Torque becomes less important when you switch to a hybrid drivetrain. Electric motors can provide a LOT of torque and there is essentially no torque curve; it's all available from 0 RPM to maximum. The limiting factor of torque in a hybrid or EV is usually how fast you can pull power out of the battery rather than what the motors can do. (Ludicrous Mode in some Tesla cars is an exception; they do have to limit the use of full acceleration because of heating of the motors.)
Partly it's because there were individuals who were willing to pay a premium to be green, and were willing to buy early hybrid cars before they made economic sense. A first generation Prius saved fuel, but most drivers would not get back the extra cost of buying it over the lifetime of the car. Since then the price of gasoline has increased and the price premium for hybrids has dropped, but even now the payback for hybrid cars in pure economic terms is marginal for non-urban drivers. (The hybrid is a big winner if you mostly drive on city streets.)
Businesses are rarely willing to pay a premium for environmental benefits. (Government agencies can be an exception, which is why most of the flex-fuel cars and trucks are sold to them.) They're not going to buy in quantity until the life cycle cost of a hybrid or electric vehicle is lower than a gasoline or diesel vehicle.
The latest development in diesel locomotives is true hybrids. They can throttle the diesel engine or turn it off completely, though it's slow changes to address overall load rather than immediate power demands, and they feature battery power storage and regenerative braking. They have been in development for over fifteen years and small numbers have been used by railroads; widespread adoption has not yet happened but is likely in the near future as decreasing battery prices make them more appealing. They are expected to offer efficiency gains of 10-15% compared to conventional locomotives in freight applications, and perhaps more in commuter rail because of the frequent rapid acceleration and quick stops that those trains make.
Not entirely true. It's true that the first adoption of hybrid drivetrains in the US was for small passenger cars, but hybrids are rapidly taking over other areas as well.
Vehicles that start and stop a lot are prime candidates to be converted to hybrid. Hybrid cars achieve DOUBLE the fuel economy of non-hybrids in congested city driving. Urban taxis have been switching over to hybrids rapidly, and many Uber and Lyft drivers use them as well.
Urban bus systems have been converting their fleets to hybrids. For example, the MBTA here in Boston will be down to less than 25% conventional diesel buses by the end of 2020, and those will be used solely on longer-distance suburban routes where the buses don't start and stop as often. Hybrids will be about half the fleet, with the rest being CNG, electric trolleybuses, and dual mode diesel-electric buses.
Local delivery trucks are probably better candidates for hybrid drivetrains than long distance trucks are, because many of them spend all their time on crowded city streets. They are also candidates for full battery-electric systems because their daily driving distance is lower than that of long distance trucking. But so far we have seen no movement in the marketplace toward developing hybrid or electric trucks for that application.
And you're overselling what Yang is saying about self-driving cars. The cornerstone of his campaign is Universal Basic Income; anything he says about cars is secondary.
We try to provide an education for all students, and there are federal laws protecting that right to an education. But some students cost more to educate than others. Special needs students are very expensive to educate. Most charter and voucher schools find ways to get out of taking their fair share of special needs students, and few parents will have the resources to home school them.
But voucher systems typically pay the district-wide average of student cost, rather than the average cost of educating a non-special-needs student. As a result, they overpay for what the schools are delivering. Students who are less costly to educate leave the public school system, leaving that system with a higher percentage of those expensive students while simultaneously damaging its economies of scale. The result is a downward spiral of public education.
The algorithm was designed to understand the needs of who the designers thought were the primary customers, the students, and for the desire of the school district to save money on transportation. The desirability of adopting later start times for high schools is well documented; teenagers are natural night people. There don't seem to be any particular disadvantages to earlier start times for elementary schools in terms of student outcomes. So if those are the things you are trying to accomplish, starting high school later and elementary school earlier makes perfect sense.
The problem was that although the new schedule was beautifully designed to address the needs of the students and the school district, it made no attempt to address the needs of the parents. In the case of high school students it SHOULDN'T be necessary to consider the needs of parents, as those students are old enough to get themselves out of bed and to their schools without parental intervention, but not all parents see it that way. And the change in elementary school schedules, especially the earlier end times, caused serious problems for some parents who were facing the need for hours of additional day care every afternoon. A further complication is that those very high school students with the early start times were often expected to be the caretakers for their younger siblings after school, which doesn't work if the high school gets out hours later than the elementary school.
Ultimately it's a textbook example of optimizing for the wrong variables.
It's possible to do better, though. Amazon does. If you bought something from them it stays in your library, and you can stream it or download a new copy, even if the title is no longer available for purchase.
Depends on the major. Computer science students, for example, aren't flocking to Chromebooks because they're pretty useless for software development unless you install a full Linux environment on them.
Current Chromebooks would at best walk Crysis, as none of them have a discrete GPU. Not even Google's own super high end Pixelbook has an option for one. Chrome OS also doesn't supply drivers for serious 3D graphics, so even if you somehow attached a high end NVidia or AMD card the OS wouldn't do much with it.
But that's now. It could change in the future. Chrome OS is based on Linux, so the drivers exist and could be added to Chrome OS.
Microsoft is already giving away Windows for free or very cheaply on low-end computers, so the cost of it isn't an issue there. Chromebooks are winning in education despite the fact that they have little or no advantage in purchase price over a low end Windows laptop. They do have advantages in administration cost, and that's a big force that is driving sales.
There are multiple tiers of entry level devices; the highest level for notebook computers as of 2017 called for a "low-end CPU" (term not defined, but probably applies to anything less powerful than an i3), 4GB or less RAM, a screen size of 14.1" or less, and eMMC storage of 32GB or less. (Reference: https://www.cnx-software.com/2... ) Those requirements have ratcheted up a few times since Microsoft first started offering discounted Windows; it was 2GB RAM, 16GB eMMC, and 10.1" display at one time. All of the cheap Chromebooks sold to the education market qualify, as do Chromesticks and Chromeboxes.
That 32GB limit is REALLY limiting for Windows. Owners quickly discover that if they store more than about 5GB of their own stuff, the system no longer has enough free space to install new builds of Windows. (There are workarounds involving flash drives.) New builds come along about every six months so that's no small thing; Microsoft will probably have to raise the limit to 64GB, like their own low-end device (the Surface Go) has.
This new class of premium Chromebooks lies outside the parameters for cheap Windows licenses so the cost of Windows is a factor there. Many of them have mid-range CPUs and Microsoft will be forced to respond by allowing a larger range of systems to get cheap licenses for Windows, more than just allowing more storage. 8GB RAM, real SSDs with 128GB or more storage, and i5 processors are common for that class of system; some companies are even offering an option for an i7. So far they all use low power (U series) or very low power (Y series) processors; I don't think we'll be seeing a Chromebook with an H series process or its equivalent from AMD any time soon.
I suspect that the end point will come within five years (and that's a conservative guess): Microsoft will make ALL licenses for Windows Home free of charge. You will only pay for the Windows Professional and Enterprise features: domain logon, disk encryption, remote console capability, etc. They may also continue to charge for licenses for the very high end hardware that requires the Workstation edition: multiple CPUs, RAM above 256GB, etc.
That's an example of the Clbuttic Mistake, a relative of the Scunthorpe Problem. The Clbuttic Mistake happens when you blindly do string replacement on text without bothering to check for things like word separators, and then use the replaced version. It's about replacing content, rather than blocking it as most examples of the Scunthorpe Problem are. Replacing "ass" is the most common example, leading to such silliness as articles about buttbuttinating a politician, but there have also been articles that refer to the Consbreastution.
What percentage of the time you spend commuting is wasted depends on what mode of travel you use. Commuting time driving a car is nearly a total waste for most people, though some mitigate that a bit by listening to audiobooks, and you can sometimes combine the trip to work with needed errands. (For example, if you stop to buy groceries on the way home from the office, you eliminate time that you otherwise might spend taking a trip from home to get them.) Commuting by public transit varies depending on how crowded the train or bus is; it may be possible to read, or even get work done on a laptop on a long trip. Walking or bicycling to work is time spent on exercise, and not wasted at all for most people with desk jobs.
Another possible reason for Dropbox to discontinue Linux support is that Linux users are experts who will luse whatever capacity they pay for to the maximum. Their business model likely depends on people paying for more than they need.
Also the lack of Microsoft Office. Sure, you can mostly run it by using special compatibility layers (WINE, or its commercially supported relative CrossOver) but the experience isn't perfect. Or you can use the more limited web versions. But if you want the full Office experience you still have to run Windows.
There are also lots of more specialized software packages that are only available for Windows or that run best there. Developers gravitate to the largest market and ignore others.
Linux has beaten Windows in the server room. And even more dramatically in supercomputing; every one of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world runs Linux.
If you can't make money by running an honest business that treats all its customers fairly, you are in the wrong line of business. A business should not have the right to refuse to serve customers for reasons other than disturbing the peace or the like.
Business post signs saying things like "we reserve the right to refuse service to anybody" but it isn't true. They are already legally prohibited from banning people because of their race, for example.
There are existing precedents for other forms of gambling. New Jersey and Connecticut casinos can't ban blackjack players for card counting (Nevada casinos can); they can and do make the playing conditions unpleasant and unfavorable for counters that they catch but they shouldn't even be allowed to do that.
Unfortunately, we would need a change to the Constitution to ban the political calls. That legal precedent is already established, and it's why political campaigns are allowed to call even if your number is in the Do Not Call registry.
That explains why I haven't gotten the email that has been mentioned in various stories. But the restrictions on what movies are available remain and have been hampered my use of MoviePass. I won't be asking for a refund because there is still enough value to continuing to use it for the rest of the year (assuming it keeps working that long), but renewing is another question.
AMD's CPU chipsets have been solid for quite a while. The problematic AMD motherboards were mostly back in the day when third party chipsets were still available. VIA, notably, did a number of them and not all of them were good. The only reports of problems with Ryzen motherboards I have heard of involved support of very fast RAM; that one appears to have been the fault of both the CPUs and the motherboard chipsets; it was mitigated with microcode updates for the CPUs and fixed in the second generation Ryzen products.
AMD, nee ATI, graphics drivers can still be a problem. And the company tends to drop support of older graphics hardware like a hot potato, much more quickly than NVidia does. On the bright side, AMD is much more cooperative with open source development than NVidia is, so older ATI/AMD graphics hardware is well supported on Linux.
The license of Debian explicitly gives users the right to redistribute it, with or without modification. That right is inherent to the nature of free software. So they can't possibly comply with a restriction on redistribution.
Bulldozer had very disappointing single thread performance, making it a poor choice for gaming. It was further crippled on Windows by the fact that Microsoft didn't release a process scheduler that really understands it until Windows 8, leaving all the installed base of Windows XP and 7 with ever worse performance than the processor was capable of. Linux, of course, was updated right away, and Windows 10 inherited the improvements from 8.
Basically, you can't schedule Bulldozer as if it were a straightforward 8 core CPU because of the resources shared between core pairs. It needs to be scheduled in a way that is more like Hyperthreading on Intel CPUs, acknowledging the performance differences of various combinations of cores. Microsoft wrote that code but didn't backport it to the versions of Windows that most people were using at the time.
At the initial release, Ryzen suffered from a similar problem. Not with SMT; that was handled properly right away. But what Windows didn't understand was the need to be aware of the two CCX units and the increased memory latency for cross-CCX access. So far as I know Microsoft STILL haven't fixed that for the single-die Ryzen processors, though they do address it correctly for Threadripper. In short, they should schedule Ryzen as if it were a dual-socket system, and keep threads of the same program on a single CCX when possible.
But the second generation Oasis has real buttons. Even better.
The basic problem with the Voyage is that it's caught in the middle. People who want a fully premium e-reader step up to the Oasis. People who want the mainstream offering buy the Paperwhite, and bargain hunters buy the basic Kindle. The Voyage is the Oldsmobile of the Kindle line and has now suffered the same fate that the car line did.
Once the second generation Oasis came out, there wasn't much point to the Voyage. (The first generation Oasis vs the Voyage was less clear because of the limited battery life of the bare Oasis without its battery pack cover.) Just about everybody will either pay the additional money for the clearly superior Oasis, or save some money and buy the Paperwhite.
Slashdot Mirror
Torque becomes less important when you switch to a hybrid drivetrain. Electric motors can provide a LOT of torque and there is essentially no torque curve; it's all available from 0 RPM to maximum. The limiting factor of torque in a hybrid or EV is usually how fast you can pull power out of the battery rather than what the motors can do. (Ludicrous Mode in some Tesla cars is an exception; they do have to limit the use of full acceleration because of heating of the motors.)
Partly it's because there were individuals who were willing to pay a premium to be green, and were willing to buy early hybrid cars before they made economic sense. A first generation Prius saved fuel, but most drivers would not get back the extra cost of buying it over the lifetime of the car. Since then the price of gasoline has increased and the price premium for hybrids has dropped, but even now the payback for hybrid cars in pure economic terms is marginal for non-urban drivers. (The hybrid is a big winner if you mostly drive on city streets.)
Businesses are rarely willing to pay a premium for environmental benefits. (Government agencies can be an exception, which is why most of the flex-fuel cars and trucks are sold to them.) They're not going to buy in quantity until the life cycle cost of a hybrid or electric vehicle is lower than a gasoline or diesel vehicle.
The latest development in diesel locomotives is true hybrids. They can throttle the diesel engine or turn it off completely, though it's slow changes to address overall load rather than immediate power demands, and they feature battery power storage and regenerative braking. They have been in development for over fifteen years and small numbers have been used by railroads; widespread adoption has not yet happened but is likely in the near future as decreasing battery prices make them more appealing. They are expected to offer efficiency gains of 10-15% compared to conventional locomotives in freight applications, and perhaps more in commuter rail because of the frequent rapid acceleration and quick stops that those trains make.
Not entirely true. It's true that the first adoption of hybrid drivetrains in the US was for small passenger cars, but hybrids are rapidly taking over other areas as well. Vehicles that start and stop a lot are prime candidates to be converted to hybrid. Hybrid cars achieve DOUBLE the fuel economy of non-hybrids in congested city driving. Urban taxis have been switching over to hybrids rapidly, and many Uber and Lyft drivers use them as well. Urban bus systems have been converting their fleets to hybrids. For example, the MBTA here in Boston will be down to less than 25% conventional diesel buses by the end of 2020, and those will be used solely on longer-distance suburban routes where the buses don't start and stop as often. Hybrids will be about half the fleet, with the rest being CNG, electric trolleybuses, and dual mode diesel-electric buses. Local delivery trucks are probably better candidates for hybrid drivetrains than long distance trucks are, because many of them spend all their time on crowded city streets. They are also candidates for full battery-electric systems because their daily driving distance is lower than that of long distance trucking. But so far we have seen no movement in the marketplace toward developing hybrid or electric trucks for that application.
And you're overselling what Yang is saying about self-driving cars. The cornerstone of his campaign is Universal Basic Income; anything he says about cars is secondary.
There is a fallacy of averages in play here.
We try to provide an education for all students, and there are federal laws protecting that right to an education. But some students cost more to educate than others. Special needs students are very expensive to educate. Most charter and voucher schools find ways to get out of taking their fair share of special needs students, and few parents will have the resources to home school them.
But voucher systems typically pay the district-wide average of student cost, rather than the average cost of educating a non-special-needs student. As a result, they overpay for what the schools are delivering. Students who are less costly to educate leave the public school system, leaving that system with a higher percentage of those expensive students while simultaneously damaging its economies of scale. The result is a downward spiral of public education.
The algorithm was designed to understand the needs of who the designers thought were the primary customers, the students, and for the desire of the school district to save money on transportation. The desirability of adopting later start times for high schools is well documented; teenagers are natural night people. There don't seem to be any particular disadvantages to earlier start times for elementary schools in terms of student outcomes. So if those are the things you are trying to accomplish, starting high school later and elementary school earlier makes perfect sense.
The problem was that although the new schedule was beautifully designed to address the needs of the students and the school district, it made no attempt to address the needs of the parents. In the case of high school students it SHOULDN'T be necessary to consider the needs of parents, as those students are old enough to get themselves out of bed and to their schools without parental intervention, but not all parents see it that way. And the change in elementary school schedules, especially the earlier end times, caused serious problems for some parents who were facing the need for hours of additional day care every afternoon. A further complication is that those very high school students with the early start times were often expected to be the caretakers for their younger siblings after school, which doesn't work if the high school gets out hours later than the elementary school.
Ultimately it's a textbook example of optimizing for the wrong variables.
It's possible to do better, though. Amazon does. If you bought something from them it stays in your library, and you can stream it or download a new copy, even if the title is no longer available for purchase.
Depends on the major. Computer science students, for example, aren't flocking to Chromebooks because they're pretty useless for software development unless you install a full Linux environment on them.
Current Chromebooks would at best walk Crysis, as none of them have a discrete GPU. Not even Google's own super high end Pixelbook has an option for one. Chrome OS also doesn't supply drivers for serious 3D graphics, so even if you somehow attached a high end NVidia or AMD card the OS wouldn't do much with it.
But that's now. It could change in the future. Chrome OS is based on Linux, so the drivers exist and could be added to Chrome OS.
,
Microsoft is already giving away Windows for free or very cheaply on low-end computers, so the cost of it isn't an issue there. Chromebooks are winning in education despite the fact that they have little or no advantage in purchase price over a low end Windows laptop. They do have advantages in administration cost, and that's a big force that is driving sales.
There are multiple tiers of entry level devices; the highest level for notebook computers as of 2017 called for a "low-end CPU" (term not defined, but probably applies to anything less powerful than an i3), 4GB or less RAM, a screen size of 14.1" or less, and eMMC storage of 32GB or less. (Reference: https://www.cnx-software.com/2... ) Those requirements have ratcheted up a few times since Microsoft first started offering discounted Windows; it was 2GB RAM, 16GB eMMC, and 10.1" display at one time. All of the cheap Chromebooks sold to the education market qualify, as do Chromesticks and Chromeboxes.
That 32GB limit is REALLY limiting for Windows. Owners quickly discover that if they store more than about 5GB of their own stuff, the system no longer has enough free space to install new builds of Windows. (There are workarounds involving flash drives.) New builds come along about every six months so that's no small thing; Microsoft will probably have to raise the limit to 64GB, like their own low-end device (the Surface Go) has.
This new class of premium Chromebooks lies outside the parameters for cheap Windows licenses so the cost of Windows is a factor there. Many of them have mid-range CPUs and Microsoft will be forced to respond by allowing a larger range of systems to get cheap licenses for Windows, more than just allowing more storage. 8GB RAM, real SSDs with 128GB or more storage, and i5 processors are common for that class of system; some companies are even offering an option for an i7. So far they all use low power (U series) or very low power (Y series) processors; I don't think we'll be seeing a Chromebook with an H series process or its equivalent from AMD any time soon.
I suspect that the end point will come within five years (and that's a conservative guess): Microsoft will make ALL licenses for Windows Home free of charge. You will only pay for the Windows Professional and Enterprise features: domain logon, disk encryption, remote console capability, etc. They may also continue to charge for licenses for the very high end hardware that requires the Workstation edition: multiple CPUs, RAM above 256GB, etc.
That's an example of the Clbuttic Mistake, a relative of the Scunthorpe Problem. The Clbuttic Mistake happens when you blindly do string replacement on text without bothering to check for things like word separators, and then use the replaced version. It's about replacing content, rather than blocking it as most examples of the Scunthorpe Problem are. Replacing "ass" is the most common example, leading to such silliness as articles about buttbuttinating a politician, but there have also been articles that refer to the Consbreastution.
The Telegraph had more to say about it in 2008: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne...
What percentage of the time you spend commuting is wasted depends on what mode of travel you use. Commuting time driving a car is nearly a total waste for most people, though some mitigate that a bit by listening to audiobooks, and you can sometimes combine the trip to work with needed errands. (For example, if you stop to buy groceries on the way home from the office, you eliminate time that you otherwise might spend taking a trip from home to get them.) Commuting by public transit varies depending on how crowded the train or bus is; it may be possible to read, or even get work done on a laptop on a long trip. Walking or bicycling to work is time spent on exercise, and not wasted at all for most people with desk jobs.
"No userspace software should directly interact with a filesystem."
What about mkfs and fsck? *ducks*
I accept your point as valid for anything other than edge cases like those.
Another possible reason for Dropbox to discontinue Linux support is that Linux users are experts who will luse whatever capacity they pay for to the maximum. Their business model likely depends on people paying for more than they need.
Also the lack of Microsoft Office. Sure, you can mostly run it by using special compatibility layers (WINE, or its commercially supported relative CrossOver) but the experience isn't perfect. Or you can use the more limited web versions. But if you want the full Office experience you still have to run Windows.
There are also lots of more specialized software packages that are only available for Windows or that run best there. Developers gravitate to the largest market and ignore others.
Linux has beaten Windows in the server room. And even more dramatically in supercomputing; every one of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world runs Linux.
If you can't make money by running an honest business that treats all its customers fairly, you are in the wrong line of business. A business should not have the right to refuse to serve customers for reasons other than disturbing the peace or the like.
Business post signs saying things like "we reserve the right to refuse service to anybody" but it isn't true. They are already legally prohibited from banning people because of their race, for example.
There are existing precedents for other forms of gambling. New Jersey and Connecticut casinos can't ban blackjack players for card counting (Nevada casinos can); they can and do make the playing conditions unpleasant and unfavorable for counters that they catch but they shouldn't even be allowed to do that.
Unfortunately, we would need a change to the Constitution to ban the political calls. That legal precedent is already established, and it's why political campaigns are allowed to call even if your number is in the Do Not Call registry.
That explains why I haven't gotten the email that has been mentioned in various stories. But the restrictions on what movies are available remain and have been hampered my use of MoviePass. I won't be asking for a refund because there is still enough value to continuing to use it for the rest of the year (assuming it keeps working that long), but renewing is another question.
AMD's CPU chipsets have been solid for quite a while. The problematic AMD motherboards were mostly back in the day when third party chipsets were still available. VIA, notably, did a number of them and not all of them were good. The only reports of problems with Ryzen motherboards I have heard of involved support of very fast RAM; that one appears to have been the fault of both the CPUs and the motherboard chipsets; it was mitigated with microcode updates for the CPUs and fixed in the second generation Ryzen products.
AMD, nee ATI, graphics drivers can still be a problem. And the company tends to drop support of older graphics hardware like a hot potato, much more quickly than NVidia does. On the bright side, AMD is much more cooperative with open source development than NVidia is, so older ATI/AMD graphics hardware is well supported on Linux.
The license of Debian explicitly gives users the right to redistribute it, with or without modification. That right is inherent to the nature of free software. So they can't possibly comply with a restriction on redistribution.
Bulldozer had very disappointing single thread performance, making it a poor choice for gaming. It was further crippled on Windows by the fact that Microsoft didn't release a process scheduler that really understands it until Windows 8, leaving all the installed base of Windows XP and 7 with ever worse performance than the processor was capable of. Linux, of course, was updated right away, and Windows 10 inherited the improvements from 8.
Basically, you can't schedule Bulldozer as if it were a straightforward 8 core CPU because of the resources shared between core pairs. It needs to be scheduled in a way that is more like Hyperthreading on Intel CPUs, acknowledging the performance differences of various combinations of cores. Microsoft wrote that code but didn't backport it to the versions of Windows that most people were using at the time.
At the initial release, Ryzen suffered from a similar problem. Not with SMT; that was handled properly right away. But what Windows didn't understand was the need to be aware of the two CCX units and the increased memory latency for cross-CCX access. So far as I know Microsoft STILL haven't fixed that for the single-die Ryzen processors, though they do address it correctly for Threadripper. In short, they should schedule Ryzen as if it were a dual-socket system, and keep threads of the same program on a single CCX when possible.
But real buttons don't smudge the screen!
But the second generation Oasis has real buttons. Even better.
The basic problem with the Voyage is that it's caught in the middle. People who want a fully premium e-reader step up to the Oasis. People who want the mainstream offering buy the Paperwhite, and bargain hunters buy the basic Kindle. The Voyage is the Oldsmobile of the Kindle line and has now suffered the same fate that the car line did.
Once the second generation Oasis came out, there wasn't much point to the Voyage. (The first generation Oasis vs the Voyage was less clear because of the limited battery life of the bare Oasis without its battery pack cover.) Just about everybody will either pay the additional money for the clearly superior Oasis, or save some money and buy the Paperwhite.