better. You can waste a lot of time chasing a better solution, switching distros fixes one problem and gives you two new ones. To be honest I don't like that being used as a suggestion very often, pick one roughly right for you and unless it turns consistantly sour or is a real deal breaker for you most of the time you're better off trying to fix it or live with it than jumping ship.
Given Nintendo's historical opposition to basically anything they don't explicitly allow happening on their consoles, it seems like a real surprise that this one cheerfully accepts being reflashed with a modified system image. Does Nintendo just not care in this case? Are they doing console lockdown almost as retro as the games being emulated?
Nintendo wants to sell consoles. Usually you do that by offering a locked down platform with anti-piracy features developers want to develop for, so they make games and users buy it for the games. In this case the games are already written. Who is going to start writing new games for the Nintendo Classic? Nobody. So why should Nintendo try to get between you and your favorite non-included classic? I'm pretty sure this means you'll quickly see "every game under the sun" classic boxes for sale on eBay. Which means Nintendo will sell lots of boxes. Companies are very good at not looking too hard into why they make money when it's in their best interest not to.
I fear that their top end chip is still getting stomped by the Core i5 in most benchmarks, so they are still making last minute tweaks to improve performance. They can only do so much at this point, though. I'd like to be wrong about that, but until we start seeing reviews I'm going to be a skeptic.
What AMD will do that Intel won't do is release a mainstream chip with no graphics. If you look at the Skylake quadcore die you'll see something like 40% of it is graphics, 40% CPU cores and 20% miscellaneous. You could put four more CPU cores in the same space. Obviously you won't have built in graphics but for gamers you'll have a dGPU anyway, so nothing much of value was lost. Intel has force bundled this so they can kill the low end graphics market, but as a dGPU gamer you're paying an "GPU tax" for something you don't use. Of course you could move to the X99 platform and "enthusiast" CPUs, but then you're paying an even bigger premium for that. I don't know if they'll match an i5 single threaded, but it's a long time since games started to have to work with dual and quad cores. If games scale well to eight cores I'm sure a Zen octo-core will beat an i5 quad-core by a considerable margin. Of course Intel could just "mainstream" their enthusiast platform to compete, but that would mean lowering prices a lot. Either way it's a pretty big win for the consumer.
Work hard. Save money. Pay for the things that you want to pay for. Don't force someone else to pay for your stuff-- and that includes your medical treatment.
Grow wings. Learn to fly. That's roughly how likely 99.9% of the population are to ever pay for a major stay at the ICU out of pocket. So unless you want to make due totally without you need to get insurance. I like insurance when it's reasonably clear what the terms and conditions are like theft or fire. Health insurance is a horror show, it's paying money into a black hole hoping that some day you get the help you need if shit hits the fan.
But if you show any signs of actually needing that help, they'll do their best to get rid of you. The hospital wants to over-treat you to bill more, the insurance company wants to under-treat you to pay less and if you end up in any conflict about the degree or quality of care you'll be fighting in court instead of getting well. It's the freedom to starve or eat what turd you will. Or you could have a sandwich, whether or not you want it or not because they already taxed you for it.
I don't like many aspects of the nanny state, but I think it has to be somewhat balanced up against the realistic choices people have. Otherwise you might argue you should be able to make slave contracts, if only you find people far enough backed into a corner they'll do it "willingly". Or if your parents are bums who won't pay your schooling then you shouldn't get any K-12 education, what real choice does a six year old have? There's such a thing as too much freedom...
Ah, "social democracy". Where they do what's "best for you", not what you want.
Because in the US the politicians never do what people are against. You're like a guy in a wheelchair making fun of another man's limp. We voted for these clowns. We continue voting for these clowns. And if the latest polls are any indication we're moving to a more socialist government in this year's election. Democracy is working fine. The voters, eh.... but at least we haven't stooped to electing reality show celebrity billionaires.
And compared to FM, DAB is mostly nothing. At a fraction of the range where you'd still be pulling in very usable FM audio. DAB is gone entirely, or slamming open and closed like a berserk doorman on meth.
This is where commercial interests have won. DAB+ is actually quite nice in populated areas, more channels and better sound. We're building tunnel coverage and such so along the main roads it'll be okay. But when you start to consider the streaming capabilities of cell phones and particularly compared to the antenna and battery = power of a car we should have dropped radio altogether and just built out data transfer for streaming.
Because the places you don't have good cell phone coverage DAB+ isn't very good either. Remote cabins, deep in the mountains, far out at sea out of cell phone coverage where you don't care about DAB+ and 20 channels of music. You want to hear the weather forecast and know if there's a storm coming. I'm sure we could find some other alternative for that.
DAB here in the UK is a failure because we adopted it too early, and we are stuck with first generation DAB rather than DAB+. I hope Norway is a bit more advanced.
We were just as early adopters, but in an effort to give as many as possible the finger it will be exclusively DAB+. So if you bought a DAB radio it has both been born and died in less time than most FM radios have lived. If you live in a sane country and need FM radios you can probably get them for a few bucks + shipping, there will be literally millions of them thrown away. To my knowledge there will be zero effort made to recycle them other than as electronic trash, when you could have just put them in a container and shipped them to... anywhere but here, really and sold them cheap or given them to a third world country. We spend billions in tax relief for EVs... but trash millions of working radios, that's good environmentalism. /facepalm
The "news for cynics" version of this story's headline is "AMD unveils yet another set of powerpoints". Where is (Ry)Zen? Where is Vega? Every month is another month Intel and nVidia rule unchallenged on the high end. We need actual product on the shelf, not more tech demos. And I bet so does AMDs financials, you have to actually hard launch it before you get any revenue. I'm a bit hyped out, now it's more like hoping for a miracle.
Further, the passengers are not the driver's clients, they are Uber's
The moment you start down that road Uber is a taxi service, which they very strongly insist that they are not. They're just a matchmaking service, like eBay for car rides. The "ride sharing" are private agreements between drivers and passengers, Uber just takes a commission like on eBay. At least that's their narrative on the customer side. Their problem is that they're not really much like eBay at all, when you start regulating in detail what you can sell, how you can sell it and to what price sooner or later you'll cross the line where you're not an independent seller but a store employee.
It's like trying to claim the fry cook at McDonald's is an independent contractor delivering burgers and the company just takes a commission for matching him with hungry customers, even though they decide the menu, branding, price, commission rate, opening hours and everything else. You could simply stop driving for Uber any time, but in an at-will state you could walk out at any time. That alone doesn't make you a contractor.
It's not a usable currency because one of the points of currency is a value store - a way of 'keeping score'.
Except money pretty much universally sucks as a value store. If you don't want to lose money because of inflation you have to invest them. Even putting them in the bank is investing them so the bank can lend it out to others, the risk has just been insured out of it. We keep money because of the overhead, risk and capital binding of doing anything else. If you want a savings account somebody should probably set up a BTC to index fund bridge or to gold or some other easily traded valuable. If you have money to spare, you buy shares and if you need money you sell shares and in your BTC wallet is just your spending cash. Then it doesn't matter so much if it's just your spending cash fluctuating wildly and effectively you're not dealing with any other currency. For really big trades like buying a house you could first do a swap for shares or gold then sell those off slowly so you don't get hit with a huge one day swing.
I think it's important to realize that most currencies that have gone to hell have done so because the government was printing tons of money causing hyperinflation. Bitcoin is all over the place, it'll soar and crash and soar and crash and if it'll do more or less of one or the other is anyone's guess. But just volatility is fairly easily beaten by statistics, maybe it's unusual that sometimes you end up paying $90 or $110 instead of $100 but if they both happen then 10 times down the road you've probably paid $1000 +/- $30. It's worse for stability if you lose every time like with hyperinflation, then everybody wants to spend their cash as soon as humanly possible. If you're holding Bitcoins you're a speculator, if you hold cash during hyperinflation you're an idiot.
Tesla will be transitioning the Model S and Model X to redesigned packs with the new form factor (whether or not they announced itâ"it's just how they roll).
Well they also plan to produce 100k Model 3s this year, so I guess that depends on whether the Gigafactory can ramp up quick enough. Eventually it will certainly happen but if the 3s eat all the new capacity there's no urgent need to switch.
The claim is "they can express all colors at any level of brightness".
It doesn't mean what you think it means, if you have say a red, green and blue bulb then you can only do red at 1/3 intensity of white (R+G+B). Apparently this technology lets them shade all the lamps dynamically so you can have any displayable color at max intensity. It makes a huge difference for colors that are both strong and bright.
Moreover, even the gamut of Rec. 2020 is not "all colors."
It doesn't do all colors but it does do 99,8% of the colors you'll see reflecting off real world objects (Pointer's gamut). The only colors that are missing are those you'd only see by watching a laser show, because nothing but a 450nm laser looks exactly like a 450nm laser.
No system can display "all colors" additively, unless you use a system with color primaries based on all of the monochromatic colors (i.e. much more than three primaries - thousands). Four or five color primaries added together can get close.
My impression is that by using quantum dots you effectively have more, not infinitely many but as many as you have different sizes of QDs.
I was at Best Buy last week; all of the TVs there looked awesome. I'm sure some of them looked slightly better than others, but really, who cares? At this point the quality of your viewing experience will be determined almost exclusively by the creative content of the programming you chose to watch, not by any limitations of the display technology. Adam Sandler movies will continue to suck no matter how large the contrast ratio gets.
And how your commute is will be more determined by where you live and where you work, but that's no reason to stop refining cars. A car from the 80s got you from A to B too, but we keep tweaking them and making them better. I want to look at a TV and wonder if I'm looking out a window. I want the blacks to be black. I want the bright whites to be bright white. I want all the colors to be there and to be just as clean and vibrant. The real world doesn't have color banding. The real world isn't fuzzy and doesn't have film grain. The real world isn't interlaced or run at 24 fps. If you want it for a "filmic" look that's fine. If you can achieve overkill, you can always back down later that we don't need 8K 120Hz with 100% Rec.2020 colors at 12 bits and HDR bright enough to stare into a virtual sun. Don't get me wrong my TV looks okay too, but it clearly has a few shortfalls as a "reality reproduction device", even if works as an entertainment device. Well, except when Adam Sandler is playing then it's a torture device.
He won 51 games straight before his 52nd rival, Chen Yaoye, went offline, forcing the game to be recorded as a tie.
So the only way to win is not to play.
The robots are 16in tall and weigh 145kg.
the specifications for the robots are not correct at all. these machines weigh slightly more than 340 kilograms
They probably started hiring American robots...
I'm sure there's a reason why someone might want 8K, but I've not even been convinced of the benefit of 4K yet.
Well on my UHD monitor I can see the difference between a 3840x2160 crop of a photo and the same photo resized to 1920x1080 and back, though it's not huge. If I use a really stupid upscaler to simulate a 1920x1080 screen it's even more obvious. But if I need it to watch TV... not so sure. But there's UHD the resolution and there's UHD the format with HDR, Rec.2020, 10 bit color etc. which all together is a pretty big improvement over BluRay. Going to 8K is probably going to be like 96KHz/24 bit audio, it might be nice if you're editing it and mixing it but for final presentation you don't need it.
I think you have to understand that Apple has morphed into a tech-bling company. The iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air, Apple Watch and AirPods are all high visibility items. The Mac Mini, Mac Pro and to some degree even the MacBook Pro? Mostly stuck on someone's desk or shelf and not for showing off. Well not just showing off but like a premium car, I could get here just as fast in a clunker but I'm doing it in style. They've realized that if the only thing they're fighting on is tech specs it's not really a business they want to be in. So if it comes down to whether there is a Haswell or Roswell in the Mac Mini you're not in their target market anymore.
Is that bad for Apple? Well if what they do go out of fashion, I suppose. If on the other hand it's like wearing Ray-Bans they can keep selling things for way above cost for decades because it's the premium brand people want and buy when they can afford it. Here in Norway I see iPhones have >50% of the web surfing market, it's not because Android is bad but because it's not an iPhone. They don't want to be in the value market and if they tried they might not be very good at it. You really don't want a Michelin star chef to try running a McDonald's any more than the other way around.
I am not a hater of EV technology but if your going to really make a dent you can't cater to the 1%. The people who could really benefit from EV technology are not the 1% it's the rest of us. Is Tesla trying to serve everyone? Or just a few? When Henry Ford made history he was making a vehicle for the masses.
The Ford Motor Company was founded in 1903. The first mass market car was the Model T in 1908. Before T there was A, S and K that was their "Roadster", "Model S" and "Model X". It's just that hardly anyone remembers, because T became the famous one. If the giga-factory and "Model 3" pays off and sells millions, it'll be straight out of the same playbook.
Hardware x264 and x265 video decoding and x264 video encoding has been standard in ARM chips for years. Intel just got x264 decoding. They don't have 265 decoding and they don't have any hardware video encoding. I could go on but my point is that Intel has fallen way behind because they figured they didn't have competition.
Not sure what you're smoking, H264 encode and decode support has been there since Sandy Bridge 6 years ago and Kaby Lake does H265 Main10 decoding in UHD resolution as well as 8 bit encoding. Maybe you've used a poor media player?